The Roving Eye E-Book

Richard Evans

• Herausgeber: Clink Street Publishing
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Go. Be there. For the past six decades Richard Evans has followed that dictum - being where the action was, not just as a tennis writer and broadcaster - 196 Grand Slams and counting - but through his years as a foreign correspondent in America, France and Vietnam as well as a spell as a roving global reporter for the US television programme Entertainment Tonight. Evans, whose English family fled France in June 1940, also became a National Service Captain in the British army, without having to dodge a bullet which was not the case in Cambodia nor in Miami where he was struck by a cop during an anti-Nixon demonstration. Evans was in Memphis hours after Martin Luther King was shot; campaigned through Indiana and California with Bobby Kennedy - "a unique politician" - before he, too, was assassinated and witnessed the pre-Olympic demonstrations in 1968 against the Mexican Government which ended in massacre. He accompanied the Wimbledon champion and activist Arthur Ashe on two trips to Africa, witnessing the dark days of apartheid and was back in South Africa in 1990 covering Mike Gatting's rebel cricket tour during the historic weeks that saw Nelson Mandela released and apartheid abolished. Evans paints an insider's portrait of Margaret Thatcher and No 10 Downing Street during the time he was with the Prime Minister's daughter, Carol; a romance with the actress Gayle Hunnicutt and two marriages; friendships with Richard Harris, Michael Crawford and more Wimbledon champions than you could fit into the players' box. He was also the last person to interview Richard Burton. A life lived to the full, covering the globe with a Roving Eye - being there.

Leseprobe

The Roving Eye

A Reporter’s Love Affair with Paris, Politics & Sport

by Richard Evans

For Ashley So that he knows what his father has been up to

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEDEDICATIONINTRODUCTION1.PARIS: THE BEGINNING2.SCHOOL3.A CAREER BEGINS4.THE IRON CURTAIN5.THE ARMY6.THE EVENING STANDARD7.AMERICA8.AND THE SHOTS RANG OUT …9.JAMAICA, AUGUSTA AND MEXICO CITY OLYMPICS10.MIAMI & CHICAGO 196811.PARIS: A NEW BEAT12.VIETNAM13.NIXON: A SHORT LIVED TRIUMPH14.I JOIN THE ATP15.ASHE IN AFRICA16.ASHE AND APARTHEID17.GAYLE18.BOOKS19.RADIO20.THE THATCHERS21.WITNESS TO THE END OF APARTHEID22.ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT23.LEW HOAD IN SPAIN24.LYNN & ASHLEYPLATESACKNOWLEDGMENTSBIBLIOGRAPHYCOPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION

This is the story of a long, varied and, I hope, interesting life. It is the story of a reporter’s life – a reporter who turned himself into a writer and broadcaster, skills that overlap and intertwine.

It is the story, inevitably, about aspects of our world which are of particular interest to me. Journalism, broadcasting, sport, politics, travel and people. And it is the people that make the whole thing worthwhile. Without people, as Nelson Mandela must have contemplated on occasion during his 27-year incarceration, what is there?

I have been uncommonly lucky in knowing both private and public people and, if this story concentrates more on the latter, it is because many of them have shaped our world, using their exceptional gifts to add colour and mood, excitement and controversy, all embellished with the headlines that my profession enjoys so much.

I am not one of those people who scorn the idea of having heroes. Most of us need someone to inspire and guide us; to quicken the heartbeat and bring us joy.

In journalism, no one inspired me more than James Cameron, not the film maker but a sardonic Scot whose view of life was forever tainted by having witnessed, from a dubiously safe distance, the atomic bomb tests over the island of Bikini in Micronesia. Cameron wrote of it at the time: ‘This enterprise was a pantomime of such hilarious tragedy, compounded of every factor from the banal to the appalling, that it remains in my mind as a kind of slapstick nightmare.’

As we shall see, from his description of a visit to the Gabon to meet Dr Albert Schweitzer, Cameron possessed a talent that enabled him to write from the heart and leave his readers in no doubt as to where he stood. Needless to say, I admire that.

It unleashes a whole discussion about the divisions between reporting and commentating – in Britain the two are allowed to merge far more than they are in the United States – and Cameron did not shy away from it.

Writing in 1967, Cameron, in the last chapter of his captivating autobiography, Point of Departure, said this: ‘Today, we journalists spend our time splashing in the shallows, reaching on occasions the rare heights of the applauded mediocre. It looks, perhaps, easier than it is.

‘To the individual in this machine (of journalism) it brings its own dilemma: the agonising narrow line between sincerity and technique, between the imperative and the glib – so fine and delicate a boundary that one frequently misses it altogether, especially with a tight deadline, a ringing phone, a thirst and an unquiet mind.’

Not many in my profession would disagree with that.

As I write, a man who likes only journalists who write nice things about him has gained entrance to White House. It is too early to know where that will lead but I fervently hope it will ensure journalists are made ever more aware of the very serious duty to tell the truth.

On a more personal level, I owe my whole career to Reg Hayter, who took an extraordinary punt on a seventeen-year-old when he had just set up his freelance agency in Fleet Street with Ron Roberts and Freddie Garside and offered me a job. Whatever skills I have as a reporter were learned while grappling with the assignments Reg gave me. There are many others who can say the same thing. Hayter’s became the best school an aspiring sports writer could ever attend.

Even before I started wearing long trousers, I became captivated by a genius in white flannels, a cricketer called Denis Compton, a batsman of such carefree abandon that he left thousands of runs unscored, giving his wicket away because he may have picked up the wrong bat in the dressing room (he often mislaid his own) or was wondering if his nag had won the 3.30 at Epsom.

Before his cartilage blew up, Denis played on the left wing for Arsenal with his brother Les. Like thousands of others, my day was made or ruined by a Compton century or a Compton duck. It is the same, even now, depending on whether Arsenal win or lose. Those who captivate you in childhood have you forever.

In politics Winston Churchill was my hero. I grew up in England during World War Two. Do I need to explain? Much later, when I came to cover politics for the London Evening News and BBC Radio in America, I found Robert F Kennedy to be the most special of people; a haunted, evolving human being who became a unique politician. It is almost unbearable to think how much better a place the entire world would have been had he become President instead of Richard Nixon.

There have many other people I have admired from near or far and I will remain indebted to those who have offered their friendship. Many will appear in this story. Inevitably some will not and to them I apologise. Omissions are purely the result of how narratives unfold, as anyone who has tried to write a book will understand.

It has been a life carried out on the hoof; in hotels and airports and 747s, leading to an ever-changing vista of what this amazing world has to offer. I have had homes in Paris, London, Stockholm, New York, Mijas, El Castillo de Castellar and now, under the blazing Florida sun, in Delray Beach. I should have spent more time in each but then, what would I have missed? Curiosity and the need to earn another dollar always drove me on and there is little that I regret.

Somehow in the middle of it all – or, to be precise, at the beginning and towards the end – I managed to persuade two remarkable women to marry me. Glenys has remained a lifelong friend and I think Lynn will, too. And, of course, I cannot find adequate words to thank Lynn for producing Ashley, a son to cherish.

I also want to thank those friends who not only put up with my stories, but encouraged me to write them down. That is what I have tried to do here. During the process, Chris Bowers, a great friend and partner of mine at the Tennis Radio Network, volunteered to read the manuscript and offer suggestions. As a biographer himself, Chris has a shrewd eye for detail and nuance and I have taken heed of many of his observations. My thanks, too, to Gayle Hunnicutt, Heather Mitchell and Robert Sackville West who were kind enough to read early chapters and offer the kind of encouragement one needs on those darker days when one thinks ‘What the hell am I doing?’

They seemed to enjoy what they read. I hope you do, too.

Chapter 1

PARIS: THE BEGINNING

Parisian air was the first air I breathed; her trees the first trees I saw. The chestnuts, a shiny mahogany as they split from their green casings, fell at the foot of my pram as my mother wheeled me down the quayside by the Seine, which flowed less than a hundred yards from the room where I was born.

I left before I could talk, returned before I could write and went off to be educated elsewhere. But, of course, you never leave Paris. Hemingway uttered many truisms but, for me, none more accurate than his remark to a friend in 1950: “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”

Feasts were difficult to put on the table in France in December 1945. Since the day of my birth on 10th February 1939, the Second World War had dimmed the lights, swept the gaiety from the boulevards and turned the world’s most glamorous city into a place of fear and suspicion as it struggled under the Nazi jackboot.

So allow me to re-trace some steps to the beginning. I had been born at home in my father’s dressing room, on the 3rd floor of a typical Parisian apartment at 6, Rue Francoise 1er. The flat ran the length of the building and from the balcony you could see the Seine and the glittering Pont Alexandre 111. The Champs Elysees was a few steps away but to get to his office in the Avenue de l’Opera every morning my father had Rene, the chauffeur, to whisk him across the Place de la Concorde in our splendid Renault tourer. Lassere, still one of the city’s finest restaurants, was just around the corner. My silver spoon was waiting for me in our dining room.

Inevitably, I have often wondered how I would have grown up had the Maginot Line held and the war been kept at a distance. Spoilt brat would have been the obvious outcome. We would certainly have continued to live in considerable luxury, presuming the Paris office of Price Waterhouse had continued to function.

My father, C.H. (Harry) Evans was a founding partner of the European firm, in 1921, I think it was. For a lad born in the previous century in Beverly and educated in Whitby, he had risen fast in his chosen occupation of accountancy and, by an extraordinary quirk of fate, had avoided the worst horrors of the First World War. This came about because he was given the singular task of saving the margarine in Holland. No, really. In 1914, Britain imported most of its margarine from Holland but some of the ingredients were made in Germany. The British government decreed that the margarine could still be imported as long as no part of it was manufactured in Germany. So some Minister or other selected Price Waterhouse as the firm that would be responsible for overseeing this operation, which was of considerable importance because butter would be scarce to non-existent once war time rations took hold.

By chance, my father had already been to Holland on one of his first foreign trips for the firm and had picked up a little Dutch. “So give the job to the young man from Yorkshire,” someone must have said at the PW headquarters in London. “Tell him to make sure the margarine is pure Dutch.”

There was just one problem. The young Yorkshireman had just been called up to join the London Rifles in the City. My father had barely got his boots on before a phone call from Whitehall had him back in mufti and on a cross-channel steamer to Rotterdam. And there he stayed for the duration. He never told me much about his exploits, not even how he made scores of dangerous cross-channel journeys, once ending up in a lifeboat just outside Tilbury after the ship had been torpedoed.

But he obviously got the job done because Britain had a regular flow of margarine throughout the war. Soon after the hostilities ended, my Dad got himself transferred to the newly opened Paris office and was offered a partnership in the European firm.

Around that time, he married an American, had two children, Patricia and Tony, who would become my half-sister and half-brother, and lived in the Villa Montmorency, a complex of town houses near the Porte d’Auteuil. Stade Roland Garros, which I would be visiting so often in later years, was in the process of being built little more than a mile away.

The marriage didn’t last and by 1935, Daddy had met my mother, a blonde-haired beauty who was also a divorcee. They were married the following year, lived briefly in Neuilly, and then bought the splendid apartment on the Rue Francois 1er.

By the time my first birthday came around, war had been declared and things were getting sufficiently uncertain for my mother, a nanny and me to be packed off to a rented house in Niort, a town in northwest France not far from where my mother’s daughter Margot, then twelve, was at school. Apparently, we stayed there for several months while my father continued to work in Paris but, by June 1940, it became obvious that the game was up. “Pack,” said my father when he called. “I’m closing the flat and we’re taking a boat out of Bordeaux.”

And so we joined the pathetic ragtag army of refugees streaming south as Hitler’s forces burst through the paper-thin Maginot Line, skirted whatever other resistance remained and descended on Paris. Margot, who had been rescued from school by Alma Dax, the wife of our family doctor in Paris, remembers low-flying aircraft and the sound of distant bombing. My father had booked us into the Grand Hotel in Bordeaux but we never made it to our rooms. Right in the middle of lunch, the manager ordered us out. “The Government is arriving!” he announced in a panicky voice. “They are taking over the hotel!”

They were indeed. Realising Paris was no longer safe, Ministers, their secretaries and their entourages, probably including a mistress or two, were arriving in droves. In an instant, we found ourselves sitting on our luggage in the big square outside. And it was stinking hot.

So there we were, the well-heeled family of a Price Waterhouse partner, with a future that could best be described as uncertain. According to rumours – and there were plenty of those – the Germans were nine miles away.

With no time to lose, my father checked on the ship reservations he had made and discovered that our boat was not only going to be one of the last to leave but was, in all its glory, a coal boat that had been sunk in the Spanish civil war, dredged up and put back into the service. Normally it had a crew of 30. Now it was going to be filled with 300 refugees.

My father decided the best thing to do was to get my mother and me down to the boat. After a quick look at what was on offer, it was clear that water was going to be in short supply, especially as it was turning out to be one of the hottest French summers on record. So Daddy drove back to the square to pick up Margot; pay off the nanny who was, of course, in tears; and go off in search of Evian.

Meanwhile, back at the ship, the captain was calling my mother up onto the bridge. Evidently, I was left screaming in a sailor’s arms at the foot of the steel ladder as Mummy, who was never good with stairs at the best of times, struggled to the top.

“I am afraid I have some bad news,” the captain said. “I have orders to sail immediately.”

“But you can’t do that!” replied my horrified Mum. “You said two hours and my husband has all our passports and our money!”

Taking pity on her, the captain offered his cabin as I was the only infant on board. But that was scant consolation to a woman faced with the prospect of arriving in England with nothing except what she stood up in and a babe in arms. Not to mention the thought of a husband and daughter left to face certain incarceration in a prison camp. She never discovered what happened next and never knew whether it was an act of God or a captain disobeying orders. But the story was that the anchor got stuck.

Half an hour later, the Renault hove into view and, with passengers yelling encouragement from the ship, Daddy and Margot grabbed the cushions from the back seat and ferried the water bottles up the gangway. With what must have been a very regretful backward glance at the beautiful Renault – soon to be driven, no doubt, by the chauffeur of some Nazi General – we set sail.

It would probably have been quicker if we had, indeed, had sails. The old boat chugged along, somehow avoided some bombs that were dropped in our vicinity at the mouth of the Gironde, and took no less than four days and three nights to get to Falmouth. Other ships had sailed with us but they soon steamed off into the distance, leaving us as the very last refugee ship to make it out of Bordeaux. From the description in his autobiography, Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English?, Ed Behr, the celebrated Newsweek correspondent, might well have been on our boat. If so he, too, would have arrived in Falmouth covered in soot because no one had cleaned out the hold and soon coal dust was flying everywhere, impregnating every pore and making everyone, including my very blonde mother, look as if they had just arrived from Africa.

I think a little place called Pra Sands was our first stop and it seems to have provided me with my first memory. My mother and I were walking down a Cornish lane when I saw a black horse. Then somehow it disappeared and I remember saying, “Mummy, mummy where did the horse go?” I never found out.

After a while in the West Country, we gravitated towards London and found a spacious house in Knapp Hill near Woking. My father, too old now to be called up, was given a job at the Ministry of Supply which was under the direction of Lord Beaverbrook, who, on orders from the new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was busy getting Spitfires built. Sometimes Daddy would commute back to Woking but, more often during the week, he would stay in town, taking turns to do look out duty on the roofs of Westminster, tin hat firmly on his head.

My mother used to go up to London as well and help serve tea to the troops on Waterloo station. Once, she took Margot and stayed the night at a hotel. The Blitz had started but that didn’t seem to deter anyone very much. “There was an amazing spirit of defiance,” I remember her telling me. “One night some friends and I had a few too many cocktails and ended up on the balcony of the hotel as the searchlights lit up the sky and the bombardment started, as it did every night, and we just laughed at Hitler. We didn’t seem to care. If he’d seen us it would have confirmed his opinion that the English were crazy. It was what got us through the whole thing. Have another pink gin and to hell with it.”

Or have a ‘nice cuppa tea’. It was the great phrase of the war years. “The ’ouse next door just got hit, love.”

“Yes dear, just have a nice cuppa tea.”

But, of course, the humour couldn’t cover up the carnage as the German bombs rained down night after night, not just on London, but Liverpool, Plymouth, Coventry where the trucks and tanks were being built as well as other industrial centres. Swathes of England were laid to waste and the nation clung to the radio to hear Churchill’s bulldog tones.

“We shall never surrender.”

It is impossible to overestimate the effect that man had on a nation’s morale. The jutted jaw, the cigar, the Homburg hat – clichés now, but very real as the bombs fell and the news went from bad to worse.

It wasn’t getting any better in Surrey. We had moved to a new house near Guildford which happened to be the marker for the Luftwaffe as the bombers turned to head into London. The town bristled with ack-ack guns and if the German pilots thought it was all a bit too much, they just dumped their bombs right there and went home. For fourteen consecutive nights, I remember being lifted into my mother’s arms from a dead sleep and taken down to sit it out under the stairs. A tree was uprooted by a direct hit in the garden next door but, physically, we survived. Not so my mother’s nerves. Calm during the bombardment, she tended to collapse with fatigue and anxiety the next day and, finally, she decided we had had enough.

Margot’s boarding school had been moved, lock, stock and barrel from an exposed position at Cooden Beach, near Eastbourne on the south coast, to the depths of Shropshire. We found a little barn of a house not too far away in a tiny village called Leintwardine where there was a pub called the Red Lion, a butcher, and not much else. The butcher, a Mr Griffiths, was our defence against the Germans. He had a shotgun. He was the Home Guard. All 5’ 10” of him. The war? Yes, everyone knew about the war but it hadn’t really penetrated deepest Shropshire and so we settled down to a calmer life and I made my first real friend, the butcher’s son. He was called Eric and we used to chase cows in the fields behind our cottage and do all the naughty things five-year-olds will do when left to run free.

For my mother, with a husband hundreds of miles away in bomb-stricken London, no help and no idea how to gut a trout, it must have seemed a very long way from the Rue Francois 1er. But, unlike so many, we were safe and we survived.

The next move, as a staging post to return to Paris, took us to Bournemouth and the Dover House Hotel on Dover Road. If the film of Terence Rattigan’s play Separate Tables, which had starred Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr, was not filmed there it could have been. It typified Bournemouth down to the last pine needle in the garden.

I remember Margot taking me down to the town square to join in the throngs rejoicing in VE Day, which signaled the end of the war in Europe, but, shortly before, I had received a brief visit from the only grandparent I ever met – my father’s mother. I am afraid my only memory is of a slightly formidable old lady dressed in a long black coat with a squat black hat covering wisps of grey hair. Sad.

My father had already left for France, virtually tailgating the French and American forces into Paris. He arrived back only a week or two after General de Gaulle had marched up the Champs Elysee at the head of his troops, defying the last remaining German snipers to shoot at him. If they tried, they missed of course, as did everyone who tried to kill this immense figure. As my father turned the key in the lock of the Price Waterhouse office on the Avenue de l’Opera he could hardly have imagined that it would fall to his son to be the first voice heard on the BBC announcing the death of de Gaulle nearly 30 years later. Le Grand Charles had outwitted all his enemies, dying of a heart attack in his own living room.

When Mummy, Margot and I returned later in 1945, we constituted the first British family to take up residence in the city after the war. For the first few months we lived primarily off Red Cross parcels that had been prepared for the prisoner of war camps and were no longer needed. I can still remember sticking a finger into the glutinous and wonderfully creamy condensed milk. Occasionally my father’s contacts would produce something from the thriving black market – a chicken, a piece of tough meat or, at Christmas, a turkey.

We were luckier than some foreign residents who found their homes virtually destroyed. Ours had been occupied by three young German officers who, apart from drinking my father’s extensive wine cellar dry and throwing some dregs onto the carpet, had not done any lasting damage. It was pot luck as to who you got as uninvited guests. One friend of ours returned to find a note on the burnished dining room table. It was from the German Admiral who had occupied their apartment, thanking them for their hospitality and apologising for two pieces of broken crockery from the carefully detailed inventory. The note said that he would be happy to return their hospitality should they visit Berlin. So there were some gentlemen fighting on the other side.

But it was difficult to forgive and forget. I shall always remember the look of disgust on my mother’s face when she dropped a knitting needle down the side of the sofa one afternoon. In pulling it out she came up with a photo of three German officers. The French family living upstairs confirmed it was the trio who had been sleeping in our beds.

Christmas provided momentary relief from the horrors of the past and, on a purely personal level, an extraordinary piece of luck. As far as we could make out from our fairly wide circle of new friends, I was the only British or American child in the capital. Almost everyone we knew was in the military and it was much too early to think of bringing families over to join them. So … guess who got the presents?

We must have invited nearly a hundred people for drinks on Christmas Day and, of course, nearly all brought something for the ‘young man’. The prize present was a huge toy fortress, complete with turrets and passageways, soldiers, armoured cars and tanks. The vivid memory of playing on the floor amidst a forest of uniformed legs as the guests moved around me remains to this day. There were the blue legs of the RAF officers; khaki of various shades; the occasional dark Royal Navy blue; and then, of course, the light tan of US Army colonels and captains. They were the ones that impressed me most because of the smart contrast between what the Americans somewhat strangely called their pants and the chocolate coloured tunics.

In return for all this attention, I had a bizarre job. The lift in our apartment building was one of those open topped contraptions which would not move until the swinging, wrought iron gates had been properly closed. A load of more than three people caused it to slow down alarmingly and by the time it reached the third floor it would often need some assistance. This I was able to provide by leaning over from the staircase and physically pulling it up the last few inches.

“Hey! Swell, kid! Great job!” I got a lot of praise from crew-cut Americans with ribbons all over their chests.

And, out on the street, the GIs were no less generous. The young men from Alabama and Ohio used to sit on the balustrades of the Metro stations on the Champs Elysees, their caps in their epaulets, legs swinging free as they watched the young ladies of Paris parade before them. And for a child it was always, “Hey! Have some gum, chum!”

There was, of course, a lot going on in Paris that a six-year-old didn’t understand. While I was taken for walks and offered the treat of a very watery ice cream at Pam-Pam’s on the Champs Elysees – or occasionally at the Marigold, a café which existed until very recently – some nasty recriminations were taking place as the French turned on collaborators, of whom there were more than anyone wanted to admit. And they were not only little businessmen who had been out for a quick buck or women who had slept with German officers. The great Maurice Chevalier, who was deemed to have performed too willingly for the Nazis, was banished to small theatres off the boulevards and had to work his way back into favour. It took a while.

More amusingly, Maxim’s, the iconic restaurant situated between the Madelaine and the Place de la Concorde, was heavily penalised for having made a fortune off the gluttony of the Nazi High Command. Not wishing to deprive Parisians of such haute cuisine – heaven forbid – the new Government came up with the perfect penalty. Maxim’s would feed all Allied officers for the next two years at cost. Inspectors would visit regularly to ensure that culinary standards were maintained and that the profit would be zero.

So slowly Paris regained some vague semblance of its former self and, from what my parents told me after a night ‘up the hill’, as they called it, the Montmartre haunts of Le Lapin Agile or La Cremaillere were soon alive with the sound of the accordion and the haunting songs of Edith Piaf. She was brave to ‘Regret Rien’ because there was so much to regret. Even so, some had managed to live passable lives during the occupation and my Godmother, Joyce Bayol, was one of them.

Although English, her marriage to a Frenchman had enabled her to remain in Paris for the duration. With their two sons, the couple lived at 102 Avenue des Ternes, which, much later, would fall into the shadow of the monstrous Concorde Lafayette Hotel. Joyce told me some harrowing stories of the occupation. One of Britain’s best secret agents, code named The White Rabbit – an incredibly brave man whose real name was Wing Commander Tommy Yeo Thomas – hid out for several months on the second floor right above their flat. He used to come down and play with the boys, Jerry and Max, who both loved jazz music. But, after twice returning to England following invaluable work with the Resistance, he was betrayed on his third visit in 1944 and arrested at the Passy Metro station. The Gestapo tortured him for four months but he never revealed a thing. Eventually, he was sent to Buchenvald and other camps. After several attempts, he escaped and, after testifying against Nazi Guards in trials held at Dachau in 1947, he returned to his pre-war job as an executive at Molyneux, the Paris fashion house. Joyce thought him to be the bravest man she had ever met and she was not alone.

Others were less fortunate. Joyce knew a young couple who had been round at their place for dinner and, foolishly, had decided to risk breaking the 9.00 pm curfew. They were arrested while walking home and sat in the local police station waiting for the customary fine. But a German soldier had been shot by the Resistance that night. So, caught in the trap of time and circumstance, they were included in a group of a dozen Parisians who, next morning, were taken out and shot.

The manner in which the French Police enforced this barbarous justice on behalf of their German masters was a sore that took a very long time to heal.

After nearly a year of Red Cross rations, my father sent us off on holiday to Switzerland. On the sleeper to Geneva I had my first banana. I had never seen one before. Nor I had skied and that, partly, was the purpose of the trip. We were heading for Villars, a resort above Lake Geneva, and all seemed new and exciting until, as Margot and I got ready for dinner, an earthquake hit. I vividly remember sitting on the bed watching the tallboy sway towards us before settling back against the wall.

The next day I was dressed up in all the right gear with big boots and children’s skis and taken out into the glistening snow, which looked remarkably unruffled by the earthquake.

“I don’t want to ski, I don’t feel well,” I moaned and my mother told me not to be silly, thinking it was just a reaction to the night before. But it wasn’t. I had scarlet fever and soon developed a temperature of 104. So it was down the winding mountainous road, in a swaying car smelling of petrol and leather, and six weeks in a sanatorium in Montreux. End of holiday.

At least Margot had a good time. She and my mother stayed in considerable comfort at the Metropole Hotel where, every three days, a new batch of young American officers arrived on leave. As one of the few young ladies around who could speak English, she was not short of dates and spent most of her days escorting a stream of young men with crew cuts on trips to Lord Byron’s castle, which stood a little further down the lake.

On returning home to Paris, my father got some surprising news. The Stockholm office was not doing well and the PW partners decided that he should be transferred to Sweden to take care of the problems. So it was that, on Christmas Eve 1946, we found ourselves spending our last nights in Paris at the Hotel Regina, right next to the Louvre. Joan of Arc, now all golden on her horse but less lovely then, sits outside in the little square. We were to take the train to Stockholm on Boxing Day. I still had one eye open as Mummy and Margot tip-toed into our room to leave Santa’s presents and I just got an inkling that maybe Father Christmas wasn’t quite who they said he was.

The growing up continued as the wagon-lits carried us, for four days and four nights, across the wreckage of Europe. Bombed out buildings flitted by as we picked up speed through Belgium and on into Germany. But the image which remains is that which greeted us at the main station in Hamburg. The platform is raised above street level and we found ourselves looking down on a scene of total devastation, alleviated only by two or three stalls selling fruit and vegetables to huddled figures clad in little more than rags or old pieces of uniform.

The ferry from Copenhagen carried us across the Oresund Straits to a different world.

There was – and, indeed, still may be – a sweet shop at the Stureplan in Stockholm. On one of our first walks around the city I stopped and gaped. There were chocolates and Smarties in the window. I had never seen a box of chocolates and nothing as colourful as Smarties. Sweden had worn the war years well, wrapped in its neutrality.

The Grand Hotel, an establishment that really was grand in every sense, turned into our home for the first three months as my parents searched for a flat. The year of 1947 turned out to be a freezing winter, even by Swedish standards, and although the snow along the Stromgatan just outside the hotel was deep and inviting, it was not long before I caught a bad chill and was confined to barracks. So I had the corridors and nook and crannies of the Grand Hotel to play in and, from what I remember, had a pretty good time.

We eventually found a lovely apartment at 101 Karlavegan but life turned out to be a little more difficult. The war had damaged my parents’ relationship, not least because of an affair my father had been having with his secretary in London, and it was not long before my mother went back to England.

So, with the aid of a Scottish governess, I lived in Stockholm with my father and Margot and became a movie addict. Apart from enjoying my toboggan in the local park, I knew nothing of sport and my motivation each day was to find a movie that was marked ‘Barntil’ instead of ‘Barnforboten’.

The problem was that the censors thought Robin Hood unsuitable for children because Errol Flynn kissed Olivia de Havilland yet considered Great Expectations, with its truly terrifying scene of John Mills as Pip being confronted by Finlay Currie, the convict, in the graveyard, quite all right. I didn’t sleep for a week.

But Westerns seemed to be OK and I remember insisting that Mummy took me to see Randolph Scott in Western Union for a second time at the Rialto or Rio or Rigoletto – the cinemas in Stockholm all had those sort of names. These and some musicals like Blue Skies with Bing Crosby became my window on the world, opening up new vistas for a child who was trying to grasp just what life had to offer.

Chapter 2

SCHOOL

None of it prepared me for the jolt of reality which confronted me when I was sent to prep school at Cooden Beach in Sussex. The school was called Seafield and was run by two brothers: Granville Coghlan, a former Cambridge rugby blue, and his younger brother Pat. They were a spartan pair who insisted on cold showers in the morning, winter and summer, and a heavy regimen of sport. Pat, who wore dark prescription glasses because he had fallen back onto his head as a child and damaged his eyesight, almost always wore a pair of blue shorts and knee length socks under his black gown as he strode about the school from class to class.

If I have made them sound somewhat frightening, that would be unfair. It would have been difficult to find a more conscientious, intelligent and caring pair of headmasters than Granville and Pat.

The teaching staff were a memorable bunch, too. There was genial Major Bennett with his military moustache; Captain Wheeler, gaunt and faintly yellow from the malaria he had caught in the jungles of Malaya; and Mr Kempson with his shock of white hair that stood straight up and a nose that, alarmingly, bent sideways when he blew it. The nose was boneless.

The problem for me – one of many, actually – was that I was frequently speechless. I had a stammer. Maybe it was the trauma of leaving France or the nights under the stairs in Guildford, but, for whatever reason, I had developed quite a bad speech impediment. Answering questions in class was often agony and I was only too happy when my mother told me that she had found a speech therapist – a Miss Scott – who was willing to come round twice a week and help me.