LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

return from Australia – he refused invitations to appear. His reasons for doing so were strictly commercial: so long as the BBC had monopoly of television, their fees would remain unrealistically low – too low, Dad decided, to make it worth his while to put together elaborate programmes which could be used on only one occasion. Once the public had seen a show, that was that, he thought. Radio was different: the listeners were curious to see in the flesh the performers they had come to love. It was the arrival of ITV which changed his mind.

      Meanwhile I had left school and toured the country with Dad while I waited to be called up for National Service. For Ted’s twenty-first birthday, Dad bought him a brand-new MG Midget, in those days virtually the only mass-produced sports car on the market. A few months later, Dad and I were driving through Coventry and stopped off at a garage for petrol. There in the garage’s showroom was a brand-new fire-engine-red MG. I was gazing at it longingly when Dad came up and said, ‘By the way, that’s your car. Look after it.’

      Later he told me that Ted had felt uncomfortable about having a state-of-the-art sports car while I was driving a clapped-out pre-war Fiat Topolino. He lobbied Father to get me one for my eighteenth birthday. What a way to get your first car, and how typical of both Ted and my father’s generosity of spirit! I was a very lucky lad, and knew it.

      My father loved cars, every type of car, from Rolls Bentley through Aston Martin to Jaguars and Mercedes and the latest line in runabouts. He had a Morris Minor which we called ‘Leapin Leaner’: it leaned when he got in and it leaped when he got cat! One day I was in his office when he received a phone call from Jack Barclay, the distributor for Rolls Royce and Bentley in Hanover Square. Jack invited him for a sherry. When we arrived at the showroom there was a magnificent Rolls Bentley gleaming in its newness and with the number-plate BC 1. Dad took one look and said, ‘I’ll have it.’ The sherry was swapped for champagne and joy was unconfined – until they produced the invoice. ‘What’s this?’ he asked. ‘It’s the number-plate I want – I’ve got a Bentley and you sold it to me!’ Jack Barclay took it very well and gave the old man the number-plate. BC 1 was on many a car until Dad died.

      I was eventually called up, and joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in late 1946 when the world was comparatively peaceful. On the basis that I preferred to ride than walk – especially with full equipment on my back – I was commissioned into the Royal Army Service Corps as a transport officer.

      The only truly terrifying thing that happened to me during my military service was my encounter with the legendary Regimental Sergeant-Major Brittain on the parade ground at Mons Barracks, Aldershot. He was a fearsome sight and had a voice that could shatter glass at half a mile. One exchange with him when I was dozy on parade still lingers in my memory.

      RSM: ‘Are you a spiritualist, sir?’

      Me: ‘No, sir.’

      RSM: ‘Well, you’ve got your head on an ethereal plane, your body in the West End, and your feet are just about in Aldershot. Put him in the guard room.’

      Long after I left the army, I met the RSM again. I was producing a record show for television and a girl singer known as Billie Anthony had a new record out called ‘Fall in for Love’, on which Brittain, long since retired from the army, appeared at the beginning of the song bellowing the command, ‘Fall in for love!’ So we booked Billie Anthony and also Mr Brittain to perform the song live in the studio. When Britten arrived I went up to him and said, ‘I have waited a long time to say this, sir. Stand there and don’t move till I tell you.’

      The only time I fired a shot and hit a live target was not during my army career but shortly afterwards. We were staying at Sandbanks for Christmas, and there was quite a big house party that included the composer and impresario Noel Gay. We used to go sailing every day, and on this occasion I took with me a four-ten shotgun to shoot shag, the voracious green cormorant. Fifty yards off our port bow, a beautiful swan gave us a disdainful glance and then lazily spread its wings to take off. Jokingly, I said, ‘I’ll ginger him up,’ and fired quite casually into the air in the general direction of the bird. To my horror, this freak shot killed the swan outright. My father said, ‘That’s illegal. All swans belong to the Queen. You could go to gaol for that.’ Someone else suggested that ‘we’d better suppress the evidence’, so we pulled the body into the boat and cruised around until dusk fell. Then we went ashore and marched in single file up to the house, the swan over Dad’s back while the rest of us chanted the Seven Dwarfs’ ‘Heigh-ho’ song from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

      We found Noel Gay dozing on a settee in the sitting-room. ‘Look, Noel,’ someone shouted, ‘a Christmas goose.’ Noel opened one eye. ‘I never eat goose,’ he confided and went back to sleep. Just so he wouldn’t feel left out of the fun, we decided to stow the swan in the boot of his car, until Christmas night, when we all dressed in dinner jackets and boarded a dinghy to bury the swan at sea. The corpse was tied to a trawler drag and heaved overboard. We underestimated its weight: all that happened was the swan’s neck went under and its bottom bobbed up. I doubt whoever found it with an iron bar round its neck would think it had died a natural death.

      Dad was at his most exuberant on holiday at Sandbanks, when laughter, joking and frenzied activity surrounded him. Next door to our house was the Royal Motor Yacht Club whose Commodore was an ex-naval officer called Bersey, a splendid man but a stickler for protocol. Every morning at eight o’clock a saluting gun would be fired and a Blue Ensign run to the masthead. It so happened that in the garage of his Sandbanks house Dad kept a whole load of old stage-props, including the Soviet flag, the Hammer and Sickle, which had been used for a stage song called ‘Comrades’. This was in the early days of the Cold War when the former camaraderie between Russia and the West had evaporated.

      One morning the steward came out of the club house, checked his watch, fired the saluting gun, tied the furled Ensign to the halyard and looked up to see the Hammer and Sickle already flying proudly from the masthead. He dashed inside and brought out the apoplectic Commodore in his dressing-gown. The local constabulary was called in just in case the Russians were planning an invasion of the Bournemouth area and had landed an advance raiding party. About a year later, the Commodore came up to my father who was drinking in the Club verandah. ‘Don’t think I don’t know who put that Russian flag up,’ he spluttered.

      I was demobbed in the latter part of 1948. I had a place at Clare College, Cambridge but I didn’t fancy taking it up; the world of academia wasn’t for me. So I became slightly unfocused and, having nothing better to do, went on tour with Dad, protesting all the time that I really must set about getting a career. He couldn’t see the problem. He’d say, ‘You’re enjoying yourself, aren’t you?’ and point out that we enjoyed each other’s company; he was doing very well financially and I was very useful to him. That was debatable. I had two main tasks: one was to act as his chauffeur; the other to reconnoitre every town the band was visiting to find out which cinemas might be showing cowboy Western films in the afternoons.

      I went to enormous trouble to locate these local flea pits where Dad would sit down assuring me we were in for a treat. Before the opening titles had finished running, his head would drop onto his chest and he’d snore his way through the entire film. Having woken up, he’d take off in search of a cup of tea, murmuring appreciation of a film he’d never seen. That happened again and again.

      During this period, my father took a week off which happened to coincide with the British Grand Prix for Formula One racing cars. He suggested we drive up to Silverstone to watch the practice laps for the great event. Since pre-war days, he had been a member of the prestigious British Racing Drivers’ Club, so he knew most of the personalities in the motor racing game. He also displayed proudly on his radiator the Brooklands 120 mph badge commemorating the occasion he clocked a lap at 123.89 mph in an MG and became one of a very select group.

      We waved goodbye to my mother who fondly imagined that Dad was going to the Grand Prix as an interested spectator. When we arrived at Silverstone, Dad sought out Wilkie Wilkinson who used to prepare his racing cars before the war and had joined forces with a couple of wealthy up and coming drivers to form an ERA (English Racing Automobile) team. It soon became clear that Dad had arranged beforehand to drive one of Wilkie’s cars.

Скачать книгу