Squeezing the Orange

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There was a certain amount of pain, because my skull had been badly broken, and one cheekbone was squashed flat and had to be cranked up again in an operation. Cleverly, I managed to flatten it a second time while I was asleep, and it had to be done once more. I am not sure if everything went according to plan, because I still have very little feeling on the left side of my face. One or two of the nerves must have taken a turn for the worse. My large nose had a bit of a going-over too, and had to be reorganised. I was left with a whacking great scar on top of it, which was skilfully removed later on by a plastic surgeon called Stuart Harrison, who had learned his trade under the famous Archibald McIndoe in his hospital at East Grinstead. Even after that I am not sure I would ever have won a beauty contest, but I don’t think I was visually much more offputting than before the accident. I think my right shoulder had to be rebroken, under anaesthetic of course, although the aftermath was painful. My skull was broken most of the way round, but not all of it, otherwise my ghost would have needed a ghost to write this. Some of it was crushed, and a certain amount of digging around had to go on to remove all the bits and pieces of bone that were floating about the place. I am not sure whether I actually remember any of this, or whether I am just repeating what I have been told. One thing I do know is that I suffered quite badly from brain bruising, which stayed with me for a number of years – there are of course those who say it is still. There were lots of other amusements to keep the doctors busy, but considering all things it wasn’t too bad. I lingered in hospital for a week or two, then once again we journeyed back to Norfolk in the old Rolls, which was still one of the joys of Tom’s life.

When I got back to Hoveton, there was something of the return of the prodigal son about the way in which everyone bustled around me. I didn’t care for all the fuss. I felt all right, and perfectly able to get on with things on my own, without all the mollycoddling. But obviously I was not allowed to do much, and I hated the shackles that were imposed upon me. All I wanted to do was to get back on the cricket field and to look to the future, for there was nothing I could do about my accident. I also had a burning desire to return to Eton for the final week of my last half. I particularly wanted to sing one of the verses of the ‘Vale’, the leaving song at the school concert on the last Saturday of the half. There were four verses, and four of the best-known chaps who were leaving the school, who always included the captain of the Eleven if he was on his way, sang a verse each. I made sure this message was conveyed by Tom to Bush Forrest.

I believe, although I can’t really remember it, that at some stage in those days at home I picked up a cricket bat and someone trundled in and bowled me a ball or two. Maybe Nanny made a late comeback with her right-arm unders, which were less nippy than Miss Paterson’s. But there was one dreadful cricketing moment hereabouts. After my departure Edward Lane Fox took on the captaincy of the Eleven, which was lovely, as it sort of completed the circle after all the years we had played together. The two days of the Eton and Harrow match arrived, when I should have been leading Eton down the steps at Lord’s, one of the very few things resulting from my knock on the head which I regret just a little. I suppose that later, there was a chance that I might have been asked to captain the Public Schools against the Combined Services, when I would have had another crack at captaining a side at Lord’s. Anyway, while Eton were taking on Harrow I was stamping around at Hoveton like a caged tiger. I was desperately keen to find out the score, and I well remember sitting in the hall after lunch on the Friday, the first day of the game, listening to the lunchtime scoreboard, which was a daily five-minute broadcast on the BBC Home Service. At the end of the county scores, the announcer said, ‘And now at Lord’s …’ and gave the score, although I have long since forgotten what it was. I think it was just about the most awful moment of my life, sitting there at Hoveton knowing that I should have been at Lord’s and in the thick of it, and there was nothing I could do about it. I think even Grizel was hard-pressed to entertain me that afternoon.

At first, in spite of my determination to go back to Eton for that last week, everyone shook their heads and wondered if it was sensible. I suppose that as I had been so close to snuffing it, this was hardly surprising. But all the various bits and pieces seemed to mend quickly enough, and in the end I got my way. The old Rolls was in business once more. I don’t imagine anyone has ever been more delighted to return to school than I was then. Of course I found that I was Exhibit A, and from the moment I shook Bush Forrest by the hand – I don’t think he said ‘oh dear’ – everyone stared at me, not because I was in any way disfigured, although my nose had seen better days, but in sheer disbelief that I was there at all. That week I behaved exactly as if I was an ordinary member of the school, attending the appropriate divs and joining in everything. I even played in the semi-finals of the house sides’ cricket competition. Forrest’s were playing Tiger Wykes’s on Agar’s Plough.

I can’t remember if I was allowed to open the innings, but I must have batted near the top of the order. There was one perfectly ghastly moment when I was made to realise all too vividly the effect my beastly accident had had on my cricket. NGW’s (Wykes’s) main opening bowler was dear old Edward Scott, who I know felt in a predicament as he ran in to bowl to me. He obviously didn’t want to hurt me, and was reluctant to bowl flat out. Even so, he still seemed quite brisk to me. But I coped well enough defensively, and picked up the odd run here and there. Realising that I was not as bad as he had feared, he then ran in and bowled me a short one. I had always been a good hooker – a dangerous thing to say in the modern world – and I loved to hook anything short. As soon as I saw the ball was dug in, my instinct told me to hook, but I was unable to alert my feet of the need to make the appropriate movements. It was as if they were stuck in concrete, and all I could do was flap in a ridiculous, firm-footed way at the wretched ball, and somehow fend it down. The signal system had gone, and my reflexes were in no sort of condition. I don’t know how many runs I made. It can’t have been that many, although I was cheered off – because of my mere presence rather than any cricketing brilliance. The fact that I could take my place in the side without making a fool of myself did me a lot of good, even if it left me with that one nagging doubt. I didn’t attempt to keep wicket, which seemed too risky.

I sang my verse of the ‘Vale’ at the school concert, and my rendition was a tuneless rival to that verse of ‘Cock Robin’ in my first school concert at Sunningdale. I remember waking up on my last full day at Eton and feeling so sad that this was the last time I would be putting on the stick-up collar and tying the white bow tie – at school at any rate. I had the same feeling when I climbed into that splendid assortment of sponge-bag trousers, coloured waistcoat and floral buttonhole that members of Pop wore, and that made me look like a peacock on a day out. The old Rolls was in business again the next day as I was ferried away to Hoveton with as many of my Eton accoutrements as could be fitted into it. An era had passed, and another one was about to begin. At the time I had no idea of how precariously placed I was to face up to it.

My accident had prevented me from taking the entrance exam to King’s College, Cambridge, where both Tom and my brother John had prospered notably on the academic front. The clout on the head at least saved me from failing that entrance exam, and King’s, in their infinite wisdom, took me blind. It took me two years to teach them the folly of their ways. Tom had always regarded Cambridge as the pinnacle of his education, and when King’s said they would take me in October that year, there was no alternative as far as he was concerned. With the advantage of hindsight, this was one decision he got wrong. He may have felt that if I had refused the invitation, it would not apply to the following year, and I might after all have had to take an exam which I would have failed by a good many lengths. Maybe, too, my outward appearance and the speed with which I had mended physically made him think that all would be well.

I did not suggest that I was not fit to go up immediately; in any case, at that time children by and large did what they were told over something like this, and I longed to get back into the mainstream of life. Nonetheless, the fact was that after 7 June I had been laid out for a long time, and the doctors had warned about brain bruising and its effects. Yet here I was, clocking in at Cambridge in the first week of October. It was hardly the moment for me to start a new life in much more of a man’s world, where I was likely to struggle on several fronts. Also, my one strong point, namely cricket, had been at least partly taken away, although I was certainly not ready to admit this. I am sure that Tom and Grizel must have agonised for ages about what I should do next. Maybe they felt it would be psychologically bad for me not to be allowed to carry on as normal.

I played a few games for Norfolk in August with little success, which was another thing I should never have done. I had become a less confident chap, and it was probably a bit much to expect me to hold my own in Minor County cricket so soon after my accident, even though I was desperately keen to play.

Although I was alarmed at the prospect of starting out in a new, more grown-up world, I was happy that Cambridge was to be my lot. Plans were laid, and I was allotted rooms in a lodging house in Newnham Terrace, run by a Mr and Mrs Hughes. She was large and tough, bossy and without much humour; he was small, with a faint moustache, and was generally a rather grey character who did precisely what he was told. I had a decent-sized sitting room and a small, pokey bedroom up two flights of gloomy stairs in a house that smelled mildly but permanently of stale cooked cabbage. It was into this far from prepossessing milieu that I was dumped by Tom and Grizel, not in the old Rolls, which had been put on ice, but in a new and sleek dark-green Jaguar which Tom sometimes liked and at other times felt rather ashamed of. His friends in Norfolk mischievously pulled his leg for buying such a fast car.

They decanted me into my rooms with a few pictures, which they helped me hang, and the odd suitcase. Then it was a quick peck on the cheek and they jumped into the Jaguar and drove off to Harwich, where they boarded the ferry to spend a few days in Holland to visit some antique-dealer friends in Amsterdam.

Thus began two years in which I never felt fully at ease, and which I did not enjoy as I should have done. National Service had not quite come to an end, and I had been heading for the Rifle Brigade, but when I had a medical the quacks all threw their hands in the air with horror when they heard the details of that encounter with the bus. Almost every other undergraduate had done National Service, and was two years older than me. I was just eighteen, and at that age two years is a lot. At school you were a trifle subservient to boys two years older than you, and at first I found it hard to realise that in spite of the age gap we were on level terms. Another sea-change was that I was expected to call my tutors and supervisors by their Christian names, which was difficult after ten years in the world of ‘sir’.

I was reading history, the subject I had specialised in at Eton after scraping through eight O-levels. Those, incidentally, were the last exams I ever passed in my life. King’s was an intensely academic college, and I didn’t fit in on that score. My supervisor, Christopher Morris, made some allowances because I played cricket (his son Charles had played against me while he was at Marlborough), but otherwise I was some way from being his favourite pupil. I had heard he took a dimmish view of Old Etonians, but I suspect the main reason was the awfulness of my weekly essays.

I soon found that I loved the social side of life at Cambridge, which, not unhappily, took me away from King’s. I became a member of the Pitt Club, which was founded in the memory of William Pitt the Younger. I would have loved to have eaten lunch and dinner there rather more often, but I was not as well off as some of my friends, and was forced to lunch and dine in College, where the standard fare still had a marked post-war flavour to it and it was much cheaper. For a number of my King’s contemporaries a non-academic, Old Etonian, Pitt Club member was not quite the flavour of the month either.

Anyway, life progressed, and Christopher Morris gave me a list of lectures I should attend. I started off by going with bated breath to Mill Lane to listen to John Saltmarsh’s opening discourse about Medieval European economic history. Saltmarsh himself looked discouragingly medieval. There was a good deal of facial hair in one place and another, a voice with a strong underlay of chalky, ecclesiastical tones, and if he had a sense of humour, it went way over my head. His mind was brimful of every aspect of the medieval condition, but sparkling stuff it was not. For about ten minutes I took feverish, indecipherable notes, but I was soon wondering what on earth I was doing there, being lectured to on a subject about which I knew nothing and cared even less. I saw a pretty bleak future for me with Medieval European history. I was too young, too naïve and too unsure of myself to be seriously rebellious, so I sat through a fair number of these sessions. I listened as attentively as I could to the offerings of a good many other lecturers too, who as far as I was concerned were also dreadful bores. It was not all bad though, for there was one don at King’s called Hibbert, with an agreeably unsolemn way of putting things across, who made American history come off the shelf at you. But that was about it.

I didn’t have a car of my own, or indeed a driving licence for much of my first year, but I found myself getting lifts up to London from various chums for deb dances, although I was not certain how or why the invitations kept turning up. I fell in love with just about every girl I met at these dances, but sadly I was no competition for the swaggering chaps who were three or four years older than me and had just come out of some famous regiment or other. I did get one or two of the crumbs that fell from the rich men’s tables, but that was about it. Generally speaking, of course, one’s expectations from sorties such as these at that time, even from the crumbs, were not anything like as high as they would have been a few years later, when the joys of what was to become a hugely permissive society were chucked into the mix.

As the summer of 1958 approached, I felt both excited and anxious. Cricket was very much on my mind, but so was the memory of that short one from Edward Scott. I went to Fenner’s early in April for net practice with the main candidates for a place in the university side that year, which included a formidable body of old Blues. The magisterial figure of Ted Dexter, the captain, towered over everything. He was tall and good-looking, but an aloof figure to those of us who were not his special friends. Watching him bat in the nets was extraordinary, and I needed no more than that to tell me I was entering a completely new cricketing world. There was Ossie Wheatley, tall and blond and a wonderful fast-medium seam bowler who went on to Warwickshire and Glamorgan; Michael James, always approachable and friendly and a fine striker of the ball, who in 1956 had scored a hundred as a freshman against the touring Australians; and Ian Pieris from Colombo, who bowled at a sharp and mean medium pace and was more than useful in the lower middle order, if a man of few words, to newcomers at any rate. He was to become an influential figure in the development of Sri Lankan cricket, and was always extremely hospitable whenever cricket took me there. Another old Blue was Ian McLachlan from Adelaide, the oldest son of a huge landowning family in South Australia, who in later years would take care of this visiting Pom with a nonchalant and generous ease. The most genial of men, and an opening batsman who like Dexter was at Jesus College, he was once twelfth man for Australia, but never made it beyond that. In the 1990s he would be a member of Malcolm Fraser’s Australian government, and he is still very much the patriarch of Adelaide and South Australia. Then came the also-rans, of whom I was one.

The two pros who came up to Cambridge to coach that year were the redoubtable Tom Graveney, ever elegant and charming, just like his batting, who made me feel very much at ease, and ‘Dusty’ Rhodes, the leg-spinner from Derbyshire who went on one England tour to the subcontinent, but never played a Test match. He was a small man, with a vermillion face which was not only the product of many days spent in the sun, and the ready humour I have always associated with wrist-spinners. Like Tom he was a good coach, and there were many happy hours spent just across neighbouring Parker’s Piece in the bar of the Prince Regent, where the two of them were billeted.

Perhaps the most important figure of all at Fenner’s was the groundsman-cum-coach-cum-general-bottle-washer who quite simply ran the place, the incomparable and ever-helpful Cyril Coote. He was a man of many parts, and to describe him as the groundsman, as many did, missed the point by miles. At first, the most noticeable thing about him was his pronounced limp, for he had been born with one leg significantly shorter than the other. No one could have made lighter of such a handicap as his limping stride took him all over the place, brimming with enthusiasm and encouragement. He turned himself into a considerable batsman, and opened the batting for Cambridgeshire for many years in the Minor County Championship, although my friends from the Norfolk side of that vintage remembered him more for his adhesiveness than his fluent strokeplay. No one I have ever met understood the mechanics of batting better than Cyril, and it was remarkable how clever he was at correcting faults in the nets. He was almost invariably right in his assessment of the characters of the players he coached, to whom he varied his approach accordingly. Half an hour in the nets with Cyril was worth a week with many others. He also had the reputation of being one of the best shots in Cambridgeshire, and any bird that had the luck to get past him once knew better than to try again. In addition to all this, he was a wonderful groundsman, and produced the superb batting pitches which in the fifties were the hallmark of Fenner’s. He was cheerful, extremely determined and uncompromisingly robust in all his opinions. There were no grey areas with Cyril.

I played a few matches for the university in my first year, without getting into the side. The delightful and charming Chris Howland filled the wicketkeeping spot. He was undoubtedly better than I was after that stupid accident, but I still have the feeling that if I had missed that wretched bus, it might have been the other way round. My reactions were a mess, and my keeping suffered more than my batting. It was only for one brief spell, on a tour of Barbados with Jim Swanton’s Arabs in 1967, that my wicketkeeping ever fully came back to me, but it was too late, for I had by then become a cricket watcher and writer, and had little time to play. I suppose all through my life I have suffered occasional pangs of what might have been, if only … But there was no future in that line of thought, and I was always anxious to get on with the present, even if that did sometimes mean flying by the seat of my pants.

My first-class career had an unusual start. May 1958 was an important month for me, what with exams, the cricket and keeping a watchful eye on the social scene in London, with deb dances and all that. My particular love at that time – and gosh, she was beautiful – had asked me as her partner to the tour de force of the London season, Queen Charlotte’s Birthday Ball. This was an invitation it was impossible to refuse, although as it happened I was well out of my depth by then, not that I knew it, and it wouldn’t have made the least difference whether I had gone or not. As luck would have it, two days before the party, the team for the university’s forthcoming game against Kent went up in the window of Ryder & Amies the outfitters on King’s Parade. The match began the day after Queen Charlotte’s, and of course sod’s law decreed that my name should have been down on the team sheet. Showing all the optimism – or maybe the insecurity and bloody stupidity – of youth, I attempted to fulfil both functions, which remains one of the craziest decisions that even I have ever made.

I caught the train up to London, and changed into a white tie and tails at my brother John’s mews cottage. But as soon as I turned up at the appropriate house and met the rest of the party, which was full of dashing cavalry officers and a fair sprinkling from the Brigade of Guards, I realised that any hopes I might have had in the direction of the beautiful deb had disappeared weeks ago. Anyway, off we all went to the Grosvenor House in Park Lane, where we danced a good deal of the night away. Eventually I bade farewell to all concerned and legged it to Liverpool Street station to catch the milk train back to Cambridge before taking on the might of Kent that same morning. As luck would have it, the first person I ran into on the platform was Ian McLachlan, who was being rested for the Kent game and who had also been to Queen Charlotte’s. As he was a good friend of Ted Dexter’s, the news of my nocturnal progress soon got about. Sod’s law again.

I took a taxi back to my lodgings, and after the briefest of lie-downs before a hurried bowl of Corn Flakes, I pedalled my way to Fenner’s in the hope of greater success than I had achieved at Grosvenor House. Dexter and Colin Cowdrey tossed, and we were batting, which was not quite the way I had planned things. Shortly before half past eleven, therefore, I was making my way, horribly nervously, to the crease as one of the openers. I don’t think I took the first ball, but very soon I was down at the business end preparing to face Alan Brown, a tall, blond fast bowler. I managed somehow to survive my first ball. The second was short, and lifted on me. I followed it up in front of my face, and it hit the splice of the bat and dollied up to give forward short leg the easiest catch in the history of cricket. I shuffled miserably off to the pavilion, and as I passed Cowdrey at first slip he said, ‘Bad luck,’ in the kindest of voices. It was no help. In the space of approximately fifteen hours I had played two and lost two. So much for youthful optimism. I would always have lost at Grosvenor House, but who knows, I might have made a better fist of things at Fenner’s. Some time later, I wondered if I might have hooked that ball if it had not been for my bang on the head. I made one in the second innings. What a start.

I opened again in the next game, against Lancashire, and somehow managed to put on 78 with Dexter for the second wicket. I spent my time at the non-striker’s end jumping out of the way of his thunderous straight drives, and at the other end playing and missing or edging the ball just short of the slips. Eventually, having made 41, I missed a low full toss from off-spinner Roy Tattersall which hit the outside of my leg-stump. Lancashire were captained by Cyril Washbrook, and their attack consisted of Brian Statham and Ken Higgs with the new ball, while the spin was provided by Tattersall and the left-armer Malcolm Hilton, who as a beginner in 1948 had famously dismissed Bradman. I faced a few overs from Statham, bowling almost off the wrong foot, and I don’t think he sent down a single ball I could leave alone. His accuracy was of course legendary, and at that time he and Fred Trueman formed one of England’s greatest pairs of opening bowlers.

A week or two later I was out first ball to the examiners, but as this was only a college exam and not part one of the tripos or anything particularly serious, King’s looked benevolently upon me, and I was not shown the door. After that I wiled away the summer working on the first floor of Simpson’s in Piccadilly. There was one moment of excitement, which proved to be a false dawn. The university were on tour, playing various counties before the University Match, and I received an SOS to go to Guildford and keep wicket against Surrey. I was mean-spirited enough to hope that Chris Howland had perhaps broken a finger, but when I clocked in at the Hog’s Back hotel I discovered that he was merely having a game off. So four days later I was asking Simpsons for my job back and it was Daks trousers and cashmere jackets all over again. I never quite got the hang of the measuring tape, but I was not too bad at the chat, which just about got me by.

I played a bit of cricket for Norfolk, without much success, before beginning my second year at Cambridge. Towards the end of the summer term I had arranged to move lodgings to a house at 3 St Clement’s Gardens, which was run by an elderly landlady called Agnes Smith, who must have been the best of her sort in the whole of Cambridge. Her cooked breakfasts were magnificent, her kindness, enthusiasm and humour simply remarkable, and she had a wonderful, chuckling laugh. One of my companions there was Christopher Mallaby, who went on to reach spectacular heights in the diplomatic profession: his last posting was as our man at the amazing embassy in Paris. Another benefit of St Clement’s Gardens, which didn’t altogether please my bank manager, was that it was just around the corner from the Pitt Club.

My second year was much more fun than my first, especially as far as the social whirl was concerned. As a result my overdraft increased inexorably, which irritated Tom, who found it difficult to understand how I could not live within the slender means he allowed me. We had a number of lively conversations on this subject. Academically, little had changed. My distaste for lectures grew worse, and alas, I did not work hard enough to get by. I did a bit better against the examiners, surviving almost a complete over and scoring what was known as ‘a Special’, which meant guilty unless there were extenuating circumstances. King’s made it clear that if I returned for a third year I would not be allowed to play cricket until after the exams, which didn’t seem much of a bargain to me. I turned it down, and had a sorrowful letter from John Raven, the college’s dark, angular, friendly, bespectacled head tutor, saying that perhaps it was time I moved on to the next stage in life – without attempting to specify what that might be.

By then, however, I had had one piece of great good luck. Cambridge was not as good a side in 1959 as it had been the year before, and I just managed to squeak in as one of the last two choices. I was probably the worst opening batsman to play for either Cambridge or Oxford since at least the Boer, and probably the Crimean, War. It was the most exciting experience though, and in a funny way the best education I could possibly have got when you consider what I was going to be doing for most of the rest of my life.

My two greatest memories of the cricket came when the home season at Fenner’s had ended. We went on tour, and late in June we arrived at Trent Bridge to play Nottinghamshire in a Saturday–Monday–Tuesday game; there was no play on Sunday in those days. Nottinghamshire were captained by Reg Simpson, who had opened the batting many times for England, and was a fine player of fast bowling. In order to try to drum up some interest in a game which was otherwise pretty small beer, Reg had got hold of Keith Miller, the great Australian all-rounder, to come and play as a guest star. He had retired three years earlier, and was now writing about the game for the Daily Express. He would prove to be one of the greatest men I ever met in the world of cricket, and we remained good friends until he died.

This must have been Keith’s last or last-but-one first-class match. We batted first, and he opened the bowling, slipping in some quickish, almost humorous, leg-breaks in the first over. I faced a couple of them. He then made a hundred in Nottinghamshire’s first innings, thanks partly to the fact that I dropped him off a skier at deep midwicket when he was on 65. There was nothing remotely solemn about his approach or his strokeplay. He hit the ball murderously hard, and talked happily away to everyone throughout his innings. More than forty years later I came across a completed scorecard from this game, and when I asked Keith to sign it, he scrawled across it without any prompting, ‘Well dropped, Henry.’

But the best part of Keith’s foray to Nottinghamshire happened off the field. He brought with him a former Miss Victoria called Beverley Prowse, and until I set eyes on her I had not realised that God made them that good. She sat in the ladies’ stand at straight deep midwicket for three days, and put us all off our stroke(s). Of course, she was the reason I dropped that skier. On the first evening Keith was a few not out at the close of play, and therefore had to be at the crease, booted and spurred, at half past eleven on the Monday morning. About twenty minutes before the start of play, Reg Simpson came into our dressing room, which was below the home dressing room, and asked if we had seen Keith. We had not. A couple of minutes later there was a crash against the door, which burst open, revealing a somewhat breathless Keith. ‘Come on, boys,’ he said. ‘I can’t get all the way up there. Lend me some kit.’ We did our best to fit him out, and I had the luck to help him off with his shirt. His back made a deep impression on me, and I could only deduce that Miss Prowse had long and powerful fingernails. I’d never seen such a sight. It was all part of life’s rich learning curve. It didn’t affect Keith in the least, and he went on to make that splendid hundred. Years later I asked him if he had remembered to slip a packet of emery boards into Miss Prowse’s Christmas stocking that year. He smiled, and looked mildly sheepish.

Ten days later we played MCC at Lord’s, in the game before the University Match. Denis Compton, who had retired from serious cricket year or two earlier, turned out for MCC in what must have been just about his last first-class match. In their first innings he made a quite brilliant 71. Despite his having had a kneecap removed in 1956, his footwork was remarkable, his improvisation astonishing. He is the only batsman I have ever seen who appeared to be able to hit every ball to any part of the ground he wished. His bat really was a magic wand.

I was so lucky to play against two such Adonises as Miller and Compton. Every girl in England and Australia was in love with one of them, and many with both. If it had not been for their joint efforts, I have no doubt that Brylcreem would have gone out of business. By then, of course, I knew that I would not be returning to Cambridge for my third year. But what memories I had to take ‘on to the next stage in life’. Tom and Grizel didn’t have the faintest idea what they were going to do with me, so they enlisted the help of Uncle Mark.

FIVE (#ulink_7cd2d3f9-7451-5a86-88cb-e7b75bb583c9)

Mad Dogs and Honeymoons (#ulink_7cd2d3f9-7451-5a86-88cb-e7b75bb583c9)

Grizel and her younger brother Mark were the joint products of my maternal grandparents, Kit and Jill Turner. My grandfather was a smallish man whom, if you were sensible, you treated with the greatest care. He had white hair when I knew him, and he spoke in a rasping voice, as if he was firing machine-gun bullets at all and sundry. He was easily irritated, and I remember him having no obvious love for children beyond what passed for duty. Before the war he had worked in the House of Commons where he became Deputy Clerk. He was, by all accounts, a difficult man to work with and did not make friends easily. This is probably why he never got the top job. He was also for time Clerk of the Pells at the Exchequer. Jill, who was close to Grizel, was a dear, but died of leukaemia while I was at Sunningdale. Mrs Fox told me the news, and made me sit down there and then and write letters to Grizel and to my grandfather, whose grief was prolonged, dreadful, and perhaps a trifle stage-managed. Kit loved Switzerland, and every day he received a copy of a Swiss newspaper written in German, a language he spoke fluently. He gave everyone in the family a crumpled pound note in a brown envelope for Christmas, although I think I probably started off with a ten-bob note which I am sure was just as crumpled. He even gave Uncle Mark, who had made a lot of money in the City, a pound note along with everyone else.

After Jill had died I never much enjoyed the visits to ‘Greenhedges’ in Sheringham’s Augusta Road, which was about as ghastly as it sounds. We would go over for lunch, and the food was some way from being haute cuisine. Mrs Fenn, the diminutive, bespectacled, straggly-haired, middle-aged cook, was an eccentric character. She spoke with a deep voice in the broadest of Norfolk accents, and had only a rudimentary knowledge of cooking, although she did make excellent marmalade. When I was very young I would have lunch in the kitchen with Nanny and Mrs Fenn. Afterwards I would be taken off to swim in the North Sea, which I loathed because it was always appallingly cold. I would put on my swimming trunks in the family bathing hut, which stank of stale seaweed and salt water. To get to the beach I had to walk down a huge bank of painful pebbles in my bare feet, which made the prospect of shuffling slowly out into the sea, getting colder as each step took me an inch or two deeper, seem even more appalling, but I was shamed into it. Sheringham put me off swimming for life, just as Sunningdale made sure that I never again ate porridge. The only time I enjoyed it at all was when, with the help of Nanny, who holding up her skirt was an inveterate paddler, I was allowed to catch shrimps. Pushing the shrimping net along in the sand where the water was about eighteen inches deep, I always netted a few, which were taken triumphantly back to Hoveton and boiled for tea. The North Sea also produced a good haul of cockles and winkles. Winkles were great fun, mainly because I used one of Nanny’s hatpins to winkle them out of those curious twisted shells. They were delicious, as long as you didn’t get a mouthful of sand at the same time.

My grandparents would always come over to Hoveton for lunch on Christmas Day, in their austere black saloon car with Kit at the helm. They arrived soon after we had got back from church, and we waited with bated breath for those crumpled one-pound notes. Kit, who just managed to reach his nineties, drove almost until the end with steady 35mph purpose. About twice a year he went to stay in Huntingdonshire with Aunt Saffron, my grandmother’s much younger sister, who was a great ally of Grizel’s. The old boy drove himself there and back. Once, well into the 1950s, he was asked why he always drove in the middle of the road. He dismissed the silly question with a brusque ‘In order to avoid the nails from the tramps’ boots.’ You could see where Grizel got some of it from.

During the Second War Uncle Mark had been one of the more important brains in the Department of Economic Warfare, for which he had been knighted. He was a delightful man, with an open, smiling, enthusiastic face, and I don’t think I ever saw him disgruntled about anything. Both he and Grizel were extremely bright, but their lives followed completely different paths. Grizel had thrown herself into being the country squire’s wife, while Mark had negotiated the City of London with remarkable success. Tom and Grizel were of the old school who felt that making money was intrinsically rather vulgar, and that while City slickers might be tolerated, their habits and customs should be viewed with a somewhat jaundiced eye. Uncle Mark drove a Bentley, which I think Tom and Grizel may have felt was a touch flashy. We always had fun when we came up to London, going to his house in Edwardes Square, and later on to the Grove in Highgate Village. Mark’s wife Peggy was great value too. A continuous smoker, she drank whisky, coughed and laughed raucously, and always entered into the spirit of everything. Like Uncle Mark, she was an inveterate bridge player.

With my spell at Cambridge being cut short, and my future career looking decidedly uncertain, Tom and Grizel turned to Uncle Mark as an act of last resort. Of course, he delivered. I was signed up for three years, starting in late September 1959, as a trainee in the merchant bank Robert Benson Lonsdale, of which he was a director. So began the most boring period of my life. Uncle Mark had done his best, but there was no way I would ever have made the grade as a merchant banker, or have wanted to. For two years I tooled off five days a week to Aldermanbury Square, where the headquarters of RBL were located, before I was shoved off to Fenchurch Street after RBL had merged with Kleinworts in 1961. I can honestly say that I never came within several furlongs of doing anything within those two years that remotely quickened the pulse. I had a room in a flat in Egerton Gardens in Knightsbridge, and the early-morning walk to Knightsbridge Underground station, the change of lines at Holborn and the ten-minute walk to Aldermanbury Square still haunt me. I wore a stiff collar and a three-piece suit, carried a rolled umbrella, and topped it off with a bowler hat. I must have looked the most preposterous of oafs. I suppose that if I had kept my hand out of the till (which I did), and they had found me some backwater where I could do no harm, I might have made lots of money, with a bonus or two thrown in, who knows? But it wasn’t for me. Living like that for five days a week in order to enjoy the other two seemed the wrong way round, and a lousy way to spend my life.