A Year to Remember Read online

  ‘You are. Too bad. Let me know next time you’re back.’

  Even so I was excited about my return to England. I was eager to see my parents. London was my base. I had my flat in Chelsea. It was actually in the Royal Hospital Road; it was called Cheyne Place because the proprietor considered that that sounds better as an address and could therefore command a higher rate. It was an unfurnished four-room flat. I also had a secondary base in my parents house, Underhill, 145 North End Road, a quarter of a mile south of Golders Green tube station. My father had built the house in 1907. Evelyn had spent his childhood there and I my boyhood. It was a comfortable three-storeyed house, typical of the suburban houses that were being built round London in the first years of the century. When I married for the first time in 1919 I converted the old nursery into a library sitting-room. I still kept a number of my possessions there, and so did Evelyn; particularly our clothes. We were a united family. Underhill was very much a home.

  At the end of 1929 my father retired from the managing directorship of Chapman and Hall, but he remained chairman and literary adviser. At Underhill he turned my old sitting-room into his study.

  When he retired he began to keep a daily journal in one of Boots’ commercial diaries. Ten lines were available to every day and with his small Greek script he could get twenty-five words in a line. He set high store by these diaries; but though they have a deep interest for me, they could scarcely be of interest to the general public, so full are they of names of whom only the family had heard. I presented his diaries – all except that of his last year – to the Boston University Libraries. Last spring, I asked the library to lend me a copy of the 1931 diary.

  During the first months of the year, he was at work upon his autobiography, One Man’s Road, which was published in the autumn. He was not well that winter. He notes that he did not take his first afternoon walk until February 3rd. His doctor advised him to take things quietly and have breakfast in bed. Yet he was writing two thousand words a day on his book, in addition to reading MSS for Chapman and Hall, writing reports on them and conducting a vigorous correspondence.

  Evelyn was abroad, on his first trip to Abyssinia for the King’s coronation. Children tend to imagine that their parents’ lives revolve round them, and because parents make themselves available at a moment’s notice, putting off guests, cancelling acceptances, they picture their parents’ lives as ceasing when they themselves go abroad, as in The Blue Bird the grandparents vanish when the young people cease to think of them. It was not until I read these diaries that I realised how very occupied my parents were; what a constant coming and going there was. ‘Alec came out to lunch to say goodbye before leaving for America. Read a novel by Beatrice Kean Seymour: fairly good. Rosemary came to tea, she told me. . . . While she was still there Aubrey rang up to ask if he could call after dinner.’ One person after another, and that was how it went on, right to the last week of his life in late June, 1943. He died early in the morning of Saturday 26th. He had tried to write his diary on the Wednesday but his script was illegible. He dictated the Thursday’s entry to my mother, but on the previous Saturday he had been watching cricket all day at the Highgate school ground.

  Evelyn was back from Abyssinia on March 9th. My father’s diary announced that he looked ‘very hearty and rosy and well’, bringing many delightful gifts – carved animals and a canvas picture of the Abyssinian farmer’s life. My father describes Evelyn as spending many hours opening letters. He had probably received no mail for several months. Two days later he lunches with Duckworth’s partner Tom Balston and pockets a cheque for £260 on royalties from Labels; at the next board meeting Chapman and Hall signed for him a cheque for £117 which does not seem a large amount in view of the fact that Vile Bodies had been published in the spring of 1930 and he had not received a large advance. He took his mother to the Ritz for tea. She enjoyed its splendour. He went to see the Plunkett Greens at Littlehampton, thence to Brighton where Harry Preston feasted him at the Albany with oysters and champagne. It was a typical Evelyn return. Usually he would have taken his father to a film or a theatre, but my father was far from well; he was having injections and running a steady temperature. Instead Evelyn gave him a copy of 1066 and All That.

  I arrived on April 1st; though my flat in Chelsea was unlet I went to my parents’ house in North End Road. Evelyn was in partial residence. It was Holy Week and that night he was leaving for retreat at Stonyhurst. My father wrote in his diary, ‘Alec home from U.S.A. looking very thin and tired and most charming.’ I am not surprised that to my father, who had not seen me for four months, I should have seemed thin. The previous autumn I had had a shock. I had felt that my shirt collars were somewhat tight. I presumed that the material had shrunk, but 1 thought I had better make sure, so I consulted my tailor. He showed me the measurements of my waistcoats over the last eighteen months. There had been a steady increase in girth; thirty-two is a dangerous age. I had played my last game of Rugby football in October 1928.1 was no longer subjecting myself to training during the last half of the week. I was taking less exercise and eating more. On a cricket tour that summer, in order to avoid a heavy four-course dinner I had ordered every evening sausages, fried eggs and mashed potatoes, which I had washed down with a couple of pints of beer. The time had come to call a halt. I have seldom eaten a potato since: I have substituted wine for beer. It is not difficult to diet in New York, where most people lunch off a cocktail, a single entrée and a coffee. One of my first acts on my return to England was to carry my old suits round to Savile Row and have them taken in: on the whole over the last forty years I have waged a reasonably successful battle against obesity. I am bald and short; there was no need for me to be fat as well, dearly though I appreciate the pleasures of the table.

  My mother kept a diary as well as my father. Hers was simply a record of engagements, but the one diary amplifies the other. It was, she records, the wettest Good Friday for fifty years. Richard Connell had said that he would be interested to see the Bank Holiday Fair on Hampstead Heath. He arrived for lunch on the Monday bearing with him a bouquet of flowers, a transatlantic gesture that touched, as much as it surprised, my mother. On the Tuesday I went back to stay in my own flat. I used in those days to put rings in my diary round the days on which fate accorded me the delights of dalliance. There are rings round the Tuesday and the Thursday.

  H. G. Wells said in The World of William Clissold that all that was required for the conduct of an affair in London was leisure and convenient premises, and a travelling writer can fit easily into the life of a married woman who does not want to be bothered with the strain and responsibilities of a serious affair but is glad to escape every now and again from her routine to a quiet oubliette where she can be cherished and appreciated during a shuttered afternoon. There were at this time two such ladies in my life.

  Evelyn and I have never, I hope, failed to express appropriate gratitude for the devoted love that our parents gave us. But I have no doubt that their friends, among themselves, often used to complain about the casual way in which we accepted this devotion. ‘They treat their parents’ home like a hotel. They turn up when it suits them.’ But in point of fact that is how my parents wanted their sons to treat their home. And reading over my father’s and my mother’s diaries, I cannot feel that we were neglectful. During this period Evelyn took his mother to City Lights; to the film Morocco, and to lunch at my flat into which he had moved when I went away. I took my mother to see Bitter Sweet, Marda Vaune’s play To See Ourselves and to the Ideal Home Exhibition at Olympia. There was no self-sacrifice involved. We enjoyed our parents’ company and they knew we did. My father was not well enough to leave the house during the wet chill weather. He spent the time indoors, correcting the proofs of One Man’s Road and making out his income return. His fees from Chapman and Hall were £800 and he had earned £163 from writing. It was, he wrote, his lowest return for many years.

  How far money went in those days, though no one realised
it at the time. My father had no private income. He had no old-age pension. My mother had a minute private income. I question if it was more than £30. She had a hoarding instinct. When Underhill was sold in 1933 and they moved to a flat in Highgate, she opened a Post Office Savings Account. I had no idea that she had done so: nor, I think, had Evelyn. But when she died in 1954 it was found that she had amassed some £640. What a happiness that savings account book must have been to her. She always liked to think that if anyone was in need she could be of help to them. She said to me once in her last years, ‘If you or Evelyn wanted some money, I should be so proud if I could lend it to you.’ I remembered her having said that when her lawyer and I found a Post Office savings book among her papers. If I had known of it, I might have been tempted to borrow a hundred pounds from her, even though I did not need it. It would have given her such a feeling of being useful. It would have been a kindness to her.

  I had the incident of that savings account in mind when I was writing my novel A Spy in the Family. One of the characters was an apparent playboy, an amateur golfer who represented a wine firm, a very flimsy and uncertain source of income. He was, however, unknown to everyone, employed in the Government Secret Service. His golf and his wine connection were his ‘cover’. He was his mother’s favourite and he was in the habit of borrowing money from her which he did not need and which he put in a trust fund for his brother’s children. It made his mother very happy to feel that she was of vital importance to him. She loved him for his weakness. Eventually he was offered a government decoration, an M.B.E., for his services to the country; he could then have been the spy who came out of the cold, promoted to an administrative post. But he felt forced to refuse, because it would have broken his mother’s heart to learn that she was not so important to him after all, that he had been fooling her.

  The incident brought, I believe, the character to life. It is another example of how a novelist puts real incidents and real characters into his books. It is a point that I am planning to elaborate in a few pages time when I talk about the novel on which I settled down to work in Villefranche.

  As I said, I took my mother to see Bitter Sweet. It was showing at the Golders Green Hippodrome. Peggy Wood was in the lead. I had met her the previous autumn at a party given by Mary Servoss and Erin O’Brien Moore who were then acting in Street Scene. When I went to America I let my flat to Mary and Erin, and when their London run ended I saw a lot of them in New York. ‘Be sure to give Peggy Wood our love,’ they had adjured me.

  As the Golders Green Hippodrome was at the foot of the North End Road, I called in there after dinner. I had a cosy chat with Peggy Wood about our mutual friends. She was, she told me, going to Vienna to see a musical, Victoria and her Hussar, in which there might be a part for her. She was not looking forward to it, she said. Now that Bitter Sweet was over she was in a hurry to get back to her son and husband. ‘But the trip’ll be fun,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s a long way, a night on the boat, then twenty-four hours in a train. Besides I’ve been to Vienna twice.’

  ‘I’ve never been there.’

  ‘Why not come along, then?’

  ‘Why don’t I?’

  ‘I’m catching the 8.15 from Liverpool Street on Sunday week.’

  ‘I’ll be there,’ I said.

  I was at that time ready to fall in with sudden plans. A month earlier in New York, when Street Scene was going to the coast, I had nearly gone there with it. But San Francisco was a very long way – nearly two weeks – from the French Riviera, and I wanted to start work on my new novel. Though I was always ready to change my plans at a moment’s notice, I was careful not to break my working schedule. Vienna was a different matter – only a few hours from Villefranche. I could take Vienna in my stride. It was a brief diversion. It might provide useful copy; it would be another setting for a story. It should be fun.

  It was, but in an unexpected way. On the Tuesday, after moving into my flat, I booked my ticket to Villefranche via Vienna and set about seeing as many of my friends as I could manage during that short time, with a ring in my pocket diary round the seventh and ninth. I dined with my agent, A. D. Peters; I lunched with my lawyer, E. S. P. Haynes; I gave a small dinner party at the Savile, whose main purpose was to introduce Evelyn to Richard Connell; there were one or two attendant courtiers to act as ballast in case my brother’s meeting with Connell was unsuccessful, although in those days Evelyn was far from being the difficult element that he became in the later ‘50s. The dinner seemed to go well enough and I noticed that after the meal they drew apart in a concentrated duologue. I wondered what they were discussing, as Connell was not a Catholic.

  Evelyn was staying the night at the Savile, I returned to North End Road.

  Next morning Evelyn rang me up. ‘That was a good party,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

  We discussed it for a moment or two. Then he asked after Connell. ‘Do you know his address?’ he asked.

  ‘The Connaught Hotel,’ I told him.

  ‘If I were you, I should ring up and ask if he’s all right.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He may be dead.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He told me he wasn’t sleeping. So I offered him my pills. I’ve just looked in my box. He’s taken eight. They’re very strong, and he isn’t used to them. I should think eight would do the trick.’

  But Connell had a sturdy constitution. He survived to write many more stories. Later that day I went to Oxford to see the Willerts and on the Sunday to Guildford to make contact with some other friends with whom I was anxious to re-establish immediate touch. I remember that lunch party because a decanter of port was placed upon the table. After the meal it was set back upon the sideboard. It sent a shiver of apprehension along my nerves. After four months of prohibition I was nervous at the sight of an unemptied decanter. Anything might happen to its precious contents.

  I was, in fact, so busy during that week that I hardly had time to reflect on the fact that on the Sunday night I was to start off on a trip to Vienna with a female of high attractions whom I scarcely knew. It was something of a shock, therefore, on the Monday morning to find myself after a turbulent crossing facing her across the breakfast table of a dining car. ‘What on earth am I doing here?’ I thought. I looked at her, appreciatively. It was the first time I had seen her in the daylight. She was of about my age. Without considerable good looks she could not have become the prima donna that she had: she had a healthy, wholesome look. In spite of the early hour and the rough crossing, she was highly appetising. I knew nothing about her, except what the whole world knew: that she was the daughter of a professor of English; that her husband was John V. A. Weaver, the poet; that she mixed with a highbrow group; was one of the Algonquin’s Round Table set; that she was a serious actress; that her great role was in Candida. I had heard her discussed as an actress, but never as a human being; she was a very agreeable person: she was witty and good company. But I had no idea what she was like. Yet here I was about to spend four days alone with her in early springtime in the glamorous city of Vienna. It was the kind of situation that I had difficulty in devising for the characters in my stories; it is not easy to find a credible situation in which two youngish people, unattached, or at least with no immediate liens should find themselves alone in a strange city or a beach hotel. Four days; and the first day in a train during which they could get to know each other … the very situation for a Cosmopolitan short story. How was it going to work out in actuality?

  It worked out in a way that no fiction editor would have approved, but was exasperatingly true to life. On the Tuesday morning, almost before it was light, I came out into the corridor with the train slowing down at Vienna, to find that Peggy was having difficulty with her luggage. She had hurt her hand, she said. She had shut it in the door of her compartment.

  ‘When did you do that?’

  ‘Last night.’

  ‘Why didn’t you let me know?’

&n
bsp; ‘What could you have done? What could anyone have done?’

  ‘Was it hurting?’

  ‘Yes, quite a lot. But there wasn’t anything I could do. I had to wait till I could see a doctor. I cried myself to sleep.’

  I cannot think of any conduct less like what you would expect from a theatrical prima donna. Yet I cannot think of any action that was more like Peggy Wood. She was not the person to make a fuss, when making a fuss would not do any good.

  Her first act in Vienna was to find a doctor. She returned from his consulting room with the information that she had broken a finger and with her arm in a sling. That settled the problems of the magazine short story situation. There is no more effective chaperone than an arm stretched across a bosom in a sling. During our four days in Vienna we laid the basis for a friendship that has lasted forty years.

  Those four days in Vienna were indeed among the very best in this year that is the one which I would most gratefully relive. We saw Victoria and her Hussar. It came to London in the autumn. Whether it ever reached New York I do not know. If it did, I do not believe it was a great success. I remember chiefly about it – I was watching it in German which I cannot speak – a wonderful duet sung by Oscar Denes, a large plump romantic creature, and just the right itsy-bitsy Poppet to be a foil for him. I did not feel it was the right medium for Peggy Wood because the heroine was a married woman whose husband has been kind and loyal, but whom she leaves for the sake of another man because she loves him more. Somehow I did not see that as the right role for the star of Bitter Sweet. Today that might seem a ridiculous objection but divorce was not quite so universally condoned in 1931.

  For the most part in Vienna we were straight-forward sightseers. Schonbrun, the gardens, the galleries, all that. We also, through Peggy, had some social contacts. Larry Larue was then the local Herald Tribune representative; at the party that he gave for Peggy, I met John Gunther, then on the threshold of his long series of successes. Larry Larue’s current wife became later Maureen Shirer, whose guest I was often to be after the second war in Princeton at the Music Box. A great deal started, in fact, during that five day visit in Vienna: later I became a very good friend of Peggy’s husband, John V. A. Weaver. Once we went down together for a working holiday to the Easton Court Hotel, of which I shall be writing in a future chapter. Peggy herself was soon to be back in England, acting in the musical The Cat and the Fiddle. Peggy was, as she is, a person of great prominence in the theatre on both sides of the Atlantic. Friendship with her opened many doors for me.