Fault Lines. David Pryce-Jones
when his brother Adrian was born and the difference in age guaranteed an unequal relationship. Less was expected of Adrian, he did not write poems or play the piano, he was allowed to go to a prep school. The education of their two sons cost more than the parents could easily afford. Although much decorated and mentioned in dispatches in the war, Harry had not risen above the rank of colonel. Seconded to Field Marshal Haig’s staff quartered in Montreuil, of all places, he had lost seniority. Between the wars, he still had a paid job and an office in the Duke of York’s Headquarters in Chelsea, dealing with the recruitment and training of the Territorial Army. “No kinder, quieter man ever lived,” is one of many a backhand compliment that Alan pays him. To go straight on to say that he was not a practical man was to cut away the ground under someone engaged in military administration. Perhaps it was Harry’s conception of correct behaviour that obliged Vere to keep accounts of her expenditure, which neither of them ever added up. It turned out that he never asked to see Vere’s marriage settlement, so its investments remained exactly the same as on the day when they were made, except that some by then no longer existed or were bankrupt.
Long after Harry and Vere had died and Alan had only memory to go on, he sketched their personalities, the detail and the tone calculated to expose their limitations. “My father is very much the colonel, with mouse-coloured hair and moustache, gold watch-chain – he considered wrist-watches, like suede shoes, and heaven knows, pocket-combs marks of the beast (an effeminate beast); my mother ran to strap shoes, mink capes, a regimental brooch in diamonds – the Coldstream of course – and sufficient but not obtrusive pearls … they were endlessly loving and unselfish, endlessly, also, at odds with reality.”
From 1931 onwards, Harry and Vere and Adrian abandoned Buckingham Palace Road to live in a grace and favour house in Windsor Castle, the second of the royal palaces in Cyril Connolly’s satire. This consisted of rooms set into the Henry VIII Gateway, the public entrance to the castle and built in Victorian Gothic style. This architecture dictated the strange asymmetrical interior of the house, all angles and niches and window-seats, a corridor poky and dark because so little light of day came in, and a staircase dangerously steep with virtually no light at all. A few feet outside the drawing room wall was a sentry box, and the day and the night were punctuated by the commands of the sergeant changing the guard, the hard smack of the guardsman on duty shouldering his rifle and then the clip of his boots on the cobbles as he marched the regulation number of paces in order to stay awake. In a final promotion that must have been close to his heart, Harry became Harbinger (a title of seniority) of the Gentlemen at Arms, a body of retired officers with ceremonial duties to perform for the royal household in resplendent uniforms complete with a plumed helmet and sword evoking another age.
In the course of the war my grandfather took me with him to Buckingham Palace where he was to receive the Order of the Bath. Many of the men awarded medals that day had been carried on stretchers into what seemed to me then an immense hall. Nurses attended some of those most wounded and bandaged. King George VI moved among them, a slender figure in a naval uniform. His features were sleek, sharp-boned like a whippet’s. He patted me on the head and said that there was a lot to see of interest in the big rooms of the palace.
On the day the war ended, Harry showed me the copy of The Times with the Six List printed in full. Dr Franz Six was the Gestapo official charged with drawing up the list of Englishmen to be shot out of hand immediately after a victorious German invasion. There was Alan’s name, and in brackets after it Tätig Kreis Petschek, Active in the Petschek circle. The Petscheks were Czech industrialists and anti-Nazis who had saved their holdings from expropriation by the simple expedient of transferring ownership to trusts in neutral South America. (Sharing the honour to be on the Dr Six list is Clarissa’s grandfather, Sir George Barstow, chairman of the Prudential.)
On a Sunday while I was at Eton I would try to finish the compulsory extra work on some scriptural subject in time to have tea with the grandparents in Windsor Castle. A secret entrance led from the High Street to the so-called Hundred Steps and steeply up an embankment to cloisters and St George’s Chapel. Inside is the white marble effigy on the tomb of the Prince Imperial, Napoleon III’s son. Corresponding to the blow that had killed him in the Zulu wars, a black stain appeared on its cheek, returning no matter how often it was scrubbed away. My grandfather liked to take me to check on a phenomenon that he was sure had no rational explanation. Sometimes we walked in the Great Park or used a special key that residents of the Castle were allowed for access to Frogmore with its mausoleum. Helplessly undomestic, Granny Vere neither shopped nor cooked. Mrs. Butler, the one and only pair of helping hands, did not come in at the weekend but would have prepared sandwiches and a Fuller’s chocolate cake. On one occasion when they had not been expecting me, I caught Harry eating cornflakes with water. They were saving money. One November afternoon with the Thames Valley mist gathering, I was playing football on one of the numerous distant pitches that were not so easy to locate. These insignificant games between junior house teams were compulsory, and nobody ever came to watch them. But there by the sideline was a solitary spectator perching on a shooting stick, my grandfather, wearing a heavy overcoat and his brown felt hat.
Eton in his time, Alan insists in his autobiography, “was not a very lively place.” Henry Yorke was his only creative contemporary, he said, except that on the very next page he contradicts himself, naming as friends at the school Peter Watson the future sponsor of Horizon, James Lees-Milne, A. J. Ayer, the bibliophile Jake Carter, and others equally successful. In the swim, Alan was free at last from the eccentricity of being kept backward for fear that he was too forward. The school used to publish what was called the Calendar, an alphabetical list of all the boys, and any who had won a prize was rewarded by a footnote recording it. Alan’s footnote was many lines longer than anyone else’s as year after year he had scooped all the prizes available for literature and music. His self-portrait as someone who couldn’t kick a football and wanted to leave the school as soon as could be is the cliché that aesthetes have cultivated to ensure that nobody mistakes them for hearties.
Besides, Alan never raised the possibility that I might go to some other school. My mother was not so sure. We had struggled round the London shops to buy the right clothes, including the Eton jacket, known as bum-freezer, worn by boys below a certain size. She had stayed up late sewing on name-tapes. My parents were due to accompany me on my first day at Eton. At Tonbridge station where we started the journey, Alan caught his hand in the train door, turned white and decided that he had to go home. Poppy called after him that he was the one who’d set his heart on sending me to this English school, she was a foreigner, she didn’t know the customs and couldn’t manage on her own. But of course she could, and did.
The Fourth of June is an Eton holiday when parents come to watch sporting events on the cricket pitch and the river in an atmosphere similar to Ascot races. On one of these occasions Alan and I were walking through the school when someone came up from behind and put his hands firmly over Alan’s eyes. You are a lower boy, this man began to intone in the school idiom, you are late for chapel, you will be punished with a week on tardy book, you have got a rip for your essay, you haven’t done your extra work, your tutor Mr Whitworth is extremely put out. This turned out to be Henry Yorke, whose first novel (writing as Henry Green) is set in the anagrammatic school of Note.
Cyril Connolly had more of a story to tell. In some ways he and Alan had much in common. His father was a regular army officer with the rank of major. In the background, relations with aristocratic titles were to be envied and emulated. “Why had my father not got a title?” was one of the questions to which Cyril wanted an answer. Enemies of Promise, published in 1938 when he was already thirty-five, is about self-discovery, and Alan acknowledged that he recognized in it “a more intelligent version of my own uncertainties.” Cyril was speaking for many in his generation who thought of themselves as writers. The ambition was to write a book that would hold good for ten years. Combining experience and imagination, fiction was self-evidently the highest form of literature. At Eton, Cyril had created a hothouse of romance with other boys in College. Nostalgic submersion in the memory of that past overpowered the practical difficulty of choosing a subject that could support the intended masterpiece, and then sitting down to write it. Masters of the false start, Cyril and Alan both amassed in their papers innumerable notebooks with one or two pages of writing and the rest expressively blank.
When