Odd boy out, p.10
Odd Boy Out, page 10
Sir John remembered Pa with affection. ‘Your father had a distinct advantage. He was fifteen years older than the rest of us. He didn’t look like a callow youth. He had grey hair, as I recall. And he didn’t have a shiny new wig like the rest of us. He had his father’s old wig, so he looked as if he’d been around for a few years. Clever trick. My father was a barrister, too. I should have tried it.’
In 1951, Pa had grey hair, high hopes and an allowance from his father’s boyhood friend, Shirley Jones. It was the allowance that enabled my father to survive and to pay the school fees. The girls were all set for Cheltenham Ladies’ College. Where was the golden boy to go?
I arrived in London in 1951, aged three, speaking English and (thanks to Bertha and Hans) speaking German, too. Clearly, I had, if not quite the gift of tongues, at least a gift for languages. My parents couldn’t find a German school in London, so they sent me to the French Lycée in South Kensington instead. I began in the jardin d’enfants – the day nursery – which was in a small building away from the main school, somewhere off The Boltons. The only memory I have of it is a good one.
After lunch we always had a rest. Each of us was given a thick brown blanket and we had to roll ourselves up tight inside it – like the filling of a sausage roll – and lie on the polished wooden floor, all in rows, all facing the same direction, with our eyes shut. I remember how hard the floor seemed and how comforting the blanket was. I can see its colour now: dark chocolate. I can smell it: musty, but nice, like the smell of apples in a storeroom. Most of all, I can feel the texture of the blanket. When I was about fifteen and read Rupert Brooke’s poem ‘The Great Lover’, I came across the line where he describes ‘the rough male kiss of blankets’ and I thought, suddenly, excitedly, ‘Yes, that’s it – that’s the feel of the blanket we rolled up in for our afternoon rest at the jardin d’enfants.’
Now, seventy years later, when I am lying awake at night, I pretend I am rolled up in that all-encompassing, heavy, itchy, smelly brown blanket again. I was safe there. And happy. I seem to recall that the mademoiselle who was in charge of our class sat on an upright chair in front of us, knitting quietly while we slept. I can hear the rhythmical click-click of her needles.
But perhaps I have imagined that.
We lived in and around South Kensington throughout the 1950s, mostly in flats taken on short leases, once in a house, and for a month or two in a respectable but faded hotel, just opposite Gloucester Road tube station. My mother liked hotel life. So did I. As a little boy, I pictured myself as a bellhop, immaculately dressed in a sky-blue uniform with brass buttons down the front and a matching pillbox hat, running around the hotel delivering telegrams to the residents. Later, I went through my waiter-as-seducer-and-confidence-trickster phase. Later still, a friend introduced me to the ‘secret floor’ at the Randolph Hotel in Oxford. It’s the floor the guests don’t know exists, above the official top floor. It’s where the staff live – and anything goes.
I have since discovered that almost every grand hotel has one. In the mid-1950s, the American actress and singer Kay Thompson published a series of humorous story books about a naughty little girl called Eloise who, like Miss Thompson, lived at the Plaza Hotel in New York. My mother and I loved those books. They depicted one of our shared fantasy worlds. A long time later, Liza Minnelli told me that she was Kay Thompson’s goddaughter and that she, Liza, was the model for Eloise. I wish my mother had known that. My mother adored Judy Garland. Every Easter, while my father was hiding the Easter eggs, she would sing her favourite songs from Easter Parade.
Back in 1951, our first London address was 42 Lower Sloane Street, a tall, handsome, red-brick house on the road that runs south from Sloane Square. I think we had the ground-floor flat that opened out on to communal gardens at the back. I don’t remember the inside of the flat at all, but I have a faint recollection of running up and down the garden making woo-woo whooping noises wearing a ‘Red Indian’ feather headdress, and a distinct memory of riding my tricycle along the pavement, unaccompanied, all the way from the Good As New second-hand clothes shop at one end of the street to the colourful flower barrow on the corner of Sloane Square at the other. I loved pedalling up and down that street. I could go faster than either the milkman or the rag-and-bone men on their horse-drawn carts. I always saluted them as I raced past. They always saluted back. It seems they, too, knew I was somebody special.
I have only two friends from that time whose names I can still recall. One was a girl called Jane Sarah Dorothea Hoos. Ma and Pa both always said her name in full, as if it came in inverted commas, as though she might be a character in a verse by A. A. Milne: ‘Yes, Gyles, “Jane Sarah Dorothea Hoos” is coming over to play. Won’t that be fun?’
I think it must have been, because we spent a lot of time together. We played hopscotch in the street and she always won. Girls are invariably better at hopscotch than boys. I was more successful when we played lines and squares – that’s the game where, going along the pavement, you’ve got to move from square to square, from paving stone to paving stone, never putting a foot on any of the lines in between.
Whenever I walk in a London street,
I’m ever so careful to watch my feet;
And I keep in the squares,
And the masses of bears,
Who wait at the corners all ready to eat
The sillies who tread on the lines of the street,
Go back to their lairs,
And I say to them, ‘Bears,
Just look how I’m walking in all the squares!’
Ma loved the verses of A. A. Milne and knew most of them by heart. Curiously, looking at the pictures of me and Jane Sarah Dorothea Hoos, we seem often to be dressed more like children from the 1920s world of Christopher Robin than the post-war world of 1950s austerity. Jane Sarah Dorothea Hoos has quite a wardrobe of pretty flower-covered frocks and I look quite dandy in my cream-coloured soft felt bowler hat. Judging from the photographs, she was six to my four, assured, self-contained and (I now see) extraordinarily attractive. I am often in costume (dressed as a policeman or a clown, or wearing a kilt), larking about; she is always demure. I think the best picture is the pair of us riding a life-size Muffin the Mule on the seafront at Broadstairs. She has allowed me to sit in the front, I notice.
The other friend from that era whose name I still know is Julian Fellowes. You will know him, too. He became an actor, then an Oscar-winning screenwriter, and then the creator of Downton Abbey. Indeed, Julian is the only Oscar winner with whom I have shared a bath. I was five and he was four at the time. (The Oscar winners with whom I’ve shared a shower is another gether altothing, as Princess Margaret used to say.)
In 1953, either just before or just after the coronation, I know we moved from Lower Sloane Street, SW1, to live in the basement of the Fellowes’ house in Wetherby Place, SW7. I am not sure how that came about, or why. Hoping he might, I emailed Julian with some fun pictures of us together in the playground and the paddling pool at Normand Park, in Fulham. He has just emailed back.
Dear Gyles,
What marvellous photographs, complete with that strange, slanting fringe that little boys were given then. It looked okay for one minute after brushing, and then it looked bonkers for the rest of the day.
My father [a diplomat stationed in Ethiopia] developed TB towards the end of the war and my mother, ever intrepid, had to go to Africa to bring him back. This she did, and got him into the military hospital (King Edward’s?) at Midhurst in Sussex. My brother Rory and I were not yet born, so she had two sons, the younger one a baby, and somehow she had to sort out a place for them to live, all on her own. She found 2 Wetherby Place which had suffered damage from the building directly opposite being blown up (it was still a bomb site in 1953), so all the windows had been broken, etc., and she managed to negotiate a long lease, on the proviso that she would renovate it. However, in 1944/45, it was fairly impossible to find any casual labour so she had to do most of it herself. At first there was no running water, and she would take the bus, in Gloucester Road, up to the cinema in High Street Kensington, and wash there at the end of every day, before going back to her parents’ house.
Eventually, she got the place sorted out, just in time for my father’s return from hospital. She had already let the basement flat for a bit of income, and so they lived in the rest of the house. There was a break in about 1948 when they went to Cairo for two or three years, when Pa was posted to the Embassy there as Second Secretary or something. He worked with Donald Maclean, whom he disliked, but my mother was great pals with Melinda Maclean. They were both pretty shocked by what happened later, especially as Pa had worked closely with Guy Burgess in London, whom he liked enormously. He had worked with Kim Philby too, but they were not close. Even so, he must have been investigated. Anyway, in 1951 (I think), we came home (I had been born in Cairo in 1949), and returned to 2 Wetherby. The arrival of all of you was not long after that. I cannot remember how our parents knew each other, but I do recall that they were friendly, more friendly than just tenants, so I imagine it must have been because of an introduction by a mutual friend. Your parents (but you will know this better than I) were looking for a house and then I seem to remember they had a very welcome inheritance while they were there, which they all celebrated together. At any rate, that was part of the legend they left behind. My mother would sometimes look after you, and your mother would sometimes look after me, hence the famous bath and our day at Normand Park in Fulham.
I hope some of this is useful.
Love,
Julian
It’s more than useful, I’d say. Ethiopia, Egypt, virtually the complete Cambridge spy ring, the bomb site across the street, the boys in the bath … It’s a complete mini-series in three paragraphs.
Julian in his seventies (and now Baron Fellowes of West Stafford) looks exactly as he did aged four. He is still good company and endearingly unpretentious about his hugely successful work. ‘What you have to understand about period drama is that it’s “history light.”’ He is both witty and wise. Not long ago, I did a Q&A with him as a fund-raiser for the British Film Institute. He rather shocked the young actors in the audience. ‘Be grateful to be typecast,’ he told them. ‘If you are a type they’re looking for, how lucky you are. Stick with it.’
Pa’s mother (the lady who links us to the Empress Eugénie, Kenyon’s the Undertakers, and George R. Sims) died in 1953, so that must have been the source of the inheritance we celebrated with the Fellowes family. In any event, that’s when we moved to 27 Oakley Street, SW3, another handsome, Victorian terraced house, on a street that runs from the King’s Road down to Cheyne Walk and the River Thames.
It used to be said that everyone lives in Oakley Street at some point in their lives. Oscar Wilde and his mother lived there for a while. Scott of the Antarctic lived there with his mother. Bob Marley and David Bowie lived there around the same time, but at different numbers. When I met him, the footballer George Best was living at No. 87, the same number as Oscar and Lady Wilde. Donald Maclean, Cambridge spy friend of the Fellowes, had lived at No. 29, in the house next door to ours.
I remember nothing of our house except the stairwell. It was always dark. And hanging on the first landing was a large oil painting. It was the portrait of a man. He was bearded and wore a black suit. I don’t know who he was, but he frightened me. Indeed, that painting introduced me to fear. I can remember running past it down the stairs as fast as I could. It filled me with dread.
Because of the painting, I have avoided opportunities to revisit Oakley Street. According to my diary, I was last there on Saturday, 6 October 1973. I went to 15 Oakley Street that day to have lunch with Richard Goolden, an old actor whose claim to fame was playing the part of Mole in the original stage adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, in 1929. He went on playing the part almost until he died, in 1981, aged eighty-six. Richard Goolden was Mole: small, bent, gnome-like, and completely delightful. Over lunch he chattered away merrily about Kenneth Grahame (who wrote the book) and A. A. Milne (who wrote the play) – he knew both of them – and about life in the trenches during the First World War when he was in charge of the latrines. He scurried about the house – it was his family house, left to him by his mother – and, when I told him how much I liked our chicken soup, ran off to the kitchen and returned triumphantly waving the empty Swiss Knorr soup packet at me. After lunch he took me into the kitchen and showed me his collection of empty Swiss Knorr soup packets – hundreds of them. He did not throw anything away. He took me upstairs to the top room in the house – bare floorboards with old suitcases and cardboard boxes all over the place – and showed me the shelves where he had kept every bank statement and chequebook stub that he had had since he first opened a bank account, in 1914.
The worlds created by Kenneth Grahame and A. A. Milne were two of my mother’s favourite worlds. She introduced me to them and we were both very happy there. The worlds my father introduced me to were less cosy, more dangerous. He was a Treasure Island and a Robinson Crusoe man. And, at bedtime, while Ma was reading me nursery rhymes about Christopher Robin, Pa was performing dramatic monologues at my bedside – complete with melodramatic gestures. By the time I was six, I knew some impressive chunks of Milton’s Samson Agonistes. I am sure it is those bedtime stories and poems that gave me my lifelong love of language. If I was going to write a verse about my parents it would begin a little differently from Philip Larkin’s: ‘They tuck you up, your mum and dad …’
In the 1950s my mother was what most middle-class British women were: a stay-at-home housewife. She hankered after something more, and eventually she found it, but while I was small I had no idea she was anything other than completely contented with her domestic lot. I don’t think she was very interested in housework or cooking, but she got on with both. I remember helping her shell peas. I loved popping the pod and being allowed to eat every tenth pea raw. I remember, too, helping her with her knitting. I had to sit on a footstool facing her with my wrists held out while she unravelled her wool, slowly looping it around them. I felt I sat there like that, with my hands stuck out, for hours on end. I realise now it was probably only a matter of minutes.
We had happy times together – ‘chiggy’ she would have called them: it’s a Hindi word. Pa was at work, the girls were away at school, Griggs the cat was asleep on the sofa, Mitou the parrot hadn’t yet arrived: it was just Ma and me – and tea. Tea was always the same: Marmite and tomato sandwiches, with the white bread sliced thin and the crusts cut off. Ma drank Indian tea, poured from a small metal teapot into her favourite bone-china cup, and I had a glass of cold chocolate-flavoured Nesquik. On high days, I also had a lemon or chocolate Lyons’ cupcake. Meticulously, I peeled the silver tinfoil off the side of the cake without damaging any of the crenulations on the icing. Then I ate it, slowly, deliberately, in a state of near ecstasy, eyes closed, nibbling my way round the edge.
From June 1953, when we got our Radio Rentals television for the coronation, Ma and I always watched Watch with Mother together, too. Andy Pandy was on Tuesdays, and Ma’s favourite. I thought Andy was a bit of a drip, but I liked Teddy and I had a soft spot for Looby Loo. My favourite was The Flowerpot Men, on Wednesdays: Bill and Ben with Little Weed and a tortoise called Slowcoach. These were black-and-white puppet shows: in every shot you could see the strings attached to the puppets.
These characters also appeared in the children’s weekly, the TV Comic, that I bought with my pocket money every Thursday. Muffin the Mule, Sooty and Noddy were the star attractions. I had my own Muffin string puppet, of course, and my own glove puppets of Sooty and Sweep. My Noddy was a doll made of rubber, with a real bell attached to the top of his blue cap. He came to bed with me every night and slept under the pillow. Growler, my teddy bear, watched over us from the foot of the bed.
In time I moved on to The Dandy (where I preferred Korky the Cat to Desperate Dan), The Beano (naturally, I adored Lord Snooty and his Pals) and The Beezer, but while I tried the hugely popular Eagle for a while, the adventures of Dan Dare and the green Mekon never caught my imagination. I did not want to travel into outer space.
Neither of my parents was interested in science or sport, so neither was I. My father loved golf (though he rarely played it) and we had to watch the Oxford vs Cambridge University Boat Race every year, but beyond that my sporting life as a child consisted of the occasional round of crazy golf with my mother, and listening to the football results on TV on Saturday afternoons. There was something hypnotic – almost poetic – about the way the announcer intoned them.
Stirling Albion, nil: Ayr United, one
Queen of the South, two: Dundee United, three
Hamilton Academical, one: Albion Rovers, two
Arbroath, nil: Forfar Athletic, nil
I have only watched one football match in my life: the World Cup Final in 1966. (We won. When I watch, we win. Clearly, I need to watch more often.) I cultivated George Best when I met him in 1970 because he was famous. It was at a party in Dublin, where I made the mistake of introducing George to Sinéad Cusack. (She bunked off with him instead of me.) In 1990, I hosted a dinner for Sir Stanley Matthews on his seventy-fifth birthday because I knew he was a legend – and I do love a legend. He was also extraordinary: he told me how he was earning £5 a week at the height of his fame, and happy to be. Later, when we showed some film footage of highlights from his career, he sat next to me looking down at his knees. (As Shakespeare has Henry V put it: ‘There’s nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility.’)
As an adult I have encountered some of the great sporting figures of our time – and their families. In Jamaica, not long ago, Usain Bolt’s auntie told me she could run just as fast as her nephew: ‘I had to chase him when he was a little boy and I always caught him – always!’ But as a child the world of sport passed me by.
