Father Dear Father Read online

  ‘You’ve been cheating,’ grandfather shouted. ‘You are a cheat and a liar.’

  From then on, he assumed, some canker of evil grew in Father’s soul. He considered him lazy and a disappointment because he failed to excel at sports. Grandfather had had a large part in coaching his nephew, R.E.S. Wyatt, who became Captain of the England cricket team and one of the greatest cricketers of all time. He never concealed his contempt for Father. When he demurred at the age of ten from advancing into cold, eight-foot-high September waves from the Atlantic breaking on the Cornish coast, Father was beaten for cowardice. Corporal punishment was an expedient grandfather regarded as a virtue.

  Another penalty was to deprive Father of books for one week. He had a habit of asking those dreadful blanket questions beloved of adults, ‘What are you going to do today, Woodrow?’ One morning at breakfast, when he asked that question, Father decided on a dangerous experiment. It was to find out whether it was possible to speak through a mouthful of runny porridge. Father carefully filled his mouth before answering. The porridge splattered onto the table. Father spent a week alone in his room without books.

  Politics was the cause of the final break. Grandfather was a fundamental, thoroughgoing conservative. Once, when Father was eleven, there was a public meeting in a gym to be addressed by the local Tory MP, Sir Archibald Boyd-Carpenter. He couldn’t come but sent his son, John Boyd-Carpenter, then President of the Oxford Union, and later a Tory Cabinet Minister. Grandfather’s speech compensated for what it lacked in sophistication with its extreme vigour. He always trusted to shouting to ensure his points went home, particularly on long-distance telephone calls when he was convinced that unless he made a noise like a megaphone, the Post Office’s technology would not be advanced enough to carry his voice to the other end.

  ‘It is confounded cheek of the Socialists to pretend they can govern the country. It is against the natural order,’ Grandfather bellowed. This statement was followed by one of his home-made apophthegms: ‘Socialists know nothing about money – they haven’t got any.’

  They were not even patriots; they were pacifists and cowards. They should be driven out of Parliament, perhaps imprisoned. Socialists were enemies of the nation.

  Because grandfather attacked the Socialists so vehemently Father concluded there must be a great deal of good in them. This was part of the impetus that led Father to join the Labour party. The rest was provided by the war.

  Though he never saw active service, Father rose to the rank of Major. He was shocked by the stories told by the men under his command. They spoke of their mothers who had died because they could not afford a doctor or a hospital. They talked of intelligent boys with their education cut off at fourteen because their families were so poor they had to go to work; of squalid homes where there was not enough to eat and less hope; of unemployed fathers who had lost all self-esteem.

  Father’s thoughts veered to socialism. If the Army could function without the stimulus of personal gain, why couldn’t Britain after the war?

  Life under the Tories had been cruel. Life by its nature might be unfair but it didn’t have to be that bad. There must be scope to relieve the worst poverty, to provide decent medical care and housing, to offer equal opportunity in education. The Tories would obviously do nothing about it. And the Tories had been negligible in their supposedly strongest areas: defence and managing foreign policy to prevent war.

  Thus it was that in 1945 Father was chosen by the Labour party to fight Aston. He covered every alley, yard and back-to-back house there. Ugly, cramped, wretched in their despair, these places were more like stables than dwellings for human beings. Poverty walked in the corridors and ugliness covered the rooms with her black wings.

  Father stayed with a family called the Meadows. They put pails in his bedroom and a strategically placed towel to catch the water dripping through the roof, even though this was one of the best houses in the area. Yet the outrage felt by Father at these conditions was not wholly shared by Jim Meadows and his wife Edna. They had jugs of bubbling ale from the pub, roast beef, and roast potatoes. Miserable houses do not necessarily make miserable people. That explained why in Aston many people stayed Tory despite rotten landlords and conditions.

  While out canvassing, Father approached a house with boards instead of windows, slates falling off the roof and holes in the walls. He knocked on the front door, which almost fell in. An unshaven man clambered past its remains. His trousers were torn and his shoes had no soles. ‘I’m the Labour candidate. We can count on your vote?’ Father began confidently. He was startled by the man’s response. ‘Get on with you,’ he glared. ‘You lot don’t even believe in the Union Jack.’

  As the campaign went on, signs of hope began to appear. Father could not forget the huge crowds that cheered Churchill in the streets when he came to Birmingham. Yet Father had been among them cheering Churchill, though he was the Labour candidate. Maybe others had done something similar. Reports came in of Labour stickers going up in areas they had never been seen in before. The unimaginable started to be the believable: the Tory majority of 12,000 was at risk.

  The results were announced on 26 July. Father had won by six votes. The celebrations lasted all day. Half the night, Jim Meadows played ‘Strephon’s a Member of Parliament’ from Iolanthe on the record player, shouting Woodrow instead of Strephon. On 28 July, Clement Attlee was acclaimed as Prime Minister.

  Soon afterwards Father was sent to India as part of Stafford Cripps’ Cabinet Mission to arrange independence. It was a change from Aston. The Viceroy’s house shone in the majestic sun of the full British Raj. Strict protocol was upheld and the Viceroy and Vicereine, Lord and Lady Wavell, were more royal than the King and Queen. (It was the Prince of Wales before the war who remarked that he never knew how royalty lived until he stayed with Lord Lloyd, the Governor of Bombay.) The splendid Viceregal bodyguard, the magnificently apparelled Pathan servants made taller by their handsome conical turbans, all contributed to the pomp and display designed to impress Indians of all classes with the might and power of Britain.

  After dinner at the Viceroy’s house came a period of horror when little groups sat with hushed voices awaiting the summons for one of them to sit alone with the Viceroy or the Vicereine for a few grand minutes of petrified and petrifying conversation.

  One of the three Cabinet Ministers with the Mission was A.V. Alexander of the Co-operative Party, who had been made First Lord of the Admiralty. He was very fond of jokes, of drink and of playing the piano loudly. During a tedious evening in the Viceregal drawing-room, he whispered to Father that he would like to liven up the atmosphere by playing the piano, but there wasn’t one in the room. Father made the request for a piano to a supercilious ADC. He consulted the Viceroy, who approved.

  Six enormous Pathans marched in with a grand piano. The old guard of British India and the young guard, just as conscious of privilege and status, waited for the usual trite diversion. After he had played music hall songs for a while, A.V. felt his shoulder tapped by Father.

  ‘I dare you to play The Red Flag. If you do I’ll sing the words.’

  A.V. thought this a bit risqué, but buoyed up by whisky, he was willing. So out it came.

  ‘The people’s flag is deepest red. It shrouded oft our martyred dead.’

  On Father trundled in his atrocious voice, ‘Then raise the scarlet Standard high. Beneath its shade we’ll live or die. Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we’ll keep the Red Flag flying here.’

  The forty or so listeners sat silent and incredulous with shock. So this was what the first Labour government with an absolute majority was all about – a bloody Communist revolution: no person of property or standing was safe. Surely the Viceroy would express his alarm and deep displeasure to no less a personage than the King?

  But Lord Wavell was the only person in the room who was amused. Later he said to Father with a wink, ‘I know poor Mr Attlee has to pretend to like singing that balderdash at Labou
r conferences. As for you, Woodrow, you are about as revolutionary as a rich man’s chauffeur. You want to straighten out the road but you don’t want to drive off it.’ He added with more verve than viceregal elegance, ‘Tradition has you by the goolies, old boy.’

  2

  The heresy of enthusiasm

  FOR FATHER THE antique and the arcane held out an irresistible appeal. His sense of history was a romantic one; sometimes it seemed like an ambition to realise all the passions and modes of behaviour that belonged to every century but our own.

  Imagination dogged him with winged feet. We children were drafted as her handmaidens – something to which our names testified. Father had given my half-brother, by his third wife Moorea Hastings, the name Pericles after the noble ruler of Hellenic Athens.

  ‘When we have a daughter,’ he said to Mother shortly before their wedding, ‘we shall call her Aspasia.’

  This bizarre fiery-coloured name was unfamiliar. Father explained that Aspasia had been a fabled Greek hetaira, a queen of the grandes horizontales. She became, more pertinently, the favourite mistress of Pericles. For her sake he was rumoured to have waged war.

  Mother’s gravity was understandably upset; a dark frown hovered about her face.

  ‘Really, Woodrow. I won’t have it. Everyone will think you want them to go to bed with each other. It’s positively indecent.’

  In the end Aspasia became my middle name. My first was Mother’s choice. It was she who settled on Petronella. Or rather Petronella settled on her.

  Like Aspasia it had its roots in the classical period. Ancient Romans were fond of the variation Petronilla, while there is, I believe, a Saint Petronella whose parents locked her away in a stone tower so her bright jade eyes would never look upon men. Fat chance, Father dear.

  But it was not from some dusty temple inscription that inspiration finally came, but from a novel by Jean Rhys. A character called Petronella, a strange creature with eyes like agates, swept through its pages. The name touched my parents’ sense of the fey. To Father it sounded like a wild dance, or some dark Mediterranean perfume scented with ambergris and musk.

  When I was born, hot tears coursed down Father’s face. The reactions of others were more bathetic. My half-brother Nicholas, who was Mother’s son, claimed I resembled a loo brush. Like the Richard the Third of Thomas More’s polemic, I was born with a full head of black hair. The doctors predicted it would fall out, but it became more thick and black every day until it appeared as if my scalp was covered in tangled wires.

  Mother put carmen rollers in them for my christening. Pericles had not been afforded this particular Christian ceremony, as both Father and Moorea were atheists. Father believed that if there was some sentient being from which originated all we know and are, then no Pope, Archbishop, Mullah or Rabbi has ever had a glimmering of what it is.

  Men invented God to lessen their terror of life and then fear of death. It was early man’s vanity that made it hard for him to accept that he, like the beasts of burden, would perish. His thoughts, his longings, his instincts added up to soul, and a soul, particularly that of a man, could not be mortal.

  Time and again Father would assert that no beliefs were more ludicrous than the extraordinary conceit that the human body is more than a body and has, however wispily, an element inside it or attached to it which survives eternally after the body has decomposed. If we have been good we are to meet our loved ones and sail serenely with them for ever in some celestial paradise. If we have been wicked we shall suffer permanent excruciating bodily pain even though we have no bodies.

  Father said all religions were rubbish, requiring a suspension of objectivity and a willingness to believe fairy tales that would shame a child of six. That men and women were paid to assert that they know what God or Christ wants us to do, and how we are to love them, was a scandal. Otherwise intelligent people with the gift of scholarship spoke of the existence of Christ as recorded fact, though there was no historical evidence for it.

  But Mother protested that not to christen a child was unfair. Father agreed that I might be baptised an Anglican, which he said was like being an atheist anyway. So on a dew-drenched summer morning, the christening took place in the gold and opal crypt of the House of Commons.

  My godparents were Serena Rothschild, Caroline Somerset, later to become the Duchess of Beaufort, Julian Amery, the Conservative politician, and the prolific John Freeman, whose powers as a broadcaster made him the Jeremy Paxman of the era. The Bishop of London picked me up and pronounced my names, which must have given the congregation a jolt.

  ‘I baptise this child Petronella Aspasia.’ And Petronella Aspasia I remained. As long as Father lived he would brook no abbreviation.

  It was not that other people’s names were sacrosanct. What’s in a name? Rien, to Father. He felt entitled to change them whenever he chose. My sister-in-law Alison underwent such an involuntary re-baptism. Father decided that her Christian name was lacking in resonant feminine graces. It made him think of stout chambermaids bending crookedly before coal fires instead of the Millaisian heroines of Gothic romance. Henceforth, Father announced he would refer to her as ‘Clarissa’.

  Then there was a university friend of Nicholas. I think he was called something innocuous like Bertie Bray; one of those names that make you no enemies but cause your friends to despise you slightly. It didn’t suit him either. He had a face like a medieval notary. Within minutes of being introduced Father looked him up and down with his honey-coloured eyes.

  ‘I have decided that your name will not do, young man,’ he declared. ‘I am going to call you Pandolpho Ducket.’

  He never asked these people if they minded. Only shallow souls would smart at such trifling alterations.

  Inconstancy made Father constant. Although he disapproved of religion, he loved churches. He liked their aura and their beauty. Had he been religious he might have become a Roman Catholic. The ritual always had a great allure for him. He loved to stand on the cold marble of some Continental cathedral and watch the priest in his vestments, his hands moving aside the veil of the tabernacle, or raising up the monstrance with its pale wafers. The fuming censers, the young altar-boys in their lace and red, had an incredible fascination.

  In his own way Father had spirituality. He believed in the goodness and supremacy of the human race. He once had a conversation about this with Bertrand Russell. Russell was an even more convinced atheist than Father. When Father asked him what he would say if he died and was summoned before God, he replied,

  ‘I should say, I’m very sorry God, but your propaganda was so bad.’

  Father thought there was something very comic about the picture of the great philosopher standing before God and politely making this statement in his high reedy voice. But an absence of religious beliefs does not imply an absence of spirituality or moral standards.

  A daughter of Russell, a biological archaeologist, had been talking to Father and Russell at tea about the theory that a sudden excess of radiation from the sun had killed off all the dinosaurs, and that our then unrecognisable ancestors had been so tiny that they escaped. The only animal potentially able to grow as large and intelligent as us, yet small enough to survive a global nuclear fallout, was, she asserted, the rat.

  ‘How dreadful,’ cried Russell at once, ‘for the world to be taken over by rats.’

  ‘But you don’t believe in an afterlife so none of us would know about it,’ Father teased.

  ‘But rats could never paint beautiful pictures or create beautiful music.’

  ‘How do you know? They haven’t had a chance yet. You wouldn’t have thought the tiny things which we evolved from in the reign of the dinosaurs could spawn people who would build great civilisations. Fully developed rats might do better than us.’

  The old man was so cross at this sacrilege that he wordlessly spluttered and gasped for minutes and his companions seriously thought he might choke himself. But Father secretly agreed with him.


  This curiosity, these painted figures that danced in Father’s mind, extended to material things. As I have written, it was claimed in Father’s family, with some truth, that a Wyatt had invented the first Spinning Jenny, but had forgotten to patent it, so that the credit had gone to Arkwright. As a counterpoise to this omission, Father decided to dabble in inventions of his own.

  How he ruminated over these objets de farce, like a wizard bending over his cauldron. Father’s ideas included a revolving egg cup which enabled him to slice the top off an egg without moving his knife. It was made from a record turntable and pieces of Dutch tape. Everything was put to a dual use.

  A society beauty had once presented him with a silver swordstick, on the handle of which were inscribed Oscar Wilde’s tender and triste little words, ‘The coward does it with a kiss, the brave man with a sword.’

  Father took these sentiments to heart. When there were no burglars about at which to brandish his weapon, he used it to slice Stilton cheese.

  A bare acquaintance with the accoutrements of the modern world was just about all he could manage. Father had a solipsistic view of life; he believed most things had been done much better before. For some curious reason, however, he enjoyed pop music. When opera buffs pleaded for more state subsidies, Father would riposte, But no one ever subsidised the Beatles.

  In the year before he died, he became fixated on the Spice Girls. When the Spectator ran an interview in which the girls revealed that they were Tories he liked them even more. At once he wrote to John Major, suggesting they be asked to Downing Street. I don’t know if the Prime Minister replied, but Father’s enthusiasm could not be marred. He expressed his intention to attend a Spice Girls concert but Mother said that as an approaching octogenarian he risked a humiliating decapitation by jiving teenagers. He contented himself with sending the girls a Valentine card instead.

  Everything Father did possessed that element of strangeness that is essential to fancy. He lived with an extravagance of the soul and an ardour of the temperament. Yet throughout his life he clung to the belief that everyone else was guilty of the most wanton excesses and must be curbed in their extravagance. He firmly believed that people in this century appreciated the wrong things. Their influences were too unsubtle. Poverty, for instance, was relative, not absolute. Venturing onto council estates, which Father did with surprising regularity, he would rebuke the dyspeptic inhabitants thus,