Pilgrim Son: A Personal Odyssey (33 page)

'The star?' I said, puzzled. 'I thought Leslie Howard was the star.'

'He was! Alex crowed, 'And Leslie Howard was Hungarian! You didn't know that, did you?'

He talked of growing up in a place that sounded like Purtarol Poparol (I never did find out how it was spelled), where his father was agent of a great estate, and the family were the only Jews in the village. He told me why he became English: 'I came from Europe,' he said. 'There was the depression, and Hitler rising. No one in Europe trusted anything any more — not their governments, nor their banks, nor their leaders, nor themselves. Then I came here, and I was buying cigars at a little shop off Piccadilly — I still buy my cigars there — and, while I was paying for them, I asked the man what he thought about the depression, the chance of devaluation, or of the banks failing... I was very nervous very jumpy, myself, I tell you, Jack. And the man said, 'Well, I don't know much about that, sir, but there's one thing certain. The pound will always be worth 240 pennies.'

I walked out in a daze. How could anyone be so stupid?

Yet these people had beaten the Germans, and the French over and over. This was the most stable country in the world. Gradually I began to feel better. If everyone really had such confidence, then the pound really would always be worth 240 pennies. I stopped being nervous, and began to try to think like an Englishman.' He was very proud and grateful for his British citizenship, and his knighthood.

He told me his favourite Hungarian proverb: if you have a Hungarian for a friend you don't need any enemies. But if anyone, except perhaps Merle Oberon, ever applied that one to Alex himself, I never heard of it.

He wanted me to write a successor to
The Thief of Baghdad,
an enormously successful film he had made before the war, with Sabu as star. He said, 'There are hundreds more stories in the
Arabian Nights
than we used in that film, than most people have ever heard of. Take this —' he gave me a complete set of the Mardrous-Mather edition of
The Thousand Nights and a Night
— 'Go away, read it, mark the stories that interest you, and that you think you can link into a continuous new one, then come back and we'll have another talk. I'll fix the money with your agent. And your expenses. About a hundred pounds a week, I should think.' He was showing me to the front door. He opened it, shook my hand and then muttered, 'My God, look at that!'

I turned, and began to laugh. Korda was staring at a lean, stooped old man standing outside on Piccadilly. He was wearing an off-black suit of 1880 cut, the tight trousers strapped under black boots, the coat long-frocked. Instead of a collar and tie he wore a white hunting stock with gold pin. His hat was a curly-brimmed grey bowler, and his long face was screwed up double while he tried to read something on a bit of paper held an inch from his eye, through a monocle held on a thick black ribbon.

'He looks as though he's escaped from
Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities,'
Alex said.

I said, 'Left over from them. That's Ned Haines, squire of Wilsford, near Devizes. I ate sixteen sausage rolls at a children's Christmas party at his house when I was twelve.' I said goodbye to Korda and went down to greet Ned.

He had been visiting Apsley House (the Duke of Wellington's London house, now also a museum) almost next door, and was trying to read instructions someone had written down as to how he was to reach his next destination. He was almost blind and as I read the instructions for him I noticed that nearly everyone who passed us stared, gaped, and giggled at the caricature figure beside me, neighing away in his high old-fashioned accent with plenty of
doncherknows
and
dear old chappies;
but none of them knew that on the wall of his study there hung a cowboy hat, chaps, spurs, lariat and a full set of Western tack. He had spent two years as a wrangler in Wyoming, as a young man. Since he was incapable of speaking or acting any other way than he always did, my imagination had always boggled — and still does — at the picture of him in those days. I see him in Western gear, monocle in the eye, addressing another cowhand in the Last Chance Saloon: 'I say, old chap, would you awfully mind if I asked that gea-al you're holdin' for a dance...?'

On the writing front, although the Wingates never actually came right out and said so, it was becoming clear that they meant to insist on their right of censorship of any book written about Orde with their assistance, so I abandoned that project. In truth, I already had on my plate all I could manage, for
Bhowani Junction
now had to share my time with
The Thousand Nights and a Night.

All around was England, where the beer was warm, and tasted like horse-piss, ice was doled out grudgingly on a teaspoon, when available, no one knew how to make a decent Martini, and the language and I seemed to have parted company. At one London restaurant the more I complained that the Martinis were not dry enough, and sent them back for treatment, the worse they became. I finally found out that every time I asked for a drier Martini they put in more bitters. In more was I changed than in my garments.

Barbara had a joyful and tearful reunion with Liz and Mike, and arranged to see them again next year, either in England or America. We also visited my father's mother, then aged ninety-two and still bathing every day in the icy English Channel. She was an old gorgon, a devout Roman Catholic who equally despised Frogs, Jews, natives, niggers, and the lower classes. My father hated her, my mother feared her, and I, when aged eleven, had run away from her house during the school holidays, but she had sat unmoved when German bombs hit the cinema she was in, she then eighty-four, and afterwards helped carry out the dead and wounded; and she had raised seven children in Indian jungles and — worse — British suburbs, with little money and less help from her husband. She plainly had guts. I was not to see her again.

Lyme Regis was as pretty as ever, and larks still climbed in ecstasy to the sky on the Dorset Downs. The prehistoric Long Man still proudly waved his outsize instrument over Cerne Abbas, and they still drew good scrumpy in the saloon of the Three Cups, though G. K. Chesterton, whom I had seen there when I was a boy, had gone. The kids regained their English accents and no longer wore their cowboy hats... and we secretly began to calculate how many days were left before our ship sailed for America.

The
Arabian Nights
tale came along nicely and Alex Korda wanted me to stay an extra month to work on it. He promised he'd send us all back first class on the
Caronia
instead of cabin class on the
Queen Elizabeth.
Reluctantly I agreed. Sixty days more, instead of the thirty we had just worked out.

I went to the Chindit reunion dinner and sat at the high table next to Bernard Fergusson, a fellow brigade commander in 1944. I listened glumly while he told the gathering that one of our Chindit heroes was in serious trouble with the law and of course it was all a mistake and the hero's name would soon be cleared: glumly, because my cousin, an army lawyer, had prepared the case and in view of the hero's reputation had cross-checked and triple checked every piece of evidence and every legal nicety. There was in his mind no doubt that the hero had done what he was accused of doing, (as the courts later agreed). I felt glummer yet because Fergusson's speech was precisely
not
what we ought to be saying to the hero, which was: 'Look, even if you've done this thing, it will make no difference to us, we still admire you, and will help you.' — which some of us were able to do later, when the thunderbolt fell.

I was not in a very good temper when Fergusson, who was never one of my favourite people, sat down and turned to me with a 'witty' anti-Americanism, based, as usual, on a profound antipathy to the American ideal and a profounder ignorance of the American scene. But I should not have been so particularly curt with Fergusson, for the English air was thick with anti-Americanism. The ordinary people didn't particularly love the Yanks (or any other foreigners) but they were reasonable about it, friendly, and good natured. It was the upper class, the old-school-tie brigade, who sniped and snapped in private and to the newspapers, though being perfectly polite to individual Americans. Their feelings also were understandable: on the 'bad' side — envy, ignorance, and a sense that America owed her position to staying out of wars and making money, while England bore the brunt: and on the 'good' side — legitimate doubts raised by such farces as the Caryl Chessman case, Eisenhower's cowardice in the face of McCarthy, wide support for MacArthur's messianic delusions, Jim Crow
redivivus.
When all this is festering under the skin of people who have ruled the world for a century and a half, and who believe in the deepest recesses of their being that
everything
British is best, the resultant emotions can be quite strong, and bitter. Since I spoke English-English and occasionally wore a Gurkha Brigade or Old Wellingtonian tie, the evidence of my Brooks Brothers suit was not correctly read, and I received several lectures on the horrors of America. No, the speakers had never been there, thank God! I.ife in America, where American achievements and motives were questioned to an extent then unusual in other countries, had made me consider the nature of patriotism. I graded it into three categories: a boy could be proud of his country's things — its Rolls-Royces and Golden Gate Bridges: a youth could be proud of his country's men — its Nelsons, Napoleons, Lincolns: but for a grown man the only proper object of pride was his country's ideas; what, of value, it had given to mankind. Most British newspapers were still in the 'things' stage, and fate played a ghastly trick on them in this year of 1952.

The first commercial jet to fly was the British De Havilland Comet. By 1952 one or two examples were flying on B.O.A.C.'s routes, but the plane had not been certified by the U.S. Federal Aviation Agency, without which it could not fly to America or be bought by American airlines. The nation was very proud of the Comet — a genuine first — and the newspapers dropped hints and made accusations to the effect that the dirty Yanks were delaying certification until an American jet was ready, in about a year, in order to do Britain out of dollar sales. I pointed out, when the subject was raised that the Comets I and II, then flying, were not intended to cross the Atlantic and indeed could not do so; it was the Mark II that was going to be used trans-Atlantic. As the Mark III had not yet flown at all, the F.A.A. could hardly be expected to certify it. In vain: the outcry continued... until a fatal flaw in the Comet I's construction resulted in aerial break-up of three of them in quick succession, with great loss of life. The 'dirty Yank' theme ended, without apology, but only until another suitable grudge arose. Given the chauvinism of many newspapers., these were not hard to find. Attacks on 'Americanization' of the language were popular; no one pointed out that, powerful the U.S.A. was, it could not compel Englishmen to speak American unless they wanted to. If American words and phrases were coming into common use it was because English people found them good, and because the genius of the English language will take and absorb anything it needs, and (unlike the
Daily Express)
considers no source unclean — but then the
Daily Express's
contacts with the English language were always minimal.

This sort of thing should have passed over my head without bothering me, but I was English by blood, I admired most English institutions, and I did not like to feel ashamed of my own people; but ashamed I was, when I remembered again that in four years in America I had never once had to defend England — neither its things, nor its men, nor its ideas. As a contrast there was the heading in the automobile section of an English magazine: 'Though of American origin, a good-looking motor car.' I tried to imagine an American magazine headlining an article: 'Though British, it works.' I failed, and was about to cry, when I decided to laugh instead.

Since I was obviously on the point of giving up my birthright — my status as a British gentleman it was time to consider just what was involved. I would lose something, all right.
Men's Wear Weekly
is all very well but only a British gentleman can tell what tweed it is proper to wear on any occasion. Why? Because the Right tweed for that occasion is the one approved by the British gentleman. Why? Because on this and related matters the British gentleman is infallible.

I should here clear the decks of some misconceptions common in the U.S.A. Few gentleman wear monocles. Those who do usually have a defect in one eye (like Ned Haines and Bernard Fergusson), but not in both; it is un-American to sneer at chaps who suffer from lopsided physical defects. Few gentlemen are dukes: the converse proposition has also been debated. Gentlemen do wear top hats but only when attending Ascot, the Eton & Harrow cricket match, and certain types of wedding.

If you meet a man with a monocle and a top hat, who says he is a duke, the circumstances tell you nothing about what the man is but a great deal about where you are — Hollywood. A gentleman never says 'Beg pardon', or 'Granted', or 'It's a pleasure': and incidentally he never says 'Bally', 'Eh what?'. 'What-ho', 'Ripping', or 'Jolly good show'. These expressions are one with Nineveh and the cat's pyjamas. Gentlemen eat with the knife held in the right hand, sharp edge down, and stuff the food into their mouths with the fork, which is held in the left hand at the very same time. Ladies too. Gentlemen do not behave in a courtly manner to ladies in public. This is a dago trick. A gentleman may kiss a lady practically anywhere except on the hand or wrist. This is a dago trick.

How does one recognize and define a gentleman? By job? No. Gentlemen may now be fishmongers (but not barbers). By title? No — see above re 'dukes'. By acreage owned? Partly. A man who owns more than fifty acres is a gentleman unless he has made enough money out of it to live on, in which case he is a farmer. If he loses a little money most years he is a bad farmer. If he loses a lot of money every year he is a gentleman farmer.