The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (12 page)

The airy eighteenth-century elegance of Faringdon House made it the perfect architectural style for the times. There were various campaigners for the celebration and reinvention of the Georgian aesthetic, from Lytton Strachey and Edith Sitwell to the Georgian Group, a charity that worked to protect and preserve eighteenth-century buildings and gardens. Gerald’s young friend Cecil Beaton dressed up his friends in Georgian costumes, but he was also serious about the visual strength of classical proportions. Gerald added effortlessly to the vogue, simply by taking over his mother’s place and then making it his own.

GERALD PLAYING THE PIANO AT FARINGDON, THE TRAVELLING CLAVICHORD VISIBLE TO THE RIGHT

Faringdon House had been built around 1780 by the Poet Laureate who is most famous for being the worst – Henry James Pye. So poor a verse-maker was he that the nursery rhyme Sing a Song of Sixpence (with its blackbirds baked in a pie) was supposedly some kind of tease, and Sir Walter Scott quipped that Pye was’ eminently respectable in everything but his poetry’. Since the 1620s, Pye’s forebears had lived in a much larger Elizabethan house, a long, gabled affair nearer to the church. Earlier still, the Manor of Faringdon had belonged to the medieval Beaulieu Abbey that was to the north, by Grove Wood. During the Civil War, the old Faringdon House was garrisoned by the Royalists, where they remained, despite Cromwell’s attempts to break in with 500 soldiers. During the fighting, the solid, thirteenth-century stone church near the house got its spire knocked off and it was never put back.

When Henry Pye decided to build another manor house, it was to replace the charred remains of the previous one after it burned down. He moved away from the church and closer to the edge of the Golden Ridge on which the town is situated. This gave an ideal vantage point, looking north-west across the Thames Valley, and the grounds and lake that would also be landscaped. As Pye put it in one of his poems, ‘Through aromatic heaps of ripening hay, / There silver Isis wins her winding way.’119 The house was to be what people then called a ‘neat villa’, constructed using material from the old manor, as well as some creamy, newly cut Bath stone that livened up the dove-grey rendering. In addition to the two main storeys, there was a useful semi-basement level and an attic floor that was hidden by a parapet. The architect remains unknown, and although some have said that Wood the Younger of Bath was associated with it (he designed nearby Buckland House in the 1750s), there is no evidence to support this. But whoever it was, his collaboration with the mediocre poet was inspired. As a 1930s architectural guide put it, ‘The house is as charming an eighteenth-century stone house as may be seen in England.’

During the nineteenth century, the house passed through various hands, including that of the Cunard family. (Their legacy was a number of massive cast-iron cauldrons that had been used to melt down blubber on a fleet of whaling boats that formed part of their enormous shipping empire.) Not all that much had changed by the time Gerald and Robert lived there during the 1930s. By all accounts, the small market town of Faringdon was a charming Berkshire backwater (until later county restructuring brought it within Oxfordshire). Most of its buildings were made from local limestone and its streets were still lit by nineteenth-century gaslights. Visitors usually arrived at Faringdon by train, disembarking at the end of the branch line into the Victorian mock-Tudor station. London had been left far behind. This was deep countryside. A car would be sent from the house to collect the guest for the short drive through the centre of Faringdon, past the old town hall (like a Wendy house perched on stone pillars), up the sloping market place and through the main gate by the church. Parking on the gravel in front of the porch, the visitor would leave the footman to deal with the luggage and was shown into the house by Lambert, the butler.

The hall was filled with exotic plants and flowers brought in from the greenhouses or orangery and emanating a powerful scent. The guest would proceed through to the drawing room, with its ceiling-high windows flooding the place with light. It was always warm – not something associated with English country houses, which were frequently cold, uncomfortable places with a temperature in inverse proportion to the social standing of the owner. The painter Adrian Daintrey nicknamed the place ‘Faringdonheit’ for its luxurious heat, and Nancy Mitford too memorialised this unusual lavishness in The Pursuit of Love. When Aunt Sadie and Louisa go to dine with Lord Merlin at Merlinford, they come home ‘with their eyes popping out of their heads. The house, they said, had been boiling hot, so hot that one never felt cold for a single moment, not even getting out of one’s coat in the hall.’120

Gerald decorated his home with a characteristically eclectic, magpie-like approach, and was not interested in the designs of trendsetters like Syrie Maugham, with her fashionable layering of white on white, mirrored screens, white leather furniture and books covered in white vellum. Gerald threw in whatever pleased him. He had the confidence to combine furniture inherited from his mother or the previous Lord Berners with pieces he picked up on his travels, ancestral portraits and French landscapes with small oils painted by himself and friends, ornate antique mirrors draped with Woolworth’s pearl necklaces, busts crowned with animal masks and marble tables topped with mechanical toys.121 An appreciation of the strange, monstrous and kitsch combined with an educated degree of good taste made for a fascinating interior. A wry affection for Victoriana was thrown into the mix. Anything linked to the grumpy old monarch who had reigned during Gerald’s boyhood was fodder for fun: small figurines of the plump Queen sat on mantelpieces and her portraits were scattered unceremoniously.

The drawing room was divided into two parts with the larger section papered white and filled with gilded French and Italian furniture. The other, smaller end was olive green, ‘providing a perfect background for a riot of tropical birds, some alive and hopping about, some stuffed in cases, some pressed, like flowers in a screen, some modelled in china, one jumping with a song out of a gold box, and hundreds between the green morocco covers of Mr Gould’.122 There could never be enough birds for Gerald, and he introduced flamingos, storks and other gaudy-feathered creatures that strutted around the gardens and into the house. Guests were amused to find that ‘odd, large-beaked birds wandered through the Georgian silver on the Chippendale dining-table, pecked in one’s plate or left squarking horribly on some guest’s head’. Plumed birds-of-paradise brought flashes of unfamiliar colours to the subdued palette of the English countryside as they patrolled the house or sat, preserved in fixed poses, beneath glass domes. One of Gerald’s favourite pets was a flashy green member of the Paradisaeidae family who he named John Knox, honouring the sixteenth-century Scottish Protestant in a way that would have appalled him. Gerald claimed that once, when he was laid up in bed with lumbago, he entertained himself by teaching the bird to turn somersaults. When the pet died, Gerald placed a notice in The Times personal column: ‘Died of jealousy, aged fifteen, John Knox, emerald bird-of-paradise belonging to Lord Berners. His guests are asked to wear half-mourning.’123

It was an inspired day when Gerald decided to help nature along in the decoration department. According to Robert, Gerald read about dyeing doves in a Chinese book. ‘They should have whistles on their wings too, but we never got round to that. We thought up some of the ideas together but I always did them.’124 Colours were acquired and the effect was stunning: turquoise, emerald, ruby and sapphire fantailed pigeons swept over the plain stone town like a bizarre daydream of gems thrown into the air. It was just the sort of alchemy that pleased Gerald: aesthetically surprising; a challenge to the humdrum; a sophisticated tease to the English, the conventional and the rural. And it involved birds. After a visit in 1937, Stravinsky’s mistress, Vera Sudeikina, sent some new dyes, and Gerald wrote to thank her, calling them ‘magnificent’ and saying that they ‘add a tropical touch to this wintry country’. There were suggestions that all sorts of animals (even the grazing cattle) might go the way of the pigeons and improve their natural colouring, but it doesn’t seem to have happened. Later, in a novel, Gerald would describe another version of this trick. A papyrus box is filled with flies that have had tiny streamers of coloured silk attached to them and when it is opened, ‘Like miniature birds of paradise they filled the air with swirling colour as they flew out into the courtyard and settled on the trees.’125

THE COLOURED DOVES AT FARINGDON

The weekend guest at Faringdon might have been surprised by the degree of warmth, the number of flowers and birds and even, beside the bedside biscuit tin, the pornographic books disguised inside a copy of the Bible, or the Bible inside a dust-jacket reading ‘This is the hottest thing written in the last 20 years – sex, crime, violence …’126 He or she was never one of an overly large group; it was not like Vaynol, where vast numbers made up the house parties. At Faringdon, there were only five main bedrooms on the first floor, two of which were taken up by Gerald and Robert, so three couples would normally be the maximum number that could stay the night. Helping run the place were two housemaids, a footman and a kitchen maid, in addition to the butler and the cook. Dairy produce was brought from the farm and there were six men under Mr Morris, the head gardener, to provide vegetables and fruit for the table: peaches and grapes from the glasshouses, and raspberries, strawberries and all manner of other summer produce from the fruit cages. Later, when wartime austerity would decimate culinary standards, Cyril Connolly said that ‘when every sort of luxury has been forever banned in England, Lord Berners will somehow manage to maintain a secret melon house’.127

Additional guests were often invited over at weekends for the famously marvellous meals. Gerald had learned to take food seriously as a sixteen-year-old in Normandy, but what was viewed as culture and pleasurable Epicureanism on the Continent was often seen as gluttony, or even an ‘improper’ subject for conversation in England. ‘I don’t mind owning up to being greedy,’ he wrote. ‘Greediness is among the more amiable of the Vices: it does less harm in the world than, for instance, Vulgarity or Priggishness.’ Fond of wine and cigars, but not excessively so, Gerald was not ashamed to like rich food, claiming that delicacies like caviar or plovers’ eggs ‘have the additional merit of not being exposed to the danger of being spoilt by bad cooking’. Elsewhere he wrote, ‘It was a happy moment in my life when I discovered that, in the Diet my Doctor had prescribed for me, he had omitted to mention both Caviare and Foie Gras among the forbidden foods.’128

Faringdon’s dining room acquired a reputation for the bizarre, and some recalled further experiments with colour. Stravinsky mentioned meals ‘in which all the food was of one colour pedigree;
i.e.
if Lord Berners’s mood was pink, lunch might consist of beet soup, lobster, tomatoes, strawberries …’129 But most close friends recalled the consistent quality rather than the games. Naturally, the table was laid with attention to the linen, silverware and china. Gerald loved gaily coloured geraniums, which were planted out in pots and urns for the summer months, and he sometimes filled a silver basket with pink and red geranium flowers as a pretty centrepiece; at other times he preferred to create an entertaining arrangement of tiny cuckoo clocks or swathes of Venetian beads.130

‘What food does Lord Berners dislike?’ asked the Daily Express in 1937. ‘Hotel food,’ was the reply; ‘Especially the kind of hotel food which you get in some private houses, with watery soup at its beginning and indifferent ice which brings it to an equally watery close.’ His preferred cuisine was French, and his partiality to rich sauces and extravagant puddings evokes the recipes of his childhood housekeeper, most of which began with instructions like: ‘Take two pints of cream, two dozen eggs and one pint of old liqueur brandy.’131 Another cherished Faringdon dessert was pudding Louise, with boiled marrons glacés and raspberry jam, topped with ice-cream, although Gerald once listed his ‘favourite dish’ as pouding Nesselrode – a cream-filled, custardy ice, made with chestnut purée, candied fruits and maraschino liqueur, invented by the eponymous Russian diplomat.132

Gerald tempted his guests by describing the enticing food they were about to eat, and had daily discussions with the cook. As the Daily Express reported, ‘Lord Berners believes in conversing with his cooks. He thinks that a cook who is hardly ever spoken to becomes a bored cook. And a bored cook soon becomes a bad cook.’ His four tests of cooking were ‘the making of coffee, soufflés and pastry, and the roasting of a joint. A cook who can do these four things well, he thinks, can cook anything well.’ An accompanying photograph of Mrs Dora Nelson, the cook from Gerald’s London house at Halkin Street, smiles out from the page – a dark-haired, wholesome-looking woman. She had apparently been to America and offers recipes for a couple of her favourite dishes from there: ‘Johnny Cake’, the American breakfast dish made with yellow cornmeal, eggs and butter, baked in a Yorkshire pudding tin; and an apple tart sprinkled with cheese. ‘Apple tart without cheese is like a kiss without a squeeze,’ said Mrs Nelson roguishly. She also mentions soufflé de Berners, which sounds like the Nesselrode, with cream, rum and mixed crystallised fruits previously soaked in brandy. ‘Put into a charged ice cave and freeze for 2–3 hours.’ Heaven.

HE MAD BOY was finally getting an education. He might have been fictionalised by his friend Michael Duff as someone who was continually flinging off his clothes, but he was becoming a part of Faringdon life. He was increasingly involved in the practical aspects of the estate as Gerald appreciated home-grown flowers and fruits but was not interested in the details of how they were produced. And it was usually Robert who dyed the doves and kept the grounds in order. More important, he was absorbing the cultural world that Gerald had created. He couldn’t help finding out about food and he became attentive to what was served at Faringdon in a way that must have pleased his teacher. On their travels, the Mad Boy didn’t have to try in order to learn about architecture or landscape – it was laid out before him, discussed and written about by others, painted by Gerald and their friends. He gradually started to use this knowledge, bringing home ideas about how to improve the house and grounds that would continue over a lifetime.