1

ONE

One South Audley Street. Mayfair mansion. We don't go in yet.

I can't give the exterior a once-over. We don't go in anymore.

It still stands. A red-brick and stone edifice freaked-up ~~with neo-Gothic indiscretions, unfortunately not erotic. An architectural horror with bay windows somehow inviting. Area. Wrought-iron railings.~~

~~Familiar London.~~

~~Contact

Plenty of comfort inside, even luxury, for the gentry, and unguessable conditions for the staff of fourteen. Once I did go in and often stayed in. Until everything began to break up.

My father-in-law, Sir John Ellerman, Bart. (he declined an upgrading because of the cost) died of a stroke one squally morning in Dieppe.

My wife received a telegram delivered to our new, half-built house on the Lake of Geneva. She went from Lausanne in a small chartered 'plane up into the forbidding gallop of spitting clouds to Dieppe (the pilot seemed more confident than I) and I hastened to Geneva and took a 'plane for London to prepare for the return of the body.

A ship of the Ellerman Lines was speeding across the spitting Channel to bear the body quixtly home. A matter of possible French death-duties.

That was the beginning.

Next, during a family row at luncheon, soon after the disgraceful funeral (I will come to this in time), over-harrassed by criticism of his proposed new policies in management of the giant business, announced by John the younger, joint heir with his sister, Bryher, my wife, he lost his temper or his nerves broke, and sweeping into soggy ruin a mass of glassware and flower arrangements in front of him, he jumped up, sending flying a heavy Chippendale chair and announced to his newlywidowed mother in front of the butler and two footmen that we were all "nothing but a pack of shits" and he was "through". The heavy mahogany door slammed behind him; a weighty painting shook and slipped a bit, and he, too, was gone.

My wife, Bryher, never forgave this insult, which I think she felt for her mother, not for us. With us it was water off a duck's back, except, of course, for the circumstances.

While the debris left by the new baronet was swiftly put in order, muttering excuses I ran out hoping to catch him. He had liked me well enough and I hoped to restore order in this sorely tried household.

As surely as his father, he too was gone.

* * *

This happened even before the Second World War was beginning to

in its

barometric pressure to affect the news of the world.
an increasing uneasy world.

September 1939,wartime.

I was at the time busy in New York preparing a small house for Bryher and myself to have for our annual visits. Naturally she did not come, and I did not go back. She had her reasons. I had mine. She was in Switzerland and would "try to make it".

"Be wise," she wrote, "and stay where you are. There will be useful work to be done."

The useful work turned out to be a fund set up through Bryher and administered by our mutual lawyers' bank representatives and complete ~~with other~~ to transport refugees from Europe to America and underwrite their responsibilities to the New World. I sat at this round table, found housing, furniture, directed their first steps, and so on.

I may return to the wartime experiences which were interesting and dire, and am going deliberately ahead of my story in order to complete the record of separation.

Bryher wrote at last that she wanted a divorce.

To be exact, she sent over a lawyer, who later became a good friend, to tell me I must go to Trenton, New Jersey and there be cited for desertion.

In shock, I think I haggled about it being just as simple to be cited in New York City, and for some reason this was not feasible. I was too upset to reason why. To New Jersey I went, and if you know Trenton you will understand the ruin I braved with such a heavy heart, in such a God-forsaken dump on such a Godforsaken errand. A mild, sunny day. Extinguishing marshy smells.

Lady Ellerman, having kindly invited my mother and father to leave London and go with her to Cornwall for a few days after the declaration of war, waited a day or two for several reasons, one of them perhaps for my mother to make up her mind. She decided to remain "for the time being".

Almost at once, in Cornwall, Lady Ellerman died. She had always said that she could not live through another war, and although her death was from natural causes, she lost little time in making this clear.

Nobody left from whom to separate! My mother had died, too, and my father, who had then crossed the Atlantic in a convoy was enjoying America. He was getting on for eighty and having a fine time with the girls. After the war he returned to England and remarried. It must have been soothing, because my mother decidedly wasn't. Norman Douglas pronounced in no uncertain terms: "You're mother was a tough, my deaw!" I could only nod.

* * *

3

When in 1946 I heard that Norman had returned to Italy, remembering the enormous fun we had always had together, and thinking how little of it I could forsee elsewhere, I did not hesitate. I wrote that I would be over as soon as possible, and please xxx start looking for a house where he could have (awful pun but he liked them) at least a "South Wing". He wrote back, "Your news warms the cockles of my heart." And that destroyed mine.

During the War a Quaker friend of mine, Howard Sturges, had been able to get some money to him in Portugal where he was staying temporarily with Neil Hogg, I think it was. Later he had to return to England which he detested.

The moment permission to return to Italy was given, back he went. Janet Flanner, the famous "Genet" who still writes "A Letter from Paris" for the New Yorker wrote about this, saying that, at the age of 79, he was setting an example to the young in strength and energy, climbing like a mountain goat over all the crags of "Siren Land", the Surrentine Peninsula.

I arrived in early March, 1947.

He met the boat from Naples looking thinner, as might well be expected after London was rations; otherwise remarkably well and full of vigour.

No more time to mope.

It was like dumping, unread, a whole mass of old letters, documents, contracts, bank statements, on a bonfire. It was time to begin again. With no ties, with no active retrospection. At least, as a respite.

We found and shared a villa until he died in February 1952. A five-year respite.

* * *

In her book about Norman, "Grand Man", Nancy Cunard gave a sunlit picture of life as it was in those times at the Villa Tuoro, and I continue to thank her for this; a tribute not only to the Grand Man but to the laughter which she says filled the hours on that incomparable terrace.

Every resident on Capri says that there is the incomparable view. Some of them are right. It depends, as with painters, on what you like best. I picked out the view, not the villa, which had to be knocked about quite a bit before it would do. Some visitors, including Nancy, complained of the climb up. Far be it from me to say tuttut!

* * *

Nancy wrote in her book, as if in a letter to Norman himself:

"I think I saw you five or six times at the Villa Tuoro itself, where, after innumerable years (nine) it was good to meet Kenneth again, and to see Islay for the first time, Islay de Courcy Lyons, whose charm and sense of humour delighted me, and who, thanks to his excellence as a photographer, has certainly recorded you "in all moods".

"And in the best of them, to which I am a witness.

"That lunch at Villa Tuoro, about October 10 - what an apotheosis!

"The word has never come to me before as the exact one for any specific occasion. Now why did it seem just that? Because everything was complete and perfect, I suppose, around the spontaneous inthronisation of yourself that day - the mood of all present, the wonderful good fare and wine, the sun, the warmth, the flowers, all centered round you.

"And such laughter ... Whoever wrote of Norman Douglas as 'a sun of laughter' should have been recompensed anew with the sight of it, then.

"What can the talk have been about?

"Perhaps, at one moment, of eccentricities? No - all of it is gone and I can remember nothing - nor do Kenneth and Islay, nor yet does Arthur Johnson.

"On that terrace, with Capri's shimmer off to one side by the Certosa, the sea far away below on the other, and the sort of crystalline whiteness I thought I could almost see sparkling around you - now at the end of the long lunch, sundry cameras and reflectors, long coils and other apparatus came into play, as Islay moved nimbly from spot to spot, catching this and that angle of it all, as the laughter went on and on, your sallies coming out - smack - one on top of another, and every one a winner. And I swear there was, at one moment, the chirr of the movie-camera. Where was that dictaphone? Maybe there was one today, hidden in some discreet clump of flowers? Never before, or since, have I thought one so necessary - catch, oh catch and perpetuate the jewelled moment forever!

"It must be from long habit, obviously, that you and Kenneth had such a wonderful flow of inter-repartee! And, as Arthur Johnson tipped in some quiet spontaneous barb, with a shaft now and then coming from Islay (all busy with his machines), I thought that our laughter must be heard as far away as the Faraglione Rocks, or maybe it was echoing on and on around the whole island."

* * *

There has been good laughter since. Hazy, I suppose, compared to that bright light.

I will come to all this in time: the exciting friends and neighbours, the constant flow of visitors. We are not yet on Capri. We live at One South Audley Street.

* * *

6

lush), climate (benign), natural resources (limitless) opportunities (limited), habits (formal). To be sure, I like to feel, as who doesn't, there's a coin in my pocket, I don't like starving, to live in comfort is nice, but if I have to think about money let alone money-making a trance of rejection numbs me.

One South Audley Street was easy to take to. The running of it must have been iniquitous. I may be unfair. I can only guess. I never saw the servants' quarters. Certainly the men were Brummels, and the escaping petticoats (apparently maids were never to be seen by the masters) as white as Everest. On occasion I did meet the housekeeper, a portly lady of immense dignity whose hands I used to think must be Siamese twins, so permanently were they locked together beneath her one bosom. As Barbara Kerr-Seymour said to me (Queen Mary still reigned) "Like Noah's wife, queens and housekeepers may have only a bust, never breasts."

In those days (we married September 1, 1927) next door to One South Audley Street was the beautiful, long since demolished Chesterfield House where lived the Princess Royal and her husband, Lord Lascelles. When they mentioned him, I noticed a tendency among the ladies to sigh, and I think it was more on behalf of the princess than her husband. There was a large courtyard before their house, but our Number One, adjacent, jutted right out to the street, with a flight of steps with sentinel columns at the pavement's edge and a square balcony on top. The visitor mounted these steps, crossed the square space before the front doors and found with little difficulty a polished bell to press.

Two heavy doors with inset panels of stained glass (or do I just remember it that way?) seemed to warn: "No use trying Open Sesame!" Less daunting than "Abandon Hope ..."

* * *

Standing there for the first time with Bryher the afternoon after our wedding - a secret one at the Chelsea Registry Office - I wondered if I was feeling like an aerial artist in a circus who rides a bicycle across a wire too high up, with tense girls in spangles balancing while one of them, upside down, is doing the splits on his head.

One falsely serene glance back towards Park Lane, that great refuge of freedom full of leaves so enviably attached to their family-trees, and I am ready for the ride. The girls fan out. The drums roll...

Silently, half the vast front door swings back and at once the space is filled, like a full-length portrait, with this gorgeous giant in a striped waistcoat, gold buttons and white gloves.

Bryher barges in as if he didn't exist. I am inside, débonnaire as all get-in.

Standing there for the first time with Bryher the day after our
marriage - a secret one it had been - I wondered if I was feeling like
an aerial artist in a circus who rides a bicycle across a wire up there
with tense girls in spangles and tights balancing acts while one of
them is upside down doing splits on his head. One falsely serene glance
back towards Park Lane and the leaves of trees in the Park, so enviably
attached to their family trees, and I am ready for take off. The
girls fan out, the drums roll...

Silently, half the vast front door swings back and at once is
filled by this gorgeous giant with a striped waistcoat, gold buttons and
white gloves.

Bryher barges in as if he didn't exist. I am inside this house,
débonnaire as all get-in.

A

XXIX compact outer hall is like a closed-in St. George's Chapel
at Windsor Castle, except for banners. A Chianti-skin bottle shaped
butler, designed by Ronald Searle, XXIXXXIXKIN is gravely inclining his head.

My congratulations, Sir."

Thankyou."

Shall I announce you, Madam?"

"Her Ladyship is expecting us."

Yes, Madam." As Bryher starts to mount the stairs, Ronald Searle's
invention, again bowing, gives me a smile which XXXXX seems somewhat
conspiratorial, and my acknowledgment is noncommittal. A glance up to what
seems higher than Chartres. Paintings. Giant Chinese vases. Staircarpet
positively mingy; not in the least like the Gaumont Palace where you sink
up to your ankles. I would welcome one that sank completely, leaving
you in peace, to bleat later, "Please let down a cold beer and a ham sandwich."

* * *

On my right, I had time to notice a vast oil-painting of
Cupid and Psyche floating rapturously in the empyrean.

I had met Lady Ellerman before, in Hans Crescent where Bryher, then
married to an American writer, Robert McAlmon, had a flat.

Mamma."

Dolly. Come in."

"Well, here we are." Hearty.

There she was, seated beside a splendid fire. She held out her
hand to me and said "Naughty boy!" Then, with great sweetness held out her
cheek to be kissed.

Seated, in her own place, her own chair, in her own boudoir, she looked like a newly-cleaned Gainsborough. Splendid and taking it for granted.

At our first meeting months before in Hans Crescent, my version of the first remark I remember her making is: "Dolly, I wish you could see the expression on your face!" Which set her off into gales of laughter, hidden in Japanese style, behind her hand. I have no idea what was the expression on "Dolly's" face (she always called Bryher Dolly, and would have liked her that way, but how relaxed and amused was this beautiful buxom woman with her hair done up in curls like Queen Mary's, even if the toque was less of a State Barge. They went to the same dressmaker. They even looked alike, although Lady Ellerman had a slight advantage in embonpoint. Her laughter was always real and came from the wide open spaces of humour; it was infectious and charming."

She so enjoyed herself (when she did) that her enjoyment was turned on in everybody's party, unless it was at somebody's expense, as once it was at a solemn family dinner at South Audley Street when Sir John was holding forth.

At times he had a way of speaking with weighty concentration and scientific accuracy, as if salvaging amphorae from the seabed. And when, during one of these engrossed moments he said, "surfacing a specially fine specimen, "Speaking as an old Atlantic Liner -" there came from the far end of the table Lady Ellerman's joyous "Oo-hoo-hoo!" And then: "You never told me that *that's* what you were! Oo-hoo-hoo."

I am afraid we all had to join in. The footmen turned their backs and even the imperturbable Ronald Searle butler was glueing the muscles of his face into control. The old man, instead of laughing too, went colourless with rage, even his eyes, like a slow fade-out, while "Oo-hoo-hoo" rang through the room. Sir John never lived that down.

This (under the circumstances) enchanting slip was to be trotted out quite a few times when he sulked. "You'll soon be as big as one."

* * *

But here I am, for the first time meeting her for tea in her boudoir, and she has called me a naughty boy and inclined her cheek to my timid peck.

"Dolly tells me you're going to Germany for your honeymoon. What a place for a honeymoon!"

Her eyes, the deep dissolved blue of designs on Dynastic Chinese pottery, seemed to look far beyond the Baltic. I wonder where they were looking? Perhaps no further than Capri, which she "adored".

9

When we were seated, she said: ХХХХХХХХХ "Why Germany?"

I explained about the *film* magazine Bryher and I had started in
July 1927, CLOSE UP. The ~~top~~ Austrian director, George Pabst, was there
making a film (*The Loves of Jeanne Ney*) and we were invited to see him at
work on it. There, too, were - although she had never heard of them and would
have hated their masterpieces - the ~~two~~ leading Russian directors, Eisenstein
and Pudovkin. Then Brecht and Weill and the great Lotte Lenya, the
enchanting Elizabeth Bergner, the grotesque Valeska Gert, Asta Nielson with
her tragic deadpan and flashing irony. At that time these great names would
have meant nothing to Lady Ellerman, nor could she have approved of some of
them. Later she did meet Elizabeth Bergner who curtzied to Sir John and
addressed him as *Your Grace*, which he took in his stride with a mere flicker
of amusement. He may have even made a lightning calculation of the price
of a dukedom since, like everybody else, he obviously fell under the famous
Bergner spell.

To Lady Ellerman, scornful and sceptical, we murmured only that great
new art movements were in the making. I did try to soften her by telling
her Berlin at that time was wild. Even this she rejected. To Bryher and
me the prospect was irresistible; to Lady Ellerman we walked hand in hand
toward Styx, or more likely, *re*treated into something like a shadowy war
graveyard. Somehow she, among many others, ~~had been~~ quite shattered by the
First World War.

So there, in that and consecutive years, was the great galère: Pabst,
Pudovkin, Eisenstein, Lenya, Weill, Brecht, Bergner, Gert, Dietrich in her
first "great", *The Blue Angel*, Fritz Lang, who had made a film which might
almost be about modern Manhattan, except that aboveground it was smog-free,
*Metropolis*. Others too; names that today could mean little to the young,
if anything at all.

But here is my Gainsborough lady still talking about Berlin. My arm
is touched by - yes - a fan. Carried away by impatient enchantment
I cried out that the whole "rigmarole" could only be pleasure.

"Rigmarole!" At this gaffe she laughed openly; no fan, no Japanese
hand before the mouth, just pearly teeth enjoying the unfortunate word.

No rigmarole. Germany, Berlin especially, went deep and straight to
my heart.

I'm afraid it will be neccessary to jump back and forth a bit from
one place to another, but life itself is like that, even when you sit alone
in a room.

* * *

O, Berlin! No Wall, no East-West infantilism. Berlin, too febrile
to last. Your winter days were my Summer. For there excitement began.

10

Not the first year, but once in a while in the next, and often
in the third, after Bryher's retirement, many a night Eisenstein and I sat
at a corner café on Kurfurstendamm while he drank hot chocolate with whipped
cream and I cold lager, talking our heads off. Not consecutive nights,
to be sure. Neither of us had time on his hands.

These nights were remarkable, a time for illumination, for the
electric-shock vocabulary. If only one had taped all this!

Sometime about two in the morning we would make a move.

"I'll walk back with you."

1929. I thought it had been earlier because, at first, Bryher
and I lived at the Adlon and only in October (appropriate month! Eisenstein
had recently completed <u>Ten Days That Shook The World</u>, known in Germany as
Oktober.) did we go at Pabst's suggestion to the more practically located
~~Famoso~~ "Pension Exquisit" on the Kurfurstendamm. Memory plays tricks with
time and time with memory. I kept few notes, and could kick myself for
this. The actual dates do not matter except that they teaze and one will
never know them. The three active years in Berlin are what matter. The
Hotel Adlon was in what is now East Berlin, and Eisenstein lived near the
Gedächtnis Kirche where the Kurfurstendamm begins, at the other end of the
city. We will not have walked each other home as far as that. And I
wrote Bryher about dates and she has kindly and helpfully come up with
this from her notes:

"1929 Returned Berlin October 6th. We overlook the Kurfurstendamm.... in modern rooms, all square, with a Viennese Pabst bed, and wallpaper all green tapestry and roses.

"The Pension was only opened in February by a blonde Viennese
female who after nine years of married life wondered at the motor show
last year why only her husband should have a business."

This makes it certain that these walks happened in October - and
on through November, 1929.

So: "I'll walk back with you."

The pension was not far down the street, misnomered "Exquisit", a
dead-lifelong "blonde Viennese female" ran a precarious business;
unpaid-for furniture constantly carted off and replaced with new variations
from some other "splurge-now-pay-later" establishment.

Eisenstein lived up beyond the Gedächtnis Kirche, and having arrived
at my door, without thought we would retrace our steps and make for his
place, still talking. Sometimes it was getting light before I fell into
bed.

Bryher approvingly suggested that I had really married him. I said
that rather he seemed to be my obstetrician. I said "I feel I am being
created."

11

"In his own image?" Not Bryher's question. It sailed out, as it were, from the snow, mustering weight above the city's packed air, soon to start feathering <u>XX</u> with a go-slow commission the street-corner Black Forests selling like hot pies.

If man is made in God's image, where in him for God's sake is God's
light?

Sergei Eisenstein. "Sergei" was used little if at all, just as nobody called Garbo <u>Greta</u>. Eisenstein still brings to memory a sense of snow - snow on Dürer-steep roofs, on animals in the beautiful Zoo, snow on the ground, overhead, all round in regattas racing, in lungs, on the face, in the eyes, and the steam of exhaled breath, in the closeness of that Russian winter in German Christian trees piled at street corners; with childhood's recall, and once more, with zebras in groups painted by a pointillist, with the white Arctic owl which daily hissed at me what sounded like a sincere "Piss-off!"; with the apes and monkeys free to choose warm indoors and the chill of the snow. They chose both. Goats, too, wearing snow blankets, eaters of peanuts. And, once outside, the important movie house, the UFA Palast am Zoo, the unpinched Berlin faces; above all, the face of Eisenstein, statue-still, mobile, oblong, his own monument that need not flinch at snow in his eyes.

He suggested not only a power-station or control-tower but the
presence of serenity of abiding truth. Yet so wholly
was he incarnated that he turned others into distant objects or super-
numeraries. If anyone is Godlike, then he was Godlike.

The <u>was</u>, to be sure, no abject sitting at the feet of a Messian, no
nonsense of <u>cher maître</u>. He mixed in the whipped cream on top of his
chocolate. I sipped my cold beer. And yet one was keyed to inner shiver-
ing. One may reach this excitement, which is like a new element charging
the blood and the nerves, when great music is perfectly played;
at a few lines which hit home in a great poem; at certain climaxes of
enlightenment in a discussion. To remain in such a transport for one
mesmerised hour after another is a state nothing has induced in me before
or since.

And far from being exhausted, on the contrary, no hours of sleep could have been so energising. And we got little sleep.

Bryher shared and understood many of our excitements but night-life
was not for her, an early riser. Back to the Pension Exquisit, where it was
always a toss-up whether she would find a bed in her room. Generally there
was one, but they did change in size and shape and were all brand-new and
ganz gemütlich. Once, the beset <u>Gnadige Frau</u>, who ran the place with her
consumptive little Bavarian servant girl, was found by Bryher on her return near midnight in a towering Viennese rage, hammering an awful old lump of
bed into place. She explained it was only for the night. She had ordered
a ravishing suite and it had failed to arrive in time.

12

Bryher: "There was so much ruched taffeta we feared the bed was her own, but deemed it wise to say nothing."

* * *

Why Germany?

Soon Lady Ellerman and I became close friends. When Bryher and I were in London at One South Audley Street, living like "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" - even if the Yule Logs were anthracite - Lady "Audley" and I had our Thursday nights off, like members of the downstairs staff, and we would be driven by one of the two chauffeurs in one of the three cars to Prunier's to start off dinner always in the same way - oysters and champagne. Later, to some music hall, the Palladium or Holborn Empire or even Hammersmith. I looked up the "funnies" in the ads. She loved this sort of escape and had positively a schoolgirl crush on Gracie Fiels, her two favourite songs being *Sally* and *'Twas on the Isle of Capri That I Met Her*.

Years later, on Capri, Gracie became a dear friend. At that time, although I thought she sang rubbish (please remember Pabst, Eisenstein, Pudovkin) a kind of glory did shine from her and she was rightly adored because her heart was generous and shining and no nonsense.

Sometimes we went grand in order to hear Bea Lillie, best clown in the circus, at the Café de Paris or some other jip-joint, and were prone to arrive home just the least bit tipsy (never mentioned) quite late. One of those two handsome footmen would have to let us in. Haggard with sleep or sleeplessness yet uncrushed, he would offer me - set out by the Ronald Searle butler, an ex police-officer named Payton - a nightcap, Scotch and soda, which of course I took.

suffuse

I believe I am beyond blushing, yet I know I used to XXXX when Lady Audley took to calling me Prince Charming.

Secretely, of course I knew she was right.

Well, Shakespeare said it: "Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder."

Chinese ceramic blue, those eyes. Beauty lived in *them* all right!

Wit, too.

New Page

THREE

She got cross, quite jealous, about Berlin, sensing the passion both Bryher and I shared for it. *Films! Bolshies!* As stated, we lived first at the Hotel Adlon (shades of Vicki Baum; of Garbo in *Grand Hotel*!),

13

when I last saw it, a miserable <u>remnant</u> still used and with the same name; only the back entrances for service and servants, the rest having been flattened by bombs. It rises, a sore thumb indeed, attached to no hand, in East Germany among the stretches of flat weeds where once was the splendid avenue, Unter den Linden, an almost forestal width of perfumed lime trees - the sudden poetry <u>in Germany</u> when all is forgiven in <u>a drench</u> wonder, to say nothing of a drench of fragrance.

No more limes. Why should there be? They may have erected barbed-wire substitutes, and if they have rebuilt you may be sure the architecture. Will look penal, not, as it was, blowzy Rococo in the best Edwardian <u>adiposity</u> <u>compulsion</u> of what E.M. Forster called "the land of <u>Ach</u>! and <u>Ja</u."

There is always too much in life to horrify and rend the average humanist. The degradation of this once fine city - surely the last straw if ever there was one - that <u>WALL</u>! - remains one of my personal wounds. This degradation to me seems not only in its <u>obscenity</u> to the eye and comprehension (the bombings had done enough), but to <u>sensibility</u>, spirit and soul of peoples everywhere, <u>desperately in need</u> of one sign of merciful First-Aid.

It adds up to pity, <u>by no means an indulged sentiment</u>. This was able to happen, this ignoble, infantile <u>dispetto</u>, because somewhere along the line, man lost the pride of his manhood, without which he is a pretty noxious refuse. # <u>That isn't right</u>, <u>what is?</u>

There have always been prisons and forts; surely never one sp abject, so <u>XXXXXXXX</u> as this. <u>contaminated</u>

* * *

Lady Audley's ammunition at least was not trained on Berlin. Never go anywhere <u>near</u> the Black Forest. <u>Never</u>! She suddered <u>even</u> remembering it. Those miles, that suffocating labyrinth, of dense mourning <u>traces</u>. And <u>snakes</u>! <u>Don't go near</u> that terrible Rhine.

She had a pathological fear of rivers. <u>Because</u> the moustache-twirling villain of the piece was the Rhone; she may even have hissed it. There it was, like an endless snake coiling all over Europe, lurking to get at you and forcing your car to <u>run over</u> it. Barely could she endure our Lac Leman because the Rhone <u>debouched</u> into it.

Montreux was too near that hateful castle Byron wrote about (water rats). Geneva was unmentionable because <u>two</u>- rivers went galloping through it. Where later we built near Vevey, the <u>lake</u> is not far from its widest and that would just do - as would Ouchy below Lausanne where she and Sir John stayed.

14

Beyond these drawbacks were two more; Switzerland was stodgy and, to use Norman Douglas's description of it, "too licked and manicured." Sometimes Norman "hopped it" much from Italy to see us there. We would pub-crawl together up and down the lake tasting wines. He found one at his test where the lake begins.

Lady Ellerman adored him. He _lived_. O, how she loved adventure! On the whole, life was so _dull_! Because Norman had lived for years at Posillipo on the outskirts of Naples and, later, on Capri she was recalling children in Naples having their dark curls deloused on the front doorsteps, and an expression of seraphic tenderness mixed with melancholy made me think of Leonardo's adorable faces. Norman who liked to amuse as well as be amused, sure of her absolute enslavement, found her a "remarkably agreeable woman, my de-aw, and _no fool_, mark my words!"

* * *

## The rhodendrons!

My father who, when he remembered, liked to design gardens, had suggested (not sent) the "magnificent new strains", and after much ado about soil-testing, and the garden was taking shape, himself sent the new strains from Holland. They arrived in time looking rather like a widespread Equatorial African village of straw huts on stilts. Unwrapped, they flew open and smacked you hard, even when you'd learned to watch out. I expect local gossip had it that Bryher and I went in for spectacular brawls, what with black eyes, scratches and bleeding gashes on top of the taped ones. Planted and watered, they expanded even more and soon bloomed with gratifying New Strain bombast.

Her Ladyship, visiting during their flowering ("That terrible Rhone!") comfortably urged me to cut her an armful to cart back to Ouchy.

## What?

Cut _shrubs_? On this occasion I was no Prince Charming. "One never flowering shrubs!" I gestured at roses, tulips, iris - any of these. But New Strains!

cuts/

Soon she laughed at me and said how absurd I was which was true enough. With cunning, however, that same afternoon I ordered to be delivered to their Ouchy hotel a good specimen, if not new strain, in full flower which, with ancestral wiliness, I knew would be returned to us when they left Switzerland.

She must have smiled (and I bet it was no Leonardo smile) when, departing, she sent the plant to a hospital. Fair enough. Our plants survived unmutilated, the new strains, ordered but not paid for by my father who took little enough thought of anything and none of cash payment. No criticism. A nature more harmonious and gentle does not exist. He lived in a daydream, ignoring bills as he ignored rudeness; ho-hum. Not a few

15

times that ho-hum puffed us straight onto the rocks. Mother got us off them.

* * *

Showing Norman Douglas a photograph taken after the war at Portofino:

"Cor blimey! Who's this priceless shit, my de-aw? Looks like a broken-down Foreign Office failure with a blotted copy-book."

"That's my father, Norman."

"Your father? But your father's a very handsome man!"

Not for the first or last time, I think he felt I was making a joke in poor taste.

Without one more glance, he tossed the F.O. failure on a garden table.

Later I re-examined the offending picture. The sun, sideways, did give him a worried, preoccupied look rather as if he were fearing another bowel movement. A look I may say he never wore in all his 85 years. When necessary he was a royal farter.

* * *

As we are still in Switzerland, although this is a year later and only two of the family have left us - the two Sir Johns - her ladyship is staying at the Grand Hotel in Montreux with a staunch and often lachrymose ex-governess of Bryher, then still my wife.

Lady Audley: "Why does Dolly keep on using that ridiculous name?"

K. M. "I like it. As you know it's one of the Scilly Isles."

Lady Audley: "Silly! Suitable." Laughter. I do not join in. The sound of Bryher - crash of Atlantic breakers, calls and cries of seabirds, the answering shore; these voices that you love are the only ones. This isn't playing with dollies.

* * *

waterlogged

One night we escaped the waterlogged governess and went to see a German film in Montreux starring a formidable old stalwart we liked named Henny Porten who wore her hair in a blonde plaited coronet. ThePrincessandtheKing

Lights dim. Film about to begin. Bryher and I and "That Woman", Lady Audley's less than gracious appellation for a great friend who soon must appear on the scene - hastening into our seats in the balcony third row.

16

Bryher: (stage-whisper) Front-row. Middle. We fear recriminations.

My eye darts as the lights go out. The waterlogged governess!

K.M.: (stage-whisper) Shall we sneak out?

Bryher: (Film beginning) No. We fear she already knows.

Small cinemas still have that terrible Interval when sour lights go on and glare biliously at the haggard audience which either wants or doesn't want the abysmal refreshments on trays peddled by people with weights on their minds and a cheerless outlook. In those days magic-lantern slides to advertise tea-rooms, chocolates, shoes and so on, and an unwilling old-age pensioner of a gramophone to play something brisk like "Yes sir, that's my baby, no sir, don't mean maybe," gave animation to the morguelike confrontation.

Right at the beginning of this collapsed time, the ex-governess swivelled her head round as if she had pressed a button, and permitted herself an audible gasp. So audible that it must have been well rehearsed. It drew a certain amount of attention. Other heads turned as well with some anxiety, as if fearing fire in the projection-room.

The ex-governess had the extraordinary nickname of "Snap". Why? It would have been better.

Gazing at us, she allowed her jaw to drop and Bryher waved. It was feeble but a gesture. Then one saw the reason for "Snap". The abruptly turned back of that little pill-box hat was like "Present Arms!"

"Dear me," Bryher murmured, not, I felt, without a certain delight, as I rose if not to the occasion at least to some instinct of salvage. There was an unoccupied seat beside me.

Down to the front row with the false grin of a card-sharper.

She was dabbing her eyes with a pink Kleenex.

"Snap, dear, we had no idea - "

"Just go away, please. Please!" Kleenex. Awash, about to sink.

"But come and join us."

"Bryher knew... perfectly well... that... I was all alone tonight."

"Does it matter? (I bit my tongue) I mean, we just decided at the last moment, haha, you know... Please come and sit with us. There's an extra seat."

Now the sobbing began.

The audience liked this better than Henny Porten in her muslin blouse loosely gathered to her shoulders by a dark ribbon, and her copious bandle.

Some faint thread of memory tells me that this film was called *Refuge*, of all things!

17

I could hardly be unaware that the audience was enchanted. "He was her man and he done her wrong." I looked up at Bryher for connection if not first-aid. The beast was reading! "That Woman", solemn with dancing eyes, almost luminous in that wan glare, was deep in fascination of a slide advertising a Longine wrist-watch.

As the house-lights began to fade on this exposure of male infamy, Snap rose with alacrity, and thoroughly ruffled, I pushed her in next to Bryher(who was reluctantly closing her André Gide) quite expecting to be booed. Instead, a titter or two. Snap continued the polemics silently(while Bryher whispered a consoling word), like a small moored boat feeling the wake of a CrissCraft, and then became a ramrod. What was driving me round the bend was not her private disaster but the realisation that we lived in Territet which is in the opposite direction from The Grand at Montreux and that I would have to walk this wet rag home! Never have I felt more tempted to do a bunk and let the reader of André Gide, the rapt student of a Longine wrist-watch, the gelid leak beside me, freeze or stew in their own juices.

* * *

We are invited to the Grand Hotel in Montreux for dinner at eight. Black tie for the gent. and gowns for the ladies. "That Woman", who takes what she knows will be an ordeal with wise resignation, becomes Helen of Troy in accordion pleats, while Bryher, who hates chiffon (though she has to wear the stuff at Audley) wears a dull satin designed by me as for Shaw's Saint Joan when she got out of drag, made by, and doubtless saved by, a lady friend who made clothes in Monte Carlo. I will describe this ravishing costume later, when it became the reason for one of those Big Scenes which might have reduced my opinion of myself as Coco Chanel's equal to less than the dust, but didn't. A cork can float, even on the Rhone.

We arrived in our Buick at seven-thirty on the dot. In the course of the Ellerman punctuality one became almost a dotted line. Norman Douglas, who had built-in punctuality used to say crossly (my extra five minutes, very rushed) "Punctuality is the courtesy of kings." Admonishment turns me into the kind of boy who gets expelled from schools. "And time is made for slaves," I'd be a mutter and finish doing up my cuff-links as we did a walking Marathon down the steep XXXX of Capri.

A corner of the Lounge. (Is there a worse word in the English language?)

Over Lady Audley, like a tarpaulin, a potted palm. Snap, not snivelling, on her left. Greetings. Seatings. Champagne, served with a flourish.

Elaborate courtesy extended to **_That Woman_**!"

19

She wrote. Poetry - "if you can read that stuff."* Had been
engaged to Ezra Pound but decided in favour of an English writer, Richard
Aldington. Went off with "Dolly" to America where "Bryher met, among the
literati of the day, an American writer, Robert McAlmon, and they married.

This, I suppose, was the first iniquity. Not that Lady Audley
disliked McAlmon. She had, I would say, a sneaking fondness for him.
To be sure he drank. His manners were nothing if not crude. He was apt
to pop over to Paris "just like that" without XXXXXXXXXXXX warning. But he
and "That Woman" were bad for Dolly. One of the most implacable hatreds,
a Holy War was on, engaging without declaration or even a waking up to the
fact, the entire United States. Dolly was no more. Victim of New World despoliation
and rape. Cold, XXX the fuggy rooms. Stoke up the fires!

"That Woman". Not even a name. Just two initials: H. D.

Slender books of perfect words like coins of sunlight on the Aegean,
the "scant shade" of olive trees grooved, the spinex whorls of murex. Sea again.
H. D. was used instead of her maiden name - Hilda Doolittle from XXXXXXXX
Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

It was she who introduced me to Bryher. That marvellous confrontation
is for another book, if I get around to it, not for this slight record.
How can I have scratched my pate in doubt about that caul?

* * *

On the swaddled bottle of champagne Bryher bestowed a look of
unqualified loathing. Good reason for this, as we shall see. She firmly
thrust away her glass.

Snap, the governess, demurring: "Eu, neu, thenks most awfully.
Ai think safer not, it puts me to sleep, haha. Eu, well, just a teensy
drop... *Thenk-yaw.*"

Lady Audley and I exchange glances. "Oh! For a night in Bohemia!
Oh! for the frolic and fun!" Both of us loved Douglas Byng, whose songs
were smutty and smart.

Eight o'clock.

"Milady, Mesdames, Monsieur - dinner is served."

* * *

* "that stuff" in 1959 won the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award and
in 1960 the Award of Merit Medal for Poetry, from the American Academy of
Arts and Letters; the only time the latter has been awarded to a woman.

20

Milady led the way, ushered in by the headwaiter. I thought of
the entrance of Princess Aurora. H.D., or Helen of Troy in pleated chiffon,
followed with Snap, the ex-governess in dejected lamé. Bryher and I brought
up the rear.

Bryher had glued her elbows to her waist, one hand hugging a wrist
close to her bosom as if fractured, head down, face blank.

"Cheer up, ducks," I say.

"Growl!"

"What?"

"Snarl!"

On this ominous note we are seated.

Snap (after the champagne) "It's rather hot, ai think ai'll just
slip off mai jacket. Eu, thenks most awfully, waiter, just euver the beck
of the char." Snap! No more than a flash of reproach at me for not
having sprung to attention.

Bryher, opposite me, did something with her mouth, as if pursed for
the reception of a Holy Communion wafer. It remained like this, frozen
by the glacial eternity in her ice-blue eyes.

Fuss and service. Conversation spasmodic, not by any means
circulating. Ice bucket with wine. Soup.

Turbot. Johannisburger. Things are looking up.

It is when the lamb comes with the peas that real animation enters
this Last Supper gloom.

Lady Audley tastes the peas, puts down her fork.

"Houtrageous! These peas are tinned! Waiter!"

"Milady?"

"Send me the maitre d'hôtel at once."

Like Perseus, that suave experienced face from Torino arrives beside
Milady's.

"Dica."

"Someone has dared serve tinned peas!"

Jump. Gesture of horror.

"Milady! Toutes mes excuses, mais impossible! Dans cet hôtel -
un hôtel de la dernière conséquence, bien entendue - is served only the
most fresh, top quality. Nothings tinned. Pardon; mais jamais, Milady."

21

All the experienced self-assurance of a nurse soothing a fretful child.

You now must imagine the Lady Audley voice which booms forth with the
clarion ring of Edith Evans in _She Stops to Conquer_. are

"You may think you are telling the truth, but you're not! Tinned,
I say! Houtrageous!" She glares like police searchlights.
surrounding

Is he about to faint? Perseus has come a cropper. The dinge of/
diners is rapt. One or two glance at their own peas.

"Milady, accept my word ... " ("Santa Madonna!" he murmurs.)

"Your word! What I will not accept is tinned peas. I shall never
be able to invite my young people again. Houtrageous! Tinned! Stop
pretending. We've both lived through a war. Straight out of a tin.
Jolly cheap brand, too!"

He is not going to faint. A brave attempt at hauteur collapses
because of a bright enamel of sweat which has polished his forehead. Suddenly
at this unspeakable moment, to everyone's surprise, Lady Audley bursts out
laughing.

"The expression on your face! Antonio, you are forgiven. But have
these terrible things removed and substitute something fresh."

She is now in a rollicking good mood, and Snap neither bursts out
crying nor *drops* off to sleep. Bryher has de-gelled. A secret wry
amusement has softened her Gorgon look and made her beautiful like water.
The Delphic Oracle in person, H. D.'s eyes meet mine briefly, though it
seems an evening's conversation.

Return of Antonio, a victorious army of one.

"Milady, mi scusa..."

She affords him her smiling attention.

" ... a terrible mistake."

"Well, a silly one. Be more careful about these things. As you see,
people can tell. You are forgiven. Cheer up."

Reprieved, Antonio steps down from the scaffold. His stuttering
excuse about kitchen fare and an apprentice is unheard. Lady Audley has
started to say: "I must tell you - " but can't go on *she* is laughing so
much she has to shake her head and gasp: "I can't!" This infects me and
I start laughing. So does Snap and hastily gulps a tainy drop of waine.

H. D., I think benignly powders her nose and Bryher gently urges: "Du calme."

For Antonio later a whacking big tip as we leave, their hands meeting
almost as if a clandestine rendezvous were being affirmed for midnight "on the
dot". Snap, whose nose has gone red, may fall asleep at any moment.
Stifling a yawn, she looks like one of those rubber faces you can squeeze
into funny shapes.

22

Bryher: "Well, Mamma, I think - "

Lady Audley is chirpy. "Early to bed early to rise." She adds:
"Dolly, you look as if you'd been to a funeral."

" ... the tragedy of the peas ... "

"Did you see the expression on his face?"

* * *

On the way home Bryher says: "We trust you noticed she had two
helpings of the same tinned peas yesterday at home with us?"

I seem to remember and try to think of the "expression on her face" and
don't succeed.

"Dear me! People are most odd." Bryher gazes out at the moonlit
lake.

I thought it quite subtle. It had been a roundabout way of scolding
us! Poor Maitre-d'hôtel! For a moment I thought I should send him a
rhodendron, then thought I shouldn't.

23

FOUR

Sir John, bearded, almost a replica of King Edward VI, in memory
lives in the South Audley Street library; a large square room, my favourite.
I suppose this is because, after dinner, he and I retired to it while he
smoked a cigar and I a Melachrino 4. They were tinned.

For the life of me I cannot describe the man.

Patriarch? Some persuasion of this is dismissed through a smoke megaphone formed by his mouth only partly visible between moustache and beard. Also, something cut-off, solitary, dismissive.

Logistic acrobat from the word Hoopla! However, a non-performer, set down among his books. An Old Testament figure! Oriental? Mage, yes. Not Jewish, yet somehow talmudic. His family, Bryher said, had long been millers on an island in the Elbe.* She told me she had hopefully searched the family tree in vain for Jewish ancestry. I suggest that Monsieur Peyrefitte might be able to trace it. His eyes, ice-blue like hers, were (unlike hers) prominent and so secret and undivulging you could have been staring at, not into, the eyes of a statue. They didn't seem mirthful when he laughed. He seemed to be watching you. When angry they only turned paler. No distress ever showed in them; a glass imperturbability, a silence, a disconnection. And yet they were not disconcerting. They were ice-cube eyes which never flashed a message. And they were not dead. They regarded you as steadily as a still lizard. They fascinated me.

He was portly in a contained way. Immaculate. Fine hands, often laced across his middle when he sat. His beard was so neat it could have been applied with spirit-gum. Soft-spoken, never discourteous. The enigma defeated me. Hoping, then, to be a man of the world and with requisite subaltern respect, I would nod sagely and knit my brow. One was really trying to communicate with the Ice-Cap. Or with Eternity.

I decided he was a sort of Eternomatic precision instrument, and also a full-time solitary chess-game. He liked to discuss whether Shakespeare was Shakespeare or Bacon, and if not ... That was in fashion at the time, and it was the kind of thing I could debate. It may have been kind condescension for nothing could have induced me to have a whack at stocks and shares.

* * *

* Recently Bryher wrote, answering some of my questions, "1927. I remember the voyage to Hamburg, looking at the Alster and wondering about my ancestors who were said to have lived there but it was briefly, as I found when I went to Hitzacker a few years ago."

24

This explained in instance, why, when she ran out of a room, her skirt lifted and sank so slowly motion.

What I remember of the first meeting with Pabst was his instant intimacy, warmth and enthusiasm for all that had to do with films, with people, with life. He had a kind of blazing ardour that made ignited every moment of his waking day.

It is wonderful when things happen this way. Fired already, I think the sheer cosmic energy of our first evening together must have made us seem like a new comet, Bryher, too, was blowing and, as usual, at the controls, watching the arc of orbit.

How odd that I cannot remember a word of what was said, but do remember my joy in finding in this restaurant long stems of white celery which ice, and having had to eat so many compôtes, so much sauerkraut and other tinkered vegetables, this fresh cold crackle was a great deal of my own contribution to sounds and a celebration in our world was ours. Nancy Cunard has, described joy at the Villa Tuoro. This was sheer joy in Berlin, the curtain just risen.

* * *

Next morning, early to the Ufa studios outside Berlin. Pabst had written a pass for us, which I remember was carefully examined, after which the salute was given with smiles and a flourish. A guide came along to direct us to the outdoor set.

I saw at once why he had suggested a raincoat and umbrella. I don't know how many fire-hoses with sprinklers were shooting up in the air into a Crimean seaport, but, in the raw light of many arc-lamps, it was a good enough chance. It was a farewell scene. I saw the girl, hurrying down the half-drowned street, to embrace, perhaps for the last time, her loved one, whom she was leaving beloved. And I was in a tingling Paradise. The ship was about to set anchor. There was no time to lose. Then, suddenly, plop! and all the rain stopped, the lights went off.

"Dear me!" said Bryher, looking anxiously at the slippery ground as we began our descent. I could see what she meant. If there was to be a retake we would be caught in the middle of it. There was also the danger of slipping and suddenly sitting down. "Could we not descend on all fours?" Then, below, I saw Pabst and yelled his name.

I saw his gestures, firmly thrusting us back. I was aware that the two figures which had been clasped in the rain had separated, the girl was again behind the man. Hoses. Rain. Lights. Cameras. Again they encountered clasped, half drowned, and made their agonised farewell. Lights out. Hoses off. A sudden trickling quiet. Pabst climbing as we descended along dry land on the lip.

"You see, I said, bring umbrellas. It was a good scene. You will see. Come. Come, please, and watch your steps."

25

A lovely young French actress played Jeanne Ney, Edith Jehanne. She it was who had to catch the xxx ship leaving the Crimea. I think I can hardly do better than to refer to my own article on Jeanne Ney which appeared in our magazine, Close Up, December, 1927. If I quote at too great a length, skip. I quote what then was true and to some extent still is.

"Pabst said: 'You have no idea how difficult it is for us to make good pictures, of how I had to fight to make this picture. It is really terrible. They want us to make films only in the American style. And I say to them, we are not Americans, we cannot make pictures in the American style (even if we wanted to)...

"With each new film in this category the fight grows steadily harder and harder... This will not do, we cannot have that, you must do this, you must cut out that, you must add in the other thing." As example, there is a scene in Die Liebe der Jeanne Ney where a young communist quite simply accompanies the girl, Jeanne, into a church. He has just come from the Crimea, and has been with her for the first time; walking through the poor streets of Paris, loading her with flowers from the market flower-sellers' baskets. It is a scene full of warmth and deep feeling and the ardour of young people for whom there will be--only brief and flaming--loveliness. They are dazed by each other, covering their feelings with gaiety and gay tributes. The passing into the church was a half-hypnotised, small adventure.

"Pabst could laugh at this. 'All they have said is that a communist would not go to church. I say to them, 'I am showing that ... this ... communist ... does ... go ... to church.' 'Oh, but a communist doesn't go to church.' 'Well, I am showing you how this communist did go to church.'

He meant, of course, into a church, not to attend a service.

"There are moments of exquisite beauty. One of them is after the murder of (Jeanne's) father as she and Uno Henning as the young communist stand transfixed by one another and shattered in so many ways, but still without relinquishing what has not yet been spoken. Another follows shortly as Jeanne leaves the Crimean town for Paris. With a simple black oilskin, she leaves her house for the boat. (Had the luggage been sent on ahead?) Rain is falling heavily, and the roads are deeply rutted and in large puddles from the traffic and guns which rattle past her. Groups of soldiers stand about, others hurry past through the rain. She swings through the bustle both conscious and unconscious of it. On the outskirts of the town, where the roads are ploughed out of recognition, through huge puddles splashing in the rain and bare trees dripping, she comes face to face with Henning. They stand a long time in the swirl of wind (machines) and rain, then go straight to each other's arms. Presently, she goes on as before, leaving him. He stands there while she continues her way to the boat."

This is the scene Bryher and I walked into that day at the Ufa Studios at Neubabelsburg (what a name - new label town - for the days of silent films!)

27

Far too young, Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein died in 1948. He was only fifty years old. Just beyond the halfway mark, at the age of 26, he directed perhaps the greatest film ever made, _Potemkin_, which even today stands out as such. That was made before I met him. In Berlin, I saw his marvellous _Ten Days that Shook the World_ (in Germany entitled _Oktober_) and he was still working on his _General Line_, parts of which I was allowed to see. The Russian Embassy film group was kind and cooperative.

When we arrived (before having met Eisenstein or Pudovkin) and presented our credentials, one of them said, "Ja, gut! Close Up stedt Links." (Good. Close Up is left-wing.) We were permitted to sit and sit and see three or four films a day. Quite a number of hours, especially for the projectionist. No doubt they came in relays. Reel after reel. Bryher and I would leave, reeling too. Famished, too. And half blind.

## But what films we saw!

The first, if I am not mistaken, as well I could be, having seen no less than forty, was Pudovkin's _Mother_, a staggering experience. I hope that it is preserved in such museums as The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and elsewhere. The second was sheer self-indulgence. In all, I suppose I have seen _Potemkin_ not less than thirty times, and can see it with my eyes shut. The magic is this: that to see it again, today or tomorrow, I will experience the same transports of participation and "be with it" as much as ever. This may be in part associative. I have to remind myself that, to a young man in his twenties, prone to infatuation verging on religious experience, I did literally enter heaven, my own kind of heaven. Eisenstein was God, Pabst his Prophet; they had both befriended this young religious maniac! Well, good luck, young man. I said earlier I have had it. I suppose Pudovkin must have been the Holy Ghost. His masterpiece, "The Last Days of St. Petersburg" had the quality of a sea-storm crowding in on a west wind, and, with the shafts of light you would expect through such tumbling skies, why not the Holy Dove?

As Bryher might have said: "We fear he would not appreciate the analogy." We fear we agree. No room for ghosts up there!

§ § §

Eisenstein (to me) "My father built ships. You are attached to the business of ships, no?"

K.M. "Did he build the Battleship Potemkin?"

Eisenstein (smiling into the distance) Do not be journalistically romantic. Imputation is possible, especially in thought, and can change a fact into a factual deed. Consider the Bible.

K.M. "Is the idea of linking things up any more journalistically romantic than studying a chess-board?"

Eisenstein "Chess is not fantasy."

29

He stops, turns. My shoulders are seized and crushed by a Russian bear who had dug trenches during the revolution.

"Go home now. You are whiter than a clown."

"It's the Neon light."

"We'll find a taxi."

"There aren't any. You have exactly three minutes before you're tired too. Time to walk to your door."

He thrusts an arm through the trench dug by him, through mine as if to prevent me giving at the knees, which in fact would be a pleasure.

* * *

What a relentless confidence-trickster is *time*! The important things in life remain, like granite, forever andFOREVER and Foreigners to it. Then clouds sink down the ridges and make a flatter prospect, the heights all gone. And suddenly this isn't true XXXXXXX after all. They are back, shining as bright as a button.

I have just been writing of Berlin in 1927 and 1928 as if I had this minute returned from that tawdry city of young ardours. Then, reflection and a bit of counting on the fingers tells me that there is life and reality, no further away that a short jet journey, happened 42 and 43 years ago. Tomorrow I can jet back and everything will go on as before. O dear! But yet it can go on as it was.

In a different setting, Florence, I met Norman Douglas in February 1931; he died on Capri in 1952; Another wide prospect in absolute - I cannot say "stark" - contrast.

Here was the natural but always to me surprising contrast between the eager fuss of young participation, which was joy, and middle-aged Nepenthe, which was peace, lived in the world with Douglas, where I was then living, having been bowled by its beauty, "But doesn't such a life tend to stultify, a sense of reality?" At that time, I was grateful if it did. In those days it was a quieter place. Those internal travel agents hadn't yet got their talons into it.

All this, to the young world of today will seem like the stone age. Today, children of twelve peddle dope, teen-agers are main-stemmers, great and serious matters are down the drain. Anything will do to turn out a demonstration - liberalism, not liberty; it soon may be an anti sanitation parade. Even the function of office Today are as insolent as violent. Naturally,

You cannot with great success war against war when you moon in sodden stupor and psychadelic mysteries. This does not always apply. To protest, to strike, is right when the provocation is intolerable. I used to protest. Now, getting on in years, like Norman Douglas, "all I want is peace - with or without honour!" And I heave a groan as I set it.

29

I did not find any text in the image.

He stops, turns. My shoulders are seized and crushed by a Russian bear. He had told me he dug trenches during the Revolution.

"It's the Neon light."

get

"We'll go to a taxi."

"You have exactly three minutes before you are tired too. Time to walk to your door."

He thrusts an arm through mine as if to prevent me giving at the knees.

* * *

What a relentless confidence-trickster is *time*! The important things in *time* life remain like granite, forever and ever, made and foreign to us. Then the clouds sink over the ridges and they seem another land, but we know it is not. Back shining, diomatically gone forever. Then suddenly it isn't true at all. They are of now. I have just been writing of Berlin in 1927 and 1928, as if I had this minute returned to it from some other land. Then, reflection and a bit of counting on the fingers tells me that this living reality has happened 42 and 43 years ago.

In a different setting, Norman Douglas and I met in February 1931; he died in February 1952. Again, another world - I cannot say in "stark" language, for I am too young. But I know that between the ages of 20 and 30, a person can be a man and a father. Then, I was a child.

Today there is a world to which all this must seem extinct. Children of twelve peddle dope, teen-agers are main-stemmers, great and serious things, are down the drain. How can you fight it when you are a sodden stupor and psychadelic colour lighting, having sex with the same interest with which you might pick your nose, and no more charming sex has ever興prized at you, and when you are a child and care about the extinction of *all* doomed beasts and water-life, Arms Marathon-race, *goodwill* and scabrous and soon leprous. Nobody could have wished the atmosphere created by us, which we have ourselves created around us, and it is too late for revolutions, except perhaps, the overthrow of wicked science which, when weighed, plonks down an overweight of *all* the weight of extinction, its cause choice.

If that major prophet, the first Sir John Ellerman were still living, I wonder how long he would give us and how he would explain his prognosis.

* I hope the picture will not take this to mean that I am my way of life. However, that is the way if life is to be lived. I never wanted to "drop out" of a group of the young. In this so-called personal age, I thought to be in some extent a theatre actor. And my play was cinema and against the darkening decade of the drop-outs we have all lost.

FIVE

With his ~~XXIX~~ XXIXXY concentration and its ~~XXIX~~ XXIXXXX habits, Sir John lived a XXXXXXXX sedentary life. Unless they were staying in the house, ~~the~~ guests at lunch were few and far between. Quite often there were XXX~~ few ~~ some for dinner. Very seldom (~~there were~~) large evening parties which he hated. I suppose he did on occasion accept a return invitation, though never when Bryher and I stayed in the house, where everything was wonderfully lavish and not immoderate.

Knowing how much I love oysters, he would add them to the menu in season as often as I hoped he might. Breakfast was at nine in the dining-room (on the dot!) and a marvellous sideboard groaned with chafing dishes, with York ham, and general abundance.

When he had finished eating, two books would be laid in front of him. The one on top was the chef's suggestion for luncheon and dinner, the other his suggestions for meals for the staff; a complicated business, as there was greater protocol below stairs than in our own huge room with Cordoba leather walls, Chippendale and paintings. I never understood why he bothered with the below-stairs menus, arranged on different social levels, and was always pleased with his alert study of what we were going to eat; for he was also bearing in mind which wines he wished to drink. Without telling any of us, he would cross out and substitute what pleased him more, and this was quite a process. Sometimes he closed the book without comment, and often he twinkled at me: "Oysters!" And once in a while, in a golden mood, he would pull out his wallet and extract a fold of those beautiful white banknotes of long ago, and would hand one to Lady Ellerman and say, "There you are, Mothers, I expect you shall need a new hat." One to me: "For gadding about." One to Bryher: "Just don't put it in your bank. Spend it." These beautiful banknotes were for 1100, Why don't I see young John receiving this bounty? I suppose he slept late or had breakfast upstairs. I do not see him at the breakfast table."

Then off Sir John would go in his Lanchester to his offices in the City to return for lunch at one, on the dot.

Once in a while he announced that he had a business lunch, and what would we like? Lady Ellerman said she would take care of us; just leave the books. When he had gone, she would say in winter, "Let's have a lovely steak and kidney pudding with oysters." Sir John knew what we were up to (or, as he would have said, down to) and never commented on asked what we had chosen. Merrie England was a gale-crasher in this gallic majesty.

They were, I must say, superb. The chef had been literally kidnapped with bribes from the Hôtel Meurice in Paris, and rightly received a king's ransom. Once he invited me downstairs to see his collection of his own sculptures in sugar. These awe-inspiring masterpieces included a galleon in full sail, a swan large enough for Lohengrin with cygnets of a more practical size, the column in the Place Vendome, a Roman triumphal arch (but not the Arc de Triomphe) curvaceous baskets of coloured flowers like bowers in a Fragonard, a pair of winged sphynxes, and much that I cannot remember. He had medals and diplomas. For some reason Canova came to mind and I mentioned this, as well as Fragonard, and also the élan, and he was content. I left this temple goggle-eyed.

24

Bryher, who was devoted to him, was convinced that the greater part of his life was what today we would call a computer (more accurate than some) and that what was left over was easygoing and in later life leisurely. He had been a keen mountaineer when young, and the first to scale one of the Alpine peaks. It all fitted: the snow, the ice, the heights. Wonderful, to have known no failure! She said that, when not cerebrating, his interests were those of "a boy of sixteen". I could discern nothing suggesting sixteen.

He himself told me, and Bryher bore this out, that he had a certain (I would have said awesome) precognisance, whether mystical or euclidean or both one cannot know, which traced and set the time and place of the world's fast changes as far as fifteen years ahead. No hit-or-miss gamble. As naturally as walking or being seated, he took this for granted; there was no complacence or bragging. He might have been saying, "I shall walk round the Serpentine tomorrow at five, if you care to join me."

The dates of both World Wars had been predicted even to the months - August and September. I was told that on Armistice Day, November 11th. 1918, he breathed no sigh of relief, but said: "A breathing-space until 1938."

But for the Munich Pact he was right. This slight miscalculation was due, one feels, to his inability to presuppose that a British Prime Minister would sell-out the so-called honour of his country to a strutting cacodemon. And, in any case twenty years was stretching his claim by five.

Sir John was a man of honour, hence the error in timing - that one bloodcurdling year, and, consequentially, the far more bloodcurdling years that this "year of grace" made possible.

* * *

Back in the library.

I have kept no old diaries. I suppose this to have been in 1930.

He said, in words to this effect: "Sell out all your European investments, even at a loss if necessary, and put the proceeds into an American portfolio." I remember the rate of exchange. The pound sterling was worth $5.18, and now is worth $2.40. He said, in the tone of "I shall walk round the Serpentine tomorrow at five", that England would abandon the gold standard and the value of the pound would take a big tumble. I followed his advice and am grateful when I reflect that, thanks to him, in the course of monetary vicissitudes my capital doubled, or, to put it the other way round, was not decimated to the point of extinction. A short-term prophesy, to be sure, yet promptly and in good time obeyed.

He said that if he had not gone into the shipping business exactly when he did he could never have become a "man of means". It was wise of him to speak with modesty, which was his habit. Modesty was a trait one of his natural virtues as well as a useful one. Any mention of his name in the Press meant showers of begging letters. And it is admirable that he knew so well, like Shakespeare's (or Bacon's) "pard's", just when to "leap upon the moment."

25

In his mind was a kind of police helicopter sharply observing the trade routes of his ships, and he knew which vessel was where, what it carried, where and when it would arrive, what it would unlade, when it would sail newly laden, how many would embark and disembark and where, what the journeys were worth and what were the future movements and expansions of this vast mercantile undertaking. To me this held the spell of oceans, and gave it all an almost piratic fascination.

Because I love the sea, I was easily drawn into this fascination of his ships and where they went, and would have preferred to be a dolphin leaping beside them - a personal preference to be in and not on the sea. It has something, as well, of the engrossment of one's fleet of toy boats in the bath as an adventure-dreaming five-year-old.

Instinct also turned his attention to those glossy weekly magazines, slowly failing in a mire of middleclass snob gossip, hunt-balls, debutantes, people engaged and married, with upward gazes at royal happenings; and, having turned their penury to profit by the simple means of reducing the width of the margins. Prophetic, too, in a way.

* * *

If something good was on at the theatre, that is to say a light musical, Saturday was the night. Exceptions were made after careful deliberation for certain opening nights. "Bitter Sweet" was one, and all the Ivor Novello shows at Drury Lane.

Dame Novello Davis, Ivor's mother, had become an intimate friend of Lady Ellerman. From time to time she stayed at Audley. She had a choir of young Welsh women. If you are interested in that I can be of no help since I never heard them. I had to confess this, quick to add that Bryher and I lived in Switzerland.

"Then the mountain must come to Mohammed," she said with royal condescension and professional intent. The mountain did not come. Perhaps she reflected we already had enough peaks and might expect her ladies to yodel. Or Lady Audley looked blank when she suggested it."

* * *

Was she "Dame" or just "Madam"? Who cares. She was a charming woman, and my first glimpse of her was before the opening of one of Ivor's spectacles with the title of "Glamorous Nights". Drury Lane, of course, and the Royal Box. I don't know if you are old enough to remember the kind of welter. Tropical isles, a sinking ship, Noël Coward's quips of the year before last ... well aimed at the sophisticated from shires and counties "up to town" for a day or two to buy and brush up on the blase.

26

This first entrance of Madam (Dame? I'll settle for Madam) Novello Davis was better than any Glamorous Night. We were all dressed up with white tie and tails and waiting in the front drawing-room. All but "Dolly" who was late on parade.

Payton, the Ronald Searle butler, appeared, and in a smothered voice choked on suppressed mirth, announced Madame. I knew her son, Ivor, and was happy to be about to meet his distinguished mother.

From where I was seated I saw some fronds of pale-blue ostrich feather beginning to waft in. This was fast followed by more, by a bosom, by blinding diamonds, by a five-foot-nothing little feminine wad, instantly of immense allure. The ostrich-feather cape had a long train, the ball-gown glittered like morning sun on a Riviera sea, a white-gloved hand was already extended, heavy with more diamonds. Focussing on Lady Ellerman, this small celestial phenomenon, this XXXXXXXXXXXX feathered comet, emitted in the tone of Edgar Allen Poe's raven not "Nevermore!" but a piercing "DARLING!" The huge room was suddenly suffused by all the perfumes of Araby. Her tiny pointed toes came pecking through the hem of her ballgown and they too were blinding. A few strands of pale-blue feather detached themselves and floated out of sight.

"Dear Sir John!" She gave the train a little precautionary kick XXX as she turned. Then I was introduced.

"Oh!" she generously exclaimed, "it's easy to see that Dolly married him for his looks!"

A seat was indicated and placed for her.

"But isn't this ... all ... too ... ex-CIT-ing! I can hardly - Oh, well, yes, sherry as usual? (takes it as if she would have preferred something else) But, darling! Black Lace! This is an Opening Night at Drury Lane! And hardly one of your beautiful jewels! Oh, come, come, come! At least brighten yourself up with a parure or something. To honour my darling Ivor. In the Royal Box you must look Regal!"

Bryher entered "Very well," said Lady Audley, amused. At this moment in a flowing dress of floral chiffon.

She looked a fright. What was wrong? Her solemnity and inscrutability were much too phoney. This evening dress had been acquired for her by her mother, designed especially to turn her back into "Dolly."

Lady Ellerman had one of her attacks of uncontrollable laughter.

"Dolly, darling, you've got it on back to front and inside out!"

What was meant to be a kind of draped cape behind hung down in front as if to conceal pregnancy. You could see the crisscross stitching down the seams.

Bryher, victorious, could no longer contain herself.

"How is one to know?" She retreated in tears of joy.

27

Madam Novello Davis would have been the last to mind me telling the story of the orange-juice. First, a word or two about "Glamorous Nights".

She and I became chums that first night of Ivor's smashing success.
Behind the Royal Box is an ante-room all gilt and scarlet plush, and when
we retired to it after the first act, a marvellous spread awaited us. At
home we had hurriedly eaten oysters and salmon trout. Now we sat down to
~~greasy balloons~~ of caviar and champagne, if you wanted it, or Scotch or
cognac. There were two peruked lackeys in white satin tails, and red
velvet breeches. Lightly veiled by tulle, Lady E. had changed her double
row of pearls for a triple one and wore the famous huge pear-shaped pearl
pendant from India to a large diamond. This was a spectacular piece which
she feared was vulgar, although it was far too noble to be that, hence
the slight tulle draped across it.

When the agreeably long Interval was about to end, Madam Novello Davis
with ~~x~~ slightly exaggerated concern urged the Ellermans to be safely seated
before the lights dimmed. They obeyed. The flunkeys were leaving.
We were alone.

"Quick, dear boy! Another brandy, a mere nip. And help yourself to what you want." We swigged like midnight robbers. She sailed down the steps, all aglow in more senses than one, and moved to the front of the box where she stood and raised her arms. Some rounds of applause. Not too many. Then, as the lights dimmed, they caught sight of Lady Ellerman and Sir John, who in the light looked more than usually like Queen Mary and King George, and since the box was wreathed in carnations and roses, there was sudden thunderous applause, acknowledged by Madam N.D: Bryher was looking so prim I knew she was giggling in her adjusted floral chiffon. The applause died as the curtain rose.

Orange juice.

Madame was staying at South Audley Street for the first time. She
had breakfast in bed, an unheard-of thing. It was taken in by a maid, I
think Lady Ellerman's own bundle of discretion, who looked like "Well, I never

"Just strong tea, dear, toast and orange-juice." I think she did
not appear until 2.00 pm before lunchtime.

"Good morning, darling; yes, beautifully thanks; but what sort of
house do you run? I asked the maid for a little gin to take the edge off
the orange-juice and she came back and told me your butler said there was
never gin!"

Gordon's arrived that afternoon. This event saved the day for Lady

28

Ellerman whose golden mood returned after a ruffling morning out shopping,
and entered to the tune of "La Donna è Mobile" on a barrel-organ.

Sweeping into the house, she snapped at Payton: "Give that man
some money and tell him to go away. It's nothing but a lot of hinarmonious
noises!" She was flustered and mixed-up.

Barrel-organs were vanishing and I wanted to run out and ask the man
if he would consider selling it, but judged it was not the right moment. And
I'm sure he loved it, anyway.

Alas! There was a little dressed-up monkey, too, and a dream died
sadly as the beginning of "Santa Lucia" came to a sudden gurgling stop.
William, the footman on duty, to my wan pleasure placed the coin in the
monkey's trustingly red fez. How cheated can one feel by the
insensitive brushing aside of some innocent delight! Madam Novello Davis
saved the day indeed, not only for Lady Audley but for me.

I meant to take milady to task about that organ, telling her that if
she loved Southern Italy so much she should appreciate this great musical
instrument, and that, on a barrel-organ with a monkey, "La Donna è Mobile"
sounds far far better than in any opera house. The opportunity did not
arise. Perhaps it is wise not to dispute the private treasury of one's
childhood.

Trouble is, La Donna is too bloody Mobile! To think she even
crooned, dreamy-eyed, " 'Twas on the Isle of Capree that I met her"!

How about that for hinarmonious noises? But she loved both Capri
and Gracie Fields. So did I. Gracie forever; the isle before they
really made it "Cap-ree." One must overlook the fact that "Our Gracie" was
partly responsible. Far worse were those true villains of pollution and
despoliation, the Tourist Agents. A pox on Thos. Cook & American Express!
And those ignoramuses, their clients, who want to see the world without
understanding either its history or its peoples. Amen.

or even being curious about

Library again.

Leather armchair holding Sir John; holding the mould of his shape
when he stands up. Behind him, drawn deep green velvet curtains denser
than forests. Huge fires. Smokeless. He owns mines in Wales. Bought
up at JUST the right moment. His cigar, my Melachrino. Soft lights.

My eye runs along a line of red-Morocco-leather volumes as long as
an American freight train, saying in gold lettering The Complete Works of
Charles Dickens. I can just make out Dombey & Son, Martin Chuzzlewit, The
Old Curiosity Shop, and the next seems to be Bleak House. Somewhere in this
freight train Mr. Micawber is being realistic about bank balances, and

29

somewhere, seated, is the kind of woman we take to our hearts, Sarah (or is it *Sary*?) Gamp with her umbrella so well drawn by Cruikshank, like the bulging yarn on a spindle.

From where Sir John sits on the other side of the fire I obscure
a fine view of an oil painting of a Capri (not *Capree*) precipice with
Indian Figs in the foreground, and over my left shoulder is the painting
I like most - a mid-period Corot of the Loire on a grey day. A stationary
sky heavy with unfallen rain. Resigned green trees admiring themselves
in the colourless leisure of the river. Sir John is telling me that his
miners are going on strike for a raise in wages. The smokeless coal blazes.
It is beautiful.

How much?

They want a raise of two-shillings-and-sixpence a week. I see my
knuckles go white and relax.

"What do they get?"

"Thirty shillings."

He went on to explain how this would upset the entire balance. I
gazed into the merry fire.

"It should be trebled at least," I said. Life was five times cheaper
than today. Even then that seemed rock-bottom.

"What should be trebled?"

"Thirty shillings."

"You are not a realist." He is smiling pleasantly at a lunatic.

"I've had to be. I've been poor, too."

* * *

Can you see the editorial pencil scoring out an offending phrase?

If you remember that Lady Audley's bogey, the Rhone, melts from a
long ~~long~~ *giant* glacier, *hides* only because it looks forbidding and rather
grimy, you may imagine that this is the kind of glance I momentarily
confronted.

No love lost, are you thinking?

Not an ounce. Not a grain. On either side.

I gazed back into the comforting fire. There was no point in saying
anything.

30

Gazing at that beautiful anthracite, its great smooth <u>shiny</u> sending up a tower of laughing flame, I thought that at least nine of these conflagrations were galloping away all over the house. The cost per <u>minute</u> must have been in excess of thirty shillings.

And my mind's eye saw those hilly rows of Welsh hovels. It also saw the groups of unemployed, Welsh miners soaked in the rainy London streets singing so beautifully for pennies. And it saw infamy.

Did we need all this?

Must these brave men and their families suffer

Daring to ask for two shillings and sixpence a week!

But if we didn't consume in luxury what they mined in peril, how could they live? Ipso facto, we were supporters of the social structure. So, toast your tootsies.

This rage was a flash in the pan. Sir John was benignly puffing on his cigar and I said, as there had been a short silence, the first thing that came into my mind.

"I've been noticing, you have all the works of Dickens. It's high time I had another look at them."

"Well, do. He was a great humanist."

<u>Mamma mia!</u>

* * *

Who was I to be having these Commie indignations, lolling there, toasting my tootsies in evening clothes from Savile Row and cuff-links from Cartier? Comfy as all get out except inside.

I had accepted that Sir John, courteous and thoughtful and generous beyond anything I earned from him, thought little of me and in his way he was right. Bryher and Berlin thought something of me. That I much preferred. I used to tell myself when roused by brazen exploitation, which is the common currency of commerce, that in this pursuit you do not get sloppy and think that here and there it might be a comfort to own an old winter overcoat and a pair of heavy boots.

And yet, this I have to say of the old boy: he was a tough and valiant mariner, a well-built "old Atlantic Liner" good for many more prosperous crossings.

* * *

31

I turn from this petulance to magnanimity.

When the Press announced his death with the compassionate headline: "WINDFALL FOR THE TREASURY!" I could have kicked the Treasury on its then fat bottom.

Alas! No windfall for able-bodied seamen, for dock-hands, for miners, for officers, for office-workers, for the vast body of loyal slaves who had brought all the gold to Midas. But I promised to be magnanimous.

With the exception of the Corot and objets d'art, every painting he owned, and some bibelots, had been bought to benefit an artist living, at least at the time of the purchase. The choice was erratic and sometimes delightful.

Unfortunately, from my point of view and for anybody who may have inherited this collection, no Impressionists or Post-Impressionists, no Fauve, Dada, Cubism, Surrealism. Some excellent views and landscapes, one in the dining-room especially, a view of Auxerre which Milady hated because the river was in the foreground. XXXXXXXX Ladies drifting through gauze, flowers slipping from their exhausted hands; torrid afternoon languor. Le Salon, the Royal Academy.

There was the life-size portrait of Dolly by Sir Luke Fildes, enthroned and wearing white tulle with a blue sash.

Lady Audley explained, in an impressed way, as if entering Chartres for the first time, that the ribbon had been sent back twice to Paris to be redyed before Sir Luke was satisfied with it. Old fraud! thought I, knowing enough to know that if an artist cannot invent the colours he likes, what on earth is he doing sitting at an easel?

This preposterous piece of trash was perched on a gold easel in the front drawing-room, and a gold wicker flowerstand in front of it flowed with freshly cut flowers and, touchingly, was referred to as The Shrine. And yet, if the Dolly Madonna was indeed up in Heaven, at least the far more attractive inspiration for this sugary myth was very much up and alive and didn't get the floral offerings. I suppose the dream is what matters most. Bryher detested jewels and chiffon; why should she be given flowers?

Her only comment, quite sufficient, when I mentioned the painting, was: "Don't" The change from a simpering nonentity into its exact opposite was attributed of course to "That Woman". But the picture was a lie, anyhow.

Be it remembered, however, that big money was paid to these accomplished men and they had worked to get it. It was kind. Will that do for today's magnanimity?

32

FIVE

I reached Audley a day before the bereaved family arrived with the
body.

Already cameramen were gathered. Soon a closed canopy was run from
the street to the front door. There had to be lateral openings for the
passage of pedestrians. Many paused in expectation. As I entered, the
camera fireflies winked round me.

Then the vigil from the library window.

When the car, followed by the hearse, arrived, there was a general
rush, as if the windfall for the treasury were being strewn in a carnival
battle of flowers. They drew up. No opening of the car doors. I
descended with Payton, and the two openings in the awning were closed by
the two footmen who stood guarding them. There were police as well.
It seemed after that to take no time at all.

Heavily veiled and screened as much as possible by police and the
chauffeur, Lady Ellerman descended and hurried up into the sheltering house.
Bryher and John followed. Then the hearse. Flowers again but no "battle".
There were attendants to bear the coffin into - yes - the library. There
were members of the family, standing and ready to leave at once.

In the hall, Lady Ellerman said only (and it was eloquent)
"Oh, Payton!" and for the first and last time in his life his arms were
round her.

"There, there, Milady," is what he said. Bryher was the colour of
the white of celery. I could have wept but I seem to weep only when it
isn't necessary.

* * *

INTRUSION INTO PRIVATE GRIEF

After the funeral, this was the headline of a letter signed by Lady
Ellerman to The Times. It protested the hooliganism,
during the burial service.

The cemetery was at Putney Vale.

33

Grey heavy day. It had been raining and was now quibbling whether to stop or not. Sooty look of mourning on the small semi-detached xx houses in row after row, the road shiny black like a film-vamp's satin. Closed corner Crown and Anchors or Ship's Arms; an occasional lowering church with printed appeals for funds for repair. General atmosphere of drip drip.

Outside the cemetery a gathering, some xxx opened umbrellas. Inside the gates, a guard of honour of captains and officers of Sir John's vast fleet. I cannot be sure, but I think the flowers started there as a background. Nor can I remember, nor does it matter, in what order we arrived. The hearse, naturally, was in front, and Lady Ellerman, naturally, with John, her son, were next in the Rolls Royce which we called the Crystal Palace because it had been designed round Lady Ellerman as she sat in comfort wearing her high toques and demanding above them plenty of headroom, the result being that it looked like a Hilton Hotel on wheels, towering over everything on the roads except tops of buses.

I believe that Bryher and I followed in the Lanchester. After us the procession.

The details of this dreadfully sad day escape me.

I know that out of the kind of trance that only death xxx you care about, XXXXXXX induced, I was, as if being brought-to, of the emerging vision, over the rise of the hill, of masses of people, not silent and still but looking like trees thrashed in a gale. I remember a momentary awareness of surrealistic wonder before I cottoned on.

This skirmish had nothing to do with anything but getting a good gawk at the incredible grave.

Flash! Flash! Flash!

I see the solid lining of the grave with pale gold roses making also a carpet round it, and I see the great banks of flowers go tumbling in the tussle. This is disturbing, but my first feeling is of astonishment at the beauty of this floral tribute to the remains of the old Atlantic liner. Then, of course, is the last welcome to Sir John. This infinitely woeful tribute to a latterday Caesar, touching indeed. Then chaos. I see the cameramen jumping over the wreaths, knocking them over, jumping on the carpet of roses. We are ourselves all but pushed into the grave on top of the flower-heavy coffin. Only then, as the body is lowered into its bower and the service starts, does the crowd fall back a little though, behind, people are still jostling and jumping. This revolting fracas now momentarily quietened will soon begin again. Through my pity and the grief I feel even for Sir John himself (though most for Bryher then Lady Ellerman and John) a slow but sure rage. A disgusting confrontation at any time and at this sacred crisis of finality and bereavement. recognition

The only sign of this cruelty is that by Lady Ellerman is a deep broken sigh, otherwise she is steadfast. Young John, standing on his mother's right, knows his arm firmly through hers, looks drawn, inscrutable and far away as if this were going on in a forlorn dream. Bryher, on her mother's

34

left and on my right is a stone. Having noted this, I look straight ahead
with a masked expression. It has to be or it would shoot forth death rays.

Flash! Flash! Flash!

I believe the police control which should have been organised at the
beginning was at work at last.

But now all compassionate feelings had given way to disgust and rage,
and hate, and, worst of all, despair. For this was it. This was how people
are. Was there any point in being what Sir John had called Dickens - a
humanist - if this was humanity? This last farewell probed through a
second hell, a ghoulish cabaret, by thieves already gathering the untrodden
roses! I saw that some puritanism still controls those who loot. They
did not steal the toppled wreaths. At least I did not see them do so.
Lady Ellerman did not weep then or later. Perhaps she too was in a white
rage.

* * *

Spoken quietly to a cameraman: "Do you feel happy about your scoop,
you and your colleagues?"

"All in the day's work, old XXXX chap. One has to live."

"Can you suggest one reason why?"

"Oh, come off it, cock. That's an old one."

"I expect so. But don't forget that what applies survives."

He was XXXX cocky.

"All right. So what? I'm surviving, aren't I?"

I had to go, anyhow, but felt that not to let him have the last word
at this point would be descending to his level. Besides, his point called
for debate not the annihilating snub.

If I am not mistaken, we all rode back together in the Rolls.
Solidarity, at least for the time being. You have already read that it
was short-lived.