IX

BERSERK JEEP HITS LONDON

Sometimes I would take a large umbrella out into the middle of the estuary and sit under it on the sand, dreaming in the pouring rain. I forget of what I dreamed the most, but sex (in some warped, childish and uninformed version) and cars had a prominent place. I could not bear the wait until I would be seventeen and old enough to drive. I imagined that the young Queen of England would make a special dispensation allowing me (and only me) to drive when I was eight or nine years old. As it was, I had to be satisfied with being allowed to drive our Willys American Army Jeep the mile of our drive to the main road. I was only allowed to do this when we were going somewhere, petrol being still rationed and scarce. As for driving alone, that was permitted when I was transporting horse manure from the pile behind the stable to Father’s vegetable garden. I would load up the small heavy trailer and then drive it cross country, through a small stream and a couple of narrow gateways. I soon learned to back the trailer through the third and last gateway without backing over the cliff, which went down the rocks to the line of the high tide. Loading and unloading the manure was backbreaking work for me at that age but seemed well worthwhile if it meant I could drive at all… at eight or ten years old.

Later, when finally I had a licence (at seventeen), each time I met a tourist car on one of the narrow walled lanes in the mountains, I would unhesitatingly race backwards to the last passing place, even if it was two or three hundred yards back, while the other car would have only had to back a few feet – I had found from experience that tourists were hopeless at reversing and it was much quicker to do it myself.

For many years, that Jeep was our family car and Father even drove it 240 miles all the way to London and back. Nowadays, such a trip would seem trifling, but then the roads were very poor and narrow. One had to drive through every town and its market along the way and besides, the Jeep never could go over 50 mph. Its seats were barely upholstered, the suspension felt as if it was non-existent, and the track rods so worn that the front wheels wobbled ominously. They literally flapped between thirty and forty-five miles an hour. Policemen would stop us to say that our front wheels were falling off. Father would reassure them the wheels were safe enough (road worthiness tests were not yet invented) and we would be dubiously waved on. Nor did the drama end when we reached London. Taxi ranks were often in the middle of wide streets and I was sitting beside Mother as she drove closer and closer to the line of taxis. I told her she was getting too close for safety and she scolded me for distracting her attention as she proceeded to scrape the sides of five of them in a row. Being left hand drive and driving on the left side of the road was certainly a handicap, but all her life, Mother was a better horsewoman than driver. The taxi drivers were distraught and a policeman stopped her. After a long discussion and exchange of addresses, he told Mother to “Carry on regardless, but at least get off my beat”. She refused to drive any further saying something about “not being responsible for the behaviour of the Jeep!” I admit that there was so much play in the steering, she was not exaggerating. Father had to come and get it.

Another problem of being left hand drive in England was that it was impossible to make hand signals. Of course the Jeep was not fitted with direction indicators for the field of battle, so Nino had fitted it with little red flaps on each side, carved out of wood, which could be raised to indicate a turn by pulling on a string. That was the job of the passenger and I thoroughly enjoyed the responsibility.

Before I started going away to school in 1951, I was mostly ‘home schooled’. Mother gave me endless writing exercises of neat loops and twists in a copybook. She taught me to read, but her spelling was so atrocious that I have maintained the same affliction all my life. I started on Beatrix Potter, then The Wind in the Willows and fairy tales such as those by Hans Christian Andersen. She taught me about English history, which she enjoyed enormously and we stuck pictures of knights in armour of different eras and styles on pages for different centuries. She tried to teach me the dates of the Norman Conquest and other great landmarks in history. The lives of the average peasant or even the priest were ignored. ‘Life’ was defined as a catalogue of catastrophes such as death and destruction (for some) and ‘successes’, for others who had done the killing, raping and burning. There was no mention of what most of us call ‘Life’. She also versed me in the Romantic Poets such as Keats, Wordsworth and Shelley.

When it came to arithmetic, sometimes Father would teach me, showing amazing patience and giving clear, methodical explanations so that even I could grasp long division and multiplication in the end. Usually, though, he was too busy writing and I would go to the house of a retired teacher in a village two miles away. I would walk to the Halt or tiny train stop a mile away and take the train for the next mile. Then I would walk up the steep hill behind the village and sit with a bored old lady who had already seen too many reluctant students in her long career…

Occasionally, Mother would invite boys from the village to tea and to play with me but everything conspired against the success of such attempts at assimilation. We lived in a ‘Plâs’ or large house and travelled to London regularly. Despite Father’s efforts to learn and speak Welsh, he only used it in Church to read the Lesson – and I heard that no one could understand him when he did! These boys were painfully polite and respectful. They spoke with a very different accent to ours. Their horizons were circumscribed by their position in society. Yes, they could theoretically break out and move on, but they would certainly have been the exception, not the rule – there has only been one Lloyd George, the only Prime Minister of Britain whose first language was Welsh and who had hired a young Welsh-speaking secretary to correspond with Welsh Constituents. There were many young Welshmen who escaped the drudgery, danger and low pay of working as miners in South Wales by going to America and starting coalmines in Pennsylvania, hiring Irishmen and Poles to work the Face, while the Welshmen now ran the business.

Yes, there are the poets, theologians and other creative people who broke away, but of the boys with whom I played, they all stayed at home, spoke more and more Welsh and some became Welsh Nationalists, virtually refusing to speak English. This, I discovered years later when I met some ‘old friends’ in a pub. How humiliating they must have remembered their ‘play dates’ with me!

Years later, in the early sixties, I worked as a labourer on farms, gravel pits and in forestry (first, to pay for my journey to Iran, then across North Africa). My workmates were kind to me, accepting me for the same muddy boots and thermos of hot tea that they all had, although I was ‘apart’, with my English accent and my 1931 touring car that I had saved from the scrap heap and almost completely restored (it still needed a windscreen and a bonnet – which I could not yet afford), while they came in ‘old bangers’ or small new cars bought on the ‘never-never’. Sometimes they asked me if I lived in a ‘Plâs’; I prevaricated, not at all sure that our chaotic, bohemian house really was a ‘Plâs’ – so they knew… but they didn’t seem to hold it against me and we would meet up in the evenings to play Bingo at a Village Hall.

I was never expected to stay in Wales and if I had, I might have been successful in business and so quickly reviled as part of the ‘ruling class’. To this day, I cower in shame at the memory of teasing them about their accents… perhaps enough to foment their Nationalism. As much as Father sought integration in church, he could never be considered a real local. I have a niece who now lives there, whose children went to the local school and speak Welsh. Both she and her husband work locally. They are widely liked and relatively integrated. They live in a small house. The divide is not the chasm I knew as a child. The very fact that our neighbours heard Father speaking on the BBC, set us all apart as foreigners. We did not feel wealthy, but in comparison with our neighbours, we most certainly were. We went to private schools, first my Parents and later the rest of us, travelled extensively and spoke one or more European languages.

We spent some Christmas holidays in London for the social and artistic stimulation it afforded and to be away from the cold and damp of Wales. For some years we rented converted stables in Carlton Mews, just off Trafalgar Square. The ground floor had been coach houses and was now used as garages. Access upstairs for the horses was up a long, gentle ramp and then there was a wide balcony or walkway connecting the different stables above. I remember that the wooden loose-box dividers had been removed but the floor remained paved with small stone blocks draining towards huge floor drains. The bedrooms were up a narrow spiral staircase in the haylofts above and in the coachmen’s quarters. This was loft-living in London circa 1950. We were right in the centre of the city and I am sure the rent was paltry. It lit my fire for the day when I would move into lofts (and develop them) in New York City in the 1970s.

Mother used to take me out in the evenings to see the bright lights of Piccadilly Circus. Coming from the velvet black nights of our electricity-free area in North Wales, the cascading, erupting, flashing and bursting, the neon-lined periphery of the Circus was fabulous… it only lacked the clowns and lions of an actual circus.

She took me to Hampton Court, the gigantic palace built by Cardinal Wolsey, starting in 1514. By 1528 Henry VIII had broken with Rome, in part because the Pope refused to countenance his desired divorce of Catherine of Aragon and divested the Church of most of its property, including Wolsey’s York Palace and Hampton Court. She told me how her elderly Aunt Isabella (known as Nonina) Howard, who had been granted a ‘grace and favour’ apartment in the Palace, was still living there at the time. The great honour was bestowed on her when she was widowed at the death of her Diplomat husband, Esme Howard. She had gone to stay with them when he was British Ambassador to Washington. She said it was a shame that she had not arranged for us to visit the old lady, but we really could not just drop in on her. What she did not mention was the primitive living conditions endured by these grand old people – minimal heat and food delivered in a basket on a pulley!

She also took me to matinée concerts at the Wigmore Hall and Royal Albert Hall. The classical music could seem interminable to a small child, but I suppose I learned to sit quietly all the way through.

To get there, we would take a double-decker bus (how I loved riding upstairs, with its superior, lofty perspective) or the Tube. Both had sprung, upholstered seats covered in a heavy patterned material somewhere between velvet and a sisal doormat. Everyone smoked on the upper deck and in the smoking carriages of the Tube, mostly cheap Woodbines, their fingers heavily stained with nicotine. Men and women were pale and gaunt; their hands shook as they took another drag on their fags. Sometimes they would be talking to themselves or even shouting at no one in particular. I remember asking Mother why they acted so strangely, she replied: “It’s the Blitz”. At that age, I had already heard the word ‘Blitz’ so much in grown-ups’ conversation that I knew exactly what she meant: the 1940-41 intense bombing campaign of London and other major industrial cities by the Germans.

It had left a huge proportion of citizens psychologically scarred for life, just as had happened to the inhabitants of Dresden and many other great flattened centres of population. Traumatic Stress Syndrome had as yet no name, but you can be sure it was prevalent, just as it must have been in the Middle Ages and long before. When we walked in the streets, there were signs of the Blitz everywhere: houses cut in half, so that you could look up to half a bedroom, flowered wallpaper on the walls, a washbasin, ragged curtains flying in the wind, once even a bed teetering on the very brink of the abyss where the floor ended. Other buildings had just disappeared completely, leaving a gaping hole in the ground, a gap in the line of buildings, a missing tooth in a huge metropolitan mouth.

Despite great heroism and extraordinary human kindness between all citizens of every class, many people never did recover from the trauma of the Blitz: the sleepless nights in underground bomb shelters, the double and triple work shifts trying to keep the country going without any young men, digging people and body parts from rubble, cordoning off dangerously damaged buildings, losing one’s home, one’s place of business. It was not just the soldiers who came out of the War scarred for life, but many citizens too. After the War, Britain was left broke, using 97 per cent of funds from the Marshall Plan to pay off wartime debt to America. The conquered and occupied countries of Europe had not accumulated such debt. War reparations represented only 10 per cent of the cost of the British Occupying Forces in Germany. Britain was broke and remained so throughout my childhood – going from the world’s biggest creditor nation to the biggest debtor nation. As the Historian Tony Judt put it: “… post-war Britain would have been familiar to citizens of the Soviet bloc, with its constant queues, ration books and shortages.”

* * *

Robert Graves’ deaf son Sam took me to see a Mickey Mouse film when I was perhaps five. Father was furious – he was determined to protect us from ‘trash’ culture and had the reputation of being able to smell a comic book if one entered the house. To him, Walt Disney was the anti-Christ while A.A. Milne came a close second with Winnie the Pooh. Sentimentality seemed on a par with murder in his moral code. He would find comics (by their smell, we claimed!) with uncanny speed as soon as they crossed the threshold, and then burn them. Sentimentality was purged from the family with Stalinist efficiency to the extent that, bolstered by the ‘grin-and-bear-it’ regime of boarding schools, I grew up in the belief that one should not feel emotion. If one did, one should hide the fact like dirty laundry and sex. Emotions are messy. Emotions are sissy. Emotions are feminine. Emotions are illogical. Emotions lead one off the ‘right path’… whatever the ‘right path’ is.

So, buried as these feelings were, I came to confuse emotion with sentimentality, love, romance and sex. I spent years of my childhood and adolescence seeking austerity, pushing myself to withstand discomfort: mountain climbing and sailing were perfect trials of endurance. When I was finally seduced sexually, a major volte-face in my outlook was introduced in which I had to readjust my childhood misconceptions about sensuality, love and sex.

Sam pretended not to understand what upset Father about the Disney film and went on being his funny goofy self. He cantered like a frisky horse down the streets of London, with little me in tow, talking incessantly and, being stone deaf, quite unintelligibly, very fast, and very loudly.

Father had sold the film rights to his first (highly successful) novel back in the 1930s. Still no film had been made yet and the rights were bought and sold several times until, in the 1950s, Disney Studios purchased them. He went into a deep depression about the fate of the film. Nevertheless, his agent suggested to Disney that the original writer help with the script. Quite unannounced, a large black car (with driver) arrived in Wales, all the way from London. It brought three hot staffers ‘whiz kids’ from Disney six thousand miles away. Father courteously welcomed them and told Mother there would be company for dinner and asked her to take care of their driver while he gave the Americans glasses of Sherry. Almost at once things went wrong when one of the men enthusiastically grabbed Father by his lapels and said: “But you don’t get this story, we’ll make it into a comic farce with guys slipping over and falling around… it’ll be a real comic wow…” Father made the rounds of his guests once more, this time calmly but firmly removing their scarcely-touched glasses. He said: “And now, gentlemen, you shall leave and never trouble me again with your infantile stupidity.” They left into the dark night, the way they had come. Disney gave up on the project and sold it to another studio that finally produced it starring Anthony Quinn. Father was mostly a quiet man, but huge in the indomitably of his forceful determination.

Back then, houses in London were still heated with coal fires in each room. The resultant smog (the capillary action of soot particles attracting the water droplets of natural mist) in winter could be so dense that one could not see one’s own feet, but had to slide them along looking for the edge of the pavement. Years later, when I worked briefly in an office in London, it was not much better – taking the bus home in the evening, the driver would sometimes pull to the side of the street and ask for a volunteer to guide him. I often did that job, recalling the very early days of motoring when horseless carriages were obliged by law to be preceded by a man on foot with a red flag. Furthermore, I wore a white handkerchief in the breast pocket of my suit (as was the fashion) and when I got home and took it out, the exposed part would be grey with smoke particles while the hidden part was still white.

To this day, if I smell coal smoke it brings tears of nostalgia to my eyes, but what ravages pollution brought to millions of lungs is frightening – the equivalent of a two or three pack-a-day smoking. Indeed, ‘nostalgia’ may have been another word for an addiction to coal smoke… since I breathed so much of it. Besides, most people smoked as well. Three of us, among my siblings, were asthmatic, which is hardly surprising. They went on being asthmatic for the rest of their lives, but I was lucky: it disappeared when I was twelve. For the next forty years I believed I had been ‘cured’ of my asthma by being beaten each time I came in last in the school winter cross-country running races. My lungs would seize up with the icy air – as if filled with cement, and I would have to stop to gasp and vomit. Later a doctor told me that asthma often leaves you at puberty. Q.E.D.

Mother, being married to a successful novelist, gave ‘brilliant’ parties in those upstairs stables, attended by some famous intellectuals of the time. Painters, writers, actors, architects and even a few politicians attended. I remember young Peter Ustinov snogging with a new girlfriend. The architects Max Fry and Jane Drew were always lively additions to any party. Lance Sieveking, an old friend, now with the BBC, was over 6’6” and Mother said he was oversexed – I treated all very tall men with circumspection for some time after hearing that. I imagine he had made an unwanted pass at Mother. Robert Graves and his wife Beryl never came, because they now lived in Deià, Majorca and certainly would not be in London in the winter. Alan Sillitoe, also lived there and though friends with Graves, had not yet struck up his friendship with Father.

The production team from Ealing Studios (with whom Father had been working on a couple of film scripts) also came to these parties: Monja Danischevsky, T.B. Clarke and Charles Frend, who had all been to Wales to encourage him to actually finish a script. In fact, as far as my young eyes could see, they all got tipsy and acted out hilarious scenes together while crippled with laughter.

To my eyes the best of those parties included charades, with some of the shyer young actors wearing masks we’d received for Christmas. One of these masks resembled my Parents’ friend and neighbour in Wales, Bertrand Russell. ‘Bertie’ raised howls of laughter when worn on the face of a shy young cousin. He was one of four children brought up in European Diplomatic circles, all perfectly quadrilingual.

Father complained that his friend (they had dined together several times at a Copenhagen Pen Club meeting) Evelyn Waugh never came to these parties on the pretence that he was ‘too old’ – though he was three years younger than Father. Other guests included my godfather, Teddy Wolfe, a Bloomsbury painter – as well as Amabel and Clough Williams-Ellis from Wales. Clough always dressed in long jackets like frock coats, cravats and breeches with bright yellow stockings of heavy wool knit. He was an energetic, impetuous man who, well into his nineties, drove much too fast. He once killed a sheep on the mountain road when racing to catch a train. With no shepherd in sight, he pinned his visiting card to the deceased sheep and sped on. Goronwy Rees was another very lively addition. The proceedings were uproarious, but were they brilliant? Or were they just well lubricated with alcohol?