The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me

by Sofka Zinovieff

  Military entry papers report that Robert was admitted with the rank of second lieutenant. A few vital statistics make no mention of whether he was an Adonis, merely recording that he was of medium height and slim build: ‘Height: 5ft 10½; Weight: 140 lb [10 stone]; Chest: max 36½ inches, min 33½ inches; Vision 6/6’. The short experiment with military discipline was not a success. Uninterested, disorderly and sloppy enough to commit a faux pas like taking off his military cap to a general, Robert was clearly not soldier material. At the end of the four months, the young officer’s immediate commander wrote that duties were not carried out satisfactorily and that Robert was unfit for promotion. ‘I do not consider that he was keen to learn his work whilst attached for instruction, he paid little attention to his instructors. He appeared to lack concentration and his proficiency after 4 months was very much below the average.’ The multiple-choice answers that his superior underlined in a confidential ‘Analysis of Personality’ build up a picture of a young man who doesn’t give a fig:

  Reliability: very reliable, average, uncertain

  Energy: hard-working, average, lazy

  Tact: very tactful, average, tactless

  Leadership: good, average, indifferent

  Loyalty : very loyal, average, poor

  Adaptability: most adaptable, average, unadaptable

  ‘Intellectual Qualifications’ are no better:

  Imagination: fertile, average, meagre

  General ability: brilliant, average, poor

  Tactical knowledge: excellent, average, scanty

  Common-sense: abundant, average, lacking

  Ability to teach: considerable, average, small

  Even Robert’s ‘Physical and Athletic Qualifications’ are called into question. After all those years on horses and chasing around the estate at Hodnet, he couldn’t even be bothered to ride well, let alone join in team games:

  Physique: robust, average, poor

  Strength: powerful, average, weak

  Energy: untiring, average, small

  Horsemanship: excellent, average, indifferent

  Keenness at games: great, average, small

  Cyril reports a somewhat different reason for Robert being requested to resign his commission. After a London party, Robert arrived back at Tidworth the next morning, driving a hired Daimler and wearing evening dress. He was already late for the daily parade, known as Stables, which was obligatory for all but the most senior officers, so went straight to the dining room and ordered breakfast. As he ate his fry-up, the commanding officer and second-in-command came in. ‘They halted, rooted to the ground. There before them sat a very junior officer, quite unperturbed, eating eggs and bacon. The meal was not finished, and his exit was speedy. Robert, they realised, would never make a soldier.’90

  HE HEBER-PERCY PARENTS were reaching the end of their patience. Robert recalled feeling like the black sheep of the family, and was threatened with a sea passage to a rougher existence in Australia if he didn’t shape up. No doubt Gladys went up to London and took her favoured boy for lunch at the Ritz for warnings and maternal advice. And one imagines Algernon senior summoning his youngest son to his tobacco-reeking study off the hall at Hodnet on his visits home. The horsewhip was no use now, but then nothing else seemed to be either.

  In London, Robert was clearly maturing into the Mad Boy who would so captivate Gerald the following year. When he wrote his letter of resignation to his commanding officer, he was staying at the Jules Hotel in Jermyn Street, just next door to the Cavendish Hotel, a much-loved haunt of London high society that he surely frequented. The Cavendish was run by the legendary Rosa Lewis. Outspoken and fearless, she had worked her way up in life from a housemaid, then cook, to the owner of a hotel that reminded its clients of the splendours of the Edwardian era. Evelyn Waugh used her as a model for Lottie Crump in Vile Bodies – much to her annoyance. He described the Cavendish as being like a run-down but comfortable country house, where the head waiter was ‘hard of hearing, partially blind, and tortured with gout’, and there were ‘innumerable old housemaids always trotting about with cans of hot water and clean towels’. Rosa had been there since 1904 and was favoured by the Bright Young Things; she had known their grandparents as well as their parents. She was a terrible snob, favouring the ‘Three As’ – Aristocrats, Americans and the affluent – and wouldn’t hesitate to ban people she didn’t like.

  Rosa provided the perfect mix of decadence and familiarity for people in Robert’s circle. Quick to flout the rules, she amused everyone with her gossip and propensity to break open ‘cherrybums’ – jeroboams of champagne. Food had declined since her days of cooking for Buckingham Palace, when recipes included quail wrapped in slices of beef and cooked in suet pudding, but it was solid English fare, even if Evelyn Waugh described the game pie as ‘quite black inside and full of beaks and shot and inexplicable vertebrae’.91 Rosa drove around in a decrepit Daimler that was ‘even more old-fashioned and regal-looking than Queen Mary’s’.92 For a section of the well-heeled, well-connected London youth, the Cavendish was ‘like the dream nursery they had never had, presided over by a nanny in turn forbidding and indulgent, ribald and stately, pickled in Edwardiana, peppering them with her fruity vernacular’.93 Many of the people who would remain Robert’s lifelong friends were Cavendish aficionados, including the glamorous Lygon siblings, the Betjemans and Daphne Fielding. Gerald too was no stranger to the place, and had chosen some years earlier to entertain the Ballets Russes under Rosa’s eagle eye.

  Robert had the confidence of a hedonist and the fearlessness of a wild sexual opportunist. He was a natural candidate for the mad, jazz-flavoured partying that had got going in the 1920s and never stopped, and certainly belonged to the category that was viewed with scorn by Evelyn Waugh, and labelled ‘shrieking little poseurs’ by George Orwell. Robert’s older brother Alan was equally good-looking and disreputable. With an advantage of five years, he was ‘the most wicked and the most attractive’ of the four brothers and undoubtedly provided an example for his younger brother to follow. While the older two siblings remained lifelong devotees of rural activities and wildlife (particularly how to kill it), the younger two were just as dedicated to the wild life of the city. Robert later described how he had sometimes been so short of money during these times that he learned how to make one meal last three days – and if this sounded like the start of a sob story or a revelation about soup kitchens, it was not: ‘I would get a rich man to take me out to Claridge’s and order three large courses.’94

  If Gerald was pushing the boundaries through his music and creative friendships, Robert was doing the same with his own body by testing his physical limits – the epitome of the jeunesse dorée. Both men fitted into what was known as ‘High Bohemia’, with its cosmopolitan, artistic aesthetic and irreverent exuberance. Despite the memories of Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment and destruction, and the continuing threat of arrest for homosexuals, it was not such a bad time to be queer. Many of the old taboos were broken by the Bright Young Things, who refused to follow in the conventional footsteps of their parents, yet had (in the case of the men) gone to public schools where relationships between boys were the rule not the exception. A group of slightly older men had helped pave the way for Robert’s generation – talented, mannered aesthetes who made it chic to prefer men. Cyril Connolly described the ‘great homosexual trail-blazers in the arts in the early twentieth century who avenged on the bourgeoisie the latter’s killing of Oscar Wilde’, naming such inspirational spirits as Diaghilev, Proust, Cocteau and Gide. Even those who ended up marrying and loving women had often had liaisons with men when they were young: Connolly, John Betjeman and Evelyn Waugh were all part of the famous 1920s Oxford set who entered into the homoerotic spirit of their alma mater.

  Robert probably didn’t know much about these people – though he might have heard of the Russian Ballet – but he undoubtedly visited the Café Royal, Wilde’s old haunt on Regent Street that was still going strong. And he sure
ly made use of the Savoy Turkish Baths, which were just along from his hotel in Jermyn Street. Known as a safe haven for the sort of gentlemen who could afford the price of admission, the baths were filled with men eager for assignations in the changing rooms or dark corners.

  He may have been a Mad Boy, but Robert was never one of the camp ‘pansies’, nor the painted and scented ‘nancy-boys’, ‘West End poofs’ or ‘Dilly boys’ who frequented the many public toilets without attendants that were helpfully identified in For your Convenience: A Learned Dialogue Instructive to All Londoners and London Visitors.95 Whether or not he visited these conveniences – ironwork constructions that often had tiny holes so one could see who was approaching – is anyone’s guess. But the locations of the more popular venues were well known – the spacious one off Wardour Street with two entrances, or ‘Clarkson’s Cottage’ by Clarkson’s theatrical costume shop. Naturally, there were risks involved and the so-called ‘pretty police’ (official agents provocateurs) were a source of fear to all who engaged in ‘cottaging’. Robert at one point certainly worked in a Lyons Corner House, perhaps even the one on Coventry Street, by Leicester Square, ‘the absolute Mecca of the gay scene’ and one of queer London’s landmarks. Quentin Crisp was a habitué of the Lily Pond, a tearoom on the first floor, where two old ladies served tea and toast and turned a blind eye to the flirtatious behaviour of their male guests.96 It also seems likely that Robert would have made use of his Army contacts to meet willing young men, ‘something in uniform’, especially a red-coated Guardsman, who might be willing to go for ‘a walk in the park’. As J. R. Ackerley wrote, ‘It would be the blackest ingratitude to disparage the Guards. These brave soldiers are of incalculable use to a great many lonely bachelors in London.’ In his day, ‘A pound was the recognized tariff for the Foot Guards . . . The Horse Guards cost rather more.’97

  It was perfectly acceptable to prefer boys in the circles in which Robert moved, but he was also interested in girls. At one point he was even engaged to the elegant and beautiful Kathleen Meyrick, four years his senior. She was already notorious, not for her own behaviour but for the sins of her mother. Kate Meyrick was an Irish-born mother of eight whose husband had left her and who became a hugely successful London nightclub owner in the 1920s. She believed that ‘men will pay anything to be amused’, and her post-war advocacy of the pursuit of ‘pure pleasure’ was still just as palatable for the young of the 1930s.98 The ‘Queen of Nightclubs’ ran the Silver Slipper on Regent Street, where the glass dance floor was illuminated from beneath with coloured lights, and little slippers filled with sweeties and novelties were handed to guests on the opening night. ‘Meyrick’s Marvellous Maids’ were the hostesses, carefully chosen for their good looks, their exquisite dancing and their charm.

  According to Robert’s family, he was not only engaged to Kathleen but lived in the Meyrick household and ‘helped run a nightclub’. Although no details remain, it seems logical to surmise that the club was the 43, where many members and guests would have been his friends anyway. The 43 was Mrs Meyrick’s greatest triumph. A large rambling place that occupied six floors at 43 Gerrard Street in Soho, it was depicted by Evelyn Waugh in A Handful of Dust as the Old Hundredth. It attracted the well-heeled types who were regulars at the Cavendish Hotel, and provided the glamour, pretty girls and flow of champagne that were prerequisites for dancing into the night. As at other exclusive clubs, there were membership lists, dress codes and the sort of prices that guarded against all but the most privileged becoming members; a bottle of champagne cost about 30 shillings, almost half the average working man’s weekly wage.99 Dressed in tall hats, white silk scarves, fur coats and long dresses, this ‘animated gathering of toffs in toff’s togs waiting to be raised up to the latest toff’s paradise’ was a familiar sight to Soho’s locals.100

  Mrs Meyrick managed to send her daughters to Roedean and her sons to Harrow, and they became part of the class to which she offered so much entertainment. Two daughters married into the aristocracy, becoming, respectively, Countess of Kinnoull and Lady de Clifford. But disaster was lurking. By the time Robert became involved with Kathleen, her mother had already been in prison several times. First, there had been raids on the club by ‘ruffians’ and by the police. Then, as part of a clean-up campaign, she was arrested for selling drinks after hours and jailed for six months. Kathleen was only seventeen. And then the same thing happened all over again. Worse came when Mrs Meyrick was accused of bribing a certain Sergeant Goddard at Marylebone police station after his colleagues became suspicious about his sudden acquisition of a fancy Chrysler and an expensive Streatham home. Ten-pound notes were traced to Mrs Meyrick. The upshot was fifteen months of hard labour in Holloway and a reputation in the press as ‘the most dangerous woman in London’. Although she survived, her health was wrecked. Her legal costs had been hugely damaging and it was not long before she died, aged fifty-seven, from pneumonia.

  KATHLEEN MEYRICK WITH ROBERT AT THE RACES. THE PAIR REMAINED FRIENDS AFTER THEIR ENGAGEMENT, AND KATHLEEN OFTEN WENT TO STAY AT FARINGDON. IN COUNTRY GET-UP, THEY BOTH LOOK AS THOUGH THEY KNOW HOW TO PLAY BY THE RULES AND HOW TO BREAK THEM

  Gladys and Algernon Heber-Percy were appalled. Their youngest son didn’t have a job and his life was filled with decadence and debt. There was little hope that the twenty-year-old would give up his life of metropolitan indulgence interspersed with a bit of careering around the countryside on a horse. According to Robert, his parents had already bought him a one-way ticket to Australia when he went to stay at his friend Michael Duff’s estate, Vaynol, for the life-changing weekend. ‘And he came back in a blue Rolls-Royce,’ recounted one friend who heard the story later.101

  It would be easy to presume that Gerald provided a way out for Robert: a sugar daddy for a spoilt young man. The story of the two men’s meeting has developed all sorts of variations among people who knew them, including one that tells how Lord Berners came across the Mad Boy working in his Lyons Corner House, and another that has Gerald bowled over by him in Venice. The fact that they met on equal terms at the country house of a mutual friend who had known Robert since boyhood is interesting because the younger man was not at a disadvantage. A close friend of Gerald’s, Diana Mosley, later wrote, ‘Heber-Percy’s high spirits, elegant appearance and uninhibited behaviour enchanted Gerald who no longer needed a drug to give him contentment.’102

  Gerald did not write openly about his feelings for the Mad Boy, but a fair amount can be deduced from his light if bitingly satirical novel The Girls of Radcliff Hall. In this spoof girls’-boarding-school story, the schoolgirls are based on young men in his circle and Gerald himself is the headmistress, Miss Carfax. Robert is clearly Millie Roberts, a pupil who ‘brought a new interest into Miss Carfax’s life’. The tone appears confessional: the headmistress ‘had become convinced that there could be nothing more in life that could arouse that wonderful sensation of ecstasy she had so often experienced in her youth . . . But now it seemed as though within her breast some strange unresolved chord had been struck that caused her whole being to vibrate.’ Millie on the other hand, like the Mad Boy,

  was wild, unrestrained and a little crazy. You never knew what she was going to do next. Her movements were often violent but, although she was constantly breaking things, there was nothing clumsy about her movements. You felt that if things happened to get in her way and she was obliged to knock them over, it was their fault rather than hers, and everything she did was redeemed by a peculiar gracefulness. She was like a young panther.103

  The attraction was not only one-way. The younger man was intrigued enough to take things a step further. Above all, Gerald was entertaining – a quality that each found essential to successful relationships. And although Robert made a point of portraying himself as uneducated and almost illiterate, he was intelligent enough to be interested in the stimulating world of the creative arts to which Gerald belonged. He also loved Gerald’s iconoclasm, blended as it was with a deep understand
ing of the Shropshire boyhoods they had both enjoyed and endured.

  THE MAD BOY

  Gerald had long left behind dun-coloured dogs and wearying blood sports and was now like the trumpeter bird: plain and plump at first sight, yet unusual, charming, iridescent, and free to fly in whichever direction he liked. That Robert seemed to him like a panther is revealing. Sleek, black and dangerous, the panther may threaten the trumpeter, but he cannot reach him: the bird can sit on the tree and tease as much as he likes. Gerald and the Mad Boy’s relationship thus had the improbable and yet touching air of a partnership between the unpredictable, ebony feline and the shy, shimmering, inky-feathered bird. The pair were about to create a bizarre new life together, with Faringdon as the magical stage on which the public performances and private dramas were played out. In very different ways, each contributed to creating the captivating place that would enchant so many talented and remarkable people during the 1930s.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Et in Arcadia Ego

  ERALD’S FRIENDS WERE ASTOUNDED. They were used to the jokes and teasing, the stunts and parties, but there had never been a boyfriend. And here was a spectacular one. The Mad Boy could hardly be kept discreetly in the shadows, but this was part of the attraction. It was as though the death of his mother had freed Gerald to pursue love without fear or shame. There was also his age; forty-eight is a point when many start to ponder what time is left in which to taste the joys of life they have missed, or still desire. The younger man ‘had a streak of pure fantasy in his make-up. With Robert about, Diaghilev’s demand to Cocteau: “Etonne moi!” would not have been necessary, for he never failed to astonish.’104 Life as part of an unlikely couple was not straightforward, but Gerald blossomed. In a letter to Cecil Beaton describing his travels and Robert’s crazy escapades, he admitted, ‘Far from being a strain on my system the incidents of the last month have acted as a tonic and I feel years younger.’105