Memoirs

‘It would be no good,’ he said. ‘There are twelve boys in our dormitory. Each has a position in the order. “Y” – the boy who was being bullied – is twelfth. You and I are about eight and nine. We do not have the strength to intervene. If we do, we shall join “Y” in being bullied; it will do him no good and we shall then be bullied ourselves.’ I recognized the truth in Bishop’s logic and, I regret to say, accepted the realities of our political situation.

The winter passed. The spring of 1940 came and with it the German invasion of Norway, the attack on Belgium and the Netherlands, the battle for France, the fall of the Chamberlain Government, the appointment of Winston Churchill as Prime Minister. While these great events were happening, one of the boys in our house had gone down with polio; it was a mild case and he survived with little or no disability. But we were all put in quarantine, and encouraged to stay outdoors. So I heard of most of these events, and Churchill’s early speeches as Prime Minister, sitting in the bright sunshine on Clifton’s Under Green, listening to a junior master’s portable radio.

In the West Country, life went on surprisingly normally during what we all knew was an ultimate struggle for survival. There was a German daylight raid on the docks at Avonmouth. A detachment of the Coldstream Guards, having just been taken off the beaches of Dunkirk, spent a few weeks at Midsomer Norton. We felt the safer for their presence. We all followed the daily scores of German aircraft shot down in the Battle of Britain. We now know that they were exaggerated. The fear of German invasion gradually receded. Throughout this time my basic expectation did not change. I thought we would win the Battle of Britain, I believed in Winston Churchill, I did not expect an invasion to succeed, I looked to the United States as ‘the arsenal of democracy’. I felt confident that we would win in the end, as we had in 1918 and 1815.

My American aunts sent a Western Union cable in June inviting me to go to America; it even, touchingly, promised that I would be able to continue with the classics. I was rather excited by the idea, which might well have changed my life. I would, in any case, have been at greater risk from torpedoes crossing the Atlantic, than from bombs if I stayed at home. My parents took the view that they were not entitled to send me, or my sisters, if the other people of Temple Cloud could not send their children. In any case they believed in keeping the family together. I am sure that they were right, but I have always felt grateful for the invitation.

We went back to Clifton for the autumn term of 1940. A new brick and concrete shelter had been built for us at the end of Under Green; it looked like an oversized public lavatory. Thirty boys from Poole’s House slept there every night, in bunks. I did not find it disagreeable; it was certainly warmer than the dormitory.

The German night attacks on the larger cities outside London started in November. Coventry was the first to be hit. Bristol came next. We were bombed in two raids, with a week between them. On the first occasion the bombs did not come very close to our shelter, though it was a noisy night and there were large fires in the central area. My parents, in Cholwell, could see the glow of the fires, and heard the bombers passing overhead. The Heinkel bombers had a particularly penetrating, intermittent drone.

The second night was more frightening. As the sirens sounded, the matron suggested that we should all say a prayer. I suggested that we should say our normal grace, ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful’!

The Luftwaffe used at that time to drop their bombs in sticks of four or five. In the middle of the raid, we heard a stick of bombs moving towards our shelter, which would certainly not stand a direct hit. The first bomb was loud enough, the second louder, the third louder still. The fourth was loudest of all, in fact about 50 yards away, and threw stones and earth on top of the shelter. It was apparent that the stick of bombs was falling in a straight line. If there was a fifth, it would land on top of us. We waited for it. It did not come. Although I was to be bombed again later in the war, in Somerset and London, that was the nearest I came to being killed.

After the previous night of the Bristol Blitz, my parents had thought of taking me away from Clifton. There was no question about that the second time, for them or for the school. I was driven out to Cholwell by one of the housemasters, Mr Hope Simpson, on his motorbike. We passed the burnt-out churches and the broken glass. My father had driven in but missed us on the way. The school evacuated itself to Cholwell House, sleeping on mattresses. The boys ate us out of the drums of Canadian honey which my mother, ever mindful of the Irish famine, had laid up in the cellar. After a few days most of them dispersed to their homes, and remain only as names in the Cholwell visitors’ book. My last two terms at Clifton Preparatory School were spent at Butcombe Court, a pleasant country house about ten miles from Cholwell, within bicycling distance on Sundays.

In late May 1941 I was in my last term at Clifton Preparatory School when the German battleship Bismarck sunk the Hood in the mid-Atlantic. Only three of the Hood’s crew of 1421 survived. My mother and I were taken into Temple Meads Station in Bristol by my father; we went by train to Windsor where I was about to sit the Entrance Scholarship for Eton. Most public schools were by that time sending their scholarship papers to be taken at the preparatory schools, but Eton’s only concession to the problems of wartime travel was to put up the scholarship candidates in the boys’ houses. My mother stayed at the White Lion in the High Street; I was sent to Lyttelton’s House.

The three days of the scholarship examination were interwoven with reports of the pursuit of the Bismarck by the Royal Navy. On the last evening, the Bismarck was torpedoed from the air and sank the following day. The Hood had been avenged. I found the exam papers rather too difficult for me. My Latin, thanks to my father, was tolerable, though hardly up to scholarship standards; my Greek was negligible; my French was of Common Entrance standard; my mathematics was scarcely up to that. However, I enjoyed the history paper and romped away with the essay, which was set on Satan’s fall from Heaven as described in Milton’s Paradise Lost. It was just my subject:

Him the Almighty Power

Hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky

With hideous ruin and combustion down

To bottomless perdition.

I did not need to be asked twice to describe the fires of Hell. Lyttelton later told my mother that my essay was the best of them all.

Before we went back he had a long conversation with her, which she recounted to me on the train. He did not know whether I would get the scholarship; no Eton scholarship had ever been given to a candidate as weak in the classics. In any case, he thought that I would find the atmosphere of College too tough. He said he would be very pleased to take me into his house, whether I got the scholarship or not.

We discussed this with my father when we got home. I was also entered for the Charterhouse scholarship. My father suggested that I should go to Eton if I got the Eton scholarship, go to Charterhouse if I got the Charterhouse scholarship, and go to Lyttelton’s House if I got neither. I was happy with that proposal. The Charterhouse scholarship would pay half my school fees, and I liked the idea of being a scholar. On the other hand, I much liked the atmosphere of Eton, and had been impressed by Lyttelton himself. I had even been measured for my top hat.

A few days later we received a sympathetic letter from Lyttelton saying that I had not been awarded a scholarship. Everything therefore depended on the Charterhouse exam. Fifty years later my son, Jacob, who had himself gone to Eton, heard a somewhat different story from a visiting Eton master in Hong Kong.

By this account, the 1941 examination was the last time the Provost of Eton played a part in deciding who was to receive a scholarship. The provost was Lord Quickswood, earlier Lord Hugh Cecil, son of the Lord Salisbury who was Queen Victoria’s last Prime Minister. The provost, it is said, objected on quite other grounds. He did not take his stand on the fact that I knew little Latin and less Greek, true though that was. He argued that I should not have an Eton scholarship because I was a Roman Catholic. The examiners wanted to award a scholarship; the provost prevailed; no provost was ever again invited to join in the scholarship proceedings. No Roman Catholic was ever barred again.

In the meantime, my papers were written at Butcombe Court and sent to Charterhouse. They followed the same pattern; an excellent essay, good on history, weak in Latin and French, negligible in Greek and Mathematics. Indeed, in one mathematics paper I got three marks out of a hundred. I do not know why I was so bad at elementary mathematics since in my adult life I have used them more than most people do.

Robert Birley was the Headmaster of Charterhouse. The examiners spent the Friday discussing the various papers. They found it easy to award the first scholarship, which went to Simon Raven. They awarded ten others. They came to mine, and the weight of feeling was that my classics and maths were simply not up to scholarship standard. Birley, who was himself a historian, wanted to get a potential historian into the list. On Friday evening, he was not getting his own way. If they had decided then, I would not have got the scholarship.

Robert Birley was, however, a skilled chairman of a committee. He used a device which I remember using later on a critical occasion as Chairman of the Arts Council. Because he realized that he couldn’t get the decision he wanted, he postponed it. On the following day, the examiners met again. I was nodded through for the twelfth scholarship. When the telegram arrived I was delighted.

There is no doubt that Lord Quickswood’s intervention and Birley’s persuasiveness changed my life. I know that I would have enjoyed Eton, and would have been happy in Lyttelton’s House, possibly happier than I was at Charterhouse. Indeed, I might well have been too happy, too much of an Etonian; Charterhouse presented me with greater challenges. The difference extends beyond the schools themselves, to my Oxford life, to my career. If I had gone to Eton, I doubt if I would have gone on to Balliol; I might have opted for a more sympathetic political environment at Oxford. I would probably have found my political progress easier; there were plenty of Old Etonian chairmen of safe Conservative seats in the 1950s, though few are left now.

I am grateful to Charterhouse for many things. But I felt more at home at Eton, both in 1941 and later when my son Jacob was enjoying his time there. Perhaps the real advantage of going to Charterhouse was that it did not have the same dangerous charm for someone of my interests and personality. If I had entered the world of Eton, the world of Luxmore’s garden and the College Library, of the cricket fields, of Thomas Gray and Horace Walpole, I might well have found it too much of a lifelong lotus land. Cyril Connolly, with whom I was later to work on the Sunday Times, regarded nostalgia for Eton as one of ‘The Enemies of Promise’. It was so for him, it might well have been so for me. Jacob has become a loyal Old Etonian, and Eton suited him extremely well, but he did not become addicted to its ancient charm. For myself, I think Charterhouse was probably for the best, but there were aspects of Eton, including the personality of Lyttelton himself, a remarkable and scholarly housemaster, which I would clearly have enjoyed very greatly. In the words that Senator Bill Bradley used of basketball, Charterhouse did ‘teach me to use my elbows’.

Chapter Four

A Peak in Darien

As soon as I knew how to read, I delighted in reading. I still have the copy of H. G. Wells’ Outline of History which Anne bound in a canvas jacket in 1934. It is a chunky book, of some six hundred pages. I may never have finished it, but I waded through several hundred pages. My first fascination was with the dinosaurs, but I was also interested in history as such. Before reading Wells, I had read Our Island Story, which was very imperialist, and Dickens’ Child’s History of England, which was very Protestant. I responded to his account of the Reformation by becoming equally partisan on the Catholic side. It was the Catholic martyrs I cared about; Bloody Mary became Good Queen Mary. King Henry VIII I abominated, as I still do. For Queen Elizabeth I, I had mixed feelings.

Literature forms the architecture of the mind. Shakespeare came first, even before I could read. In the winter of 1931, my mother was reading Macbeth with my sisters. We were in the nursery at Cholwell, with a fire in the little Victorian stove. I was three and a half years old, and had not yet learned how to read.

To my sisters’ irritation, my mother insisted that I should join in the reading. She would read a line, and I would repeat it after her. My sisters felt that this procedure caused undue delay, and that Lady Macbeth was too substantial a part to be given to a three-year-old; they would then have been nine and ten years old.

I can remember moments of the reading. Most vividly, I remember the scene in Macduff’s castle, when Macbeth sends his murderers to kill Lady Macduff and their son. I was young enough to identify with the son. When the murderer calls his father a traitor, the boy has the splendid line: ‘Thou ly’st, thou shag-hair’d villain’. I liked that, and I admired the courage of his last words: ‘He has kill’d me, mother; run away, I pray you’.

However, most of the lines I remember from that first reading come from my own part, that is from Lady Macbeth herself. My sisters thought it comic when I repeated the lines:

I have given suck; and know

How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me:

I would, while it was smiling in my face,

Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,

And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn, as you

Have done in this.

I had to ask what the words ‘I have given suck’ meant, and remember my mother explaining to me about breastfeeding, a practice I had only abandoned some three years before.

In this speech, Lady Macbeth is spurring her husband on to the murder of the old King, Duncan. Macbeth interjects ‘If we should fail’ and receives the reply:

We fail.

But screw your courage to the sticking-place,

And we’ll not fail.

This led to a discussion of Lady Macbeth’s response. How did she say ‘We fail’? Was it scornfully, as though failure was impossible, or was it fatalistically, as a consequence to be faced? In 1915 as a young actress in Margaret Anglin’s company, my mother had discussed this point with old English actors in the cast. Beatrice herself was still a junior; Margaret Anglin was playing Lady Macbeth; Tyrone Power Senior was playing Macbeth; Tyrone Power Junior was being dandled on Beatrice’s knee, as his father learned his lines. Tyrone Power Senior always found it difficult to remember his lines, but, like his son, he was a fine figure of a man, in the old Irish style.

The English actors in the cast opted for the fatalistic reading ‘We fail’, which should be said with a falling tone in a matter-of-fact way. That, they had been told by old actors of their youth, was how Sarah Siddons had pronounced it, and she was the greatest Lady Macbeth the English stage could remember. So I played the line in the Sarah Siddons tradition. My sisters were much better than I was in the role of the witches, and danced gleefully around the nursery table.

I was particularly close to my mother because when the slump came, in 1930, my parents decided that they couldn’t afford a nanny, so my mother completely took over looking after me. I was two. I spent a great deal of time with her, the two of us mostly just conversing with each other. It fell to my sisters – Elizabeth was seven years older than me and Anne six years older – to get me up and dress me which was a chore they got very bored with. I had one lovely month when my American granny, Granny Warren, came over and stayed. She was in fact dying of cancer – although she kept her illness from us all. She took over the job of dressing me in the morning and I would rush along to her bedroom and she would talk to me about her childhood in the America of the 1860s.

My mother was a hugely entertaining person to be with. She had a perfect voice, a sense of timing and a sense of occasion. She had the temperament of a star, but not of a star who made excessive claims for herself. She had wit and intelligence and energy and I remember her saying she couldn’t understand people being bored because she’d never been bored in her life.

As an actress my mother had considerable dress sense and awareness. She dressed in the smart, understated American style of the 1930s which was made fashionable in Britain by Mrs Simpson. She didn’t spend a great deal of money on her clothes. When she got married she’d been given an allowance for her clothes, by her father, in American Trading Company preference shares. But, about a year later, the American Trading Company – under a callow new proprietor – lost most of its money and stopped paying even preference dividends. My mother felt that she had had money to buy clothes in the past but that she didn’t any more. She was well dressed but thrifty.

My mother still went out on the English countryside routine of ‘making calls’. The rules still really came from the carriage days: you knew the people living in the big house of their village within a seven-mile radius and you called on them – you called on houses rather than people. Therefore you had a secondary acquaintance with people who weren’t in a seven-mile radius of your house but were in a seven-mile radius of a house on which you called. The calls were made in the afternoon and occasionally I was taken as a child with my mother to call. My mother had been fascinated by and had mastered the whole etiquette of calls and how Somerset ladies spoke to each other. She observed, as an actress, how old Lady Waldegrave used to talk. If you were visiting Lady Waldegrave, she would say, as the hostess, ‘How kind of you to come.’ And you would reply, ‘How kind of you to ask me.’ Beatrice discovered that she could play the Somerset ladies role better than the Somerset ladies themselves.

We were to read Shakespeare again as a family during the war. I remember that we read the English history plays, which seemed to have most to say about the dire circumstances of 1940 and 1941. Shakespeare always teaches the Churchillian doctrine: ‘In victory magnanimity, in defeat, defiance’. We read Richard II, which contains the great patriotic speech ‘This Sceptered Isle’ of old John of Gaunt, ‘time honoured Lancaster’. We also read King John, a much underrated play. I read the part of the Bastard, which also has a great patriotic speech, well suited to the worst days of the Second World War:

This England never did, nor never shall

Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,

But when it first did help to wound itself.

Now these her princes are come home again,

Come the three corners of the world in arms,

And we shall shock them: Nought shall make us rue,

If England to itself do rest but true.

In 1943 and 1944, my mother took me to see John Gielgud, first in Macbeth and then in Hamlet. London was covered by the blackout, and the plays started early, so that the audiences could get home in safety. Gielgud was not, by his own high standards, a particularly memorable Macbeth; he lacked the physical characteristics for the part.

Gielgud’s Hamlet was another matter. No single actor can capture all the aspects of Hamlet’s personality. No doubt Gielgud overemphasized the intellectual and sensitive Hamlet, at the expense of the active young Prince, but his was the most moving Hamlet I have seen.

It was Shakespeare who framed my mind, in terms of my vision of the world, before my experience of adult life had set in. He gave me a sense of the drama of life, and its poetry; he gave me a sense of the variety of personality and of the range from good to evil. I was fond of the wise old men, of Cardinal Wolsey, of Polonius. Indeed, my critics might think that I have made a living out of playing Polonius on the public stage; I am particularly aware of his inability to see what a comic character he was making of himself.

I did not see Hamlet as a role model, or Julius Caesar, or any of the English kings. I knew already that I was not destined to play Romeo. It was, rather, the great speeches which gave me my picture of the world. The ancient Greeks were brought up in the same way on Homer. I do not suppose many of them thought they would grow up to be a second Achilles; it was the total effect of the poetry that gave them access to a Homeric consciousness.

In wartime, one needs to turn to great literature. Shakespeare gave that, and he also gave expression to a patriotism which makes other patriotic verse sound like a penny whistle. In peacetime, one needs to understand the world as Shakespeare sees it with affection but without illusion, with caution but without timidity, with realism as well as idealism, with humility as well as ambition, with a certain melancholy. I certainly took my politics from Shakespeare. I have never doubted that he was the leading genius of the English nation. He taught me to think, to feel, to understand and to place myself as appropriately as I might in the drama of life. Like him my politics have been rooted in the human need for order and harmony. Like him I hope for the best but fear the worst. Like him I have a Catholic nostalgia for a lost past: ‘Bare ruin’d choirs where once the sweet birds sang’.

It was in the first winter of the war, in January 1939, that I came across the next book which changed my life. I had caught a bad dose of influenza. The local doctor prescribed the new sulfa drug, M & B 693, which was later to be replaced by penicillin. I had to stay in my bedroom for two or three weeks. We still had a young housemaid, though she soon vanished, and I remember her coming in early in the morning to lay and light the bedroom fire, a luxury which lasted in English country houses down to – but seldom beyond – the outbreak of the Second World War.

As I was recovering, I wanted to find a book to read, so I went down to the Cholwell library. There I found a set of James Boswell’s Life of Johnson, which had been published by the Oxford University Press in the 1820s. I could only find the first three out of the four volumes.

I lay in bed for the next ten days, entranced and delighted by Boswell. Here the romantic lines of Keats really come close to it; Boswell’s Life of Johnson had on me the effect that Chapman’s Homer had on him:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men

Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

There were many things I found attractive about Boswell’s Life. I immediately came to share his hero-worship of Samuel Johnson:

To write the life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others, and who, whether we consider his extraordinary endorsements, or his various works, has been equalled by few in any age, is an arduous, and may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task.

I slipped easily into the notion that I was reading the life of a congenial, great man.

Johnson is also a moralist; which is a dangerous thing to be, because it is hard to make moral judgements without becoming something of a prig and a hypocrite. To Boswell, himself constantly in a state of moral torment and doubt, it was the confidence of Johnson’s morality which was most attractive. I do not think that was so in my case; no doubt I have myself been too self-confident in making moral judgements. I felt that Johnson was right to consider moral issues as essential to life. At ten I wanted to learn how to make sound moral judgements, and I wanted to know how to write good English prose. I thought Johnson could help me to learn both those things.