I

LEFTOVERS OF THE 1920s

Oh, that delicious first moment of six-year-old consciousness in the morning: when the bedroom wall is dappled by limpid sunlight, so clear and fresh, filtering through tree leaves that shiver slightly in the early morning breeze – their blurred shadows flickering and dancing upon the wallpaper by my bed. That delicious, warm first moment when there is a tremor in one’s lower self and, since Mother is not there to say: “No wigwig”, one can indeed indulge in secret, delicious, forbidden wigwig. It could have gone on for ever and ever, but…

I heard the growl of a lorry outside and, even forgetting wigwig, sat up and looked out of the window. There was an old lorry in the garden outside, towing away Father’s 1922 two-seater Bentley. It looked short and squat with its great barrel of a hood, held in place by a heavy leather girth and buckle – big and powerful as a steam locomotive to my child’s eyes. It stood high and ungainly on its huge wheels, more like a motorized carriage than a car… wasn’t it Etore Bugatti who once declared: “Mr Bentley builds the fastest trucks on the road today”? Only the day before, I had been playing in it where it stood in a stable, covered in chicken shit, its tyres flat, its windshield yellow from the ageing of the layer of plastic in the ‘sandwich’ that was Triplex glass. It had been stored there throughout the great uncertainty of the Second World War. Now, ignominiously, the noble touring car was being dragged from its geriatric roost amongst the chickens, past the huge, stark ruins of the medieval castle that stood in jagged dilapidation in the garden: decayed, cavity-riddled fangs of former medieval military might. And now our beloved Benty was gone…

A few years later, I discovered the enormous leather suitcases that were custom-made for the luggage rack of that car. There were two of them, almost one and a half metres long and quite shallow – so one could lay out a full ball gown or suit of tails in one without folding or creasing them. I also found Father’s motoring clothes, worthy of a First World War fighter pilot: an ankle-length, tight-waisted white leather greatcoat, with elbow-length gauntlets and helmet to match. Hardly practical attire for getting in and out of a little biplane, or even a motor car, for that matter. He must have cut quite a figure driving his gleaming, dark green, 3.5 litre two-seater Bentley, tall and slim as he was then, the brilliantly successful, the lionized young novelist that he was, with a dark beard and such a romantic air – that first time in 1931 when he went to stay with Mother’s family in their country mansion.

Father was discovered there prowling around upstairs by a Bavarian cousin, a Baroness Pia von Aretin (who later helped him enormously with his last novel by introducing him to people who had known Hitler when he was on the lam after the failed Munich Putsch) pacing the corridors of my grandmother’s house, barefoot. Naturally, being a well-bred German girl, she waited for him to introduce himself, but all he said was: “Do you speak Chinese?” Of course, his romantic, creative, exotic aura was given another lift. Then, when he went to change for dinner, the valet had laid out a tent for him on his bed! He rang for the valet and asked about his tent: “Well sir, we found not a single bag in your motor, all we could find was the tent and seeing as we’d heard in the servants’ hall that you’d been to Arabia and such foreign parts, we thought perhaps that you might be in the habit of wearing tribal robes instead of trousers and tails.” The aura gained yet another tone of intensity. Mother’s family was at once impressed by his fame, but fearful of the scandalous controversy around his first novel. That children could be such wicked little savages when left to themselves – not the ‘little angels’ brought downstairs by nurses, washed, combed and forced to behave. ‘His’ children managed surprisingly well in the captivity of pirates, much as Golding’s boys later survived on a desert island. Children are not by nature innocents; they are already learning survival techniques.

What a time-warp the Second World War created! Before then, the ‘haves’, the 1 per cent, drove motor cars, which, like their clothing, were bespoke. Mother knew only the name of the Head Gardener, because there were too many other gardeners and, anyway, no instructions were to be given without being passed first through Mr Edwards. He wore a three-piece suit with a gold watch chain across his prosperous paunch. The others, the ‘have nots’, still walked to the pump down the street for water and hoarded coal to warm the house a little on Christmas Eve – coal in your stocking was a blessing, not a scold in those days. This 99 per cent who produced everything, died in wars ‘for their country’ and served the gentry hand and foot. Only, twenty years later, there were no more servants and everyone bought what they could afford and find.

There certainly remained anomalies, such as the barber whom Father occasionally visited in London. I remember the place after the war, with its dark wood-framed bevelled mirrors and great high, stuffed leather armchairs around which glided the Gentleman Barbers, armed with hand clippers and scissors, long razors which they stropped on leather – the same genteel old men who had regularly trimmed the beard of King George V. They were masters of conversation, no doubt researching the interests of the morrow’s client the night before – sport was not the dominant subject as it is today, but gentle mention of Politics, Art, Literature and (for Father) even Sailing! Or Jacksons of Piccadilly, where you could still see an immaculate ‘Gentleman’s Gentleman’ tasting a little aged stilton, only to declare that “His Lordship would not approve, it’s under-ripe, you see”.

In general, while still hugely divided, there had been a giant leap towards egalitarianism. When working on his second novel, Father had consulted a Chinese laundryman (who spoke enough English) on details of local colour from his past. He was researching his next book (which came out in 1938) and when the man mentioned that he would like to open his own laundry, instead of working for someone else, Father gave him five pounds and asked him to bill him when he had used up his credit. He posted his dirty dress shirts to London and they came back immaculately starched and ironed – and he was never asked for another penny – those five pounds had been seed capital that started a small Chinese laundry empire! Not that Father wore dress shirts by the time I was around in North Wales – well, perhaps once a year. He wore modern nylon shirts that he washed himself and hung to dry in the bathroom. Unlike his old friend Dylan Thomas, he had several shirts, whereas Dylan only bought one for his first lecture tour in the States – he said he tried to wash it every night, but since it was never dry in the morning, he always put it on wet next day. Much like the vicar who announced that his dog collar was made of plastic, so he could “lick it clean in the morning and it was ready to wear!”

Sixty years on, I found the car again, when my brother sent me an e-mail with an attachment: a couple of black-andwhite snapshots of it at its very worst, slumped by a stone wall in a small field belonging to our friend Hamish, high up in the Welsh mountains. Pieces of body were hanging down to the ground or removed and loaded onto the seats. Then there were glossy colour photographs of it immaculately restored, with its original licence plate: KU631, outside an expensive suburban brick house somewhere in England, its distinctive body changed beyond recognition. The gracefully long, sweeping wings – so modern for a car built in 1922 – had been replaced by small individual mudguards. The only access door was on the passenger side because the handbrake was exterior. Even the gear stick was on the outside of the driver, though inside the car. This left more room for the passenger and an easier slide-through for the driver when getting in. I suppose it also left no excuse for groping the skirts of attractive young flappers while changing gears. His was the 113th Bentley to leave the workshop, the original body built by a private coachbuilder – as was the custom in those days.

Just as Fords came “in every colour as long as it’s black” and all early Bugattis came in bright blue, so all Bentleys were British Racing Green, a green so dark as to be almost black. It had last changed hands for £75,000. I believe Father had bought it second-hand in 1928 for the phenomenally high price of £2,000 (say, £100,000 today). He was doing well in those days.