Going Up

T
HE MANAGER’S NAME was Love. His first-floor flat was diagonally across the private road and the rose beds from ours. Each weekday morning, at eight fifteen, he hooked open his lattice-paned bedroom window and did exercises, in a white sleeveless vest and white drawers. Inhaling at length to expand his narrow chest, he flexed blanched arms, then bent and straightened unseen knees, five times. His physical jerks had the timeliness of a figure in some medieval German clock. On the hour of nine, he issued forth, at ground level, in black coat and striped trousers, in order to walk his briefcase to his bungalow office, opposite the green main gates and porters’ lodge of Manor Fields. Tall and thin, head rounded off with a bowler hat and hanging forward on an elongated neck, he resembled an ambulant question mark. His first name was Bernard, but he was spoken of only as Mr Love.

Manor Fields consisted of several blocks of red-brick Key flats, disposed among lawns and nice trees in what was once the rural estate of Lord North. Built at the top of Putney Hill in the 1930s, they were designed to appeal to ascendant members of the middle class. Each set of three entrances – apart from the one labelled ‘Harvard’ – was named after an Oxford or Cambridge college, although few tenants were likely to have attended one. Perhaps out
of secular tact, none of the blocks bore the names of sainted colleges. Our first-floor flat was 12 Balliol House. My father had been at St John’s, Oxford, neighbour to Balliol, which was known to those next door as ‘Bloody Belial’. One of Cedric’s friends had tried to take a running jump from one college to the other and was impaled on the spikes atop an intervening wall.

In my teens, during the late 1940s, most of the lock-up garages in the back lot of Manor Fields stood empty. Early in the war, my parents had renounced their black Standard 8, EYR 332, with an enamel Union Jack on its bonnet device. Not until 1953 did they buy a patriotic, under-powered, fawn-coloured Morris. During the Blitz, Manor Fields’ cavernous underground garage served as a communal air-raid shelter. On holiday from boarding school, I looked forward to the ululating air-raid siren. The threat of German bombs promised a late night, sweetened by communal cocoa and Huntley & Palmers biscuits and loud with ack-ack fire from a sand-bagged battery on Putney Heath. The moan of the all-clear was an unwelcome relief: it signalled bedtime.

No trace remained of the eighteenth-century mansion of the Prime Minister whose indecision had lost Britain its American colonies. However, when strange scents were sniffed in the first-floor flat rented by John and Adie Tutin, in Somerville House, which stood on the site of the great house, Adie – a short, permanently waved, blonde, breathless, one-eyed Yorkshire woman – was sure that the perfume emanated from the ghosts of conscience-stricken aristocrats. On the telephone to my mother, the gush of gossip from what I called ‘Radio Tutin’ was audible from my parents’ bedroom door.

The Tutin flat featured a white telephone, concealed under the crinoline of a ceramic Madame Pompadour. It also sported a heavy collection of blue bound copies of the
New Yorker
, for which I had an exile’s appetite. Central Park West, where I had lived until I was six years old, was my equivalent of the Old Country. In early adolescence, I embarrassed Adie by taking pointed pleasure in the Peter Arno cartoon of a businessman saying to the barman, as he indicated the scantily dressed floozy on the stool beside him, ‘Fill ’er up.’

During summer holidays, I played tennis with the Tutins’ neat, pretty brunette daughter, Dorothy. She had a freckled nose and a penetrating cross-court forehand. After a spell as a flautist, under the tutelage of the conductor of the Metropolitan Police band, Maestro Barsotti, Dotty gained entrance to RADA, borne on the wind of her mother’s ambition. Adie seemed to have been born to impersonate Noël Coward’s Mrs Worthington. Dorothy proved, in due time, that there was an escape from suburbia, along the yellow-brick road that led to the distant West End. Her favourite record, played on the family’s wind-up gramophone, was ‘My Heart belongs to Daddy’. I preferred another number in the Tutins’ brittle collection: ‘She had to go and lose it at the Astor’. The twist was that what the singer had lost was not her virginity but her mother’s sable coat.

By the time I left Charterhouse, Dotty had her first professional part, as a pageboy (blackface, can it have been?) in some Shakespearian drama. She spoke no lines, but one of the reviews was headed ‘THE TUTIN GIGGLE’. After she was cast in Graham Greene’s
The Living Room
, with Eric Portman, who fidgeted with eye-catching effect when anyone else on stage seemed to be attracting the audience’s attention, Dotty never looked back. One day, I thought, I would write her a play and earn myself a one-way ticket out of Mr Love’s enclosure.

Dr John Tutin was a tall, square-shouldered naval engineer. He had a dipsomaniac’s careful step. Having gained pre-war fame by designing a revolutionary propeller for the
Queen Mary
, he went up to Piccadilly most days, after the morning rush, in black overcoat with velvet facings, and homburg hat. During the war, he had an office in Lower Regent Street, where he had been commissioned to work on ‘The Tutin Safety Hatch’. It would assist submariners to avoid the fate of the sailors who, in June 1939, had been trapped, and drowned, in Liverpool Bay in HMS
Thetis
. When HMG ceased to pay his rent, Dr Tutin installed himself in the reading room of the Piccadilly Hotel, where he made seigneurial use of the stationery and other
amenities. His velvet-faced comportment won salutes from the doorman and immunity from managerial question.

On the odd occasion, he joined Dotty and me for weekend tennis on one of the two
en-tout-cas
courts on the garage roof. Wearing jaundiced flannels and dainty gym shoes, he would pause and then serve with an abrupt dab of the racket that imparted a high, slow, unreachable bounce to the ball. John was sometimes partnered by the exophthalmic George Coulouris, an English actor with a Greek father. In New York, he had been a member of Orson Welles’s Group Theatre and played the part of Walter P. Thatcher in
Citizen Kane
.

I was never more wholeheartedly British than in the last month of 1949, when, having finished my scholarship exams in snowy Cambridge, I stopped off at Manor Fields to await my results. Who could guess that, in 1938, I had been transported, an honest-to-God American kid, from New York City to England? As a result, I had been untimely ripped from Ethical Culture School, on Central Park West, and subjected to an English classical education, first at Copthorne, a Sussex prep school evacuated for the duration of the war to north Devon, and then at Charterhouse, near Godalming, Surrey.

I was alone in my parents’ flat when, late in the afternoon and with waning hopes, I received a telegram from R. L. Howland, the senior tutor of St John’s, congratulating me on having been elected to a Major Scholarship in Classics. A florin persuaded the telegraph boy to stay and share my pleasure with a glass of sherry. My joy derived less from the opportunity for advanced study of Latin and Greek than from triumph over George C. Turner, the headmaster of Charterhouse.

Obliged to return to Godalming for the rump of the Oration Quarter, I put on the fawn, zip-fronted trousers, without turn-ups, which I had acquired the previous summer, while on a visit to Kansas City, my mother’s home town. Over my demonstratively transatlantic Arrow shirt, with button-down collar, I wore a Fair Isle sweater of many colours, knitted – on several simultaneous, curved needles – by my mother’s agile young fingers (Irene was not yet forty).
I refrained from flaunting one of the hand-painted, kipper-wide ties that a salesman had wished on me in K. C. after I had promised that I was all right for socks. Even a modest sartorial declaration of independence would stand out against the herringbone-tweedy, house-tied uniformity of fly-buttoned Carthusians who had yet to complete their penitential sentences.

My sixth-form masters, I. F. ‘Gibbo’ Gibson and V. S. H. ‘Sniffy’ Russell were quick with congratulations. I received none from the headmaster. Some months earlier, George Turner had barred me from the shortlist of candidates for the Holford Scholarship, which offered one Carthusian per annum privileged access to Christ Church, Oxford. My candidature was proscribed because of a letter I had written to the Provost of Guildford. During a Sunday night sermon in chapel, he had invited the congregation to imagine young Jesus going to sell his handiwork as a carpenter to a Nazareth shopkeeper. ‘And the shopkeeper,’ he declared, ‘
being a Jew
, would give him as little for it as possible.’

Had I, at that point, ventured from the sixth-form stalls and strode down the long nave of the Giles Gilbert Scott Memorial Chapel and unlatched one of the big, echoing doors and gone out into the night, my time at the school might have been summarily curtailed; but it would have been a far, far better thing than I dared to do. I sat still. Later, closeted in my study, I wrote a sardonic letter to the Provost. He did not reply directly. He forwarded my callow philippic to George Turner, adding that he would never have said what he did if he had known that there were any Jews in the chapel. Turner, a short man, summoned me to his presence and accused me of bad manners towards a guest of the school. It was my duty to write and apologise. Brimming with unworthy tears, I refused. The headmaster then declared that my discourtesy rendered me ineligible to be included on the shortlist of candidates for Christ Church.

It was a Carthusian tradition that anyone who had won a major Oxbridge award was commissioned to carry the good news, on a card written by the headmaster, from classroom to classroom. The announcement that he had won an
extra half-holiday for the whole school procured brief popularity for a clever boy. Carthusian slang labelled scholars ‘hash pros’, no deferential designation. In 1940s England, to be a professional implied that you did things because, unlike a gentleman, you needed the money. George Turner gave the rank and file no occasion to put their hands together for me. Nor did I receive the leaving prize of £40 in books regularly given to those who had won major laurels.

In the envoi appended to my last report, Turner hoped that my success would encourage me to abate my resentments and take pleasure in ‘the adventure of ideas’, a phrase lifted from the title of a book by Alfred North Whitehead, the co-author, with his quondam pupil Bertrand Russell, of
Principia Mathematica
. Russell’s Whiggish accents were familiar from his contributions to
The Brains Trust
on the radio. Turner was advising me to renounce my mission to reproach the Christian world for iniquities visited on the Jews; I should do better to lose myself in the higher culture to which I was fortunate enough to have been offered access. I had every wish to do so.

To buy the blue Pelican edition of Whitehead’s elegant book, I went to W. H. Smith’s, in Putney High Street. A varnished board hung from two brass chains over the foyer of the shop displaying – in appropriate shades of blue – the winners of the University Boat Race each year since its inception in 1856. With instant new pride, I observed that Cambridge had won more races than Oxford. My vision of Cambridge promptly displaced that of Oxford. I imagined a Great Good Place, where wit procured eminence and where there was neither Jew nor Gentile.

Smith’s had a lending library on the first floor. Monica Dickens, Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer, Angela Thirkell and Daphne du Maurier were the authors most in demand by south London
literatae
. Suburban solitude made me bookish rather than scholarly. To learn about the world, one did not look or listen, one read. Until 1948, we had no television in 12 Balliol House; nor was there ever a gramophone. In 1925, partnering Phyllis Haylor, my father had been amateur dancing champion of the world. He
always loved to dance. His favourite venues were downstairs at Hatchett’s, adjacent to the Berkeley Hotel in Piccadilly, Quaglino’s in Bury Street and, more rarely, the Savoy Hotel. It had an elevated dance floor and bespectacled, soft-voiced Carroll Gibbons’s sucrose orchestra. What counted for Cedric was the beat, not the music.

We never went to concerts, rarely to the theatre. Our Philco radio was seldom turned on except to listen to the nine o’clock news (read, most often, by Alan Liddell or Bruce Belfrage), Tommy Handley’s
ITMA
(‘Well, if it isn’t Poppy Poo-pah!’) and Ronnie Waldman’s
Monday Night at Eight
. It featured a weekly ‘deliberate mistake’, which listeners were incited to detect, and an encapsulated thriller,
Meet Dr Morelle
. On Christmas Day, we tuned in to the king’s speech in good time to sympathise with brave royal pauses. My father and I stood at attention for the national anthem, enacting moral rectitude. My mother, being American, was exempt.

In the 1940s, I had no way of learning about sex except through print. Although a measure of information came with the kit, a solitary boy had to imagine how his bit might fit into hers and, more difficult, why she might care to brook such an invasion. I had neither brothers nor sisters. Since both my parents were only children, I also lacked first cousins. All my relatives were old. By the time I left Charterhouse, when I was eighteen, I had yet to see an unclothed female in the flesh.

At the age of eleven, I had been enlightened, by chance, about what men and women did in the course of what Somerset Maugham, when I came to read him, called ‘sexual congress’. During a school holiday, while on a bicycle ride with a Dartmouth cadet who lived in the next entrance of Balliol House, I chanced on an unofficial exhibition of black and white photographs pronged on the barbed wire around the pond on Wimbledon Common. A congeries of tallowy men and Rubensesque women were disporting themselves with hirsute abandon. One or two were smiling at the camera. We looked and we looked, Martin and I, and then we pedalled home.

When I returned, alone, to do some revision (‘boning up’ might be an apt modern usage), the photographs had disappeared. I had to satisfy myself with the breasts of the single naked woman available, for one and sixpence, in the monthly
Lilliput
. The space between her legs was blanched and uncleft. I looked to Picasso for hairier information.
Lilliput
also carried the adventures of ‘That Naughty Girl Myrtle’. She was advertised as being no better than she should be. Her chronicler never disclosed details of what precise naughtiness she got up to. I was much taken by a Reprint Society novel in which the heroine was revealed, by her overall tan, to have sunbathed in the nude. Art and literature supplied what suburban life concealed or was fudged by editorial discretion.