Basil Street Blues (12 page)

My mother was obviously impressed by Brocket. The large hall with its light oak panelling, its beamed and rafted ceiling, was a perfect place for parties. The French doors opened on to a veranda some six feet above the tennis court and, when the evenings were warm and the lamps lit, there was no better place for sitting out between dances. It is not difficult to imagine how exciting these dances and parties were for my mother now that she was not under the watchful eye of Kaja.

Ulla wrote regularly to Kaja who was delighted with her daughter’s progress into British society. These Holroyds with whom she was spending so much time appeared to be a wealthy and well-appointed English family, with some Irish and perhaps Scottish ancestry as well as an Anglo-Indian chapter in their history. Basil himself, curiously christened after a herb, recommended himself as an Old Etonian and a Cambridge man whose central names (De Courcy Fraser) had to Kaja’s ear a reassuringly rare Anglo-Saxon elevation. Kaja was pleased that her daughter was enjoying herself. It was all most satisfactory.

But events were to move with a speed and unorthodoxy that took Kaja aback. ‘You must have been conceived,’ my mother hazarded, ‘on the canebacked sofa in the drawing-room at Brocket’ – which rather puts paid to her speculations over my conception at the Hyde Park or Basil Street hotels. Perhaps it was that same sofa on which Norah Palmer Holroyd had lain, her pretty hair spread out, before her final journey into France in 1913; and the sofa on which the enormous frame of Tom White expired after breaking his golf club in the early nineteen-twenties. Dr Johnson once boasted that he could write the life of a broomstick, and it would need him, or Virginia Woolf, to tell the common reader the story of a sofa.

My father was twenty-seven on 20 October 1934 and my mother celebrated her eighteenth birthday on 20 November which was probably also the date of my conception (but since I was apparently born almost a month off schedule it is difficult to tell). The two of them were then secretly married at the Registrar’s Office at Bromley, not far from Beckenham on 15 December 1934. One of the witnesses was the taxi-driver who drove them there and then took them up to London through the rain (it was pelting down that day according to the Meteorological Office). They spent their honeymoon at the Basil Street Hotel, which had some good Lalique glass in its art deco interior (it was only a few yards from the Breves showrooms). Then they went off to spend Christmas in Stockholm where, rather belatedly, my father asked Kaja for permission to marry her daughter. Kaja answered that she wanted them to have a decent period of engagement, which was awkward – no one thought of consulting Ulla’s father Karl whom Basil never met.

To set things off correctly Kaja took Ulla to be fitted for her white wedding-dress, at which stage I can make out the word ‘
Calamity!
’ in my mother’s handwriting, dramatically underlined as she underlined other decisive words such as ‘
pregnant!
’ and ‘
married!
’ There was no hiding the pregnancy from Kaja’s sharp eyes. Ulla was too sick for that; after which there was no point in hiding the marriage. Had they intended to stage a second marriage in Sweden? I believe they had. It would have been a good joke: and everything still had the air of a joke. But Basil now admitted to the marriage – and his wife’s pregnancy. It was certainly not what Kaja had had in mind: a Registrar’s Office in Bromley. For a time, a rather short time, she looked severely about her, then relented. ‘I think Kaja was glad to see me “happily settled” as she thought,’ my mother wrote, ‘since she herself was busy with poor old Birger Sandström.’

The white Swedish wedding was called off and the married couple sailed back to England in January 1935. After Basil had brought his parents up to date, they settled into 91 Drayton Gardens, the cottage in Fulham to which Fraser had retired after leaving Agnes May. My mother’s labour pains came on that August in the Fulham Forum, the cinema at the end of the road. She was taken to the London Clinic and Kaja arrived from Sweden just in time for my birth at 4.20 p.m. on 27 August. My father, who had been playing golf, was late – which may account for him assigning me a birthday two days later.

Kaja stayed on in England for the autumn and came to visit us again in 1936. The regime at Drayton Gardens seems to have been pretty comfortable. There was a Danish housekeeper called Vera who looked after my parents; and a nanny who looked after me – ‘she fell in love with the milkman & had to have all her teeth out (nothing to do with the milk)’, my mother explained. There were also two small town dogs, Snaps and Popples (which sounds like a breakfast cereal or perhaps a circus act), a tabby cat that discovered things and was called Christopher Columbus (he had been bought from the grocer for one penny by my mother who believed that it was ‘bad luck not to pay for a cat’). We also owned two goldfish, Dalgleish and Pullen, named after a couple of architects my father knew.

All this was agreeable enough, but what my Swedish grandmother liked most were her visits to Brocket. English society might be incomprehensible, but its incomprehensibility was impressive. What for example could she have made of the family Arms and Crests and Latin mottos – those Demi-Griffins Wings Endorsed, those Roses Gules and Pierced Mullets in Saltire that occupied a more prominent position at Brocket than the lavatory of my father’s flat in Surrey that was to be their hiding place years later? Whatever she made of them, I feel sure she was glad they were there. Only they should not have been there. What Kaja could not have known, since no one else knew, was that none of these Holroyds, not Fraser nor his father Charles, nor even their eminent forebear Sir George Sowley Holroyd, nor the first Earl of Sheffield himself, had established through the correct registers and pedigrees, the right to ancestral Arms by inheritance. So this parade of exotic Conquerfoils, that Fess Dancetty Argent, those many Escallopes Gules, diamonds and lozenges, the very Pierced Mullets themselves were all assumed without proper authority.

Never mind. Basil took Kaja round the house. Off the hall was a large drawing-room with two silent grand pianos where Adeline held her bridge parties. There was also a cosier ‘morningroom’ and a rather dark formal dining-room, its refectory table lined with straight-backed chairs. This led on to an Edwardian conservatory full of ferns and garden furniture. Down some stairs by the side of the dining-room were the kitchen quarters – a pantry and spacious kitchen off which stood the cool larder and a scullery where vegetables from the garden were prepared. Basil introduced Kaja to the staff in the Servants’ Hall, but did not take her of course to their rooms which were on the top floor and reached by the back stairs. Kaja’s own room when she stayed at Brocket had once been Kenneth’s, and contained a magnificent Hepplewhite four-poster bed. It was on the first floor, as were Fraser’s and Adeline’s bedroom and their two dressing-rooms (one of which, with its separate door on to the passage, had by now become Fraser’s bedroom). At the south west corner of the house, overlooking the garden, was Yolande’s bedroom which no one else entered. There were three other guest bedrooms and along one side of the corridor two bathrooms, as well as a spare room that had once been the children’s nursery.

Basil ended his tour where they had come in downstairs, at the entrance hall with its medley of sticks and umbrellas, and its two lifesize figures of a black man and black woman that had fascinated him as a child but that somewhat perplexed Kaja. Yet it was the quality of her perplexity that was important. Indeed she exaggerated the grandness of life at Brocket and when offered a pot of Russian caviar at lunch, served by the parlourmaid on a silver salver and with a silver spoon, she took the whole pot and had to be corrected by her daughter in Swedish.

Another foreign visitor to Brocket and to Drayton Gardens was Rudi. He had first come over as a trainee at Breves Lalique for a few months in 1934. The following year the Nazis introduced conscription and he had to submit himself for a medical examination. Standing stark naked before a panel of senior officers, he was congratulated on his excellent health and asked in what arm of the services he would prefer to serve. Surprised, he replied that, as a Jew, he was surely ineligible for any service, but was told by the presiding Colonel that the new ‘Reichswehr’ (German army) needed strong ‘Burschen’ (members of the student fraternity) like him, and that he should not believe all he read in the newspapers. It was this incident that finally decided him to seek his future abroad, much to the chagrin of his father and his ‘Aryan’ partner who were both convinced that the Nazi nightmare would soon be over.

By 1935 the United Kingdom immigration laws had been tightened. No one could arrive and simply look for a job. Only prominent people – capitalists who brought money to invest – were welcomed and given a home. Rudi’s grandfather had recently died leaving him £750 (equivalent to approximately £25,000 at the end of the century). This he proposed putting into a new company my father was starting called Holroyd (Glassware and Lighting) Ltd. His money, my father promised, would guarantee Rudi a junior partnership. But there was a difficulty. It was impossible to transfer money out of Germany legally, and illegal currency smuggling was now a capital offence.

It was then my father came up with one of his ideas. In the rather kitsch range of table-lamps made by the Stensch factory in Berlin were some with a stem cast in the shape of a gnarled tree with a variety of animals lurking in its shade. Among this odd zoo was a herd of elephants, the largest of which was so big that the front and back parts had to be cast separately. What my father was proposing sounded like one of his innocently dangerous pranks which were becoming less innocent and more dangerous as the decade advanced. Why shouldn’t one of these huge elephants convey Rudi’s inheritance abroad? Basil ordered six of the table-lamps for his company, and suggested that the loaded elephant should be marked with a scratch on one of its heels. So this was agreed. When the lamps were ready for dispatch, Rudi’s father and his partner sent the nightwatchman out on an errand, concealed the fortune inside two of the raw elephant halves, soldered the parts together and put the whole elephant in a patina bath. Then they scratched the prearranged code and substituted this elephant for one of the six already waiting export.

The consignment arrived at London and, instead of waiting for customs clearance and dispatch to the warehouse in Fulham, Rudi went to the docks at my father’s suggestion and took possession of the elephant with the damaged heel. ‘I was very nervous and in the taxi riding back tried to break the beast open,’ Rudi remembered. ‘I made such a racket that the Jewish cabbie asked what the hell I was up to. I revealed the secret to my co-religionist, whereupon he took a big spanner and somewhere on the Commercial Road, smashed the elephant to bits, revealing the hoard. Cheers all round: my future was secure.’

My father had one more suggestion. He had changed his young wife’s name from Ulla Knutsson-Hall to Sue Holroyd. Now he indicated to his new partner that the name Rudi Stensch would sound less well in England than in Germany. Forty years later it was Ronald Stent who, having read one of my biographies, wrote to me from Ealing asking for my father’s address.

But my father did not now want to give his address. He was getting old, he was poor and he lived very modestly with his dog in Surrey, having been left by his third wife. He could not invite anyone there, and he did not want to go anywhere else or to see people, or write to people, or read what people wrote to him. He simply did not want people. Or even the absence of people. He did not know what he wanted. Or whether he still had wants. He did and he didn’t. In any case he was no longer the jovial personality who could ‘talk anybody into anything’. When he compared his meagre circumstances to those heady expectations of the early nineteen-thirties, a sense of humiliation spread through him. That was perhaps one reason why he could not continue with the account of his life he had written for me beyond his uncompleted schooldays. Besides he did not wish to be reminded of those mad escapades when he was a damn fool in his twenties. So I learnt of his adventures with Lalique from Ronald Stent who in the late nineteen-thirties used to push my pram along the Hammersmith Road; and also from Hazel Truman and Merle Rafferty who happened to see in a news paper a picture of my mantelpiece on which stood my Lalique legacy, three glass sparrows. ‘I remember meeting your grandfather and your grandmother,’ wrote Hazel Truman, ‘both of them aristocrats in my opinion. Your mother we (that is the staff) thought was so beautiful and so very young.’ ‘Basil often appeared with friends to “borrow” a dinner service which came back with breakages,’ Merle Rafferty wrote, ‘but his father was always long suffering where his younger son was concerned.’

In my library I have a copy of the general circulation edition of T.E. Lawrence’s
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
with its curious subtitle:
a triumph
. It has been inscribed: ‘To Mr E.F.R. Holroyd with every good wish from the Staff. Christmas 1935.’ There is a photograph of them all in their best evening clothes taken the following year. Fraser wears his white collar and tails, Adeline one of her long black dresses with a silver fur stole; Yolande sits next to her in a patterned dress – she is already beginning to look like her mother; then comes Ulla, a blonde beauty, still very Swedish, still in her ’teens; and standing behind them is Basil, smiling in his dinner jacket; and also Kenneth nearer the centre looking very smart. There are over a hundred people altogether, including Hazel Truman and Merle Rafferty. It is like the last picture of a royal dynasty before the republic comes in.

Everything moved quickly after this. My parents left Drayton Gardens (the lease of which was sold to help pay off debts) and moved to Latymer Court, a block of flats in the Hammersmith Road. Brocket was given up in the summer of 1937, Fraser discharged most of the servants and took Adeline, Yolande and Nan off to a much smaller house a few hundred yards away called Norhurst. Lalique had begun to go out of fashion and the family business was running into the ground. By the time war came Fraser had to tell what staff remained that it was all over – there was no money for anyone.