2: Birth in Bruton
Street, Mayfair

THE GENTLEMAN IN THE HALL looked like what he was: a refugee from the Victorian Age. The tall silk hat, beautifully brushed and glossy, had been handed to the footman on his arrival. The rest of his attire, the black frock coat, the stiff collar, the pinstriped trousers, were what you would expect a Member of Parliament to have been wearing in the reign of Queen Victoria.

But change was abroad, and Jix, as his friends affectionately called him, did not like change. It was un-English. If anyone could hold the incoming rollers at bay, it was surely Jix. He was, after all, Home Secretary. He had opposed giving women the vote, and he and his friends, to their very great surprise, had lost that argument. At least he was able, for the time being, to limit the number of female voters to those over the age of thirty.

And at least he could do his best to stop them reading filth. He might have failed to prevent women bothering their heads with voting, but he had it in his power to cleanse the rot of modern literature. D.H. Lawrence – save the mark. Jix was assiduous in nosing out, and prosecuting, salacious literature. Why, that woman Radclyffe Hall! She had written of a ‘love’ which makes you shudder.

As well as banning her novel, and those of that Lawrence fella, Jix had successfully instructed the Metropolitan Police to occupy and close down some notorious nightclubs. At one such establishment, the police had been embarrassed to inform him that they had encountered no less a person than the Prince of Wales. Even more shocking than the royal presence in such a ‘low dive’ (as Jix was informed they were known in America) was the fact that the Prince of Wales had been found to be wearing not the starched shirt front and a white tie which any gentleman would have been wearing had he chosen to stay up to a literally ungodly hour, but . . . but . . . a soft silk shirt. In the evening! When the head of the Metropolitan Police told Jix this story, the Home Secretary could scarcely believe his ears. When you hear something like that, the first person you pity is the man’s mother. A soft shirt in the evening! Poor Queen Mary. After all the sacrifices she had made for the Empire.

Not that Jix had ever been to a nightclub himself. They were one of the many innovations gnawing at the heart of civilization as he understood it. For Jix – Sir William Joynson-Hicks – Home Secretary, and half-successful stemmer of unwelcome historical tides, there were too many assaults being attempted on what made Britain British: who but an American would consider starting a ‘nightclub’?

Worse than the sleazy morals of novelists and nightclub proprietors, was the march of the Reds. Less than a decade ago, the Bolsheviks had murdered the Russian Royal Family. And now – in Britain – in Jix’s Britain, the good old Britain of silk hats and frock coats and the Book of Common Prayer – what was happening, at that very moment, as he sat in Lord Strathmore’s marble hall, and heard the reassuring ticking of the long-case clock? A General Strike! The working classes united against the established order.

Jix had been inspired by the way in which so many public-school-educated, sensible young men had volunteered in the last few days as strike breakers. They had driven trains and buses, they had defied picket lines in factories and printing presses. They had volunteered as mounted policemen. No one, however, was going to forget this week in a hurry. It was as if Britain was at war with itself.

Only eight years before, the British had all pulled together, in the battlefields of Flanders and Northern France. Joynson-Hicks had been astonished, during the last week, to hear Bolshevik voices claiming that the gallant struggle, put up by a united front of officers and men, during the Great War had been a fight in vain; astounded at the wicked idea that the working classes had not wanted to fight. And when they came back, the brave Tommies, they had found a land fit for heroes, no?

A figure was leaning over Joynson-Hicks as he sat in the hall chair. Important as his reveries were – about the General Strike, about the mounting waves of anarchy and decadence – there was a matter here, at 17 Bruton Street, which was of even greater significance. It was an event which could, potentially, put an end to the march of time – stop all this madness of soft evening shirts, Communism and women’s rights. That was, after all, the Home Secretary’s reason, in the middle of a General Strike, for sitting in the hall of the Earl of Strathmore’s town house on the very edge of Berkeley Square.

The polite, hovering figure was not the footman who had taken his silk hat. This time, it was His Lordship’s butler, no less.

Jix started.

‘Has it . . . has he . . . Has Her Royal Highness . . .’

‘No, sir, no news as yet to report. But His Lordship was wondering whether you would not feel more comfortable waiting in the library.’

‘I must stay here,’ said Jix. ‘I am, as it were – in earshot.’

‘His Lordship’ – the butler suppressed a lugubrious Caledonian chuckle – ‘assures you there are no warming pans on the landing.’

‘I am sorry, but there you have the advantage of me.’

‘His Lordship wished to assure the Home Secretary that no one was going to smuggle a baby into the Duchess’s room in a . . .’

‘In a what? Smuggle a baby? What on earth are you talking about, man?’

Jix was not known for his sense of irony.

True, ever since the Jacobite times (and, as far as Jix was concerned, the Roman Catholics, capable de tout, were probably as dangerous in their own day as the Communists were in this the year of grace 1926), the Home Secretary had been present at the birth of royal babies. Queen Victoria, of course, God bless Her, had put a stop to the Home Secretary actually being in the room when the birth took place, although he was expected to wait outside. But it was still considered not merely respectful but, ahem . . . appropriate, that the birth into the world of a royal heir should happen within the respectable proximity of a man in a frock coat and pinstriped trousers.

From where he sat in the hall, Joynson-Hicks could look up the stone staircase, the grey walls hung with portraits in gilt frames of Lyonses and Boweses and Bowes-Lyonses, the Earl’s forebears, and the eye could follow the swooping bannisters to the first-floor landing where, in a bedroom easily within earshot, the Duchess of York was confined. It was her first child. It was to be the third grandchild of His Majesty George V, King Emperor, but it would be the heir presumptive. Unless or until the Prince of Wales were to abandon his wild courses and his nightclubs and find a respectable wife, this child could one day inherit the throne. Highly unlikely, of course. The Prince of Wales was a healthy young man, who would surely come to his senses, or have some sense knocked into him by His Majesty. And he would in any case live another forty years at least. Putting jazz bands and silk shirts and nightclubs behind him, he would marry, and become respectable, and do his duty to the Empire. Surely? It was the gravest of historical misfortunes that so many of the eligible Protestant Princesses and Grand Duchesses were, ahem, Germans, but if necessary, Jix and his fellow Tories felt they might find a bride for him among the daughters of the British aristocracy.

The eye of Jix fell on the array of Bowes-Lyonses in hall and staircase. That, after all, is what Queen Mary had done for the Duke of York – Bertie as they all called him. A nice, quiet, kindly naval officer. Pity about the stammer. They could scarcely have married Bertie to a German so soon after the war, so they had lighted upon the Earl of Strathmore’s daughter, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, and it was she who was now upstairs with her midwife, bringing a Prince, a royal heir, into the world. Bertie, of course, was only a younger son, and there was probably no chance that the baby being born would ever . . . But what is this? . . . on the landing, a nurse in a starched white cap has approached a footman, and a footman has spoken to Mr McKay, the humorous butler, and now, at a stately pace and with surprisingly swift balletic steps, the butler is descending the stone stairs.

‘His Lordship wanted you to know, sir, that they have given an anaesthetic to the Duchess.’

‘Indeed? Is that, ahem . . . normal?’

‘A certain line of treatment has been decided upon, sir.’

‘Indeed?’

It did not immediately occur to him that delivery by Caesarean section was conveyed by the phrase. When the information sank in, the Home Secretary instinctively thought of ‘Macduff was from his mother’s womb untimely ripp’d’. Shakespeare could be very coarse and Jix had often felt that Dr Bowdler’s emendations made the national poet’s output much more palatable.

‘So, sir, you are not going to hear anything, either in the hall or in the library. And His Lordship was hopeful . . .’

In that event, Jix was most grateful to His Lordship and allowed himself to make a stately progress to the library, where a fire was still glowing, and where he acceded to the butler’s suggestion that he partook of a wee dram.

At two-forty the butler returned.

‘Mr Joynson-Hicks, sir. I am happy to inform you that—’

‘A Prince! We have a Prince.’

Jix had only intended to speak, but he found his voice had changed to a hoot, almost a hallelujah. It was met by the quiet irony of a Scottish butler coughing gently.

‘Ahem . . . Sir, not exactly, not in so many words, sir.’