Odd boy out, p.16
Odd Boy Out, page 16
John Stride was good as Romeo – but not as good as I would have been.
Alec McCowen was very good as Mercutio – as good as I hoped to be.
By the time I was eleven I already knew my childhood was coming to an end. Life at home was changing. My eldest sister, Jennifer, was at London University studying modern languages and about to get her own flat; Virginia was twenty and qualifying as a nurse at the Middlesex Hospital, mostly living in the nurses’ quarters in Marylebone; Hester was coming up for eighteen, working with horses, but in and out of hospital, still struggling with bouts of mental illness that nobody seemed to know what to do about.
Pa was busy. He was legal adviser to the AA (the automobile people, not the alcoholics) and his office was a light and airy corner room on the third floor at Fanum House, the AA’s headquarters overlooking Leicester Square. I used to visit him there quite often, timing my arrival to coincide with the appearance of the tea lady who toured the building floor by floor, bringing coffee in the morning (‘One lump or two?’) and tea in the afternoon (‘Two lumps or three?’), with extra biscuits (‘Custard creams or Nice?’) just for me. I can see Pa sitting at his desk correcting his correspondence, leaning on his elbow, his right hand holding his forehead. Since his right hand was also always holding a cigarette, there was a yellow streak of nicotine running through his grey hair. He had grey hair from about the time he was thirty – ‘useful for a lawyer’, he used to say, but annoying in other ways. When we were out together he was always taken for my grandfather. I didn’t mind, but I think he did.
He was always correcting his correspondence because his good-hearted secretary, Miss Webb, a homely spinster of indeterminate age, was not the world’s best typist.
‘She’s the worst, my boy, the worst!’ Pa would exclaim – showing me all the corrections and deletions required to the document in hand.
‘It doesn’t look too bad to me,’ I’d say.
‘It’s terrible,’ he’d protest. ‘And I have to correct the carbon copies, as well as the originals, because we have to keep them on file. She’s worse than useless.’
But she stayed with him for thirty years, until they both retired.
I remember visiting the office in the week she got engaged. ‘Look at the ring! Look at the ring!’ Pa calloohed, marching me through the glass-fronted door that led to her room and pulling her hand off her typewriter keyboard to show it to me. ‘Miss Webb is engaged! There’s hope for us all.’ His joshing was tinged with cruelty, but I don’t believe he meant it to be. ‘It’ll never materialise, the marriage,’ he said, chuckling a little too loudly, as he closed the door on his secretary’s room.
He was right. It didn’t.
He was a good lawyer: the undoubted authority on all aspects of motoring law. Whenever anyone of any note was caught for speeding, or parking where they shouldn’t, Pa looked after them – and invariably got them off. When he went to see the Duke of Edinburgh about some minor infringement of the Road Traffic Act, he took me with him. I can remember the scrunch of the gravel as we walked across the Buckingham Palace courtyard, then later sitting on a red velvet stool in a small anteroom while Pa was ushered into the royal presence.
‘Will you be able to get him off?’ I asked when Pa emerged.
‘It won’t even come to court,’ said Pa knowingly, tapping the side of his nose.
His favourite famous client was the actress and model Katie Boyle, celebrated in those days for her appearances on What’s My Line? and later famous as one of the hosts of the Eurovision Song Contest. Katie was very beautiful, and very funny, and she told Pa she kept on driving too fast and parking in the wrong places entirely because she wanted to go on meeting him. (She died, aged ninety-two, in 2018, after enduring ten years of dementia. I went to her funeral in Hampstead, feeling that Pa would have wanted to be represented. The church was packed. The left-hand side was filled with dozens of Filipino ladies – Katie’s carers through her final years. The right-hand side was filled with scores of elderly gentlemen – the last of her many admirers.)
From the late 1950s, Pa was a regular on a BBC radio programme called Motoring and the Motorist and sometimes took me to sit in on the recordings at Broadcasting House. All the other contributors read their contributions – everything was scripted in those days – but Pa was allowed to improvise his. He knew his stuff and he was amusing. He was a natural performer. He took part in amateur dramatics. I remember him taking the lead in a play called Miranda. It’s about a man who falls in love with a mermaid he finds washed up on the banks of the Thames. Glynis Johns, aged twenty-four, played the title role in the movie version in 1948 and again in a sequel, in 1954. I remember seeing a photograph of her in a magazine being put into her mermaid’s tail and thinking to myself that this particular mermaid must join Joan of Arc, along with Juliet Mills as Alice, in my own personal Wonderland. This may seem bizarre, but it’s one of the most vivid recollections of my childhood.
In the 1950s, Pa was still in his forties. He had energy and ambition. He wanted to go into politics. He was a keen Liberal and managed to get himself on to the Liberal Party’s list of candidates, but he didn’t pursue it because he couldn’t afford to. Up until 1957, MPs were paid £1,000 a year, plus a daily allowance of £2 to cover expenses. Even when the salary was upped to £1,750 (taxable and inclusive of all expenses), that was nowhere near the amount Pa needed to survive.
Was he happy? I did not give it a thought then. I was only a little boy. Now, I think the answer must have been both yes and no. He looks very happy in all the family photographs, but I have one of his scrapbooks sitting open on the table in front of me. In it he has pasted a full-page newspaper article from 1954: ‘Mr Middle Class is broke … on £ 2,000 a year’.
A page or two later, from 1956, he has cut out and pasted in a leader from The Times: ‘The middle classes are depressed that they are being destroyed by taxation …’
On the next page: ‘Divorce in 1957 – an Evening Standard investigation. Why do 26,000 marriages a year end in court?’ One of the answers to the question was: ‘Financial stress and strain’.
People sometimes seem amazed that I go on working in my seventies, seven days a week, year in, year out, spending the day at my desk and going out most evenings to do a show or host an awards ceremony or give an after-dinner speech. I say it’s because I agree with Noël Coward: on the whole, work is more fun than fun. Michèle says it’s because I only think I have any worth if I am working. She reckons I have spent a lifetime relying on what the psychiatrists call ‘performance-related self-esteem’. There is something in that (she is always right), but there is more to it, too. At home, on the kitchen wall, while I don’t have those framed prints of ‘Balance on the right side – happiness’ and ‘Balance on the wrong side – misery’ (my sister Hester’s daughter has them at her home in Australia), I do have, in a similar oak frame, in large lettering, a verse from the Book of Proverbs: ‘A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a vagabond and want like an armed man.’
Pa was worried about money from the moment he got married until the moment he died. In 1959, when I turned eleven and the Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was telling us we’d ‘never had it so good’, the Brandreths were on the move again. The lease on 42 Kensington Mansions was up. Pa found us another flat, no more expensive and even closer to the centre of town: 5H Portman Mansions, in Chiltern Street, right by Baker Street tube station – Sherlock Holmes country. I liked the idea of that. I was just beginning to discover Sherlock Holmes. Although 5H wasn’t quite as spacious as No. 42 had been, it was a better address: Kensington Mansions was in SW5 but Portman Mansions was in W1. And Portman Mansions had a lift.
By 1959, we needed a lift. Ma was stouter than she used to be, and she had a recurring bad back. (The sight of visiting osteopaths putting up their portable treatment tables in the sitting room is one of the recurring images of my childhood.) And there was a pram in the hallway now, and hiking a pram up and down eighty-four steps is no laughing matter.
Was Ma happy? I hope so. She had been given what she most wanted – another baby. Ma was wonderful with babies and with small children (especially boys) up to the age of nine or ten. Then her interest in them waned. Once my adopted brother Ben arrived, I was no longer the focus of Ma’s attention.
I did not mind. I was changing, too.
At the age of eleven, I was quite ready to leave home. Don’t get me wrong: I loved my home, I loved my parents, I was happy to be with them, to watch TV with them, to go to the theatre with them, to eat our Indian and our Chinese meals out together, to go on holiday with them … but I was equally happy not to. From the age of seven I had been on one or often two holidays a year abroad, in France or Switzerland, staying with families of strangers, going out and coming back on my own; I went to the theatre alone; I went to church alone; I visited the museums alone; I pushed Ben around the streets in his pram for what seemed like hours on my own. Aged eleven, I was quite ready to take on the world single-handed.
I look at my grandchildren today at around the same age and wonder if they feel now as I did then?
One of them does, I suspect. My daughter Saethryd’s elder son, Rory, made his first appearance on the professional stage, in the Christmas show at the Rose Theatre in Kingston, when he was thirteen. He is looking for an agent now.
According to a certificate from the Broadstairs and St Peter’s Urban District Council Entertainments Department, ‘Gyles Brandreth, aged 10, was placed first in the Children’s Talent Competition held at the Broadstairs Bandstand on 18 July 1958.’
On our annual summer trips to Broadstairs, I took part in every fancy-dress parade and talent contest going. I always came away with a prize, but I can’t think why. Beyond vitality, there was no discernible talent on display. When asked by the compère what I was going to do, I said ‘acrobatic dancing’. My routine featured neither proper acrobatics nor anything that resembled real dancing. As the band played, I simply threw myself around the stage like a whirling dervish, arms flailing, legs splaying, flinging myself into the air and on to my knees with complete abandon. I had no sense of rhythm and no sense of style, but clearly I was giving it a go and not holding back on the energy front – and in a children’s talent competition (and in life, it seems) that can get you quite a long way.
In recent years, I have been asked to take part in the television show Strictly Come Dancing. I wouldn’t do it, because I don’t want the humiliation of being kicked out at the first opportunity. The older contestants who thrive on the show tend to be the rounder ones – John Sergeant, Ann Widdecombe, Russell Grant, Ed Balls – and people with at least a feel for music. I have none. When I was in pantomime, Bonnie Langford (a dazzling dancer) tried to teach me the simplest routine. Even when we had done it a hundred times, I couldn’t keep in step. At the end of it, she would be facing out front, arms extended, and I’d have my back to the audience and my head in my hands.
At the end of my routine in Broadstairs, I leapt wildly into the air and crash-landed on my knees. It was a spectacular finish in its way – and disastrous, too, the first time I did it at the old Bohemia Theatre. The stage there had a stone floor. I can feel a faint flicker of remembered pain in my knees even as I write this.
My favourite Broadstairs venue was the Pavilion on the Sands, above Viking Bay, at the foot of Harbour Street, where every afternoon, in the gardens, ‘Cecil Barker and his Trio’ entertained, and where, every evening in the auditorium, ‘Cecil Barker and his Orchestra’ performed a live show. I appeared there three times a week: on Novelty Night, on Carnival Night, on Children’s Night. To vary the fare, in addition to my acrobatic dancing, I sometimes ‘played the drums’, carrying my small drum kit on to the stage and bashing away at it much in the way the Swedish chef used to bang his utensils on The Muppet Show. I wasn’t as entertaining as that (obviously), but I was a little boy with an impish grin and a touching enthusiasm, and the audience always applauded.
I have just googled Cecil Barker and he’s there online: ‘a violinist who, with his orchestra, played in Broadstairs throughout the 1950s and 1960s’. And there’s a picture of me with him onstage: he is grinning broadly, leaning into the microphone to introduce me, and I am looking up at him with shining eyes. I am relieved to see I look a little apprehensive. (Given I had no idea what I was about to do, I should have looked terrified.) You can tell from the photograph that Cecil Barker was a kind man. I learnt two things watching him from the side of the stage at the Pavilion on the Sands: you can always recognise a violinist because he wears his buttonhole on his right lapel; and if you want the audience to like you, be likeable.
I was very happy onstage at the Pavilion on the Sands, perhaps happier there than anywhere else. I must have been, because a couple of years ago I found the theatre was up for sale and I wanted to buy it. I would have done – we had the money – but my wife said, ‘No, Gyles, really no. You’ve got to start leaving your childhood behind.’
Ma loved the Pavilion on the Sands, too. She came with me to every show. I think she saw me as a song-and-dance man: Al Jolson meets Danny Kaye, with a touch of Maurice Chevalier and Fred Astaire. She never really left her childhood, either.
In fact, my happy years with Cecil Barker notwithstanding, I had no plans to be a hoofer. I was going to be an actor. Somehow, by the time I was ten, my parents had found me an agent – and a good agent, too. He was based in a block of flats on the corner of Oxford Street and Wardour Street, at the north end of Soho. His name was Landor. I don’t remember much about him, except that he made it clear he was either going to ‘make’ me or drop me. He would give it a year. I would visit him once a week – on a Thursday afternoon after school. I’d take the tube to Piccadilly Circus and then cut through to Wardour Street.
I enjoyed walking along Wardour Street. The film companies had their offices there and, as I passed the windows, I looked out for the posters advertising the forthcoming pictures – films that might star Nicholas Goodliffe’s dad, or Michael Redgrave (Ma and I had spotted one of his daughters at the dentist’s) or John Mills, the father of Juliet Mills, my Alice in Wonderland. Walking through Soho, I knew that the women I passed on the way, standing in groups of two or three, in doorways or at the street corners, always smoking, often laughing, were ‘prostitutes’, but I had no idea what that meant. Because I was on my way to my agent and because of where they were and how they were displaying themselves, I sensed that they, too, were part of the entertainment industry. I liked that.
Mr Landor told me I needed two audition pieces. I suggested a bit of Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘And for your modern piece, how about the schoolboy Taplow from Terence Rattigan’s play The Browning Version? Did you see the film with Michael Redgrave?’
I hadn’t, but I visited French’s Theatre Bookshop and found the play and learnt the scene he wanted.
Week after week, I made my way down Wardour Street to meet Mr Landor, to run through my audition pieces for him – my Puck amused him, my Taplow he found ‘effective’ – and to hear that, ‘Nothing has come up yet – but it will.’ And one week it did. ‘An English picture,’ said Mr Landor, smiling. ‘Good director. He did Ice Cold in Alex with John Mills. This is another film with Mills, but set in South Wales. It’s about a young boy who witnesses a murder. Quite dark. Lovely script. You’ll be the boy. John Mills is the detective. They’ve seen your photograph, Gyles. They like the look of you.’
I went to the audition and I gave it my all, but I didn’t get the part.
For the first time in my life, I was conscious of failure.
I lost the part, I lost the agent, and I left home, all within the space of a few weeks.
Part Two
* * *
LEAVING HOME
Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood – for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience; they are formed out of our own disappointing memories.
Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear
12. Sex
I realise now that I must have been a ghastly child. Those bullies in my class at the Lycée had every reason to ambush me for my sweet money. I was insufferable: precocious, pretentious, conceited, egotistical. My friend Piotr was right to do what he did that afternoon at the ABC tea room. He put mustard in my mouth to shut me up.
I have just this minute, for the first time, opened a box of bits and pieces that belonged to my mother. In it I have found a stash of school reports and letters from teachers at the Lycée. They do not make happy reading. I had rather assumed I was the darling of the dixième. Not so. My energy and enthusiasm were welcomed, but my concentration was poor, my application a bit hit and miss, and my relentless, frenetic ‘showing-off’ detrimental to both my popularity and to my potential. I was the ‘class clown’ who never stopped talking. It was a serious issue that I needed to address. The teachers at the Lycée, the headmaster reported to my parents, had a nickname for me: ‘le bavard’.
