Outrageous Fortune: Growing Up at Leeds Castle (29 page)

For the first time in my life I had come face-to-face with the shattering nature and force of crushing sadness. James was dead. For the time being I was inconsolable, and there was nothing I, or anybody, could do. I cried until there were no tears left inside me. I called out his name until my throat was raw. When I returned to my house I was soaked and dishevelled from top to toe. I had no energy or inclination to clean up. It was the middle of the night. I dumped my clothes, put on my pyjamas, ran a towel over my head, and went to bed. I must have exhausted all my reserves. I slept.

*   *   *

Sunlight, cruel, demanding, insensitive, insistent, streamed through the tall bow windows of the castle dining room, casting corners filled with Chinese porcelain into dark shadow but saturating the eight of us seated at the polished mahogany table with bright, unwelcome intensity. My parents and Granny B were wearing sunglasses. I’d never seen that at the luncheon table before. Conversation was sparse. Words did not come, or at least not the kind of words that meant anything, or helped at all. Woody, so eloquent by nature, was almost silent, as were David, Vanessa, Nanny, and I. The depth of misery which hung palpably in the air was draining, debilitating. It had been eight days since the accident. No one mentioned James. The shock was still too present, the pain too raw.

My mother spent the afternoon in her bedroom in the Maiden’s Tower while my father went, on his own, for the longest walk anyone recalled him ever taking. No one actually announced what they were going to do except Nanny, who understood that Vanessa should not stay cooped up unnecessarily on such a gorgeous day. David chose to read in the drawing room, and I went upstairs to be alone in the blue bedroom I had shared with my brother so happily, for so long.

I opened the cupboard by his bed and felt the tears well up seeing the familiar jackets and jumpers he’d worn only in the country. Going to the window, I saw my father striding out across the golf course, his pace a good deal quicker than usual.

“Good night sweet prince: / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” I was reading
Hamlet
at school and couldn’t dislodge Horatio’s beautiful farewell from my mind.

But the past was now a shattered mirror. The protective shield of innocence was gone. Why, now, did I start thinking about how so many of Granny B’s friends were no longer around? How so many loyal retainers, some going back three generations, were also no longer around? How Granny’s health was deteriorating, her weekend house parties greatly reduced? How Uncle Gawaine, for reasons always unclear, had displayed no interest in living at Leeds? How Her Majesty’s Government—I was reliably informed—was waiting in the wings, anticipating an 80 percent windfall on the estate when Granny B died, thereby removing any possibility of the castle’s remaining a private home?

I had stared out of these same windows in a state of extreme unhappiness that Christmas Day we learned that Morg had died. I was thirteen then. I was seventeen and a half when James died, and such was the shock to my system that I felt I would never be the same. His death left me wanting even more to be like him, in some way to try and fill his shoes. It was unrealistic to think I would ever come close, but I had to try. His death took away the guide I needed most when it came to understanding how to effectively, winningly, rock the boat. His charm, spirit, candour, and smarts had, over time, softened the castle way’s grip on our household, and on our lives.

20.

T
HE
U
NWARY
B
ENEFICIARY

I left Stowe in 1970 with a brace of decent A-levels in English and History. My father insisted I follow the rules and organized a job for me at Cooper Brothers and Co., Chartered Accountants, overlooking the fact that mathematics was something I’d never quite got the hang of. I knew that reminding him would be an error because he simply would have instructed me to pull my finger out and not be an ass, just as he had done on the two or three other occasions he had offered his counsel in the past. So I spent a year and a half wrestling with ledgers, charts, and figures in the heart of the City of London before admitting total defeat and quitting, probably as much to the relief of my employers as myself.

At twenty-one I came into the first portion of my trust fund (thanks to Granny B’s generosity), and I moved out of David’s Bayswater house into my own in South Kensington. Dreaming all the while of playing in a band, I found myself a job with J. Walter Thompson advertising. I had my sights on a post in the creative department as a copywriter, which a vocational guidance test my parents suggested (I wish they’d done that before the accounting idea) had proclaimed was my ideal job. But there was a two-year wait before I was permitted to take the copywriting test, and that was just too long.

The emerging pattern, clear to any interested party but entirely absent from my own thinking, was that the castle way’s operating system, automatically downloading updates and adding additional layers of code, like Hal in
2001: A Space Odyssey,
was in charge of the ship and had been so, emphatically, since I was five.

In less than three and a half years I walked away from two potentially good careers simply because I wanted to and because I could. How many people are similarly blessed, or cursed? I had a house, I had a trust, and I wanted truly, madly, deeply to be a professional singer-songwriter. No laws were laid down by my parents as to how long this (to them) incomprehensible choice of occupation should be allowed to continue before the cash spigots were turned off. Perhaps that was because they had other more crucial matters on their minds. Their divorce in 1971, after twenty-five years of marriage, had come as a bitter blow to my mother, who appeared to be the last one to find out about my father’s less than clandestine affair with a much younger French woman, a relationship that had been going on long before James’s accident. Fortunately, after suffering a near–mental breakdown, my mother found happiness with Col. Edward Remington-Hobbs, a small-business owner, whom she married in 1972. They, too, spent twenty-five years together until his death in 1997.

*   *   *

The bubble in which I had existed did breed a mind-set all of its own. It had enveloped me everywhere I went. It had told me I was richer (without needing any actual money) and better than the rest. It had told me that I could have everything I wanted and that my position at the top of the heap would remain sacrosanct and unchallenged forever without my having to achieve a thing. Those had been unsuitable thoughts for a child on the cusp of being sent off to boarding school for the next ten years, but for a young adult seeking a way to make his mark such thoughts had moved into the realm of the dangerous.

*   *   *

Four years after my brother’s death, I was playing in a band in London, performing in pubs and clubs and the occasional far-off university, happy at last and brimful of confidence in achieving success down the road. Regrettably, I was again ill prepared for the realities of life when, in 1974, I met with Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary, charismatic cofounder and chairman of Atlantic Records, a friend of my father’s, to see if he would consider signing me to his label.

“How do you plan to make it?” he asked me in the drawing room of his London house after listening to four of my self-composed demo recordings. As always, he was dressed in a perfectly cut suit with formal shirt and tie—so unlike most other music executives—and exuding a powerful cocktail of bonhomie and hard-nosed professionalism. He was leaning forward in his chair, staring at me through oval glasses which emphasized the size of his eyes and the force of his gaze.

My plan “to make it,” if it could be called such, was to get a record contract, have hits, and go out and play them in front of enthusiastic audiences. Instead of dismissing me out of hand, Ahmet said, “I’m going to put you in the studio with Dave Dee (who’d been a pop star himself with Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, and Tich) as producer, and I want you to record five singles for me. Your best tunes.” His hoarse growl seemed to convey a modicum of optimism about the outcome, and he made no mention of “paying dues”—the act of playing the clubs, building an audience, and becoming a seasoned performer—as one or two well-known musicians, including Eric Clapton, later did to me. But with great kindness and generosity he gave me the opportunity to see if I could come up with something to disprove what his instincts were telling him: The kid may be good; he certainly has ambition; but he’s been brought up in a different world; he’s naive about the music business; he’s naive about life. His heart’s in the right place, but his head tells him all the wrong things—no “blood, toil, tears and sweat” required. Atlantic Records eventually turned me down—and the castle way’s operating system marched on.

It is one of life’s more regrettable features that the most important life decisions are often made when one is young, irrational, lacking in experience, and (oh dear) frequently plain dumb. One’s upbringing either fills or leaves empty the common-sense larder, either promotes or ignores the importance of being serious, either nurtures or casts aside the essence of self-awareness. In all three cases the castle way maintained a lofty indifference, thereby ensuring less than desirable outcomes most of the time. I was consumed with ambition and, according to some, not a bad singer and player. A top London producer wanted to turn me into “the next David Cassidy,” but I insisted on playing my own brand of self-written melodic pop. I should have listened: It might have opened the door.

Three years later Mick Jagger informed my glamorous French girlfriend, Florence (whom our mutual friend Taki Theodoracopoulos, the famous playboy, journalist, and gossip columnist, christened “the High Priestess of the Jet Set”), that I would never make it in music because I was too posh, too damn spoiled, too
right side of the tracks
. He even said to me once—with a slight sneer—“Of course,
I
didn’t grow up at Leeds Castle!”

Music helped me distance myself from the castle way, but it was too ingrained to disappear over the horizon never to be heard from again. Its power as a curse upon motivation and normalcy had resulted in my first twenty years on Planet Earth becoming a minefield of mixed-up emotions and complicated mind games. The creature comforts were never less than dazzling, but detecting and disarming the mines had been left almost entirely to Nanny, and her expertise in this field was, on the surface, rather limited.

But if Bertrand Russell was correct that “the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it,” then Nanny was clearly onto something. “There, there,” she would reassuringly tell me whenever things were looking grim. “I expect you’ll muddle through.” She wasn’t, of course, trying to be rude or put me down by mapping out my entire future in one curt phrase, but it turned out she was right on the money. No bright lights. No glittering career. The castle way and I kept close and consistent watch over one another, and like ragged misfits we muddled our way through a sometimes enterprising but generally mismanaged life. Family welfare (a trust fund periodically topped up) and an inheritance when my mother died in 2001 virtually guaranteed that the huge holes in my understanding of how the world works would remain untouched by toil and trouble. I have travelled umpteen times to the fleshpots of the world but failed to make intelligent use of the proverbial silver spoon. It’s obvious now that the castle way and rock music (just like the castle way and family holidays) were never going to see eye to eye despite my best effort to make them.

21.

T
HE
M
AN AT THE
G
ATE

Shakespeare, in his most famous sonnet, chose to compare the beauty of his undisclosed subject to a summer’s day, and that element of perfection was everywhere to be seen, and felt, when I visited Leeds Castle on a sublime Monday afternoon in August 2009, not having been back since my mother died in April 2001.

My wife, Catherine, and I had been staying with my brother, David, a local councillor and businessman, and his wife, Tia, an antique collector and gardening maestro, in their fine Georgian house on the outskirts of Rye, a picturesque medieval town on the Sussex coast. David’s life had also been crucially touched by the castle way and its hard-line programming, but, never one to make a fuss, the furthest he ever cared to go in expressing his feelings on the subject to me was, “I suppose we were brought up a little soft.” Academically and intellectually very bright, I’m sure the careers my brother started but didn’t quite finish, including publishing and property development, would have turned out very differently but for the troubled waters of our castle way upbringing.

My wife and I decided we would visit my mother’s grave at St Nicholas’s Church in Leeds village before continuing on our way back to London. After spending half an hour in the pretty churchyard, where natural meadow grasses flourish year-round and the gravestones are dotted haphazardly about as if indulging the untidiness of death, we entered the magnificent eight-hundred-year-old Saxon/Norman church, with its massive twelfth-century tower, high steeple, and intricately carved rood screen separating nave from chancel, and a flood of childhood and adult memories came rushing back, prompting me to suggest to Catherine that we should drive over to the castle to see if they would let us in without, perhaps, having to pay the £16.50 entrance fee.

Granny B had devoted her life, and vast amounts of money, to exquisitely restoring and maintaining Leeds Castle’s splendour. Before she died, in September 1974, she bequeathed it to the nation with an endowment of one and a half million pounds. I was not at all ready to start becoming a paying customer.

With few exceptions (golfers for the most part) all visitors now arrived at the new front drive main gate, two hundred yards off the A20 London-to-Dover road. The park drive, which bisects the other two, runs uphill past the cricket pitch directly towards Leeds village, was unattended but had a barrier for which one needed a pass card. I sensed that the back drive golfers’ entrance, just off the narrow country lane to Broomfield village, would provide a calmer negotiating forum, and so it turned out to be.