I was conceived in Gosport, an RAF base near Southampton. Many years later I was on a joy-ride in a little Cessna out of Silverstone racing circuit. When the pilot said that we were over Gosport, I said, “Oh, I was conceived there,” to which he replied, “Do you remember much about it?” “Since I was born in Singapore,” I answered, “I remember very little.” The poor man blushed; he had clearly not taken in the meaning of ‘conceived’.
SINGAPORE
I was born in Singapore on 3rd June 1937. I was christened in St. Andrew’s Cathedral and the reception was across the road in Raffles Hotel, in the bar, where once a tiger had jumped in the window, disturbing no doubt the Singapore Slims and the chota pegs. My father was still flying at the time and was in command of a squadron of ancient biplanes in Singapore, soon to be withdrawn or wiped out by the Japanese. We lived in a fine house in Priory Lane and I must have absorbed the image of the house because when I returned thirty years later, I recognized it immediately. The taxi driver stopped reluctantly on the opposite side of the road – he was keen to take me to his brother’s factory- and waited for me. I crossed over and stared through the wrought iron gates, amazed that the sight was so familiar. A servant approached suspiciously. What did I want? I only wanted to look at the house, I said. It once belonged to my father and I was born here. “I know nothing about that,” she said crossly and walked away. I returned to the taxi and the driver asked, “Your flend (sic) not in? Go to factory?”
Soon after I was born, my father was promoted to Wing commander and from then on, he was no longer an operational pilot. He was appointed Air Attache in Hong Kong, whither we then moved.
Father was convinced that the Japanese would not enter the war, otherwise how could he, at such a critical moment, have sent my mother and me, together with my Amah, up into the hills of Indo-China for the hot season, as was the custom. When the Japanese did enter the war, we were stranded in Dalat, a French protectorate. The French Commandant was not only ‘fifth column’ –an expression I never knew the meaning of – my mother told me, but had taken a great fancy to her and was making unwelcome advances. No doubt he thought his chances would be improved when Japan entered the war and he had forbidden any foreigners to leave the town. There were two other English wives in Dalat and they asked my mother if she would join them in an attempted escape by car to Shanghai, a perilous twisting road in those days. My mother thought that it was too great a risk and refused to join them. They went without us and were never heard of again.
Escape from Dalat
Meanwhile Mother managed to buy tickets for the three of us on a train to Shanghai. She told me she never forgot seeing the train as it pulled into the station at Dalat: it was so covered with people hanging on to the outside, that she could not see the engine. A space was made for us in a carriage and we arrived in Shanghai where mother found a small hotel near the dock.
Every day she walked up and down the quayside trying to find a passage to Hong Kong. After three weeks, when money and food were now in equally short supply (all three of us were surviving on my tinned milk, called Cow & Gate, I remember her saying but both Amah and I were running high temperatures)), she came across a Chinese captain who said he would take us. As she left the docks a Chinese dockworker came up to her, tugged her by the sleeve and said, “Missy, you look so nice. If you go on that ship, you no seen again.” My mother went back to patrolling the wharves. One day she saw on the horizon a white vessel catching the sun as it approached. As soon as it docked she asked to speak to the captain. He was English and though at first he said there was no room and so he could not help, he finally agreed to take us and said, “come back in the morning.” History does not relate how mother discovered that the boat was sailing at midnight, but once she knew this, she returned to the hotel, piled Amah, myself and our belongings into two taxis, returned the docks, bluffed her way past the officials at the entrance gates and in a few minutes we were on board and hiding behind a life boat. Mother told me there was no one keeping watch and that everyone was off in the drinking saloons. At midnight the crew and captain came on board, all the worse for drink, and the boat set sail. When it was a few hours out, mother made our presence known to the Captain who was furious but it was too late to turn back. A kind Englishman gave her his cabin and Amah slept on the deck. At meals, mother hid whatever food she could secrete in her blouse, in order to take up to her.
Hong Kong
We arrived in Hong Kong and struggled up several flights of stairs, with all the luggage, to our apartment only to find that Father had been posted back to Singapore and that someone else was living there. Passages to Singapore were as rare as hen’s teeth but fortunately mother had once done a favour for an employee at Thomas Cook’s and now the young man returned it by finding us berths on a Dutch vessel. This vessel had the added attraction of not having to sail in blackout, as Holland was not at war yet. We had already lived on very little food for some weeks and mother told me how shocked she was at the amount of food the Dutch passengers ate and how overweight many of them were.
Singapore at last, and when my father saw us, mother said he hardly showed any surprise: it was as if nothing untoward had happened!
Just as father had been convinced that Japan would not enter the war, so he was sure that Europe was where the battleground for Britain would be. Therefore when he was offered the command of an air station, along with a promotion, in the Malay peninsula at Kuala Lumpur, he refused it and said he would rather return to Britain. This probably accounted for the fact that, although he did very good work during the war and was twice put up for promotion, someone blocked it on both occasions. But it no doubt saved all our lives. Father was posted back to England and we sailed on a P&O boat. Our departure was one of my earliest memories: Amah had come on board and when I understood that she was not coming with us, I became hysterical; I had probably spent as much time or more with her as with my mother. The boat stopped at Capetown and the next boat along the quay was on its way to New York; father said to mother, that if she wanted to go with me to the USA, where he had masses of relations (and she, in Canada) for the duration of the war, he would understand. She said, no, we would stay together.
ENGLAND
Once in England we went to live with a great-aunt in Sidmouth, the widow of a General Carew Hunt. His hobby had been model railway trains and the room above the garage was a wonderland of complicated tracks, signals, stations, bridges and trains, where I was not allowed to go. We must have lived through a summer and autumn because I remember my mother saying that she had never had an unblemished apple, though there were many apple trees: we were only allowed to eat the windfalls. The house, Syd Abbey, stood high above a small river, several lawns at different levels, leading down to the water’s edge. One day when the adults were sitting outside the house, I was playing with some other children by the water. A boy fell in and was struggling in the fast-flowing water. I screamed as loudly as I could and a bevy of adults came rushing down the steps between the lawns, their arms outspread, like birds. My mother reprimanded me for not jumping in to save him, which I was patently unfair since Iwas not a strong swimmer. Later she apologized and said I had done the right thing.
Shortly after being read Little Red Riding Hood – I was four years old – I was allowed to come to my first dinner party. The lady on my right had noticeably large ears and at some point I remarked on them in a loud voice: ‘What large ears you have!’ My great-aunt rose from the other side of the table, picked up a handful of tomatoes, walked calmly around to my side and squeezed them over my head. My mother did nothing and I was not allowed to come to another dinner party.
Stafford
We moved to Stafford, where my father was given the command of an air station, according to my mother in a state of turmoil, which he soon sorted out: he was a good administrator, an ability that served him and his country well after the war when he worked for B.A.O.R. and the Control Commission in Germany ( I have letters from several German Burgomeisters, including Karl Arnold, thanking him for his devoted work). I was sent to boarding school in Wolverhampton at the age of five. I remember our house and a tenant, a young air force officer, working at my father’s air station: he had a 1930’s Riley car which I was in awe of. We had a Ford Prefect and once, on a shopping trip, the passenger door opened – or I inadvertently opened it – and fell out on a right hand bend. It was decades before seat belts had been invented. My mother caught me be the pants and pulled me back while keeping control of the car: one of my many near escapes in life.
My mother had a dreadful bout of sciatica, for which the cure was to be bound up, like a mummy, in wide sticking plaster. She spoke about the agony she suffered when it was removed, for many years.
London
My father was given a job at the Air Ministry, once the Stafford air station was sorted out. We lived in Elgin Mansions, Elgin Avenue on the top, the fifth, floor. I was moved to a school in Hindhead, called Brunswick House. Coming home for holiday, as I walked along the pavement holding my mother’s hand, I saw that the block adjacent to ours had been wiped out by a doodle-bug, the common name for a V1. All the bathtubs and loos were still hanging on the wall and I thought that this was where we should go during an air raid. My mother would not go to the shelters, as she was convinced we would catch all sorts of diseases. I remember watching an air raid from the balcony at night: the sky was criss-crossed with searchlights, and the air filled with the sound of ack-ack guns and aeroplane engines. I asked my father why the German planes made a whoo-whoo sound and our planes, an even wailing sound. He told me that it was because British engines were better built than the German ones. Later, I worked out that the reason must have been that the German planes were twin-engined bombers so that the sounds would clash if the engines were not turning at exactly the same revolutions, whereas the British planes were mostly single-engined fighters.
If the fighting got too close, we climbed under the beds and this is where my mother had taken shelter when the adjacent building was destroyed. She hated the idea of going down to a shelter, convinced that we would catch fatal diseases.
My father must have decided that things were too hot for comfort, so he rented a converted farmhouse, Adam’s Farm, in Crowborough, Sussex and we left Elgin Avenue. He came down for weekends and I remember the trouble he always had starting the Morris 8 when he wanted to set off for London on Mondays.
Preparatory Schools
I stayed at school in Hindhead until a doodle-bug-V1- stopped over our playground and then landed with a huge explosion in a nearby field. The school was immediately evacuated to a large country house in Cornwall, near Bodmin. We were collected from the station in a cattle truck; I put my hand through the slats as we were going down a narrow lane and got it badly scratched. The country house had huge gardens and we had a lot of outdoor activities, including scouts, but here I remember a disappointment: there was one place to be filled in the troupe and two of us hoping to fill the vacancy. I lost.
While we were at Hindhead, my father was demobilized from the Air Force and immediately taken on by the administrative side of BAOR , the British Army of the Rhine, which later became The CCG, the Control Commission of Germany. He was not only a good administrator but almost perfectly tri-lingual – he had been brought up speaking German to his Swiss father, French to his mother and English to his siblings . He went over to the continent just after D-day, taking over the civil administration of Caen, then Ghent and later other liberated cities as the army moved inland. My mother, who was working as an assistant matron in a Prep School answered an advertisement from a family with an eight year old boy, offering accommodation for a mother and child of similar age in return for cooking one main meal per day. My mother was a good cook (and indeed instilled in me the idea that food should be tasty and cooked without fuss), so this was a happy chance. The family was called Seligman and Mrs. Seligman, known always as Tiny, a descendant of the poet Coleridge, still had her mother and father, a retired General, living in the same house. General Coleridge was driven about in a Daimler with a kind of automatic gearbox that made the most wonderful – to me, that is – whirring sound. Tiny’s sister, the distinguished actress Sylvia Coleridge, also lived in the house with her baby daughter Morag, and read Michael and me bedtime stories that came alive. I can still relive the terror of the fight between the mongoose and the snake in Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.
By the most weird coincidence, we discovered only weeks after going to live with the Seligmans that Michael’s father, Reggie, had been posted to my father’s mess in Caen as an Army liaison officer. From then on the Seligmans treated me like a second son; they delivered and collected me from windy railway stations on my way to and from holidays in Germany and always took me out at half term. They also took me skiing at the age of ten and probably most years from then on until I left school. When they became aware of the physical violence at St. Edmund’s, Canterbury– I was once beaten every day for seven days – Reggie told my father he had been in the same regiment as the headmaster of the prep school of Gordonstoun, Aberlour House, and could probably get me into it. I went for an interview and was accepted; my life took another direction. When I got to Aberlour House, I really thought I had entered paradise. The staff were warm and friendly, the grounds were beautiful as was the surrounding countryside and there was no physical violence whatsoever, something I had assumed was part of being a school boy. At the end of the year I went on to Gordonstoun and, unlike poor Prince Charles when he went there some years later, I was on the whole very happy.
From the Seligmans’ house we moved to Shepherds Well, near Canterbury where my parents bought a large ramshackle house, The Grange, with equally large grounds, near the station. When I went back to see if I could find it a few years ago it had been pulled down and replaced by a housing estate – Grange Close. My favourite place to be was the meadow, where I ran after butterflies and watched the formations of bombers overhead on their way to destroy the cities of Germany. Sometimes they returned with the gaps in the formation where planes had been shot down, sometimes they closed up, but there were always far fewer that came back. I was aware of the loss of life among the aircrew but only later was I conscious of the terrible destruction that those flights represented. Bomber Harris was, I now think, a good example of a zealous commander being allowed to follow his instincts and get a little out of hand. The destruction of the cities and loss of life fell mostly on the helpless civilians and it is only a matter of conjecture that the war was shortened by pursuing Harris’s policy. I know that a lot of people disagree violently with this view and I respect their arguments, but nevertheless…..There was a similar case at the end of the Indian mutiny when a zealous administrator was allowed to run amok in his reprisals and was only stopped when the Prime Minister brought him home and retired him, against his will.
Mother tried opening a holiday home for London kids but it was not a success: the kids were very badly behaved according to her standards and she soon returned them to their parents. Father was a senior civil servant first in Belgium and then Germany; while in Ghent, he organized a trainload of toys for the children of Belgium and all my toys disappeared into a tea chest, possibly the reason why I now find it difficult to throw things away. St. Edmund’s was just a few stations away up the line. In those days it was considered to be the poor relation of King’s, Canterbury. While at the Prep school I remember the headmaster, Mr Powers, with affection. He used to come round the dormitory every night at lights out and tuck in the sheet so tightly that it was like peering out of a coffin. I do not have fond memories of the music master, who was very violent and once struck me so hard during a choir practice that I fell to the floor. Almost half a century later, I mentioned this to our neighbour Canon Pilkington who, at the time, was the High Master of St. Paul’s School across the road from where we live in Barnes, but had once been head of Kings School, Canterbury. He told me that he had given this man the job of Music Director after he left St. Edmund’s but had to get rid of him because of his temper. The Headmaster, Mr Thoseby, who also beat me, sadly committed suicide some years later.
I must add that recently I went back to St. Edmund’s with my partner, Jan, and his cousin and girl friend from Poland. I met quite by chance three of the pupils who gave an excellent impression and said how happy they were. I was also introduced to the headmaster who was charming and welcoming. I feel I have laid the ghost and when I think about it, I was not really unhappy there; it was the beatings that later prayed on my mind and unbalanced my memories. Now this had been cleared.
Gordonstoun School
At Gordonstoun I was blessed with a kind and perceptive housemaster, Godfrey Burchardt, whose own sexuality was not I think absolutely straightforward though he later married the school secretary, a wonderful woman called Mary and had two sons. I’m sure his instincts were to help me but perhaps because of the uncompromising attitude to anything to do with ‘special relationship’ – Hahn himself was responsible for this – he was not much help when an older boy became smitten with me with me and I with him. When discovered, the boy, Peter Waltz, was moved to another House and I was persuaded not to have any contact with him, which caused both of us great unhappiness. He went into the Air Force in his National Service, as I later did, but was killed in a crash. Poor Godfrey, who had been particularly fond of Peter, blamed himself because Peter had told him about passing out from time to time while flying, probably during aerobatics, and though he had begged Peter to tell the authorities, he had not done so, knowing that he would have to have stopped pilot training. Godfrey felt he should have written to the Commanding Officer.
Gordonstoun has a reputation for being tough but this is and was a nonsense. Cold showers were something you soon got used to and I still end my daily hot shower with a cold one. When I visited the school in 2009 I discovered that cold showers were a thing of the past as were ‘training plans’ which Kurt Hahn had invented to instil regular habits of exercise, study and cleanliness, as well as to inculcate the idea of trust.
I don’t remember much central heating in the school; given the very sunny micro-climate on the Moray Firth, we were generally warmer outside than inside during the winter months which is perhaps partly the reason why Kurt Hahn included so many outside activities in the curriculum. Hahn was the Headmaster for the first two of my four years at Gordonstoun and left an indelible impression on me. He seemed to know every single boy by name and nature. His energy was as remarkable as his eccentricities. When visitors came from London, they were often met by more than one taxi at Elgin station; the firm he used had only Rolls Royces, and when it was time to leave, there were usually two or three Rollers waiting in front of Gordonstoun House for a single departing visitor.
When anything serious happened in the school – though what Hahn considered serious might not be what everyone else considered so, the whole school was assembled and Hahn, stooped and staring at seemingly every single boy in the hall, turned his energy on us until the wretched culprit raised a reluctant hand. I never knew him to fail in getting someone to admit in public to whatever minor crime he was trying to solve. I don’t think he was endowed with a sense of humour but one can’t have everything and his achievements with Outward Bound Schools, the Moray Badge, which became the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, and indeed Gordonstoun itself was a remarkable legacy. His fundamental principle was that of trust. I think he would have been appalled at the idea of security cameras on every corner and ever-increasing prison populations.
The training plan, in which we had to put ticks or crosses against ten to fifteen fill activities every night was slightly different for each boy depending on his physical condition but most of the items were the same for each of us: 2 clean teeth/ 2 warm washes/2 cold showers /10 press-ups/ 20 or even 100 skips etc. The astonishing thing was that apart from very rare ‘raids’ on our training plans by the housemaster, we were trusted to fill it in, day after day and term after term, without normally being checked up. It was only when a boy had committed some major ‘crime’ that his training plan might be asked for. Punishments were walks of different lengths around a fixed course during one’s free time. Once again, we were trusted to carry out the punishment without any supervision.
This so-called system of trust has had a profound effect on me and when I was an employer, I trusted people in ways that training manuals would surely disapprove of nowadays. Of course one is sometimes let down but that is not a sufficient reason to do away with the principle of trusting people. How our society is in need of that today, the emphasis now being so much on how to catch people at their misdeeds. Dishonesty is assumed to be the natural state rather than the exception and sometimes I think the dishonesty level in all walks of life has shot up to the point where our country has little to teach anyone else. We are all about as dishonest as the much maligned Italian farmers are supposed to be, and the dishonesty discovered among MPs during Brown’s government, is only a reflection of our own. It seems to me unreasonable that we should expect MPs to have standards any different from our own; after all, we elect them from our fellow citizens.
National Service
My father and my uncle Andrew had been pilots in the First World War and in my father’s case, right up until 1938, so it was not surprising that I decided to try for pilot training during my national service. In those days, connections were still a help so it was possibly because of my air force-distinguished family rather than my perceived potential, that I was selected after three days of tests and examinations at RAF Hornchurch and proceeded to Kirton-in-Lindsay for officer training. At that time alternative years’ trainee pilots were sent to Canada for training and, by the greatest good fortune, I was in one of the years that went to Canada; good fortune, because my mother was Canadian and both her parents were still alive. I phoned my grandfather on a cold Ontario winter’s day to arrange a meeting. He was coughing so violently that I suggested coming to his apartment. This elicited a furious outburst, followed by more coughing, and it was only when I met him on a windy street downtown, that I understood he was paranoid about his wife (they had been separated for over forty years) and feared she might discover where he lived. Religion had torn them apart: he was Protestant and obsessively anti-Papist; my Grandmother was Catholic and insisted on all the children going to Mass on Sunday morning before they had eaten anything – even if they fainted.
Flying training took me from Centralia, near London, Ontario, where we flew Chipmunks, thence to Red Deer in Alberta for the main part of the course on Harvards, and finally to Gimmli, Manitoba for Jet training on T33s, after which I was awarded my ‘Wings’ and that was the end of flying in the air force. RCAF Gimmli was closed down some years after I was there, but sprang to fame when an Air Canada pilot ran out of fuel in a Jumbo Jet overhead. When the four engines all stopped, he looked at his map, remembered that there was an abandoned air station at Gimmli and managed to glide a fully laden Jumbo from 40,000 feet and land perfectly on what must have been a very short runway for a plane that had no fuel to put the engines into reverse thrust. An incredible achievement.
Red Deer, where I spent nine months, lay half way between Edmonton and Calgary. The towering cumulo-nimbus clouds, often castelanus, rolled across the plain from the mountains in the west to the disappearing east. The land was criss-crossed with boundary lines - called section lines – and finding where you had got to was doubtless much easier that in England. In spite of the fact that our air station was on the north side of a large lake, Lake Sylvan, I once managed to call up for landing clearance while letting quietly down beside a smaller lake, with more or less the same shape, some miles to the north. The control tower replied in mystification, “Breaker 27, we do not appear to see you. Where are you?” I realized my error and called back, “Breaker 27, overshooting” and never admitted to my mistake. I was in fact not very good at navigation, but got a distinction for aerobatics and was good at smooth landings. The worst thing I did without being found out was to do a tight 180 degree turn at night when doing ‘circuits and bumps’ in a continuous line of planes. I had got too near the plane in front and rather than increase distance by slowing down, also potentially hazardous for the danger of stalling, or missing my practice landing by having to overshoot – I did a steep 360 degree turn. I had of course checked that the plane behind me was far enough away, but on reflection, I realized how stupid it was. The control tower asked who was doing steep turns in the circuit but again I kept ‘mum’. Canadians are an easygoing lot in some ways; I might not have got away with this somewhere else. We were not allowed to do aerobatics at night but I frequently did which is probably why I took this risky action.
Douglas Bader
On one occasion, the war hero, Douglas Bader, inspected our Flight. He asked the Canadian next to me, as he moved down the line, how they, the Canadians, got on with us English. The Canadian answered in a light-hearted way: “ Oh we put up with them!” to which Bader replied, “ I see, about the same as we did with you fellows in the war.” I thought this rather unkind: ‘ask a silly question and you should expect a silly answer.’
There were no fatal accidents while I was training, in fact only a few ‘incidents’ as, for instance when a Belgian trainee pilot ground-looped in a Harvard on landing (Harvards have rather a narrow undercarriage and it was easy enough to get into a swing, which could get out of control if not corrected straight away and develop into a full ‘ground loop’.). For the emergency services, this was what they waited for day after day. The ambulance tore out to his plane, insisted on putting him on a stretcher even thought there was nothing wrong with him, and sliding him into the back. Someone slammed the doors without checking that he was properly inside and broke both his ankles.
It was Canada’s contribution to NATO to train pilots from all the NATO countries. I shared a room for some months with a delightful Canadian, Henry Sands, and at another time with an equally delightful Frenchman, Andre Piotte, who tragically was killed in a flying accident later on back in France. We had occasionally to fly with other student pilots, either as pilot or navigator and one of my most frightening experiences was flying as navigator to a Belgian student pilot. He got too low on his final turn into the runway and instead of increasing engine power, he pulled up the nose and we lost speed. The plane began to judder and I realized we were within seconds of a particularly dangerous kind of stall, which, in these circumstances, would have been fatal: the plane flips and there is not enough altitude to recover by the normal method. I shouted down the intercom, ‘give it throttle!’ and maybe I pushed the throttle forward, since we had dual controls. Anyway, I survived to tell the tale.
Another close shave was on a navigation test. My instructor was ahead of me in the pilot’s seat and was in the process of taxiing in at the end of the flight. He had to cross a parallel ‘live’ runway on our right and obviously forgot to look properly to see that no one was taking off. I had my head in my map when I heard a mighty roar. Simultaneously, I saw him lifting out of his seat and the right hand undercarriage wheel of another Harvard passing just in front of our canopy. He was very shame-faced about this dreadful mistake and passed my navigation test when I might not otherwise have scraped through.
Banff and Lake Louise were a hundred or so miles to the west of Red Deer and in the winter, we went skiing at the weekends, driving there and back often on ice and snow covered roads which were not gritted or salted. One got used to drifting from side to side and there were no accidents that I can remember. After our long 3 week vacation, a Canadian colleague, of Polish origin, Sczelongosky, went to sleep several times driving back to base. Finally he dozed right off and hit the vertical bank of a crossover road between the two lanes of a dual carriage way and the brake lines ruptured. The engine still worked so he drove another few hundred miles using the hand brake to stop and when that gave out, he just shoved it into reverse after slowing down with the gears.
I and two friends drove over the Rockies – it was a winding gravel road in those days – to Vancouver and then down to Seattle, San Francisco, Big Sur, LA and then as far as Tihuana in Mexico, coming back through Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. By the time we reached Las Vegas we had run very low on money so when we went to one of the grand gambling hotels, we had to limit ourselves to very modest refreshments. At the table next to us was a storybook American in cowboy outfit, but a rather short dumpy man, if I remember, and accompanied by a tall young lady in a sequined outfit. She had ordered a fancy ice cream in a tall glass vase topped with a cherry. After looking at it for some time she ate the cherry and pushed it aside. If I were the person I am now, I would have asked if we could finish it for her, but I was much too shy, as were my companions I suppose.
Driving through Yosemite National Park on our way to the Lodge where we stayed the night, we came across a grizzly bear in the road. We had not yet seen the notices, telling people not on any account to feed them, so when one of my companions had the idea of giving the bear our remaining apple, we did so. I was in the back seat on the side of the bear and my friend who was keen to feed the bear the apple was on my right. I opened the window with some trepidation and had my hand on the winder, ready to close it on the instant. The apple was deftly caught but when it was not followed by second apple the bear jumped through the window before I could close it and suddenly there was a large furry head half across my lap. He slipped out without getting a bite of anything else and we drove on, chastened. Only then did we read the notices, “ On no account etc…”
Because National Service was coming to an end in 1959 I was discharged as soon as we returned from Canada, first class on the Empress of Britain, sporting our ‘Wings’ each night at dinner, when we had to wear No. 1 uniform.
Between National Service and Oxford
I had eight months before the Oxford year began and, looking back, I missed an opportunity to do something really adventurous. Father had decided to go to Rhodesia, where he was told a man of his age could still get a good job, leaving my poor mother to sell the house she had so lovingly built to her own plans, without using an architect. Perhaps this influenced me or perhaps I was rather full of myself for having been a pilot and didn’t feel the need to prove myself in any other way for the moment. Whatever it was I took a job as a, or rather, the French teacher in a Prep School called Heath Brow School, in Hemel Hempstead for two terms. The lady French teacher had unexpectedly left. None of the masters, including of course myself had any university degrees and the Headmaster put the letter FRGS after his name on the school writing paper and leaflets. Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society! Or ‘friend ‘ for all I know.
The exercise books of my pupils were perfect with no mistakes. How could this be when the children spoke not a word of French? It turned out that the original books had been discarded and the one that the child kept was with all the corrections neatly copied out. I do not pretend that I was a good teacher and when the school inspector came, he told the Headmaster that I was a disaster and that all the children would fail their exams. This annoyed me so I coached them in how to get through the 11 plus or whatever it was on the run-up to the exams and I did not have a single failure. It was apparently the first time this had happened. We sang songs, had conversations and made a lot of noise and the exercise books looked awful.
I had two friends at the school, Siv, a young Swedish ‘au pair’ who had some sort of temporary job and another young man like me, filling in time, teaching sport I think. We used to assemble in Siv’s room in the attic before going out in the evening and, on one occasion, I offered to show them how the fire escape rope worked. Quite simple, I assured them, as I had used this contraption at Gordonstoun ( ‘put the loop round your waist and walk backwards down the wall’). I had not however noticed that a bathroom window was below Siv’s : I started off down the wall but suddenly the wall became window. I went straight through it, shattering glass and frame, and into the bath to find myself standing in the water and facing the poor matron who covered her bosoms modestly. I pushed up and backwards through the hole where the window had been, leaving the matron sitting in a bath full of glass and bits of wood, while I continued down the rest of the wall to terra firma. When I ran up to Siv’s room we were all in hysterics, which must have compounded the offence. Later when we returned from our evening out, I found her in the kitchen sitting by the Aga with the housekeeper, drinking Ovaltine. I was very apologetic but it must have been a truly awful experience for the poor lady. The Headmaster was not amused but there was no one else to teach French so I was not asked to leave.
Oxford
Oxford at last. I was lucky to have got a place. At Gordonstoun, I failed my History A level: ultimately my fault, but we had a truly bad teacher. I should have taken A level in German because I spoke it quite well and had done it at O level but unbelievably there was no one to teach me. Frau Richter, one of the original cast of Germans who came from Salem to start Gordonstoun with Hahn, had a go but I don’t think she even knew the syllabus so it was abandoned. I had always wanted to go to Oxford or Cambridge and I or my father must at this point have realized that I was not going to get there, with one A level in French and one in Latin and one failure. Father took me away from the school and sent me to a cramming establishment in Guildford: ‘Miss Hobbs’ Tutorial Establishment’ for what would have been my last year. I retook my A level in French which I raised to Scholarship level and passed the History. At the Worcester entrance exam, I was the only person to volunteer to do the German translation, which was easy for me and this may have helped. When we were called up to the high table for the interview, I found myself sitting opposite a distinguished old man whom I assumed to be Sir John Masterman, the Provost, and therefore addressed my answers to him until he (his name was Wilkinson) said that he remembered meeting me at Gordonstoun when he was visiting his old Oxford friend Godfrey Burchardt, my Housemaster. Then I knew he could not be Masterman, who was in fact a kindly looking, rather hunched man at the end of the table. For whatever reason, I got in and had three wonderful years though I did not manage to address my sexuality; all my friends were without complications in this respect and I just went along as one of them, wearing cavalry twill trousers and not being true to myself. I studiously avoided all contact with known homosexuals in the college. I read PPE and achieved a ‘Two one’ , which I considered rather a miracle as I never thought I was much good at any of the three parts. Languages should have been my subject but no matter, I have continued to read books in German, French and Italian on a more or less regular basis so that I can get along in all three and read fairly fluently. The lecturer I remember best is A.J.Ayer followed by Isiah Berlin. I made several good friends who have remained so, though one, Gary Williams, died recently.
For sport, I rowed and was in the First Eight in my college. I’m afraid I was not a good rower and the fact that the boat did rather badly in the competitions was not a little due to me.
It must be difficult for anyone today to appreciate how different it all was in the 50’s in matters of sexuality. Gordonstoun had not helped to address the problem. Any dalliance between boys was severely frowned upon and punished. However girls were also a taboo subject and anyone who had a girlfriend at home in the holidays would keep very quiet about it. Sexual attraction, it was implied, was wicked. No wonder someone like me was so mixed up. When I stupidly told my mother that I was ‘involved’ with an older boy, Peter Waltz, she wrote to him. I dread to think what she put in that sad letter, but he gave himself up, was demoted from head of our house and moved to another.
I read in a paper recently about some gay organization wanting homosexuality taught to children as an alternative life style. To me, this has the wrong connotation and suggests that everyone can just choose what he or she wants to be. It is surely a small minority who are homosexual by inclination. Estimates vary between one and ten percent but even the lower figure adds up to quite a lot of people. Surely the object of education must be to allow these people to grow up without feelings of shame and to teach other young people who do not have this difference to accept it with understanding.
The churches, especially the Catholic Church, are of little help. We have a Pope who seems to think it is some kind of illness that can be cured. At the same time the poor Catholic priests are forbidden to marry so it is hardly surprising that some of them have engaged in sex with young people (I am not referring here to paedophilia which is a different and much more serious problem) no doubt because of their frustration and because their trusted position used to make this possible before all the shenanigans came out in the open. If the Church believes that God made ‘Man’, how is it that it has not occurred to them that God must have made homosexuals as well as heterosexuals and that maybe He had a purpose in doing so. In a world suffering from exploding population, it might even be thought that we queers contribute something on that level apart from any other.
In my opinion, religions should concentrate on teaching us how to love our neighbours, to help build our communities, to be kind, and to live decent lives, but distance themselves from matters of sex which are best left to better informed people and to each person’s common sense. The idea that a man in a frock who is supposed to have had no first hand experience of sex should be an arbiter of what people should or should not do in private has always struck me as, at the very least, amusing.
Jan Pienkowski
In 1962 I was living in London and beginning to frequent gay nightclubs. I was none too happy with this life when, by good chance, I met Jan Pienkowski. For some years we met regularly but both continued sharing apartments with other straight friends Then, in 1966, we decided to live together. I moved into Jan’s house, which he was able to buy partly through my introducing him to a great customer and subsequent friend, Alan Gatward, who owned a company called Coloroll. Jan designed carrier bags that became the rage for young girls and subsequently, collections of wallpapers; Alan very kindly leant him half the amount he needed, to be paid off against royalties, as indeed it soon was, and he was able to get a mortgage for the balance. We are still in the house in 2010 and we became civil partners on the first day in the history of this country that such a thing was legal, on 21st December, 2005, the shortest day in the year. It was a very quiet affair: Angela Dixon, a friend of Jan’s since Cambridge, was Jan’s witness and my old friend, Jacqueline Hodgkinson was mine. Our two friends Viola and Greg Marczyk were the only ‘guests’. We had our party the following year on the longest day, 21st June.
Gallery Five
Even before I moved in with Jan, I had packed in my job at British Oxygen and I joined him and his business partner and university friend, Angela Holder (Dixon), in their small greeting card company, Gallery Five. Jan and Angela both had other jobs and I was left alone for most of the day to run the sales and manage the office and despatch. We grew quite fast during the 60s and 70s, making a good reputation for our products worldwide. Greeting cards were joined by posters, including huge ones which we called ‘Wall Panels’, thereby avoiding Purchase tax for many years, childrens’ friezes, stickers and we even put our toes into the book publishing world with a joint publication of books by Beshlie, a woman who had from the age of 20 lived the ‘travelling’ life: she became a lifelong friend. We also co-published books of Beryl Cook’s paintings with John Murray. Beryl Cook, too became a good friend. I had been fortunate enough to see a newspaper article about Beryl’s first exhibition of paintings in Plymouth when she was still little known except in Plymouth. I liked her work and thought it would be ideal for our cards so I wrote to her and she agreed to let Gallery Five reproduce her paintings on greeting cards and calendars. We must have sold millions of cards over the years and Beryl often said to me that this had contributed greatly to her success.
We even co-published an early book of Jan’s and a book of my own, called ‘My Bear Book’, a pop-up book which was produced and sold in the US by Waldo Hunt of IBI.
Small private firms – and I became a partner quite early on – have their great advantages. They also have their hazards: freedom on the one hand is matched by being almost trapped on the other. I had an exciting time in the early days travelling to all the countries where we did business and made several good friends among foreign distributors, but was glad to say good-bye when I was 60.
Cello
I took up playing the ‘cello in the 1970’s. Our television was stolen in a burglary so we decided not to replace it. At the same time I was able to buy a fine ‘cello from Peter Biddulph, a friend of our neighbour and I met an exceptional cello teacher, Rhuna Martin, with whom I still have lessons.
For a period of two years I was unable to play because of a problem in my right shoulder so I began to write music for the piano with the encouragement of another teacher, Henry Zajaczkowski, a doctor of music, who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of musical scores and the structure of music. He can play literally hundreds of extracts – from memory – from classical to pop music in order to illustrate a musical point. You can see the sheet music that I wrote during this period and listen to it being played by a very good pianist, Richard Black.
Painting
I started painting when I was at Gallery Five and have continued. Water colours seems to be my strongest suit and there are quite a lot of them in Barnes houses and further a field. You can see some of them reproduced here. Thirty five years ago we started having a model once a week. We draw for three hours and we still do it.
Ceramics
Two years ago I took up ceramics. I had already been through a period of buying unfired or bisque fired pottery, decorating the pieces and then returning them to the shop in Kew for firing. I wanted to learn to make the pieces myself as well as decorate them and I have had the good fortune of finding a wonderful teacher, Gioilla Zordan, who takes classes for ‘mature students’ at Chiswick Comprehensive School. ‘Throwing on a wheel’ is my ‘lieblingsspeise’ and the house is gradually filling up with mugs and other vessels. Again, you can see pictures of some of my efforts.
Teaching
A couple of years ago, I approached the Head Mistress of our local Primary School to see if I could help with reading. Pat Henchie, a brilliant Head, welcomed me and I now try to go every Monday morning. Reading has graduated to writing poems with the children and the collection exceeds 200 poems. I always give the kids a choice of reading poetry or prose and to my surprise they nearly always choose poetry. We sit outside the classroom in a narrow passage on minuscule chairs. In spite of the wonderful class teachers orchestrating constantly interesting and challenging lessons, the kids always seem keen to come out for their fifteen minutes or so of reading and writing a poem. It has been for me an incredibly rewarding experience and I feel I have learnt more than I could ever hope to teach them. Not a session passes without some wonderful surprise. The other day, I was writing a poem with a nine-year old. We had a line ending in ‘pay’. What rhymes with ‘play?’, I ask. The word gay appears and I explain that one has to be a little careful with this word as it has a traditional meaning and an adopted one. I know, he says, it means when a man loves another man. Later, it turns out that his uncle lives with another man and he and his sister spend part of each Christmas with them. He told me this as though it was quite unremarkable and that seemed to me to be exactly how it should be. How times have changed! Roger McGough, who lives in Barnes, saw the poems and chose this one as his favourite, written on Azeem Rahman’s birthday:
Azeem’s nine
Nine’s fine
Almost time
To step out of line.
Some poems are written mostly be me, but always about the child. Others, they write most of. Here is one by Rian Arbon, who came out with the first three lines, just like that,
Earthquakes shatter
Volcanoes splatter
Dormice squeak
It don’t matter
In the following ‘poem’, I just wrote down what Ashol Ayol said. She was telling me about what was happening to her that weekend and had no idea of the magic she was weaving until I wrote it down and showed her how it had shape and even rhyme,
My dad is in a plane
TODAY
My Dad is coming home
TOMORROW
He’s bringing sugar-cane
TO ME
I had been telling AlfieMcNab about rhyming schemes when he said,
ABCB
What a song!
ABCB
Not too long!
The other day it was Ahmad Noori’s ninth birthday. He is from Afghanistan so we began a conversation about his parents’ country and how they spoke about it with longing. We wrote this,
When it snowed last week in Barnes
Mum and Dad spoke of their homes:
The mountains of Afghanistan
Where drifts lie deep as any barn
That keeps the hay for hungry cows,
The hen that clucks, the cock that crows,
The goat that nibbles ’neath the snows
‘Retirement ‘
My career could not be considered more than a modest success. It did however prepare me for a creative and full life in retirement. It has made me appreciate the importance of awakening creativity in people, if possible when they are young. Education is not just to prepare us for our working life but for retirement which can last almost as long as a normal working life and be filled with different kinds of work. You never know what might come around the corner and two years ago, something new entered my life. I found myself engaged to write a book about two remarkable French horse people. I was asked by a friend who is a publisher of Horse books in the USA – Trafalgar Square Books – if I would translate a book from French. I agreed but when I met Frederic Pignon and his wife, Magali Delgado in Berlin where they were performing with Cavalia, and asked for the text, they told me that it didn’t exist. The writer – or ‘ghost-writer’ had given up the ghost, so I suggested that I had a shot at it and that they fed me the information with email attachments and when I went to see them in various European cities where they were performing in Cavalia. They agreed and the publisher agreed. The book came out in September 2009 and was the number one selling book about horses in the US for several weeks. The first printing sold out just after Christmas and as well as a second edition, it is being translated into other languages, the first being French and the second German. Researching the book took me to Berlin, Brussels, Madrid, Knokke and Avignon, where they live. I saw them perform in more than a dozen times and the whole experience was captivating. It has done a lot for my confidence and, I suppose, my self-esteem.
HOSPITAL 2010 – FIRST OPERATION
(Recently I had a couple of spells in hospital and thought that enough amusing incidents had occurred to record them. )
I’m off to sleep
Ask them not to wake me
I might not be here
But in Tintagel
To travel so far and so fast
Might prove fatal
We spend our lives visiting friends in hospital
Car park, couple of quid, corridors and lifts,
Blythe Ward, fifth floor, or is it East wing?
Hello. Take a chair . Would you like tea?
See you next week. Keep up the good work.
And then one day it’s 999 for you.
The ambulance, the wires, the trolleys, the tests
The peeps, the patients opposite, their relations,
The friends, the fruit. Take a chair. Would you like tea
“Hello! Hello!” The repeated cry comes from some distant ward on our floor. ”Hello! Hello!” on a curved, descending, mournful note. In the night, making my way to the bathroom, I come across the man, stooped, white-faced, eyes focussed on infinity, he shuffles past me, “Hello! Hello!” At close quarters, the voice is more urgent and has an air of desperation, like someone calling on a bad telephone line whose life depends upon being understood. A nurse trots along behind, ” This way, this way, Mr Brown” as she tries to steer him around and back to his ward, but without success. “Hello! Hello! - Hello! Hello!” and the odd couple disappears around the corner.
Opposite me – it is a ward for four patients- two are men of Asian origin and both enormous. The one on the right receives a visit from a daughter (there are two more daughters, he tells me later) and a son. The young man has thighs as thick as his sister’s torso. They bring fruit and Indian delicacies. They embrace their father and stand respectfully beside the bed while he holds forth and the son eats the delicacies. Papa has the distinction of a pater familias of some importance, a Managing Director perhaps. Later I ask him and he says proudly that he has been a mechanic all his life: “Every type of wehicle, and WITHOUT a pit.” I was not sure of the significance of this titbit but no doubt it is of great import.
The other Asian gentleman opposite me, but to the left, is more difficult to engage in conversation and for a long time would not meet my eye. At one point the Consultant swept in with his retinue to question him. The paper curtains were pulled around them but of course I could hear every word.
“Where do you get pain?”
No reply.
“Do you ever go up stairs?”
” Never!”
“Do you take exercise?”
“No!”
“Who does your shopping?”
“My wife.”
“You have a spray?”
“Yes!”
“You use it?”
“Yes!”
“It relieves the pain?”
“Yes!”
“What made you come here?”
“The pain spread to my back and numbness.”
“Any history of heart disease in your family?”
“Oh yes!”
“Is your father alive?”
“Oh no!”
“What did he die of?”
“Heart attack.”
Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“Yes!”
“Do any of them ever have angina?”
“Yes! All of them”
“What age is the youngest?”
“Forty six”
Next day I capture his attention. Where is he from, I ask. Sudan, he says. I’ve only known one Sudanese in my life, I say, and he was a friend at school. He had his bed next to mine in our dormitory and I got to know him quite well, a charming boy called Ahmed el Mahdi. He was the grandson of the man who killed….
“General Gordon,” he completes my sentence, and continues, “His sister is married to my uncle. He is now a very important person in the Sudan: the leader of the Alauma party and the Imam of Alansar. I have his phone number if you would like to speak to him.”
They’re all so good, it’s hard to chose
But if I had to, Nurse Joyce
Would be my choice.
She saw me through the noisome night.
She stopped the flood and staunched the blood
Her hands were silky soft and strong
Opposite was what seemed to me, from the deep voice, to be a young, rather small black lad with amazing curly hair. But it turned out not to be a boy; it was a woman and what is more, a grandmother and also a poet. She has written five hundred poems and been published. She is visited by her family, but she is in pain and hardly speaks to them. The grandson about nine years old sits by the bed, as if he were elsewhere and plays on his mobile or whatever. I’m inspired to write a little poem which I hand to the boy and ask him to give it to Grandma. He does this and it elicits a sweet smile and a compliment:
Poetry is Grandma’s skill
More powerful than any pill
But now she’s had a stroke,
(We always told her not to smoke)
She’s in bed in Charing Cross
And the doctor is the boss
But soon we’ll have her home again
Her poems will reflect her pain
An old man is wheeled in next to me. He begins talking away mostly to himself, occasionally apostrophising those opposite him, who pay noattention. A visitor arrives: it is his brother. ”Hey ladies!” he shouts at the two old men opposite, “This is my brother,” to which the brother replied gloomily: “They’re not ladies. They’re men.”
An old woman from the World’s End in Chelsea is in the bed next to me; she is hidden behind the half-pulled curtain. Suddenly she says in a loud, tremulous voice, “I don’t know the name of the lady next to me.” I lean forward so that she can see me and say, “I’m David and I’m no lady!” She looks amazed: she did not know it was a mixed sex ward.
MY SECOND OPERATION IN SIX WEEKS
As I arrive a young Pole is leaving. He came in the night before in handcuffs with a policeman in attendance. He had escaped custody. Someone bailed him and he left in seven minutes.
The next person in the bed was a senior Inspector at Scotland Yard, a very polite and cultured Asian.
He was followed by a young postman who had gone down from his apartment on a council estate in Fulham to ask some rowdy youths to make less noise. One of them threw ammonia in his face and blinded him permanently in one eye. The infection had spread to his heart and he was in great pain. The offending youth of nineteen was known to the police and caught on camera five minutes after the incident, running from the scene, but they could do nothing as they had no forensic evidence.
The next occupant of the bed was a seemingly mad Irishman. He messed his bed three times in the first hour and swore without a pause at the kindly nurses who cleaned him up, without a word of complaint. When he could he grabbed their wrists until they cried out. He continued cursing most of the night and was violent when anyone tried to take his blood pressure. At one point I went around to the end of his bed and said, “hello Paul”. He looked at me with hate in his eyes and after a long pause said, “Fuck off!”
Opposite me was a twenty eight stone man who, when taken short, sat on the edge of his bed and pissed on the floor. A pool of urine would slowly spread towards me. He was so heavy that the nurses put him on the john in the ward, protected only by paper curtains. His favourite food was curry and the resulting smell so powerful that I tore off the wires that were attached all over my torso and fled down the passage. This set off the alarms by my bed and I watched from a safe distance as nurse after nurse approached the ward and then staggered backwards when the cloud hit them. The next day he was stronger and able to propel himself to the bathroom. He was a jolly man and endeared himself to all the nurses with his banter. He even spoke kindly of the Irishman and said that the man’s behaviour was entirely due to the pain he was suffering. He had been a Trade Union representative and was now the full time paid carer and cook for his wife who weighed only eighteen stone and was also confined to a wheelchair but could do nothing for herself. She came on a visit and looked exactly like Giles’s grandma, sitting grumpily in her chair. From home she phoned him frequently and asked again and again why he was not there, caring for her. On one occasion the lady doctor doing the morning rounds had just arrived at his bedside when his mobile rang. He answered it: it was his wife and they talked for some time before he said, “I must go darlin’.” Darlin’ however had other ideas and the talk dragged on. The doctor’s body language made it clear that she was growing impatient. He smiled at her indulgently while he closed the conversation, “Back soon, my love! Got my dingle-dangle ready for you: I know you like it, at least the dingle, not the dangle.”
I was moved to another ward after my operation and when I popped back to say good-bye to him I found that he was no longer going to receive a pacemaker. We were taken to another hospital for operations and someone had forgotten to book a special ambulance required for a person of his weight; it needed forty hours’ notice but he was giving up and returning home to care for his wife.