I would not say my mother and I were lucky that I had had meningitis, but one good consequence for my recovery throughout the war was being in sunlit California. That was all over. The passion which lasted was the love of music, all from an evening at the Hollywood Bowl. I started piano lessons with Miss Perry, a loving but formal teacher with a veiled black straw hat. Eva’s influence was crucial. As soon as she saw I had some sort of gift she stopped Miss Perry trotting me through the typical children’s pieces and started me on music with emotional content: Mozart, and C. P. E. Bach’s ‘Solfeggietto’, an exciting piece which lasted about a minute. It was through playing the piano that I felt my life belonged to me as an individual, alone on a piano stool, giving a performance.
Two
We set sail back to England in June 1945, a month after the Armistice with Germany was signed. The 20,000-ton liner Franconiawas still painted battleship grey, as was the whole of our slow-moving convoy across the Atlantic. She had been used as a troopship and had a single six-inch gun on her stern. On the horizon all around us were destroyers. One of them was attacked by a U-boat and we saw the upshot of depth charges, but heard no news of the result. The enemy must have fled. We understood that a number of German submariners were fighting on, refusing to believe that their Führer had killed himself.
The Americans on board were as easy as ever. The English were cliquey. Eva, my mother and I had to share our cabin. The first evening a friendly fat woman handed an apple up to me in my bunk. She said I was a lovely boy. As soon as she left the cabin my mother and Eva complained about being thrown together with a cockney. It took some time for me to accept the cast-iron English class system as it was. Our compatriots seemed to have little barriers round them. None were entirely happy about returning home. They did not know what to expect, no matter how long the letters they had received from family and friends. They might be considered renegades even though the government had requested that mothers with children should, if they could, live overseas, so as not to be a burden on their hard-pressed nation.
Liverpool was swathed in cloud. The docks had been patched up from bomb damage but the surrounding blocks of flats were left shat-tered. Some of them, four or five storeys high, above collapsed rubble, had the remains of walls which showed where the stairs had been, the different wallpapers from floor to floor and the backs of fireplaces and chimneys, soot blackened. On the ground grew blitz weed, masking the rubble with its profuse mauve blooms.
In London we stayed with a cousin in Clarendon Road, W11. Even among friends we felt foreign, my mother especially. I had never known her comfortable in her own skin, probably the aftermath of Larry, but here in her own country where everyone else had such an unhealthy pallor, and for the most part wore frayed clothes, her nervousness and never-ending cigarettes had changed her. She found it impossible to get work in the theatre and took a small part in a film with Rex Harrison, called Escape.
She took up charity work in the Actors’ Orphanage and the Theatrical Ladies’ Guild. It was difficult for her to build bridges with friends, after their untold and untellable losses and suffering, the deaths on the front and at home from the Blitz, the crowded shelters overnight. Our days were spent queuing with shopping bags and ration books. At least that brought us together with everyone.
We rented the coldest house, in Campden Hill Gardens. She hated living alone and her sense of displacement was made worse by her divorce from Larry and his fame now rocketing with the worldwide raptures over his film Henry V. For many he had come to symbolise the England, with the Shakespearian lines of ‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers’. I was dying to see the film but she could not bear to go with me. I think this was because she was afraid of breaking down with emotion. So I went with the son of our daily woman Alice. His name was John and we became friends. We were bowled over by the movie, so clean and colourful and exciting in the enormous Kensington Odeon. It made me hugely proud. I went round saying I was his son, even though I had yet to meet him in England as a schoolboy.
During the war, like so many in the profession, Vivien had made exhausting tours to visit the troops. While he was in Ireland making Henry V, she was with other actors entertaining in North Africa. She wrote to him:
Dateline: Bone, Algeria, 13 July 1944
I don’t think I’ve told you about what General Montgomery said when he came to see us. He was v. charming and said we had no idea of the importance of the work we were doing and that we were a ‘battle winning factor’ which I must say was jolly thrilling coming from him. I haven’t written to you all this last week my darling because the heat has been something indescribable. People who’ve been here for years say there’s been nothing like it. When I’ve got back at night I’ve just fallen on my bed and lain there in a bath of perspiration. I’ve got v. v. brown, which is nice. The bathing in Tripoli was sheer heaven. Our first night there after Cairo we went to a Roman amphitheatre and gave the shows and played to 17,000 men. I have never enjoyed anything so much, [ 15 ] even though during the daytime performances 50 flies settled on one’s face and neck and flew in one’s eyes. The sight of all those boys sitting in such a lovely relic of the past was beyond words exhilarating. It was perfect for speaking too.
At the end of the war Larry bought Notley Abbey, a majestic medieval pile, endowed in the fifteenth century by Henry V, and occu-pied by Cardinal Wolsey when he was building Christ Church, Oxford. The ancient house, the gardens, orchards, and woods, and the little River Thame, all breathed romance.
There, in the years to come, their friends and guests were theatrical and cinema royalty from England, America and the Continent, several cabinet ministers like Walter Monckton, John Profumo and Duncan Sandys, leading Labour lights Hartley Shawcross and Arnold Good-man, the literary people, the owner of the Telegraph Michael Berry and the formidable Lady Pamela, F. E. Smith’s daughter, Garrett Moore, later Lord Drogheda, head of the Financial Times. Kenneth Clark of ‘Civilisation’, the composer William Walton who wrote the music for Larry’s Shakespeare films, and the conductor ‘Flash Harry’ Malcolm Sargent. Then Lady Alexandra Metcalfe and Lady Diana Cooper. Larry and Vivien were wonderful hosts: England’s most glamorous acting couple ever.
In 1944 Vivien was still exhausted from her tour. Larry tried his best to make her rest but there was excitement in the air, of victory just round the corner. She had conceived his child. She felt there was nothing she could not do. This was the seal of divine approval on their love which had started illicitly, two months before my mother had given birth to me. She took the part she had set her heart on: in the film of Caesar and Cleopatra. It was too much for her. During a violent scene when she had to chase and beat a slave she collapsed. She had a miscarriage. The loss of their baby had fearful moral overtones for both her and Larry. I think it was her miscarriage followed by a six-month-long recuperation from the TB which followed that led to her mental problems. Between times of her being her normal divine self she some-times descended into bouts of manic depression and over the next dozen or so years this developed into a mortal danger for both of them.
She and Larry had a romantic little house in Chelsea: Durham Cottage, 4 Christchurch Street, SW3. near Burton Court. They decided, during her illness, that it would be quieter for her to stay at Notley, an hour’s drive into the Vale of Aylesbury. He went to her almost every [ 16 ] night in his beautiful Rolls, lucky to be allowed the petrol. She had never been a sleepy baby. While confined to her bed, with almost military discipline she read her way through the whole of Dickens, Trollope, Scott’s Waverley novels and much more. At least that was more restful than keeping her friends up all night in Chelsea.
My mother gave a cocktail party planning for Larry to come. There were Tony Guthrie, his favourite director with his wife Judy, Leo Genn who had played the Constable of France in the film Henry Vand who was there in service dress, just back from Allied Occupied Europe; and my mother and Larry’s dearest and only lifelong friends George and Mercia Relph, bo
th of them part of the wildly successful Old Vic Theatre Company which Larry had set up with my godfather Ralph Richardson at the New Theatre. Leo Genn had been at the liberation of one of the concentration camps. With his deep velvet voice he described the unimaginable horrors of the holocaust, the clearing up, and the rescue of the starved bodies which still clung to life. In the dumbstruck silence the phone rang. My mother picked it up. Her face fell and she ended by saying ‘Maybe another time’, which we all heard.
It was Larry. He said Vivien had had another relapse and he had to go down to be with her at Notley.
Some weeks later Larry came round to Campden Hill Gardens for tea. I rushed downstairs to open the door. He was not dressed as Henry V, nor as a flying officer in the Fleet Air Arm, but fairly stylishly in a grey flannel suit and garish Garrick Club tie. My mother was in a summer frock and high heels, which I much preferred to her being in slacks.
I gazed up at my estranged parents looking at each other. Their affec-tion was real and shared, but neither of them could have known the overtones and undertones and half tones of what the other felt. She traced her forefinger down a deep scar on his upper lip. It had been cut while filming Henry V.A horse had charged too close and the camera had hit him full in the face. She said how much more important that scar made him look: this made him blush.
Attention was turned to me in my jeans, sneakers and T-shirt. I took him up to my room. He was pleased to see the pictures on my shelf which he had sent of himself, in armour and in his brass-buttoned uniform as an RNVR naval officer. He sat on my bed. He asked if I would like him to read something to me, so I took down a copy of Boy’s Own Annual and opened it at a story of four naval officers marooned in a lifeboat, under attack from a U-boat. He read it thrillingly, making it frighteningly real.
Then he was off to Vivien and Notley.
As I had done in California, I started to explore the neighbourhood, but got nowhere. I rang doorbells and after three or four hostile receptions I realised that in London I wasn’t wanted. A month or two later, after my toys had arrived from America, I tried again at the house opposite where there was a girl my age. I introduced myself to her mother. She hissed that I was a nosey parker. I went home in confusion and complained to my mother. She tried to explain the class system as then practised. It made no sense to me; I thought we were just people.
She said that she and her friends were ladies while Alice was our daily woman. Being a lady did not mean that you shunned hard and dirty work if it had to be done and there was no one else to do it. You went and did it well. Only a ‘near’ lady would be too proud for that. I was still unclear precisely what she meant. Now in the year 2011 we have a cleaning lady, and I am married to a woman.
In 1945 my mother and I stayed at Apple Porch the rest of that summer. I loved the Berkshire countryside, living beside Temple Golf Course and having a Bechstein grand piano to play; no feeling of isolated loneliness there with the grim, seemingly irremediable destruc-tion of so much of London. Nearby there lived a pretty girl called Virginia. Her father had been killed while flying for the RAF and her mother had married his best friend, a medical doctor who had served in the Navy. There really was nothing nicer than exploring the golf course and the woods, with a pretty girl my age in a flowery cotton frock. She was the first one I showed my lead soldiers to – a row of ten guardsmen in scarlet tunics and bearskins. She didn’t laugh when I said that I longed to be like that.
Vivien’s recovery became established and Larry rehearsed her in Thornton Wilder’s play The Skin of Our Teeth. She was an electrifying comedienne and given rave reviews for her part as the skittish maid Sabina. Larry introduced us and we drove off to Notley for the week-end, me in the front with him, Vivien in the back with George and Mercia.
The medieval house was in a valley, beyond the River Thame and a millstream. It was grander than any I had ever seen; stone, with cinqfoil windows and mossy tiled roof. The only rooms decorated at that stage were the bedrooms – the servants’, Larry and Vivien’s, one of the guests’ – and downstairs the dining room, and the library where we sat in evening dress before dinner. Vivien’s sophistication was perfectly stated. The butler Alan and the maid behaved naturally in their roles. As well as George and Mercia there were Tony Bushell, an ex-Welsh Guards major and associate producer for Henry V, and his girlfriend Annie Serocold, living together in the gardener’s cottage. Vivien wondered whether I ever wished I had brothers and sisters. I said no, otherwise I would have been sent to an early supper with siblings instead of being with them.
Larry gave me half a glass of white wine with the fish and a half glass of claret with the grouse. Delicious. Unfortunately I woke up half way through the night to be sick. Luckily no carpet had yet been laid in my room. Even so, it was not very nice for Larry to clear it up. He didn’t want to leave it to the butler: a perfect gentleman, I thought, equivalent to being a lady.
Larry said he wanted to have a chat; the throwaway word that can indicate something portentous. The huge drawing room was totally empty except for the full grand Steinway which I had been playing. He led me into the library and I sat in an armchair opposite him as he leant back into the sofa, smoking. He threw the cigarette into the fireplace, interwove his fingers and cracked them away from him, nervously. Eventually he drew breath:
‘I have some things I must say before you go to boarding school.’
I immediately hoped he would reveal the mysteries of sex.
‘Well, of course,’ he said, ‘you know all about sex.’
I nodded gamely, dying for more.
What he had to tell me, he said, was far more important. As my father, he loved me. Whatever I did, whether I behaved most terribly, or even committed murder, he would be displeased, maybe horrified, but I must remember that whatever happened he would always love me. From time to time we might not get on very well. I might drive him barmy or detest something about him. Many people did. His beloved audience. That could be mutual. But whatever happened, however we might otherwise feel, he would always love me.
He sat back. ‘Christ, I need a drink. Given the circumstances,’ he smiled fondly, ’I won’t ask you to have anything more serious than a juice of some kind.’
Then the others came in, joined him at the drinks table and chatted. Nothing prepared me for the total change of character I had to adapt to. All my life I had been a boy, at ease in mixed company of many kinds so long as they did not freeze me out as had our neighbours in London, and I had loved going to a Californian co-educational school in jeans and T-shirt. I now had to become something I had never been before: a little boy, with long grey socks, short grey trousers and a school cap.
My mother and I had lunch at The Ivy with the headmaster of Cottesmore School, Michael Rogerson, and his wife Marion. He had been a captain in the Army. He was now looking for new staff to join the school when it returned to Hove in the New Year. Meanwhile we were evacuated to North Wales. He said he would start me in the second form. He was tall, with a kind narrow face, and she too was handsome, with high cheekbones. We liked them.
When the time came I tied my tie, put on the school uniform and long blue mackintosh, and at last the dreaded cap. At Paddington Station all the mothers and a few fathers stood on the platform in their best, trying not to look desultory, not to let down their sons; about eighty boys. The grown-ups all wore hats and the boys school caps. Strait-laced is the phrase which leaps to mind.
The journey by steam engine to north-west Wales took fourteen hours. From Barmouth station the school buses took us away from the windswept beach and up a very steep hill to Cors-y-Gedel Hall. We new boys were shepherded into a freezing room, our names called out by a master, and we were told what set we were in: Scotts, Haigs, Clives or Drakes. I was a Scott, my school number was ‘51’ and I hung my cap and mackintosh on that peg. This gave me a feeling of identity.
We were shown up the heavy oak staircase to our dormitories. There were five other boys in mine, our school tru
nks at the end of each bed. I recognised my eiderdown, and the wooden tuck box with my name on it, all sent in advance. We immediately knew where we were, put our suitcases on our beds and clattered downstairs to the dining hall. It was freezing, despite a huge wood fire. We felt we belonged together.
From Cors-y-Gedel on a fine day, all too rare, we could see Mount Snowdon. Our local hill was called Moelfra, round-topped, high above the sheep-cropped grass and rocky streams. We played rugby football three afternoons a week. Life was a struggle. For the other three after-noons we went ‘wooding’. Great trees had been felled and we boys had to cut through them with double cross-cut saws into eight-inch thick-nesses for the games master to cleave into logs. The only heating in the school came from three huge fireplaces. Coal still went to the war effort. We all ended up in a sweat which cooled and dried as we went inside and one third of us went for a bi-weekly bath supervised by Nurse.
So Who's Your Mother Page 3
