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- Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
A The Tablet Book of the Year Last Post has a double life; it both sounds for the gallant fallen and recalls what spurred freelance journalists, in all those yesterdays before e-mail, to get their copy in the pillar-box by deadline time. Frederic Raphael's compendium, written in the lively equivalent of the French epistolary second person singular, is a rare mixture of loud salutes, occasional raspberries and affectionate farewells. Its intimacy delivers frankness that formal biography, however plumped with proper sources, seldom achieves. To John Schlesinger, '"Fuck 'em all dear," you used to say. And God knows, you did your best.'; Ludwig Wittgenstein saying 'What do you know about philosophy, Russell, what have you ever known?'; Cyril Connolly to William Somerset Maugham who was complaining about his lack of true lovers, '...then although the room was chilly, no one cared to poke poor Willie'; 'You bloody fool,' the first words said by a venerable professor to George Steiner. As the parade goes by, Last Post becomes what classicists call a 'prosopography'. Raphael's own versatility shows up in the varieties of tone and vocabulary in long letters of tribute to the two Stanleys Kubrick and Donen, Ken Tynan, Leslie Bricusse, Tom Maschler, Dorothy Nimmo the known and the less known but no less valued; finally, above all, in farewell to his beloved daughter Sarah.
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Last Post
FREDERIC RAPHAEL
CARCANET LIVES AND LETTERS
FOR BEETLE, ALWAYS.
Contents
LAST POST
To Leslie Bricusse.
Dear Leslie,
You, more than any other man, changed my life. I spent my first year at Cambridge honouring my father’s dated advice to wait for the world to beat a path to my door. I waited in vanity and in vain. During the long vac of 1951, my first, Beetle and I lived blissful weeks in hilltop Ramatuelle, up the coast from St Tropez. In the mornings, I typed chunks of my first novel. In the afternoons we had long, deserted Pampelonne Beach to ourselves. The Yanks had landed there seven years earlier. We ate Thé Brun biscuits, shared a banana for tea. Soon before we were due to return to England, it was clear that I should never finish the novel. Noël Coward had written Hay Fever in three days. I set out to emulate the Master. The eighty pages of With This Ring chattered off my Olivetti before we took our sorry way north to the tight little island.
Beetle and I had met at the Drama Group at the Liberal Jewish synagogue, where neither of us worshipped. Our friend Jackie Weiss arranged a reading of my play. It went so well that the Group voted to put it on. We rented a little theatre in Westbourne Grove for two or three nights. A quintet of my canvases, relics of Ramatuelle, dressed the sofa-and-two-armchairs set. Not to my great surprise, except when looking back, the little theatre was full each night. It didn’t occur to me that the play might be reviewed, but it was, in The Stage, generously. The only chiding comment was that I, the producer, had at one point walked backwards on stage.
Theatricals at St John’s, known (if only to themselves) as ‘the Gaiety’, had their camp at one end of a long table in Hall. At the first dinner of the new term, after I had read grace, a scholar’s privilege so irresistibly showy as to excuse 12my collusive ‘Per Christum Jesum dominum nostrum’, I joined Tony Becher at the far from gay end. The Gaiety swelled down the table towards us. They had seen The Stage. A dark horse was welcomed into their stable. A few days later, Peter Firth, President of the Young Writers’ Group whose mag had published a couple of my poems, came to my rooms. The Amateur Dramatic Club was sponsoring a play competition. He had heard that I had had a play put on in London and hoped I would participate. I explained that With This Ring was of small sophistication. He conceded that it was not likely to win, but it would give the judges something to sit on, so to say, and they duly sat on it. The winner was Hugh Thomas’s chichi fantasy about a still independent pre-war Venetian republic being wooed by Musso the Wop (as he was called in the wartime Dandy, unless it was Beano) and other caricatured suitors. Mark Boxer designed the Mondrian-style sets. Did Peter Hall direct? Some Peter or other.
I auditioned for the part of the American ambassador. My retrieved Chicago-born accent provoked no few laughs from the feet-up centurions in the stalls. An hour or two later, I met Toby Robertson, the tallest of them, outside my narrow digs in Park Street. I had been much the best of the Yanks, he told me. The selectors had gone for the experienced Tony Church, who was as American as lumpy porridge. Toby hoped I’d come to the first night. I did not. Some thirty years later, I found him a job in a radio play of mine. I can do forgive, rarely forget.
My from-day-one Johnian friend Tony Becher had joined the Footlights. I had funked the audition. I couldn’t sing for toffee nuts, as they used to say. Nor could Tony, but he had a facility for witty lyrics: ‘In a Graham Greenery / where God paints the scenery…’ There would also be a much applauded one about Lord Montagu ‘mount a few’ of Beaulieu. Today it would be indictable. You recruited Tony to collaborate on 13Ogden Nash-like squibs that appeared in The Daily Sketch. Your father was ‘in distribution’ for the Kemsley press. He despatched vans that delivered the papers.
At the beginning of the following year, Tony brought you to the rooms in the Wedding Cake I was sharing with a first-class soon-to-be-schoolmaster classicist. Dull as virtue, Brian Moore wore a tie-clip and disciplined his orderly hair with a triad of tortoise-shell implements. You, in double-vented, non-Harris-tweed sports jacket, camel-hair waistcoat with gold buttons, bow tie, specs more businesslike than scholarly, looked all set for something beyond Cambridge. I was never to see you dishevelled. Already secretary of the Footlights, you intended to start a musical comedy club. You had asked Firth, now President of the Footlights, who had written the best dialogue in the play competition won by Hugh Thomas’s little Venetian blinder. Peter fingered me. Would I care to write the ‘book’ for the show you meant to put on in a few terms’ time? Set on being a serious novelist, I never had the least wish to write musical comedies. I agreed at once.
Your charm had nothing to do with class or scholarship. Having spent a large part of the war in Hamilton, Ontario, you had the unrationed ambition of the new-worldly. You could even drive. You were one kind of mid-Atlantic; I quite another. You signed yourself ‘Lezzers’; I was never anybody’s Fredders. When I confessed that I had funked the audition for the Footlights, you said to consider myself a member forthwith. The straight theatrical A.D.C. had no attraction for you; no more did Granta, the smarties’ mag where Mark Boxer (‘Marc’ when signing his minimalist cartoons), Karl Miller and Nick Tomalin determined who was in and who was out. Only in Karl’s absence did Mark print a wishful story of mine about free living and loving in Chelsea. Later, I emulated Whistler’s fine art of making enemies by writing a column in Varsity under the editorship of that shameless 14son-of-a-rich man Michael Winner. Bob Gottlieb, early on-the-maker and later editor of The New Yorker, never forgave my mocking him and a wife he later dumped by citing Joe Bain’s canard that the reason they were rarely seen together was that they shared one pair of specs.
Rich and famous never occurred to me; published would do. You had no peripheral targets; success was your bull. Your surname announced you a rarity, of Belgian origin, was it? You were reading French, but the loudest volumes in your rooms in the modern Caius block, across Trinity Street, advertised your principal tutors to be Noël Coward, Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin. Your desk sported a framed photograph of you as a Sam Browned second-lieutenant. I cannot remember you speaking French, not even when you and I and Beetle and Tony Becher spent the following Easter vac in St Germain-des-Prés. Oh, Jonathan Miller told me years later of meeting you in the street and you said ‘Tiens’. Hard to believe, but it was reported with disdain, hence probably true. So what? We talk differently to different people, something even the best novelists rarely honour in their dialogue.
You already had songs – ‘Someone, somewhere, some day’ etc. – you wanted to fit into our show, no notion of a plot. You proposed that we seek oracular intelligence from Hugh Thomas. His rooms in Queen’s were across the wooden bridge on Silver Street. Assembled with geometrical ingenuity, its original elements had been composed by joinery alone. Dismantled for repairs, no one could put it together again without screws. Hugh received us with curly-haired hauteur. On the early steps of a pedestal far from showbiz, he condescended to be solicited. In his lop-sided voice, he affected to improvise a plot set in Transylvania where ‘youth leaders and fairies’ would sing and dance in charming counterpoint.
We deferred simultaneous blurts of incredulity until back on the clever bridge. In time, having been president of the Union, 15Hugh would veer left of centre and stand for parliament under Hugh Gaitskell’s patronage, in an unwinnable seat. He then swung right. He wrote one novel, The World’s Game, good title, light-fingered from a thirteenth-century Pope, before making a timely academic speciality of Cuba and becoming professorial. He married the lady daughter of an earl and was later made a peer, thanks to Mrs Thatcher. Upwards leads in all sorts of directions.
I have small memory of how Lady at the Wheel evolved. Its plot, about a female driver in the Monte Carlo rally, its Riviera setting, your lyrics (‘Pete, y’know, / Is kinda sweet, y’ know’) and Robin Beaumont’s and your music and my playing-for-laughs dialogue made small appeal to chic tastes. Noël Coward furnished a strip of common ground and up came Lady at theWheel, at one time entitled Zany Miss Dando. Long live second thoughts! The sole acknowledgement that there had been a war was a comic German, played by Colin Cantlie, son of an admiral, with a feather in his Tyrolean hat. I spent much more time than a scholar should ‘tickling up the book’, as you put it.
You persuaded a freckled Canadian brunette called Jane Carling to bring her singing voice across the Atlantic. Pretty girls accumulated at your call, blonde and breasty Julie Hamilton in particular, daughter of screenwriter Jill Craigie (‘Craggy Jill’ in Bricusse-speak) and step-daughter of Michael Foot. Few A.D.C. theatricals warmed to our invitation. I enrolled its president, Gordon Gould, a Chicagoan graduate of mahogany appearance, with some funny lines and a routine he rendered hilarious in the morning-after silence that opened the second act at breakfast. The male lead was played by Dai Jenkins; his pretty, short-legged fiancée was called Norma. ‘See Norma and Dai’ was Tony Becher’s meta-Neapolitan coinage. Dai was amused to tell us how Hermione Gingold had said, in some intimate revue, ‘You can’t have your kike and eat him too’. He had no idea Hermione was Jewish. 16Several of them were sitting right in front of him, he told us. I rehearsed him with unremitting politeness.
After programmes had been printed and delivered, I saw that below the discreet directorial credits a louder one, in 14-point type, declared ‘The Entire Show devised and produced by Leslie Bricusse’. When I accused you of pulling a fast one, you said ‘Bloody printers!’ I can’t recall you using swear words on any other occasion; fuck, never. In truth, you were entitled to whatever self-advertisement you cared to append. Devise and produce were indeed what you did.
On the first night, you and I huddled at the top of the circle steps of the Arts Theatre. Waves of laughter and applause soon broke over us. A palpable hit! Nothing like a live audience. You were to have that kind of exhilaration many times. The Granta clique spurned our vulgarity. Nick Tomalin wrote an exposé of our venal willingness to insert a plug for drinking chocolate, requested at a café by our comic Hun. I don’t know what contribution Cadbury’s made to our budget, a few spoonsful probably. Few could deny that you had indeed devised and produced a hit of a kind Cambridge had never seen before. Biding my time, I delivered a Varsity counter-punch to Nick T., after he had invited Oswald Mosley to speak at the Union. He was nettled enough to threaten legal action. Goose and gander rarely suffer the same sauce.
Thanks to some numbers I wrote and performed in Footlights ‘smokers’, in the big room above the Dorothy Café, I was included in the cast for the May Week Revue of 1953. Peter Firth was an indulgent president. Would the ragbag compendium ever come together? It did, just. I remember only playing Michael Foot in a skit of mine on a weekly TV chat show. I was amazed, if not a little embarrassed when my line, delivered in Foot’s best proletarian bark, ‘We in the Labour Party will do everything in our power to get everything in our power’ was greeted with a baying howl of laughter and 17sustained applause. The England of 1953 had turned blue, but I assumed that everyone under thirty remained red. Did you ever express any political opinions?
One evening, after the curtain had fallen, there was a commotion at the stage door. Word came back that someone, allegedly Hispanic, had burst in waving a knife. You went out and charmed or disarmed the intruder with well-trained subaltern cool. At the end of our two-week run, the outgoing committee distributed offices for the following year. You were, as no one ever said in those days of unadulterated English, a shoo-in for president; Peter Stephens for secretary; Dermot Hoare for some other sashed office. You promised that I was to be the Press Officer.
As you came out of the meeting, there was a raw flush on your usually calm features. Peter and Dermot had vetoed having a Jew on the Committee. I have had no experience of the horror, the horror; but the pettiness, the pettiness is not uncommon in England’s not invariably pleasant land. Beetle never encountered it. How often are good-looking, long-legged females taken to be Jews? Early in the following year, P. Stephens and D. Hoare were eased off the committee. I was en-sashed as Press Officer. Thanks to your diplomacy, neither deposed dignitary appeared resentful. They were always friendly to me. Like T.S. Eliot, they had their principles.
I spent too many afternoons in your rooms, by now in Caius’s first court, and picked up a lot of P-P-Penguins, your favourite chocolate biscuits. You had one of the first tape recorders. You and I and Tony Becher improvised skits on it for the 1954 Revue. At philosophy supervisions with Renford Bambrough, Tony and I donned a seriousness you would have found of no interest. What nice rhyme could you furnish for Wittgenstein? You determined to purge Out of the Blue of the baggy amateurishness of Peter Firth’s show. I kept my Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene number 18under my sole authorship: ‘We were nearly subjected to rape / by the man from Jonathan Cape’, etc. but Becher supplied the clincher: ‘The Greene to end all Greenes / And the Waugh to end all Waughs’.
Later in the year, when it came to casting, you asked me to break the news to Tony that although invaluable as a writer… I protested, a little. He was my first friend in Cambridge. You had me believe that that was why I was the best person, etc. Tony was less distressed by the axe than I feared. He told me, and I was glad to believe him, that it was more important for him to get a good degree. He did: he was one of two Moral Scientists to get a First in Part Two; Andor Gomme (so named intra familiam as a sexually indeterminate embryo) the other. Served me right, Becher had done the long dull work. Our friendship survived. We later wrote scripts for Hermione Gingold’s radio show.
Tony and I did not fall apart until many years down the track. Having left his wife, he promised her that she and their daughters would have the house in Weech Road, Finchley, and then claimed half. Beetle and I took Anne’s side. I never much liked her. Tony remarried. After having two children, his new wife left him for another woman. She came back to care for him when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease. I asked if I might visit him. He did not want anyone to see him in his last days. I remember him, young, in Putney High Street, on Boxing Night, imitating Charles Laughton’s lurching hunchback of Notre Dame. A policeman, not in his eye line, watched tolerantly, until Tony bumped backwards against him, took a look and straightened up. Pure cinema: no dialogue; hold, hold; and cut!
Out Of the Blue was a palpable hit. Thanks to your manoeuvres, we were all set to transfer via Oxford to a fortnight in London’s West End. We were even going to be paid, L15 a week. A few numbers were failing to get laughs in Cambridge, 19and you replaced them with prize pieces from previous years. You invited me to audition as band-leader in yesteryear’s Joe andthe Boys. The other contender and likely winner was Brian Marber. His slick monologue in Out of the Blue, a pale green anglepoise lamp his versatile prop, had proved him an agile performer.
The audition was held in the morning gloom of the Cambridge Arts Theatre. Landed with first innings, I came in from the wings in a bent-kneed rush, baton in hand, and found a Joe Loss accent in which to say ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, we’d like to do a little number written by one of the boys in the band… Who’s Got the Key, Got the Key tothe Cupboard… with a one and a two and a one, two, three…’ That spontaneous loopiness has never come back for an encore. Brian conceded the match. All of us proved to be little more than also starring with Jonathan Miller, who did the box office a favour by becoming the Tatlered talk of London. Danny Kaye rated him the English Danny Kaye. Jonathan didn’t do candy kisses. He went on to direct many operas, unpeu partout. Was he ever heard to sing a note?
One evening late in the (extended) run at the Phoenix Theatre you beckoned me into your dressing room. In the armchair, wide snap-brimmed fedora on his head, was grey-mackintoshed Jock Jacobson, representative of M.C.A., the most powerful talent agency on both sides of the Atlantic. One-time session saxophonist, he had come to see Jonathan; your jokes and Bob Hope-style delivery proved more to his taste. You went along with his idea of promoting you as a stand-up comedian, but told him that what you really wanted was to write shows. You declared me indispensable. Jock shrugged and signed us both. It took him a month or three to get my name straight. M.C.A. had fancy offices on Piccadilly. Jock’s had two white telephones on the desk. Your idea of success was three of the same, your London/Paris/New York address book next to them. 20
I had been awarded the Harper Wood travel studentship, a fat L350, in the gift of my college. It would last me a full peripatetic six months. Combining patience with better things to do, you wished me well and looked forward to our resumed partnership. In October, I set off for France, Spain, Morocco, then Italy, back to Paris, and Beetle. On my solitary way, I began my first novel, Obbligato, on a glossy block of unlined white paper. Jock ‘There is such a thing as timing, fellas’ Jacobson was caricatured as Franco Franks, the agents’ agent.
You were taken up by Binkie Beaumont, autocrat of West End theatre, to fill Bea Lillie’s breathing spaces in her one-woman show. Since you incorporated some of the material on which we had worked together, I was to receive six pounds ten a week for its use at the Globe Theatre. Abroad was a long way away in those days. Although I cribbed one or two dated numbers racked in alien streets, I did not buy an English newspaper until I reached Naples. How did I react to Ken Tynan’s rave for Bea and scorn for you? He had asked us to a big party while we were a hit, but critics take pride in turned coats. ‘Ruthlessly cut, Bricusse might ’scape whipping’ and a paragraph more of George Kauffmanesque auditioning for The New Yorker job (which Ken later got) dumped you in the nettles.
Your capacity for taking it on the chin, with something like a smile, was never better proved than by your going on, rarely to a friendly reception, night after night. That Bea loved you was not an unalloyed comfort. Her large ex-U.S. marine minder, John Phillips, did not suffer displacement gladly. You took the rough smoothly. You met everyone in Bea’s circle, Noël and who all else, and were assimilated into their cosmopolitan galaxy. Invited by Binkie to come and stay at his country place, known in the Biz as ‘Pinching Bums’, you took Julie Hamilton with you as a prophylactic. 21
Beetle and I came back, briefly, to London to get married. We still had enough of the Rev. Harper Wood’s legacy to spend three months in two rooms in the freezing eleventh arrondissement while I finished my novel. By the time we returned to London, you had been hired to write a movie, Charlie Moon, for Max Bygraves, Jock Jacobson’s star client. You cut me in for a small slice in return for beefing up the dialogue. The movie was to be directed by Guy Hamilton, later rich and famous as the director of four James Bond movies, including the first, Doctor No. He belonged to the reticent generation that had been to the war. Awarded a D.S.C., he never mentioned it. I remember only that he described some time-lapse idea of ours – an ashtray that, on a cut, became full of butts – as being ‘page one in the book’.
Obbligato was accepted by Macmillan; advance L100. You went on tour with Bea. It gave me time to get on with The Earlsdon Way. One day I noticed that the regular six pounds ten was no longer being credited to me. Someone in Binkie’s office told me that it had been payable only as long as An Evening with Beatrice Lillie was in London. I daresay my short measure was nothing to do with you. The cheapish lesson was always to read the small print. I rarely do.
For some time-shredded reason, you and I and Bea went out to Borehamwood studios where you had an appointment. You once said to me that you were better at meetings than I was. ‘People like me; they don’t always like you’. It was delivered without malice, like a weather report. Bea and I waited in the taxi. She turned to me quite suddenly and said, ‘Do you believe in the afterlife?’ I knew that she had lost her husband, Sir Robert Peel, and their only son in the war. I said, ‘Oh Bea, I wish I could say I did, but honestly… I don’t know’. She gave me a long look; then she said, ‘Does Hannen Swaffer know?’ Who he? A News Chronicle journalist who believed in Another World. 22
Who now remembers Bea herself? I shall never forget her sitting in a louche hotel and reciting ‘I’ve come here to be insulted / And I’m not going home until I am’. Her pet idea was of a number in which the curtain rises on a majestic curved staircase down which she descends in evening dress, long gloves, mink cape, gleaming tiara. She crosses to the superbly draped window, looks out and then says, ‘Still pissing down’. Another story about Bea, which I was promised (by you, was it?) was true, tells of her being in the hairdresser’s while on tour in Chicago. A local Spam – tinned meat – millionaire’s wife protested, loudly, at being kept waiting by the attention given to ‘that actress’. Bea said ‘tell the butcher’s wife that Lady Peel is in no sort of hurry’.
The next thing was that you and I were asked to take over the direction of a show already on the road. Jubilee Girl was no more Rodgers and Hart than it sounded. If Al Kaplan had not been a millionaire, or as good as one, having married a Sieff, the piece might never have been staged. He and his amateur co-author were both doctors. Al drove me down to Plymouth (you were already there) in his sumptuous two-seated Rolls Bentley convertible, its dinky gear-change neat as a clitoris. Halfway across Salisbury plain, Al invited me to take the wheel. When I confessed that I had only just passed the driving test, he shrugged. The more expensive the car, he told me, the easier it was to drive. ‘Only promise you’ll never buy one of those tinny Lagondas.’ I promised. The Roller was of a vintage without power brakes. Al urged me to put my foot down and overtake whatever loitered in our way. He liked close calls.
Pretty soon I saw a lorry in the middle distance coming towards us in our lane as it overtook an uncooperative colleague. I pressed one foot on the brake, then both; with small effect. Horn blaring, the oncoming lorry switched, just, into its proper lane. I glanced at Al. He was enjoying my sweat. 23He and the doctor with whom he had collaborated were lovers but it escaped me at the time. Years later, he demanded to be made producer of a movie I had written of Iris Murdoch’s A Severed Head. If I didn’t agree, he would get someone to come and kill me. He was living in Italy and was said to prescribe drugs, plentifully, to the dolce vita set. Not long afterwards, he killed himself.
Jubilee Girl was as dated as it sounded. I was delegated to rehearse (and re-write) the chat, while you did whatever you did to the musical numbers. The girl in the piece was Lizbeth Webb. Her happiest prize, from having been in Vivien Ellis and A.P. Herbert’s West End hit Bless the Bride, was ‘me mink, me mink’. She had a lovely soprano voice and professional patience. John Cranko, short-lived fancy director of the hit revue Cranks, did Al the rented favour of coming to Southsea to cast an eye on what we were doing. His verdict was that we had replaced bad direction with – no, not worse – equally bad. Among the cast of Cranks was Tony Newley, who became your partner in a couple of hit shows in the Sixties. Al Kaplan watched me directing and found no loud fault. Marie Lohr, the oldest trouper, always on time, was my straight-backed supporter. Al did ask me, ‘What’s Leslie doing?’
We all stood on the wide green Southsea foreshore as Khruschev and Bulganin sailed out of Southampton on their way back to the USSR. Marie had been a star of the Edwardian theatre. She had stood in the same place when the Grand Fleet sailed out, in full intimidating battle order, at the outbreak of war in 1914. I asked her whether we should wave. She said we should, politely. Jubilee Girl foundered some time after you and I had been eased over the side.
To my surprise, if not alarm, Lady at the Wheel came round again. Lucienne Hill, translator of Anouilh, and her lover Andrew Broughton (aka Broughtipoo) were your partners in the resurrection. Madame undertook to revise the dialogue 24for West End purposes. You asked me to sign over the rights. I was damned if I did. You admitted, with small grace for once, that I had you ‘over a barrel’. All the same (a tool in every fixer’s kit), I was busy writing my novel, wasn’t I? And you knew I hated rewrites. I settled for a half-credit. The refurbished show went on, at the Lyric, Hammersmith. Big Lulu, as you called her, with pectoral justice, had done ‘the book’ no marked remedial good. Beetle and I walked out halfway through. More than twenty years later, as I came out of the magistrates’ court where I had been fined for nine seconds of speeding, one of the clerks came after me. He had never forgotten seeing Lady at the Wheel at Cambridge. He had read everything I had written since.
Thanks to you and Jock, we were offered a contract by the Rank Organisation of L115 a month, each (no small sum in 1955). You were driving a fire-engine red, four-square antique Austin. Do you remember overtaking a Jaguar, just, on the way to Pinewood Studios? The run we enjoyed in the fast lane of the Biz was steered entirely by you. The red Austin was soon replaced by a new white Ford Consul convertible. After I had recovered from a prolonged attack of glandular fever, you invited Beetle and me to spend a few days in your mother’s house in Shirley, a suburb of Birmingham. I think your father must have died while I was away. You never mentioned him to me again.
It was generous and guileless of you to ask us to the little suburban house, in no fashionable quarter. Your aproned mother was a copious plain cook, forever singing pop songs as she did her chores. Her ascendant call of ‘Lez… leee’ summoned us to table. You treated your mother (I never knew her name) with affection, obedience even. She stood for everything you were determined to disown. During that cold week in Shirley, you taught me to drive. Your new, toothpaste-white Ford leaped and lurched as I sought to master changing gear. 25You neither winced nor grew impatient. You were as generous as you were single-minded. We were going places, you promised, and you wanted me on board. I kept trying to believe they were places I wanted to go.
Without our Pinewood stipend, I should never have been able to buy Beetle’s and my first car, a second-hand green Ford Anglia, personally offered to us as a bargain for L250 by Trevor (now Sir Trevor) Chinn of Lex Garages. It served us very well, even when we had to back up steep hills in Andalucia. When we part-exchanged it for our next lucky number, we were told that PLD 75 had been composed of two halves of wrecked Anglias welded together.
Never anything but generous, sometime during that year you offered us your newly acquired flat in Brighton (Brig/ton in Bricusse speak) for the weekend. It was clean and impersonal. You did have some books and folders on the shelves. Trust a novelist to be a snooper. One of the folders contained a sheaf of pages. The top one carried the legend ‘The Minor Scholar, a novel by Leslie Bricusse’. The rest of the pages were virgin.
When I had finished The Earlsdon Way, on Pinewood’s pretty penny, Alan Maclean of Macmillan’s was eager to see the new book. In the hope of prompt applause, I was persuaded to hand over my sole copy (carbons kill the muse). He promised to keep it locked in his briefcase. During one lunchtime, some thief sneaked into the unguarded Macmillan offices and out again with said briefcase. My manuscript must have been the last thing he hoped to find when he jiggled the lock. Beetle broke the news when I got back from a few rubbers in the Crockford’s two-shilling room. I could think of nothing better to do than get into PLD 75 and drive and drive. We got as far as Bath before Beetle suggested that the best and only thing was to rewrite the book. She bet I could remember a good deal of it, and so I did. 26
When you heard what had happened, you brought me the two or three Everyman volumes of Carlyle’s title is The French Revolution: A history. I am still slightly surprised that you chose so pertinent a comforter. Macmillan offered L50 by way of compensation. I rewrote The Earlsdon Way pretty well word for word. Macmillan then turned it down. My Sinclair Lewisgunning of suburbia was not of a piece with the playfulness they had all admired in Obbligato. Alan Maclean told me that I should make no friends by being acid. I told him I had not become a novelist to make friends.
‘Suez’, as that Gallipolitan misadventure came very soon to be abbreviated, the quicker to get it over, was the great caesura in post-war England’s self-esteem. The puncture of Britannia’s vanity precipitated an explosion in the price of petrol all the way up to two shillings and sixpence a gallon. You acquired a ninety-to-the-gallon two-seater, front-opening bubble car. Its vroom-poppa-poppa promised your approach to Rutland Street where Beetle, soon pregnant, and I had been able to move to above-ground accommodation in a tight terrace house. Vivian Cox, a Pinewood producer, had hired you and me, soon after our old contracts lapsed, to write a film about Cambridge. He was a double blue (hockey and rugger) bon vivant and a very tactful supervisor.
On the day Bachelor of Hearts was greenlit, Vivian had us to dinner in his attic rooms in Curzon Street and opened a bottle of 1945 claret. He told the story of the Frenchman and the Englishman who shared a dugout in the Great War. They treasured a cobwebbed bottle of Château Pétrus against the day of victory. At a minute past eleven on the eleventh of November 1918, the Englishman hurried to insert his corkscrew. ‘Mais non, mon cher ami, pas encore. Une telle bouteillemérite que tout d’abord on en discute.’ When the studio cast Hardy Krüger in the lead, as a German student in alien surroundings, we did ze necessary rewrites with professional 27promptness. In manuscript afternoons, I was writing The Limitsof Love, about Jews in the war and after.
When M.C.A. was legally obliged by some new anti-trust legislation to cease representing clients, we said goodbye to Jock Jacobson. You found us a new, go-getting agent, suave and bearded Leslie Linder, at John Redway and Associates with flash first-floor offices in Leicester Square. You had shed Julie Hamilton and taken up with the pneumatic Yvonne (‘Bonbon’) Romaine. Was she related to the patron of the Mayfair Club in Berkeley Square, where you often played host to a round table of on-the-makers? Always drinking sparkling hock avoided fancy-pantsing with reds and whites on the wine list. Behind your back, I called it sparkling ad hoc. In not much later days you collected vintage wine labels and trophied them in a scrapbook.
One afternoon in 1958, as we were crossing the King’s Road, north to south, you asked me to ‘stand beside you’ at your imminent wedding at St James’s Spanish Place. It implied a promise of best-friendship. I said it was an honour I could not accept. I could not take part in a Christian ceremony. I had not hesitated to read the shielded grace in St John’s College hall; now cowardice and tact sported the same gabardine.
Beetle and I came to the wedding and gave you whatever nice present we could afford. You had given us a Toledan-style paper knife. I thought it a curious, if not ill-omened choice. Beetle told me, years later, that you said you would send us a proper present when we came back to England. She said not to, and you took her at her word. Your reception was held in the John Redway and Associates’ office. Was your mother there? George Baker, a middling Rank regular in English films, was. You had seen him in the street and asked him up. He had no idea what was being celebrated.
There must have been speeches. I can’t remember who made them. Leslie Linder took the occasion to ask me, 28quietly, why I had agreed to be your writing partner. My soggy answer was that you did the choosing and I did not know how to break free. During the war, Leslie was a captain in the paratroop regiment. He advised me to pull the rip cord. ‘Leslie will be fine.’ Of course you were. Your songs were soon being performed all over the place; money was never to be your problem. Goldfinger clinched your renown. Did it win you one of those two Oscars for Best Song? I never called to congratulate you, did I? My bad, as they said for quite a while. Doctor Doolittle did a lot for you, despite sexy Rexy’s condescension when it came to the lyrics. Harrison has been heard talking to the animals by one generation after another. Was he really a royal by-blow or was that another song he sang? I once saw him buy The Sunday Times at Rome’s Termini station. Famous people on their own are like taxis with their FOR HIRE lights turned off.
Soon after your wedding, we went to live cheaply, and industriously, in southern Spain. You had, I am pretty sure, already found your ideal writing partner in Tony Newley. Perhaps John Cranko introduced you. I met Tony with you, by chance, in Vivian Cox’s garçonnière in the summer of 1960. As you were leaving, Newley shook me by the hand and said, ‘Good luck in whatever you chose to do in life’. When Vivian and I were alone again, I made some casual remark about ‘queers’. I had had no idea, until his face changed, that Vivian was gay. Hadn’t he boasted of driving his white Aston-Martin through France with sexy-voiced Joan Greenwood? I hope I never made that kind of remark again.
A year later, Beetle and I went to Paris and happened to see Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, twice; the first time a random choice from La Semaine de Paris, the second, after a hurried supper, as addicts. I returned to the movies with an enthusiasm I had never felt before. During the next forty years, I alternated fiction and other books with writing 29films and television of a kind that no collaboration between us could ever have produced.
You became successful and rich enough to fall for a war hero turned financial fixer, not to say finaigler, called – the name recurs oddly in your bio – Hamilton. Income tax in your fatso bracket was running at more than eighty-five percent. When the gallant (D.S.O., D.S.C.) commander installed himself in the Channel Islands and promised to secrete your surplus, you jumped at it. For legal formality’s sake, the paperwork granted him fifty-one percent of the take, but you had his word, as an officer and a gentleman, that he would cheese off a mere ten. After your royalties had accumulated, you decided to buy a place in St Paul de Vence and asked him to transfer the necessary funds. There was an endless delay. You deputised Richard Gregson and the pair of you went to Jersey to confront the heroic swindler. He took you to lunch at a good restaurant and was as nice as could be.
Yes, he said, when the time came for cards on the table, you were friends, but between absentee friendship and four hundred grand… What could you do? Nothing legal. For once you lost your cool. Did you truly, as the story goes, hire a hit-man to go and take care of the stranded submariner? The rubberised rubber-out is said to have landed from an inflatable and scaled the cliff below the commander’s address. He eased his way inside, but stopped when he saw that the startled owner had an unmistakable face nothing like his target’s. It belonged to ‘hullo, good evening’ Tom Wicker, a nasal TV regular of the day and many, many nights. The gallant commander had taken you (and your money) seriously enough to decamp. You were wise enough not to pursue him. There was indeed plenty more, and more, where that came from. Living better and better was the wisest revenge.
I don’t remember seeing or speaking to you again until April 1966 when the phone rang in our house in north Essex 30and woke us up at seven in the morning to break the news that I had won the Oscar for writing Darling. Evie, as she was now known, came next, then Joan Collins and her then man, Tony Newley, encore lui. You sounded genuinely delighted. You had had enough success to fill your cornucopia. Was Stopthe World I Want To Get Off already a hit? The following year, Stanley Donen wanted you to write the title song for Two forthe Road. Looking back, prosaic Orpheus, I was small-minded and, worse, uncommercial, in not wanting your name in the credits. Then again… if you’d won an Oscar for the song, it would probably have become better known than my movie. So? Blame Broughtipoo, why don’t we?
For the next twenty years and more, Beetle and I flew, first-class of course, countless times to L.A. When we borrowed Yvette Mimieux’s house up at Oak Pass Drive, we passed your house, down in the valley, at least twice a day. There was a white sculpture on the watered front lawn. We never thought to call in. You had become rich and successful. I had not the least feeling of envy. We were two of very different kinds, that was all. If it had not been for you, I might have found my way into the movies but you gave me the bounce that had me believe that cinema was ‘no gran cosa’, as Marcello Mastroianni once said at dinner with Beetle and me and Faye Dunaway. The comedy is that, whatever our contemporaries thought, or think, we were the only members of our Cambridge generation to win an Oscar; two, in your case.
The next time we met was at an Oscar dinner at Hampton Court, in the early nineties, I think. We were again as easy with each other as we had been when chomping P-P-Penguins in your rooms. Two of a kind, but never the same kind. Remember Ben Kingsley crossing his eyes as Dickie Attenborough delivered his prolonged, tearful allocution? Poor Dickie would later have genuine tears to shed after the Tsunami swept away his daughter and grandchild. The Oscar 31brought us together again, you and me, at St James’s Palace a few years later. Glasses in hand, we exchanged pleasantries with Camilla before standing side by side, antiques in no privileged location in the cheesy group photograph. You had achieved just about everything that you hoped for back in the days when Tony Becher brought you to my rooms.
Not long after that St James’s Palace parade Beetle was stricken, all of a sudden, with the swingeing stroke that has stranded her in a wheelchair ever since, bright and beautiful though she still is. We learned abruptly that misfortune leads to cancellation from the good address books of no few of those you took for friends. You and Evie must have heard what happened. On your way through London, you brought dinner and some very good wine (no Hock) to Stanhope Gardens. We had a very enjoyable what turned out to be last supper. We even talked of collaborating on a culminating musical comedy based on The Prisoner of Zenda. You were uncreased and all but unchanged. Your goldfingered songs are on the air all the time. You have your starred tile in the hall of popular fame. You gave a lot of people a good time, Lezzers. You and your credits were you. Nice work if you can get it, and you did.
Love, Freddie.
To Tom Maschler.
Dear Tom,
I should never have met you but for the old school tie; yours, I mean, the one you never wore. In London in the late 1950s, I played occasional bridge – low stakes (6d. a hundred), highish standard – in a dusk-till-dawn school which included Donald Simmonds. He had been with you at Leyton Park, the Quaker school. Fair-skinned, freckled, with the dry, curly, cornflake hair that never lasts, neither boy nor adult, arty but no artist, Don lived in a Chelsea basement. At any hour, he might just have emerged from a lonely bed with change-me sheets. Playing at grown-ups, we lunched a few times at the Ox On The Roof at the lower end of the King’s Road. I never knew what he did other than play bridge, rather well, with a tendency to ‘psychic’ (bluff) bids. Since he had no job, there may have been money in the family. I took him to Crockford’s a few times for duplicate partnership evenings. He proved a sharp observer of my mistakes. Told I was a writer, he introduced me to you, his publisher friend, at a Dutch lunch – each of us paid three and sixpence for three courses – at Schmidt’s in Charlotte Street, your choice; it was near where you worked.
Two years my junior, you were already an editor at MacGibbon and Kee. You had been offered a place at Oxford, you told me, but preferred to go into the world. It made you older. Your thrust contrasted with Simmonds’s languor. You were dark, handsome, seemingly sun-tanned in the way that Nancy Mitford and Alan Ross had recently declared ‘continental’: U-term for bronzed persons, not as scathing as ‘a touch of the tarbrush’, all but synonymous with ‘swarthy’ in good old England. In those days, City businessmen still 33wore bowler hats and carried tightly rolled, silk-sleeved black brollies (colours were reserved for being conspicuous on the golf course). Enthusiasm made you audible, very, in a sotto voce world. When I used you as the maquette for a character in Lindmann called Milstein, his dialogue often MAJUSCULE, his English banged on like a loud knock at closed doors. I cadged ‘Milstein’ from the great violinist whose performance of the Beethoven violin concerto was the second L.P. Beetle and I owned (Amália Rodrigues the first). Donald Simmonds became Loomis in the same novel.
You were the editor of Declaration, a compendium of essays piquing current complacencies. Contributors composed a home legion of ‘Angry Young Men’, a term derived from John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. There was also Doris Lessing. Your foreword announced you the coach of a discordant team. Colin Wilson and John Hopkins (soon to be filed under ‘Who he?’) played on the right, John Osborne, Lindsay Anderson and Ken Tynan on the left, John Wain in the centre. There must have been others; they did not include Kingsley Amis. Riding high on Lucky Jim, reprinting again, and again, soon-to-be Kingers felt no call to share his single-occupancy spotlight. It had already faded on John Wain, once Kingsley’s Oxford oppo. I remember W.W. Robson saying at dinner, in Lincoln College, in 1958, ‘One thing you can say for Amis and Wain, they do have a good sense of humour, except for Wain’.
Your father had been a publisher of children’s books in Berlin; your mother a racy lady; literally, on skis, and off. They brought you to England in 1938, just in time, and then parted. Was your aversion from female make-up kindled by her flash? At one of our lunches, sans Simmonds, you remarked how shameful it was that C.P. Snow’s ‘Mr L.’ (based on Victor Gollancz?) was the only pronouncedly Jewish character in current English fiction. Before the war, in popular fiction 34and posh poetry, Jews were sinister or ridiculous, or both (see John Buchan, Graham Greene, Uncle Tom Eliot and all). During the war, it was a commonplace to presume them at the heart of the Black Market. The police caught the people it was easy to convict or, in unpublished cases, easier to shake down. Choosy editor of Horizon (he nixed a contribution on detective stories by Willie Maugham), Cyril Connolly was the first to give Arthur Koestler rationed space to tell England about the on-going extermination of Europe’s Jews.
Foreign Office toffs dismissed the evidence as typical of ‘whining’ Jews. In April 1945, Dachau made savage truth undeniable, then unspeakable; a shame-filled reticence set in. Belsen was the one camp – by no means the worst – that stood for all. On newsreels, Richard Dimbleby delivered a hushed obituary which doubled for the cover story that the British had liberated, if not saved, the Jews to whom they had closed their ears and their doors. That victorious summer, I took the Winchester scholarship exam. The college’s canonical headmaster asked what I felt about going to chapel. I was guileless enough to say that it didn’t bother me. I came fourth when all the scholarship marks had been added up. After ‘weight for age’, distributed at the reverend H.M.’s discretion, a squad of those a few weeks younger than me were declared better scholarly prospects. Thirteenth and out, I was hived off to Charterhouse where, in my first term, Oration Quarter 1945, a skinny boy (Maxwell, C.J.M., later a philanthropic medico) was nicknamed ‘Belsen’. The lethal factories of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor and the others harboured such reeking horrors that it was as if their victims had contributed to the obscenity which it became unseemly to mention.
Years later, John Peter, ci-devant Hungarian, Sunday Times tiro, invited us to dinner with a TV writer, Alfred Shaughnessy, who had been in action throughout the war; he claimed that 35it was fought to save the Jews. Who was I to contradict a decorated veteran, just because he was full of shit? The Wimpole Street dining room we ate in had sit-at-attention chairs with upright backs, each spiky shoulder capped with a red witch’s cap, made out of paper, by our obsessive hostess, once famous for her breasts. John Peter later wrote a book of drama criticism that George Steiner declared ‘almost major’. George took pleasure in catching John out on a (literal) point of recherché detail. Discussing the old, old story, J.P. had failed to know that each of the nails used to crucify Jesus had a specific name. Imagine! Shaughnessy scripted many episodes of Upstairs Downstairs.
After 1945, if Jews were hardly less Other than before, fewer people said so out loud. Two great public schools, Eton and St Paul’s (where my father had been taught by the legendary Elam) took the hit-them-when-they’re-down opportunity to reduce Jewish admissions, until shamed by righteous old boys, Ayer and Berlin respectively. As Britannic crocodiles dried their tears, the sainted Attlee government shipped refujews back to the same camps they had been sprung from, in order to appease the Arabs, who had supported Hitler. Zionists who fought to get what was left of European Jewry into Palestine were denounced as devious and ungrateful. A Ukrainian S.S. regiment received a ready welcome in the English coalmines. Trust the guilty to put uncomplaining shoulders to required wheels.
The British Foreign Secretary, Ernie Bevin (exalted as the dockers’ Q.C.) met no criticism when he said that he wasn’t ‘’avin’ the Jews push to the front of the queue’. Despite an absence of aitches, he was highly regarded by the old-school-tied in the Foreign Office. During a Labour party conference, he once chased the young Shirley Catlin (later Williams) round her hotel bedroom and, she told me, into the street. Anthony Eden had shared Bevin’s view of 36the Chosen. Ignoring Churchill’s orders, not a single R.A.F. bomb was ever dropped, deliberately, on any of hundreds of concentration camps. ‘A quoi bon, monsieur?’ as the girl said in Le Grand Meaulnes.
Until the Eichmann trial, in Jerusalem in 1962, the Final Solution was more an embarrassment than a charge worth pressing against a now key component of the Free World. The West needed Adenauer’s scarcely purged Germany more than any Jew, man, woman or child merited justice. My old Charterhouse headmaster, Robert ‘Bags’ (they were under his eyes) Birley, had been sent to Germany in 1946 with what amounted to a bucket of whitewash. It served to absolve useful Nazis from justice; the more agreeably accented their English, the better the chances of long-grassing their crimes. ‘Bags’ returned to his reward: the headmastership of Eton and the ‘sir’ already attributed him by a sarcastic Charterhouse beak called H.C. ‘Harry’ Iredale, rarely seen outdoors without his ‘grid’, Carthusian slang for bicycle. Harry taught French, Alphonse Daudet’s Lettres de mon moulin his play-safe text, without the smallest Gallic aptitude beyond grammatical accuracy.
In 1956, The Scourge of the Swastika, by Lord Russell of Liverpool, a Nuremberg prosecutor, ruptured the diplomatic mummery. Whatever nice indignation the text aroused, crumbled crumpet photographs of naked women, pubic hair and all, being herded to their deaths added uncountable numbers to its sales. Germans had been keen with Leicas. Their snaps of the last crusade were damning mementos. Voyeurism and Holocaust denial began their counterpoint. Can Marcel Proust, master of the sequence of tenses, perfectionist with the past subjunctive, corrector of his housekeeper (‘Tu t’oublies, Françoise’) when she put fingers inside the glasses she was collecting, have been the same man who took pleasure in watching rats being skewered with hat-pins? Can he not? Was he, in secret, revisiting Dreyfus 37and, against his public stance, sharing his persecutors’ glee? Duplicity is essential to a novelist’s heart, dialogue its beat.
The success of Declaration won you a new job at Penguin books; Allen Lane, once an innovating bounder, now recently knighted, brought you in to rejuvenate the list. I gave you a proof of my second novel, The Earlsdon Way. After reading the first, Obbligato, Macmillan’s chief reader, Jack Squire, renowned 1930s bookman (and flannelled fool on summer weekends), had urged them to hang onto me ‘with both hands’. Owing more to Main Street than to any English model, The EarlsdonWay seemed knowledgeably sarcastic about the north London suburbia I never lived in. Its bumptious hero was scornful enough of true blue humbug for Macmillan to dust their hands of me, nicely. Over lunch at Simpson’s in the Strand, Alan Maclean, the Moscow-bound Donald’s brother, reshuffled from the Foreign Office, and his colleague ‘Auntie’ Marj warned me that I should not make any friends if I went on writing rebarbative books. I told them that I had not become a writer to make friends and went to Cassell. Soon after reading The Earlsdon Way, you sent me a telegram announcing that I was going to be a Penguin. You became my luck.
In the post-Suez 1950s, Ken Tynan set the style by falling in love, on paper, with John Osborne’s nihilist Jimmy Porter. At the same time Ken was moonlighting with Princess Margaret and any in-group likely to yield kudos and kicks upstairs. In his bastard case, the clenched fist and the limp handshake were fellow travellers. You, Tom, were immune from fear of seeming pushy; push was you. Scarcely interested in Judaism, undeniable Jews, both of us were haunted by what you had tasted at cruel first hand and I, as a schoolboy, only in waspish, insular form. Your rage was sublimated by campaigning for Nuclear Disarmament. The aggressive annual march on Aldermaston publicised its pacifism. Led by Canon Collins, the Michael Foot-soldiers of the new Salvation Army 38combined blistered idealism with good chances of pulling birds. A joke of the day had a girl say that she had tried using the pill, only it kept falling out.
Exalted by Declaration, your next idea was a rejuvenated version of the wartime Home Service, Sunday afternoon Brains Trust. In 1958, commercial television was on its way in. Under Sidney Bernstein’s patronage, you gathered a panel of young on-the-makers in a big room with a long, polished, oblong table in Soho Square. There was unbuttoned talk about fucking. A Granada executive sat silent. I heard myself speaking up for marriage. I was just finishing The Limits ofLove, in which, for all their variety of social attitudes, three couples stayed together. Doris Lessing, hair in a bun, long parted from an East German communist husband, wore her ‘Mrs’ like a veteran of foreign wars. Combining noli me tangere with come-and-get-it, she smiled at my defence of matrimony, a touched-up Mona Lisa.
Thanks to Leslie Bricusse, his ambition as resourceful as yours, he and I had been put under contract by the Rank Organisation. I was not proud of Bachelor of Hearts, directed by Wolf Rilla, but there it was, my name on the credits. Did it alert you to how useful I might be? You told me about your boyhood as a refugee in unwelcoming 1940 England. Might there be a movie in it? I was keen to prove, if only to myself, that I could do better than I had when co-writing a confection in which the star part was allotted to Hardy Krüger, as handsome a fair-haired ex-fourteen-year-old member of the Hitler Youth as market research could enlist. I was either too supercilious or had too keen an eye on the main chance (yes, yes, or both) to take exception to the casting of Bachelor of Hearts.
Your friend Tom Wiseman was then film critic and showbiz columnist on the Evening Standard. For both of you, common decency went up the chimney at Auschwitz; for the lucky few, insulated from the horror, it seemed to 39have survived. Wiseman père, a gambler who thought that he could roll profitable, if loaded, dice with the Nazis, had stayed in Vienna. Having made deals to save Jews with the means to buy blind Nazi eyes, he gambled too long and was murdered before he could cross the border with his takings. One of my mother’s uncles suffered a similar fate after a winning poker night with Kansas City mobsters.
When Wiseman went to do an Evening Standard interview with Hardy Krüger, he was in no forgiving or forgetting mood. After a long talk, however, it seemed that the two men had reached some kind of understanding. As they went to the door, Hardy’s wife called out, ‘Mr Viseman, vy do we not agree zat as far as the Jews and ze Germans were concerned, zere ver mistakes on both sides?’ Tableau, as they used to say. Ruptured childhoods, lost language incited both you Toms to what-the-hell pursuit of women and success in a new tongue: one of your New York contacts addressed you as ‘Tomcat’. Giving pleasure can be a form of revenge; withholding it too.
Wiseman became the scourge of Pinewood studios; insolent copy pleased Lord Beaverbrook’s readers, hence the Beaver too; every threat of libel action procured a bonus. Your eye for talent boosted your employers’ lists, enriched lucky authors; both sides owed you. I had presumed fiction an art; Lucky Jim proved it an artefact. Kingsley would become one of your proudest authors. When do cash-cows fail to find lush pasture? Your unsung virtue was that Cape subsidised writers such as Rudi Nassauer, author of The Hooligan. I still have several cases of the Château Latour 1964 he sold me (and to John Schlesinger) just before his wine business collapsed in bankruptcy, his own cubic volume shortly after, due to a deflating heart attack. To keep the wine, which had been in bond, we had to pay for it all over again. It still drinks well, as the trade has it. 40
You recalled your arrival in England with such clarity that I saw cinematic possibilities. Like many other once ladylike immigrants, your mother had had to become a skivvy, first cousin to a charlady. Virginia Woolf, paragon of feminism, disdained such sorry articles, their buckets, their mops, the water on their overworked knees. I imagined your mother employed as a domestic in a prep school like the one I attended, Copthorne, relocated to Lee Bay, North Devon. ‘You’ and ‘I’ were cast as uneasy fellow-pupils. Having recently shed my American accent, ‘I’ typified the assimilated Anglo: more embarrassed than touched by cousinship with a refujew.
