ADRIAN BERRY

The Next 500 Years

1995

IT WAS DIFFICULT TO KNOW quite where one was with Adrian. Good-natured, he would be welcoming and seemingly diffident, only to say something extravagantly wild, giving away that one had no idea what was going on his head. Quite possibly this was a protective strategy that he had developed to keep his parents at arm’s length and remain himself. His father, Michael Berry, owned and edited the Daily Telegraph, a position so demanding that he had not much energy or emotion for anything else. As the eldest son, Adrian was brought up expecting to inherit a great paper and the editorial responsibility that went with it. Adrian’s mother, Lady Pamela, monosyllabic Pam, was the daughter of F. E. Smith, Lord Chancellor and Earl of Birkenhead. Her social energy was unlimited and she used it to influence government and the arts. Her lunch and dinner parties were the talk of everyone who mattered, or who might one day matter, in Westminster, Mayfair and Fleet Street. Humor, reluctant or sardonic, crept into Adrian’s voice when he spoke of his mother herding the guests into the family home in Lord North Street.

One of those guests was Alan, my father, and Lady Pam invited him for a cruise on the Virginia, the Berry yacht, bringing me as a friend and companion for Adrian. Weighing over a thousand tons, the Virginia was a miniature liner, complete with an ex-Royal Navy captain in a uniform and a large crew. The drawing room had still-life flower pictures in the style of Matthew Smith, perhaps even by him. I must have been just eighteen, a year or so older than Adrian. My mother had not been long dead, and on board was Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, whom Alan was wondering whether to marry, as I was to discover later.

The Virginia first put in to Antibes. Alongside was a ship of similar size. There appeared to be nobody aboard. Adrian and I decided to explore. In a moment we were having to explain ourselves to Sir Bernard and Lady Docker, whose yacht this was. Snobbish England mocked him for making a fortune and mocked her for spending it with nouveau riche vulgarity. The Dockers were amused by our trespassing. They suggested inviting Adrian’s parents and then asked a steward to mix a cocktail that sent us dizzily back to the Virginia. Next day, we sailed past Corsica to reach La Maddalena, an Italian naval base on Sardinia. For security reasons, the authorities made everyone fill in a form that among other details asked for the names of father and grandfather. Hoping to pass themselves off anonymously, Lady Elizabeth wrote tenth Duke of Devonshire and ninth Duke of Devonshire, while Lady Pam wrote Gypsy Smith and Gypsy Smith.

Like me, Adrian went up to Oxford in September 1956 – in his case to Christ Church. The Suez crisis was upon us. British forces were invading Egypt. Undergraduates were going to the station to catch one or another train that would get them to London in time to join a mass demonstration. A life-long high Tory, Adrian telephoned the Oxford station master, introduced himself as the Proctor and asked for a loudspeaker announcement that undergraduates were forbidden from demonstrating and would be sent down if they disobeyed. The station master fell for it and so did most undergraduates. In much the same have-a-go mood, Adrian financed and edited Parsons’ Pleasure, a magazine so scurrilous that its life was short.

Leaving a party at Christ Church late one evening, I was walking through the cloisters when I saw W. H. Auden approaching from the opposite direction. While we were chatting, Adrian came by. I introduced him to Auden and he invited us up to his room on the floor above the cloisters. Adrian had been at the same party as me and I knew he had drunk too much, but it seemed churlish to refuse. We reached the room but there wasn’t time to sit down. Suddenly Adrian was violently sick all over the papers and notebooks on Auden’s central table. None of the work on that desk could have been salvaged. To his great credit, Auden took it in good part. No reproach. Abandoning Auden to the task of cleaning up, Adrian and I hurried away.

Whenever we met, Adrian was likely to want to tell me about the latest report by some astronomer on the conquest of space or some new theory about the colonization of the planets. My recollection is that he had no formal education in any branch of science but was displaying the passionate enthusiasm of the autodidact. Science fiction has never caught my imagination, but Adrian’s futuristic world was a model of creativity and adventure with the odd brickbat thrown at any experts with contrary opinions. The mix of conventionality and mischief-making was his special element.

Silently he mourned that his father had been obliged for financial reasons to sell the Daily Telegraph. The promise of editorship vanished. The Virginia was sold to President Tubman of Liberia, who had a heavy cannon mounted on the deck, and this so unbalanced the ship that she capsized and lies on the sea bed somewhere off the coast of Africa.