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

by Sofka Zinovieff

  Gerald decorated his home with a characteristically eclectic, magpie-like approach, and was not interested in the designs of trendsetters like Syrie Maugham, with her fashionable layering of white on white, mirrored screens, white leather furniture and books covered in white vellum. Gerald threw in whatever pleased him. He had the confidence to combine furniture inherited from his mother or the previous Lord Berners with pieces he picked up on his travels, ancestral portraits and French landscapes with small oils painted by himself and friends, ornate antique mirrors draped with Woolworth’s pearl necklaces, busts crowned with animal masks and marble tables topped with mechanical toys.121 An appreciation of the strange, monstrous and kitsch combined with an educated degree of good taste made for a fascinating interior. A wry affection for Victoriana was thrown into the mix. Anything linked to the grumpy old monarch who had reigned during Gerald’s boyhood was fodder for fun: small figurines of the plump Queen sat on mantelpieces and her portraits were scattered unceremoniously.

  The drawing room was divided into two parts with the larger section papered white and filled with gilded French and Italian furniture. The other, smaller end was olive green, ‘providing a perfect background for a riot of tropical birds, some alive and hopping about, some stuffed in cases, some pressed, like flowers in a screen, some modelled in china, one jumping with a song out of a gold box, and hundreds between the green morocco covers of Mr Gould’.122 There could never be enough birds for Gerald, and he introduced flamingos, storks and other gaudy-feathered creatures that strutted around the gardens and into the house. Guests were amused to find that ‘odd, large-beaked birds wandered through the Georgian silver on the Chippendale dining-table, pecked in one’s plate or left squarking horribly on some guest’s head’. Plumed birds-of-paradise brought flashes of unfamiliar colours to the subdued palette of the English countryside as they patrolled the house or sat, preserved in fixed poses, beneath glass domes. One of Gerald’s favourite pets was a flashy green member of the Paradisaeidae family who he named John Knox, honouring the sixteenth-century Scottish Protestant in a way that would have appalled him. Gerald claimed that once, when he was laid up in bed with lumbago, he entertained himself by teaching the bird to turn somersaults. When the pet died, Gerald placed a notice in The Times personal column: ‘Died of jealousy, aged fifteen, John Knox, emerald bird-of-paradise belonging to Lord Berners. His guests are asked to wear half-mourning.’123

  It was an inspired day when Gerald decided to help nature along in the decoration department. According to Robert, Gerald read about dyeing doves in a Chinese book. ‘They should have whistles on their wings too, but we never got round to that. We thought up some of the ideas together but I always did them.’124 Colours were acquired and the effect was stunning: turquoise, emerald, ruby and sapphire fantailed pigeons swept over the plain stone town like a bizarre daydream of gems thrown into the air. It was just the sort of alchemy that pleased Gerald: aesthetically surprising; a challenge to the humdrum; a sophisticated tease to the English, the conventional and the rural. And it involved birds. After a visit in 1937, Stravinsky’s mistress, Vera Sudeikina, sent some new dyes, and Gerald wrote to thank her, calling them ‘magnificent’ and saying that they ‘add a tropical touch to this wintry country’. There were suggestions that all sorts of animals (even the grazing cattle) might go the way of the pigeons and improve their natural colouring, but it doesn’t seem to have happened. Later, in a novel, Gerald would describe another version of this trick. A papyrus box is filled with flies that have had tiny streamers of coloured silk attached to them and when it is opened, ‘Like miniature birds of paradise they filled the air with swirling colour as they flew out into the courtyard and settled on the trees.’125

  THE COLOURED DOVES AT FARINGDON

  The weekend guest at Faringdon might have been surprised by the degree of warmth, the number of flowers and birds and even, beside the bedside biscuit tin, the pornographic books disguised inside a copy of the Bible, or the Bible inside a dust-jacket reading ‘This is the hottest thing written in the last 20 years – sex, crime, violence . . .’126 He or she was never one of an overly large group; it was not like Vaynol, where vast numbers made up the house parties. At Faringdon, there were only five main bedrooms on the first floor, two of which were taken up by Gerald and Robert, so three couples would normally be the maximum number that could stay the night. Helping run the place were two housemaids, a footman and a kitchen maid, in addition to the butler and the cook. Dairy produce was brought from the farm and there were six men under Mr Morris, the head gardener, to provide vegetables and fruit for the table: peaches and grapes from the glasshouses, and raspberries, strawberries and all manner of other summer produce from the fruit cages. Later, when wartime austerity would decimate culinary standards, Cyril Connolly said that ‘when every sort of luxury has been forever banned in England, Lord Berners will somehow manage to maintain a secret melon house’.127

  Additional guests were often invited over at weekends for the famously marvellous meals. Gerald had learned to take food seriously as a sixteen-year-old in Normandy, but what was viewed as culture and pleasurable Epicureanism on the Continent was often seen as gluttony, or even an ‘improper’ subject for conversation in England. ‘I don’t mind owning up to being greedy,’ he wrote. ‘Greediness is among the more amiable of the Vices: it does less harm in the world than, for instance, Vulgarity or Priggishness.’ Fond of wine and cigars, but not excessively so, Gerald was not ashamed to like rich food, claiming that delicacies like caviar or plovers’ eggs ‘have the additional merit of not being exposed to the danger of being spoilt by bad cooking’. Elsewhere he wrote, ‘It was a happy moment in my life when I discovered that, in the Diet my Doctor had prescribed for me, he had omitted to mention both Caviare and Foie Gras among the forbidden foods.’128

  Faringdon’s dining room acquired a reputation for the bizarre, and some recalled further experiments with colour. Stravinsky mentioned meals ‘in which all the food was of one colour pedigree; i.e. if Lord Berners’s mood was pink, lunch might consist of beet soup, lobster, tomatoes, strawberries . . .’129 But most close friends recalled the consistent quality rather than the games. Naturally, the table was laid with attention to the linen, silverware and china. Gerald loved gaily coloured geraniums, which were planted out in pots and urns for the summer months, and he sometimes filled a silver basket with pink and red geranium flowers as a pretty centrepiece; at other times he preferred to create an entertaining arrangement of tiny cuckoo clocks or swathes of Venetian beads.130

  ‘What food does Lord Berners dislike?’ asked the Daily Express in 1937. ‘Hotel food,’ was the reply; ‘Especially the kind of hotel food which you get in some private houses, with watery soup at its beginning and indifferent ice which brings it to an equally watery close.’ His preferred cuisine was French, and his partiality to rich sauces and extravagant puddings evokes the recipes of his childhood housekeeper, most of which began with instructions like: ‘Take two pints of cream, two dozen eggs and one pint of old liqueur brandy.’131 Another cherished Faringdon dessert was pudding Louise, with boiled marrons glacés and raspberry jam, topped with ice-cream, although Gerald once listed his ‘favourite dish’ as pouding Nesselrode – a cream-filled, custardy ice, made with chestnut purée, candied fruits and maraschino liqueur, invented by the eponymous Russian diplomat.132

  Gerald tempted his guests by describing the enticing food they were about to eat, and had daily discussions with the cook. As the Daily Express reported, ‘Lord Berners believes in conversing with his cooks. He thinks that a cook who is hardly ever spoken to becomes a bored cook. And a bored cook soon becomes a bad cook.’ His four tests of cooking were ‘the making of coffee, soufflés and pastry, and the roasting of a joint. A cook who can do these four things well, he thinks, can cook anything well.’ An accompanying photograph of Mrs Dora Nelson, the cook from Gerald’s London house at Halkin Street, smiles out from the page – a dark-haired, wholesome-looking woma
n. She had apparently been to America and offers recipes for a couple of her favourite dishes from there: ‘Johnny Cake’, the American breakfast dish made with yellow cornmeal, eggs and butter, baked in a Yorkshire pudding tin; and an apple tart sprinkled with cheese. ‘Apple tart without cheese is like a kiss without a squeeze,’ said Mrs Nelson roguishly. She also mentions soufflé de Berners, which sounds like the Nesselrode, with cream, rum and mixed crystallised fruits previously soaked in brandy. ‘Put into a charged ice cave and freeze for 2–3 hours.’ Heaven.

  HE MAD BOY was finally getting an education. He might have been fictionalised by his friend Michael Duff as someone who was continually flinging off his clothes, but he was becoming a part of Faringdon life. He was increasingly involved in the practical aspects of the estate as Gerald appreciated home-grown flowers and fruits but was not interested in the details of how they were produced. And it was usually Robert who dyed the doves and kept the grounds in order. More important, he was absorbing the cultural world that Gerald had created. He couldn’t help finding out about food and he became attentive to what was served at Faringdon in a way that must have pleased his teacher. On their travels, the Mad Boy didn’t have to try in order to learn about architecture or landscape – it was laid out before him, discussed and written about by others, painted by Gerald and their friends. He gradually started to use this knowledge, bringing home ideas about how to improve the house and grounds that would continue over a lifetime.

  Robert observed Gerald’s routines: his tea brought at eight in the morning, breakfast downstairs at nine and then some concentrated hours of writing, painting or composing before lunch and more leisurely activities, often with friends. It is possible that some of the conversations were above Robert’s head – he claimed he barely read books, though he exaggerated the degree of his illiteracy, an easy way of contrasting himself with all the highly literary people he was now surrounded by. The truth was not quite so simple. Gerald mentioned in the early days that Robert was writing poetry. Playing the fool or the daredevil was an obvious method of not competing and one which could easily be picturesque enough to appeal to Gerald and his friends. According to one friend, the Mad Boy would use words incorrectly, leading to much hilarity. Once, when he was annoyed, he said he had ‘taken unction’.133 When Gerald published First Childhood in 1934, he dedicated it, jokily ironic, to ‘Robert Heber-Percy[,] whose knowledge of orthography and literary style has proved invaluable’.

  Gerald and Robert began to make friends together, some of whom lived nearby. Perhaps the most significant were the newly married Betjemans, John and Penelope, who were close in age to Robert. John had published his first poems (supported by Gerald’s friend Edward James) as well as a book about architecture, and worked for the Architectural Review and the Evening Standard. Penelope was the daughter of Field Marshal Lord Chetwode, a former Commander-in-Chief of India, and the great loves of her life were India and horses. Together, the young couple embraced local life in the little village of Uffington, where they had recently moved, going as far as founding the Uffington Parochial Youth Fellowship, which offered music, talks and various entertainments to locals.134 John and Penelope were clever and fun, with the determined yet impish and impulsive air of characters out of one of Gerald’s novels. Indeed, he dedicated his strangely surreal book The Camel to them, hinting that they had similarities to the two main characters, the Rev. Aloysius Hussey and his wife Antonia, who adopt a mysteriously psychic camel. Unaffected and adventurous, Antonia has spent her youth in the Orient and takes to riding the camel around the parish. More like a fable than a novel, the atmosphere is intensely English, mannered and provincial, while bringing in a gay organist romping with his choirboys, a verger called Beaton, murder, suicide and a finale where Antonia rides off on her camel into the sunset.

  The Betjemans were unlike some of the older, more eminent visitors, but Gerald was unafraid to mix his friends and was charmed by the young couple’s unaffected energy. Penelope became so at home that she would sit down for dinner and say, ‘Gerald, what’s the pud?’135 and took to darning John’s underclothes in the drawing room. She was simple, even tomboyish, in her appearance, but ambitious in her way. Shortly after their wedding, she went to Germany to improve her German because she wanted to learn Sanskrit and most scholarly works about India were in German. Penelope soon became very close to Robert, bonding over their love of horses. The two of them often rode out together, while John and Gerald stayed at home discussing poetry or the delights of some obscure stone carvings in a tiny Berkshire church.

  Like Gerald, John understood how silliness and joking could be ways of dealing with the misery of the world and of subverting authority. Both men were able to take things seriously, but their creative output and their social personas relied on lightness and playfulness – characteristics that belied their dark insecurities and even despair. In common with Firbank and many other humorists since, they recognised ‘frivolity as the most insolent refinement of satire’.136 Gerald still had dramatic mood-swings, so he could be ‘talkative and gay at lunch, keeping everybody happy, then he’d be very down the whole afternoon probably. Then if somebody came to dinner he’d whizz up again.’137 This was a pattern that had started at school, where he described himself as not being ‘what the Americans call “a good mixer”’. John recognised Gerald’s shyness and self-doubt and appreciated his ‘remarkable gift for making friends and a loyalty to them which no reverses in their fortunes would shake. He was a man of few words and nearly all of those were extremely amusing.’138

  John also had the outsider’s sympathy with the predicament of the outlawed homosexual in England. While it is unlikely that anything would ever have been discussed openly with Gerald about his relationship with Robert, John’s marvellous poem ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’ is a beautiful attack on the absurd cruelty of the law:

  ‘. . . Do fetch my morocco portmanteau,

  And bring them on later, dear boy.’

  A thump, and a murmur of voices –

  (‘Oh why must they make such a din?’)

  As the door of the bedroom swung open

  And TWO PLAIN CLOTHES POLICEMEN came in.

  John had an enormous love of Englishness, and was a great defender of architecture that was deeply unfashionable; his 1933 book, Ghastly Good Taste, is a celebration of the much maligned Victorian and Edwardian styles. Later, he became editor of the celebrated Shell County Guides, which brought in excellent writers to explore aspects of the English countryside that had been neglected.

  Although Gerald had turned himself into a European and collected books, friends and paintings from the Continent as much as from within Britain, he now became increasingly involved in local country life. As Alexandra Harris has pointed out, if there was a Domesday Book for the 1930s, it would show that almost all the major figures of English art and letters lived in the countryside, including Evelyn Waugh, E. M. Forster, Stanley Spencer, Vita Sackville-West, Cecil Beaton, Eric Ravilious and many more. While it might seem counter-intuitive, given the long-held ideas that ‘modernism was cosmopolitan’ while English art was pastoral, in fact there was a huge amount of creative energy emerging in rural England.139

  It was John and Penelope’s influence that brought Gerald and Robert into their orbit of village fetes and church concerts – an unlikely milieu for the eccentric lord and the Mad Boy. Penelope persuaded Gerald to write the overture for a mystery play she organised at her village church. He even played the organ, while Penelope played God the Father, chasing the children out of the church on the grounds that they were Adam and Eve and the church was the Garden of Eden.140 Gerald said he’d tried in the music ‘to express the fact that the expulsion from paradise was very unfair’. And while Penelope became ever more devout, Gerald could not escape the conviction that you had to have a talent for God in order to believe. Yet it niggled; sometimes he longed to have the comfort religion evidently gave others, especially when the dark moods
of his dreaded accidie descended.

  We have no record of what Robert thought of all this, though church services were naturally familiar after the schooling he had had and his childhood at Hodnet Hall. According to Penelope herself, not only did Gerald play the harmonium when she sang in a Methodist choir, but ‘Robert used to come, and I think he even preached a sermon at one of the Methodist things once.’141 These local gatherings were not limited to churches. Osbert Lancaster did a charming drawing of the Betjemans and friends putting on a performance of ‘Sumer Is Icumen In’ at a village hall, presumably in Uffington. Gerald is at the piano, Penelope holds a guitar, Lancaster plays a flute and John and Maurice Bowra (the famous Oxford don) are singing.

  The Betjemans’ house was just under the Downs and the legendary White Horse of Uffington, whose strangely modern lines visitors flocked to admire; Penelope stood on its eye to pray for a baby, much as others do at the Giant of Cerne Abbas. In Penelope’s case it was hardly surprising that she preferred the horse’s blessing. Moti, her beloved snow-white ‘grey’, had been shipped back from India and was the centre of her life. His name was Hindi for ‘pearl’ and he had been her hunter with the Delhi Foxhounds. Maurice Bowra reported that ‘there were generally marks of lipstick on its neck’.142 Although John was not interested in horses, they were Penelope’s passion; John’s biographer named Moti as ‘a third in the marriage from the start’.143 Penelope would harness him to a dog-cart and drive over to Faringdon, where she’d take Gerald and Robert for slow rides along local roads, during which they’d gossip wickedly about the neighbours or dreaded ‘dry blankets’ who bored them with their pomposity or expertise. At other times, Penelope and Robert would set off on wild bareback rides or chase boldly at the head of the local hunts. Most famously of all, Penelope would show off Moti’s marvellous character by bringing him inside the house. A photograph of the white horse taking tea in the drawing room at Faringdon has become emblematic of this era of Gerald’s life, the hallmark of his brand of eccentricity. In fact, the eccentricity in this case was surely Penelope’s. She is shown dressed in checked shirt and tie, with a page-boy haircut, holding a saucer from which Moti is slurping tea. Gerald, Robert and another friend sit around a dainty, lace-clothed table. Gerald was delighted by Moti’s perfect manners, and inspired by the beautiful incongruity of this elegant animal to set up his easel and oils to paint him in situ. There is a photograph showing Gerald perched on an ornate stool, buttoned up and penguin-like in co-respondent shoes, while Moti poses, calm and proud. If there were multi-coloured doves outside the house, then there could be a white horse inside; both caught the imagination in exactly the way that Gerald loved.