My Uncle Hugh was the kind of man it was very easy to hate, if you were not susceptible to his particular kind of charm. He had of necessity hurt a lot of people on his way up, and he had learned to be tough. Perhaps he always had been and had no need to learn. A man does not leave school at fourteen, make a fortune by forty, and go on to become a skilful and powerful politician without ruthlessness.
My Uncle Hugh’s career, besides demonstrating his own competence, showed how far and how fast an entire family can be lifted in England in only one generation, by the efforts of one man. He was the second of four children. He came from a working-class home. None of his brothers or sisters—not William, nor Hugh himself, Mary, or my father, Max—stayed in school beyond their fourteenth birthday. No member of my family, before my own generation, had ever been well-educated, kept a servant, been to the Continent, or been in a position to waste money or to indulge in luxurious tastes.
The photographs in our family album to-day tell a very different story. There are innumerable groups taken at Uncle Hugh’s estate, Feathers. (From the album it could be assumed we spent a disproportionate amount of our time having tea in the garden.) There are pictures of the boys at Eton; of Daphne at school; of myself at school and at Newnham. We appear skiing, sailing, riding, and playing tennis. There is an elaborate photograph of Daphne’s wedding at St. Margaret’s, Westminster; a snap of Charles, elegant and amused, as best man at Andrew’s wedding to the Honourable Anne Durcott. And all this—the transition from the working class to Feathers and everything that went with it—was done by just one man. It was perhaps not the least part of his achievement.
It is, of course, education that can transplant an entire family from one class to another far higher in the social scale so quickly and with so little pain. Uncle Hugh’s task would have been much harder, though, had it been necessary for him to take a large number of adult relatives with him—or even his own wife. But she died in the third year of their marriage, leaving an only son, Charles.
Uncle Hugh had two brothers and one sister. My father, Max, was his younger brother. He and my mother were killed when I was five, and Uncle Hugh took over my guardianship. The only girl of the family, Mary, married a man called Randall, had one son, Giles, and died giving birth to her second son, Timothy. Her husband succumbed to an old war wound a matter of months later, and my uncle assumed care of the two boys as well. So the only adults he took with him on his climb were his older brother, William, and William’s wife, Mildred. The couple had two children, Andrew and Daphne.
My Uncle William had none of his brother’s ability. Nor did he have his charm, though he could on occasion produce a sort of bonhomie which passed for personableness with the less critical. He developed a certain competence in the narrow field of accounting, though he was never able to think of finance or of economics in broad, general terms. He may have been of a certain amount of use to Uncle Hugh, and he was naturally devoted to his brother’s interests since his own were inseparable from them. But I do not believe Uncle Hugh relied on his brother’s judgment in any serious or complicated matters, and though he continued to give William more money and more prestige, William was never really important in the business.
My Uncle William was not a fool. I doubt whether he dwelt much, deliberately, on the differences between his brother and himself. But unconsciously—and sometimes even consciously—he must have been aware of them; and they must have rankled. I never heard him anything but polite to Uncle Hugh. But sometimes when only we children were about, he allowed himself the luxury of a sly dig or a piece of corrosive wit. I don’t know whether I really understood these barbed remarks at the time, or whether I only came to understand what Uncle William had meant as I grew up. Nor do I know whether Uncle Hugh was aware of his brother’s deep resentment and jealousy. Uncle Hugh was a man of considerable reserve, and I seldom knew what he was thinking, still less what he felt.
My knowledge of my Uncle Hugh’s deeper thoughts and feelings was not measurably increased by the years I spent with him as his personal assistant on the political side. (A man called George Tay had for years been his personal assistant in the business, a position which my Uncle William’s son, Andrew, had strong ambitions to fill.) These years began shortly after the war ended. My job, which had been interesting and exacting, finished with the war, and I had no idea what I wanted to do next. My Cambridge ambitions had disappeared in the wake of a brief (and unwise) marriage and the responsible job at which I had overworked for nearly three years. I had read political economy and history at Cambridge, and had always been interested in politics, so that on those grounds it was perhaps reasonable for my uncle to offer me the job. It was characteristic of him to do so though he knew I did not share his political beliefs; and characteristic of me, no doubt, that I took the path of least resistance—and the job.
Working with my uncle, I began to appreciate his great energy and his ability; and I came to understand the reasons for his success. It was not due to outstanding intellectual ability. He was intelligent, but I have met many men more able in that way. For sheer intellectual ability, both his son Charles and our cousin Giles surpassed him, and Andrew was probably his equal. Nor, though he had a good deal of rather blunt, personal charm, was it primarily due to personal magnetism. But he had, coupled with energy and a clear mind, an undeviating steadiness and strength of will; good judgment and a good sense of timing; unimpaired self-confidence; the hide of a rhinoceros; and very few scruples. With that equipment, it would have been much more surprising if he had not been successful.
Working with my uncle proved over the years to be steadily and increasingly interesting. But it was demanding and wearing, and I welcomed the respites which sometimes came when Uncle Hugh decided to take one of his trips to the provinces without me. So I was not especially pleased when a last-minute change of plan, one Monday in the spring of 1952, made it necessary for me to accompany him to Birmingham at barely an hour’s notice.
Raikes, the chauffeur, who had been with us for about fifteen years, was driving. My uncle and I sat in the back, composing a speech which enthusiastically ascribed all our current difficulties to the past follies of the Labour governments. How much my uncle believed of what we were writing I am not sure: perhaps half, more probably less. But it was developing into an amusing speech and I hoped we would finish it before our first stop at Oxford, where my uncle had some affairs to attend to.
But we did not finish the speech. We were about ten miles from Oxford, doing sixty-five miles an hour on the main road, when the front tyre exploded with a roar. Raikes did the best he could, but the combination of speed and the heavy car were too much for him, and we left the road and turned over before coming to a stop in the ditch. It was a nasty smash, and a very lucky thing we were not all killed.
In fact, we got off very lightly. We all had cuts and bruises, and I had sprained my left wrist. That was all. The Automobile Association arranged for us to be taken to Oxford. Uncle Hugh there decided to continue his journey by train and to send Raikes back to London with me, in a hired car. Raikes arranged to meet him in Birmingham with one of our other cars, two days later.
I sat in front with Raikes on the way back. He was an extremely good chauffeur and he had taken great pride in the Daimler, which was fairly new. “I don’t understand it, Miss Christy,” he kept saying at intervals of about five miles. “Those tyres had just been checked. There was nothing wrong with them. There was no reason for that one to go. And there was nothing on the road I could see—no nails or glass—that could have caused it.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “These things happen every day. Don’t worry about it, Raikes. My uncle doesn’t blame you. Anyone can blow a tyre.”
Raikes looked unconvinced. He had never had an accident before, and I think he considered a flat tyre a slur on his professional integrity. I did not feel well enough to argue about it with him.
News of the accident naturally made all the papers. “Millionaire Escapes Death”, “Industrialist’s Niece Hurt in Car Smash”, “Ex-Cabinet Minister Speaks in Spite of Crash”, and so on. Luckily, there was not much of a story, and a railway accident drove us out of the headlines very quickly.
The family, however, was more of a nuisance. Our own doctor came in as soon as I got back to London and insisted that I go to bed for a few days. “Your recent trip to America doesn’t seem to have been much of a rest,” he remarked. “You still need one. And shock is shock.”
“Uncle Hugh’s been shocked, too,” I pointed out. “Why not try putting him to bed?”
“Partly because he wouldn’t go. But even though he’s sixty and you’re only half his age, you need it more. He’s got tough nerves. You haven’t. You know, there’s no point in over-estimating your endurance, Christy. I’ve been thinking of pointing that out to you for some time.”
I made some evasive answer, but he was not put off. “Things affect you more than they do him. And—even though you won’t talk about it—you’ve got something on your mind. Too many things, from the look of you.”
“I’m terrified that Labour will win the next election,” I said. “I’m equally terrified that the Conservatives will. It’s enough to worry anyone.”
“All right,” said the doctor, getting up. “You’re as bull-headed as your uncle, even if you haven’t got his nerves. But you stay in bed several days anyway.”
My being in bed naturally put me at the mercy of my family. I must except from this my cousin Giles, who having become a violent Left-wing Socialist in his Cambridge days, had more or less severed general social contacts with his family, though he did meet some of us from time to time.
But the others came to see me, singly and in pairs. They sent flowers, they rang up, and my cousin Charles even telephoned from the Embassy in Paris, where he was then stationed. After more or less perfunctory inquiries about my health and Uncle Hugh’s, they embarked with varying degrees of subtlety on matters of general family concern—chiefly the rivalry between my cousin Andrew and Tay, and how it was progressing. My family’s attentions probably retarded my recovery by a day or two.
If my family’s attentions contributed something to the general sense of strain I was feeling, a conversation I had with Raikes on his return contributed much more. He came in to see me as soon as he returned with my uncle. Apparently satisfied with my condition, he plunged directly into the subject of the accident. His first remark was unpromising. “That was no accident, Miss Christy. I’m sure of it.”
It was evident that Raikes had more than a reasonable share of that estimable virtue, professional pride. I knew it would be unwise to enter into a discussion, but I could see no alternative. “What makes you think so?” I asked.
“Miss Christy, you know enough about cars to know that tyres—good tyres—don’t blow out like that very often. Not for no reason, they don’t. And there was no reason—no glass, no nails.”
We had been over all that ad nauseam. I did not say so. “It could have been an inferior tyre,” I suggested.
“It wasn’t, Miss Christy. I’m sure of that. And I didn’t like that accident. I didn’t like it at all. Why, if someone had wanted to kill your uncle, he couldn’t have found a better way to do it.”
“If someone—Raikes, you can’t be serious!”
“Hear me out, Miss Christy. Like I said, I didn’t like it. It shouldn’t have happened. And I got to thinking. If I wanted to wreck a car—and not show any traces of what I’d done—do you know the best way, Miss Christy?”
I shook my head.
“Well, you know, if you put too much pressure in a tyre—pump too much air in it—and then the tyre goes, there’s no earthly way of telling what’s been done. If I wanted to wreck a car, that’s what I’d do.”
“It sounds plausible,” I said. “What doesn’t sound plausible is that anyone should have tried to do it to my uncle’s car. Have you any reason for thinking anyone wanted to?”
He did not answer directly. He said, “You know, Miss Chris, some people have the idea that I’m a bit fussy about where things are kept—maybe a little too neat, even.”
This was a masterpiece of understatement. Raikes was the most meticulous man I have ever met. The garage was a model of order. There was seldom so much as a nail out of place. His clashes with careless members of the staff, in the London house and at Feathers, who had rashly moved some tool half a centimetre from its appointed place, were frequent and violent.
I agreed that I had heard some mention of his liking for order.
“Yes,” said Raikes. “That’s right, Miss Christy. Well, I’ve got a tyre pump in the garage. It has its place, same as everything else. The car wasn’t out of the garage that Sunday before we left for Birmingham, and I checked it over just after tea—about five o’clock that afternoon. Checked the tyres, too—and saw everything was where it belonged. That tyre pump was in its place. I locked the garage when I took the car out the next morning. Well, when I came back from Birmingham, I had a look for that pump. It was way over on the other side of the garage—away from its proper place.”
He paused. I said, “I don’t see what that proves. Anyone could have got in the garage. There’s a spare key in the kitchen.”
“I’ve asked the staff,” said Raikes, doggedly. “They all say they didn’t go near the place. Why should they, Miss Christy? None of them has a car or a bike—what would they do with a tyre pump?”
He did not mention that most of them, terrified of his fierce tidiness, would have taken very good care to have replaced the pump, had they borrowed it for any purpose. I sighed. “There are probably half a dozen reasonable explanations of how it came to be moved,” I said. “All of them harmless.”
Raikes did not answer. He looked stubborn—and unconvinced. I said, “Have you mentioned this to Sir Hugh?”
He shook his head. “Only to you, Miss Chris. Maybe you’re right—it’s only an idea. But I don’t think so. And I thought—if anyone’s trying to harm Sir Hugh—well, you’re with him a lot when I’m not. You could sort of keep an eye on him.”
The idea of myself as my uncle’s bodyguard almost made me smile. I said, “You haven’t said why you think anyone should want to harm my uncle—or whom you have in mind.”
But this challenge Raikes would not take up. He just said he would keep a careful eye out, and he seemed to assume that I would do the same. Then he left. He had had, after all, no need to take up my challenge, and he knew it as well as I did. For that Sunday night, we had had a family dinner—the first in some months. Charles had been over for the week-end from Paris and Tay had come in to coffee. There had, I suppose, been ample opportunity for anyone to tamper with the tyre, if anyone had wanted to do so.
I don’t know how a normally effective person would have reacted to Raikes’ fears and suspicions, or how I myself would have reacted had the episode taken place while I was still at Cambridge, before I met Simon. I think that at that time I might have been able to cope with it fairly well. But my brief marriage with Simon had paralysed my ability to deal easily with such things.
I had probably always been a little more reserved and detached than most English girls. Our family life, I think, was rather dry. Uncle Hugh was not an emotional man; he would not have chosen nurses or governesses who were. I had been, throughout my life, very clever at school, well-adjusted, friendly, and sociable, but somewhat remote all the same. Perhaps that was why passion, when it first touched me, shattered me so completely. I could never really make the bridge between myself as I had been and myself as I was after I met Simon. There were two halves, and I never put them together.
If a Cambridge degree has any value, it was fortunate that I did not meet Simon until the week after I had taken my exams—very successfully, as it turned out. I met him at a party on Saturday, and spent Sunday with him on the river. He was in the Navy, commanding one of those small patrol boats which took such frightening risks almost every night along the shores of Britain. He was admirably suited to it. I think the only reason he had not joined the RAF was that it seemed to him such a conventional form of danger—and of heroism.
The worst of it was that my judgment did not forsake me. I could have excused myself or come to terms with myself better if it had. If I had thought him other than what he was—better, kinder, more scrupulous, less of a sensationalist—I think I could have forgiven myself. One has to be much more arrogant than I was to believe one can never be wrong. But I was not mistaken in him. I saw him almost from the beginning, very, very clearly. I knew just what he was. I knew it would be unwise to see him, folly to love him, insane to marry him. But I could not help myself. I literally could not have refused anything he asked me. I never did. I was never free of him for a single moment from the first moment we met. When we were together with other people, I saw them through a kind of haze. He was the only real thing.
Why he married me, I never knew. It was not with any idea of a life-long union or steadfast faithfulness. Such ideas never crossed Simon’s mind. The only thing that did cross his mind was the life of the present—excitement, danger, sensation; and nothing else. He was killed eighteen months after our marriage. During those eighteen months, I lived on an emotional plane that I would never willingly live on again. I literally never thought of anything but him. Even when I was doing something I liked, talking to other people, seeing a play, he was never very far below the surface of my consciousness: where was he, what was he doing, was he thinking of me? It was an obsession and I knew it; but I could do nothing about it.
We had a flat in London, and I did some war work. I wanted to take a regular job, but Simon would not hear of it. He wanted me there, at his disposal, when it pleased him to be with me. Of course I did as he wanted. He could generally be in London two or three times a week, but that did not mean, except in the first weeks of our marriage, that he spent his time with me. He spent it as he pleased—with me or with anyone or anything else that caught his fancy. Sometimes—very rarely—on a night when I did not expect him, I made another engagement. If he happened to come into London and found me planning to go somewhere, he sometimes insisted that I break whatever engagement I had made. I always wanted to do it. But sometimes, out of perversity and unkindness mixed, he would insist that I go, saying that he could easily amuse himself. I would rush through my evening and come home very early—usually before ten—even though I knew he would certainly not be in before midnight and would most probably not come home at all. And sometimes, unexpectedly, I would meet him at a party. I would see him across the room, a drink in his hand, smiling, his head bent a little forward to hear what the girl—he was always with a pretty girl—was saying; and I would feel my heart turn over.
I was not surprised when he was killed. I knew the chances he took, and it was a wonder he lasted as long as he did. I was just stunned—too stunned even to feel a very sharp grief or the relief of knowing that I could now belong to myself once more. I went through the normal movements of living, but it was all a blur at the time. It remained a blur. I could never say with accuracy what I did, what I said, or how I spent my time, in the weeks immediately following his death. A few months later, while still in a daze, I was offered a job at one of the Ministries. I accepted; and there I spent the rest of the war.
I gradually came to appear more like my normal self. But this did not come about because I was able to accept what had happened to me with Simon and to integrate it with the rest of myself. Instead, I repressed my memories of Simon and the emotions that went with him fiercely, almost savagely. As a result, the memory, instead of mellowing, festered. Many years later, I still winced when I heard his name, or slept badly for nights if someone spoke of him to me.
But that was not all. I could not accept what had happened to me because I could not trust myself any more. I had walked into an emotionally damaging situation, knowing it for what it was, and unable to stop myself. For the most part, I could repress the memories of it, or at least the most painful ones. I could not repress—or forgive—the knowledge of my own weakness. I no longer felt able to act freely in any situation in which my own emotions were involved. I could act efficiently and make decisions which concerned my work. But I could not deal with my own life with confidence. At any hint of an emotional situation, I froze—and then escaped.
That was why, when my uncle offered me a job after the war and suggested that I come back to live in his house, I accepted. I rationalized to myself that it was a very interesting job—which it was; and that I would be very comfortable—which I was. What I did not admit consciously was that with my Uncle Hugh, I was safe. He would make no demands on me I could not meet without strain; and there would be no difficult decisions for me to take. Uncle Hugh would cope with them, too. But unconsciously I must have known all this; and it must have been the real reason I took the job.
Some people are able, in circumstances like this, to fall back on the support and the affection of their family—or at least of some members of it. But I couldn’t. Uncle Hugh had helped me, certainly, but not consciously, and not with my real problem. No other member of my family could do anything at all; and the idea of my united family as a source of collective support never entered my head. It would have been a most unrewarding idea. We had always been a rather uneasy family, and the stresses and strains and rivalries among us were numerous and deep.
Numerous—there was always a strain between my Uncle William and my Uncle Hugh (I put it that way since my Uncle Hugh was in no sense disturbed by the relationship). My Aunt Mildred was uneasy with all of us—wildly ambitious for her husband and children, determined (as was her husband) that Andrew should succeed to my Uncle Hugh’s position, and jealous that Charles, Giles, Timothy, and I had been brought up in Uncle Hugh’s house; though since Charles was Uncle Hugh’s only son, it is difficult to understand where else she would have thought it suitable for him to have been raised. Giles had long been bitterly at odds with Uncle Hugh and somewhat less bitterly at odds with the rest of us. Charles was ironically detached and inclined to bait his relations, especially Andrew and—when he saw him—Giles. Andrew—Daphne—the catalogue could go on at length.
Of course, many families are like this. Few can boast of smooth relations between all their members. But various factors combined to make ours worse, or at least more complicated, than most. Our family had come up very quickly. Perhaps because of that, perhaps for other reasons, most of us were cool rather than naturally warm-hearted. We were all more than normally self-willed. And we all, in a way, revolved about or were dependent upon, the arrogant and powerful figure of my Uncle Hugh.
If, in view of our uneasy relations with each other, we had been able to let each other alone, none of this would have mattered very much. But we could not.
It was not that we were especially intimate; on the contrary, we each seemed to be enclosed in our isolated selves. But any little action by any one of us seemed to be reported all round—reported and reacted to. We were not a large family, and we did not usually move in the same circles. But if two of us met and clashed at a dinner-party, as Giles and I had more than once done; if the rivalry between Tay and Andrew for the future control of my uncle’s business reached new heights; if Charles got up to something in Paris; if anything, large or small, happened, the combination of a bush telegraph and a sixth sense seemed to ensure that everyone else in the family would sooner or later hear all about it. Some kind of vast malaise seemed to exist among us. The only person entirely unaffected by any currents or counter-currents was my Uncle Hugh.
The only person unaffected by family currents and cross-currents, yes; but in the past year, especially since our return from America, I had found my Uncle Hugh somewhat different. I had seen less of him than usual—he seemed to go off on his own more often. I learned on inquiry that he did not take Tay and Andrew with him any more than usual. I had made one or two rather guarded inquiries among my relatives, to see if anyone else had remarked this change in him. But I received looks so blank and suggestions so absurd (my Aunt Mildred thought he might be planning to marry again) that I gave it up. Eventually, I had become used to his new or slightly changed manner of behaving; but when I reviewed in my mind my feeling of discomfort about the family, the change in Uncle Hugh came back to me with force.