FATHER HAD A gift for exaggerating the attitudes common to life. Fashion, by which, as Oscar Wilde remarked, what is really fantastic becomes for a while universal, found it difficult to keep pace with him. Father was too fantastic. He appeared like a magic mirror’s dancing distortion.
No sartorial gesture was too outré. Every Sunday morning Father would walk down Pall Mall dressed in nothing but a yellow dressing gown. There was a practical reason for this, though what was practical for Father was not necessarily so for others. The RAC club in St James’s had a large swimming pool in which Father liked to exercise. After these exertions he was accustomed to make his way to the Waldorf Hotel for breakfast.
Changing when wet was anathema to Father. So he made the journey in his dressing gown. The robe was a yellow silk garment with square patterns wrought in black thread. He must have looked like an enormous djinn that had escaped from its bottle. Often a large cigar would accompany him on his progress, great puffs of smoke rising into the morning air. From time to time he would remark loudly and amiably to passing pedestrians, ‘Toot, toot!’ or ‘Wee Willie Winkie!’
This latter salutation was occasionally the cause of misunderstandings. One Sunday morning Father encountered a lady tourist who, perforce startled by his appearance, ventured to ask him the way to Trafalgar Square. Father informed her of what she wished to know. Alas he did not stop there. He held out a hand and added in his cheeriest voice, ‘Wee Willie Winkie.’ Alas, the cord that held together the folds of his dressing gown had loosened and the act of raising his arm caused the whole thing to fall open. The lady tourist was petrified. She suspected the worst. She screamed for a policeman.
‘Have you been bothering this woman, sir?’
‘Not at all,’ replied Father with perfect justice. ‘She’s been bothering me.’
‘The lady seemed to be under the impression that you flashed at her, sir.’
Father was aghast.
‘I did no such thing. Besides the way it looks these days the exercise would be utterly pointless.’
Fortunately for Father, this argument carried the day.
Many famous men have been characterised by idiosyncrasies of appearance. Some have been distinguished for little else. Both Solomon and Louis XIV were known for the glory of their apparel; Charlemagne was renowned for the length of his beard. It was said that he could kneel on it. The Black Prince was fabled for his funereal armour; Disraeli for his waistcoats; Gladstone not only for his collars but also for his bags. Lloyd George had his hair bobbed, Cromwell had warts, Keir Hardie wore a tweed cap, Wilson had a pipe. Then there was of course Napoleon’s hat, which looked like an upturned coal scuttle.
Father delighted in his exotic suitings. His mode of dressing and the particular styles that he sometimes affected were of tremendous fascination to all. If others had their hats and armour, nothing compared for sheer étalage with Father’s collection of bow ties.
They had an entire cupboard to themselves, which was not surprising as there were near on a thousand of them. Some were small butterflies nesting in the hollow of Father’s throat. Some were so huge that they obscured the bottom of his chin. Sometimes, when Father found himself caught in the rain he wrapped them around his head like a bonnet. Their possibilities as curtain ties were also canvassed from time to time. All were singularly garish in colour and design. But again, it was not dandyism but Father’s determination to look ahead that had prompted this indulgence. Once in a letter he explained to me why he wore them:
I am a very dirty feeder. Try as I will I cannot avoid spilling sauces, greasy meats and jam on myself. Food is always looking for the gap between fork or spoon and my mouth and has a high success rate. A tie sent to the cleaners is a tie ruined or deprived of the sheen of its youth. When I wore the more customary long ties the expense of replacing the dirty ones was oppressive. At the age of about thirty-three I found the solution. Shirts can be and are regularly washed without damage. Falling food misses a bow tie and lands on the washable shirt. That is the sole reason why I wear bow ties. Mind you, I can tie them, double ended and neatly, without looking into a mirror, which most men in this decadent age cannot.
But dandyism evidently enthralled him. Later in life Father began to buy waistcoats copied from those exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Mother was not sure about these. One was a variation on a short tunic Edward II allegedly gave to Piers Gaveston, coloured in red gold and studded with glass jacinths. Another resembled, at least when Father put it on, the huge valerium that Nero had stretched across the Colosseum in Rome, an expanse of purple on which was represented, by silver embroideries, the starry sky.
Most of Father’s suits had been purchased from Christian Dior in the 1960s. Over the years, however, he lost nearly three stone. By the time I was seventeen Father had lost so much weight his trousers seemed always in danger of falling down.
We pleaded with him to buy new pairs but he merely said that it would be cheaper to purchase more braces. There was a problem with this. In the summer he abandoned wearing braces because of the irritation they caused his skin in the heat. After we had moved the scene of our summer holidays to Porto Ercole on the Italian Mediterranean sea, he dispensed with them altogether.
One August, we were invited to an annual cocktail party given by a neighbour, Marchese Cino Corsini. Ex-Queen Juliana of the Netherlands was another refugee in this demi-paradise. This upright representative of the House of Orange lived the life of a virtual recluse nearby, but enjoyed attending the Marchese’s party, where she was de facto the guest of honour.
Before her arrival, Father and I took a stroll in the arboretum with its layer upon layer of lush plants. Father was shuffling. Obviously his trousers were loose again.
‘They’ll fall down if you don’t pull them up.’
‘Rubbish.’
We walked a few more yards. They duly slid down to his ankles like a flag running down a pole. Father didn’t seem to mind. He considered it fortunate as he felt in any case like having a pee.
‘Don’t do that,’ I called out anxiously. ‘I think Queen Juliana’s coming around the corner.’
‘Trying to tease your old dad.’ He stuck out his tongue. ‘I don’t fall for that.’
He crouched down in the middle of the path.
The situation was becoming increasingly desperate. Indeed the Queen’s legs could be seen magisterially making their way towards us. Still Father refused to believe me. He was having one of his rip-roaring pees, when his instrument behaved like a garden hose. Then he looked around. He began to yell in horror.
‘Oh my God, why didn’t you tell me the old bat was coming?’
There was no answer to this disgraceful inquiry. To the old bat’s credit she didn’t bat an eyelid. But Father kept a better eye on his trousers after that.
Despite Father’s passion for bow ties and waistcoats, he treated his clothes very badly. His idea of what to do with them when they were not on his body was to drop them in a heap on the floor. When Father undressed for bed he did so in every room of the house. First, in the drawing room, he kicked off his shoes, the left one behind an urn, the right obscuring the beam from the burglar alarm, so it was impossible to turn it on until we had found his shoe. Next came the socks. These were usually pulled off in the hall. Father would sit on the bottom of the stairs and swear at them until he had managed to prise them away from his toes. His shirt would come off on the stairs. Then he would march to the bathroom, and while brushing his teeth, shrug off his trousers. His underpants were stepped out of outside his bedroom door.
When I was a child I could always find Father by following these fantastic rivulets of colour. One knew where he was in the house by how many articles of clothing were on the floor. Poor Mother. Mother always went to bed half an hour later than the rest of us because it took her that long to retrieve all Father’s clothes and put them away.
For railway stations or airports, Father would resort to what he called ‘my informal travelling attire’. I doubt that anyone ever possessed such unprepossessing ‘travelling attire’, informal or otherwise. It consisted, almost without variation, of a pair of checked green-and-yellow golfing trousers held up with a piece of string, a claret-coloured shirt with large holes, a pair of old Moroccan slippers and a baseball cap.
As if this were not picturesque enough, Father added extraneous details. He sometimes put a boiled egg under the baseball cap in case he later got hungry. Often he forgot it was there, however. He would arrive at the airport and go to the check-in counter and suddenly, in front of serried fellow travellers, the egg would roll down his back and onto the floor just as if Father were a gargantuan human chicken.
The effect this had on the general public was a radical one. The first impulse of many observers was to assume Father was a tramp and offer him a few coins. This always amused him greatly. To my shame he sometimes took them.
‘Most generous, old fellow, thank you so much.’
Other passers-by, on being struck by this outlandish vision, backed away in consternation, anxiously gathering their children around them.
To lessen my embarrassment I used to walk five or more paces behind him in airport lounges, railway stations and outdoor cafes. I had, you might say, a prime view of all that was going on. I remember when I was thirteen creeping through the departure lounge at Heathrow airport as Father proceeded, like some extraordinary pasha, through the throng. In front of him was a young family with children in pushchairs. The wife gazed at Father in amazement and cried out to her husband for all to hear, ‘Oh darling, look at that funny man! His poor family must have a dreadful time.’