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

by Sofka Zinovieff

  16. Have you divided the best pictures all over the house and not stacked them all together?

  17. Please see that none of the petrol tins that I stored leak.

  18. Will you please forward enclosed letters. You can open them if you wish, but they won’t interest you.

  19. Tell Simpson to set the water hen trap again. They make excellent soup (they must be skinned first and also it will leave more food for the ducks).

  20. Give me news of the ducks.

  21. I am sure the Stevens brothers would give you a couple of Mandarin hens to put on the lake and they might breed there.

  22. My address is: –

  By Courtesy of Foreign Office

  Robert Heber-Percy

  c/o Captain De Gaury,

  Foreign Office

  At night, Robert and de Gaury would sit by the camel-thorn fire, wrapped in their cloaks and drinking bitter coffee after a meal of mutton or chicken with unleavened bread and dates. The old expert entertained his young companion by translating the ballads sung by the guards and Bedouin guides, and telling him Arab tales and explaining local ways. De Gaury enjoyed how easily one forgot ‘the daily customs of smoking, of drinking, newspaper-reading, and speaking on a telephone’. He knew all about the Arab preoccupation with sharaf – generally translated as ‘honour’, but covering generosity, good breeding and manliness, and also including learning, courage and good manners.293 Later, Robert would explain why he had been sent to Saudi Arabia by saying, ‘The Arabs like good manners and I have them.’ This was certainly not always the case, but he shared something else with them. De Gaury noted the Arab’s volatility, marked by patience under physical hardship contrasted with ‘sudden rages and excesses’. He may show ‘a desire for quick friendliness’ and then ‘turn on his heel after weeks of companionship, to leave you for ever, with no more than a curt farewell . . .’294 This could as easily have been written about Robert as the cloaked desert-dwellers.

  De Gaury had sensed that something in Robert’s nature would fit with the harsh, beautiful place he knew so well. Certainly, a close friend of Robert’s in later life believed that his Arabian journey had been a catalytic experience. ‘The intense atmosphere of Riyadh was almost a religious experience and confirmed Robert’s attitude into one best described as pantheism.’295 This was the first time that the Mad Boy had been removed from a familiar environment; his previous travels with Gerald had been well within the comfort zone of European culture and often surrounded by friends. This trip, on the other hand, entailed almost the subsuming of self to the wildness and differences of an unfamiliar civilisation. It has been suggested that Robert also carried out some intelligence work in the Balkans, but it is unclear when this would have been and with whom. It is possible that the success of the de Gaury trip led to something else, but sadly, no record remains.

  HILE THE BEGINNING OF THE WAR appeared to mark the end of a worthwhile life for Gerald, Jennifer, like Robert, was swept up into new and formative experiences. Jennifer’s parents were deeply disturbed by the war, each reacting in different ways: Geoffrey had a nervous breakdown, while Alathea became a Catholic. She was received into the Church by Father D’Arcy, a well-known Jesuit priest and Oxford-based philosopher linked to several famous conversions to Rome, including Evelyn Waugh’s.

  Jennifer left Oare to stay with Violet Wyndham at Parliament Piece as a paying guest. She took the bus into Swindon each day to learn shorthand and typing at a secretarial college and the teenage Francis would test her with passages from Proust. In 1940, Jennifer moved to Oxford, ending up in an airy two-bedroom flat at 6 Beaumont Street, a few minutes from where Gerald was lodging. Aged twenty-three, she got her first ‘proper job’ as a secretary, though there is no record of exactly where. One friend suggested it was at Blenheim, where MI5 was evacuated,296 though later she said that she worked as a typist in a hospital. She learned to cook and keep house and decorated her flat with flair and subtle good taste. Alathea made sure that, whenever possible, something was sent from the farm at Oare – a cheese or some eggs to supplement meagre rations.

  While Gerald felt that everything light and alluring would disappear during the war, Jennifer managed to maintain her style. As with Gerald and many of his friends, frivolity was an element in her rebellion – what some now saw as superficial, insignificant details like scent and clothes remained important to her. Even during the dullest years of clothes rationing and ‘Make Do and Mend’ slogans, Jennifer remained a glamorous figure. A fortuitous friendship with the dressmaker Pauline Hansford ensured that she was wonderfully dressed, and she used perfumes like Gardenia by Mary Chess, whose ‘little luxuries’ (‘Roman’ bath oils and ‘friction lotions’ as well as perfumes made from natural ingredients) had been popular throughout the 1930s and which were now all the more desirable.

  Although Jennifer was determined to look good, life was not easy as the war took hold. Petrol was now rationed, and windows had to be blacked out at night, which became as depressing as it was inconvenient – even chinks of light could get you in trouble with the wardens. More worryingly, large numbers of male friends were disappearing off into the terrifying and opaque machinery of warfare. There were trips up to London for a party or to meet people at the Café de Paris – famous for the best cabarets, including the black band-leader Ken ‘Snake Hips’ Johnson – but the supposedly safe underground restaurant received a direct hit in 1941 and Snake Hips was killed along with many of the clientele. London was becoming increasingly dangerous and damaged, even if some did believe in the ‘love-charm of bombs’, and their contribution to seduction.297 There were comical and surreal episodes – when the zoo was bombed, an escaped zebra reached Marylebone before it was recaptured – but many, including Harold Nicolson, were fearful of ‘being buried under huge piles of masonry and hearing the water drip slowly, smelling the gas creeping towards me . . .’298

  With large numbers of Londoners escaping to Oxford and elsewhere, it was often tempting to stay put. At her flat, Jennifer read a huge amount, particularly contemporary British writers like Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green and Evelyn Waugh, and she took refuge in music. She had a large collection of gramophone records: lots of Mozart, but also ballet music and popular recordings – American jazz singers like Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald and the latest Broadway hits. She particularly liked anything by the ‘young waif’ of Paris, Agnés Capri, whom she had seen performing in the South of France. A rival to Edith Piaf, Capri sang in nightclubs and had a good line in ironic love songs, including ‘Mes soeurs, n’aimez pas les marins’ (‘Sisters, never love a sailor’) with lyrics by Jean Cocteau – ‘As soon as they’ve come they go’. For dancing and parties, the most popular thing was the West Indian calypso, with its witty, clever lyrics and irrepressible rhythms. ‘Edward the VIII’ by the Trinidadian Lord Caresser had come out a couple of years earlier, but was still going strong: ‘It’s love, love alone / That caused King Edward to leave the throne.’

  Oxford had changed enormously since the beginning of the war and by 1941 was ‘in a state of mutilation; an extension of the Ministry of Food and Agriculture, the place swarming with civil servants carrying gas-masks’.299 Most of the students and young dons had been called up, so there was a very different university population, with many younger and female undergraduates arriving and with students often studying only for a short time. Age-old enmities, like those between ‘hearties’ and aesthetes, now seemed irrelevant. ‘Life in college was austere. Its pre-war pattern had been dispersed, in some instances permanently. Everyone paid the same fees . . . and ate the same meals.’300 There were also numerous bureaucrats, medics and students who had been transferred from London, not to mention the European refugees. ‘Czechs, Austrians and Germans crowded the pavements’, and ‘Women from Whitechapel treated their perambulators as tanks and mowed down everything before them.’301

  Before long, planes were buzzing over Oxford day and night, and Australian and Canadian soldiers arrived ‘who
roared about all day long in cars with camouflage fishnets in which branches and bright green paper fuzzy stuff were stitched’.302 New red-brick air-raid shelters appeared all over the city, and the charmed, indulgent days remembered by Oxford alumni now appeared extinct. Evelyn Waugh believed it part of a vanishing world that, along with large country houses and privileged aristocratic families, was worthy of memorialising in Brideshead Revisited. Ministry of Food regulations ensured a dull and restricted diet; Sebastian’s plovers’ eggs were long gone. Now it was tins of powdered hens’ eggs if you were lucky.

  One of Jennifer’s closest friends was a pivotal figure in Oxford. Wilhelmine ‘Billa’ Harrod was four years older than her, fiercely opinionated, religiously devout, and already becoming a pillar of the architectural conservation world. But she also knew how to have fun – through the 1930s she had been just as enthusiastic a party girl as Jennifer. John Betjeman had fallen for Billa during his engagement to Penelope and remained a close friend, calling her ‘my Turkish Delight’ for her curvy figure and dark hair. And nobody could forget Billa’s striptease, when she swung from a huge chandelier at a house party of Joan Eyres Monsell,* the clever, beautiful daughter of the First Lord of the Admiralty.303

  In 1938, Billa had married Roy Harrod, a somewhat older historian and economist, and fellow of Christ Church. They quickly established themselves as a sparkling and gregarious couple at their house opposite the college. Socially confident and with the ability to dominate her friends, Billa was seen by some as having a tendency to bossiness: ‘Billa was running Oxford,’ quipped one friend.304 The Harrods’ circle included not only erudite and amusing dons such as Maurice Bowra and Isaiah Berlin, but also students and figures from the literary and social world like Nancy Mitford and Cyril Connolly.

  Billa and Roy were already close to Gerald; indeed, he had hoped to go and stay with them in Oxford after he left Bowra’s lodgings. Roy’s letter from May 1940 makes it clear why that couldn’t happen:

  Dear Gerald,

  Billa has been telling me that you might come and take up your quarters with us at 91 S. Aldates. It is a delightful idea and there is no one whom we should like so well to have.

  But at the moment there is an obstacle. Billa is expecting a baby some time in September. That means the house being upside down with a monthly nurse in residence, presumably in the room which would otherwise be yours, and Billa unable for a considerable period to do housekeeping.

  Some claim that Billa was an inspiration for Nancy Mitford’s Fanny, the narrator in The Pursuit of Love. In 1941, Nancy reported on Oxford to her sister Diana after staying with the Harrods: ‘Oxford society is very pleasant I think, everybody so amiable & nice, most unlike what one would imagine such a small highly cultivated world to be. Gerald has taken up his residence there. Apparently he has a mania for tea-shop life & Billa says it is a kind of task, undertaken in turns, to face Gerald across rather grubby check tablecloths at mealtimes.’305

  Clearly this ‘task’ was something of a chore for Gerald’s friends; the combination of his miserable spirits and the sparse offerings of the tea shops was far less appealing than teas in the drawing room at Faringdon. There was a whole set of particular and unexpected problems for those civilians left ‘holding the fort’.

  By 1941, many of Gerald’s younger friends had joined the forces, though a few had not. John Betjeman volunteered for the RAF, but was allegedly turned down after telling the psychologist he was terrified of spiders. Following a year at the Ministry of Information, he was sent to Ireland as press attaché at the British Embassy and he and Penelope left for Dublin.306 Cyril Connolly had started what was to become the hugely influential literary magazine Horizon in 1940, funded by Peter Watson, whose flamboyant millionaire’s life was suspended in the name of art. As Cyril later wrote, ‘he stepped, gay and delightful, out of a charmed existence like a Mayfair Buddha suddenly sobered by the tragedy of his time to become the most intelligent and generous and discreet of patrons, the most creative of connoisseurs, the possessor of a formative flair which sought out everything that was contemporary, international and alive in painting and music’.307

  Cyril regarded Horizon as vital war work, and had direct access to a broad web of talented friends and acquaintances, including Stephen Spender as associate editor. Within ten weeks, the first issue of the small magazine that was to become ‘a major contribution to the cultural life of the nation’ was out. Printed on rationed paper (help came from Harold Nicolson at the Ministry of Information), it included pieces by W. H. Auden, George Orwell and Dylan Thomas. There would be art by many of the leading artists and photographers of the day: Barbara Hepworth, Graham Sutherland, John Craxton, Lucian Freud, Cecil Beaton, Bill Brandt, Paul Nash and many more.308 Gerald later contributed a literary critical piece and two poems to the magazine, including his ‘Surrealist Landscape’, dedicated to Dalí, and the poignantly witty ‘The Performing Mushroom’, dedicated ‘To Professor Jebb, author of Inedible Fungi, the Toadstool and all about it, etc., etc.’

  Cyril was keen to promote young writers in the magazine and included the then unknown Denton Welch, who wrote about meeting the elderly painter Walter Sickert just before his death. When Welch, in bad health and fated to die young, tried to attract patronage from Gerald as he had from Cyril, he was disappointed. He had painted a bizarre and touching portrait of Gerald as a boy, dressed up as Robinson Crusoe, in shaggy goatskin with a macaw on his shoulder, basing it on a photograph in First Childhood. Inviting Gerald to his room at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford, he hoped the eccentric peer would buy the work, but Gerald, uncomfortably shy, took snuff ‘furiously’ from a gold box and made no offer for the painting, which then failed to sell at an exhibition.309 Nonetheless, Gerald later encouraged the young man with his writing and Welch managed to get something out of the awkward and disappointing meeting, writing it up for Time and Tide as ‘A Morning with the Versatile Peer Lord Berners in the Ancient Seat of Learning’.

  OBERT RETURNED FROM HIS Arabian expedition in early 1940 to find himself confronted with the prospect of having to enlist. Moving rapidly from the sublime to the mundane, he entered the Army as a private in May 1940. This was an unusual choice for someone of his background, but less surprising given his lack of enthusiasm for discipline; the fiasco of his officer-training days in 1931 probably returned to haunt him. Travelling to Brighton, he joined the Royal Sussex Regiment, where he was duly weighed, measured, inspected (‘Scar 3½ inches long oval upper patella, scar left groin’), questioned (‘Religious Denomination: C of E . . . Occupations: Independent’), and given a number (‘Private 6404613’).

  Gerald was terribly worried when Robert enlisted. Even without the horrendous slaughter of trench warfare, casualties were inevitable and news of death and injury was already a dreadful part of daily life. In the event, the Mad Boy never left England and few in his regiment saw active service, but such an unchallenging war was far from guaranteed at this stage in the hostilities.

  Just when Gerald might have taken another turn for the worse, he met a new young friend with whom he was so taken that some thought she might even replace the Mad Boy. Clarissa Churchill was poised, slim and feline, with sharp, almond eyes, and known to be very intelligent. And she was only nineteen. Winston Churchill’s niece, she had moved to Oxford at around the same time as Gerald. Billa thought her ‘terribly attractive, and gay, and young, and pretty. And I remember Gerald really rather liked her and we almost thought in a sort of dotty moment that he might marry her . . .’310 The new arrival was keen to do some studying and in the informal climate of the time, Roy Harrod quickly fixed Clarissa up with Freddie Ayer as a philosophy tutor. She could not have been less like the young female undergraduates Philip Larkin depicted in his novel Jill, ‘carrying bulky handbags and enormous tattered bundles of notes; they smelt inimitably of face powder and (vaguely) Irish stew’. Clarissa was sophisticated and worldly beyond her years and she soon found herself at the heart of Oxford society. She wa
s a frequent visitor at the home of Lord David Cecil, an old friend of her mother’s, a fellow of New College and the younger son of the Marquess of Salisbury. Tall, lanky, clever and kind, he had a voice ‘like a crate of hens carried across a field’.311 David and his wife, Rachel, regularly gathered a stimulating group of people for dinners: Isaiah Berlin, Maurice Bowra, the Harrods, and on their visits to Oxford, Cyril Connolly and Stephen Spender. In spite of rationing, they somehow managed to feed their guests; pudding was usually sorbet made from Ribena, available without coupons from the chemist.312 Although there is no evidence, it is highly likely that as a close friend of Billa’s, Jennifer found herself at some of these evenings, even if she was sometimes intimidated by high-powered intellectuals, who reminded her of her father’s disapproving attitudes.

  In a corner of the Cecils’ drawing room, Clarissa noticed ‘there was often a small bald-headed man who rarely spoke and sat with bowed head. I eventually asked David who this character was and he said, “He’s called Lord Berners. He’s having a nervous breakdown.”’313 An unlikely pair, Gerald and Clarissa were soon intimates. She was attractive and opinionated; he was forlorn but full of surprises. ‘He never opened up,’ recalled Clarissa, ‘but I didn’t need that in a relationship. He was basically shy and his jokes were a defence against intimacy.’314 It wasn’t long before he had taken her by taxi to Faringdon and Clarissa was amazed at seeing the ‘ravishing’ eighteenth-century house. On another occasion, presumably when Robert was on leave, she noticed ‘a figure in private’s uniform’ walking about outside, ‘but never approaching us’. Asking Gerald who it was, he replied, ‘Oh, that’s my agent.’ Later, opening a drawer in the library, Clarissa came upon a pile of photographs, including famous characters such as Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein, the Sitwells and William Walton. She would also have spotted ‘the agent’ in rather different circumstances. ‘I was completely astonished,’ she confessed. ‘I had no idea about Gerald’s past life.’315 It is strange that Gerald should have kept Robert from Clarissa, though it appears that Robert was suspicious and even jealous of Gerald’s relationship with the Prime Minister’s niece, so perhaps there was avoidance on his part, and Gerald was merely being discreet. (In a magazine interview, Gerald later listed his ‘favourite virtue’ as ‘tact’.)316 ‘Gerald never demonstrated affection,’ Clarissa recalled. ‘He was old-fashioned.’317 She believed that some of Gerald’s other friends were puzzled by the new addition to their ranks. On spotting her in the drawing room on another visit to Faringdon, Penelope Betjeman turned to Gerald and asked truculently, ‘Who’s that girl?’