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- Herausgeber: The Robson Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015
The manager's name was Love. His first- floor flat was diagonally across the private road and the rose beds from ours. Each weekday morning, at eight fifteen, he hooked open his lattice-paned bedroom window and did exercises, in a white sleeveless vest and white drawers. So begins the compelling personal story of one of Britain's finest authors, Frederic Raphael. Going Up is a transatlantic voyage, taking us from Chicago to Putney, on up to Cambridge, and beyond to Fleet Street - but it is also an intimate journey into the early experiences and inspirations that forged the tools of this most versatile of writers. Tracing a path from the heady Cambridge days that would provide the setting of Raphael's acclaimed BBC television series The Glittering Prizes to the European wanderings and romantic yearnings that helped populate the pages of his opulent novels and Oscar-winning screenplays, this memoir is shot through with its author's incomparable wit and intellect. Ranging from the fabulously indiscreet to the deeply moving, Going Up is a dazzling display of the virtuoso prose style of one of Britain's most justly celebrated writers.
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CONTENTS
I
THE MANAGER’S NAME was Love. His first-floor flat was diagonally across the private road and the rose beds from ours. Each weekday morning, at eight fifteen, he hooked open his lattice-paned bedroom window and did exercises, in a white sleeveless vest and white drawers. Inhaling at length to expand his narrow chest, he flexed blanched arms, then bent and straightened unseen knees, five times. His physical jerks had the timeliness of a figure in some medieval German clock. On the hour of nine, he issued forth, at ground level, in black coat and striped trousers, in order to walk his briefcase to his bungalow office, opposite the green main gates and porters’ lodge of Manor Fields. Tall and thin, head rounded off with a bowler hat and hanging forward on an elongated neck, he resembled an ambulant question mark. His first name was Bernard, but he was spoken of only as Mr Love.
Manor Fields consisted of several blocks of red-brick Key flats, disposed among lawns and nice trees in what was once the rural estate of Lord North. Built at the top of Putney Hill in the 1930s, they were designed to appeal to ascendant members of the middle class. Each set of three entrances – apart from the one labelled ‘Harvard’ – was named after an Oxford or Cambridge college, although few tenants were likely to have attended one. Perhaps out of secular tact, none of the blocks bore the names of sainted colleges. Our first-floor flat was 12 Balliol House. My father had been at St John’s, Oxford, neighbour to Balliol, which was known to those next door as ‘Bloody Belial’. One of Cedric’s friends had tried to take a running jump from one college to the other and was impaled on the spikes atop an intervening wall.
In my teens, during the late 1940s, most of the lock-up garages in the back lot of Manor Fields stood empty. Early in the war, my parents had renounced their black Standard 8, EYR 332, with an enamel Union Jack on its bonnet device. Not until 1953 did they buy a patriotic, under-powered, fawn-coloured Morris. During the Blitz, Manor Fields’ cavernous underground garage served as a communal air-raid shelter. On holiday from boarding school, I looked forward to the ululating air-raid siren. The threat of German bombs promised a late night, sweetened by communal cocoa and Huntley & Palmers biscuits and loud with ack-ack fire from a sand-bagged battery on Putney Heath. The moan of the all-clear was an unwelcome relief: it signalled bedtime.
No trace remained of the eighteenth-century mansion of the Prime Minister whose indecision had lost Britain its American colonies. However, when strange scents were sniffed in the first-floor flat rented by John and Adie Tutin, in Somerville House, which stood on the site of the great house, Adie – a short, permanently waved, blonde, breathless, one-eyed Yorkshire woman – was sure that the perfume emanated from the ghosts of conscience-stricken aristocrats. On the telephone to my mother, the gush of gossip from what I called ‘Radio Tutin’ was audible from my parents’ bedroom door.
The Tutin flat featured a white telephone, concealed under the crinoline of a ceramic Madame Pompadour. It also sported a heavy collection of blue bound copies of the New Yorker, for which I had an exile’s appetite. Central Park West, where I had lived until I was six years old, was my equivalent of the Old Country. In early adolescence, I embarrassed Adie by taking pointed pleasure in the Peter Arno cartoon of a businessman saying to the barman, as he indicated the scantily dressed floozy on the stool beside him, ‘Fill ’er up.’
During summer holidays, I played tennis with the Tutins’ neat, pretty brunette daughter, Dorothy. She had a freckled nose and a penetrating cross-court forehand. After a spell as a flautist, under the tutelage of the conductor of the Metropolitan Police band, Maestro Barsotti, Dotty gained entrance to RADA, borne on the wind of her mother’s ambition. Adie seemed to have been born to impersonate Noël Coward’s Mrs Worthington. Dorothy proved, in due time, that there was an escape from suburbia, along the yellow-brick road that led to the distant West End. Her favourite record, played on the family’s wind-up gramophone, was ‘My Heart belongs to Daddy’. I preferred another number in the Tutins’ brittle collection: ‘She had to go and lose it at the Astor’. The twist was that what the singer had lost was not her virginity but her mother’s sable coat.
By the time I left Charterhouse, Dotty had her first professional part, as a pageboy (blackface, can it have been?) in some Shakespearian drama. She spoke no lines, but one of the reviews was headed ‘THE TUTIN GIGGLE’. After she was cast in Graham Greene’s The Living Room, with Eric Portman, who fidgeted with eye-catching effect when anyone else on stage seemed to be attracting the audience’s attention, Dotty never looked back. One day, I thought, I would write her a play and earn myself a one-way ticket out of Mr Love’s enclosure.
Dr John Tutin was a tall, square-shouldered naval engineer. He had a dipsomaniac’s careful step. Having gained pre-war fame by designing a revolutionary propeller for the Queen Mary, he went up to Piccadilly most days, after the morning rush, in black overcoat with velvet facings, and homburg hat. During the war, he had an office in Lower Regent Street, where he had been commissioned to work on ‘The Tutin Safety Hatch’. It would assist submariners to avoid the fate of the sailors who, in June 1939, had been trapped, and drowned, in Liverpool Bay in HMS Thetis. When HMG ceased to pay his rent, Dr Tutin installed himself in the reading room of the Piccadilly Hotel, where he made seigneurial use of the stationery and other amenities. His velvet-faced comportment won salutes from the doorman and immunity from managerial question.
On the odd occasion, he joined Dotty and me for weekend tennis on one of the two en-tout-cas courts on the garage roof. Wearing jaundiced flannels and dainty gym shoes, he would pause and then serve with an abrupt dab of the racket that imparted a high, slow, unreachable bounce to the ball. John was sometimes partnered by the exophthalmic George Coulouris, an English actor with a Greek father. In New York, he had been a member of Orson Welles’s Group Theatre and played the part of Walter P. Thatcher in Citizen Kane.
I was never more wholeheartedly British than in the last month of 1949, when, having finished my scholarship exams in snowy Cambridge, I stopped off at Manor Fields to await my results. Who could guess that, in 1938, I had been transported, an honest-to-God American kid, from New York City to England? As a result, I had been untimely ripped from Ethical Culture School, on Central Park West, and subjected to an English classical education, first at Copthorne, a Sussex prep school evacuated for the duration of the war to north Devon, and then at Charterhouse, near Godalming, Surrey.
I was alone in my parents’ flat when, late in the afternoon and with waning hopes, I received a telegram from R. L. Howland, the senior tutor of St John’s, congratulating me on having been elected to a Major Scholarship in Classics. A florin persuaded the telegraph boy to stay and share my pleasure with a glass of sherry. My joy derived less from the opportunity for advanced study of Latin and Greek than from triumph over George C. Turner, the headmaster of Charterhouse.
Obliged to return to Godalming for the rump of the Oration Quarter, I put on the fawn, zip-fronted trousers, without turn-ups, which I had acquired the previous summer, while on a visit to Kansas City, my mother’s home town. Over my demonstratively transatlantic Arrow shirt, with button-down collar, I wore a Fair Isle sweater of many colours, knitted – on several simultaneous, curved needles – by my mother’s agile young fingers (Irene was not yet forty). I refrained from flaunting one of the hand-painted, kipper-wide ties that a salesman had wished on me in K. C. after I had promised that I was all right for socks. Even a modest sartorial declaration of independence would stand out against the herringbone-tweedy, house-tied uniformity of fly-buttoned Carthusians who had yet to complete their penitential sentences.
My sixth-form masters, I. F. ‘Gibbo’ Gibson and V. S. H. ‘Sniffy’ Russell were quick with congratulations. I received none from the headmaster. Some months earlier, George Turner had barred me from the shortlist of candidates for the Holford Scholarship, which offered one Carthusian per annum privileged access to Christ Church, Oxford. My candidature was proscribed because of a letter I had written to the Provost of Guildford. During a Sunday night sermon in chapel, he had invited the congregation to imagine young Jesus going to sell his handiwork as a carpenter to a Nazareth shopkeeper. ‘And the shopkeeper,’ he declared, ‘being a Jew, would give him as little for it as possible.’
Had I, at that point, ventured from the sixth-form stalls and strode down the long nave of the Giles Gilbert Scott Memorial Chapel and unlatched one of the big, echoing doors and gone out into the night, my time at the school might have been summarily curtailed; but it would have been a far, far better thing than I dared to do. I sat still. Later, closeted in my study, I wrote a sardonic letter to the Provost. He did not reply directly. He forwarded my callow philippic to George Turner, adding that he would never have said what he did if he had known that there were any Jews in the chapel. Turner, a short man, summoned me to his presence and accused me of bad manners towards a guest of the school. It was my duty to write and apologise. Brimming with unworthy tears, I refused. The headmaster then declared that my discourtesy rendered me ineligible to be included on the shortlist of candidates for Christ Church.
It was a Carthusian tradition that anyone who had won a major Oxbridge award was commissioned to carry the good news, on a card written by the headmaster, from classroom to classroom. The announcement that he had won an extra half-holiday for the whole school procured brief popularity for a clever boy. Carthusian slang labelled scholars ‘hash pros’, no deferential designation. In 1940s England, to be a professional implied that you did things because, unlike a gentleman, you needed the money. George Turner gave the rank and file no occasion to put their hands together for me. Nor did I receive the leaving prize of £40 in books regularly given to those who had won major laurels.
In the envoi appended to my last report, Turner hoped that my success would encourage me to abate my resentments and take pleasure in ‘the adventure of ideas’, a phrase lifted from the title of a book by Alfred North Whitehead, the co-author, with his quondam pupil Bertrand Russell, of Principia Mathematica. Russell’s Whiggish accents were familiar from his contributions to The Brains Trust on the radio. Turner was advising me to renounce my mission to reproach the Christian world for iniquities visited on the Jews; I should do better to lose myself in the higher culture to which I was fortunate enough to have been offered access. I had every wish to do so.
To buy the blue Pelican edition of Whitehead’s elegant book, I went to W. H. Smith’s, in Putney High Street. A varnished board hung from two brass chains over the foyer of the shop displaying – in appropriate shades of blue – the winners of the University Boat Race each year since its inception in 1856. With instant new pride, I observed that Cambridge had won more races than Oxford. My vision of Cambridge promptly displaced that of Oxford. I imagined a Great Good Place, where wit procured eminence and where there was neither Jew nor Gentile.
Smith’s had a lending library on the first floor. Monica Dickens, Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer, Angela Thirkell and Daphne du Maurier were the authors most in demand by south London literatae. Suburban solitude made me bookish rather than scholarly. To learn about the world, one did not look or listen, one read. Until 1948, we had no television in 12 Balliol House; nor was there ever a gramophone. In 1925, partnering Phyllis Haylor, my father had been amateur dancing champion of the world. He always loved to dance. His favourite venues were downstairs at Hatchett’s, adjacent to the Berkeley Hotel in Piccadilly, Quaglino’s in Bury Street and, more rarely, the Savoy Hotel. It had an elevated dance floor and bespectacled, soft-voiced Carroll Gibbons’s sucrose orchestra. What counted for Cedric was the beat, not the music.
We never went to concerts, rarely to the theatre. Our Philco radio was seldom turned on except to listen to the nine o’clock news (read, most often, by Alan Liddell or Bruce Belfrage), Tommy Handley’s ITMA (‘Well, if it isn’t Poppy Poo-pah!’) and Ronnie Waldman’s Monday Night at Eight. It featured a weekly ‘deliberate mistake’, which listeners were incited to detect, and an encapsulated thriller, Meet Dr Morelle. On Christmas Day, we tuned in to the king’s speech in good time to sympathise with brave royal pauses. My father and I stood at attention for the national anthem, enacting moral rectitude. My mother, being American, was exempt.
In the 1940s, I had no way of learning about sex except through print. Although a measure of information came with the kit, a solitary boy had to imagine how his bit might fit into hers and, more difficult, why she might care to brook such an invasion. I had neither brothers nor sisters. Since both my parents were only children, I also lacked first cousins. All my relatives were old. By the time I left Charterhouse, when I was eighteen, I had yet to see an unclothed female in the flesh.
At the age of eleven, I had been enlightened, by chance, about what men and women did in the course of what Somerset Maugham, when I came to read him, called ‘sexual congress’. During a school holiday, while on a bicycle ride with a Dartmouth cadet who lived in the next entrance of Balliol House, I chanced on an unofficial exhibition of black and white photographs pronged on the barbed wire around the pond on Wimbledon Common. A congeries of tallowy men and Rubensesque women were disporting themselves with hirsute abandon. One or two were smiling at the camera. We looked and we looked, Martin and I, and then we pedalled home.
When I returned, alone, to do some revision (‘boning up’ might be an apt modern usage), the photographs had disappeared. I had to satisfy myself with the breasts of the single naked woman available, for one and sixpence, in the monthly Lilliput. The space between her legs was blanched and uncleft. I looked to Picasso for hairier information. Lilliput also carried the adventures of ‘That Naughty Girl Myrtle’. She was advertised as being no better than she should be. Her chronicler never disclosed details of what precise naughtiness she got up to. I was much taken by a Reprint Society novel in which the heroine was revealed, by her overall tan, to have sunbathed in the nude. Art and literature supplied what suburban life concealed or was fudged by editorial discretion.
When I was fifteen, and my mother was quarantined with mumps, I had no recourse, between attending to her, but to sit alone and read. I happened on Of Human Bondage in my parents’ shelves (two long rows, low under the bay window). Somerset Maugham’s orphaned hero, Philip Carey, was bullied at school because he had a club foot. His guardian was a Church of England vicar, as the author’s had been. Accused of a want of Christian charity, he retorted (perhaps more self-mockingly than his ward recognised) that parsons were ‘paid to preach, not to practise’. Maugham’s decorous eroticism was piquant enough to inflame adolescent desires. His young hero was dismayed, and all but dismasted, by Miss Wilkinson’s pragmatic stays and undergarments. The Literary Guild’s illustration of her, in booted demi-déshabillé, furnished my dreams and stiffened my ambitions.
Unlike the patrician elaborations of Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography LeftHand! Right Hand!, which I tried to admire, in the Reprint Society edition, Maugham’s unadorned ironies seemed by no means inimitable. Why not recapitulate juvenile sorrows with the vengeful accuracy that had made him a bestseller? He too had been translated as a small boy from one culture to another in which he both was and was not at home. Born in France, never quite at ease in England, he made a virtue of duplicity. Since Maugham was, as he later said himself, ‘three-quarters queer’, his doubleness was greater than it occurred to me to guess in the 1940s. Many years later, Jocelyn Rickards, the stage-designer wife of the film director Clive Donner and sometime mistress of, among others, Graham Greene and Freddie Ayer, told me that, in Australia at the same period, ‘everyone’ knew that Maugham was queer. Wagga Wagga, NSW, was evidently closer to informed circles than Putney, SW15.
Maugham’s notebooks and prefaces acknowledged a debt to French models, especially to the short stories of Guy de Maupassant. I added the Penguin Boule de Suif to the three white shelves of my bedroom library. With the Anglocentricity primed by Churchill’s ‘finest hour’, it did not occur to me that it would be better to read French, or any other writers – unless Latin or Greek – in their original language. Except for a fortnight in the early summer of 1939, when we went for a holiday in Knokke-le-Zoute (its attraction for my parents was its casino), I had never been to the Continent. During the war, Europe was defined as a place teeming with ‘starving millions’, any one of whom would have been grateful for my prep school menu of parsley potatoes and boiled cod, roly-poly pudding, watered treacle and the thick outside leaves of lettuce. The lure of ‘the Continent’ grew bright as I read Maugham’s account of Philip Carey’s anguished life as a young painter. To be poor and bohemian in Paris seemed very heaven.
Soon after reading Of Human Bondage, I won the third prize in the Charterhouse school painting competition. My true prize was the pursed displeasure on my housemaster’s face. Harry ‘HAM’ March had excluded my landscape from the Lockites’ official entry. I had been hung in the equivalent of the Salle des Refusés. At least as far back as the sixth century BC, when the Parian poet Archilochus shafted the family of the beautiful Neobule, who had dumped him, art and revenge have overlapped. The bearded judge, Claude Rogers of the Camden Town School, detected vestiges of ‘significant form’ in my suburban oil-on-canvas-paper. Dreams of Paris and its liberties came a shade closer.
In my teens, eager to get out of 12 Balliol House, I went regularly on the 14 bus to the second-hand shelves in the Charing Cross Road. From the diagonal rack beside the entrance to Joseph’s cavernous bookshop, I picked up the works of Byron and Tennyson, in green boards, for sixpence each, and the Nonesuch edition of Hazlitt’s essays for a shilling. I also acquired a prize copy of the often lauded Jeremy Taylor’s 1651 Holy Living, with the front board detached, for thruppence. I bought it to see why Somerset Maugham had scoffed at it.
Having paid dawdling dues to English literature, I went up the street to Foyle’s. There I passed not too quickly from history and fiction to the medical section, where it was possible to scan a few pages of Dr Van der Velde’s Perfect Marriage before one’s presence stuck out. The text informed me that, in the right position (‘see fig. opposite’), the female genitals could be raised or lowered for more penetrating pleasure. A couple’s clinching rapture was to arrive at simultaneous orgasm. It appeared to take a bit of doing, but practice made for perfection, after which what Jeremy Taylor called ‘mutual endearment’ would contrive a permanent bond.
The anatomical diagrams in Perfect Marriage were as salacious as the London Underground map, but they served to make me glad to be wearing my blue mackintosh as I walked past shady, half-curtained premises that sold Damarrhoids and trusses, to Leicester Square Tube station. During the long ride to Putney Bridge station, detumescence was assisted by Idylls of the King, though they too carried an erotic charge. What did not?
I quit Charterhouse without regret or gratitude. I had gone there, in the autumn of 1945, as a last resort. Earlier that year, midway between VE Day and the Japanese surrender, I sat the Winchester scholarship exam with a prep school friend, Richard Bird. A couple of months younger than me, Richard had spent most of the war years in America. After all the papers had been evaluated, I was fourth in the number of gross marks, Richard eleventh. Our prep school headmaster, ‘Skete’ Workman, promised that, even after the examiners had allowed ‘weight for age’, I was odds on to receive one of the twelve scholarships on offer. I set about learning Wykehamist slang. There was, I discovered, one way into the school grounds known as ‘Non Licet Gate’, because it was not lawful for boys to pass through it. I could hardly wait not to use it.
After the examiners’ final conclave, I was seen to have descended from fourth to thirteenth in the published roll. Relegated to proxime accessit (a free translation, in the modern style, would be ‘close but no cigar’), there was to be no place for me at Winchester. Richard had risen to sixth. He was in; I was out. My abiding suspicion is that the headmaster, Spencer Stottesbury Leeson, a canon of the Church of England and later Bishop of Peterborough, put his heavy, although not yet episcopal, hand on the scales, thus adding disqualifying weight to my age. During my interview with him and his formidable colleagues, Leeson had asked how I felt about going to chapel. I gave an honest trimmer’s response: going to chapel had never bothered me at Copthorne School and would not bother me at Winchester. The sideways twitch of his mouth might have become a smile but it snagged into a wince.
Old Wykehamists have denied that my elimination could have had anything to do with anti-Semitism. Nothing excites charges of paranoia more quickly than the evidence of an accurate memory. Who will now believe that in the summer of 1945, after the recent discovery of the German concentration camps, a great English school was inflected by a policy which echoed, however discreetly, that of the defeated Nazis? In fact, in 1945, Winchester’s rival, Eton College, announced its intention to operate a numerus clausus. My father’s old school, St Paul’s, with its long tradition of admitting any number of Jews, followed suit. Non licet sed perpaucis Judaeis (none but a very few Jews allowed) was the new slogan on their gates. Protests led by the Old Etonian A. J. Ayer, a leading Oxford philosopher (and ex-Guards officer), and by Isaiah Berlin, an Old Pauline of equal academic and social distinction, impelled both schools publicly to rescind the proposed measures. It would be nice to suppose that they ceased to operate them. Life in old England was dominated by those who composed not only its small print but also, if pressed, its invisible writing.
By the time Skete Workman learned of my rejection by Winchester, Charterhouse was the only major school whose scholarship examinations had not yet taken place. Despite blurring tears, I did my educated stuff and was given a £100-a-year scholarship. Two years later, it was increased by another £40 when I gained a ‘senior scholarship’ at the same time as taking the despised ‘School Cert’. Arrogance and submission were the clever boy’s systole and diastole. Part of the English education was to learn, by indirection, of the link between brains and money; a first-class degree gave a man access to enviable emoluments, but one must never talk about them and certainly not wave one’s hands around while doing so. By the age of eighteen, I had been laced into the ways and manners of the middle of the English middle class towards the end of the last season of its high opinion of itself. The British and their king-emperor had been sent victorious by a manifestly Anglophile Almighty. Even if He seemed to specialise in close-run things, few doubted that He was still in His heaven.
Austerity and rationing were the outward and visible signs of patriotic taxes that had to be paid for post-war Britain to stay on top. Life under Clement Attlee’s trustworthy, pipe-smoking, thin-voiced chairmanship was a grey vale of warnings and prohibitions. From her desk in the Home Office, the stern daughter of the voice of God warned us to ‘Keep Death Off the Roads’ and proclaimed ‘Clean Living the Only Real Safeguard’ against the unspeakable ills conveyed by the fell initials V. D. There were few activities about which we should not feel guilty. Good citizens were warned that ‘Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases’; we should ‘Trap Them in Our Handkercheases’. The traveller might still find himself sitting under a sign asking ‘Is Your Journey Really Necessary?’ Civilians of the 1940s were consigned to patriotic immobility.
According to John Raymond, a New Statesman pundit, post-war England was ‘on the anvil’. The drama of the Berlin air-lift had proved that our 1948 and George Orwell’s 1984 were distinguished only by a quirk of the pen. Russia had replaced Germany as the heavy hammer that threatened to come down on everything that the civilised world held dear. The war was over, but hostilities might begin again at any time. Why else did Carthusians blanco belts and burnish brasses before parading in the Junior Training Corps? In the second lustrum of the 1940s, I spent every Tuesday afternoon ‘doing Corps’. I was neither keen nor slack; I conformed. I was conscious, at the same time, that conformity entailed an element of irreconcilable difference. Was that why I bit my nails?
In my third year at Charterhouse, the JTC’s commanding officer, Major Morris, alias ‘Magger Mo’, announced a ‘promotions exam’. With the competitive docility that a good education fostered, I dealt with the questions set before me as well as I could: I rehearsed the infantryman’s mantra, ‘Down, Crawl, Observe, Sights, Fire!’; I defined an ‘O-group’ and its duties; my sketch map was complete with ‘church with steeple’ and ‘bushy-topped tree’, and I inserted an unambiguous arrow to indicate the proper line of march; I was even practical enough to dismantle and reassemble a Bren gun (real soldiers were said to do it blindfold) before jumping up and standing to attention. If a condition for promotion had been that I should itemise the details of the Sullan constitution, I should have done it with equal zeal. There were no hurdles like English hurdles. What counted was to clear them cleanly, never mind whether they led to anywhere one really wanted to go.
As a result of gaining good marks, I leapfrogged from private to ‘acting-corporal’. The Napoleon of Godalming Hill was launched on his unlikely ascent. Shortly afterwards, command of the Lockite house platoon was wished on me by the incoming head monitor, Jeremy Atkinson, the other senior scholar in the house (if only a natural scientist). Jeremy, whose naval officer father had been killed in action off Singapore in 1941, had more urgent administrative things to do than to ‘play soldiers’. He later became head of the school and was awarded the Holford Scholarship to Christ Church the year before I was disqualified from presenting myself as a candidate.
Leadership, I discovered, was akin to acting: imposture was easier, and more enjoyable, to sustain than sincerity. With calculated riskiness, I invited an unenthusiastic platoon to relish the comedy of excelling at something that neither they nor I wanted to do. My Tuesday afternoon squaddies responded with eager complicity: pretending to be keen turned conformity into performance. In my last Quarter, seconded by Sergeant James Cellan-Jones, I marched ‘Lockites’ into a tie with ‘Robinites’ for first place in the school drill competition. Which of the adjudicating officers could guess that our snappy uniformity carried a stamp of irony?
Promoted to under officer, I joined the only other Carthusian of the same rank, David Vansittart, a curly-haired, blond, blue-eyed Robinite. We two alone were entitled to wear officer’s uniform, carry a leather-encased swagger stick and sport a Sam Browne belt. We also had the exalted right to parade in brown rather than black boots, a privilege I lacked the means to exercise. I could, however, look forward with some confidence to selection as an officer when the time came to do National Service. My khaki future was postponed by a government ordinance that allowed scholars first to go to university. It must have been intended to increase the military intake of young men with serviceable degrees in subjects such as engineering, medicine and current foreign languages.
Although competence in Latin and Greek was likely to be of small utility on the battlefield, one band of classicists was known to have played a notably gallant part in the war. A visiting lecturer had told us how knowledge of ancient Greek had qualified Stanley ‘Billy’ Moss, Patrick ‘Paddy’ Leigh Fermor, C. M. ‘Monty’ Woodhouse and Xan Fielding to lead guerrilla operations in Crete and on the Greek mainland. Seen from a distance, the adventures of those latter-day philhellenes furnished one of the few romantic episodes of the Second World War.
While at Charterhouse, Stanley Moss had been the fag-master of my friend Peter Green, probably the greatest, certainly the most versatile, of modern classical scholars. In 1950, Moss published the bestseller Ill Met by Moonlight. A film version, in which Leigh Fermor was played by Dirk Bogarde, embellished its real-life hero’s Byronic renown. Moss himself, a Jew who was Leigh Fermor’s 2 i/c in the great adventure of kidnapping the German general Heinrich Kreipe, derived little kudos or satisfaction from his success. ‘Paddy’, on the other hand, acquired iconic standing in Greece, and an elevated literary reputation in England, for the rest of his long life. He had been at the same school, King’s Canterbury, as Somerset Maugham. Common Old Boyishness may explain how come, as a guest at the Villa Mauresque, Leigh Fermor offended his host by daring to tell a funny story about someone with a very b–bad s–stammer.
Moss was never at ease in the post-war world. In Peter Green’s words:
Bill was a charmer de luxe: very handsome, enormous natural grace. But he was also the absolutely classic example of the romantic Mediterranean expat with a Peter Pan psyche … he simply couldn’t, wouldn’t grow old, or indeed up. Billy was the one who actually married his Polish countess, but drank himself to death at about the same age as Dylan Thomas.
Perhaps Moss, the rolling stone, could never forget the hundreds of Cretan hostages who were shot in reprisal for his and Paddy’s audacious, award-winning exploit.
For non-combatants, the transcendent quality of literae humaniores was illustrated in the story of how, as his kidnappers led him through the Cretan mountains, General Kreipe glanced at snow-capped Mount Ida and then, perhaps in order to pull educated rank on his captors, recited the opening lines of Horace’s Ode 9, Book One:
Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte, nec iam sustineant onus…
When Kreipe hesitated over the next phrase, Leigh Fermor took the cue and continued, without pause, to the end of the poem. The general looked at him and said, ‘Achso, Herr Major!’ Who would not wish to have been as superbly prompt as ‘Paddy’ at that moment? I wonder with what eyes Billy Moss, whatever kind of a Jew he was, observed this time-out-of-war exchange between his commanding officer and a Wehrmacht general.
I had been as diligent and house-spirited a Lockite as dread and ambition could contrive. When in office as a house monitor, I called my colleagues by their first names, but after what had happened a year or so earlier, I trusted none of them, even those innocent of overt malice. The version of myself seen or heard in public was carefully edited. I learned from Jeremy Atkinson how to tighten the lips in order to instil dread in the lower deck, as it were; but I was careful not to reveal to him, or to anyone else, anything that might be used against me. I kept a straight enough face to seem to be one of them, and a straight enough bat to get my house colours; but I walked alone, myself and my double.
Cicero’s favourite clausula carried the concluding phrase ‘essevideatur’, which we construed as ‘that he may seem to be’, whether one thing or another. While appearing to be a proper Carthusian, I was primed by Mr Maugham to take unforgiving note of my fellows’ forms of speech and personal habits. I did so in a wide spiral notebook, ruled feint, that I had bought in New York City. A Writer’s Notebook had shown me how neatly and surreptitiously a man might can his beans before opportunity came to spill them.
II
DURING HOLIDAYS FROM Charterhouse, I had contrived to kiss a few girls, on unparted lips. English girls furnished a passive and interminable assault course: one got as far as one could, in a given time, before being stalled. Mona had the biggest, most enticing breasts. I never surmounted them. Two New York girls I dated during ten days in their city in the summer of 1949 were more accessible. Necking in the American style had its limits, but they were elastic. I sailed for England, on the Queen Mary, convinced that I was passionately in love with freckled Mary Jane, whom I had kissed deep into the early hours.
After I had returned to my Carthusian monastery, Mary Jane wrote me scented letters, in pale blue ink, on petalled paper, promising full-length proximities when we met again. In the interim, I convinced myself that my true love was the pretty Hilary Phillips, whom I had met, when we were sixteen, at the Liberal Jewish synagogue in St John’s Wood. In a surge of ancestral allegiance, my father had sent me to be prepared for ‘Confirmation’, an anglicised form of Bar Mitzvah, appropriate for assimilated Jews. No Hebrew was required, apart from the ritual Shema Yisroel. More ardent in pursuit of Hilary than of hereditary solidarity, I had learned only with disappointment, in 1948, of the foundation of the state of Israel. Hilary’s family celebration of the end of 2,000 years of Jewish homelessness obliged her to cancel a date on which I was hoping to proceed a button or two lower down the front of her nicely frilled, and filled, blouse.
My parents had chosen to live in SW15 not least because they did not care to be identified with ‘north London’. Golders Green, with its Jewish connotations, stood for everything from which they wished to be discrete. My father neither denied his Jewishness nor was he at pains to declare it. He flinched when called ‘Rayfle’, a pronunciation that he took to insinuate that he was an alien. He insisted on our Raphael being said in the same way as the name of the Renaissance painter and the anglicised archangel. Out in Putney, we did not celebrate the foundation of the state of Israel. Zionism made no call on my father, although he would be pleased when, in 1952, his friend Sir Frank Evans was named British ambassador to Israel. My parents had met Frank and Mary in the 1930s, when Evans was British consul-general in New York. Mary was what my mother called a ‘character’. At a post-war reception at the UN, she was being presented to the guest of honour when her pants fell down. She stepped out of them, handed them, between thumb and forefinger, to her husband – ‘Here, Frank!’ – and proceeded with the polite formalities.
My brunette mother was beautiful enough not to be taken for what she did not deny that she was but would as soon not be called. Irene (the final ‘e’ silent, as in Goodnight, Irene) never lost her American accent, but she showed little nostalgia for New York, still less for Kansas City, where her mother continued to live until the mid-1960s. In an access of daughterly loyalty, Irene then persuaded Fanny to cross the Atlantic and spend her remaining years, of which there turned out to be more than a few, at 12 Balliol House.
In 1930s New York, my mother’s bankrupt father, Max, had separated from his wife and come to live in our spare room at 30 W 70th St. Cedric never complained then, nor did he when his deaf mother-in-law moved into the back bedroom that I had vacated in 12 Balliol House. She often took offence at what she thought she had overheard. My father nicknamed her ‘Canasta-puss’ on account of her addiction to the game, which she had played regularly with ‘the girls’ back in K. C. In exile, the skeletal Fanny smoked incessantly; but even in her nineties she would jump up when I came to the flat. ‘Want a cup of coffee?’ She made quantities of wide, flat, nutty and delicious cookies, in accordance with an allegedly Lithuanian recipe that existed only in her head.
Cedric hated cigarette smoke. Yet he treated Fanny with implacable politeness. Was his self-restraint a form of penance? As we were sailing back to England from New York, when I was already eighteen years old, my mother disclosed that, in his dancing twenties, Cedric had fathered a daughter on a certain Molly Hall, who had been a member of the Baltic Exchange, a rare distinction for a woman in those days. Molly had promised her lounge-lizard lover that she could not have children. A few months later, she informed him that she was pregnant. Cedric’s father Ellis paid for her to go away, less because of the shame of the imminent bastard than because its mother was not Jewish. At some stage during the war, Molly opened a hairdressing salon in Surbiton called Chez Raphael. After 1945, she emigrated to British Columbia with her daughter, Sheila, and took the name Raphael-Hall. I have no clear idea why Irene waited so long to break the seal on that previously well-kept secret.
In 1929, Cedric went, on an immigrant’s visa, to sell Shell gas in northern Illinois. He did so with career-enhancing success, although his Oxford accent was not an immediate plus among the area’s filling station managers, many of them Irish. Before catching the boat-train to Liverpool, Cedric had promised his parents, with implacable gratitude, that he would marry the first Jewish girl he met who had a good figure, a pretty face and no moustache. The nineteen-year-old Irene Rose Mauser, who was working as secretary to an architect in Chicago, qualified on all counts.
Though he never thought well of her dancing, Cedric was always proud of Irene’s smartness, in both transatlantic senses, and of her long-lasting good looks. They met, on a blind date, on a very cold Chicago Christmas Eve, at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. My mother promised that it was love at first sight. She did, however, discover – not long after they were married, in 1930 – that Cedric was still writing love letters to his old dancing partner, Phyllis Haylor. ‘Phyll’ had since turned professional and again won the World Dancing Championship, with a new partner. In old age, when Cedric was broken by ill health, she visited him several times in the Royal Hospital and Home for Incurables. Phyll’s lover, the bisexual film critic and memoirist Nerina Marshall, was then living in Manor Fields. She became more friendly with my mother than my mother did with her.
When I was sixteen, my father sent me to the parquet-floored basement of a Knightsbridge Hotel, near Raphael Street, where Miss Haylor and Josephine Bradley and Charles Scrimshaw (a red carnation always in the button-hole of his black tailcoat) taught the waltz, the tango, the quickstep and the foxtrot, quite as if the 1920s had never come to an end. I soon despaired of winning pretty girls by the nimbleness of my chassis-reverse.
My father’s old friend Victor Silvester (whom Cedric called ‘Ginger’) and his ‘ballroom orchestra’ became middle-class household names in the 1940s and 1950s. His strict-tempo slogan – ‘slow, slow, quick, quick, slow’ – applied as much to the nation as to its ballroom dancers: England might be dancing to the music of time, but it was in no great hurry. My father had been invited to become Ginger’s manager when he first assembled his musicians, but he declined; perhaps because it was too risky, probably because the music business was no place for a gentleman. Despite his ‘investments’, a term he applied both to buying shares and to backing horses, Cedric never again had the opportunity to make any unusual money. He had to rely on his salary from Shell. Irene had an eye for bargains and managed always to be dressed fashionably. Since she never threw anything away, she was able, over the years, to retrieve and refurbish what had gone out of style as soon as its turn came round again. When she died, in 2010, at the age of 100, her wardrobe for all seasons included pairs of double-A I. Miller shoes that she had bought at Saks Fifth Avenue more than seventy years before, all in well-heeled condition.
Despite his steady devotion to Irene (or, when patiently displeased, ‘Reen’), Cedric told me, late in his life, that he did not think that it mattered very much whom one married. Was his indifference the result of being a Stoic, a world champion, a Jew or an English gentleman? He never alluded to his triumphs on the dance floor, but his posture to the world came, I suspect, of what it pleased him to keep to himself: once a champion always a champion, but one must never advertise the fact. Modesty was his only conceit.
Cedric could read Hebrew, but understood little. He made no attempt to teach me or to have me taught. He referred to Gentiles only as ‘the Christians’. Disdain and deference were on equal terms. In his hagiography of Virginia Woolf, Quentin Bell suggested that, when young, Leonard Woolf, an Old Pauline, spoke of Gentiles as ‘goyim’. I doubt whether any well-educated English Jewish family of the time used that term. In his film The Hours, Stephen Daldry portrayed an exasperated Leonard Woolf shouting at Virginia, in broad daylight, on the platform of Richmond station. It is inconceivable that, in the period concerned, he would have raised his voice to his wife, in public, at any hour. The scene would have played better in a whisper anyway.
My father would have considered it outlandish to cleave to a kosher diet, but he did arrive home, now and again, with slices of bread-crumbed cold fried fish that could have come only from an East End delicatessen. He laughed, somewhat, at Jewish jokes, but he seldom told one and he never put on a supposedly Jewish accent. In New York, he had admired Jack Benny but deplored Eddie Cantor. In post-war London, he loved Bud Flanagan, suffered Vic Oliver, ignored Max Miller and liked Sid Field, whom we went to see in Piccadilly Hayride and in Harvey, in which he played a hallucinating drunk, unfortunately to the life.
The first Jewish story I ever heard, in New York, when I was five or six years old, was told by Seymour Wallace, one of the racier of my parents’ crowd. It concerned the inevitable Itzig, who, time and again, when his best friend had tickets for the Giants, told him, ‘Shelley, I’d love to come but I can’t; Levinsky’s playing.’ Finally, Sheldon asks Itzig does he really have to love music that much. ‘Music, shmusic!’ Itzig says. Sheldon says, ‘So how come it matters so much when Levinksy’s playing?’ ‘Vot he plays,’ Itzig says, ‘who cares? Vere he plays, who cares? But ven he plays…! I sleep vit his vife.’ Another overheard joke, of a similar low order, asked how you play strip poker in a nudist colony. The answer was ‘Mit de tweezers’. That was as near the gutter as I came. A later slightly naughty number must also, I think, predate our passage of the Atlantic: ‘The bee is such a busy soul / He has no time for birth control / And that is why today one sees / So very many sons-of-bees.’ The last line sounds uniquely American; in the 1940s, ‘son-of-a-bitch’ had no current British usage.
Happy to pass for a New Yorker in the 1930s, complete with seersucker suit and panama hat in the summer, Cedric looked no less at home as a conventional 1940s Londoner. In chalk-striped Adamson’s suit, white shirt with cuff-links and detachable collar, bowler hat, leather gloves and silk-sleeved umbrella, he waited each weekday morning at Putney Southern Railway station for the 9.08 to Waterloo. He was pleased to seem not to differ from other City-bound suburban gentlemen; that was the difference between them. They included our Somerville House neighbour Jack Piesse, who might nod at Cedric, but – from Monday to Friday – never said good morning. Yet Jack and his wife Margaret played after-dinner bridge with my parents every Saturday night, at alternating venues.
The handsome Jack was a solicitor for Esso Petroleum. He had had a brave war, from Alamein to Berlin, as a tank commander in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. In the week before Germany surrendered, a Wehrmacht soldier swung an unloaded rifle at his head in a dark cellar as Major Piesse was bent double, feeling with his dirk for trip-wires across the concrete steps. The German’s rifle butt crashed against the wall, just past where Jack’s head should have been. Jack riposted with an upward thrust of his dirk. It was the only time on the long way from Sicily to Berlin when he knew for certain that he had killed someone.
Jack, an Old Tonbridgian, drove a Mark 5 Jaguar and played golf at Royal Wimbledon, where the entry form for new members demanded ‘Name of father, if changed’. My Old Pauline father went by Underground to play at the adjacent Wimbledon Park golf club, which was not so inquisitive. It even admitted Variety actors such as Jeremy Hawk, Sid Field’s straight man in his famous golfing sketch (‘Address the ball’, ‘Dear Ball’, etc.). Hawk wore light-blue golfing attire and a light-blue cap, in which he dazzled female members. My father played regularly with a Jewish businessman called Alec Nathan who was a director of the pharmaceutical company Glaxo. He urged Cedric to buy its shares while they were cheap, but he failed to do so.
On summer days, when the sun shone, Jack Piesse would take his deckchair onto the lawn below the Manor Fields rose beds and render himself a darker shade of brown, an alien form of narcissism in those blanched, insular days. Stephen Potter’s 1952 manual of One-Upmanship peddled a put-down to apply to smug, bronzed persons: ‘Mediterranean type!’ If anyone approached him with neighbourly overtures, Jack closed his eyes. On winter evenings, he sometimes invited me to Somerville House to play the board game L’Attaque. He had an antique set from his childhood. The pieces wore uniforms from the Napoleonic wars, except for the spy, who had a cloak, a slouch hat and a two-faced Continental moustache.
Once aboard the 9.08, Jack and other commuters would open TheTimes, with its eight columns of personal advertisements encrypted in small print across the front page, or the Daily Telegraph, as a prophylactic screen against encroaching conversationalists. After their arrival at Waterloo, ‘the Drainpipe’ shuttled the City men, like reticent sardines, to the Bank. A Stock Exchange joke of the period told of a woman crossing Threadneedle Street and being all but sandwiched between two buses coming in opposite directions. All of her clothes were ripped off in the process and she passed out cold. As she lay naked in the street, a chivalrous broker stepped out and covered her private parts with his bowler hat. When the ambulance arrived, its crew looked carefully for signs of injury; then one said to the other, ‘Better get the man out first.’ In his diaries, Evelyn Waugh alludes to a certain Enid Raphael who, so he reported, once said, ‘I don’t know why they’re called “private parts”, mine aren’t private.’ I could wish, but cannot believe, that she was some kind of a relation of mine.
My father walked down Threadneedle Street to 5 St Mary Axe, where a wooden lift worked by a rope pulley in the hands of the punctual, waist-coated Len carried him up to his office. The letters, of three single-spaced paragraphs, that he posted to me when I was at school, first in Devon, then at Godalming, were dictated to his secretary and typed on paper as blanched and flimsy as £5 notes (so rare they often had to be signed before a shop would accept them). Cedric’s hieroglyphic signature was the only personal mark on the page. My mother wrote fluently in pen on blue headed stationery. She signed herself ‘Mummy’, during my childhood, or ‘Ma’, once I was married. Only in the 1980s, after overhearing my American-Armenian agent, Ron Mardigian, call his mother ‘Alice’, did I adopt the habit of calling my mother ‘Irene’. I never called my father by his first name.
Shell Oil had been founded by Marcus Samuel, the first Lord Bearsted. A posse of Jews figured in its original executive complement. My father joined the company just too late to be of their number. The company secretary was Alfred Engel, with whom Cedric had been at Oxford. Engel’s son George was an outstanding classicist at Charterhouse a generation before me. The sixth-form master, A. L. ‘The Uncle’ Irvine, a Mr Chips who said goodbye just before I could profit from his exacting tuition, dispensed young Engel, once he had won his Oxford scholarship, from the diurnal drudgery of composing Latin and Greek proses and verses. Instead, he encouraged his prodigy to become an expert on Corinthian black-figure vases. Since I would have nine months between leaving school and going up to Cambridge, my father, while shaving one morning, in sleeveless aertex vest, commodious underpants and silk socks stretched to transparency by American-style suspenders, advised me to emulate young George. Arcane expertise could cut a key to distinction. As he spoke sound sense, I noticed that my father had a thickened and opaque left big toenail. Some twenty-five years after the reminder that winning scholarships was not identical with being a scholar, I was asked to review George Cawkwell’s Philip of Macedon, an academic work of more diligence than wit. In it, George Engel was gratefully acknowledged as editor. There were some negligible flaws, which I did not neglect, and one passage of entirely scrambled print. Printers can do things, after proofs have been corrected, that even a punctilious editor has no chance to put right. Would I have cited Engel in my review had an antique splinter of envy not been lodged in my psyche? My less-than-pretty conduct is worth mentioning only because there must be thousands of such uncharted pettinesses in every life. Biography is not a science, but a branch of taxidermy. The autobiographer alone has the privilege of stuffing himself. I now have an opaque left big toenail.
During my years at Charterhouse, contact with the opposite sex was limited to epistolary exchanges with Hilary Phillips; mine more passionate (and purposeful) than hers. Her sister, Diana – who had an unfortunate eye – had gone to Oxford. Her parents were keen that Hilary should follow her. My licence to be alone, for an hour or more, with their daughter on the sitting room sofa in Portman Mansions, off the Marylebone Road, required me to improve Hilary’s ability to construe Livy’s provincial Latin prose. Her admission to Oxford depended on achieving that now obsolete competence. My path to a rewarding session of deep kisses passed through the Caudine Forks, in which, on Livy’s account, a Roman legion was trapped by their Samnite enemies and obliged to ignominious surrender; which Hilary never was. As Latinist and as lover, my darling was of the Fabian persuasion. Had I been able to shape her into Oxford material, my ardour might have been capped by her grateful subjugation. That achievement was beyond me and so, therefore, was her Non Licet Gate.
Hilary did concede that French kisses were ‘oddly satisfying’, but when I promised that there were things that were more satisfying still, she cited the creed that marriageable men did not want a slice from a cut cake. She greeted my Cambridge scholarship with dismayed congratulations. Quick to calculate that she would be at least twenty-one by the time I graduated, Hilary then added on the two years in which I could expect to be doing National Service. She would be twenty-three, and adjacent to senility, before she could hope to have that ring on her finger. With whatever regret, I had to be deleted from the roll of suitable suitors. I had a suspicion that there was already a candidate for Hilary’s favours, an off-stage Charles, of whom she spoke with teasing warmth.
My parents’ friends often asked me what I ‘wanted to do’. Cedric was keen that I qualify as a solicitor or an accountant, or both. Such people were rarely out of work. My uncle Lionel had been a barrister whose mots embellished the family anthology. Can he truly have been the first person to say in court, ‘I deny the allegation and defy the alligator’? On solitary walks through rainy London, I often sought shelter by climbing the many stone steps to the public gallery in the law courts. I listened with emulous appetite to the silky Mr Fox-Andrews making his pitch for damages after improperly loaded barrels had rolled off a brewer’s dray and done his client a thumping mischief. He displayed a neat wooden model on which he pointed out to his lordship how the barrels should have been ranged, and wedged, and how, in practice, they had been.
I could not understand why Mr Fox-Andrews spoke so slowly until I matched the spacing of his phrases with the movement of the judge’s fist across a stiff page of his red, leather-bound ledger. I presumed that I, like Cicero in most of his cases, should appear for the defence. Although it was an article of faith in the system of British justice that a jury’s verdict on the facts be deemed infallible (otherwise how should the death penalty remain unquestionable?), it appeared to have required advocates of rare resource to save any number of defendants from being wrongly convicted.
Since a first-class degree in Latin and Greek promised access to enviable eminences, I resolved to do my bit of Tacitus or Thucydides, Homer or Virgil, every day until October of the New Year, 1950, when I was due to go up to Cambridge. Meanwhile, how could I earn enough money to take some new girl to dinner in Soho and to a movie, preferably Italian or French, but not with Fernandel in it, at the Academy Cinema, or to the theatre (Jean Anouilh rather than Terence Rattigan)? As a result of his being put in charge of press relations for Shell, my father seemed well placed to help me find newspaper work. He treated influential City journalists, such as the Daily Express’s Fred Ellis and The Economist’s Rowland Bird, to informative lunches at the Berkeley Hotel in Piccadilly. Apprentices – such as the young William Rees-Mogg, later editor of The Times – qualified only for Le Perroquet in Leicester Square.
For all its convivial perks, Cedric’s post-war office was a comedown. In 1945, he had been invited to return to New York, to take up the bigger and better-paid job that he had renounced, for patriotic reasons, at the outbreak of war. To his superiors’ displeasure, he declined to go back to Rockefeller Center. He told me that his decision was due to his wish not to rupture my ascent on the British academic cursus honorum. I did, however, remember him saying, when I was a small boy, ‘Never forget, you come third in this family.’ Perhaps it was fourth: Cedric’s mother Amy was a valetudinarian who contrived to move an inch nearer to death’s door whenever her wishes were not honoured. She was determined that her son not escape across the water for a second time.
My father was never again offered work worthy of his qualities. When I saw him sitting at our Macy’s dining room table, almost lipless with repressed fury, as he made itemised retorts, a), b) and c), to some chiding memo from a boss, Trevor Powell, who took pleasure in putting down someone cleverer than himself, I determined never to work in an office nor, if I could help it, to have a boss; better an unranked artist, preferably in Paris, than the second, or third, or umpteenth, businessman in London.
With Cedric on hand, the widowed Amelia Sophia excelled in coercive helplessness. For another dozen years my grandmother, attended by the sisters Winifred and Ada Stanley (pious subscribers to The Watchtower), played the supine tyrant in her eau de Cologne-scented flat, 12a Dorset House, overlooking Dorset Square. Whether her intermittent crises were due to heart attacks, as Winifred claimed, or to a surfeit of Maison Lyons violet chocolates, as Dr Cove-Smith hinted, Amy wanted Cedric (named after Little Lord Fauntleroy) to be on hand, whatever his American wife might wish. Ex-England and British Lions rugger captain Ronald Cove-Smith asked Amy, on one occasion, whether she had had a particular condition before. When she said she had, he said, ‘Well, you’ve got it again.’ Diagnosis and diplomacy went together at a guinea a visit.
Although Amy and my mother were barely, and rarely, civil to each other, Irene claimed that she was happy to have stayed in England. On the last occasion when she saw her 22-year-old kid cousin, Lieutenant Irvin Weintraub USAAF, before he and his glider crew and their GI passengers were massacred by the SS, after skilfully crash-landing at Arnhem, he said to her: ‘For a Kansas City girl, you sure have come a long way.’ Irene’s uncle, Max’s brother Fritz, died fighting for the Kaiser in the Great War.
My father blamed Winifred, who referred to him always as ‘Mr Cedric’, for the rift between Amy and his wife. In practice, it suited both women not to see or even to have to inquire about each other. Irene Rose Mauser had been a clever girl. Denied a college education by the bankruptcy of her father, Max, she went alone, in 1929, to work in Chicago when she was eighteen years old. Out of office hours, she kept company with the Second City’s West Side bohemians. One of them – Herman, was it, or Mitchell? – papered his living room, walls and ceiling, with silver paper. She had many followers but, I am pretty sure, no lovers. Buddy Cadison brought home an illicit, plain-wrappered copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses from Paris and allowed her to walk down State Street with it under her arm. During the war, he came, in uniform, with gifts from the PX, to see her at 12 Balliol House.
