Conspiracy of Secrets. Bobbie Neate
in lowered tones after we left their stores. Even then I felt everybody else knew more about the truth than I did. It was not until I started my investigations that I was to find out more.
When I was five or six, I started school. Byron House was based in a rambling Edwardian house with extensive grounds. Every morning we filed into the hall so that Miss Gimmingham, the headteacher, could take the register. Later on, if ever I was in doubt about having a ‘real’ father, I recalled my previous position in the register. Surely my surname had started with a ‘B’. The voice of my teacher was an auditory reminder that I had once been at the top of the school register and now I had plummeted to the nether reaches of those children whose surnames began with ‘S’. I kept the recollection to myself. There was nobody in whom I could confide. Stepfather controlled us with the divide-and-rule principle, so I felt unable to talk with my brothers and sister.
Stepfather was frightening. He was so severe I never even dreamed of disobeying him, even in the smallest way. The perplexing problem was that sometimes he tried to be nice. Looking back, I guess this was only when my mother was around. He could be brutal in his comments. He soon put a stop to my noisier games and banned me from my favourite sport of Grand Prix circuit antics on my small bike in the garden. He certainly did not want to hear any of us and if we hid ourselves away he was more than content. My brother was turned out of his large bedroom and put into a box-sized room so that Stepfather could have an upstairs study. There he hid away for most of the day, appearing only for meal times. Sometimes I could hear the tip-tap of his Olivetti typewriter but more often than not I heard popular music of the time blaring out, ‘Moon River’ being one of his favourites. Years later he shut himself away in his room with the telephone.
Stepfather’s study was his sanctuary but he also used this private space to entrap the few visitors he had. There was something disturbing about that one step into his room. I had to pluck up courage to cross that imaginary boundary and sometimes I was asked to lurk. Guests were always deferential. Stepfather did not have friends. As they entered his study they were instructed to view the series of golf books he had written, then they were guided to admire the garish colours of the dust jackets of his motor-racing titles. Next, the visitors were asked to turn their backs on the shelves and marvel at his gallery of black-and-white snaps that were placed on the wall facing the door. They were his celebrity close-ups. Most of them also featured Stepfather. I remember the close-up of W. H. Auden, whose face was grooved by deep facial lines, and his pride when he added Elizabeth Taylor to his wall. Then there were Cecil Beaton, Orson Welles, Harold Macmillan and Gilbert Murray. I knew nothing about the people, and his interest in photography sent shivers down my spine, so most of the images remain grainy in my mind.
But I have a clearer memory of his haughty voice repeating the names of the people he was meant to know: Lord Birkenhead, Jo Grimond, Eric Lubbock, the Aga Khan, the Du Maurier family, T. E. Lawrence, Duncan Sandys, Douglas Fairbanks, a man whose surname was Masterman, Oswald Mosley and the Mitfords, Lord Beveridge, Malcolm Muggeridge, Gilbert Murray and somebody strangely called Trevelyan. (We will meet some of these characters later.) He had repeated these names so often, how could I ever forget them? I wasn’t interested in the fame of the people. I was fascinated by their nomenclature. Augustus John: fancy having the surname ‘John’! I thought. The other name that amused me was Bertrand Russell. I was interested in its rhythm, but it stands out in my memory because Stepfather liked to call each male acquaintance by just his surname. So for years I thought Bertrand Russell was a double-barrelled name. Surnames such as Pitt Rivers and Goodenough amused me. Then there was the fascinating name that Stepfather always mentioned when he came home from London, which conjured up all sorts of geographical images: Beaverbrook.
Friends were something our family did not do easily. My mother was a social individual, but when she married Louis nobody dropped round. The blue gate outside our house became a kind of barrier to deter guests. If a neighbour was brave enough to open the gate and walk through the courtyard, more often than not Stepfather would get to the door before my mother and the poor visitor would leave crestfallen having had a thorough grilling. My friends suffered the same experience. Even when invited they were sent away from the front door without explanation. Often I never knew anything about their humiliation until years later.
My earliest experience of friends being banned from our house was around the time of my birthday. My mother enjoyed planning my party. She was adept at organising games. But as each birthday approached I became increasingly worried about whom I would be allowed to invite because in previous years I had cringed with embarrassment. Stepfather rudely forbade the same particular names. There was something strange about it. Even in those days I asked myself if it was something to do with his secret previous life.
My party always came to a nervous end, when the doorbell started to ring and other parents came to collect their children, my mother began to change character. I picked up vibes that she was embarrassed in some way. She stood uncomfortably on the threshold with the women who had once been her friends before Louis came into her life. To me as a little girl it all seemed so contrived. As I grew older things did not change. Stepfather’s attitude to my friends was frankly rude. I lost precious pals and potential boyfriends. It was too scary to challenge him.
Thursday had always been a special day in my mother’s life – it was the day she spent in London. As a treat I would be allowed to go too. It was always the same routine but the success of each trip depended on Stepfather’s mood. As we drove down Park Lane I used to get butterflies in my stomach: what would happen when we reached the Dorchester’s forecourt? Often there was a fuss, as Louis demanded to take one of the bays right outside the hotel entrance. We sat in the car as Stepfather spoke with the smart commissionaires with their pristine white gloves. They would shake hands and then, smiling broadly, one of them would direct my mother into one of the six prime spots. As time went on Louis did not even pretend to use the hotel, for, after leaving the car, he immediately called upon the same commissionaire to call a cab and we went off to lunch at Bendicks coffee bar in Wigmore Street. After the meal two taxis would be called and we went our separate ways, Louis to meet his publisher and my mother to the salon in Knightsbridge created by Mr Teasy Weasy.
As a treat Mum might arrange to meet Stepfather at five outside Fortnum’s Quick Bar, but things would often go wrong. He would be late. We would wait for so long that my mother would suffer the indignity of the shop closing behind our backs as the assistants pushed us further away from their steps. Even then I suspected he liked to play ‘waiting games’ with those he could.
As I grew older the Dorchester Hotel featured more and more in Louis’s life. He could not resist repeating every so often that in his previous life he had lived permanently there and that he had driven around in a Bentley. Again, to me as a child, this seemed an odd boast, as he never drove anywhere. Occasionally he went to London on the train and took lunch in the Dorchester’s Grillroom, usually with a publisher he called ‘Collins’. In later years there was no doubt in my mind that Louis had a passion verging on obsession about the Dorchester Hotel. He insisted Mum’s car use one of its six precious parking bays for the whole of Thursdays. He also tried to use the hotel lobby as his own personal space – and often succeeded – and was constantly trying to convince us that the new chef, the head waiter or the manager was a personal friend.
Then, when I was much older and he was allowed to take more and more control of the motor-racing team of BRM, he held his meetings in the hotel’s long elegant lounge. Then he progressed to hiring one of the hotel suites. My mother was very against this squandering of money and she persuaded him to lean on the hotel management to bend their strict rules. He did indeed exert his power over the manager and he allowed him to hire the suite by the day. But this did not stop his continuous boasting to the racing circuit that he had a permanent suite in the Dorchester Hotel.
It’s difficult to work out how old I was when I think about some events in my early life, but I do remember Coronation Day in 1953. It was the first time I can recall having Louis Stanley around. I was five. The royal day proved for our family, as for many in the nation, to be the incentive to buy a television set. My mother bought everything for the house. He never paid for anything.
I clearly remember the excitement of watching the engineer set up the strange-looking contraption. There