Outrageous Fortune: Growing Up at Leeds Castle (24 page)

After a final bow, final wave, they left the stage. Gone. The lights went up, handkerchiefs came out, dabbing eyes, wiping away sniffles.

Still somewhere far away and not wanting to come back down to earth, I stood up just as Granny A gave the girl in front of us a gentle prod with her umbrella and spoke to her in an angelic tone of voice: “You know, my dear, it’s only the plain girls who scream.”

17.

S
TOWE VERSUS
H
OME
F
RONT

The following year I went to Stowe. I’d visited David there and he’d shown me around, but I had found the place austere and cheerless. Even the school’s spectacular setting and architecture had left me curiously unmoved and despondent over what the future might have in store. Now was the time when a health and safety warning on the side of the Leeds Castle luxury brew (it was a home-grown blend and not available to the general public) was needed. I had imbibed all my life (no one said it was not safe for children) on an epic scale, but unlike cigarettes (Smoking Causes Cancer) the brew manufacturers never had the gumption to provide the necessary cautions on the side of their powerful product’s tin, such as: “The luxury brew has been known to induce powerful delusions of grandeur which can, if not treated, last for a great many years and prove harmful to achieving success in meeting life’s myriad challenges. The brew is known to have further unintentional side effects including, but not limited to, obscuring reality. Be aware that the luxury brew will one day cease production without any possibility of being replaced. Consume in moderation and learn to be self-sufficient.”

The magisterial grandeur of Stowe, Palladian, palatial, and exquisite in form and
façade
, once the country seat of the Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos, in 1965 a boarding school for six hundred boys, swiftly passed me by. I’d been a successful big cheese at St Aubyns, so becoming a small fry all over again wreaked havoc with my new but still tenuous self-confidence. The drab Corinthian columns which graced the school’s North Front, so greatly admired but, through my eyes, so badly in need of a clean, typified for me every aspect of my new seat of learning. What’s more, despite being only ninety minutes’ drive northwest of London, Stowe attracted the coldest, wettest, and dullest weather imaginable.

It was my winter of discontent. Twelve weeks of frigid acclimatizing to new rules, new faces, new systems, new accommodations, new teachers, new world. New friends helped. Richard and I had arrived on the first day at the same time in the new boys’ dormitory at the top of the house, both of us carting our trunks up the never-ending stairs, he aided by his stepfather, Enzo, a sculptor, and me by David, now an old boy, who had kindly driven me up in my mother’s Jaguar to offer as much moral support as he could.

After the sad farewells, Richard and I had walked round the main building, impressive, indeed stately in its institutionalized form, particularly the domed assembly hall where they say the Beatles had signed autographs and former pupil David Niven had somehow deposited a master’s car, minus its wheels. I straightaway admired Richard’s insouciance and willingness to look on the bright side, while I still seethed at my parents’ lack of consideration offloading me in such a gloomy and inhospitable place.

Clearly my attitude was unfortunate, even crass, but an unrealistic view of my place in the world had dogged me for years, and things had perhaps been a little too easy. The vast comforts of the castle way softened up the beneficiary almost to the point of no return. Although I didn’t like myself for doing it, I soon found myself comparing the amenities and splendours of Leeds Castle with the bleak, authoritarian shabbiness of Stowe. Such thoughts I was obliged to keep strictly to myself, not wishing to become public enemy number one before I’d even got started.

Richard’s jokes were quite good, and he was kind enough to find funny my laboured attempts at humour, even when I suggested how much better the place must have been two hundred years before. Lanky and possessed of a fine Roman nose, he liked the same music as I did, and our friendship took off on a high note.

Peter, a year older than me, black haired, wild eyed, and preternaturally self-possessed, became my friend later in the term. We discovered that we not only shared the same tastes in music and fondness for an occasional Player’s No. 6 cigarette, but also his father was the star stylist and owner of Olofson’s, the salon on Brompton Road where my mother went to have her hair done every week. Furthermore Peter lived with his mother, the actress Pauline Olsen, in Rutland Gate, which Nanny and I had always passed through on our way to and from Hyde Park for our walks all those years ago.

It was soon apparent that spending time with older boys had the undesirable effect of upsetting the “all in the same boat” connection with my year’s crop of new boys. Peter and Richard did not become friends with each other, so from the word go I found myself in the familiar position of operating with my feet in separate camps.

At St Aubyns there had been no such thing as free time. Each day had a set timetable which was rigorously adhered to. At Stowe, however, when you weren’t in the classroom or playing scheduled sports, your time was your own, and it was up to you how you managed it. This meant that when I wasn’t dozing through science or math class, or playing rugger, squash, hockey, or hurling down cricket balls in my capacity as opening bowler for the Colts “A” team during the summer term, I could more often than not be found strumming my acoustic guitar in the music room at the far end of the west colonnade. One reached this room by passing through the junior changing rooms, which were always liberally perfumed by the aroma of unwashed socks, sweaty jockstraps, and other sports accoutrements. It was also, distressingly, the venue of choice for prefect beatings. Fortunately I was summoned only once for a thrashing by the head of house, after receiving a chit for disobedience during house-room prep. During the administration of the six resounding thwacks, I maintained a running dialogue apparently containing sufficient humour to slightly derail the concentration of both my tormentor and his slouched witness, thereby lessening the unpleasantness of the wretched scene.

*   *   *

It was Christmas Day 1965, and my first term at Stowe had come and gone. I was standing in my Maiden’s Tower bedroom, luncheon over, staring through the windows at the rain as it fell in its usual dreary fashion on the still-immaculate croquet lawn. Off in the distance the red flag on the ninth green twisted listlessly in the wind, sodden, bowed, like a condemned man tied to the stake. Beyond, the cluster of towering cedars maintained their ancient, dignified presence, but they, too, were shrouded in a blanket of grey drizzle and melancholy.

Within the MT walls the gloom outside was matched by an all-encompassing sadness, felt in every corner, in every room. Word had come from Nassau that Morg had died. The shock was excruciating and real. The household had dispersed, each to his or her spot, to cope with the news. I felt I wanted to cry, needed to cry, and wondered how it was that someone in whose company I had, over thirteen years, spent only a limited amount of time could have formed within me such a deep, emotional connection. Natural leaders with great charisma often inspire intense devotion in those around them, even from a distance. I didn’t have proper conversations with Morg any more than I did with Granny B; castle way bylaws saw to that. But I knew him well enough to understand what my family had lost.

If this was how Morg’s death affected me, what must it have been like for my mother, who had adored him since she was a child? And for my father, who had perhaps looked upon him as a form of surrogate father for the one he never had?

I went to my mother’s bedroom, knocked on the door, and found her preparing to set off on her rounds distributing Christmas presents to all the old friends and retainers who worked on the estate, as she had done every Christmas Day since I could remember. She told me to come in as she reapplied makeup and fussed about, doing her best to pretend things were normal. Neither of us mentioned Morg.

“Can I come with you this year, Ma?” I asked. Normally David or James went with her to keep her company and help with the chatting and carrying the presents.

“Yes, darling, of course. That would be very nice of you.” My mother had such a sad look on her face and seemed so utterly bereft that I wanted to say or do something to help, but nothing came to mind. So I told her I was going off to find my brothers and load up the car with the gifts so we’d be ready to leave when she was.

This was the first time since the war, to my knowledge, that the court had not spent Christmas at Leeds. Granny B’s bronchitis and Morg’s cancer had brought about the decision to leave for the Bahamas early to escape the harsh English weather.

I knew deep down that it was more than just Lord Margesson who had died—such was his aura, his charm, his sense of humour, and his genuine concern for all of us and everyone who worked at Leeds. Without ever overshadowing Granny B’s position as the castle’s dominant personality and patron of all things great and small, Morg had embodied the spirit and the splendour that was Leeds. He had been there before the war, when the castle was one of England’s most sought-after weekend invitations among leaders of society, government, and the arts. He had been a constant and reassuring presence throughout the postwar period, when Granny B had entertained and conducted her affairs, in general, on much more modest levels than in the early years.

It was the tallest, strongest, brightest-burning candle in the whole castle firmament that had finally flickered out. The place would never be the same.

*   *   *

“What on earth are you going to do with that?” asked Mr. Gilbert, my Temple housemaster (also known, bizarrely, as Prune), who accosted me one day during my second (Lent) term, outside the house prefect’s study.

“Play music, sir.”

“Play music? With
that?
”

The object of Prune’s scorn was my new acoustic guitar, a gift from my parents for passing my Common Entrance exams the year before. Prune and I never got on well. He insisted on letting me know, once, how much he preferred David. “He was very nice,” he’d said in his strangely squeaky voice, “but you’re”—there he had paused as he sought the
mot juste
—“nasty!” This I found less than encouraging—indeed, infuriating, and somewhat confusing as well—and it further exacerbated my general ill feeling towards Stowe. “Nasty” was not a word I would have applied to myself at the time, or at any time, but Prune chose not to explain himself. In my usual fashion I told nobody about it: Never let on. People do not want to know. Get a grip. Your parents may be losing it, Morg gone, Stowe a total drag, but who doesn’t have a problem?

“Absolutely, sir. The Beatles, and many other groups like them, are being very successful and making lots of money playing music on instruments like this.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Prune genuinely did not know what I was talking about. He was old school in the classic sense and probably considered any music post-Bartók to be rubbish. It turned out, though, that dismissing what I cared about most was not to have the effect he was hoping for.

I was on my way to the music room. There, my trusty and essential chord book and the sheet music for Donovan’s “Catch the Wind” shared the rickety upright piano’s music stand, and I succeeded in learning to play the tune in one afternoon, attracting quite an audience in the process. Some of them appeared to like what they were hearing, especially Peter, and before the term was over he and I had formed a group with Max and Oliver, two like-minded new friends in Temple. Once we had laid our hands on some half-decent equipment—a struggle for all four of us and accomplished, in my case, by bidding farewell to six months’ allowance in a single afternoon—we spent the next three and a half years endeavouring to replicate the finest pop music ever made with the drive and determination of an Olympic rowing team.

Max was tall, red-haired, and athletic. He was from Yugoslavia, which gave him a slightly exotic air, and his obsession with the ladies was second only to my brother James’s advanced preoccupation in that field. When he wasn’t talking to me about beautiful blondes and brunettes over a Dunhill International cigarette down by the Temple of Concord—an activity greatly frowned upon by the authorities and likely to result in a nasty beating or even expulsion if apprehended—he was writing love letters to them in Serbo-Croat, head bowed in concentration over his desk.

Oliver was of normal height, a ready wit, a keen sportsman, and an Englishman to the core. Of the four of us he was perhaps the most scholarly and even tempered. That might have explained his decision to be the bass guitarist and his fondness for “Wasn’t Born to Follow” by the Byrds.

My first year at Stowe ended in July 1966 with the Kinks’ crafty record “Sunny Afternoon” at number one in the top twenty and Britain’s prime minister, Harold Wilson, raising taxes and nationalizing the steel industry.

Although Ray Davies’s masterful tune and lyric captured to perfection English working-class distaste for English upper-class dismay over Wilson government strategy, it seemed quite clear to me that all those new rich-and-famous Swinging Sixties superstars were, in fact, well on their way to establishing a new aristocracy. And the old aristocracy was so enamoured of this new one that it soon was hard to tell them apart as they all swanned around in velvet suits and Cuban-heeled boots at country house weekend parties and fashionable London gatherings!

In the still fully operational English class system, the long-established mutual respect between the upper and working classes was, sensibly, finding new and exhilarating outlets for its expression: “What a piece of work is a[n English]man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty!”

It was, of course, important if one was going to be a member of a pop group at school to choose a name for the band that denoted cool and spoke volumes about the ludicrously avant-garde life style and philosophy of its members. In my case this was garnered from fourteen years’ indoctrination in the castle way, and an indulgent, extraordinarily kind Nanny! After much going round in circles the four of us had settled on Source of Controversy. It might not have been as cool and avant-garde a name as we hoped, but the band was certainly controversial with Prune and with all our parents. If proof were needed that Prune might have had a point, even Oliver, the scholar, failed to achieve the two-year-mark examination results everyone had expected he would, and by quite some margin.