Country Girl: A Memoir (25 page)

Carlo wrote:

Dear Dad,

No doubt when I am older, I will want to be with you for shooting and fishing and hunting et cetera, but just now I want to be with my Mum.

Love, Carlo

Sasha wrote a perfunctory
“Putney”
and his signature.

Their father would never forgive what he saw as their betrayal of him.

They had gone to visit him at Christmas, which was two weeks later, and had brought gifts, but they were met with an icy reception. As for gifts, he said he knew other children, better and more loyal, and so handed back the pullover and the mugs with the wrapping unopened.

In the embattled times which followed, it angered him that I was writing ceaselessly and that I was given what he called undue flattery in newspapers, primarily because of being perceived as glamorous. A friend in Ireland, an author called John Broderick, was enlisted to do the dirty work there, and in a journal called
Hibernia,
quoting my husband’s exact words, he said that my “talent resided in my knickers.” As Ernest saw increasing signs of my affluence, his bulletins became more incensed and he was furious at the fact that I moved from the little house in Deodar Road to a larger house in that street, to act, as he put it, “the part of the chatelaine.” The new house had a front garden, with lilac and laburnum trees, like a house in the country, and the back garden ran right down to the river.

The Thames, its name derived from the Celtic word Tamessa, meaning dark, rose in Gloucestershire and obligingly passed the end of our garden on its way to the estuary of the East End and out to the North Sea. Most days it was brown and sluggish, porter brown, with black barges and coal boats chugging quietly by, an aimlessness to it, like a still life.

But to Carlo and Sasha it held dreams of treasure, of fleets, of merchant ships and invasions. The fact that it smelled made no difference. Once, a convoy of pigs’ heads floated by, fresh from the abattoir, white and bloated, their ears limp as empty pods. Another time it was a dead, speckled puppy, a perfect simulation of a Christmas toy. Rats that came up from the water and into the garden were a source of terror and adventure. The boys had been given a gift of air rifles from John Huston, whom we met in Claridge’s Hotel, where we had been brought by Sam
Shaw for a buffet party and where Sasha, seeing all the spread laid out, said, “What’s worrying me is who’s going to pay for this big deal.” Not too long after, the air guns had been shipped from Rome, where Huston was working on a film. Pat Lobey, the builder, who was working on various things, taught them how to load and how to fire them, so they shot at cans along the back wall until their heroics were abruptly terminated as our nearest neighbor came through the side door, outraged, asking, did I not realize that bullets could ricochet and kill somebody? The guns were put away for an envisaged safari.

With his friend Adam from his new school, Carlo came up with the bizarre idea that, even if they could not shoot at the big rats, they could drive them away by smoking cigars. Metal hooks on the back wall served as a stepladder, and with their friends, who included Roc Sandford and the ever-spirited Hodge family, they would clamber each evening to delve into the river for loot. One evening, without their noticing, the tide had
swept in, so that suddenly they were marooned on a bank of higher mud and shingle, calling out, “Rescue, ship ahoy!” and another neighbor had to lower his boat into the water and ferry them in. This adventure led to an extensive essay from Carlo about tidal activity, the unwonted gales from the North Sea, and Mistress Fate.

With Carlo and Sasha at a swish lunch in Mayfair, London, 1966.

It is impossible to convey the exuberance of ten rowdy children in Trader Vic’s restaurant in London. It was for Carlo’s twelfth birthday, a belated salve for all the unhappiness they had been through. Never had they been in such a charmed place: ship’s lanterns and wooden canoes hung from the ceiling, waitresses such as might be in Polynesia floated around in sarongs. Chafing dishes with all sorts of Oriental delicacies were set down, and the drinks were in wide glasses with gardenias floating on top. They ate ravenously, the savory dishes followed by coconut ice cream, and they then swooped on the fortune cookies, tossing aside any messages that did not live up to their, by now, exalted expectations.

Then came the moment for the pyromania, as they set fire to the tissue paper around the macaroons and watched the ash rising in random swirls and becoming one with the air itself.

A second birthday party had to be organized at home, since friends had not brought presents to the hotel, and this too had its rumbustiousness. The tea, the sandwiches, and the cake were but a mere prelude to a sort of barbaric hunt, both inside and outside in the garden, the ambushing of girls who in their gauze skirts with wide sashes ran and shrieked as they were pelted with water pistols and flying meringues. These assaults were afterward ameliorated by brief and blushing snogs.

For Sasha’s birthday party I arranged a screening of
Cat Ballou,
their covert practice with the two air guns proving invaluable, in imitation of the fast draw, and the hilarious sequence when Kid Shelleen, played by Lee Marvin, not only missed his
opponent but drunkenly staggered as his pants fell down. Lee Marvin was to be the surprise guest at the end of the screening, as Sam Shaw had been briefed to bring him, except that Lee Marvin had gone the way of Kid Shelleen and was in the bar of his hotel, reluctant to travel.

Either through Ted Allan or Sam Shaw, my two most influential friends, I met the director Jack Clayton, who played poker in Ted’s house on Saturday nights with a batch of men. Jack was casting the children for the film
My Mother’s House,
and Carlo was granted an audition, then brought back for a second one and given the lead part. The headmaster in their new school gave permission for him to be away for certain dates during the six-week shoot, on the understanding that he would have private tutoring on the set. Feeling a bit above himself and acknowledging that he was weak in Latin, he asked for tutoring in Latin and, if possible, in Greek.

A week of filming had started, and his happiness was infectious, along with a feeling of superiority over his brother. Then came a phone call from his father to say that I had broken the law concerning the stipulations over custody, and that he was taking me back to court, having already, through his solicitor, informed the film company that Carlo would not be returning to the set. He had learned of it through a newspaper article in which Carlo was photographed with some of the other children in the cast. After I put the phone down, I was in tears. How to break it to him? He guessed and shook with rage. This, his first, big, boyish dream, he had been robbed of. “I could kill Dad, I could kill Dad,” he kept saying, and I knew by the way he shook that that murderousness was extended to me also.

“There will be another time,” I said, but in his eyes there was a mistrust, as if somehow he had been expecting this all along.

But there were excitements and surprise visits, as one night in their bedroom, with all their clutter and paraphernalia, painted soldiers laid out on trays for battle yet to be, Paul McCartney entered. I had met him on my way out from a party that Kenneth Tynan and Quentin Crewe had given; the party was still in full swing, and both hosts, as I later learned, were understandably seething because Paul McCartney had decided not to go up to the drawing room to join the gathering but instead to see me home.

The children were asleep when we got in, and Elizabeth Lobey, the babysitter, while telling me they’d had their supper and their bath, was in evident danger of seizure at the appearance of Paul McCartney in our hallway in Deodar Road.

He asked where they slept, and then it was up the stairs into the bedroom, where he picked up Carlo’s secondhand guitar and began to play and sing “Those Were the Days,” a hit song by Mary Hopkin at that time.

Those were the days, my friend,

We thought they’d never end

We’d sing and dance forever and a day

We’d live the life we choose…

Sasha sat up dazed and, like Aladdin in the story, began to rub his eyes fiercely so that the genie in the bottle materialized. Carlo was angry at being wakened and said, “Go away, Mother, you must be drunk,” and buried himself under his big floppy quilt. Presently I was hearing an improvised song, which Paul McCartney strummed on the guitar:

Oh, Edna O’Brien,

She ain’t lying,

You gotta listen

To what she gotta say,

For Edna O’Brien,

She’ll have you sighing,

She’ll have you crying.

Hey,

She’ll blow your mind away.

That next day at Ibstock School a bitter feud ensued, Sasha boasting about the visit from a Beatle and the song he had composed and Carlo calling him “Fibber, fibber,” until Sasha, to everyone’s disbelief, produced the plectrum that Paul McCartney had given him.

It was sometime after that I decided, albeit reluctantly, to send them away to boarding school when they were eleven and twelve. I chose Bedales, which was coeducational and whose founder, John Badley, was a visionary who had cultivated the ideal of an education that encompassed “head, hand, and heart.”

Letting go of them had been a big wrench, and the first parting as they walked with their luggage toward the redbrick building, the leaves on the trees turning russet, was well nigh unbearable.

The house in Putney felt like a mausoleum, their bedroom still with the painted lead soldiers laid out on trays for battles yet to be and two Oxo tins with their clobber, and everywhere masterful signs saying
PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH
.

I visited several times during the term, bringing hampers, which made them very popular for binges in the dormitories late at night.

That Christmas was the happiest ever: on Christmas night I cooked a dinner for over thirty people, and one of the guests was Len Deighton, who had brought the children a gift of the seven volumes of
Lloyd’s Encyclopaedic Dictionary,
which had been printed in London in 1895. It was a marvel of language and information, strewn with quotations from great writers through the centuries, and when the time came for them to return to Bedales, I found that it was left for me on the dining room table.

We were at Waterloo station, with the several Bedales pupils hollering to one another, flinging questions that went unanswered,
and stocking up with Crunchies and bags of sweets. Among them was a girl called Wanda. She wore a bright Gypsy skirt, a man’s hat, and a patterned shoulder bag made from carpet material. Young men waited upon her. “Wanda. Wanda. Wanda.” Sasha whispered to me that his brother had a crush on her, but judging by the multiple acolytes, Wanda’s dance card was full.

She moved among them like an empress, and as soon as the barrier gate was open and we were allowed in, they followed, her satellites, and I followed too, somewhat tentatively, knowing that I must not show the merest jot of emotion. My main function was to carry one of the requisite hampers with cooked ham, pickles, and Stilton cheese, along with a clandestine bottle of port. In the carriage, which Wanda imperiously chose, there was a space next to her on the seat, which I knew that Carlo would have liked to take. He was being encouraged by his friend Norrie, who was on her other side. But with a proud, sad gesture, he declined and went on down the carriage to sit alone, where he took out his book,
Piers Plowman,
immersing himself in the humble Plowman’s allegorical search for a heaven.