The Pursuit of Laughter (69 page)

Gerald’s book was a
roman a clef
about himself and some of his friends. Radcliff Hall was a school; he was the headmistress; the girls were Cecil Beaton, Oliver Messel, Peter Watson, Robin Thomas and Robert Heber-Percy, the school tomboy, all easily recognizable. Every morning Gerald read me the latest chapter; sometimes he had to stop reading he laughed so much. It was wonderfully funny if you knew the characters and their foibles but perhaps less so for the general public. He had
The Girls
privately printed.

John Betjeman wrote once of the stories Gerald told that they were ‘too much concerned with the peculiarities of his friends’ to amuse outsiders, and went on to describe them
as ‘short, extremely funny and fantastic, yet so personal that their effect would be lost in
trying
to explain them’. Probably he was right. Gerald’s longest story was about a friend of his who woke after his siesta and saw that the lawn was covered in white. He rang for the
footman
and said, ‘What on earth is all that white on the lawn?’

‘It’s the hail, sir.’

‘What? One small bird did all that?’

‘I didn’t say the
owl
. I said the
hail
.’

Gerald made the two words sound the same. Kit, who liked to see me laugh, used to say: ‘Gerald, please tell one small bird.’

He was first and foremost a composer, whose hobbies were painting and writing. He was a great admirer of Corot, and it is easy to see the influence of the master—the golden Corot of Gerald’s paintings of Rome and the Campagna, and then the Corot of Ville d’Avray and its trees and ponds in the green Faringdon pictures—but they are at the same time very
personal
to himself. He admired Matisse, Tchelichev and Dali; some of their work hung at Faringdon, where most of the pictures were family portraits of the seventeenth and
eighteenth
centuries, framed in black.

Diaghilev and Stravinsky thought highly of Gerald’s music; he composed
The Triumph of Neptune
for Diaghilev in 1926, and a few years later another ballet,
Luna Park
, for C.B. Cochran, both with choreography by Balanchine.

When Cochran produced
Helen!
, based on Offenbach’s
La Belle Hélène
, Oliver Messel’s sumptuous décor and the beauty of Evelyn Laye when the chorus,
pianissimo
, sang Marlowe’s

captivated me.

‘Lovely, isn’t it?’ I said.

‘Oh no. What on earth has become of the music?’ said Gerald. It had been cut to
ribbons
.

His last ballet,
A Wedding Bouquet
, with words for a chorus by Gertrude Stein, was
performed
at Sadlers Wells in 1936 with choreography by Frederick Ashton; the conductor was Constant Lambert. All these talented people came frequently to Gerald’s houses. Sir Frederick Ashton says when they were working together there were few jokes; Gerald always took work seriously.

Gertrude Stein, with her cropped hair and heavy tread, and her friend, Alice B. Toklas, with her moustache, were more mannish than any man. Gertrude Stein’s books were
incomprehensible
, her prestige rested upon her collection of paintings; she had bought Picasso’s pictures before he became well known. Gerald said she was a good businesswoman, and in any case he was amused when her self-proclaimed genius was taken seriously by pretentious critics. She and Miss Toklas were very American; years of living in Paris had not changed
them in the slightest degree, though perhaps Paris gave them some sort of aura in their native land.

In 1936, when Kit and I were married, I went to live in Staffordshire. Although no longer a London neighbour, I saw almost as much of Gerald as before. He and Robert came up to Wootton, while I often stayed at Faringdon and sometimes at Halkin Street. One year they entered a horse for the Grand National: it amused Gerald to be a racehorse owner for a day, and we went to Aintree.

Faringdon is the perfect country house; not enormous but big enough for several guests to stay in comfort. It was built in the mid-eighteenth century. The beautiful double drawing room, with a fire at each end, looks out upon a lawn and a fountain, with great trees and a lake beyond, and an endless vista of English country stretching away for miles. On the other side of the house across a lawn is a pretty old church whose bells play melodious hymn tunes. Gerald said that whenever people who did not know the place came to stay, however sunny the morning, ‘visitors’ blight’ was sure to descend just as they arrived, shrouding the view in mist. There was no visitors’ blight in Rome, but it never mattered at Faringdon. The beauty of the house, the unfailing amusement of Gerald’s company and that of his friends, the delicious food, and in winter the warmth (The painter Adrian Daintrey called it ‘Faringdonheit’) quickly dispelled the encircling gloom of the English climate, and next day, having shown what it could do the blight lifted and the sun shone.

I was once invited to bring my sons Jonathan and Desmond Guinness, then aged six and seven, to stay at Faringdon. They never forgot this visit. Many years later Desmond arranged a concert of Gerald’s music in a country house near Dublin, and he wrote an article about the composer in the
Irish Times
for the occasion. He described his memories of Faringdon, a printed notice on the stairs, ‘
MANGLING DONE HERE
’ and another on the dining room door, ‘
NO DOGS ADMITTED
’ two feet from the floor, the right height for dogs. And, of course, he remembered the fantail pigeons dyed in bright colours flying round the house. Gerald was a born surrealist.

At about this time he conceived the idea of building a tower on the top of Folly Hill, a mound-like eminence covered in trees overlooking the town of Faringdon. When people round about heard of it there were protests in the local papers. It was rumoured that Gerald planned to put searchlights on his tower, and sirens, in order to annoy. The council, well known for the ugly council houses it had built here and there in pretty villages, rejected the plans for the tower, but it was over-ruled after an appeal to Whitehall.

Gerald’s tower has gothic features; he designed it with the help of his friend Gerry Wellesley, an architect. There is a spectacular view from the top, but the extremely pretty tower is almost invisible now except from the Wantage road, so high are the surrounding trees. It must be one of the last non-utilitarian buildings in England, perhaps even in Europe. Gerald painted a picture of it which was made into a poster for Shell.

The thirties are always described as a political decade, but Gerald was not in the least
interested
in politics. Of course he knew I was a Fascist and that Kit spent his life campaigning for Fascism, but he was quite accustomed to Fascism, which had been the system of
government
in Italy for years. Although in some ways less chaotic than of old, Rome was
essentially
unchanged. Gerald’s Italian friends held all sorts of opinions. Some of the Romans he knew were keen Fascists, others were keen anti-Fascists, and many had no particular
preference
either way.

At the time of the Abyssinian war most Italians thought it strange that England should be so anxious to stop them doing what a few years before had been a constant English
activity
, the colonization of Africa. When sanctions were imposed, Gerald said that the Duchess of Sermoneta was so indignant that she told him she wished she could let every drop of her English blood out of her veins, but as it was mixed with Italian she could not, and it
therefore
remained a pious wish.

We visited my sister Unity in Munich, where Gerald wrote a little poem for her in German. But I can only remember two specifically political occasions with him in the
thirties
. He and Robert dined with me before Kit’s rowdy Fascist meeting at Olympia, and so did Vivian Jackson. To my lasting regret, for it was to be a legendary occasion, I was unable to go because I felt ill. They all went off without me, and Gerald telephoned at about
midnight
to say that Vivian had been arrested and Robert had bailed him out; he was charged with obstructing the police and fined a few shillings next day. Gerald gave evidence that a policeman had hit him on the head with a weapon like a sword, and that Vivian had gone to his defence.

The other occasion was when I dined with Gerald and we went with Wystan Auden to his anti-Fascist play,
The Dog beneath the Skin
. Auden was not famous in those days. He was pale yellow, hair and skin, he had bitten nails and a dirty suit. The play was not very good—it is better read than acted—but the poet himself was intelligent and agreeable. We
naturally
had to stay until the end as the author was with us.
The Dog beneath the Skin
is more
anti-Land
of Dope and Tory than anti-Fascist.

Gerald was always well dressed in a quiet and conventional way; not for him the
rufty-tufty
Bloomsbury clothes with their unpressed trousers. He was not overfond of Bloomsbury food; when he dined with Clive Bell and was told, ‘I hope you like
oysters
. I’ve got some from a
dirty
little shop round the corner,’ he was quite rightly terrified. His quiet clothes and
serious
appearance made his jokes, often childish, even funnier.

He naturally dreaded war as much as I did. He deplored the destruction, the cruelty, the stupidity of war. Kit campaigned for peace for these reasons, but above all because he knew that, win or lose, Britain would emerge diminished. It would be the end of us as a world power; the Empire would not survive. Gerald probably did not mind about this. He was completely European. He was fluent in French, German and Italian and had read widely in all these languages as well as English and translations from Russian. I have never known a man who had read so much; it was this that made him an incomparable companion. Then
he loved art and architecture. Fortunately you cannot bomb music, but he dreaded war.

He was anything but a fair-weather friend. When war began I did not see him for some months; I was mostly in London, sometimes at Wootton, travelling was difficult. After my baby was born in 1940 I moved to Kit’s house at Denham. Wootton, where we had dreamed of living for the rest of our lives, had to be abandoned. Gerald had shut Faringdon and was living at Oxford, where he had friends among the dons. In May Kit was arrested, and Gerald knew at once that I needed him. He made arrangements to come to Denham by bus; there was no more Rolls Royce.

Considering the atmosphere at that time, when the news was uniformly bad and panic reigned, it was brave of him to make his way to Denham and spend the day with me. There is nothing more contagious than panic. He said several dons had tried to dissuade him, they told him it was dangerous to have anything to do with me. It would have been easy for him to telephone and put off the visit, the journey was fairly complicated and he was unused to buses.

We spent a delightful day together, although our talk was far from cheerful. I was
desperately
worried about Kit. It seemed to me that his arrest showed that there was hardly a limit to what the government might do. It did not occur to me that I should myself be
arrested
, my anxiety was for him.

Gerald hated the war. He said none of his usual activities seemed to have any point; he had not the heart to compose, or to paint. He could see few friends because travel had become so difficult. He did not fear death, but he was haunted by the thought of being badly injured and lying helpless with no doctors or nurses, and hospitals heaps of rubble.

He tried to convince me that there must be limits beyond which the government could not go, and I tried to convince him that one day the present nightmare would be over, peace would return and happy, civilized life begin again. We were both more or less right, but
several
years had to be lived through first. Our fears were not fantastic. Gerald’s vision of total destruction became reality in many places all over the world including Hiroshima; the British government deported a shipload of internees; they were bound for a concentration camp in Canada, but they never arrived because the
Arandora Star
was torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic. The victims were mostly Italian waiters; in wartime the government can get away with anything, and perhaps Kit and his companions might have suffered the same fate.

Needless to say, despite our gloomy conversation Gerald and I laughed about many things. I walked with him to his bus; I was not to see him again for nearly three years. Shortly after his visit I was put in prison myself. We prisoners were only allowed to receive two
letters
a week, and I asked that mine should be from my mother or the nanny to give me news of my four children, the youngest only a few weeks old. Months later the rule about two
letters
was relaxed, and I was given a pile that had accumulated in the censors’ office. I could see from the postmarks that Gerald and Robert Heber-Percy had written on the very day my arrest was announced on the wireless.

Gerald’s letter was full of pinholes, which meant that it had been to the Home Office;
the prison censors evidently felt they were not competent to deal with it. ‘What can I send you?’ he wrote. ‘Would you like a little file concealed in a peach?’

Soon after this Gerald’s gloom became unbearable and he suffered some sort of
breakdown
. When he recovered he began to write; his song ‘Red Roses and Red Noses’ dates from that time and presumably its music as well.