Guy Dawnay was thirty-seven in 1914. A staff officer with Sir Ian Hamilton at Gallipoli, he reported to London that the expedition was a disaster, and he recommended evacuation. Maurice Hankey, Secretary of the War Council, found Dawnay, “disagreeable and too big for his boots.” Lord Kitchener, the Minister responsible, took Dawnay’s side and drew the line under this military disaster. Dawnay then joined the Arab Bureau, and in Seven Pillars Lawrence heaped his usual destructive praise on him. “Dawnay’s cold, shy mind gazed upon our efforts with bleak eye, always thinking, thinking. Beneath this mathematical surface he hid passionate many-sided convictions, a reasoned scholarship in higher warfare, and the brilliant bitterness of a judgment disappointed with us: and with life.”
Granny Vere never spoke to me about her brothers. Controller of Programmes at the BBC in the mid-Thirties, Alan committed suicide in 1938. Guy became a successful businessman, founder of the investment bank Dawnay Day and chairman of Armstrong Whitworth. I could well have met him and his descendants but we had all gone our separate ways. One day my father gave me a pair of Arab jars about a foot high, the bronze metal beautifully worked, with holes for sprinkling at the top of elegant elongated necks. They had been the gift of Lawrence of Arabia to Uncle Alan, he said. Take out the stoppers and these jars have a lingering perfume of rosewater.
SIX
Here He Is!
“IT WAS NO ACCIDENT, Pryce-Jones, that you have lived near three royal palaces,” runs a private joke in Where Engels Fears to Tread, Cyril Connolly’s unsurpassed satire of the bourgeois writer mimicking a revolutionary proletarian in the heyday of the fellow-travelling Thirties. The first of these three was Buckingham Palace. On 18 November 1908 Alan was born in his parents’ house in Buckingham Palace Road. Harry and Vere will have taken it for granted that they had to do for Alan whatever had been done for them. A dutiful couple, they were bound by the conventions to which ladies and gentlemen of their generation subscribed without question. To the end of his life, Alan spoke about the limitations of his parents. He couldn’t help patronizing them. The best that parents of this kind could do wasn’t good enough.
Vere overdid motherhood. She dealt in superlatives. Things were either uniquely wonderful or uniquely dreadful. A series of miscarriages hadn’t helped what Alan summed up as “the nervous tensions that beset my mother.” Alan thought himself spoiled “in the sense of being humoured,” and at the same time neglected. Photographed as an infant, he had been put into a layered lace dress like a girl’s, and for a portrait when he was about ten he wore a pale blue velvet suit with an elaborate lace collar. Delighting in his gifts and precociousness and fearful of the roughness of other boys, Vere felt too protective to send him to school. She preserved the youthful poems that he had no trouble writing; she listened to him playing the piano, her very own Bechstein grand; she considered him a genius.
A Harley Street specialist by the name of Maurice Craig obligingly told her what she wanted to hear, writing to her in April 1917.
I am certain that at the present moment school would be the worst thing in the world for him and I speak from the experience of constantly seeing school tried. I should let him do no lessons till he is nearly ten…. Music lessons ought to be very short and difficult exercises kept down to a minimum. I strongly advise that he should be kept away from parties and entertainments…. The main point in bringing him up is to retard mental development and keep the physical if possible a little ahead of the mental, though I am afraid this will be very difficult.”
Thirty years later, her opinion hadn’t changed. She wrote to Alan, “You, of course, were the most brilliant child who has ever been born into this world, in any country, and in your case I am still sure we were wise never to let you go to a private school at all.”
Alan grew up with the sense that he was numbered among those with the means and the standing to be able to live as they pleased. He was ten in September 1918 when his brother Adrian was born and the difference in age guaranteed an unequal relationship. Less was expected of Adrian, he did not write poems or play the piano, he was allowed to go to a prep school. The education of their two sons cost more than the parents could easily afford. Although much decorated and mentioned in dispatches in the war, Harry had not risen above the rank of colonel. Seconded to Field Marshal Haig’s staff quartered in Montreuil, of all places, he had lost seniority. Between the wars, he still had a paid job and an office in the Duke of York’s Headquarters in Chelsea, dealing with the recruitment and training of the Territorial Army. “No kinder, quieter man ever lived,” is one of many a backhand compliment that Alan pays him. To go straight on to say that he was not a practical man was to cut away the ground under someone engaged in military administration. Perhaps it was Harry’s conception of correct behaviour that obliged Vere to keep accounts of her expenditure, which neither of them ever added up. It turned out that he never asked to see Vere’s marriage settlement, so its investments remained exactly the same as on the day when they were made, except that some by then no longer existed or were bankrupt.
Long after Harry and Vere had died and Alan had only memory to go on, he sketched their personalities, the detail and the tone calculated to expose their limitations. “My father is very much the colonel, with mouse-coloured hair and moustache, gold watch-chain – he considered wrist-watches, like suede shoes, and heaven knows, pocket-combs marks of the beast (an effeminate beast); my mother ran to strap shoes, mink capes, a regimental brooch in diamonds – the Coldstream of course – and sufficient but not obtrusive pearls … they were endlessly loving and unselfish, endlessly, also, at odds with reality.”
From 1931 onwards, Harry and Vere and Adrian abandoned Buckingham Palace Road to live in a grace and favour house in Windsor Castle, the second of the royal palaces in Cyril Connolly’s satire. This consisted of rooms set into the Henry VIII Gateway, the public entrance to the castle and built in Victorian Gothic style. This architecture dictated the strange asymmetrical interior of the house, all angles and niches and window-seats, a corridor poky and dark because so little light of day came in, and a staircase dangerously steep with virtually no light at all. A few feet outside the drawing room wall was a sentry box, and the day and the night were punctuated by the commands of the sergeant changing the guard, the hard smack of the guardsman on duty shouldering his rifle and then the clip of his boots on the cobbles as he marched the regulation number of paces in order to stay awake. In a final promotion that must have been close to his heart, Harry became Harbinger (a title of seniority) of the Gentlemen at Arms, a body of retired officers with ceremonial duties to perform for the royal household in resplendent uniforms complete with a plumed helmet and sword evoking another age.
In the course of the war my grandfather took me with him to Buckingham Palace where he was to receive the Order of the Bath. Many of the men awarded medals that day had been carried on stretchers into what seemed to me then an immense hall. Nurses attended some of those most wounded and bandaged. King George VI moved among them, a slender figure in a naval uniform. His features were sleek, sharp-boned like a whippet’s. He patted me on the head and said that there was a lot to see of interest in the big rooms of the palace.
On the day the war ended, Harry showed me the copy of The Times with the Six List printed in full. Dr Franz Six was the Gestapo official charged with drawing up the list of Englishmen to be shot out of hand immediately after a victorious German invasion. There was Alan’s name, and in brackets after it Tätig Kreis Petschek, Active in the Petschek circle. The Petscheks were Czech industrialists and anti-Nazis who had saved their holdings from expropriation by the simple expedient of transferring ownership to trusts in neutral South America. (Sharing the honour to be on the Dr Six list is Clarissa’s grandfather, Sir George Barstow, chairman of the Prudential.)
On a Sunday while I was at Eton I would try to finish the compulsory extra work on some scriptural subject in time to have tea with the grandparents in Windsor Castle. A secret entrance
