Completing two years’ military service I returned to London to embark upon a glittering civilian career – in what, I had no idea.
At Gilston Road the household cast had changed since I’d last been there. Mrs Reeves, our cook, whose legs were so bad she’d been unable to climb the stairs from the basement for years, had finally retired. And Mother had given birth to another son. I’d learned of the event only after it had occurred from a casual reference in one of her rare letters. This was, I think, a last attempt to save her marriage and, as such, misconceived. Hamish had a nursery at the top of the house and was looked after by Nanny. When I went by his pram in the garden I said hello, but unsurprisingly we were not close. Nor was I to my other brother David, for five years is a vast age difference in childhood and we had little in common. He was away at school, Fettes, when I arrived home from the army.
Father occupied a room on the ground floor of the house. By now he had published six books – none of them successful except the first, his biography of Gino, and was still following the same routine of sleeping on the sofa in his study, walking to the Daily Telegraph wearing a rucksack, returning by foot at 8.30 pm for supper, then retiring to write. And Mother’s domain consisted of the master bedroom on the first floor and the drawing room.
She was always busy. She looked after Hamish while Nanny did the food shopping, and again at tea time; she went to art exhibitions and galleries; sometimes she painted water-colours at an easel in her bedroom; she read a lot. She was a member of Harrods’ library and the store was also her bank. Once or twice a week she’d go there to change books or cash a small cheque. She went by number 14 bus, always getting off at Brompton Oratory, the preceding stop, and walking the rest of the way because that was a ‘stage’ and saved one penny on the fare.
She still bravely attempted to give dinner parties for her friends and relatives. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she told Father. ‘One bottle of wine is quite enough for six people. There’s one open from last time at the back of the drinks cupboard.’
On these evenings the table was laid with the good silver she’d inherited, and candles set out on its polished surface. She prepared and cooked the main dish herself. There was never enough and the portions were niggardly. ‘I got the best off-cuts I could with the money,’ Nanny would explain defensively. ‘And the butcher said they were good.’
Despite the wretched food and lack of alcohol, sometimes these parties began rather well, for a number of Mother’s friends were charming and entertaining people, and she herself could be very witty. But Father had perfected a way of ruining them. On one such evening he returned particularly late from the newspaper. The party had already moved into the dining room and started on the meal, served by Nanny in her best apron which she’d had to pay for herself.
Dumping his mountaineering rucksack in the hall, Father entered the dining room with a set face, dressed in the baggy tweed jacket and flannels he always wore. With a curt nod to the guests at table, he strode to the sideboard where the main course simmered in a chafing dish. Raising the lid, he peered inside. His face wrinkled with distaste, he let out an angry grunt. Marching to the kitchen, he returned with the wooden breadboard, a slab of margarine still in its wrapping and a pot of jam. Banging these down on the table as dinner conversation withered into silence around him, he cut himself a thick slice, spread it with jam and began to eat.
Usually Mother chose evenings when he was away to entertain. He was out of England often during the time I served in Germany. At the Telegraph he was their Arctic, mountaineering and wine correspondent and book reviewer, as well as handling the paper’s public relations – a strange job for a man who detested people so much as he did. As their travel correspondent he made a number of walks, one of these from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean above the France–Spain frontier. Ignoring roads, he followed a high mountain route, sleeping out each night beneath a tree; next morning he would leave a coin at the foot of the tree to pay for his lodging. On two occasions he was shot at by border guards, he believed he had a natural right to cross international frontiers wherever he chose.
‘When the east wind’s blowing it’s cold as charity here, I do declare,’ said Nanny.
I was sleeping in my old room on the top floor and the building was in conspicuously worse condition than when I’d last lived there. Nothing planned had been done, and the bomb damage dating from the war had never been fixed. The roof had needed replacing when Mother had bought the house, now the full blast of winter could not be kept out without constant running repairs.
Mother would accept only the lowest quote, and that with great reluctance. A series of cack-handed cowboy workmen had botched their way through the years until she’d found Mr Baines – ‘an absolute treasure, darling’. Smaller and cheaper and more incompetent than any before, he was chronically depressed; ‘trouble at home’ he confided to Nanny. One day he was out on the roof, hanging there precariously as he attempted to force in a new slate, while Mother watched anxiously from the garden below. There was no possibility of either of them being insured. ‘Oh, Mr Baines I do hope you’re not going to fall off,’ Mother carolled from the ground.
‘Quite honestly, Mrs Scott, I don’t mind if I do,’ Mr Baines shouted back.
It was a cold house that winter. There was only a single radiator in the hall to heat the entire building, but this didn’t work, and though some rooms had antique gas fires, their heating elements were no longer manufactured. Nanny passed her weekly afternoon off scouring hardware stores in Battersea for any of the honeycomb china fittings that remained in stock. The temperature sank further whenever Father returned to roost. While at home he questioned me closely on what efforts I was making to find work and had already come up with several unwelcome suggestions.
I had lunch with Alex one day to ask him how he was progressing in the search for a job. We met in Salamis in the Fulham Road, where you could eat for two shillings and sixpence (12½p), and he appeared in the most extraordinary double-breasted jacket with twin rows of large, very shiny brass buttons. Built with unpadded sloping shoulders, it resembled nothing anyone else was wearing at the time.
‘That’s a striking blazer,’ I remarked, rather lost for what to say.
‘It’s not a blazer, it’s a boating jacket,’ he rebuked me. ‘Made for my grandfather.’
He also had on a beret, which he wore throughout the meal. ‘Seventy per cent of the body’s energy escapes via the head,’ he explained. Nigel, with whom he shared a flat in Cadogan Square, had warned me he was behaving oddly and had started sleeping on the floorboards of his room rather than the bed. We’d decided this was because he’d done a course in parachuting and special training, but we wondered what he was toughening himself up for.
Over lunch I confessed my disturbing lack of success in finding work. The single job I’d been offered was as a trainee copywriter at Masius – but only if I first spent six months as a shop assistant in Selfridges ‘to learn selling’.
‘What a preposterous idea!’ he said. ‘Actually, I’m thinking of going into advertising myself, but only in an executive capacity, of course. Our qualification is we know how to lead men.’
‘Er, yes,’ I agreed, remarking that quite a lot of people in advertising seemed to be women. But Alex said that was all right, we knew how to lead women too.
‘How many interviews have you gone to?’ I asked him.
‘Don’t be depressing,’ he told me tartly. ‘I have excellent connections and that’s what counts. Some of them will be there tonight, Mother’s throwing a party. You can come, if you want,’ he added.
I arrived late at Margot Howard’s party – I’d already discovered it’s better to turn up when the revel is already warmed – and I came bearing a bottle of gin. The living room of the house was packed with people and thick with cigarette smoke. Alex said something when he greeted me, but the noise was so overwhelming, I had to ask him to repeat it.
‘I said Dylan Thomas is here,’ he told me.
I was thrilled. ‘Where? Can I meet him?’ I asked.
‘Later,’ he promised, introducing me instead to a stocky man whose scruffy suit was sprinkled with cigarette ash. ‘John Davenport – literary critic, Sunday Times,’ Alex explained, and alertly I made ready to discuss Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism, but before I could Davenport muttered in a slurred voice, ‘Better pour some of that gin before you put it on the bar, once there it’s done for.’
I was used to drunkenness in my peer group but I’d seldom seen older people drunk, and never en masse like this. I found the sight vaguely alarming and circulated uneasily for a while. It was a relief to come up against Alex’s father Rex, who appeared reassuringly sober and well-dressed. ‘I think my cousin may be in the same line of business as yourself,’ I remarked as a conversational opener.
His reaction was stony. Rex’s Whitehall office was purportedly something to do with Resource Management; was I supposed not to be aware he was in Intelligence? ‘Graham Eyres-Monsell, I wonder if you know him?’ I continued.
He gave me a long appraising look. He didn’t say anything, and his silence was disconcerting. ‘Mother insists he’s a Soviet spy,’ I gibbered on recklessly. ‘Do you think that could be so?’
Rex kept on looking at me in heavy silence. A nerve twitched beside his eye. ‘And what do you think?’ he asked at last.
I believed it quite likely. Graham’s father, Uncle Bobby, had done so much to advance the Nazi cause during the war Graham probably saw betraying Britain as a family tradition. But I realised it would be a mistake to say as much to Rex who was glaring at me furiously. I realised I’d upset him.
Then came deliverance. I saw a plump figure in a fisherman’s jersey emerge from the scrum behind Rex and stumble toward us … and my heart leapt as in that ruined face of a sottish cherub I recognised the poet whose verse had so moved me at school. ‘Isn’t that …?’ I asked excitedly as he lurched closer, and I saw his puffy cheeks were pale and slick with sweat.
‘Ah, Dylan, my dear fellow,’ Rex exclaimed, turning from me with relief.
The poet halted, staring at us glassily. He belched, and a bubble of froth ballooned in his full loose mouth. Then, quite slowly and almost gracefully, he swayed forward and threw up.
‘I say, steady on, old chap. Better in the garden donch’ya know,’ Rex said mildly and, taking him by the arm in friendly solicitude, he steered my idol to the door.
Disillusioned and soiled, I was left staring at my shoes, splattered with Welsh vomit.