The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (9 page)

Hodnet was a version of Eden to Robert, yet he was surely aware from a young age that it was one from which he would be cast out. With so much emphasis on the line of inheritance and on preserving family names and traditions, he would have known early on that his eldest brother Algy would get everything. ‘As a younger son, you are very low in the pecking order,’ said Algy, Robert’s nephew. ‘If you’re the youngest son, you know you are never going to inherit.’ Given three older brothers, it was clear that Robert could envisage no future in the place that meant everything to his family. With the English system of primogeniture and ‘the strict settlement of estates’, the winner would take it all. And the same went for titles. As Nancy Mitford pointed out, ‘The rule of primogeniture has kept together the huge fortunes of English lords; it has also formed our class system.’84 It is the great distinction between the English aristocracy and any other; whereas abroad every member of a noble family is noble, in England none is except the head of the family. The sons and daughters may enjoy courtesy titles but as a rule the younger offspring of even the richest lords receive comparatively little money. Younger sons have thus habitually been left without money, property or title, often without the skills to acquire them and, above all, without belonging to the place they care most about. As clergymen, soldiers, sailors and resentful ne’er-do-wells, these highborn outcasts litter the pages of nineteenth-century English novels, with their hopeless attempts to make a way in the unfriendly world and their irresponsible sprees of adventuring.

Many of Robert’s characteristics were formed by the early knowledge of his place in this scheme and the family hierarchy. Like all the Heber-Percys, he had an intense love of country life, but in becoming a daring show-off, he was demanding attention that was otherwise given elsewhere. A trickster and game-player, he lured people into giving him what he wanted. Easily bored, yet sensitive, he needed a protector who could care for him and get him out of trouble.

HEN ROBERT WAS THIRTEEN, a decision had to be made about his schooling. His older brothers had failed to get into Eton and ended up going to Harrow. Gladys was worried that her youngest child would not be able to follow in their footsteps. He was already renowned for his bad behaviour at Wixenford in Wokingham (a school that advertised itself as being for ‘the sons of gentlemen and minor princes’). A couple of months before Robert was due to sit the exam for Eton, she approached a new school that must have seemed rather a novelty. Stowe was well known for its extraordinary gardens, landscaped in the eighteenth century into an Arcadian vision, complete with a triumphal arch, a Palladian bridge and any number of temples, sculptures and grottoes. The magnificent house had been sold and, in 1923, became a boarding school for ninety-nine teenage boys. Gladys wrote a somewhat grovelling letter to the bursar, revealing her anxieties about her undisciplined favourite. In the event, Stowe was desperate to recruit new pupils and Robert arrived in the summer term of 1925 – an exact contemporary of David Niven, who was already a popular boy, and whose talent for drawing sketches and caricatures amused his classmates. The two would meet again during the war under very different circumstances, but no evidence suggests they were friends at school.

There is a portrait of Robert at Faringdon that must have been painted at about the time he went to Stowe – a sugary confection that exaggerates his round brown eyes, bee-stung lips, high rosy cheekbones and golden-chestnut locks. A frilly-collared shirt completes the picture. He looks like the sort of new arrival the older boys would have pounced on, but from all accounts Robert was no victim. Accustomed to fending for himself in a large family with big brothers, he had no qualms about behaving just as he had at home, with jokes and an uninhibited air of je m’en fous. Only a year after he arrived, Robert’s tutor wrote to Gladys, admitting that he had ‘been thinking a great deal about Robert recently’. Young Heber-Percy had evidently been behaving badly and the family was already contemplating removing him, something the tutor warned against

[as] one of the most unfortunate things that could happen to him … Mr Playford [his teacher] says that Robert is childish; that he asks foolish questions; that he does not retain even for a few moments what he has been told; and that he appears quite unashamed by public opinion, even when his failings do not pass unnoticed by the rest of the form; and from my own experience I am sure that all these indictments are true.

In the House, too, he is so casual that he cannot be regarded otherwise than as a weak spot.

However, in conjunction with all these, the fact that he has not as yet begun to develop must, in fairness, not be overlooked; nor must his praiseworthy efforts at improvement, which I am certain are genuine, even if spasmodic and undisciplined, be ignored.

Robert remembered his schooldays with affection and sometimes went back to visit. He also held fond memories of the legendary headmaster, J. F. Roxburgh (known as J.F.), who was unusually youthful and curiously humanitarian for someone in his position. Tall and well-built, J.F. was something of an intellectual dandy, but he was dedicated to his pupils who remembered him as a ‘magnetically brilliant teacher to generations of boys’.85 Evelyn Waugh, who was taught by J.F. at Lancing, described his sonorous voice as like ‘a hot potato in the mouth’, but also alleged that he had been caught in flagrante with a boy.86 Roxburgh apparently allowed the boys to keep pets, something which escalated into a badly run zoo as boys grew out of rabbits and ferrets and allegedly acquired monkeys, bears and hyenas; it was eventually shut down.87

However, even J.F. found Robert a tricky proposition. In one report he wrote: ‘He is a problem. Some people can’t succeed, but he can’t try – at least not for any length of time.’ But J.F. was nothing if not an optimist, adding, ‘Personally, I don’t a bit despair of him, and I know that he has many virtues which will come out later, but I doubt if he will ever make any progress at school – probably not till he is about eighteen.’

Robert didn’t make it to eighteen at Stowe, leaving for a crammer in Westgate-on-Sea in Kent when he was still sixteen. J.F. wrote to the director, urging him to take the boy and trying to mix honesty with hopefulness:

Robert Heber-Percy is a delightful youth. Personally I have always been much attached to him, though he was at one time in a mild way something of a law breaker. Latterly he has enormously improved, and there has never been anything of the slightest seriousness against him. His great failing is that he cannot concentrate, and when he tries to do so for any time, or when he gets ill or tired, fatigue appears to make his mind go perfectly blank at intervals. You will find his work startlingly bad, but I shall be greatly surprised if you do not like the boy himself. Do take him if you can.

We don’t know how long Robert stayed at the seaside crammer or what he got up to when he left. The three options listed by Stowe as ‘possible career’ when Gladys registered her son looked increasingly unlikely: 1. The University, 2. The Army or Navy, 3. The Medical Profession. To her credit, Gladys had even then written ‘not settled’. Now, for this devilishly good-looking youth who took nothing seriously, matters looked even less settled. Sadly, there are no diaries or letters relating to this period of Robert’s life; he was far too busy with escapades and adventures to write about them and putting pen to paper was never his strong point. He evidently started to spend a good deal of time in London, where life for a teenage ‘mad boy’ offered endless parties and the sparkling nightclubs that had opened up during the 1920s. Cyril recalled various of the madcap schemes that took place after his youngest brother left school and before he met Gerald Berners:

He went abroad, here, there and everywhere. He worked his passage to America, where amongst other things, he acted as an extra in Hollywood and had a standin part falling off a horse at full gallop. He was a waiter at a Lyons Corner House, but was sacked for spilling soup all over a customer. Robert said, ‘The man just complained too much.’88

Robert’s older brothers had already pursued more conventional paths in the Army: Algy left Sandhurst and was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards, Cyril joined the Welsh Guards and Alan the Royal Scots Greys. Algy was the only one to stick with the military; Cyril had his heart with the horses and eventually left to become master and huntsman of a pack of hounds. Alan, like Robert, preferred dash and speed to discipline and duty. He bought a racehorse, drove fast cars and had a couple of black Alsatians, one of which had been trained as a police dog in Germany. He eventually gave them to Cyril, who took them everywhere, even to London on leave, where they could be relied upon to behave themselves in the theatre and tackle an enemy if necessary.

ROBERT’S BROTHERS CYRIL AND ALAN, CHANGING THE GUARD AT BUCKINGHAM PALACE, 1927

In March 1931, when Robert was nineteen, he tried to do the right thing and joined the 1st King’s Dragoon Guards, a cavalry regiment established in the seventeenth century and based in Tidworth, on the edge of Salisbury Plain. Becoming a Guards officer was a well-trodden path for young men of his background, few of whom would end up as professional soldiers. There were all the trappings of an exclusive club – fancy, colourful uniforms and a variety of arcane rituals – and officers were given enough leave to allow a social life in London, albeit with rules about what they wore and carried: dark suits and bowler hats were de rigueur, a stick or umbrella was suggested, and parcels or a suitcase were forbidden.

Joining the Guards was the perfect occupation for the decorative, sociable male that Martin Green designated ‘the Dandy’ in his influential study of the post-war generation, Children of the Sun. Preoccupied with style, ornament and high manners, the dandy rejects the parents’ seriousness and is ‘dedicated solely to his own perfection through a ritual of taste’. At the root of the early twentieth-century cult of the dandy ‘is the worship of the male adolescent by older men as expressed in the myths of Narcissus and Adonis’.89 In the wake of the First World War, the circumstances were perfect for the expansion of this cult. The older generation appeared tainted with the blood of the golden youth: young men like Rupert Brooke, who had been sent to the slaughter by old men who were still alive. Elizabeth Bowen described this generation that grew up just after the First World War as one which was ‘made to feel it had muffed the catch’, but the other way of seeing it was that of Cyril Connolly: ‘In those days whenever you didn’t get on with your father, you had all the glorious dead on your side.’

Through the 1920s and into the 1930s, the pursuit of pleasure and beauty seemed some sort of reaction to the horrors of what had gone before. With a generation of young men wiped out, there is an easy psychoanalytical theory for the subsequent emphasis on masculine charms, and why it was that girls shingled their hair in short bobs and flattened their chests for flapper dresses. The excesses of partying – dressing up in costumes, drinking too much and ending up with unlikely bed partners – were methods of rejecting both the past and one’s elders. And Robert was a perfect candidate for this existence.

Military entry papers report that Robert was admitted with the rank of second lieutenant. A few vital statistics make no mention of whether he was an Adonis, merely recording that he was of medium height and slim build: ‘Height: 5ft 10½; Weight: 140 lb [10 stone]; Chest: max 36½ inches, min 33½ inches; Vision 6/6’. The short experiment with military discipline was not a success. Uninterested, disorderly and sloppy enough to commit a faux pas like taking off his military cap to a general, Robert was clearly not soldier material. At the end of the four months, the young officer’s immediate commander wrote that duties were not carried out satisfactorily and that Robert was unfit for promotion. ‘I do not consider that he was keen to learn his work whilst attached for instruction, he paid little attention to his instructors. He appeared to lack concentration and his proficiency after 4 months was very much below the average.’ The multiple-choice answers that his superior underlined in a confidential ‘Analysis of Personality’ build up a picture of a young man who doesn’t give a fig:

Reliability: very reliable, average, uncertain

Energy: hard-working, average, lazy

Tact: very tactful, average, tactless

Leadership: good, average, indifferent

Loyalty : very loyal, average, poor

Adaptability: most adaptable, average, unadaptable

‘Intellectual Qualifications’ are no better:

Imagination: fertile, average, meagre

General ability: brilliant, average, poor

Tactical knowledge: excellent, average, scanty

Common-sense: abundant, average, lacking

Ability to teach: considerable, average, small

Even Robert’s ‘Physical and Athletic Qualifications’ are called into question. After all those years on horses and chasing around the estate at Hodnet, he couldn’t even be bothered to ride well, let alone join in team games:

Physique: robust, average, poor

Strength: powerful, average, weak

Energy: untiring, average, small

Horsemanship: excellent, average, indifferent

Keenness at games: great, average, small

Cyril reports a somewhat different reason for Robert being requested to resign his commission. After a London party, Robert arrived back at Tidworth the next morning, driving a hired Daimler and wearing evening dress. He was already late for the daily parade, known as Stables, which was obligatory for all but the most senior officers, so went straight to the dining room and ordered breakfast. As he ate his fry-up, the commanding officer and second-in-command came in. ‘They halted, rooted to the ground. There before them sat a very junior officer, quite unperturbed, eating eggs and bacon. The meal was not finished, and his exit was speedy. Robert, they realised, would never make a soldier.’90

HE HEBER-PERCY PARENTS were reaching the end of their patience. Robert recalled feeling like the black sheep of the family, and was threatened with a sea passage to a rougher existence in Australia if he didn’t shape up. No doubt Gladys went up to London and took her favoured boy for lunch at the Ritz for warnings and maternal advice. And one imagines Algernon senior summoning his youngest son to his tobacco-reeking study off the hall at Hodnet on his visits home. The horsewhip was no use now, but then nothing else seemed to be either.