The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (4 page)

Among Gerald’s earliest inspirations was the screen in his paternal grandmother’s drawing room which, in his memory, was pasted with vivid pictures of unfamiliar, beautiful flowers, hummingbirds, doves of Siam and birds-of-paradise. Many years later he came across the screen in an old storeroom and was bewildered and disappointed to find that he had remembered it wrong. In reality, it was mostly country sporting scenes and political caricatures and the colourful flora and fauna were few and located far from a young child’s viewpoint, near the top.

Another source for Gerald’s youthful delight in birds and flowers was his beloved Aunt Constance. Handicapped after a riding accident, she had decorated her room with cages of birds, gaily coloured wallpaper and flowers all around. Gerald was transported by the atmosphere and loved helping her undo parcels of dresses and hats sent from Paris and London, and taking a look at her old Court dress and ageing ostrich feathers.

Like the many exotic birds he would later own, Gerald hoped to fly away from the place he came from and surround himself with beauty. His attraction to jewel-coloured tropical birds and flowers was in direct contrast to the sensible, earth-coloured dogs and dauntingly tall horses that he felt took first place in his family’s heart. At Faringdon there would be birds-of-paradise strolling on the lawn and into the house. Another favourite would be the trumpeter bird, which he trained to leap from the ground to take titbits from his hand. A small, dumpy, dark-feathered thing from South America, like a hunched black chicken on tall, skinny legs, the trumpeter has stunning patches of iridescent plumage in purple, green and bronze on its chest and under its wings. It is something like Gerald himself – physically modest, without the showy beauty of other more obviously attractive creatures, but with flashes of brilliance, comic intelligence, flights of fancy, and a trumpeting call that could shock. Gerald appreciated an animal you could laugh with as well as admire, and one that could intrigue without being practical – like the eponymous camel in his 1936 novel, which arrives unexpectedly at a village vicarage one morning. Gerald liked to be surprised – anything but the practical, predictable animals of his childhood. As an adult, he didn’t mind going for a ride on a horse, and it seems likely that his attitude to hunting was rather like Antonia’s, the vicar’s wife in The Camel. Due to her great love of animals, she was ‘very much averse to blood sports, but she objected far less to foxhunting than to the other forms of harrying wild beasts. Firstly because it gave pleasure to a large number of ladies and gentlemen, some of whom were her personal friends … And secondly because foxes very frequently made incursions into her hen coop.’

Although Gerald was wont to reject his family background, he adored his early home, Apley Park, which he calls Arley in his memoir. A romantic eighteenth-century edifice with turrets and Gothic flourishes, it was set in beautiful parkland in a valley through which the River Severn flowed. If the people surrounding him at Apley were not always caring or appealing, Gerald admitted that the place was particularly significant to him. ‘When I hear cats spoken of slightingly as being “more attached to places than to people” I always feel a little conscience-stricken.’ Wealth and luxury were taken for granted; there were twenty house servants within the crenellated walls, in addition to gardeners and estate workers.19 But these privileges are not usually the source of happiness to a child, and Gerald had detested the ‘long-drawn-out amusements enforced on me by my social position’.

When he was young, Gerald loved creating toy theatres, but he specified that he was ‘more interested in the pageantry of fairyland than in the personality of its inhabitants … Rapunzel remained a vague and hazy figure while I could visualise clearly the tower from which she let down her hair.’ He later admitted that ‘A pretty house has the same effect on me as the sight of a pretty woman on the majority of people. Without any definite hopes or intention of acquisition, I like to have a good look at it.’ This appreciation of place and ornamentation began early – Gerald decorated his room at Eton with fashionable Japanese fans and a large coloured photograph of a wisteria-covered tearoom – and it continued throughout his life. He was drawn to establishing spectacularly lovely and remarkable homes, the three main ones being in London, Faringdon and Rome. They were among his great creative works, comparable to his painting or writing, and he took pains to achieve the perfect mise-en-scène for himself and his favoured guests, who became the actors in Gerald’s clever, stylish ‘productions’. These homes were all extensions of the man – marvellous places to which he was deeply connected and which he filled with an idiosyncratic mix of art and antiques, books and music, flowers and birds, and the best possible food. And when he could add something startling or surreal – a horse in the drawing room or guests dressed up as statues – so much the better.

GERALD AGED FIVE , 1889

Gerald’s love of the aesthetically pleasing was dominated by the visual element, and yet his great passion was to be music. However, ‘even to music I was at first attracted by its graphic symbolisation … My imagination was strangely moved by the sight of these black waves of notes undulating across the pages.’20 As a young child, he quickly began to write imitation cadenzas on the page, creating make-believe music. His description of how he was first attracted to the aural charms of music is unusually precise. When a young female visitor played the piano, the romantic strains of Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu ‘burst like a rocket in my imagination’. It was the beginning of a devotion that lasted all his life. The small boy tried to pick out the notes of the dauntingly fast piece and became fixated on it. Later, he was allowed to play the uncared-for upright piano in the billiard room – a gloomy, cold place away from the main house that ‘bristled with antlers, wart-hogs, elephant tusks’ and various barbarous weapons. Hardly the scenery this sensitive child would have chosen for his conversion to musician, but remote enough to give him the privacy he always appreciated.

For many years, Gerald remained largely self-taught as a pianist and he describes how his mother’s reaction to his ‘unexpected penchant for music’ was ‘an attitude of alarm, tempered with pride’. She was pleased enough to make him play to visitors, but his talent was not nurtured. Later, at prep school and then Eton, he was allowed lessons, but he felt the permission was given grudgingly and that his tuition was never enough to allow him to become a seriously trained pianist. At Eton, the older boys encouraged him to play light music at little private evening concerts, and his love of Chopin was replaced with a feverish passion for Wagner. Again, he recalled that it was the visual sense that came first; merely seeing the vocal score of Das Rheingold in a shop window made his heart beat furiously, while some years later, the sighting of a Richard Strauss score was as exciting as ‘meeting the beloved one at a street corner’.21 After much waiting, Gerald persuaded his father to buy the expensive item for him, and The Rhine Gold transported the teenager into his own Wagnerian legend. He would play the music every evening on the dining-room piano at school and his fervour for Wagner lasted many years. However, it was only after he had left school and was able to make more decisions for himself that he was able to pursue music more seriously.

N SPITE OF his many advantages in life, Gerald was dogged from a young age by melancholy. Those who claimed that their childhood days were the best of their lives he suspected of having been particularly unfortunate later on, and he made it clear that he was not in that category: ‘black care can sit behind us even on our rocking-horses.’22 To an extent this was inherent in his character, and it appears that he was prone to misery as a child. However, it was also provoked by his experiences at school. At the age of nine, Gerald was sent to Cheam, a prep school to which his father and other male relations had preceded him. It is easy to believe Gerald’s description of Cheam’s horrible food, the lack of interest in the arts, and compulsory games. This was bad enough for a sensitive, creative, solitary child who didn’t like sports. Worse, the headmaster was a sadist who terrorised the boys with caning and threats. Gerald’s ironic depiction of the situation doesn’t hide the fact that the psychological wounds never entirely closed. ‘Nobody will deny that the majority of small boys between the ages of nine and fourteen are horrid little beasts and deserve to be frightened and bullied. But I find it difficult to believe that it is necessary for them to be tortured and terrorised to the extent that we were tortured and terrorised by Mr Gambril.’23

One punishment was recalled as even worse than the agony of the long wait before being caned. Gerald had thrown a copy of the Bible across the room for a bet with another boy that the irreverent act would not bring forth the wrath of God. Unfortunately, the headmaster entered the class just as ‘God’s Sacred Book’ was hurtling through the air and Gerald saw it land at his feet. The punishment was peculiar but effective. Mr Gambril ordered all the boys in the class to hiss at the culprit. ‘Surrounded, as it were by a roomful of infuriated vipers, it seemed to be the most terrible thing that had ever happened to anyone, and the suggestion of mass-hatred in a peculiarly venomous shape intensified my sense of guilt.’ A beating was to follow, but it was the dreadful experience of ostracism that remained.

Later, at Eton, he was rejected by the boys in his house and the ‘long hours of enforced solitude, spent in my room within earshot of the noisy companionship from which I was debarred brought with them an intolerable sense of inferiority and loneliness’.24 The teenager was only too aware of his shortcomings and later wrote about how he developed a technique of self-preservation – ‘the mixture of bluff and cunning that enables the physically weak to steer their way through dangers and difficulties’.

If Gerald felt wretched and isolated at school, he also experienced love. The first object of his desire was at prep school – a boy as different from him as he could imagine. Longworth was a tall, athletic, fair-haired youth, several years older. Captain of the 2nd XI, ‘he seemed to me to embody every possible perfection’, and it was his image that Gerald conjured in Greek lessons when learning about Homeric demigods. This yearning for someone apparently unattainable, combined with a deep appreciation of beauty, was to continue in Gerald’s life.25 Forty years later, the Mad Boy was just as unlikely and handsome a love, who would never be an equal soulmate and partner, and who had a way of keeping Gerald in a state of insecurity.

In First Childhood, there is an attempt to distance this type of adoration from clearly homosexual relationships. Gerald wrote that he was not aware of his longings for Longworth being sexual, though ‘my infatuation for this boy-hero of my schooldays was accompanied by all the usual symptoms connected with sexual attraction’. He suggests there was a purity ‘in those innocent, pre-Freudian, pre-Havelock Ellis generations … [unlike in] these days of intense sex-sophistication’.26 In A Distant Prospect, Gerald writes in an ostensibly open manner about the force of other passionate, youthful friendships, yet his discussion of homosexuality at Eton does nothing to elucidate his own experiences or his later life. He mentions the ‘vices’ which took place in the school and the hypocrisy that still existed on the subject, but then suggests that though a good deal of this sort of thing went on, ‘to speak of it as homosexuality would be unduly ponderous. It was merely the ebullition of puberty.’27 Gerald’s soothing, avuncular tone was surely intended as a knowing wink to those who knew.

The Longworth episode did not end happily. Following a short if miraculous period of friendship, bestowed by Longworth de haut en bas, Gerald was dropped. His disgrace came after the two boys climbed onto the moonlit roof to smoke and Gerald vomited ignominiously. The misery of being rejected was overwhelming and the child fell into a state of deep depression. Whether this was the first time he experienced it is unknown, but it was a condition that recurred throughout his life. What he called accidie (a term originally used to describe the inability to work or pray among monks and other ascetics) made him feel that he ‘might as well not exist’.28 During these phases, he believed he was unloved, unworthy and that he would never do any good. The literary theorist Walter Benjamin described ‘acedia’ as an ‘indolence of the heart’ that ruins great men, and believed it was the key to understanding tragic figures such as Hamlet. This ‘slothful inability to make decisions’ leads to the hero passively accepting his fate rather than resisting it. Certainly, Gerald found that melancholia destroyed even his great love of music and literature, and what were normally such consolations brought no pleasure. There was ‘that awful nervous sensation of a windmill going round in one’s heart (known in later years as angst)’.29 When struck by depression, nothing could comfort him and he re-experienced the hopeless disempowerment and torment he had known as a schoolboy. ‘In this black nightmare all the old strictures of the headmaster … cropped up again and revived once more my self-consciousness at being bad at games’.30 The triggers could be various, but the effect was deadening and familiar. Nevertheless, like many artists and writers who suffer depression, Gerald was able to spin creative gold from his disadvantages.

Gerald’s unhappiness was not helped by a keen awareness that he was far from good-looking. At Eton, his contemporaries called him ‘Newt’ and Osbert Sitwell described his ‘natural air of quiet, ugly distinction’. Even when he was an adult, some of his friends made unkind remarks. Beverley Nichols recalled, with cuttingly cruel, if inaccurate, comedy worthy of his subject, that ‘he was remarkably ugly – short, swarthy, bald, dumpy and simian. There is a legend that nobody who has ever seen Gerald in his bath is ever quite the same again.’31 In fact, Gerald’s face is rather appealing in his photographs, with his evident intelligence and sensitivity taking precedence over his unremarkable features. He took care with his appearance and he was consistently well-dressed and groomed; striped socks or shiny white spats added a touch of elan to a dapper ‘snuff coloured city suit’.32 As a boy, he was always anxious to do the ‘right thing’, and it was not until later that he discovered the liberating effect of departing from conventions. Still, for someone who valued beauty so highly, it is likely that at least in his youth he was troubled by his lack of it. The frustration, even anger, Gerald must have felt was one of the roots of a humour that could be hurtful to others.