The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (13 page)

Robert observed Gerald’s routines: his tea brought at eight in the morning, breakfast downstairs at nine and then some concentrated hours of writing, painting or composing before lunch and more leisurely activities, often with friends. It is possible that some of the conversations were above Robert’s head – he claimed he barely read books, though he exaggerated the degree of his illiteracy, an easy way of contrasting himself with all the highly literary people he was now surrounded by. The truth was not quite so simple. Gerald mentioned in the early days that Robert was writing poetry. Playing the fool or the daredevil was an obvious method of not competing and one which could easily be picturesque enough to appeal to Gerald and his friends. According to one friend, the Mad Boy would use words incorrectly, leading to much hilarity. Once, when he was annoyed, he said he had ‘taken unction’.133 When Gerald published First Childhood in 1934, he dedicated it, jokily ironic, to ‘Robert Heber-Percy[,] whose knowledge of orthography and literary style has proved invaluable’.

Gerald and Robert began to make friends together, some of whom lived nearby. Perhaps the most significant were the newly married Betjemans, John and Penelope, who were close in age to Robert. John had published his first poems (supported by Gerald’s friend Edward James) as well as a book about architecture, and worked for the Architectural Review and the Evening Standard. Penelope was the daughter of Field Marshal Lord Chetwode, a former Commander-in-Chief of India, and the great loves of her life were India and horses. Together, the young couple embraced local life in the little village of Uffington, where they had recently moved, going as far as founding the Uffington Parochial Youth Fellowship, which offered music, talks and various entertainments to locals.134 John and Penelope were clever and fun, with the determined yet impish and impulsive air of characters out of one of Gerald’s novels. Indeed, he dedicated his strangely surreal book The Camel to them, hinting that they had similarities to the two main characters, the Rev. Aloysius Hussey and his wife Antonia, who adopt a mysteriously psychic camel. Unaffected and adventurous, Antonia has spent her youth in the Orient and takes to riding the camel around the parish. More like a fable than a novel, the atmosphere is intensely English, mannered and provincial, while bringing in a gay organist romping with his choirboys, a verger called Beaton, murder, suicide and a finale where Antonia rides off on her camel into the sunset.

The Betjemans were unlike some of the older, more eminent visitors, but Gerald was unafraid to mix his friends and was charmed by the young couple’s unaffected energy. Penelope became so at home that she would sit down for dinner and say, ‘Gerald, what’s the pud?’135 and took to darning John’s underclothes in the drawing room. She was simple, even tomboyish, in her appearance, but ambitious in her way. Shortly after their wedding, she went to Germany to improve her German because she wanted to learn Sanskrit and most scholarly works about India were in German. Penelope soon became very close to Robert, bonding over their love of horses. The two of them often rode out together, while John and Gerald stayed at home discussing poetry or the delights of some obscure stone carvings in a tiny Berkshire church.

Like Gerald, John understood how silliness and joking could be ways of dealing with the misery of the world and of subverting authority. Both men were able to take things seriously, but their creative output and their social personas relied on lightness and playfulness – characteristics that belied their dark insecurities and even despair. In common with Firbank and many other humorists since, they recognised ‘frivolity as the most insolent refinement of satire’.136 Gerald still had dramatic mood-swings, so he could be ‘talkative and gay at lunch, keeping everybody happy, then he’d be very down the whole afternoon probably. Then if somebody came to dinner he’d whizz up again.’137 This was a pattern that had started at school, where he described himself as not being ‘what the Americans call “a good mixer”’. John recognised Gerald’s shyness and self-doubt and appreciated his ‘remarkable gift for making friends and a loyalty to them which no reverses in their fortunes would shake. He was a man of few words and nearly all of those were extremely amusing.’138

John also had the outsider’s sympathy with the predicament of the outlawed homosexual in England. While it is unlikely that anything would ever have been discussed openly with Gerald about his relationship with Robert, John’s marvellous poem ‘The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel’ is a beautiful attack on the absurd cruelty of the law:

‘… Do fetch my morocco portmanteau,

And bring them on later, dear boy.’

A thump, and a murmur of voices –

(‘Oh why must they make such a din?’)

As the door of the bedroom swung open

And TWO PLAIN CLOTHES POLICEMEN came in.

John had an enormous love of Englishness, and was a great defender of architecture that was deeply unfashionable; his 1933 book, Ghastly Good Taste, is a celebration of the much maligned Victorian and Edwardian styles. Later, he became editor of the celebrated Shell County Guides, which brought in excellent writers to explore aspects of the English countryside that had been neglected.

Although Gerald had turned himself into a European and collected books, friends and paintings from the Continent as much as from within Britain, he now became increasingly involved in local country life. As Alexandra Harris has pointed out, if there was a Domesday Book for the 1930s, it would show that almost all the major figures of English art and letters lived in the countryside, including Evelyn Waugh, E. M. Forster, Stanley Spencer, Vita Sackville-West, Cecil Beaton, Eric Ravilious and many more. While it might seem counter-intuitive, given the long-held ideas that ‘modernism was cosmopolitan’ while English art was pastoral, in fact there was a huge amount of creative energy emerging in rural England.139

It was John and Penelope’s influence that brought Gerald and Robert into their orbit of village fetes and church concerts – an unlikely milieu for the eccentric lord and the Mad Boy. Penelope persuaded Gerald to write the overture for a mystery play she organised at her village church. He even played the organ, while Penelope played God the Father, chasing the children out of the church on the grounds that they were Adam and Eve and the church was the Garden of Eden.140 Gerald said he’d tried in the music ‘to express the fact that the expulsion from paradise was very unfair’. And while Penelope became ever more devout, Gerald could not escape the conviction that you had to have a talent for God in order to believe. Yet it niggled; sometimes he longed to have the comfort religion evidently gave others, especially when the dark moods of his dreaded accidie descended.

We have no record of what Robert thought of all this, though church services were naturally familiar after the schooling he had had and his childhood at Hodnet Hall. According to Penelope herself, not only did Gerald play the harmonium when she sang in a Methodist choir, but ‘Robert used to come, and I think he even preached a sermon at one of the Methodist things once.’141 These local gatherings were not limited to churches. Osbert Lancaster did a charming drawing of the Betjemans and friends putting on a performance of ‘Sumer Is Icumen In’ at a village hall, presumably in Uffington. Gerald is at the piano, Penelope holds a guitar, Lancaster plays a flute and John and Maurice Bowra (the famous Oxford don) are singing.

The Betjemans’ house was just under the Downs and the legendary White Horse of Uffington, whose strangely modern lines visitors flocked to admire; Penelope stood on its eye to pray for a baby, much as others do at the Giant of Cerne Abbas. In Penelope’s case it was hardly surprising that she preferred the horse’s blessing. Moti, her beloved snow-white ‘grey’, had been shipped back from India and was the centre of her life. His name was Hindi for ‘pearl’ and he had been her hunter with the Delhi Foxhounds. Maurice Bowra reported that ‘there were generally marks of lipstick on its neck’.142 Although John was not interested in horses, they were Penelope’s passion; John’s biographer named Moti as ‘a third in the marriage from the start’.143 Penelope would harness him to a dog-cart and drive over to Faringdon, where she’d take Gerald and Robert for slow rides along local roads, during which they’d gossip wickedly about the neighbours or dreaded ‘dry blankets’ who bored them with their pomposity or expertise. At other times, Penelope and Robert would set off on wild bareback rides or chase boldly at the head of the local hunts. Most famously of all, Penelope would show off Moti’s marvellous character by bringing him inside the house. A photograph of the white horse taking tea in the drawing room at Faringdon has become emblematic of this era of Gerald’s life, the hallmark of his brand of eccentricity. In fact, the eccentricity in this case was surely Penelope’s. She is shown dressed in checked shirt and tie, with a pageboy haircut, holding a saucer from which Moti is slurping tea. Gerald, Robert and another friend sit around a dainty, lace-clothed table. Gerald was delighted by Moti’s perfect manners, and inspired by the beautiful incongruity of this elegant animal to set up his easel and oils to paint him in situ. There is a photograph showing Gerald perched on an ornate stool, buttoned up and penguin-like in co-respondent shoes, while Moti poses, calm and proud. If there were multi-coloured doves outside the house, then there could be a white horse inside; both caught the imagination in exactly the way that Gerald loved.

GERALD PAINTING MOTI, HELD BY PENELOPE BETJEMAN

It is fitting that Gerald’s ‘English period’ should produce more writing and painting than music. While some of his music is unconventional, harmonically modern and must have been challenging to many of his more conservative contemporaries, his books are light and funny and his paintings mostly peaceful landscapes, with the occasional portrait of a friend.144 He had started young, with his watercolour outings with his mother and producing sketchbooks full of competent and charming impressions of his early travels. In one of his many notebooks, Gerald described his youthful passion for watercolour painting that incorporated his great admiration for Turner:

PENELOPE BETJEMAN FEEDING TEA TO MOTI, WATCHED BY ROBERT, GERALD AND A FRIEND

I produced a sunset that outdid Turner’s most lurid efforts in almost every respect. I was very proud of my sunsets but my father, when I showed him one of them, rather dampened my pride by saying that, although he was sure it was very nicely painted, he was not sufficiently fond of either poached eggs or tomato soup for the picture to have any very strong appeal for him. This chilling appreciation of my work rather put me off sunsets and I turned my attention to other less flamboyant aspects of nature.

Gerald then describes how a ‘particular hue of green stirred my fancy in a strange and violent manner’. Finding out the name of the colour led to a very liberal use of oxide of chromium for a while, and Gerald playfully quotes Havelock Ellis’s theory ‘that a partiality for green is one of the things that denote unnatural tendencies so perhaps this is a dangerous admission; however this mania for green on my part was only a passing phase …’

In adulthood, Gerald took the lead from Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, the painter he most admired, and created gentle, mild-coloured oils that are pleasing but hardly unexpected or strange. According to Gerald himself, he liked ‘the directness and simplicity’ of Corot’s early paintings and found his style ‘the perfect method of dealing with landscape’. He was an avid collector of the nineteenth-century French artist, picking up many early pictures at bargain prices and later trying them out at home before buying them from London’s Reid & Lefevre Gallery. He eventually amassed the largest collection outside the Louvre, as well as acquiring paintings by Matisse, Sisley and Degas.145

Gerald’s friend Harold Acton saw his conventional approach to the visual arts as ‘the residue of his very conventional ancestry – the aunts and people who went sketching. A sort of compulsive thing.’146 It is interesting that Gerald didn’t feel the need to live up to his reputation as full of surprises, and was willing to study and follow in the well-trodden footsteps of the masters. It has been suggested that Gerald wasted his efforts by spreading his creativity so widely and not concentrating on music, where his real talent lay. Nevertheless, his paintings were good enough to be exhibited, and they sold. The mealier-mouthed cited his social standing as a contributing factor – ‘It just goes to show the advantages of being a Baron,’ sneered Evelyn Waugh – but the pictures continue to be admired and to sell today. Gerald had his first exhibition in 1931 at Reid & Lefevre. It included many Roman scenes, some Venetian views and some lush English landscapes. When Gerald had his second exhibition at the Lefevre, he received a positive review in The Times: ‘He appears to see instinctively and naturally with Corot’s eyes … And he can also see without the help of Corot, so that nearly all his landscapes are sedate and satisfactory in their organization and observed with quiet and unpretentious precision.’

FARINGDON HOUSE PAINTED BY GERALD

Although his landscapes are well executed and charming, it is often Gerald’s portraits that are the most memorable. He managed to get Robert to sit still long enough to paint several pictures of him – though he did work from photographs as well. Gerald also encouraged the Mad Boy to develop his own strengths and was delighted when Robert rode his horse, Passing Fancy, in the Grand National, sporting the Berners colours of red and green with a black cap. Deborah Mitford wrote to her sister Jessica: ‘Lord Berners had a horse in for the first time in his life and the Mad Boy said to us before the race “If it falls at the first fence Gerald will be broken hearted.” And it did! Wasn’t it awful. But luckily he is very short-sighted and he thinks it was the second fence so all is ok.’147

There is no evidence of any fall-out from this disappointment, but both Gerald and Robert were superstitious. According to Robert, if Gerald saw a white horse he would stamp, even if he was in the car. Then he might add, ‘You can’t talk now. When I’ve stamped 100 white horses I get my wish.’148 Gerald later admitted that this was useful for when there were bores in the car. However, he also considered it bad luck if you neglected to pick up a fallen white feather and ‘plant’ it upright in the ground.