and St George’s Chapel. Inside is the white marble effigy on the tomb of the Prince Imperial, Napoleon III’s son. Corresponding to the blow that had killed him in the Zulu wars, a black stain appeared on its cheek, returning no matter how often it was scrubbed away. My grandfather liked to take me to check on a phenomenon that he was sure had no rational explanation. Sometimes we walked in the Great Park or used a special key that residents of the Castle were allowed for access to Frogmore with its mausoleum. Helplessly undomestic, Granny Vere neither shopped nor cooked. Mrs. Butler, the one and only pair of helping hands, did not come in at the weekend but would have prepared sandwiches and a Fuller’s chocolate cake. On one occasion when they had not been expecting me, I caught Harry eating cornflakes with water. They were saving money. One November afternoon with the Thames Valley mist gathering, I was playing football on one of the numerous distant pitches that were not so easy to locate. These insignificant games between junior house teams were compulsory, and nobody ever came to watch them. But there by the sideline was a solitary spectator perching on a shooting stick, my grandfather, wearing a heavy overcoat and his brown felt hat.
Eton in his time, Alan insists in his autobiography, “was not a very lively place.” Henry Yorke was his only creative contemporary, he said, except that on the very next page he contradicts himself, naming as friends at the school Peter Watson the future sponsor of Horizon, James Lees-Milne, A. J. Ayer, the bibliophile Jake Carter, and others equally successful. In the swim, Alan was free at last from the eccentricity of being kept backward for fear that he was too forward. The school used to publish what was called the Calendar, an alphabetical list of all the boys, and any who had won a prize was rewarded by a footnote recording it. Alan’s footnote was many lines longer than anyone else’s as year after year he had scooped all the prizes available for literature and music. His self-portrait as someone who couldn’t kick a football and wanted to leave the school as soon as could be is the cliché that aesthetes have cultivated to ensure that nobody mistakes them for hearties.
Besides, Alan never raised the possibility that I might go to some other school. My mother was not so sure. We had struggled round the London shops to buy the right clothes, including the Eton jacket, known as bum-freezer, worn by boys below a certain size. She had stayed up late sewing on name-tapes. My parents were due to accompany me on my first day at Eton. At Tonbridge station where we started the journey, Alan caught his hand in the train door, turned white and decided that he had to go home. Poppy called after him that he was the one who’d set his heart on sending me to this English school, she was a foreigner, she didn’t know the customs and couldn’t manage on her own. But of course she could, and did.
The Fourth of June is an Eton holiday when parents come to watch sporting events on the cricket pitch and the river in an atmosphere similar to Ascot races. On one of these occasions Alan and I were walking through the school when someone came up from behind and put his hands firmly over Alan’s eyes. You are a lower boy, this man began to intone in the school idiom, you are late for chapel, you will be punished with a week on tardy book, you have got a rip for your essay, you haven’t done your extra work, your tutor Mr Whitworth is extremely put out. This turned out to be Henry Yorke, whose first novel (writing as Henry Green) is set in the anagrammatic school of Note.
Cyril Connolly had more of a story to tell. In some ways he and Alan had much in common. His father was a regular army officer with the rank of major. In the background, relations with aristocratic titles were to be envied and emulated. “Why had my father not got a title?” was one of the questions to which Cyril wanted an answer. Enemies of Promise, published in 1938 when he was already thirty-five, is about self-discovery, and Alan acknowledged that he recognized in it “a more intelligent version of my own uncertainties.” Cyril was speaking for many in his generation who thought of themselves as writers. The ambition was to write a book that would hold good for ten years. Combining experience and imagination, fiction was self-evidently the highest form of literature. At Eton, Cyril had created a hothouse of romance with other boys in College. Nostalgic submersion in the memory of that past overpowered the practical difficulty of choosing a subject that could support the intended masterpiece, and then sitting down to write it. Masters of the false start, Cyril and Alan both amassed in their papers innumerable notebooks with one or two pages of writing and the rest expressively blank.
When we lived in Kent, Cyril came to the house, and his name is in the visitors’ book for the first time in 1943. He published in Horizon Alan’s account of postwar Vienna and also a short story that reads like another false start. It was in our house that Cyril hid a half-eaten plate of eggs and bacon in a drawer and left a chamber pot in the spare room for Poppy or Jessie to empty. He took no exercise, he let himself go, he waddled rather than walked, his face was fatty and colourless but with a redeeming gleam of humour in his eyes. I must have been at least twenty when I came to know him well, and by then his affections, transferred to women, were as demanding as ever. At the peak of his Eton intoxication with literature and sexuality, he told me several times, a small boy had been fagged to bring him a note. This was Alan, and the note read, “Here he is.”
The chances were high that Alan would think his early life had been a strait-jacket from which he had to escape by whatever means there were. In 1926, he talked his way out of Eton and was allowed to spend that summer and autumn in France. As the train moved out of Victoria Station, he records unconsciously a family tableau in the diary that he now began to keep: “Mummy walks quickly besides, a little tearful and Daddy waves in the background.” The impatient departing schoolboy arrived in Paris as the fully-fledged adult he was to be for the rest of his life, just as a caterpillar emerges in the new unexpected form of a butterfly. In the Ritz Bar he met up with Lord Tredegar (writing as Evan Morgan), “dear darling Evan, whom I love more deeply every time I look at him,” and Hugh Lygon, the original of Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited, not to mention “a dear little German boy, Gustav. All the Queens were there.” Without introductions or preliminaries of any kind, suddenly this escaped schoolboy is in Touraine, the guest of hospitable French dukes and counts and their cosmopolitan neighbors, appreciating châteaux and possessions with the total confidence of a connoisseur.
That November, telegrams from Harry urgently recalled him to sit for his entrance examination to Oxford. Sir Herbert Warren, President of Magdalen College and a renowned snob, interviewed him and noted his testimonials: “I liked what I saw of him.” Going up to Oxford in October 1927, Alan wrote regularly to his parents. In Magdalen’s New Buildings (elegantly eighteenth-century in fact), he had “charming rooms, both panelled in a rather decadent cream-beige” which he had improved with a few alterations and the hiring of a piano. “I have five tutors but only very few lectures a week, so that I can easily do a few Newdigate poems.” He tells them about dinners with Peter Watson and Graham Eyres-Monsell and George Harwood, friends richer than him.
In his second term, he opens one of his letters, “Lest you think too badly of me, I enclose a chronicle of my late doings.” And chronicle it is, with names and places. On the back of one envelope is a scribble whose pay-off is in French, “I propose to have the Imperial Coronet stamped on my paper. Bel effet?” He has been to parties in houses as grand as West Wycombe and Sezincote. Cecil Beaton “walks like an exhausted pendulum,” his orbit getting smaller and smaller until it swings up more violently than ever. A leaving party for Lord Clonmore was followed by “a fancy dress dance for which I wore a ballet skirt and tights and ropes and ropes of Woolworth jewellery and had rather a success.”
John Betjeman also had rooms in New Buildings at the time. Summoned by Bells, his autobiography in verse, catches similar highlights of camp showing-off. (Kolkhorst was a university lecturer in Spanish, an eccentric, a Colonel in Betjeman’s imagination just as Alan was Bignose: “Dear private giggles of a private world,” as that poem has it.)
Alan Pryce-Jones came in a bathing-dress,
And, seated at your low harmonium,
Struck up the Kolkhorst Sunday-morning hymn
“There’s
