The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (50 page)

Our friends and family also made use of the times between lets. When my old friend Sarah decided to celebrate her civil partnership with her girlfriend Julia, Faringdon, with its history of unconventional marriages and gay unions, was the ideal setting for her family party. Sarah’s son Samuel, who had first visited Faringdon as a toddler and was now a grown man, gave a moving speech.

Over the years, several of the significant characters in the Faringdon story died. In 1998, Alan Heber-Percy had a fatal heart attack aged only sixty-three. Coote died three years later, just short of her ninetieth birthday. After decades of self-imposed exile from Madresfield due to family tensions, she had recently returned to visit after the estate passed out of the hands of a hated sister-in-law and into those of a beloved niece. Coote’s funeral was held in the place that had meant so much to her, in spite of its association with great pain. In her thoughtful way, Coote had left her small house in Faringdon (which passed to her after Robert’s death) back to the Faringdon estate. Despite the honourable intentions, there was gossip; apparently a loyal nephew had been expecting it. This was the second time that, quite without trying, I usurped a legator’s nephew and presumably became very unpopular.

Jennifer’s death came in 2003, when she was eighty-seven. I had never tried to speak with her about who my mother’s real father was; it was often hard enough to have any kind of normal conversation, though the sweet nature and silvery laugh of her youth remained till the end.

Rosa’s end was as dramatic as her life. She was killed by a lorry on Faringdon’s ring road in 2010. Aged eighty-five, she was still working as a cook, and was walking the several miles to her job in the early morning when she was hit. After decades of frugal living, her savings turned out to be over half a million pounds, and apart from her house and a few small legacies, she left it all to a children’s charity in London. I was over from Greece and helped spread her ashes around a tree by the lake at Faringdon. Despite the many years since we had last met, it was easy to picture her striding across the field, red-cheeked and eagle-eyed, her grey hair tightly pinned. She’d be gathering mushrooms or chasing trespassers, a large dog at her side. I imagined she would have been rather pleased by the thought of this little autumnal gathering and the wind that gusted small clouds of grey crematorium dust into the air.

ANDY SMITH DIGGING FOR GERALD’S ASHES, HELPED BY JACK FOX

When I began researching for this book, one of the invaluable sources of information going back to the 1930s was Jack Fox. Although there had been a degree of tension after Alan’s forced deal with the shooting rights, Jack and I found common ground and great enjoyment in the detective work that is involved in an investigation of this kind. I had no idea what had happened to Gerald’s ashes until Jack told me the story of burying them at the top of the lawn when the estate office was built. We even had an archaeological dig to try to retrieve them. Jack turned up with a variety of probing tools from his undertaking days, Andy the gardener dug trenches into the grass he had recently mown and Des, the long-retired gardener, came along from his lodge on his mobility scooter. I had hoped we’d find the oak box and possibly rebury it somewhere with a monument for Gerald, but sadly, though we found the old foundations of the Elizabethan house, there was no sign of the ashes. Either the flowerbeds had changed position and we were digging in the wrong location, or Gerald’s remains had become one with the place he had so lovingly fashioned after himself.

Jack was determined that we should try another excavation and the matter remains open. While discussing burial rites, Jack also mentioned that, unbeknownst to anyone else at Faringdon, Alan Heber-Percy’s widow had returned to the grounds with her husband’s ashes. She had taken them to the stone sculpture in the monkey-puzzle avenue, where we had scattered Robert’s a decade or so earlier. ‘The ashes just sat there, all white, for ages,’ said Jack, ‘so I went and dug them into the ground a bit.’

PRIL 2013, the coldest spring in England for half a century. I left Athens bathed in scented sunshine and landed at Heathrow to sleet sliding down the windows. Over the dozen years since I had settled in Greece with Vassilis, Anna and Lara, I had often travelled back to England and made my way to Faringdon. Occasionally, it was to stay in the house, but more often the house was occupied by tenants and I spent a couple of days with Leo and Annabelle in their nearby home, going over to Faringdon to make plans in the gardens with Andy and plough through the accounts and the latest problems in the estate office: a lead roof needing to be replaced, a historical group requesting a visit, the perimeter wall that has collapsed, the town sewage pipe which is gushing inexplicably, dangerously near the lake, just like it did in the 1930s … This time, though, Leo and his family were away in Scotland and I booked myself into a pub for a couple of days.

I’d had a few drinks over the years at the Bell Hotel in Faringdon’s Market Place, but it never crossed my mind I might stay there. It smelled of beer and fried food and had the sombre hush of a winter afternoon before the first drinkers arrive. The landlady, Mel Gravestock, had a hennaed crew-cut and a nose stud and told me she and her husband had been managing the place for two years. ‘It’s tough work that never stops – on duty twenty-four hours a day.’ The building is an old coaching inn, with sections apparently dating back to medieval times; there were narrow stairways and unevenly floored corridors to negotiate before we reached what had been described as the ‘bridal suite’. A low-beamed attic room, it gave on to rooftops and the back courtyard and offered a large, windowless bathroom with a beaten-up circular bathtub. The temperature felt sub-zero. On enquiring, it emerged that the heating oil had run out and wouldn’t be delivered for two days. Electric fires were brought, blankets piled on. It could have been the beginning of one of Gerald’s stories. A camel might arrive at the front door, or a fur-wrapped marchesa pass by with her python in a glass travelling box, heading up towards Faringdon House. Perhaps a flock of vibrantly coloured birds would swoop down before returning to a magical place where a lord wears masks, plays music on a piano in his car and throws wild parties for the famous, rich and beautiful with a mad boy.

I had come to Faringdon this time to unveil a blue plaque. Recently, quite unexpectedly, an email had come from Eda Forbes, my ancient-history teacher from Oxford High School. I remembered her well – a clever classicist with hair wound high on her head. She had been surprised to find me in her class. I had arrived at the school aged sixteen, a rebel from Wheatley Park Comprehensive following a move with my father to an Oxfordshire village where he had gone in search of the good life. Accustomed to the precociously erudite daughters of Oxford dons, Miss Forbes had looked at me sadly after my first homework assignment and said, ‘Sofka, you don’t know how to write an essay, do you?’ Now retired, she worked as secretary of the Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board, which had agreed that Lord Berners should be honoured and that the ideal location was his tower on Folly Hill. She wondered if I could give a little speech.

The next morning, an icy wind was blustering around the hill as I walked up towards Gerald’s Folly. I was glad I’d brought my old astrakhan coat, acquired decades before in a Soviet state outlet in Leningrad before it reverted to St Petersburg, as my Russian grandparents knew the place. A small crowd was gathering around the square brick base of the tower. Miss Forbes wore the additional decades very well and her hair was still arranged as I remembered. There were three mayors, including Oxford’s, all of whom sported gleaming gold chains. A few journalists took notes and snapped photographs. Eddie Williams, the man who has galvanised an enthusiastic group of supporters into repairing, restoring and cherishing the Folly, was beaming with pleasure. There were all sorts of local people who have made this tower theirs, who walk their dogs, organise parties or take friends up on open days to look out across expanses of England.

Robert handed over the Folly to the town in the 1980s when it was at its crumbling nadir – unsafe to enter and scarred by vandalism and graffiti. There were various attempts to patch it up over the years. When I inherited Faringdon House, I automatically became a trustee of the tower, along with the mayor and the accountant. Inevitably, I was influenced by the way Robert always treated the place, recalling how he would bump us up the track in his car to the tower after lunch, fumble with some keys in the thick, bank-vault door (put in after the other was destroyed), and let us creep up cautiously to the top and push open the trap-door to the viewing platform. I, in my turn, also kept a key and would take friends there. Some of my daughters’ birthdays were celebrated within the turreted top, with a cake and picnic carried up the creaking stairs. Now things are different. What began as one man’s indulgence or as a gift to his wild young lover, is now a municipal amenity. There are information boards to explain the history, health and safety regulations, volunteers on a rota. Some of the romance might have been lost, but it is the exclusive romance associated with the old ways of privilege, inappropriate in this age.

Gerald and Robert were always amused by teasing their more conventional neighbours, and at the time there were many who were outraged at the prospect of this imposing construction. Now the last laugh is with the townspeople, who have adopted Lord Berners and his tower both as a local attraction and a trademark for Faringdon. A charitable group called the Pink Pigeons Trust is ‘Bringing the spirit of Lord Berners back to life!’ Local artists and voluntary groups are encouraged to produce work in a surrealist, humorous spirit that is then placed around the town and the Folly. Model pink pigeons are attached to windowsills, comical signs hung on walls and unusual sculptures placed in the trees on Folly Hill. In September 2013, on the anniversary of Gerald’s birth, a Berners Night dinner was organised at a local restaurant: ‘quirky quocktails, qurious qanapes … kinky koffee and folly fancies’ were provided and among the entertainment was a ‘Queer Quiz’ with Gerald as its subject.

Lord Berners is becoming a brand. A retired magician and entertainer, Peter Wentworth, dresses up as Berners whenever the occasion warrants, with a pink plastic pigeon on his bowler hat, a Dalí-esque black moustache and an ornate silk waistcoat. A local hotel put in a request for Andy to provide dyeing lessons at Faringdon House so that they could colour their own flock of doves (though eventually it didn’t happen). When Bob Canning, a Californian playwright, wrote Faringdon Follies, based on the lives of Gerald and Robert, it was given its highly successful premiere as a reading in the aisles of Budgens, the local supermarket. A full staging of the play might have proved more challenging in that setting: act I begins with the two heroes chasing each other naked around the drawing room.

Before the celebrations of Gerald’s centenary in 1983, he was seen as an obscure footnote to musical history – an eccentric aristocrat who had been largely forgotten by all but his friends and a few specialists. Since then, however, his star has risen. To mark the centenary of Lord Berners’s birth, there were recitals of his music and readings from his books in the Wigmore Hall and the Purcell Room, an exhibition at the Royal Festival Hall (all events enthusiastically supported by Robert) and widespread interest was shown by the media. Thanks largely to the work of Peter Dickinson and Philip Lane, who have championed and performed Lord Berners’s music for many decades, there are now recordings of all his major compositions. Mark Amory’s 1998 biography provoked new interest in Gerald’s life, as did the subsequent collection of interviews and critical appraisals of Lord Berners’s work by Peter Dickinson. The Berners Trust has also provided support and funding for all sorts of performances, recordings and publications and Gerald’s fiction and non-fiction has been re-released and appreciated by a new generation of readers. The frolics of the elite 1930s in-crowd can seem distasteful, but there is also a fascination with their extremes, their passions and their creativity.

THE AUTHOR UNVEILING THE BLUE PLAQUE FOR LORD BERNERS ON HIS FOLLY, 2013

At the unveiling in 2013, there were some introductions, then I gave my speech about Lord Berners and pulled back a blue velvet curtain to reveal the plaque. It quotes from the epitaph that Gerald composed for himself and which neatly encapsulates his attitude to life, with its oblique playfulness and its failure to mention his great love of music, his offbeat creativity or the Mad Boy:

Here lies Lord Berners

One of the learners.

His great love of learning

May earn him a burning

But, Praise the Lord!

He seldom was bored.

It was strange to be taking the part of unveiler – as if in some way I was Gerald’s spiritual great-granddaughter, though of course that’s rubbish. I wondered what he would think to see me doing the honours for him. I suspect he would be amused by the tangle of inconsistencies that landed me there. There are so many contradictions. Yes, I inherited the Mad Boy’s house, but I don’t live there – my home is in Greece. And although I think of Robert as the long-lost grandfather I came to know and care about, he might not even be my blood relation. The fact that I have a Russian name many find impossible to pronounce and that my Russian grandmother was a card-carrying British Communist to the end of her days merely adds further twists.

ARLIER THAT MORNING, when I had gone downstairs for breakfast at the Bell, Mel advised me to go to the bar, where her husband was blowing on a few pieces of coal, trying to get a fire going. I sat at a large table in the bay window, and while Mel prepared scrambled eggs, doorsteps of toast and coffee, I looked out at the Market Place. There were people hurrying to work or out on errands, farmers passing in Land Rovers, a pretty teenage girl dawdling, the flower shop putting out its wares, a queue for the Oxford bus. It was a contemporary version of the reproduction engraving in the pub of exactly the same view in the nineteenth century: women with crinolines and parasols stroll by, a shepherd drives his flock down the slope. From my chair, I could see the gates to Faringdon House up by the church. This was a new vantage point for me – the outsider looking in. It was strange to look at a place that was both mine and not mine. I sensed the mystery of the house that can’t be seen from the town but that dominates it in a certain way. This novel angle was enjoyable, though I also recalled the awkwardness and shame I felt emerging from the gates, soon after inheriting the estate, and being taken down to the market stalls on a Tuesday so the new estate manager could introduce me. He collected the rents: £5 from the egg stall, something else from the chap with the baskets. That seemed a long time ago and I was pleased to sit anonymously in this window, watching the world pass. ‘Did you tell the landlord at the Bell who you were?’ a friend had asked the previous evening. It made me think of Gerald’s old retort: ‘And who were you?’ Back in the early days, a conversation was overheard by my brother Leo, while having a drink at the Bell: ‘Do you know about the new owner of Faringdon House? It’s some Czech woman.’ Another person said they’d heard that the chatelaine was ‘a very old lady’.