Even so I did so want to excite him. For my final school concert, which I longed for him to attend, I learnt the ‘Revolutionary Study’, written by Chopin when he was twenty-one, in an overwhelming nationalistic rage at the Russian seizure of Warsaw and the partition of Poland, land of his birth, between Russia, Austria and Germany in 1831. It is a hell of piece, virtuoso by any standard, often played by professional soloists as a final encore to wrap up a piano recital. It was brave of Dr Watson to entrust me with it.
Every weekday I practised it for half an hour on my way back from sculling on the river. My hands were very strong. There is a tremendous climax built up on page two, with the left hand doing impossible leaps and convoluted runs while the right hand chords crash higher and higher. At the summit, top of page three, they give a yell of such rage and tragedy as is seldom equalled on the keyboard. Now my purpose was to excite my father. I thought the way to get him would be, for that climactic chord, to throw my head back theatrically, look up at the ceiling and blindly bring my right hand crashing down – accurately. This I practised over and over. I knew that for any performance to work you had to take risks, no matter how humble the medium, even reading the lesson in church. Without risks it is not a performance, only a bore, no matter how perfect the delivery. But what I was aiming for was not just a risk. It was near-suicide.
Unfortunately Larry could not come that Saturday night of the School Concert. In my self-centred state it didn’t even occur to me that he might be acting. But my mother, Eva and Virginia were there and School Hall was packed. I had second billing, the best, after the Eton College Musical Society, lamely accompanied by the School Orchestra, worked their way through something quite dull. So I made my entry at the end of desultory applause, cast the tails of my coat behind me over the piano stool and sat down. As soon as all was still and seeming to crackle with expectancy I started.
After only ten seconds I realised that I was playing it faster than ever before. This was terrifying. I couldn’t stop and restart. That would have been terrible. Adrenaline came roaring to my rescue. I forgot about my hands and gloried in the sounds. It was my heart that was playing. Yes, the climax built up at impossible speed. Yes, there came the violent crescendo and I only just remembered in time to gaze upwards at the ceiling, as if seeking a place in space, and from a great height I axed the chord. It worked. It was wonderful.
As I took my bow I remained in a vice-like trance, locked into music as if transcendentally. For an encore I played Debussy’s ‘Clair de Lune’, a piece everyone knew. My interpretation was to play it as if it represented the four seasons, starting with springtime. The warmth of summer comes and this leads to the gathering together of all the cascad-ing sadness of falling leaves. The reprieve of the original spring is in the sharp guise of frozen winter, an octave higher. Not much to do with moonlight but a lovely context. At the end the cheers burst out all round and it seemed that a line had been firmly drawn over the school-boy part of my life that was now at an end.
Three
For National Service I wanted to fulfil my childhood dream of serving in the Coldstream Guards. The War Office Selection Board had to decide who was officer material, and selection by the regiment was by no means guaranteed. We stood outside the gates of the Guards Depot at Caterham, Surrey, carrying suitcases and feeling awkward, mostly in grey flannel suits, about seventy eighteen-year-olds, virtually all from public schools. We were waiting at the edge of the great barrack square, looking down three long ranks of guardsmen in battledress, boots gleaming, rifles at the slope, the Adjutant facing them, a drummer boy behind him. The Adjutant flicked his wrist, the side drum struck out with a crack and the whole parade took a sharp pace forward. As the drum cracked into a roll the men snapped to eyes right and took their dressing in thunderous tiny steps. The drummer quietened as their lines reached perfection. They stood, facing smartly to the right. The Adjutant flicked his wrist again, the side drum rapped out and they faced the front like lightning. So that, we realised, was what was to become of us.
There was a bellow from a sergeant. Two guardsmen rushed out from the Guard Room and told us to follow them. They marched so fast we had to run to keep up. About twenty of us Coldstream recruits were in the first barrack hut, Scots and Grenadiers in the second, the Irish, Welsh, the Life Guards and Blues in the third. We Coldstreamers were in the charge of Lance Sergeant Brough, a magnificent man who had been sixth in Mr Britain at the age of sixteen. Like most other ranks in our regiment he was a Geordie, from Newcastle. Our barrack room was under the orders of a guardsman whom we had to call ‘trained soldier’, who slept in the corner next to my friend from Eton, Duff Hart-Davis, whose delicate duty it was to wake him up at Reveille by placing a lit cigarette between his lips. We were the lowest of the low, mere recruits.
These men, the regulars in the other ranks, had hard eyes. Several of us were stopped and asked bluntly ‘Are you in love, are you courtin’?’ Unlike them we looked out on the world as a friendly place. Some of them said we looked like poofters, the whole ruddy lot of us. Our trained soldier was paid to be unpleasant. Our boots had to be polished to look like ‘fookin’ glass’, the floors scrubbed to be ‘fookin’ white’, everything had to be ‘fookin’ immaculate’, to the degree of making me wonder whether he could ever respond to finer things. I showed him a picture in my copy of Life Magazine, of a Madonna and Child. I could see he was actually moved and asked what he thought. He struggled and then selected a word which was precisely accurate: ‘Fookin’ immaculate.’
Almost all of us passed the War Office Selection Board’s assessment. Those who failed had to stay on at Caterham and move in with the other ranks, while we went on to weapons training and field exercises at Pirbright. At the Adjutant’s suggestion we gave Sergeant Brough a farewell dinner, a rousing and splendidly tipsy time. I thought he would never stop singing ‘Hallelujah, I’m a bum …’ That was the end of our Coldstream platoon. We proceeded north to the Infantry Officer Cadet School at Eaton Hall, the Duke of Westminster’s palatial country place near Chester. We were combined with three times our number of others from line regiments. With them our standards of drill deteriorated. The Regimental Sergeant Major, a Coldstreamer, yelled out his despair: ‘If you don’t get a shaggin’ move on, I’ll rift you round till your legs is wore down to your arses; then I’ll put you on a charge for arsin’ about on the square.’
Most of the time we attended lectures, took copious notes and memorised scores of technical and organisational facts. Our lives outdoors were devoted in the main to the infantry platoon as a fighting force, chiefly in the attack. The one great defensive exercise was given the deserved name ‘Marathon’. This had us in opposing camps on top of a mountain referred to as ‘the Bickerton Feature’. We had to dig in, facing each other over a mile wide valley and spend three nights patrolling and being patrolled against. According to the programme we would then march the dozen miles back to Eaton Hall. However, that January it snowed and became the coldest winter of the century. To warm us up we were ladled plenteous supplies of rum. Our senses of humour were unfrozen.
The captain in charge of my squad gave me a wonderful report, saying that I was a very determined young man. When I was accepted by the Coldstream I was given No. 1 Platoon, of No. 1 Company, of the First Battalion, stationed in Chelsea Barracks. With three other freshly minted second lieutenants, solitary brass pips on each shoulder, we were trained in sword drill, and in carrying the colour for changing the guard at Buckingham Palace. We did public duties in scarlet tunics and bearskins. It gave us a feeling of style and pride. In later months when we were posted to the British Army on the Rhine there was a noticeable difference between the guardsmen who had done public duties in London, and those who had joined after our transfer to Germany. When on field exercises the new arrivals had nothing like the pride nor the discipline.
In London the Fifties were a decade of unmatched elegance: the New Look – high heels, narrow waists, full breasts and hips
– hourglass figures, day dress lengths below the knee, stockings and suspender belts, entirely delicious. That decade, before the Pill, provided the final gasp of the Coming Out Season. Those of us National Service officers based in London were few in number and much in demand for the debs, the cocktail parties, dinners, white tie and tails extravaganzas in London’s ballrooms, and for weekend country house parties with huge marquees. With my own officer’s servant to look after me life was like Czarist Russia; effortlessly spoilt, the only social duty being the care-fully hand-written thank-you letters, trying to sound genuine.
One evening in the officers’ mess, still in battledress, I was sitting on the fender with my brother officer Martin Lutyens, a contemporary since Eton days. We were both debs’ delights, wondering what to wear. He put my problem into verse: ‘Heads dinner jacket, tails tails, Macbeth’s son’s nightly quandary.’
This was the end of the age of innocence. We heard that one debs’ delight had taken a deb to bed with him. This outraged us; what a rotten thing to do. Our limited sense of adventure confined us to clinches. Taxis, then with rear windows the size of rear-view mirrors, were a favoured field of play. Abbreviations describing men abounded among the girls. NSIT – not safe in a taxi. A few men were dubbed SSITPQ – suspiciously safe in a taxi, probably queer. Most of us were MTF – must touch flesh. Life was beguiling and simple. Now, fifty years later, our days and nights appear to have been absurd, flippant and disconnected from the real world. And so they were.
Life with Larry and Vivien was terribly stressed at that time with her on another of her manic depressive ‘highs’. Noël Coward’s diary (published in 1982 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson as The Noël Coward Diaries) records:
The Olivier situation is worsening by the hour. Graham [his part-ner] and I drove down to Stratford with Cecil Tennant [Larry’s agent] on Tuesday. He is deeply perturbed and wanted to discuss the whole business. We went to the opening night of Titus Andronicus. Larry was wonderful … and Vivien not very good … She was in a vile temper and perfectly idiotic. Larry was bowed down with grief and despair and altogether it was a gloomy little visit.
Last night I dined with Tarquin ‘on guard’ at St James’s Palace. It was a perfectly sweet evening. Three very young officers and one slightly older. Lovely manners and good old shabby, tradi-tional glamour. Tarquin is bright and attractive although too small. He obviously is worried about Vivien and Larry. He’s been to Notley a good deal and seen it coming. I do so hope, if only for his sake, that another rip-roaring scandal can be avoided.
One weekend at Notley the guests were Tristram Hillier, who painted an impressive picture of the grand old abbey beyond the River Thame, and Quentin Keynes who became a lifelong friend. Among his forebears was Charles Darwin as a great-grandfather; Sir Geoffrey Keynes the famous surgeon was his father and his uncle the economist Maynard Keynes. He had led an expedition to South West Africa and Angola in search of the giant sable antelope. In the rutting season he had come across a herd, isolated between two remote rivers. The antelopes were all off guard, watching two stags locking their curved six-foot horns in a show of strength, their haunch and neck muscles bulging with the strain. He was able to go close enough to take the first ever photographs of those noble creatures. They were published in the Illustrated London News. On his way home he went to Spain to meet the Condé de Yebes, who had shot a giant sable and transported it home to be preserved by taxidermy. After their meeting the Count suggested to Quentin that he make his own way down the terraced garden. There was someone there he might find interesting. So he left the palazzo and trod down the old stone steps. He came to a terrace with a fountain, perhaps even with cupids, a chaise longue beside it. There, her cigarette at the end of an extra long holder and lying in a negligée, was Vivien Leigh. She invited him to Notley. I found him fasci-nating and hoped one day to accompany him on one of his expeditions, I started writing to him about my adventures while on night patrols with my platoon.
I had been writing to Jenny constantly. Her handwriting was child-ish, but I had been once-in-a-lifetime smitten two years before in Grindelwald. She and her foster-mother Marie-Rose had come to visit me at Eton. Jenny had high heels, a modest summer frock over her long legs and perfect figure; her face welcomed the whole of life, fine long eyebrows which curved to her temples, high cheekbones, and soft wide blue eyes. Her voice was mellifluous. Her foster-mother, on the other hand, was clad in black like a spider, was tight-lipped, supremely possessive of Jenny, archly Catholic and petit bourgeois. Yet she had a low voice and did her best to be pleasant, for the sake of ‘ma petite fille’.
At that time of constant emotional and spiritual highlights I had to have a mild operation on my sinus. The left antrum, the passage from the bridge of the nose through the cheekbone and under the eye, had become clogged and the mucous was going rancid. The specialist in Wimpole Street gave me a general anaesthetic. Gas. The experience caused a profound and extraordinary change in my views on life, dying, and death itself.
The anaesthetist made me lie on the operating table with my hands down behind my back to keep my arms still. A nurse spread a white sheet up to my neck. The gas mask was lowered. The specialist stood waiting beside his tray full of instruments. I breathed in. My lungs filled slowly and for some reason expelled the gas at speed. Slow in and sudden expulsion, in a perpetuating rhythm. I sensed I was going down a dark tunnel, and at the end of each outward breath there arose flash-ing lights. They repeated again and again at every breath, becoming brighter and brighter, and in the background behind and all around was an atmosphere of harmonious feelings. Each flash made them more wonderful, more filled with goodness and love: the ultimate orgasm.
Next thing I heard was the two men having a conversation about trades unions.
The ‘dark tunnel’ and its accompaniments have been described by people at the point of death, for example by drowning, who have been saved at the very last second. I had just experienced it. Now there was nothing for me to fear about death. Fear of pain before dying, certainly, and the whole range of agonies and the deterioration of physical and mental health, but death itself? None. A perfect ceasing to be.
Strasbourg was a day’s train journey from our barracks in Krefeld, near Düsseldorf, down the Rhine with a change of trains at Karlsruhe. I went for a long weekend in late November. The city was looking its grimmest, the huge Strasbourg Cathedral forbidding. The taxi driver spoke neither French nor German but a thick local dialect common to [ 34 ] many Alsatians. Many times he had to ask the way to ‘rue Schiller’. He eventually found it off a road skirting the upper reaches of the Rhine. It was a large house. No sooner had I paid the taxi than Jenny came bounding out of the front door, arms outstretched, fair hair flowing.
Her foster-mother Marie-Rose introduced me to her foster-father, Jules, a tiny grey man with glasses as thick as bottle bottoms who reminded me of Arthur Askey. They led me down a passage lined with coat hooks. It was a primary school with little rooms and desks, the walls plastered with childish drawings, empty and peaceful over the weekend. They insisted I have a bath after my ‘long’ journey and showed me into Jenny’s bedroom; narrow, with a single bed under shelves full of books, a single window, a desk and a potted philoden-dron. She was to take the spare room, isolated the other side of her parents’ double bedroom.
Once bathed and changed and in the drawing room I was made to feel that I was in a long lost home. As Jenny went to prepare dinner, Marie-Rose set out our relationship as if she were laying a table, every-thing in full view and just so. Her daughter was in love with me. This suited her very well as a parent while I was in England, and even now while I was in Germany. It meant that the boyfriend was not a daily occurrence, living nearby, perhaps on the prowl. Her daughter, like her, was a devout and practising Catholic and was constantly praying for my happiness. Her husband, she said dismissively, was not Catholic. He was Russian Orthodox. Not the same thing at all. The school, for eight-year-olds to twelve-year-olds, wi
th forty or so children, was a gold mine. They were very well off.
So after she had defined her daughter’s love, their faith and wealth, I wondered if I could ever fit in. I hoped that love would conquer all and was relieved when dinner was ready.
The next time I went was over Easter. We took the train to Paris and stayed at a modest hotel in the Place de la République. I had never been to Paris before. That brilliant spring, as Jenny and I crossed the Louvre Courtyard above the Place de la Concorde she pointed to the Champs Elysées, a shimmering and wondrous mirage of cars toiling up to the far off Arc de Triomphe. My jaw dropped in wonder. She said: ‘Ceux qui n’ont pas vu Paris n’ont rien vu.’
French was a language which started to consume me. I no longer had to think ahead before saying anything. My gestures and facial expres-sion took on a mimicry of the people. Jenny took me up the Eiffel Tower, then across the city to the heights of Montmartre, and the glowing white Sacré Coeur with its domes narrowing into points. Inside the incense-tainted gloom we bought our candles, lit them and placed them among ranks of others. We knelt and prayed – she to the Holy Virgin. Mother Nature had wrapped my love in puritan robes. Very faith-affirming.
Next day the four of us took a bus to Versailles. Marie-Rose regaled us with the glory of French history, the treaties signed in the Hall of Mirrors, the divine dictatorship of Louis XIV, and who had done what to whom in the Petit Trianon. Jules listened obediently. She was a historian while he, despite his incomprehensible accent, taught English. Jenny and I had only thoughts for each other, which got on her foster-mother’s nerves. Marie-Rose was sour the rest of the day, disapproving all through dinner at La Thermomètre restaurant in Place de la République. At the hotel she hastened to the lift, Jules in her wake, and up they went, leaving us alone at the foot of the stairs. Jenny was upset about her ‘petite mère’. I put my arms round her and we kissed. She floated upstairs. Next day we took separate trains, they to Strasbourg and me back to soldiering.
So Who's Your Mother Page 5
