Niv: The Authorized Biography of David Niven (7 page)

That summer he spent his last holiday in Bembridge sailing and chasing girls – ‘I had a heart like a hotel with every room booked,’ he wrote in
The Moon’s a Balloon
– and enjoyed it all the more because his restless, ebullient twenty-six-year-old brother Max was briefly home on leave after his five-year stint as a cowboy in Australia before setting off for the South Pacific to manage a banana plantation on Norfolk Island. One shadow over that Bembridge summer was that Etta had begun to suffer dreadful pains that she tried to shrug off but that were in fact the first symptoms of the cancer of the colon that was to kill her three years later. In her last years, when she was often bedridden, David became closer to her and she told him and Ann that she dearly wished they would get
married. Although David and his mother had never been especially close, Ann Todd told Morley, ‘he was the baby of the family and she really loved him.’

At the start of David’s final term at Sandhurst he was promoted yet again, this time to the giddy rank of junior under-officer – a rare achievement since No. 1 Company had only one senior under-officer and four juniors. One cadet under David’s command that term was the future Major-General David Belchem, who wrote in his memoirs: ‘He kept us, and everyone else, in good humour. He was, inevitably, constantly in trouble himself through committing minor military transgressions (such as leaving his bicycle in the wrong place, a heinous offence). But his personality and charm enabled him to get away with it.’

In October David took part in another variety show, this time appearing in three sketches with H. A. L. Montgomery-Campbell, a Stowe contemporary who had joined Sandhurst with him. One was about a seance, one about a Beau Geste firing squad, and ‘Niven and Montgomery-Campbell were as good as ever we have seen them,’ reported the
R. M. C. Magazine and Record
. ‘Each is a splendid foil to the other. And when Miss Watson-Smyth comes to help them we get a finale raising the quality of a truly high-class entertainment.’ During that final term he also played the juvenile lead in the Sherlock Holmes mystery
The Speckled Band
, turned out often for the 1st XV, and won his rugby Blue again. He certainly looked a formidable rugby opponent: the 1929 1st XV portrait shows a tough, frowning, intimidating nineteen-year-old bruiser with no resemblance at all to any theatrical luvvie.

When he took his final exams at Sandhurst he found them ominously easy and was convinced that his entry into the Argylls would be a simple formality, but when the results were published he came very low in the final order of merit: 122nd out of 148 cadets, despite being given bonus marks for having been an under-officer. As one Sandhurst examiner once wrote about another cadet, ‘This candidate sets himself
remarkably low standards, which unfortunately he fails to live up to.’ To be certain of a commission in his first-choice regiment David should have done much better and was devastated to learn that he would not be going to the Argylls after all but to the very regiment that he had sneered at, the Highland Light Infantry, the HLI, or Hairy-Legged Irish as they were jocularly known by the other Scots regiments – the only Highland regiment to wear not the kilt but tartan trews with weird vertical and horizontal stripes.

He left Sandhurst on 18 December 1929, deeply depressed not to be going to the Caribbean, without winning any distinctions or prizes, and after a six-week Christmas break he was gazetted as a second lieutenant in the Highland Light Infantry (City of Glasgow Regiment) on 31 January 1930. His mother was shocked to have to pay £250, the equivalent of about £7500 in 2003, to buy all the uniforms and tropical clothes that the regiment demanded he should have, and once again it must have been Uncle Tommy who footed the bill. In
The Moon’s a Balloon
Niv gave the impression that during these years his mother and Uncle Tommy lived mostly apart, she in Bembridge and he in London, but her name appears with his at 110 Sloane Street on the Chelsea electoral registers for every year from 1924 to the day she died in 1932, and two codicils to her will in 1926 and 1931 had them living together there.

In
The Moon’s a Balloon
Niv said that he sailed immediately from Tilbury to the Mediterranean island of Malta in January, aged eighteen, aboard a liner, the
Kaisar-i-Hind
, to join the 1st Battalion of the HLI, but his army record shows that he was not posted to Malta until nine months later, on 1 October 1930, when he was nearly twenty-one, and in an article that he wrote in 1945 for the Fleet Air Arm magazine
Flight Deck
he said that his ship had been the
Criterion
. His army record does not say where he was during those missing nine months, but he was probably at the regiment’s barracks in Aldershot or Dover training and learning how to command a platoon.

His trip to Malta was the first time he had been further than Switzerland, so at first he was excited, but he soon regretted that he had not been sent to join the 2nd Battalion in India, which was much more exotic and fun. In Malta, where the harbour of the capital, Valetta, was packed with the battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, destroyers and submarines of the British Mediterranean Fleet, the HLI’s job was a humdrum policing operation at a time when many Maltese wanted to become independent of Britain, and Niv quickly became bored and frustrated. He was placed in ‘C’ Company and put in charge of No. 3 platoon, a bunch of about thirty rough, tough, streetwise Glaswegians, many with razor and knife scars from old brawls, but most of his fellow officers seemed to be middle-aged deadbeats and few could be bothered to talk to him at first, including his commanding officer, except for one old major who replied when Niv asked when breakfast was served, ‘Breakfast? Officers of the Highland Light Infantry never have breakfast. They are generally sick around 11.’

Malta was noisy and smelly, his room stank of donkeys and goat dung, and the only action he saw was when his platoon had to guard a Customs shed at the harbour one night during an anti-British demonstration when some hoodlums threw a few stones. His life in the HLI was so dreary that he claimed in
The Moon’s a Balloon
that he served there for two years whereas in fact he was there for only fourteen months. In 1957 he told Lionel Crane that he had spent over three years there. It just
felt
like more than three years.

There were only two bright consolations about that year in Malta: sex and Michael Trubshawe, though preferably not at the same time. Trubshawe was a massive, noisy fellow second lieutenant, 6ft 6ins tall with a huge handlebar moustache, a mischievous twinkle in his eye, an eccentric sense of humour, a bottomless capacity for alcohol and an irresistible talent for getting into trouble. The men thought he was hilarious, the officers shuddered and looked the other way. When Niv met
him at a cricket match against the Royal Artillery, Trubshawe produced a bottle of whisky, a soda siphon and two glasses out of a briefcase. ‘Come,’ he said, ‘let us drink to your most timely arrival with a glass of Scottish wine.’ Niv took to him immediately and Trubshawe – ‘this amazing and wondrous creature’, as he called him – was to be his best friend for many years and became a surrogate brother to make up for the fact that Max was so much older and hardly at home.

Trubshawe was himself immediately attracted to Niv’s ‘wonderful smile, flashing white teeth, very blue eyes and a blue-and-white polka-dot scarf tied around the neck’, he told Morley in 1984, a few months before he died. He was twenty-three and lucky enough to have a private income, so it had not bothered him when he had been sent down from Cambridge University after seven terms because he had spent more time hunting than studying. He had a grand piano in his room on which he played medieval folk songs, and instead of wearing a heavy, hot helmet on parade like everyone else he sported a cool, light, papier-mâché replica that eventually turned into mush during a downpour. Niv called him ‘an Elizabethan with a hunting horn’ and he certainly galloped to the rescue on David’s first regimental guest night, when the daunting guest list included an air marshal and a couple of admirals; the tables glittered with regimental glass and silver, and Niv found himself sitting trapped next to his commanding officer and desperate to go to the lavatory after drinking far too many aperitifs, but unable to move because no one could leave the table before the loyal toast to the king at the end of the meal. After soup and several courses accompanied by glass after glass of wine, David’s bladder was bursting by the time the cheese arrived and he was in agony when he heard a whisper in his ear. It was Mr Gifford, the mess steward. ‘With Mr Trubshawe’s compliments, sir,’ he murmured, ‘I have just placed an empty magnum underneath your chair.’ Gripping the huge bottle with his knees, David relieved himself for several minutes while thanking heaven
for the perspicacity and inventiveness of his wacky new friend. Suddenly his CO, who had never yet spoken to him, remarked, ‘I have fucked women of every nationality and most animals, but the one thing I cannot abide is a girl with a Glasgow accent. Pass the port.’ The colonel never spoke to him again.

Because of his private income Trubshawe could afford to be generous to Niv, who had to survive on his army pay of nine shillings a day – the equivalent of about £95 a week in 2003 – and constantly picked up the bill for both of them, managing to do so without making David embarrassed. They hunted girls together and drank too much and played cricket and polo. In Niv’s article for
Flight Deck
he told an hilarious story about one polo match in Malta when he was on a horse called St George and riding off one of his opponents, an admiral, when St George bit the admiral on the buttocks. The admiral roared with pain, Niv lashed out at the ball and implanted the head of his polo stick up the admiral’s pony’s bum. The pony clamped its tail over the head of the stick and both horses and their riders careered across the field, past the spectators’ stand, irretrievably locked together.

‘There was really nothing at all to do there except the four Ps,’ Trubshawe told Morley, ‘polo, piss-ups, parade and poking.’ In pursuit of the latter they popped now and then into a brothel in Valetta called Auntie’s although neither needed to pay for sex because Malta and especially the posh Marsa Polo Club seethed with available girls: local beauties, officers’ wives and daughters, women from England desperately looking for husbands (‘The Fishing Fleet’), and the hundreds of lonely young naval wives whose husbands spent months at sea every year. Niv started to pursue rather too openly the wife of an army captain who called him in to his office one day and enquired, ‘Niven, are you very much in love with my wife?’

Niv was stunned. ‘No, sir,’ he stammered. ‘Not at all, sir. Thank you very much, sir.’

‘Well, if you’re not,’ said the captain, ‘be a good chap, don’t go on telling her you are. Upsets her, you know.’

Another close shave that Niv liked to describe was the night that he was in bed and about to ravish the wife of a naval officer who had just sailed off on his destroyer for six weeks of exercises around the Greek islands when she sat bolt upright suddenly and hissed, ‘Christ! He’s back!’ Her husband’s ship had broken down just outside Valetta. She bundled Niv into a cupboard, went down to the sitting room, and kept her husband distracted while Niv dived into his clothes and crept out of the house. ‘I was impotent for days,’ he said. To prevent any similar incident Niv and Trubshawe installed a ‘husbandometer’ near the harbour that was equipped with a piercing siren so that it could be sounded whenever the fleet was spotted returning to base.

In the summer of 1931 David returned to England, by boat to Marseilles and train to Calais and Bembridge, for his two months’ annual leave, and he said later that he was sad and jealous to discover in London that Nessie had given up whoring and gone to Seattle to marry an American. In Bembridge he renewed his friendship with Brian Franks but was horrified to find that his mother was now in constant pain. ‘So selfishly occupied was I with my immediate pleasures,’ he wrote in
The Moon’s a Balloon
, ‘that I only dimly realized how serious her illness had become. She herself was gay and vague and wonderful and she pushed it all aside as something boring she had to live with.’ Gay, too, but in the modern meaning of the word, was twenty-four-year-old Grizel, David’s beloved ‘Gump’, who was about to give up acting to go to the Chelsea Polytechnic and study under Henry Moore to become a sculptress and who turned out to like girls as much as Niv did. He did not mind that she was a lesbian and referred to her jokingly as ‘my sister the dyke’. To brighten Henriette’s penultimate summer Max was also home on leave from his South Pacific banana plantation and amazingly persuaded her to lend him £3000, a huge amount
that would be worth about £100,000 today. Maybe she knew that she would soon be dead because she told him that the loan need not be repaid until after her death, and it was yet another indication that Etta was not poor at all but extremely wealthy. The other highlight of that leave came when Niv was selected to be a member of the British crew in an international amateur sailing contest for eight-metre yachts at Ryde on 18 July 1931. The British boat,
Severn
, was skippered by his old chum Ralph Gore, and they won the Cumberland Cup by beating the French boat,
L’Etoile
, 3–0 in the final.

Back in Malta Niv and Trubshawe resumed their desperate attempts to brighten their lives. When they went off into the hinterland for manoeuvres and saw that the senior officers’ tents all had little wooden signs outside saying ‘C.O.’ or ‘2nd I/C’ they erected their own that read ‘Chief Raspberry Picker’ and ‘Asst. Raspberry Picker’. Their spirits lifted dramatically when a like-minded lunatic, John Royal, joined the battalion briefly. Royal was a vast and very naughty young man from Sandhurst whose taste for booze matched theirs and who was later to be court-martialled for hitting two officers who were foolish enough to wake him after a party and accuse him of being drunk. At his trial he explained in his defence that because he had been dropped on his head as a baby he tended to lash out if he were suddenly awakened.