More Fool Me (4 page)

You do not, I believe, grow up, even if you are Stanislavsky, Brando or Olivier, knowing that you are a great actor. Much less do you grow up believing that you have it in you to make
any
kind of a career out of performance on stage or screen. Everyone has always known that it’s ‘an overcrowded profession’. We are most of us these days I suppose familiar with the tenets of Malcolm Gladwell’s
Outliers: The Story of Success
, which quite cogently argues that no one ever made a success of themselves without having put in at least 10,000 hours of practice before breaking through. No one, not Mozart, not Dickens, not Bill Gates, not The Beatles. Most of us have instead put in 10,000 hours of wishing, and certainly as far as acting was concerned I had long thought I would
like
to take a stab at it but hadn’t gone much further than that. I think my first print review, ‘Young Stephen Fry as Mrs Higgins would grace any Belgravia drawing-room’, went to my head when I was about eleven years old.

‘Oooh,’ whistling intakes of breath. ‘Nine hundred and ninety-nine actors unemployed for every one with a job, young fellow.’ How often would I hear this at drinks parties when I was a boy, such remarks always accompanied by the merest flash of a look acutely designed to assure me that with a face and string-bean body like mine I would never make a handsome leading man and should perhaps think of some other career.

‘Being a barrister is a little like being an actor,’ became my beaming mother’s comforting and hopeful mantra. For a while I went along with this and between the ages of twelve and fifteen would tell the Norfolk landowners and their wives to whose parties we came and went that I was all set to make it to the Bar. Norman Birkett’s
Six Great Advocates
was now my constant companion, and with all the repulsive self-confidence of the lonely geek I would bore my family with stories of the great forensic triumphs of Marshall Hall (my especial hero) and Rufus Isaacs, a great role model for any Jewish boy, since he rose to become Marquess of Reading and Viceroy of India. From a fruit market in Spitalfields to being curtseyed and bowed at and called Your Highness in the viceregal Palace of New Delhi. Imagine! And unlike Disraeli, a
practising
Jew. Not that I was ever that; nor were any of my mother’s immediate family. We were, in Jonathan Miller’s immortal words, not Jews, just Jew-
ish
. Not the whole hog. But then, as the Nazis showed, you don’t have to practise (even for 10,000 hours) at being Jewish to be beaten, exiled, tortured, enslaved or killed for it, so one might as well embrace the identity with pride. The rituals, genital mutilations and avoidance of oysters and bacon can go hang, as can the behaviour of any given Israeli government, but otherwise consider me a proud Jew.

My background and upbringing in rural Norfolk seem, from a twenty-first-century perspective, a bizarre throwback. I think our way of life was in fact old-fashioned even in its own time. A fish man every Wednesday clopping in by horse and cart, coal trucks, butcher’s, grocer’s and bread vans arriving to deliver whatever provender that wasn’t brought up to the back door by the gardeners for the cook, whose sister-in-law scrubbed floors on her knees three times a week. No central heating, no mains water, just coal or wood fires and a Victorian pump-house to draw up water, one source being a cistern reliant on soft rainwater which filled the tank that fed all the baths and wash basins with soft but rusty-brown bathwater, the other source drawn up from a groundwater aquifer which supplied the house’s single drinking-water tap, fixed low down over a wooden bucket in a vast Victorian kitchen warmed only by a coke-fed Aga. There was a china-pantry, a food-pantry, larders, sculleries and an outer-scullery with a huge butler’s sink that could only be filled from a grand brass hand pump. Outside the china-pantry, just by the door to the cellar stairs, hung a long rope which ended in a bulging red, white and blue sally. If any of us children were out in the garden and were needed, the rope would be pulled. The clang of the bell could be heard half a mile away at the local pig farm, where I sometimes liked to spend my time ogling piglets. Every time I heard that bell, my stomach seemed to fill with lead, for unless it was lunch or supper time it nearly always meant Trouble. It clanged the news that somehow I had been Found Out and was required to stand on the carpet in front of the desk in my father’s study and Explain Myself.

Back inside again, on the wall next to the sally, was the predictable bell panel, which would have told servants from a previous era into which room to scuttle, bow and bob for instructions. Instead of the pulled-by-wire shaking bells so familiar from today’s country house films or television series, ours – being an in-its-day modern Victorian house – took the form of a wooden framed box. Each room’s name was printed beneath a red star in a white circle which oscillated when an electric bell was pressed. It was said that my parents’ house was one of the first in its part of Norfolk to be thoroughly ‘on the electric’. I am sure the circuitry was never upgraded from the time of its building in the 1880s until my mother and father finally sold the place nearly a century and a half later. The ceramic fuse boxes, the solid bakelite and brass three- or two-pin plugs were at least eighty years old when I was a boy in the 1960s and I was always astonished by the eye-achingly dazzling white three-pin plugs I saw in friends’ houses, just as I was astonished by, and more than passingly envious of, the wall-to-wall carpeting, colour televisions and warm radiators that my friends took for granted. Not to mention their easy access to cinemas, shops and coffee bars. Such ordinary, modern households as theirs may not have had trained plum and pear trees stapled to the gable-ends of their outbuildings, nor could they boast built-in hand-carved linenfold cupboards that a contemporary antiquarian would orgasm over, but they were, to my restless rusticated brain, as
exciting
as my life and household were
dull.

We move along, as an estate agent would say, from the pantries and cellar door, past the bell panel and rope and encounter an always closed studded baize door which leads through to the house proper. There, hallways, dining room, drawing room, great front stairs and my father’s study could be found. Forbidden territory. Next to the baize door were the
back
stairs, which led to our domain.

On the third floor of the house my brother and I each occupied a huge bedroom, leaving the others (one of which was already divided into two rooms) for furniture overspill, spare rooms and attic space. These unfeasibly proportioned rooms, a little William Morris wallpaper still showing through in one of them, had originally been designed as dormitories for servants. Whitwell Elwin, the architect who built the house, had made the mistake earlier, when building his own Victorian rectory in the same village, of providing small individual rooms for his staff. It seems that in these narrow rooms they had suffered acutely from homesickness and loneliness and thus, given a second chance at domestic architecture, Elwin had created in our house enormous servant chambers in which the maids and footmen (in their ruthlessly segregated dorms, naturally) could chatter and console each other through the night.

Elwin’s finest work of architecture was neither the rectory nor our house, but the village church. Booton church is worth travelling
miles
to see. ‘The cathedral of the villages’ it has been called. Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, the great master registrar of Britain’s architecture, who visited every county and chronicled any building of worth in the United Kingdom, gave this chapter of my book its subheading when he described St Michael the Archangel’s in Booton as ‘very naughty, but built in the right spirit’. I remember quoting this observation of Pevsner’s to John Betjeman when he came down to the church with a camera crew and some of his Victorian Society friends during one of my school holidays or rustication (temporary punishment suspension) periods. I had been given the exciting job of escorting this distinguished party around, the self-appointed local expert, and telling them about the Bath stone, the knapped flint, the crocketed pinnacles, chamfering and idiomatic Gothic influences and any other such pretentious guff as my mind (stuffed as it then was with prized Banister Fletcher jargonese) could come up with: ‘note the influence of the Cluniac revival’ – that sort of gobshite, as if they didn’t know all that without the cocky pipings of a twelve-year-old who behaved as if he was the Professor of Architecture at the Courtauld. The great Poet Laureate (or were those years still ahead of him?) was very friendly and patient about all this, but it was only years later that I learned that Betjeman and Pevsner were not on the most cordial of terms, despite each of them so valuing, and indeed so
raising
the value of, architecture in Britain; perhaps therefore my quoting of Sir Nikolaus had been injudicious. I spent the rest of the day, I remember, as a guest of the Victorian Society’s formidably knowledgeable and likeable Hermione Hobhouse, diving in on unsuspecting Pugin and Gilbert Scott mini-masterpieces around the county.

Whitwell Elwin may have created an astonishing church, but his major interest (outside, one presumes, his fifty-one-year ministry at Booton) was his editorship of the
Quarterly Review
, his querulous correspondence with fellow Victorian greats like Darwin and Gladstone and his somewhat ‘inappropriate’ relationships with a series of young girls, the most prominent of whom was his ‘blessed girl’, Lady Emily Bulwer-Lytton, a viceroy’s daughter who later went on to marry the truly great architect Edwin Lutyens, best known for his creation of colonial New Delhi and his collaborations with the horticulturalist Gertrude Jekyll. Lutyens also designed Booton Manor, an ‘averagely fine’ example of his work. After building Booton church and its rectory (envious of Lutyens’ superior talent as well as jealous of his snaffling the beloved Emily, one supposes), Whitwell Elwin built our house as a thank you to the spinster sisters who had bankrolled his magnificent ecclesiastical folly.

Just to drive home to you how preposterously old-fashioned a dwelling ours was, I should tell you that the lavatories were the boxed-in kind with a high up cistern. Instead of the later decorated china ‘pull me’ chain, there had originally been a handle next to the bowl which you pulled
up
to flush. The wash basin in the lavatory’s ante-room didn’t have a plughole. You pulled on a sprung tap to fill it, washed and rinsed your hands, tipped up a lip in the basin which also served as the overflow slit, and the bowl pivoted to empty its water underneath before swinging back to its original position. You probably can’t picture it, and I am dissatisfied with my ability to convey its workings succinctly and clearly. Never mind. Similarly, the bathtub upstairs, with its great lion’s claw feet, had a long cylindrical ceramic pole that you twisted and let down to seal the plug hole. It was also one of the few bathrooms I have ever known to possess a fireplace.

My brother and I were only ever allowed to have a fire lit in our bedrooms if we were ill. I cannot overstate the pleasure of waking on a dark winter’s morning and seeing the embers still glowing in the grate. Otherwise in winter, one relied for warmth on a mountain of eiderdowns and blankets or the company in bed of a cat or two. I had never even heard of a duvet or quilt.

I once found a thin Dimplex electric radiator in an attic and brought it into my room. When my father discovered I had kept it, dialled up to maximum heat for three days in a row (the breath steaming from my mouth and nostrils was nonetheless visible), he made me sit down and work out, given the price of kilowatt hours, how much my profligacy had cost him. This was an arithmetical problem, of course, wildly beyond my competence. The radiator disappeared, and my fear of mathematics grew that much greater.

Outside, the gardeners provided what the grocer, butcher, bread man and fish man could not supply with their weekly van visits. Apples, pears and potatoes were stored in outhouses over the winter; jams, pickles and chutneys were prepared in the autumn by the cook, Mrs Riseborough. Lettuces, tomatoes, cucumbers, scarlet runner beans, broad beans, peas, marrows, asparagus in raised beds, figs, damsons, plums, cherries, greengages, strawberries, rhubarb, raspberry and blackcurrant canes and the whole rich bounty of the garden supplied us all. Milk was delivered daily in wax cartons which, when dried, we used as kindling for the fireplaces; a local farm provided eggs and dark-yellow butter patted with carved wooden paddles and wrapped in greaseproof paper. I had never heard of or been into a supermarket before I was … I can’t even guess what age. If we needed brambles for one of Mrs Riseborough’s blackberry and apple pies, I would take my baby sister Jo in her pushchair along a bridle path and pick the fruit by hand. The October mixing of the Christmas puddings and the pouring of the apple jelly … I am sure that plenty of people still do this every year – more than
ever
before perhaps, thanks to all the Take-offs of the Bake-offs and Cake-offs that now take up most of our television schedules. Cream of tartar and crystallized angelica have never had it so good. Men and women the length of the land still grow vegetables, apples, pears and soft fruits too; I am not, I hope, over-misting my own childhood idyll. Not that for me it was anything close to idyllic, much as it might and ought to appear to have been from this great distance in time and manners.

A grass tennis court and even a badminton lawn were at our disposal; for whatever reason we didn’t use them much, only when American cousins visited.

Behind the stable-block was a cottage and separate garden, where a couple who worked for my father lived, and next to that a paddock filled with noisy geese. I used to brave these hissingly aggressive birds to get to a walnut tree around which they honked and flapped as if it were a sacred temple being vandalized by heathens. Despite growing up in the country, I have never been fully at ease with wild animals.

In the garden’s overgrown old pigsty and hidden in a hedged area filled with broken sundials and choked ponds my sister Jo and I found, tamed and finally domesticated feral cats and kittens which had been let loose from the almost incredibly eccentric rector of the village church, who didn’t, of course, as a high religionist, believe that animals possessed souls, and so they could therefore happily be thrown away like so much litter. Horses we did not have, for over the way my father had converted the monumentally solid stable block into a laboratory. He was a kind of designer, physicist and electronics engineer, impossible exactly to categorize. The stable mangers were filled with tools, the stalls with lathes, mills and other machinery; the vast upper rooms where the grooms might have slept housed oscilloscopes, ammeters and circuitry of the most curious and impenetrable kind. After ten or twenty years of his work there, the smell of solder, Swarfega and freon finally overcame decades of dung, straw and saddle soap.