We had no television. Indeed, until the coronation of the Queen in 1953, I had no idea that there was such a thing. Our neighbour in the adjoining part of the school had just purchased one. Derek Knight was a housemaster. He lived alone and chain-smoked Senior Service cigarettes, which stained his long fingers orange-brown and made his sitting room stink of tobacco. His entire existence seemed to centre on cigarettes. My mother had smoking in common with him, and had rather a soft spot for him. She did motherly things like darning his pullovers. One day he called us in to observe a new invention. An enormous walnut cabinet stood in the corner. It had a little window in the middle, with a couple of brown Bakelite knobs beneath it and a lot of wire hanging out of the back. This was my first sighting of a television set. I couldn’t really make it out. After all, I had never seen a moving picture.
Shortly before this I had been taken on my first trip to London, to see the preparations for the coronation. I remember a hot, sunny May day. The roof of the Hudson was fully down. As we approached Buckingham Palace through thronging crowds we passed open dustcarts full of workmen throwing boiled sweets. I caught one. ‘Don’t eat that, Jonathan,’ my mother chimed from the front seat. ‘You don’t know where it’s been.’
In the smelly, uncomfortable safety of Derek Knight’s sitting room, the thick brown woollen curtains were drawn against the summer sun. Ten or twelve of us craned at the little window to watch the great Coronation Day on 2 June 1953. The picture was a series of greys. It appeared to be snowing in London. From time to time I could detect a carriage, a white-gloved hand, and lots of men in ridiculous clothes. ‘This will never catch on,’ said my father of the walnut-facia’d contraption, and marched us out long before the service was over. The little window was certainly very small, and the picture indistinct, but to me it was still very intriguing.
Monarchy and the royal succession matched war as part of the background to my childhood world. The third fixed point was my parents’ marriage. Yet even here, war had played a role. In 1942, in addition to being the unpaid auxiliary fire chief and air raid marshal, my father was chaplain of Charterhouse School. This was an institution some notches higher up the league of English fee-paying schools than Ardingly, to which he was to move as headmaster in the year of my birth. In his role as a cleric he would go occasionally to the neighbouring YMCA, and it was in the canteen there that he encountered Joan Way, serving tea from a large urn. She was thirty, he was forty. In the extensive scrapbooks in which he recorded his life I can find no hint of a woman until that night. Indeed, my father, the indefatigable scoutmaster and housemaster, seems to have been far more interested in boys. That is not to say that he was a homosexual. More a self-obsessed man – he called his scrap albums ‘Ego books’ – he seems to have spent his holidays in the company of some of the boys he had taught. He and they built and maintained a narrow boat on the Grand Union Canal.
My mother’s arrival in the ‘Ego book’ is sudden, and comes with their engagement. George, the seasoned bachelor, proposed within three weeks of meeting Joan, and married her six weeks later. ‘That’s how it was in those days,’ my mother told me. ‘We were so conscious that we might not even survive the war.’ The engagement was so short that my father did not realise that my mother had no hair of her own. She had to tell him on the day he proposed to her that she had suffered an attack of alopecia totalis at the age of thirteen, after sitting her exams for the Royal College of Music. Her hair had fallen out over three nights, and never came back. ‘Your father was an absolute saint,’ she would say. ‘He asked for twenty-four hours to think about it after I told him, and he said he’d marry me anyway.’ This defined her status thereafter: her life was dedicated to his every need. It was a status which defied the reality that she was a concert-grade pianist who had studied composition with Herbert Howells, one of the great influences on twentieth-century English classical music. She knew as much about music as my father did about the Bible.
For us, growing up with George and Joan, the lodestar was the war. Nothing was ever quite so good or quite so bad as it had been ‘during the war’. Deeply conservative, they both worshipped order, an order in which everyone knew their place. Yet my father was not entirely conventional, for in addition to his love of the electronic he had a passion for fast American cars. Apart from this, in contrast to the absolutely dominant role America was to assume in my own life, George never went there, and he expressed little or no interest either in the place or its people. In his mind Britain still ruled the world.
The elevation from his 1920 Buick to the Hudson took place before I was born. The Hudson Essex Terraplane Eight was a rare beast indeed. Only six were ever made, and this one had been on the Hudson stand at the New York Motor show in 1931. Twenty-eight horsepower, she had a long bonnet and a very flat, almost unusable boot. My father had found and purchased the car through Exchange & Mart. In British terms, the Terraplane was like a cross between a Bentley and an MG. The dashboard looked like something from a makeshift cockpit: my father had installed an altimeter, a gradiometer and various other gadgets. The car was his greatest material joy. We would shop in it, pick up logs in it and go on holiday in it, squashed in the back, towing a vast caravan behind. My poor mother had to lash her wig down with tightly knotted headscarves.
One day in 1956 my father upped and sold the Hudson for £70 without warning. That was the moment that I discovered we were at war again. Our enemy this time was not Hitler, but someone called Nasser. It seemed funny to me how enemy leaders always seemed to end in ‘–er’. Ration books were back for petrol, and I was reduced to riding to school on the back of my mother’s bike. My father regarded Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister who had precipitated the Suez crisis, as a ‘good egg’. Many others thought he was unhinged. Certainly we now know that he was on a cocktail of antidepressant and other drugs at the time. With his white hair, tall good looks and white moustache, Eden seemed very much out of the top drawer.
I was too young to grapple with the full story, but according to my father, ‘This man Nasser, President of Egypt, has taken it upon himself to seize the Suez Canal, which we built, and will have to be dealt with.’ Washington, for once, saw the adventure for what it was, and provided the pressure which forced the British, French and Israelis to withdraw. The Anglo-French attempt to flash the flaccid tail of empire had failed. All I knew was that our world had retreated still further into the Sussex countryside. There was another consequence too, for Suez delivered a new Prime Minister.
From time to time on a Sunday evening I would go with my parents to 6.30 evensong in the school chapel. Sitting alone across the gangway, rather stooped, would be an old man in a tweed coat. One Sunday after Suez, my father introduced me to him. ‘This is the Prime Minister, Jonathan,’ he said.
I shook the man’s hand and looked up into rather sad eyes and drooping eyebrows. ‘Do you know what a Prime Minister is, young man?’ Harold Macmillan asked me.
‘Something to do with the Queen?’ I suggested. ‘Are you married to her?’
‘Good Lord, no!’ chortled Macmillan. ‘One day you might like to be a politician. That’s what I am.’ With that he got into the waiting Humber and purred away to his huge country home, Birch Grove, just beyond Ardingly village. Little was I to know that Macmillan’s wife Dorothy was probably at that very moment in bed with the scoundrel Tory MP Bob Boothby, with whom she maintained a torrid affair throughout her husband’s premiership. Perhaps this strikingly sad man gained solace from the chapel services while she found hers between the sheets.
The only good politician in my father’s house was a Tory politician. Labour never got a look-in. My father’s Christian faith did not extend to embracing the birth of the welfare state. His faith was the Tory party at prayer: war, Conservatism and Anglicanism were the trinity upon which my father’s philosophy was