Life Worth Living (28 page)

I was thoroughly alarmed that he might undermine my free will. Eli was ‘into’ psychology, so he was forever finding reasons why no really meant yes. Much as I liked him, I would hardly have said we got along. In fact, he used to drive me crazy, and we were forever rowing. It bothered me more than it bothered him, for Eli’s philosophy was that: any attention was better than none. Nevertheless, Eli and I saw each other regularly for three years. He even weathered Hurricane Larry, my intense and wonderful romance with the English actor Larry Lamb.

In the late 1970s, Larry stood on the threshold of stardom. Acclaimed first in Canadian repertory, where he had appeared with Dame Maggie Smith, and then in the English theatre, working with Joan Plowright (Lady Olivier), he was being hailed as one of the new generation of leading men. Tall, well built and ruggedly handsome, he was bright, entertaining and exquisitely mannered, like so many products of good working-class homes. I first met Larry at the opening of the London Ritz Hotel’s casino. I was gossiping with Robert Sedore of St Laurent and the interior designer John Siddley, Lord Kenilworth, when Edward Duke, the actor best known for his one-man show
Jeeves
, came up to say hello. With him was this mouth-watering hunk who zeroed in for the kill before I could even get out a greeting. Talk about taking your breath away.

For the rest of the evening, Larry made sure he was the focus of my attention. Not that I was complaining: far from it. He exuded charm and humour and sex appeal and fun and laughter like no one else I’d ever met. Like Colin Campbell, he had an impressively strong personality, but unlike Colin, Larry was acutely attuned to the reactions of others. Just the way he scanned your face, looking for clues as to what lay behind your eyes, was a revelation.

The course of passion promised to run no more smoothly than true love, however. Even if I had been inclined to jump into bed with him straight away it would not have got this romance off the ground, for the following morning I was leaving to spend several weeks in Jamaica.

‘I’ll take you to the airport,’ Larry said – just the right move.

On the evening of my return, Larry and I were due to have dinner at La Poule au Pot, a fashionable restaurant in Belgravia. My cousin Enrique, who was staying with me, met him when he picked me up. Larry was an instant hit. ‘He’ll be so much better for you than that snooty racing-driver you used to go out with,’ Enrique said. He hadn’t taken to Richard Down, who I thought a real sweetie-pie, and who used to compete with Prince Michael of Kent. Over dinner, I was able to see something of the man behind the good-looking face. Larry had a sparkling and original intellect. He was also a nice guy.
Without a doubt I was drawn to him, though by now I was well into my ‘Everest attitude’: whoever wants to scale this peak had better get out his pickaxe and get down to the serious task of chipping away at the rockface. He therefore had to exercise a lot of patience and embark upon some heavy seduction before he was able to hoist his flag. When he did, though, the experience was as exciting as it was gratifying. Not only was Larry an accomplished lover with highly developed technical prowess, but he was also a healthy young man at his sexual peak. And he was even more entertaining in bed than out of it.

For several months Larry and I had an enchanted romance. He had been married twice before; he was also something of a ladies’ man, which didn’t bother me. We got along famously. My brother Mickey was as enthusiastic about him as Enrique had been, and my friends all adored him, the girls because he was so good-looking and attentive, and the men because he was so masculine and intelligent. Unlike his British predecessor who had turned the difference in our backgrounds into a battlefield, Larry made it a source of interest. He was truly fascinated by some of the things people like us did. ‘Even the way you drink soup has a logic I bet you’ve never figured out,’ he observed, pointing out that ladling the spoon away from one was a way of preserving one’s clothes by minimising the risk of spillage.

For my part, I saw no reason why Larry’s working-class roots should be an issue, and they never were. He didn’t have a chip on his shoulder, so why should the circumstances of his birth matter? If anything, his background was a bonus, for he had a sensible handle on life that many an over privileged wastrel did not – and having been married to one, I certainly knew what I was talking about. Besides, Larry was one of nature’s aristocrats. In terms of intelligence, energy, height, looks, courtesy and just about any other human quality you could think of, he was out of the top drawer.

Once I got to know Larry well, it became apparent that he was ready to marry again, which indeed he did with his next girlfriend. Wonderful as he was, and enchanting as our romance was, I simply did not believe that we would be compatible in the long term. We were two artistic temperaments, with all the passion and emotionalism typical of our type – I simply didn’t believe we’d survive five good rows without both of us licking our wounds to the detriment of the relationship – and even if I surmounted that in my temperament, I wanted a man who was calm instead of volatile. Once I had come to that conclusion, it was only a matter of time before the romantic side of things came to a halt. This they did, appropriately enough, over dinner after a birthday party hosted by Mary Archer Shee, whose great-uncle was the subject of the famous Terence Rattigan play
The Winslow Boy
. Larry’s response could not have been more gentlemanly, and we have remained friends from that day to this.

I was now twenty-nine years old. I had left Colin Campbell four years before. Although I had not married, as I had expected to do, it was not through lack of opportunity. I knew my father especially was concerned, but fulfilment and development were my goals, and I had no doubt I was on the right track. It did not frighten me that I was following a rockier path than the one
Daddy would have chosen for me. As long as life was good, what did it matter if it was also sometimes tough as well?

I
n 1980, Jamaica rid itself of its Cuba-loving prime minister, Michael Manley, after eight horrendous years which not only saw the imposition of democratic socialism (a euphemism, if ever there was one, for encroaching communism) but also the suppression of wealth, initiative, law, order, and the ostensible racial harmony that was responsible for the national motto: out of many, one people. Racial prejudice, which had been a feature of Jamaican life under British rule, had ceased to be a national problem in the decade since independence in 1962. Jamaica really had been on the way to becoming a colour-blind society until Michael Manley came to power in 1972.

Jamaica’s tragedy was that the suffering of the Manley years – and no one suffered more than the poor – proved to have been entirely unnecessary. Prior to Manley’s regime, most people recognised that the society had to change, that there had to be a narrowing of the chasm between the haves and the have-nots. The pie had to be divided more fairly, and even the rich were in favour of more equitable slices in the interests of national harmony. Because the country was now more prosperous than it had ever been since the eighteenth century, there was indeed a pie to carve up, and Manley was elected on the basis that he would take out his knife and give a fair portion to all.

Once he was in power, instead of fulfilling his election promises, the loquacious, egocentric prime minister began to preach Black Power and the dastardliness of the white oppressor, inciting racial hatred and class envy. In the process, he managed to destroy the tourist industry, one of Jamaica’s prime sources of revenue, as well as the economy: the American government promptly embarked upon a policy of subversion geared to toppling the racist, anti-American politico on their doorstep.

Of course, Michael Manley’s own English-born mother, Edna (a delightful woman and a fine sculptor) was white, which made for some ludicrous scenarios when her son’s Black Power cohorts tried to explain her away. As the Trinidadian poet Wayne Brown recounted in his acclaimed biography,
Edna Manley – The Private Years, 1930–1938,
Edna laughed at their assertions that she could not be Michael Manley’s mother because of her colour, and at the implication that she was a vicious white who had stolen a poor black woman’s baby. I know from contemporaneous conversations with her that she didn’t think the matter in the least funny, but she had her son’s political position to protect and her own face to save.

Manley’s rhetoric, beamed over the airwaves, was geared towards earning him a place upon the world stage as a leader of the Third World (making a triumvirate with Africa’s Nyrere and Kaunda). So what if he alienated Jamaica’s closest neighbour, the United States of America, and ruined the national economy? What did the poverty of the people matter compared with admiring column inches in Britain’s
Guardian
newspaper? As the economy of the country faltered he thrashed around for scapegoats. Naturally, he chose the least sympathetic sector of the Jamaican population: the haves.

So families like ours became the bogeymen responsible for all the nation’s ills. The Jamaican government now encouraged the poor to take what was theirs ‘by right of need’. Violent crime and murder became the order of the day, as the criminal element misinterpreted government rhetoric as permission to have an open session of lawlessness. These criminal elements now divided their targets into three main groups. The first was any politically motivated person of any affiliation other than the government’s People’s National Party. These people were gunned down on a daily basis in busy streets in front of crowds of witnesses. Although the Gun Court, a detention camp for perpetrators of gun crimes located beside the Army’s headquarters at Up-Park camp, was full of gunmen who were supporters of the opposition JLP, there was a dearth of gunmen who were supporters of the PNP confined within the concentration camp-like barbed wire fences. Of course such lawlessness provided an ideal cover for the gunmen of all political persuasions to settle personal scores, or merely to hold up anyone who had a gold chain or bangle worth stealing. The victims of crime now shifted to include the poor, who inadvertently became the second target group. As the government-sanctioned gunmen terrorised the people, the world’s press reported that Jamaica had become one of the most dangerous and violent places on earth. Although the government had not intended the average voter to become a target of their henchmen, once the predicament arose, they did nothing to alleviate it, reasoning that it would destabilise their power base if they went after their own.

The third target group consisted of the established families, the haves, without whom, the more radical element in the government declared, Jamaica would be better off. We had oppressed the people and fleeced the country of its lifeblood, and we should leave. The democratic-socialists, as the communistic element in the government called itself, then sat back and watched the decimation – and cull the criminal element certainly did. Every one of the established families lost friends and relations in barbaric murders.

In 1978, an attempt was made on my father’s life. He was held up by gunmen at work, and as they openly discussed executing him, Daddy, recognising that his one chance of survival lay in knocking the gun from the thug’s hand at the moment the bullet was leaving the chamber, kept calm and struck out at the right moment. Although the bullet did hit him and at point-blank range, it passed beneath his heart, missing all his vital organs. He never got over this experience, however. He not only became a nervous wreck – thereafter we could never go out without an even lengthier diatribe from him than the one he had perfected after Grandpa’s murder – at sixty-two, he was too old to recover physically. His back muscles had been irretrievably damaged, and he spent the last sixteen years of his life in varying degrees of infirmity.

Some of the so-called democratic-socialists’ techniques aimed at ridding the country of families like ours were more direct,
calculated to terrorise us into fleeing. The most successful ploy was the List of the Twenty-Two Families. This contained the names of generic families who were supposedly being considered for liquidation once the glorious declaration of communism was made, along with all their offshoots – cousins, in-laws, cousins of cousins – a neat way of getting rid of just about all of the establishment, the democratic-socialists’ own establishment supporters excluded, of course. Even we had relatives in Manley’s government: Delroy, J.W. Ziadie’s son, and Mummy’s first cousin Dan Williams, although of course they, and people like them within the government, frequently had no idea what the more radical wing was up to.

The circulation of the list created pandemonium among the established families and I personally know many people who fled as a direct result of it. I paid scant attention to it until just after the election in late 1980, because I viewed it as nothing but scare tactics.

‘Delroy is a good boy,’ Daddy said to me that Christmas while updating me on the political situation. ‘Do you know what he did just before the election? He came and told all of us that we had three days to leave Jamaica if that bunch of rogues got in again. Can you imagine, they had taken a decision to arrest all of us and strip us of our citizenship! The government planned to go completely communist. You don’t need much imagination to figure out what our fate would have been once the glorious revolution and show trials got underway.’

Fortunately, Michael Manley and his cronies were resoundingly voted out by the people after eight years. In came Eddie Seaga, son of Uncle Philip and Aunt Babs. Whereas Manley had talked about his love for the people while he continued to live at the elegant uptown Manley residence, Drumblair, Eddie, as a young man, had left the comforts of the Seaga family home to live in Trench Town, the worst slum in downtown Kingston, with his followers. Here was someone who really did put his money where his mouth was, and, as American aid reappeared, Jamaica returned to a semblance of normality.

It is fascinating to observe what an immediate and profound effect a change of leadership can have upon a whole nation. Almost overnight, the rhetoric of hatred yielded to a recognition that everyone, black, brown, yellow or white, rich, poor or in between, had a place within society. It was now OK once again to be white and rich, to be elegant and civilised, to be poor and black and a non-PNP supporter. The nightmare was over.

Once Eddie became PM the fawners were out in force – the average Jamaican seemed to think that the Ziadie and Seaga families were related, especially as Arthur Ziadie was a senator and a leading light in the Jamaica Labour Party. Security, expatriates and a measure of stability returned, though the financial battering that the nation as a whole and people like my father had taken could not be so easily remedied. Though by no means poor, my father was no longer as comfortable as he had once been. Money no longer mattered to me. Having spent the latter part of my twenties living on very little aside from what I earned (and that was no fortune), I knew that one does not need a great deal of the green stuff to live well.

So what if you could not afford to serve the finest wines? ‘No one comes to my dinner parties for the food or the wine,’ I often said. ‘It’s strictly for the company.’

The hidden wealth – the human wealth, the wealth of shared experience, of fun and laughter, of good times and unexpected adventures – I had acquired as an independent woman of limited means far exceeded what I would have gained as a rich man’s wife. And I learned far more about antiques, for example, from having to go and ferret them out from the dross in Portobello Road Market than I would have done swanning into some smart shop in Bond Street.

I was now thirty years old. Although I enjoyed my life and firmly believed, like Miss Jean Brodie, that I had entered my prime, it was not what I had envisaged it would be. Eli Wallitt often told me that I was too romantic and that I idealised sex too much. ‘You should have a purely sexual relationship,’ he used to advise (no Brownie points for guessing whom he wanted me to have it with).

In 1980, as I headed off to spend Easter in Jamaica, I wondered if Eli might be right. Providence soon presented me with the prospect of finding out in the shape of J.E. J.E. was an actor with the looks of the young Richard Burton, except that he was burlier and had good skin. He had been brought up in Latin America, where his family had extensive holdings, and Britain, where he was educated. Like me he was equally at home in the First and the Third World, and like me he was fun-loving. We met in the least likely of circumstances, when I almost tripped over his luggage at Heathrow Airport. We then coincidentally found ourselves in adjacent seats on a flight to Miami, or so I thought – he later confessed that he had swapped seats with someone else. I had a firm rule about never speaking to anyone on aeroplanes, but I made an exception for J.E. He radiated sexuality through every pore.

By the time we parted in Miami, I had no doubt that the first thing he would do when he returned to London was telephone me. The first evening I saw him again I decided that J.E. and I had no future. I was picking up strong alcoholic signals which were anathema to me for obvious reasons. Then and there I decided that he would be the perfect candidate for the sort of relationship Eli was constantly advocating.

Bed with J.E. was heaven on earth. Our bodies might have been designed for one another. As well as being an accomplished lover, he also provided me with unintentional pleasure simply because his physique so perfectly complemented mine. Nature had been generous to him, and his manhood was thick and lush and wonderfully formed. Even his alcoholism worked in my favour when the lights were out, for he took a welcome eternity to climax. In time a strong bond of affection was formed between us for the most incredible of reasons. J.E.’s sister, whom he adored, had been born with a medical condition identical to mine. She was one of the lucky ones; she had been brought up as the girl she was, and had lived a normal life. We fought like cat and dog – he was a macho drinker much given to bursts of actorish temperament – but 
beneath the volatile surface, this bond became the basis for solid friendship.

J.E., though, was never going to be anything but a lover, and during the two years I lingered with him I was aware that the clock was ticking and I still had neither the relationship nor the job I truly wanted. I left Lloyd’s in 1981 and went to work for my brother, who was setting up a law firm. A committed Christian, Mickey had switched from being a barrister to a solicitor so that he could start a law practice that would benefit the poor West Indian community in London. I took quite a cut in salary, but working with him seemed a good way of helping him out and at the same time doing something for society.

For the eight months I worked with Mickey, I discovered rather too much about British society for my own comfort. ‘You know nothing about life as it’s lived by most people,’ he had always said, and he was right. Often the police were as crooked as the crooks, all of whom pleaded innocence even when they were palpably guilty. Fascinating though it was to visit murderers, rapists and fraudsters in prison, to provide comfort to families when the judicial system was ‘stitching up’ an innocent person, and to get to know the disadvantaged – who frequently displayed more generosity of spirit than the great and the grand – frankly, the pain and suffering were too taxing. I decided that if making a contribution to society were my motive, I might be better suited to raising funds for large groups of people whom I would never see or know, but who would benefit nevertheless, on a voluntary basis. It was a more effective way of reaching a larger mass of people, and, while it was less spiritually enriching, it was also less emotionally enervating. So I left Mickey’s firm when he no longer needed me, in February 1982, and returned to writing, which was the best thing I could have done.

In July 1982, my grandmother died. It was a great blow: I adored her, and as longevity ran in her family, I had always expected her to live well beyond the seventy-nine years she managed. But her health was irreversibly ruined by a beating she sustained at the hands of two gunmen in Jamaica in 1979, who spared her life only when my step-grandfather placated them with a lavish display of humility. A great character as well as a lady of the old school, Grandma had had a profound influence upon me. She was broad-minded, vibrant and two generations ahead of her time. Independent in an age when women were meant to be docile, she loved earning her own money and became a successful businesswoman without surrendering either her femininity or the respect of her peers, most of whom would have preferred to kill than to work.