The Genius in my Basement. Alexander Masters
up sewage brands like Heineken or Budweiser, and brew your own beer using oysters and wild rice.
22 February: ‘Say no to plastic bags.’ There are now 46,000 pieces of plastic waste in every square mile of the world’s oceans. In Australia, eighty million plastic bags are added every year to the mist of garbage that floats across the scrub there. Cows eat them and die; then the sack re-emerges from the rotting flesh, is cleaned off by rain, scooped back up by wind, and bundled along to be eaten by another cow: it is, biologically speaking, a protovirus. Simon is therefore a force for salvation. He keeps these viruses out of reach. If it weren’t for him, thousands of extra plastic bags from the Excavation would be tumbling through our fields and woodlands.
1 May: ‘Join the sex workers’ union.’ Fight to give prostitutes access to health care, safe places to work and legal support against rapists and pervy Italian prime ministers. ‘Membership is free.’
‘Michael Norton is a one-man “ideas factory”,’ bellows the Guardian.
‘You know, he knows when he comes to dinner here dressed in a dirty T-shirt that he’s doing wrong,’ says Michael, stooping under the lintel of his cottage door (he lives in Hampstead, but the house looks as if it’s been airlifted from beside a village brook in Hampshire) and balancing a tea tray. ‘But there’s no point telling him. You’d physically have to burn his old clothes before he’d get rid of them.’
He’s brought a photograph album into the garden along with the Victoria sponge cake. The album’s green, with a cushioned cover, from 1954, and it’s all the paperwork Michael has that includes Simon. They are not a sentimental family.
‘That’s my hand at the edge there, sorting out his food, even at that age. We’re at our summer bungalow in Ferring. This is David …’. David is a friend who later murdered his wife by bludgeoning her to death with a champagne bottle:
‘And here’s Simon aged … oh dear, not a pleasant-looking young man’:
‘Our mother doted on Simon. She was really proud that he was a genius. I don’t think she ever understood why he didn’t sustain that. I mean, he sustained it in his brain, but why is he not a professor? Why has he not got a proper job?’
‘He’s too peculiar,’ I suggest.
‘He’s not that peculiar,’ retorts Michael sharply, catching me out, correctly, in one of the phrases I have lately come to use about Simon without thinking. ‘There are lots of peculiar people in Cambridge. Half the dons that I had as a student there were peculiar. There must be somewhere that would give him a home.’
He taps his china cup of elderflower irritably.
‘All I can say is that since our mother died, Simon’s become a different person. I noticed that almost immediately. He’s got more sociable. When he comes to dinner, he’s much more at ease. Instead of sitting in a corner reading a book as he did when she was alive, he joins in. I’ve bought him three clean shirts which hang in a wardrobe here, for him to pick up whenever he comes to London.
‘I think my biggest triumph is persuading him to get rid of his money. Did you know, he gives £10,000 a year to campaign against cars?’
Francis Norton, Simon’s middle brother, works here …
… in a jewellery shop.
Francis brings in the family money. The company, founded by Simon’s great-grandfather, is the oldest family-run antique jewellery business in the world, patronised by the Queen, pop stars, fringe aristocracy, footballers (if they know what they’re about) and all London people with 100-acre second homes in Wiltshire.
Ten years before Simon was born, S.J. Phillips established itself as the epitome of Englishness by taking part in a famous wartime deception called Operation Mincemeat, later dramatised in the film The Man Who Never Was.
In April 1943, a Spanish fisherman discovered the decomposing corpse of a man floating off the coast of Andalusia. Documents on the body identified him as Major (Acting) William Martin of the Royal Marines. He was handcuffed to a briefcase, which contained a bunch of keys, an expired military pass, two passionate love letters, a picture of a woman in a swimming costume (‘Bill darling, don’t let them send you off into the blue the horrible way they do’), a £53 bill for an engagement ring and a letter from Lord Louis Mountbatten to General Alexander revealing the plans for the Allied invasion of Europe.
Spain, though neutral, supported a very efficient network of German agents. They soon found out about the drowned Marine, got hold of the briefcase and carefully extracted the top-secret letter from its envelope. The British had made the greatest intelligence blunder of the Second World War. With ample time to prepare his defences, Hitler now knew that the Allies were going to invade Europe through Sardinia and the Peloponnesus: the Germans transferred the 1st Panzer Division to Greece and started laying minefields.
It wasn’t until the British got the corpse of Major (Acting) Martin back, a fortnight later, that they knew the Nazis had definitely fallen for the trick. British Intelligence had folded the fake letter to Mountbatten only once before sliding Martin’s dead body into the sea from a submarine off the coast. When the body and effects were returned, investigators spotted under
Excerpt from an interview with Francis and his wife, Amanda
Amanda: When I met the Norton family, I thought they were all so bizarre.
Francis (nodding): My mother was very, very old-fashioned. It was, you know, ‘It’s four o’clock in the afternoon, you can go see your mother.’ We absolutely adored her.
Amanda: They were just so Victorian. I’d never met anything like it in my life.
Francis: My father always said his ideal was to have a tail-coated butler behind every chair.
Amanda: I’ve never known parents who were so unphysical. In the morning Helene, their mother, would go off and do her charity work, then come home and have a long cigarette, put on her kaftan for the afternoon, and sit there doing the crossword puzzle.
Francis: Terribly unfulfilled.
Amanda: I remember once – this is how old-fashioned they were – I’d just had my son Alexander, he was about nine months old, and Dick [Simon and Francis’s father] was standing there, with the table laid with all the silver, and Domingo the butler hovering around. And Dick looks at me and says, ‘Amanda, darling, has Alexander started masticating yet?’
a microscope that the letter had been carefully refolded, creating a second crease.
A month later, Britain and America began their assault 300 miles west of the location indicated in the letter, though Sicily.
S.J. Phillips, Simon’s family firm, provided the £53 engagement-ring bill – it was seen as the touch that the Germans would regard as unfakably, quintessentially English.
Francis is Simon’s saviour. It’s because Francis keeps the family firm alive and profitable that Simon has never had to have a job or a mortgage and, despite using seventeen different variants of bus, train and visitor-attraction discount cards, doesn’t actually need a single one of them.
A mild, self-effacing, apparently undogmatic man (I’ve met him only twice), Francis lives on the other side of Hampstead from brother Michael, and has the talcum-powder-dusted look of the very rich. He is an accomplished cellist.
Every year Francis or Michael invite Simon to their house for Passover; and every year Simon arrives with his shoelaces