Memoirs of a Private Man (33 page)

Neither
DEATH, TAXES or ELECTIONS
Can Stop
PADDY BAULER'S ANNUAL ART FAIR PARTY
You are commanded to be present at the
49th WARD CULTURE CENTER
403 WEST NORTH AVENUE
on Sunday 11th June beginning at 4 p.m.

The committee was twelve-strong, and included such interesting names as the Illinois Assistant Attorney General Joe Rubinelli and jazz club owner Earl Pionke. Heading the list was Governor Otto Kerner and Mayor Richard Daley. Third was the newspaperman Herman Kogan, who arranged my invitation, so I was in influential hands.

It was a brownstone house in an unexceptional street – except that it had been swept and scoured of all litter, and blue-washed, sidewalk, street and all, and was guarded by armed and uniformed policemen sitting astride motorbikes. You went in through a small hall into a much larger one, with two other rooms beyond and then a backyard, also blue-washed and guarded. We were given chicken legs and hamburgers, and beer to drink. A German band played music and an operatic soprano sang items from the shows of the time, accompanied by a zither. Many influential people were there, including a Catholic bishop, several judges and aldermen, a district attorney or two, and Adlai Stevenson junior.

Although recently having stepped down as an alderman, Paddy was still powerful in the Democratic Party; also he had a rake-off from most of the one-armed bandits in clubs and arcades in the city, so he was very rich. In his later and more respectable years he had developed a passion for things Chinese, hence the appearance of the invitation card. All the names of the committee had their Chinese equivalent in gold leaf beside their own on the card. There were Chinese lanterns in the rooms, and numerous bonsai on pedestals. Fireworks occurred later in the yard.

Paddy was known to give not unvaluable silk kimonos to those who took his fancy at such parties, and he was wearing one himself on the night, with Chinese silk trousers. He was a very small man, and he sat on a high chair surrounded by his henchmen. His face was lined, his head shrunk between his shoulders, his eyes small and a faded blue. Herman introduced me. ‘This is Winston Graham, the celebrated British novelist, who is over in our city on a brief visit.'

Paddy took a shrivelled-looking cheroot from between his lips and stared at me belligerently.

Presently he said: ‘ You look like an egghead.'

I smiled apologetically and said: ‘ Oh, I don't know about that. Just a writer, I suppose.'

He continued to stare and then snarled: ‘ Your country starts all the wor-rs.'

This was the end of the interview. I didn't receive a kimono.

San Francisco was chock-a-block with some convention, and my publishers had had to get us accommodation in one of the older hotels instead of at the Fairmont where we had previously stayed. Breakfast in our room proved an almost insurmountable obstacle. Telephone calls were to no avail. Hours seemed to pass. I was due for a radio interview at eleven, and only just made it.

The hotel where we were staying was the one where Fatty Arbuckle, one of the most famous of the earlier film stars of the silent screen, had many years before committed suicide in mysterious circumstances. Arriving at the restaurant (it was to be an interview in a restaurant) feeling frustrated and very angry, I was about to say that I had at last solved the mystery of Fatty Arbuckle's suicide. He had shot himself, at the hotel where I was at present staying, in frustration waiting for his breakfast.

But as the interview began I happened to glance down and see a printed notice on the table saying something to the effect that ‘interviewees' were ‘personally and legally responsible for any action for libel or slander brought by any person or persons as a result of this interview'.

I have never seen this notice before or since. Perhaps it is everywhere – if so I haven't spotted it. But perhaps it is as well I took heed. Knowing something of the speed of the American law processes, I think if I had spoken out, I might just still have been over there fighting my corner.

Between Charterhouse and university Andrew took a year off and worked for my American publisher in New York, before travelling widely round the States by Greyhound bus. He had done well at school, though was not perhaps ‘
facile princips
', as the headmaster of the Cathedral School, Truro, presciently described him. He coasted along pleasantly at St Edmund Hall for a couple of years, but in the third year began to make big strides. It was a time when the National Economic Development Council (NEDDY) was in its infancy, and an official came round seeking likely recruits. His tutor recommended Andrew, who was invited for an interview and offered an appointment before he sat his Finals.

So to the tall new building on the banks of the Thames; but within a few months George Brown created the Department of Economic Affairs and invited Sir Donald MacDougall to lead it and to bring with him from NEDDY a half-dozen of the brighter young economists. Andrew was one of them.

He came home one weekend and told us there was a vacancy in the Cabinet Office, and it had been suggested to him that he might apply. He did so apply, and was appointed; but found when he arrived that he was not to be in the Cabinet Office but in 10 Downing Street itself, where he was to be the junior in an office of five under the then Sir Thomas Balogh.

In a fairly short time one after the other of his seniors in the office left to take up other posts and were not replaced, and he found himself Balogh's personal assistant. Then Balogh accepted a peerage and came to spend most of his time in the House of Lords, and Andrew was left on his own with two secretaries and five telephones at his disposal.

In the meantime Harold Wilson had taken a liking to him, and he became accustomed to accompany Wilson to Cabinet meetings and subcommittees and sit with Wilson's secretary, taking notes. By this time Henry Kissinger was already emerging as senior adviser to the President. Wilson wanted to send him a résumé of Britain's view of how the world economic situation had developed since the days of Bretton Woods, and he asked Andrew, then twenty-five, to write it. Andrew came home with about thirty pages he had written, and with an occasional notation from the Prime Minister made in bright green ink. In due course this was sent off.

The following year Andrew told me there was a vacancy for an economics fellowship at Balliol, and it had been suggested he might apply. What should he do? I said there was no harm in his applying so long as he didn't expect to get it. So he applied, and got it. He was one of the youngest dons to be appointed to Balliol in half a century.

Later, the Labour Government fell; but they were not out of office for long, and when he came back Wilson immediately applied for Andrew to return as the economic adviser in his policy unit. This he then did for the next two years. New as he was to Balliol, it was a very exacting time for him, and he was not disappointed, I think, when Wilson's resignation created a natural break.

But he expected to be recalled when the next Labour Government came to office – and would have been. He had become personal economic adviser to John Smith, and was a close personal friend, but when Smith unexpectedly died, the top echelons of the Labour Party underwent drastic change, and Andrew was marginalized.

It cannot really be looked upon as a consolation prize that he has now become Master of Balliol.

Rosamund, being nearly four years younger, thought naturally enough that when she left school she too would be entitled to travel as her brother had done. But she did not want to go to university. Going on from Truro High School to Westonbirt in Gloucestershire, her routine as a normal schoolgirl had been abruptly, if blissfully, interrupted by a summer on the Côte d'Azur. This too was a fairly natural reaction. Give any pretty blonde a summer in Cap Ferrat, where she spends hours sitting in the sun in a bikini, surrounded by admiring French boys, then returns after two months to the rigours of the English public school, wearing thick grey stockings, flat-heeled shoes and a plain school uniform, and academic life does not appeal. After a year at a finishing school, the Institut Alpin Montesano at Gstaad, she wanted to take another year in the States, working as Andrew had worked, travelling as Andrew had travelled.

At that time there happened to be a ban on the employment of British secretaries in New York, as the local girls were being deprived of their jobs. So by infinite contrivance I arranged a fictitious job in a publishing firm in Boston. (It did not occur to me at the time that I was arranging for her to spend most of the rest of her life at a distance from us of 8,000 miles, but that, as someone once said, is how the cookie crumbles.)

Rosamund met a tall, good-looking American, and it was love at first sight. Already divorced, Douglas was still in his twenties; and although I have not been able to monitor his life at close quarters, I get the strong impression that he has never looked seriously at another woman since he first met my daughter.

After two sojourns in England, where two of their three children were born, they finally settled in California, where Rosamund has been the linchpin of their family life. Maximilian, Dominic and Anthea are all tall and goodlooking. More important is that they are all jolly, cleanliving, affectionate and highly intelligent, the two boys already married. Max is in law, Dominic is in law-enforcement! Apart from bearing and raising the children, Rosamund has worked all through, first at a Californian university, and more lately she has become Director of Human Resources for the District of Tulare, responsible for the welfare – and the hiring and firing – of 750 personnel, of mixed races, many Hispanic.

Before she was married, she rejected the academic life. Now, having raised a family and all the time lived a life of endless and extraordinary activity, she has recently studied for, and been awarded, a BA.

Both children have now been long and happily married, my son to Peggotty, a remarkably pretty, but not noticeably studious, girl from Somerset. However, since she found they would have no family, she decided to follow a fully academic life of her own, is now an MSc and is at present Dean and Director of Social Sciences at the Open University.

As to the rest of the immediate family, my niece Barbara (my brother Cecil's only child) lives at Haywards Heath, not far from Buxted, and – together with her late husband, Ronald – has provided much appreciated support and companionship. Recently widowed, but ever cheerful and competent, she has often stepped in to help at times of domestic crisis.

Jean's niece, Jacqui, now married to Geoff Williams and living in Newport, Shropshire, I see far too rarely.

Slow, slow, fresh fount,
Ben Jonson wrote,

Keep time with my salt tears,
Yet slower yet, O faintly, gentle springs.
List to the heavy part the music bears.
Woe weeps out her division when she sings.
Droop, herbs and flowers,
Fall, grief, in show'rs;
Our beauties are not ours.
O that I could still
Like melting snow upon some craggy hill, drop.
Drop, drop, drop.
Since nature's pride is now a withered daffodil.'

In 1983 my wife began to lose a lot of weight she could ill spare, and her voice became hoarse and croaky. Emphysema was diagnosed, but she refused to believe she had this. She became in the next few years quite tiny and bent: it was strange for me to see her when I remembered her straight back, her sturdiness and her great vitality.

It cannot have gone unnoticed that I think my marriage was an extraordinarily lucky one, because it was such a happy one. The best of marriages have their ups and downs, but in half a century I recall only one serious quarrel, which lasted about half an hour, and in the course of which my wife threw part of our dinner service out of the window onto the lawn, but, when anger cooled, compelled herself to go out and pick up the pieces before the maids arrived in the morning.

For the most part I remember it as an association full of passion and laughter, constant amicable companionship and enduring love.

She died in December 1992, to the last issuing strict instructions as to how her Christmas pudding was to be cooked.

After the loss of a woman with whom one has lived in the greatest amity for much the larger part of one's life, one is not a little bereft. When towards the end she would once or twice become a mite depressed, I would say to her: ‘ Don't be so selfish. You can't go and
die
on me. Think of
me
. I can't go on without you.' And, although light-heartedly expressed, I meant it – and totally believed it. But I have.

Sometimes if you wear a cheerful face to deceive, the deception begins to stick, and you end up by deceiving yourself. I was of course greatly helped by my family, though necessarily after a few weeks most were far distant. And a few very good friends, the Chapmans, Christopher Biggins, Angharad Rees, and some of Jean's bridge friends such as Molly Burton. But the largest contribution came from a young woman called Gwen Hartfield. My wife had taken her on when Gwen was living nearby with a husband and a daughter of seven. She came to help in the house, but then, as Jean's health deteriorated, she took over ever more of the housekeeping, and when Jean died she became my housekeeper, while continuing to see to her own husband and child, and this has continued ever since. Efficient, humorous,cheerful, witty and eccentric, she offered me friendly yet challenging companionship which I so much needed at that time, and which has never wavered. She has recently celebrated twenty years with us.

A year or two before Jean died we also took on a second helper (replacing one who left) called Tina Creelman, and a new young gardener, Robin Brown. These three formed a young and jolly triumvirate and have continued so ever since, making the big empty house more pleasant to live in and more tolerable to return to after one of my visits to London or my travels abroad.

I dedicated my novel
Tremor
to them, and they were my guests at the Savile Club for a birthday party that was given to me there a few years ago.