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Personal Terms
The 1950s and 1960s
By Frederic Raphael Carcanet Press Ltd
Copyright © 2013 Volatic
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84777-741-6
CHAPTER 1
1951
Ramatuelle. In the early evening we walked along the high road. The village was a turban scarfed around the summit of its hill. Piles of cork, unsleeved from the raw tree-trunks, stacked by the roadside; insects chatter and scrape. Beyond the village, the silver necklace of the sea, polished by the sweep of the Camarat lighthouse.
In the deep night we bathed on the long white beach at Pampelonne. Afterwards we made goose-pimpled love on shingle that stuck and freckled the skin. We walked back through the vineyards, past the farms, heralded at each one by vigilant dogs. There was a villa on the main road blinded with shutters. I called it 'eyeless in Gaza'.
The villagers go into St Tropez in the bus for fresh milk and other food. The village shop sells only eggs (sometimes) and tinned goods. Women collect water at the spouting fountain in thin-throated tin jugs.
The Auberge de l'Ancre. The villagers spoke of it reluctantly. An English couple, who had come to Ramatuelle for the day, told us that they went there for supper. Asked what there was to eat, the patron chuckled and eventually said, 'Curried chicken, as much as you can eat, mille cinq cent francs.' Could they get a drink first? He directed them upstairs to the bar. The room was filled with couches on which couples reclined, smoking what seemed to be reefers. A waiter asked them what they wanted. When they asked what there was, he said, 'The usual.'
The couple fled. In the village café they asked us how we were going to get back to St Trop. We said we weren't; we were staying there. They said, 'Staying here? What do you find to do?' We were in love; there was plenty to do. A Swede whom we used to see on the rocks above the beach at L'Escalet called out to us, 'Adam and Eve ... Adam and Eve.'
Cambridge. D. opened her handbag and I happened to see that it contained a piece of lavatory paper. I asked her why. 'Oh, to remind me there's more to life than the things of the mind.' Who but a Newnham girl would need, or select, such a reminder?
CHAPTER 2
1952
A child was collecting shells in the shingle-strewn bed of the river. What little water remained jittered between boulders like fat, smooth muffins. The road looped round the river, crossing it where it narrowed. Whitewashed political slogans were scrawled on the concrete of the bridge.
Pisa. A chocolate-and-white palace like a child's bilious biscuit. Flat-faced houses fronted the river. They had the emptiness of lost glories. The front halls smelt of tobacco and old women. Many bridges crossed the river, few with traffic on them. An occasional tram flipped left or right from a bridge and resumed its even course to the station or the duomo. A little Russian church, meretricious with pinnacles and statues, crouched down by the river, under the big houses with their blank façades, like milady's pooch, pert and distinct, in some smug bourgeois painting.
Fontainebleau. The tram was olive green, with straw-mat seats. The conductor was an old man with a wispy moustache and a tired square cap. He collected the fares and put them in a leather satchel. We swayed and jolted through the back streets of the town, past recondite mansions, little cafés and general stores. In the early morning, the café owners hose down their tables and chairs and rely on the sun to dry them before the customers arrive. Snails could have overtaken us. It was a place that seemed to be waiting to die. The old conductor and the tram seemed necessary to each other; when one died, so would the other. We had to run to catch the train.
Lyon. We tried to leave our luggage at the station but were warned that it was 'déconseillé'. The man was unwilling to say why. Later we discovered that a strike was imminent. If we had left our bags, we should have been sentenced to stay in Lyon until the grève ended.
The nearest cheap hotel was beside a heavy steel railway bridge. You went through the restaurant to the office. A large dog growled. We were advised that it was trained to bite anyone who stroked it. The patron was scarcely able to write and had protracted difficulty in filling in our fiches.
To get to our room, we had to go through a glass door to the adjacent stairs. They were of greeny stone and, in the evening, very dark. There was a lavatory on each half-landing: an enamel covered hole in the floor. When you pulled the chain, the whole floor flooded with dark water. The bedroom contained a double bed, a wardrobe, a single chair, a basin (behind a screen) with one tap. A bare bulb hung from the ceiling. 650 francs.
Heavy, bent old ladies, in black, shapeless dresses, walked the narrow streets on knobbly, distorted feet.
Lucca. The station is outside the fifteenth-century walls. You walk along tram tracks, through a strait gate into the city. A wide drain divides the rich quarter from the poor. The people were suspicious because I wore a beard and looked fierce. They stopped in the street and watched us go by. Once I shaved the beard, they lost interest. The young girls wore crosses round their necks and kept their bodies covered. Old ladies wore black dresses and cloth shoes. During the day, men wore jeans and T-shirts, but in the evening they changed into suits and ties for the ritual passeggiata. Radios play popular music all day. The heat is oppressive and dry as earthenware. The woman who owns the Pensione Ardea wanders about with her eyes almost closed and clutches a shawl around her shoulders.
Bagni di Lucca. The bridge used to be named after the Virgin Mary, but now they call it 'ponte di diavolo'. It is arched like an angry, petrified cat. The upward slope is a sunny ladder to paradise; it soars as if never to descend. At the top of the arch, however, it falls in a warp to the left and ends deep in shadow, by the grassy railway line. The bridge is cobbled and steeper than any other bridge. It is solid and unbudging, but you feel oddly insecure until you reach the far side.
At Viareggio. The pedlars tramp along the hot beach, in broad straw hats, leaning away from the wide, heavy baskets on which they tote their goods. From where you lie on your rented mattress, they seem up to their knees in sand. 'Bomboloni, gelati, aranciata!'
The Impressario. George Black is Alfred's brother, and Albert his; their names are indissociable. G. is well-dressed, in a slightly 'off' way. He wears monogrammed shirts and his fleshy face sports a small moustache. The brothers' office contains two wide his-and-his desks; standard lamps with fat cylindical navy-blue shades. Above the mantlepiece, a large chalk portrait of Sid Field; in the corner, a white mini-piano; on the shelves, reference books with photos of actors and actresses, taken years ago.
G. is courteous, offers cigarettes and seems on good terms with members of the profession whose calls he takes. All he wants is to please the public. He had just been to Paris and caught up with an Apache act. 'As soon as I saw it,' he told us, 'I thought of it.' The dancers asked four hundred pounds a week. Robbery, right? He memorised their routine and is getting a cheaper troupe to perform it. He thought a sketch in which some children end up burning an RSPCC inspector at the stake had a 'splendid twist'.
The Foots' house. The lavatory has an original Henry Moore on the wall and a bookcase to the left of the throne; serious books in it. The lounge is grey-walled, L-shaped; many books, cheap and fancy editions thrown together without class consciousness. A Henry Moore and Renoir, of a small pinkish woman; not very good. Marble fireplace; glass soot-screen; black cat. Crimson curtains in box pelmets; three chairs and a sofa, all upholstered in beige plaid. Squat lamps and flowers in squat pots. The ostentation of wilful modesty. Michael refers to the House of Commons as 'the boys' club'. Before he goes there, he checks in the mirror to be sure that his red, woollen tie is not straight.
CHAPTER 3
1953
Grenoble. The bus crosses a steel suspension bridge and goes up a long street to the central square. The terminus is flanked by tinny cafés. Mountains rise sheer and sharp; a castle on a spur commands the valley. It is a quiet town. In the evenings the populace come down to the cafés by the river. The other guests in the pension were all French. The Grenoblois are hard-working artisans; there is no industrial unsightliness. The people are methodical, tidy and not given to ostentation. During the war, so I was told, they killed just one German a night.
Peter Tranchell. Renowned for his naughty, deadpan wit; one of his monologues begins 'It is spring and we are beginning to feel ourselves again.' We went to his house above Castle Hill to be instructed in how to write Footlights lyrics. He took the whole thing very seriously and was surly with anyone who sought to be amusing. It was, he said, wrong to write 'In the nice quadrangle/ The vice squad wrangle' because it was clear that the rhyme was contrived. Better to say 'The vice squad wrangle/In the nice quadrangle': the more improbable phrase should always come first. Sound advice, but for a famously sardonic person he did tackle his task with rare solemnity.
Another Footlights musician was famous for walking along Trinity Street and, if someone inadvertently bumped into him, calling out 'That'll be ten shillings'. One night he picked up a paratrooper. The next morning he walked across First Court to breakfast wearing a red beret.
CHAPTER 4
1954
J.G.W. Davies. He once bowled Don Bradman for a duck. He talks about 'the boy, the wife' etc ... He has no doubts and despises whoever does. The four 'secretaries' at the Appointments Board do not much like each other; they are united only in the criteria upon which they judge about-to-graduate applicants for jobs. They dislike Jews, ugly people and swots; they admire Blues, club organisers and Presidents. They noted of one of my acquaintances that he was 'Jewy and wore Jewy-cut clothes'. Luckily, I don't want a job and chose never to go near them.
A few years later, Bernard Levin wrote in The Spectator that there was no longer any sign of anti-Semitism in England (as we then called it). Perhaps he confused his own success, as the pseudonymous political columnist Taper, with evidence that Jews were no longer subject to discrimination or disparagement (he should have heard what his targets said about him behind his back). Since I had a sheaf of the Appointments Board's disparaging remarks about Jews, both undergraduate and potential employers of graduates, I dared to write and tell him he was wrong. One of the Secretaries had even confessed, as if it were no sort of confession at all, that he felt 'instinctive' hostility to 'the Chosen Race'. Levin was promptly on the war path and published the more contemptible comments in his 'diary'. Lord Rothschild, he told me, 's'interesse'; he was sure that heads would roll. Fairly soon, however, B.L. (and his lordship) lost interest in the cause, not least because the revelations were received impenitently by the Secretaries. Certain assurances were, it was promised, given that such things would not be said, or at least recorded, again. But no one resigned. When I mentioned the matter to Bernard several years later, he had more or less forgotten about it. He told me that he destroyed all his correspondence at the end of the year and kept no record of what had been written to him. I asked him if he was not afraid that he would forget or destroy what might have proved interesting to posterity. He said that he had small interest in it.
Tony Becher and I went to dinner with Charlie Broad. The professor was sitting, reading, in an armchair on the far side of the enamel stove in the fireplace. His domed forehead shone in evening light that glimmered through the sash windows overlooking Trinity Great Court. Clusters of undergraduates were making their way to Hall. 'Now then, come along, boys,' he said, and showed us where to hang coats.
A serving table stood under the window, a tureen on the lower shelf. The dining table was already laid for supper: two glasses at each place; at the corners, a lamp-like candle-holder fringed with beads; the centrepiece a silver bowl filled with budding anenomes. Broad poured us sherries and sat us in armchairs. We talked of the weather and of travel. He took annual holidays in Sweden, but he was about to go to the US for a lecture tour. He had had to fill in many forms about his politics. One of his destinations was Delaware. Maryland had regarded him with particular suspicion and required him to swear not to subvert the constitution of the state by force. 'I never swore to anything with a clearer conscience,' he said.
The other guest arrived, Simon someone, a fleshy undergraduate whose family evidently included old friends of C.D.B. A gyp came in with a two-handled college tray with high edges. It contained hot dishes and a basin of soup. The gyp put the tray on the floor and unloaded the plates and a silver chafing-dish onto the serving table. Broad thanked him in an amused way, as though it had struck him that it might well have been he who served the food and the gyp, a Pole I think, who gave the orders.
Broad went into the scullery and lit the gas and heated the soup to which he added some grated cheese. 'I think we can begin,' he said, as he decanted the soup into the tureen. 'Raphael, you might cut some bread, would you?' He lit the candles and stood behind his chair. We went to our places and stood by them. Broad had the reputation of being an atheist, but we all seemed to fear that he might say Grace. On the chimneypiece was a framed canvas with a Biblical quotation on it in faded Indian ink. He regarded us (and our thoughts perhaps) with a blue twinkle of amusement and then he said, 'Shall we sit down then?'
He is a small, well-polished man with those china blue eyes and a long thin mouth. He wore a blue suit; small, puffy hands emerged from white cuffs yoked with heavy gold links. In town, Tony and I often see him in sports jacket and grey flannels, a fawn scarf around his throat and a green snap-brimmed trilby. Once he told us that he was off to buy yoghurt, from which he cultured fresh supplies. It was, he assured us, the only scientific experiment which still interested him since its results were unpredictable. Under identical conditions, dissimilar consequences followed: if A, then B, but also if A, then not-B.
After the thick, meaty soup, chicken with rice and cauliflower; a Rhenish wine with it. The candles shone gaily, deepening the shadows in the room. A mahogany bookcase at the far end was filled with fat works by philosophers from a longwinded age. When Broad criticised MacTaggart, it took two volumes of some five hundred pages each one. Now he himself is to be the subject of a volume of critical essays, to which he is to add the customary responsive chapter. This tome will be a weighty addition to what he calls 'the library of moribund philosophers' (the editors prefer the adjective 'living').
Broad said that he had become especially fond of ice cream since he started wearing false teeth. It used to give him 'tuthache', but now he could enjoy it without painful consequence. It was followed by cheese and Madeira. A Victorian silver biscuit dish opened in an elaborate manner: by lifing two handles at the centre, the lid slid round and underneath the vessel.
When we returned to our armchairs, cigars were offered. Broad extinguished the candles and lit the lamp on the table by the fireplace. Tony raised the tactful topic of Comic Verse, on which B. is said to be expert; he quoted extensively from Lear, Hood and Belloc. He took us to see a first edition of Ruthless Rhymes which he kept in his bedroom. It was lined with books, mostly philosphical.
Later he told a story about W.S. Gilbert. He was informed by a young man who had listened to a rigmarole of conceited reminisences that 'self-praise would never get him anywhere'.
'On looking at you, young man,' was Gilbert's reply, 'self-abuse doesn't appear to have got you very far.' B. reddened as he told the story, but laughed loudly.
We set about leaving at 10.30, though he seemed happy to have us stay all night. After the others had made their excuses, he said, 'You don't have to go yet, do you, Raphael?' I did.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Personal Terms by Frederic Raphael. Copyright © 2013 Volatic. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
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