A Prince Among Stones (5 page)

I was at the time reading a lot about Byzantine history and at one dinner found myself sitting next to an extremely ancient don, Professor Dawkins, a professor of Modern Greek. I asked him, ‘When were you last in Turkey?' and he said, ‘Oh well, um, I was last there before the Young Turks rose.' The Young Turk Revolution had taken place in 1908, so that gave me to think, sitting there in 1951, a difference of only forty-three years, how close we are to the past, and how short the time was to that completely different world, now vanished forever.

When my relations and their friends talked about ‘our war', they meant the Great War of 1914–18. When I went up to Oxford there were many older students who had fought in the war which had ended only six years earlier – a war within touching distance – young men who had been away to fight and only now could come back to do their degree.

My own skirmish with military service – the moment when I was in danger of being enlisted by three different national armies – had ended in an honourable truce, as I was saved by the asthma I had first developed at Long Dene. Just before I was called up by the British Army a young man had died after an asthma attack during training. Although his doctors had recommended that he shouldn't be called up, the army had originally overridden the medical advice. Now they were being very careful. Although my asthma was not all that bad, in their cautiousness they thought it was not a risk worth taking.

The aftershock of the war rumbled on. Rationing for most foodstuffs, tea, bread, sweets and sugar, remained in force, clothing coupons had only just been abolished, and for at least my first year or so at Oxford, restaurants were still limited as to what they could charge: five shillings was the highest for food. Restaurants with expensive decorations and good service were allowed to charge an additional cover charge, the maximum of which was 6/6, so at the Ritz or Claridge's you would have paid 11/6 for lunch or dinner.

Nevertheless I contrived to have a jolly existence. I was not a diligent student, very much to the contrary. I did not work very hard because I enjoyed the life in Oxford and making friends, talking and chatting, and all the other things which Cardinal Newman, in his book
The Idea of a University
, thought were equally important for young men going to university, to be around intelligent people, even though it might not be strictly part of the course that they were following.

I basically worked for one day a week, the day I had my tutorial. That one day I diligently walked to the Sheldonian, parked myself there, and read through part of what I had to read and wrote part of what I had to write – or sometimes even less (my tutor later recalled I had ‘read out' one essay from an entirely blank sheet of paper). I always rather slyly managed to arrange my tutorial for the late afternoon on Thursdays so that for the rest of the week I floated about, went out and got drunk with friends, and enjoyed myself tremendously. I made many lifelong friends: Desmond and Jonathan Guinness, Michael Dormer, John Pollington (now the Earl of Mexborough) and Dickon Lumley (later the 12th Earl of Scarborough, now deceased).

There were a few girls at Somerville, LMH, St Hugh's and St Hilda's, or studying at the Ruskin School of Fine Art. Other girls could find themselves at a strange kind of finishing school, or a typing school called Cuffey's. One of the Cuffey's girls I knew was Serena Dunn, now Lady Rothschild (sister of the writer Nell Dunn).

There would be no mixed colleges at Oxford for another twenty years. Despite my mother's ardent support for co-education, I think I rather liked the fact that Magdalen was all-male, partly because historically it had always been like that and I was aware of the fact that before 1870 all the Fellows had to be celibate and the rest of them had to be in orders of the Church of England. To me that aspect of Magdalen formed an integral part of the history of Oxford.

I spent quite a lot of my time going up to London – if we missed the train back, taking a taxi for the fifty-mile journey was a very expensive five pounds. Coming back from London one night after the college gates were locked I had to climb back in with the assistance of a suitable, though booby-trapped, lamppost: I have a mark on my arm where I cut it on one of the vicious spikes the college had placed around it to prevent precisely that means of access after hours.

I had a great deal of fun with my friends. With Desmond Guinness I visited Faringdon House in 1951, the year after the death of Lord Berners, about whom I had heard so much from Desmond, whose mother, Diana Mitford, had been a great friend of his. Lord Berners, Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson, was an idiosyncratic avant-garde composer (he was called ‘the English Satie' and Stravinsky much appreciated his work), painter, novelist and all-round surrealist. Regular dinner guests at Faringdon included the Sitwells, Aldous Huxley and Cecil Beaton.

Lord Berners had left the very nice house to his younger boyfriend and heir, the equally unconventional Robert Heber Percy, known as ‘the Mad Boy'. I had met Robert once or twice casually without getting to know him to any great degree, but he was a closer friend of Desmond's, whose family he knew very well. He invited Desmond and me for a weekend. Faringdon was in the Vale of the White Horse, twenty miles or so south-west of Oxford, and we decided to go there by horse. It was not a completely insane idea. I much enjoyed riding; Desmond was a very good horseman, who had also ridden while in the army.

It was rather longer a ride than we had anticipated. It seemed to take a day or two, although in reality I can't imagine it took more than four or five hours. But it was great fun. The main difficulty of this rather strange, though most enjoyable, trek was how to complete it because of having to navigate our way through villages, gates, fields and private property. But we managed it and arrived late at night.

Staying at Faringdon was well worth the effort. We had a hilarious weekend, Robert Heber Percy being extremely amusing and, between games of charades, regaling us with stories about Lord Berners, the ‘Last Eccentric' as one biography of him was titled: he had placed an advertisement in the personal column of
The Times
, declaring that ‘Lord Berners has left Lesbos for the Isle of Man', his telegraphic address was ‘Neighbourtease', and he dyed his pigeons various colours, most notably pink.

He kept a clavichord in the back of his Rolls-Royce, once had a giraffe as a pet and in the grounds of Faringdon had built Folly Tower, which he was delighted to describe as ‘entirely useless'. The epitaph on his gravestone read, ‘Here lies Lord Berners/One of the learners/His great love of learning/May earn him a burning/But praise to the Lord/He seldom was bored'. We certainly had not been. We decided to have our horses picked up for the return journey and came back to Oxford more pragmatically but less interestingly by train.

On another occasion I had heard from Prince Henry of Hesse that he was coming over to England and wanted to see Oxford. So Desmond Guinness and I took him on a tour and thought a good trip would be to go to Cornbury, an Inigo Jones-style seventeenth-century house near Charlbury. At that stage Cornbury belonged to Togo Watney of the brewing family, who in a rather convoluted way was married to Desmond's stepmother's sister.

The house was most impressive, and the paintings were staggering. They had not yet had to be sold off. Prince Henry was a talented artist himself; his pictures were almost the size of miniatures. He was impressed by the fact that the art collection at the house included a small Botticelli of which he had never heard. It had originally been owned by the Pucci family of Florence, and was the first painting to feature forks (which the Puccis had introduced to Europe). A year or two after we had visited, it was sold back to Emilio Pucci, of the silk pyjama fame.

A rather more unfortunate happening surrounded the bizarre attendance of Constantine Nicoloudis, who, as his name suggests, was Greek and whose father had been a diplomat and accompanied the royal family to Egypt and South Africa during the war. The father was married to an extremely tough and energetic wife née Manos, a niece of Aspasia Manos, the commoner who married King Alexander I of the Hellenes in a secret ceremony following an elopement (King Alexander died in 1920 after being bitten by two monkeys. The ensuing fateful war against Turkey conducted by King Alexander's father Constantine I, who returned to the throne, led Winston Churchill to write that ‘it was a monkey bite which caused the death of those 250,000 people').

Constantine arrived at Oxford in a blaze of notoriety, not quite publicity, since that did not exist in the form that it does today, but we all knew that he was coming and that he had some link with the Greek court. His early days as a student were symbolised by what we took to be his trademark: a batch of elegant white five pound notes which we thought he had come by from his parents or perhaps was even his own money. Constantine was a regular gambler. When he lost he became very mournful and dejected, and then his mood would lighten and the five pound notes became apparent once more.

It emerged that he had forged some cheques belonging to Teddy Millington-Drake. Teddy's bank in London had spotted the forgery after noticing a rather suspicious person coming in to cash them. Desmond and I could not believe that this was true because, although we occasionally went up to London with Constantine on the same train, we thought it would have been impossible for him to go to the City to cash a cheque in the time available, since banks in those days were only open between ten and three. So we thought that it was simply a somewhat hysterical response of Teddy's.

When the police politely came on a number of occasions to question us about Constantine, we stood on our hind legs and protested violently that he was an abandoned Greek in a sea of enemies. This went on for a week or two before Desmond said, ‘Well, I'm afraid it's true, because he has forged some of my cheques as well.' We had to change our tune, apologise to Teddy for having imagined that he had invented the whole thing and generally to understand that this delightful and entertaining companion of ours had acted criminally.

The story ended in the expected manner. Constantine was sentenced to jail but after three or four weeks was released.

The next time I saw him was many years later, by which time he had married a rich English girl, and was spending his time taking choice guests sightseeing in Athens. We were wandering around the Acropolis, and I noticed Constantine with a gaggle of tourists. One of the people we saw him with cheered me by saying, ‘Constantine, Constantine, you
must
show us the Seven Horsemen of the Acropolypse'!

I certainly learnt a lesson from that experience: that you have to look much harder than one expects to be necessary before you are able to trust people where money is involved.

During one of the summer vacations I went on a trip to Europe with Michael Dormer. In Biarritz we met an amazing couple. The male half of the couple was the most elegant man I'd ever seen: tall, white-haired, with a moustache and an eyeglass. He was a Baron Wrangell, a nephew of the General Wrangell who commanded the White Armies after the onset of the Civil War in Russia in 1918. Baron Wrangell was picked by David Ogilvy, the founder of Ogilvy & Mather, to feature in one of his early ads as ‘the man in the Hathaway shirt' sporting an eyepatch, which made him instantly recognisable.

George Wrangell's father had been the Imperial Russian ambassador to Rome during the First World War. When the Revolution started his father's brother, the General, told him, ‘Don't come back, stay where you are. We will get all our money out, because what's happening now is a nightmare. This Revolution is far worse than anybody realised.' But George's father responded, ‘No, I am an ambassador and I work for His Imperial Majesty. There is no question of deserting Russia in its time of need.' He went back to look after his property, but didn't get a penny as everything that belonged to the family had been looted.

When I met George Wrangell he was married to one of those terrifying rich American ladies; this particular specimen of the breed was called Kathy. The Wrangells were often in Europe and by and large lunched on dry martinis and the odd olive. George himself, I discovered later, had been an admirer of my mother's in Rome in the late 1920s. He and Kathy had bought a house in the south of Spain where they spent part of the time and the rest of the year they stayed at Claridge's, the Ritz in Paris or in their apartment in New York. George rather took to me because of knowing my mother and we also made friends with Kathy.

She once said to Michael and myself that she had been married previously to a whisky manufacturer – ‘panther piss', she called it – who had made a lot of money. ‘So then, boys, I had three other husbands, two of whom I shall never mention to anybody they were so dreadful, and the first one was a darling but he died of drink.'

I spent my twenty-first birthday in Biarritz with Michael, and the Wrangells gave us dinner. Afterwards we went off to the casino, where she said, ‘Here you are, kid. Here's a chip for your birthday.' When I looked at the chip it was a £1 counter, which I promptly put on number twenty-one, and equally promptly lost.

Kathy was hilarious. She took us to a party thrown by American friends of hers, Tiny and Chuck, at their very grand house. The party, which we rather enjoyed, was equally grand. But Kathy got fed up, went up to Chuck and Tiny and said, ‘This is a ghastly party. I'm taking my guests away before they throw up in corners. The drink was disgusting, the food was worse, and your guests were ugly. Goodnight.' Michael and I did what I call the ‘double wink', winking simultaneously at her and the wretched hosts. Next day, two o'clock came round, and whom did we see coming for a luncheon party but Chuck and Tiny. ‘Oh darlings,' Kathy welcomed them. ‘What a great party you gave for us last night. We had such fun. We couldn't stay too late because George was getting tired . . .' It was a swift education in social diplomacy. And about a world that no longer exists.