The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (28 page)

Meanwhile, the Mad Boy’s military service was as patchy as might be expected. His older brother Cyril described a visit to his barracks, when the mention of Robert’s name brought a hush to the guards, followed by a summons for the duty-officer. It turned out that Robert was in the guardroom under arrest for stealing a car. ‘But he has one of his own,’ replied Cyril. ‘Is it a large Buick?’ ‘Yes.’

It emerged that Robert had been stopped by the military police and when asked whose car it was, ‘just out of cussedness’, replied, ‘Whose do you think?’ It seemed unlikely that a private would have such a fine model and they locked him up. Later Robert said, ‘You know, it was interesting to see what it was like.’326 According to Cyril, Robert’s section ‘consisted mostly of cockneys’, and given their knowledge of how to work the system and Robert’s car, they all had a grand time; ‘The NCO in charge was kept well in hand.’

In July 1941, after 1 year and 61 days in uniform, Robert left the Army, discharged under Paragraph 390 (XIV) – ‘ceasing to fulfil Army physical requirements. Permanently unfit for any form of military service’. According to Billa, he might have ‘got a wound or something’ (presumably during training) and was in a military hospital set up in St Hugh’s College, Oxford, which specialised in head wounds. It is possible, she added, that ‘it was just a sort of nervous thing’. Others have suggested a chronic problem with migraines; Gerald wrote to Penelope Betjeman that Robert had been ‘granted unlimited leave’ on account of his ‘continuous headaches and the peculiar conformation of his brain’. Could he have taken a tip or two from John Betjeman and mentioned a few neuroses as well, encouraged by Gerald’s psychoanalytic knowledge? In another letter, Gerald wrote, ‘Robert has been removed from the army for being loopy.’ Whatever the case, the Mad Boy was soon back at Faringdon. Gerald too headed over from Oxford when he could, usually staying Saturday to Tuesday. It was almost as if everything were back to normal, although, of course, it wasn’t.

* Later Rayner, then Leigh Fermor.

HEN ROBERT RETURNED to live at Faringdon in the summer of 1941, the place had changed. The house and estate had been requisitioned by the Army, and about a dozen Nissen huts had been erected in the trees to the side of the lawn. Men from the Royal Engineers and Royal Army Service Corps were stationed there, fixing army vehicles and preparing their food in a special cookhouse. The Folly was now the observation post for the local Home Guard (those on duty saw the glow from the Coventry bombing), and there were pill-boxes and holes in the roads all over the town ready for road blocks. At night, the whole area was darker than anyone had ever known. What with blackout blinds and cars with shrouded headlights, it was easy, walking through the marketplace in the evening, to bump into people. Accidents were legion.

Robert was in his element and set to work organising the estate again and trying to protect it from the soldiers. Gerald reported to Clarissa that ‘Robert made a terrific fuss because a soldier broke a branch off a lilac tree but if one gets away with no further damage than that one may account oneself lucky.’ Coming over for weekends from Oxford, usually by train, Gerald reported that the military were hardly noticeable. ‘Except for distant motor-bikes they are as quiet as mice.’ Robert worked hard on the farm, driving the tractor and joining Fred Shury, his lanky former groom, to plant wheat in the fields by Grove Wood. They managed to harvest and thresh it with help from Italian prisoners-of-war, who were brought in from a nearby camp to work in the fields.

As part of the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign, ornamental grounds were to be planted with vegetables – London parks were now sporting carrots and onions rather than flowers, and St James’s Square had rows of cabbages around the central statue of William III. There was an attempt to dig up the lawns at Faringdon, but the foundations of the old Elizabethan house broke the plough and the task was abandoned. Instead, six sheep were put there to graze, and if they were unable to provide the velvety green stripes of the glory days, at least they prevented the grass from getting too high. Vegetables and fruit were plentiful; Mr Morris, the head gardener, was too old to fight and though the urns were no longer filled with geraniums and areas were overgrown with weeds, there was plenty of garden produce. In the summer, plump, scented peaches and purple grapes still emerged from the greenhouses.

Fred Shury was now performing many jobs to cover for the staff who had left. It was he who drove into Oxford most weeks with a trailer of vegetables and surplus fruit. The bulk was donated to the Radcliffe Hospital, thereby gaining an extra petrol allowance for the maroon-coloured Austin 8, but a box of supplies was also dropped off with Miss Alden at 22 St Giles’ for Gerald. Everyone, even the royal family, had been issued with a buff-coloured ration book to ensure that the entire population would be fed fairly, but Faringdon provided myriad opportunities for augmenting the careful measurements and dull, repetitive diet. Soufflé de Berners, with its brandy, eggs, cream and crystallised fruits, was not on the menu, but when friends like Clarissa, Cecil Beaton, Daphne Fielding or Peter Watson were invited for the weekend, there were meals that still met exacting standards. Cooking was done by Mrs Law, and while the food was ‘not sumptuous’, recalled Clarissa, ‘lunch parties for fifteen people were normal’. Still, Gerald lamented the good old days and yearned for the delights of French cooking: ‘For one who is greedy, the striking figure of Brillat-Savarin [author of The Physiology of Taste] is nostalgically present to the palate in these days of rationing and make-shift cookery.’

Mr Morris kept the vegetables coming from the garden and long-standing friendships with local farmers ensured a supply of dairy produce. Perhaps there were more carrots than usual – the carrot and Marmite soup sounds a dubious invention – but they were also cooked up with butter and sugar into a mouth-watering caramel. There was certainly no such thing as ‘mock cream’, ‘mock duck’ or other horrors of the wartime kitchen. Robert went off in the early mornings with a gun, returning with soft, bloodied rabbits or a couple of pigeons in his leather bag. In the early summer, he picked morels in the woods and in autumn field mushrooms in the rough grass above the lake. While Gerald was pleased to be back with his birds at Faringdon, he did not object to Robert setting traps for the moorhens and coots on the lake – both provided a dark, rich meat for the table. The exotic birds had been sent off to the zoo because their food was now unavailable, and nobody knows what became of the ornamental ducks that lived in a cage by the fountain on the back lawn. The urge to consume them may well have overcome scruples about their beauty.

Clarissa remained Gerald’s preferred guest at Faringdon after her move to London, but she was not Robert’s. The Oxford rumours that Gerald might even marry her would surely have reached the Mad Boy and Clarissa remembered, ‘He was a bit prickly at the beginning. It must have been irritating. “What was I at?”’327 Robert would have understood Clarissa’s attraction, though she was surely not his type. His prickliness is unlikely to have been sexual jealousy; aged fifty-eight, Gerald gave the impression of being no longer interested in sex, and indeed admitted his relief at this development to A. L. Rowse.328 It was more likely to have been a fear of being replaced as youthful confidant and companion by someone who possibly had more qualifications than him, particularly in intellectual terms. Gerald would discuss his writing with Clarissa, whereas Robert’s role as ‘manager’ had given his position a practical and thus potentially slightly demeaning function. ‘I had a rapport with Gerald,’ admitted Clarissa. But she insisted that Gerald ‘was madly in love with Robert … though perhaps there was a masochistic side to Gerald … But by that time they were an old couple. They were used to each other.’329

After her mother died in 1941, Clarissa became very ill and was hospitalised with a kidney complaint. The final part of her convalescence was spent at Faringdon, in the womb-like cosiness of the Red Room, with its wine-coloured wallpaper, damask curtains and four-poster drapes. Sleeping long hours in the red bed, she found it hard to wake in the mornings. ‘Once, Robert came and banged on the door and told me it was one-thirty. There were lunch guests. “We’re all waiting for you,”’ he shouted, with more vehemence than was necessary. ‘I was mortified,’ Clarissa remembered sixty years later. Perhaps it was then that Robert accepted Clarissa – an exhausted, orphaned girl who slept the days away and was not about to take his place. ‘He realised I wasn’t after anything,’ she said. Robert, too, suffered his own bereavement that Christmas, when he received the news that his father had died. He travelled to Shropshire for the funeral, where his thirty-seven-year-old brother Algy was now Lord of the Manor. This confirmed Robert’s distance from the old family seat; Faringdon was now his home and his future.

During 1942, when Clarissa was back at her Foreign Office job, she continued to go down to Faringdon by train as often as possible. She was usually collected from the station by Mr Webb, the local taxi driver who regularly drove Gerald after William Crack joined up. Sometimes, though, Robert would take the wheel and, if Clarissa could run rings around him with cultured dinner-party conversation, he evidently managed to get back at her with his unreformed technique on the roads.

Dearest Gerald,

Just to thank you for a lovely weekend. We left you telephoning hard. Robert nearly killed a dog on the way to the station – the train was gone. Our journey to Didcot hell-for-leather in Mr Webb’s Rover was a sort of ‘Destry Rides again’ – the car made a noise like the first aeroplane, only chance remarks were possible – I remember screaming ‘Not another dog!’ as we nearly killed a second one – we caught that train by a fraction of a second. Mr Webb was sweating and shaking.

Gerald sent letters to Clarissa reporting on his latest work. ‘Publishers are delighted with Cleo [The Romance of a Nose] and want to get it out before Xmas. But I doubt if they do as printing etc is getting more difficult.’ He thanked her for gifts with his usual humour: ‘Dearest C, Thank you so much for the lovely chocs. Robert and I fell upon them as cannibals might fall upon a missionary.’ He also sent picture postcards upon which he had drawn or added inappropriate comments. On Fra Angelico’s The Annunciation, with the Angel Gabriel and the Virgin holding their hands crossed over their abdomens, Gerald wrote around the edge: ‘HOW ODD THAT WE SHOULD BOTH HAVE TUMMY-ACHES. IT MUST HAVE BEEN THAT MELON.’

Gerald’s wicked humour was clearly back on form by the time Dottie Wellesley published a slim book of poems with the Hogarth Press in 1942. Separated from Gerry Wellesley for twenty years (though they never divorced) and known since diplomatic days in Rome, Dottie took her writing very seriously and had been encouraged by her hero, W. B. Yeats. Lost Planet and Other Poems is grandly ambitious – the verses of an educated woman who does not shy from speaking of planets, eclipses, myths, ancient stones or from using anachronisms – ‘thou hast’ features quite regularly. This earnestness was too much for Gerald, who went through the book pencilling in cheeky comments and cartoons on every other page. The poem ‘Mars’ has ‘-Bar’ added to the title. When Socrates, in an ‘Elysian land … beyond the Pleiades’, is called a ‘wilful old tease’, Gerald adds:

Variants

That pessimist sour

Old Schopenhauer.

That awful creature

Friedrich Nietzsche.

Better the bottle

Than Aristotle.

Throughout the volume, the numerous references to bones and stones are underlined or given asterisks, particularly the allusions to ‘a phallic stone’. Dottie’s ‘Epitaph for Everyman’ was too much. To the verse ‘No bud of flesh, nor of spring,
No cross, no thought in stone,
Shall give Man anything / More beautiful than his bone’, Gerald adds his own little creation beneath:

Bone Sweet Bone see pp 16, 17, 24

I sit alone

On the Phallic Stone

And moan

And gnaw

My Bone –

My beautiful Bone.

Gerald was greatly amused to hear in the spring of 1943 that Dottie had behaved disgracefully at a grand poetry reading in Bond Street in the presence of the Queen. Given in aid of the Free French, it featured illustrious poets such as T. S. Eliot, Walter de la Mare, Vita Sackville-West and the Sitwells, all performing in alphabetical order. Dottie had allegedly got so drunk that she was not given her turn (which as ‘Wellesley’ was last). There were tears, insults, and Dottie hit Harold Nicolson with an umbrella while Vita (who had already done her reading) tried to soothe her and ultimately succeeded in taking her away in a taxi. Gerald later wrote to Edith Sitwell, joking that ‘Dorothy Wellesley is suing Harold [Nicolson] for saying she was drunk – whereas it was merely a Dionysiac Frenzy. I am mad at having missed it all.’

F CLARISSA WAS Gerald’s new best friend, he also remained loyal to his old ones – a defining characteristic throughout his life. Another clever beautiful young blonde woman he was close to was now in prison – Diana Mosley. In May 1940, Oswald Mosley had been imprisoned under Defence Regulation 18B – as a threat to national security – and Diana was interned in June. Gerald and Robert were among the few people who wrote in support on her first day in Holloway. ‘What can I send you?’ asked Gerald. ‘Would you like a little file concealed in a peach?’ What Diana and her friends did not know was that her sister Nancy had been summoned to the Foreign Office to give her opinion on whether Diana’s friendship with Hitler and various other Nazis made her a threat to the country. Nancy announced that she considered Diana ‘an extremely dangerous person’, something that probably sealed her sister’s fate, but Diana only discovered this decades after Nancy’s death, with the declassification of MI5 documents in 2002.

Despite Gerald’s depression and the warnings of Oxford friends that he was putting his own reputation in danger, he also went to visit her. Conditions of indefinite internment at F Block in Holloway were not pleasant, and Diana had been forced to leave behind her eleven-week-old son, whom she was breastfeeding. Gerald brought her Floris bath essence, which must have offered new olfactory delights wafting along the bleach-scrubbed prison corridors. He also sent her a copy of Far From the Madding War. Even after a year of incarceration, her tough joie de vivre remained intact. In a tight, girlish script that filled the page, she thanked ‘dearest Gerald … for the ‘wonderful book which made me simply scream with laughter so that the walls of my cell echoed with my laughing …’ Her politics may have been abhorrent, but it is hard to deny the witty courage of Prisoner D. Mosley 5433E1/12, who sends her ‘fondest love’ to Robert, Penelope Betjeman, Roy Harrod ‘or anyone who might like to have it’.