The Pursuit of Laughter (70 page)

He wrote several short novels during the war, and in 1941 he sent me
Far from the Madding War
to my prison. In order to be able to thank him for it without depriving the children of their weekly letter (it was still the rule that we could only
send
two a week), I rather
dishonestly
requested that I should be allowed to write to a member of the House of Lords. Permission was granted. Gerald had only once been to the House of Lords; he said he would never go again because a bishop had stolen his umbrella. He kept my letter, written from Holloway Prison on 8 July 1941, and it turned up in his centenary exhibition at the Festival Hall in 1983. I thanked him for:

When, after some years, more visits were permitted, Gerald came to Holloway to see me and Kit, who had by then joined me there. We spent twenty minutes laughing; the time flew. He brought Mary Chess luxuries and was displeased when they were taken away from him at the prison gate; he wanted to give his presents himself, but of course this was against the rules. They had to be carefully searched for files, or blow lamps, or heaven knows what.

Far from the Madding War
is about wartime Oxford. Emmeline, daughter of the Warden of All Saints, feels impelled to do some war work now that all her friends are busy in the ATS, or collecting blood, or evacuees. Since the point of war is destruction, she decides to destroy a very beautiful and rare fourteenth-century German embroidery of the saints. It
should have been in a museum, cared for in the right temperature and available to scholars and art lovers, but Emmeline had inherited it. It turned out to be far harder to destroy than she had imagined. She has to insert her sharp embroidery scissors with care and precision, and only succeeds in snipping off a few ancient silk threads at a time. She sets aside definite hours for her war work in case she is tempted to slack, and the rest of the day she leads her usual life among the dons of Dimchurch, Unity and Corpus Diaboli, and people working at Cheatham House, which has been evacuated to the university from its premises in St James’s Square. One of the dons’ wives works there; she is ‘crazy about small nations, the smaller the better’. Emmeline keeps her war work secret, which it is easy to do because so many
people
say their work is too secret to be spoken of.

In this novel Gerald describes himself as Lord Fitzcricket the versatile peer, who can paint, compose and write—it is an absurdly unflattering self-portrait:

Lord Fitzcricket confides in Emmeline; he does not know about her war work. His
confidences
are word for word what Gerald had said to me in the summer of 1940 when he
visited
me at Denham, except that he omits the part about his fear of lying wounded and untended among ruins. All the rest is there, the regret for the harmless pleasures and
occupations
of peacetime, the hatred of the destructiveness, cruelty, danger and boredom of war. He fully realizes that many people are enjoying it; it is delightful for bossy women who like ordering everyone about, and for men who can leave their tiresome wives and children, busy with goats and rations, for an office in Whitehall and a glow of patriotism. Of course, it is not such fun for those who are fighting. Lord Fitzcricket had offered his services, but there was nothing in particular for him to do. ‘I’ve never been any good at anything practical. I’m an amateur. I am also private-spirited. I have never been able to summon up any great
enthusiasm
for the human race, and I am indifferent as to its future.’

Emmeline listens to Lord Fitzcricket sympathetically, but she does not tell him about her war work. Her reasoning, with regard to destruction, is that since all created things are doomed to change and decay, only destruction can give them immunity. Therefore the impulse to destroy is more reasonable than the impulse to create. ‘Oh dear!’ she cried as she
poked her scissors into the breast of St Agatha, ‘if only one didn’t have to think.’

Because of the mania for attributing characters in novels to real people, I may as well say that except as a recipient of Gerald’s thoughts about the war there is not a single point of resemblance between me and Emmeline, who was popularly supposed to be based partly upon Robert’s wife Jennifer Heber-Percy and partly upon Clarissa Churchill, with what truth I do not know.
Far from the Madding War
is extremely funny but it is at the same time a
devastating
satire. An old butt of Gerald’s was Harold Nicolson, who had become a bellicose armchair warrior with a job in the propaganda ministry. He figures in the novel as Lollipop Jenkins, who comes down to Oxford to lecture, and exhorts his audience to meet the foe with blazing eyes. ‘The Provost complimented him on the success of his oratory, and said he had heard that so many people were walking about the streets with blazing eyes that torches were no longer necessary in the blackout.’ Harold Nicolson had a streak of silliness combined with a touch of pomposity which made him an irresistible target for Gerald’s unkind jokes.

Lord Fitzcricket mentions masks. Although at various times I motored hundreds of miles with him I never saw Gerald in a mask except once. Olga Lynn, who organized such things, persuaded some of us to take part in a parade for charity at a ball: we were supposed to be gods and goddesses. Gerald rather liked fancy dress and he agreed to be Pluto, for which part he wore a frightening disguise including a mask. ‘Playful Pluto,’ he said. There was a large photograph of him in the
Sketch
(Lord Lambton tells me that he once asked about the masks, and Gerald said that they made a great impression in France and Italy, but that in England people thought it was the squire out for a drive).

We were released from prison in 1943, and while we were living in a very dirty and uncomfortable inn, the Shaven Crown at Shipton under Wychwood, Gerald came to stay. I warned him about horrible food, chill rooms and that my four sons all had whooping cough, but he bravely came. He pretended not to notice the shabby surroundings, and I remember his visit for the way it cheered Kit, who had been very ill and was still far from well. The
reason
for its incredible shabbiness was that the inn had been shut since the war began, and dust and grime had accumulated for four years.

Gerald’s short novels had all been illustrated by himself. While he was staying with us he told me a new story he planned to write, about a prince who built a rococo palace in the eighteenth century beside the medieval capital of his little domain. He made an ornamental lake in the park, shaped like a letter S because his princess’s name was Sophie. During the bombing raids in the Second World War this lake was a valuable landmark for airmen. The end of the story was one of them returning to his base and saying he had had to jettison his cargo of bombs so rather than waste them in open country he had dropped them on the palace and the town near the S-shaped lake. As far as I know this story was never published; possibly it was never written.

We were living under house arrest, but were trying to find a house of our own, as Denham had been requisitioned by the army. When I heard of a house for sale in Berkshire,
near Newbury, I asked the Chief Constable to send me over to see it as I could not go unguarded. The police car took me by way of Faringdon where I lunched with Gerald. The food was as delicious as ever, the house as beautiful, Gerald as amusing. After years and years in gaol, and then the poor degraded Shaven Crown, it was like a glimpse of paradise to me. After luncheon Gerald took me upstairs to see Robert and Jennifer Heber-Percy’s baby daughter Victoria, who looked like an expensive doll with huge eyes. When he saw me off with my two uniformed policemen in front, he said frivolously: ‘You’re the only person now with a chauffeur
and
a footman on the box.’

I bought the house, Crux Easton, and he often came to stay. We could not go to him because house arrest means you must stay near your dwelling, but Gerald found a train from Swindon to Newbury which he loved. It had grand drawing room-like carriages with
armchairs
upholstered in crimson velvet and no corridor; a relic from another age.

We once managed to buy a lobster to regale him with; I tried to make
Homard Thermidor
. I left Gerald in the kitchen while I went up to dress, with instructions to take it out of the oven at exactly eight o’clock. At eight I heard appalling screams from downstairs. I flew to see what had happened. The lobster was safe on the kitchen table, but Gerald’s poor hands were terribly burned. He had used a string cloth to take the sizzling dish, and despite the agony had bravely not dropped it. During the evening his hands became covered in blisters, and he said: ‘Martyrs went to the stake for their faith, and I went to the stake for Diana’s
lobster
.’ During the war Gerald had made two new friends. One was my sister Nancy, who was working at Heywood Hill’s bookshop in Curzon Street. They had met before, but it was now that their friendship blossomed. He invited her to stay at Faringdon while she was writing
The Pursuit of Love
. She said he was not only a perfect host but that he drove her back to work when she was tempted to stay in the drawing room. As she made him a character in her book, Lord Merlin, it has sometimes been thought that he was a family friend and neighbour when we were children, but this is not so. As far as I know he never met my father. He loved stories about him, particularly the terrible one when Peter Watson telephoned and Farve, in Uncle Matthew vein, shouted for us to come, ‘That hog Watson wants to speak to you,’ in such a way that Peter must have heard. Gerald henceforward always called him Hog Watson, than which no name could have been more inappropriate.

Before the war my brother Torn sometimes played duets with Gerald, and either Lady Rosebery or Mrs Hammersley, taking it in turns to perform on two pianos in a room they hired for the purpose. Gerald was not an accomplished pianist, but very appreciative of those who were. Whether they played his own piano pieces, which have been described as fiendishly difficult, I do not know.

Gerald and Robert were also very fond of Derek and Pam Jackson. Gerald was
enchanted
by Derek’s brilliance and his idiosyncrasies. The other wartime friend was Daisy Fellowes, a Frenchwoman he positively adored. She and Reggie Fellowes lived at Compton Beauchamp after the fall of France. Gerald loved her elegance—she was described in the newspapers as ‘the best-dressed woman in the world’—and her malicious remarks made in
silky tones. After the war she decided to buy a house in England and asked Gerald to look at Donnington Grove and give her his advice. He and I went over together from Crux Easton, and found it a beautiful eighteenth-century gothick house. Daisy made it as pretty inside as it was out, and an oasis of luxury in the prevailing greyness of post-war England. She put a statue of St Joseph on the front of the house, ‘patron saint of cuckolds’, said Daisy.

She represented to an extreme degree the side of Gerald’s life which he had always admitted played a part—the worldly, fashionable side. It was at all times subordinate to his work, but it was nevertheless important to him, and the war had starved him of it. He admired Daisy’s beauty, and became so devoted to her that I sometimes thought he almost resented the presence of her lover, Hugh Sherwood, even though her name for Hugh was H.L., which stood for hated lover.

For a long time after the war nearly everything was difficult to get. Books practically
disappeared
and Gerald used to say that he had hardly arrived on the threshold of Blackwell’s or Heywood Hill than one of the assistants would rush out to tell him triumphantly: ‘No Tolstoy! No Dostoevsky!’ He said they enjoyed
la volupté du refits
. Just as some people enjoyed the war, shortages and rationing gave great pleasure.

The male equivalent of Daisy in Gerald’s affection and esteem was Philip Sassoon, who had a similar talent for luxury. He amused Gerald with stories about his cousin, Mrs Gubbay. She gave Queen Mary an expensive present every Christmas, from Spink’s. One year the Queen changed it, saying that of course Mrs Gubbay must never know, but she couldn’t abide the object. The following November Mrs Gubbay went back to Spink’s to choose
presents
, saw the disliked bibelot on a shelf and said it was exactly what she wanted for Queen Mary. Attempts to divert her attention on to something else were in vain. ‘Please allow
me
to know what Her Majesty will like,’ she said severely. Mr Spink was afraid it must have seemed to the Queen like a practical joke.