Faul Lines Read online

  Max’s bid to stand in for Eugène as head of the family had failed. Father and son owed their way of life to Mitzi. Had either of them insisted that the relationship between her and Frank was destructive and intolerable, she had only to resort to the power of her money; she could cut them off at any time, in which case they would have to earn a living. When all was said and done, here was a competition for resources. Frank had nothing to lose, everything to gain. Eugène, and then Max, had everything to lose, nothing to gain. A penitent Max soon went to Montreuil and she gloats that he “begged my pardon so sweetly.” Unable to stand up to his mother, for the rest of his life he never quite gained independence and his rightful status.

  “My children!” she was expostulating in June 1931 about what she felt was their continued resistance to Frank, “Why are you all so complicated, theatrical, méfiants [mistrustful] and egotistical … they have it well in their minds that he speaks against them to me.” She attributed this to the nannies whose moral code was far too rigid to accommodate Frank. This was a moment for divide and rule. She took Poppy alone of the children to Montreuil and after a happy evening together “ever so tenderly told her the nannies had to be pensioned off. First she turned to stone and said nothing.” Just seventeen at the time Poppy then screamed, “We are always alone, nobody loves us but Nanny, she is everything to us,” and went on, “You do nothing but laugh since my father’s death.” Since that death, Mitzi wrote expertly shifting the blame, this was “the most cruel blow I have had. I left her.”

  Back at Royaumont three days later, with what she considered “a world of tenderness,” she told the nannies that they had to leave. Nanny Stainer replied, “You will never manage to part me from the children.” Jessie was even more blunt, “I don’t know why I listen to your palaver,” and banged the door. Whenever this scene was mentioned in years to come, Jessie would emphasise that she could never have left the children. And next morning Poppy returned to the charge, “For seventeen years you have done nothing but kill me!” To Mitzi, she “was like a lunatic for days.” Fault lines were out in the open.

  In fashionable places such as Naples, Capri and Venice, offering museums, opera houses and five-star hotels, Mitzi had only to announce her arrival with Frank for them to receive invitations from other rich or prominent local people. At the time Egypt was effectively governed by the British almost as though it were a colony, and some with social aspirations were in the habit of going out there for a winter season. Frank was one such, travelling to Egypt as before with his old lover Paul Goldschmidt. Wherever he was, work proceeded in his absence at Montreuil. The “dream house” proved too small and inconvenient. A footbridge from its garden led over a sunken street to a park and a row of cottages. Mitzi had bought the park and three of the cottages, which were then pulled down. Supposedly an architect, Frank had designed a much larger new house to be built on the site. His original drawings, it is said, omitted a staircase, and Frank had wanted to have shutters and windows that opened outwards. Mitzi told me one day that Frank had gone ahead with the building regardless of expense at the height of the Depression. As the works were nearing completion, a bill of particulars shows that she still owed just over two million francs. She was fretting about paying when a letter arrived from Hungary with a huge payment to compensate for laying a railroad across one of her properties. By the end of 1932 she and Frank had moved into Montreuil, and in January 1933 they had a civil marriage in the town. In the same month that Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, Mitzi became English; suddenly, thanks to Frank, “my country has ever been England.” A short year later, she had accommodated herself to “Our England … each time you are in London you feel, if possible, prouder to have an English passport.”

  The change of nationality was accompanied by conversion to the Christian faith. She would be free from those Jewish nerves that were always troublesome. In her diaries she persuaded herself that she wasn’t escaping but once again was quite right to be doing what she wanted to do. “It’s queer how in my heart I never felt driven to the Jewish religion. I only protect the race the moment anyone attacks it, but I don’t like them.” In June 1933 she asked herself, “A Hitler, who can understand?” In common with many frightened and wishful Jews everywhere, she was interpreting Nazism as the personal aberration of Hitler. She and Frank could visit Bayreuth and drive through Nazi Germany as though it was still the country they had always known and the stormtroopers and swastikas were local colour, not worth a second glance. The danger was apparently unimaginable even to someone so well travelled and cosmopolitan. Yet what the new British and Christian Mary Wooster imagined was the final step in a welcome process of assimilation was only impersonation.

  Marriage to Frank drove the somewhat pointed hinting of sexual repression out of her diaries. “I thought that our oneness was something so wonderful that physical union could not better it,” she had confided to herself. She told Father Cardew, the priest who received her into the church, that the relationship with Frank had not been physical, and he took it that Frank had displayed the manners of a gentleman, waiting until he had made an honest woman of her. At Montreuil on 17 May 1934 and still confiding to herself as usual, she resorts to explicit language, “The first time I was yours at last was on a 17th. The first time in our new house.”

  Long after Frank’s death, in the fumoir at Royaumont, we were gossiping about some contemporary of Mitzi’s who was said to have had an affair with her gardener. “Quand on a eu Frank on n’a pas besoin du jardinier” (When one has had Frank there’s no need for the gardener.) Mitzi’s sudden vulgarity seemed altogether out of keeping, the kind of thing she thought people ought to be saying in those liberated days. As though passing off the wisdom of a lifetime’s experience, on other occasions, and especially to her grandchildren, she was in the habit of stating as it were ex cathedra: “Homosexuals make the best husbands.”

  FIVE

  Reputed Father

  Heb dduw heb ddim, ddu a digon – the Pryce-Jones motto

  I WAS BORN in Meidling on 15 February 1936, in the corner room on the first floor where Poppy had also been born exactly twenty years earlier. Whether my first name acknowledged Jewish or Welsh antecedents was apparently much discussed in the house. What it might mean socially or culturally for me to have a surname that is identifiably Welsh was never raised either at a personal or an abstract level. I was twenty before national service took me to Wales for the first time and then only to practise platoon attacks at Trawsfynnydd, a military training ground with a nuclear power station in the distance. In the village there I wrote a cheque to a man with exactly the same names as myself.

  Marriage brought me to the land of my Welsh fathers. Clarissa’s parents, Harold and Nancy Caccia, lived at Abernant in the Wye Valley, and we acquired Pentwyn, a cottage nearby but much higher on the edge of Eppynt, the open hill with a view of the Black Mountains fifty miles away. Time was when Clarissa had ridden up on her pony and formed a wish that one day she would live here. One room had a bath that had never been plumbed in. The slates were sliding from the roof of a separate building, once a barn. A long time later, we had made a home, and Clarissa’s mother called it Pen-trianon. I was weeding the minute garden when a neighbour telephoned to say that Princess Margaret was staying with her, and she was about to bring her round to show her the barn.

  More incongruous still than the royal party in this isolated retreat was the visit of Svetlana Stalin. Cursed by her parentage, tempestuous by nature, she existed in a perpetual storm that might break in any direction. A circle of friends wished her well, and among them were Laurence and Linda Kelly, both historians with experience of the Soviet Union. During a meal in their house I invited Svetlana to Pentwyn, never thinking she’d accept. My nerve failed when we picked her up as arranged in a hotel in nearby Hay, and I apologized for the cottage’s lack of amenities. Does it have running water, she asked. Having said point blank that she refused to talk about her father, she would come d
own from her room and talk exclusively about him, tormented that she couldn’t help loving a father whom she knew was a monster. At moments, a tiger gleam in her eyes gave her an uncanny look of Stalin himself. In another mood, she took over the kitchen with a special recipe for chicken. When she had retreated to Wisconsin for her last years, I sent her a novel of mine and got back the title page, torn out without further comment.

  Not long before he died, Alan stayed at Pentwyn. He wanted to pay a last visit to Dolerw, the Pryce-Jones house at Newtown where he had spent childhood holidays. It was raining that day and he refused to put on a coat because, “I don’t get wet, I’m Welsh.” Links had survived. He had been President of the Montgomeryshire Association, and he had promoted R. S. Thomas whose early poems with their angry mourning for a lost Wales had been published locally in Newtown.

  Like Meidling, Dolerw is the monument of a self-made man out to show what he can do and expecting to be admired for it. Welsh gentry lived here in the eighteenth century. Briefly the house came into the possession of Charles Hanbury-Tracy, a local grandee and Liberal Member of Parliament. From the 1870s onwards Pryce Jones, as he was originally called, transformed Dolerw into a large Italianate villa complete with a tower. He and his wife, Eleanor Morris, had four daughters and four sons, the youngest of them all being Harry (1878–1952), father of Alan. Another of the four sons, my great-uncle Victor, sold the lease in 1947 and moved to Norfolk where he and his wife spent the rest of their lives riding to hounds. Since then, Dolerw has been successively a Catholic school, a convent, and a Voluntary Sector Resource Centre, four dissociated words that give away public funding.

  Born in 1834 in Llanllwchaiarn near Newtown, Pryce was the illegitimate son of Mary Goodwin and, according to the parish record, his “reputed father William Jones.” He built a small draper’s shop into the Royal Welsh Warehouse or RWW, a concern primarily based on processing wool, the staple product of that countryside, into flannel, blankets, sleeping bags, extending the range gradually into clothing and household goods. Trading internationally, he pioneered marketing by mail order, using his influence to have a railway track laid where it suited him and organising special trains to and from London for his business. Mr Sears and Mr Roebuck are said to have visited, learnt how he operated, and sold him founder shares in their business. The RWW, a huge lump of red brick, still stands today as he left it, with the family name up on the roofline in outsize white lettering. A stone set into the wall by the main door commemorates a gold medal the RWW was awarded in Vienna in 1873, by coincidence the very year in which Comte Vasili observed Gustav doing himself a favour by buying good stock cheaply. By 1880, the RWW was employing 6,000 workers and had about 250,000 customers worldwide. When Queen Victoria knighted him in 1887 he hyphenated and duplicated his name, to become Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones. He enjoys a nationalist image as a model entrepreneur who proved that the Welsh could succeed through their own endeavors and so dispense with English patronage. His obituary in a local newspaper, the Montgomery Express, concluded that his business acumen amounted to genius and had brought worldwide renown to the Principality.

  The telephone rang one day at Pentwyn and a friendly stranger informed me that great-uncle Victor had left portraits of these forebears of mine to one of the churches at Newtown. The sanctuary where the portraits were hanging was being converted into a badminton court and unless I retrieved them that very afternoon they would be put on a bonfire. Far from flattering the couple, the artist, Arthur Nowell, depicts stiff and forbidding figures against a dark background, he in a morning coat, she holding a teacup with no suggestion that she might offer a cup to anyone else.

  The historical record bears out Arthur Nowell’s characterization of his sitters. At a moment when a general election was in the offing I was in the main street of Builth Wells, the small town closest to Pentwyn. For a long time this part of Wales has been politically volatile. An elderly man came out of his shop to ask me, “Why aren’t you standing for parliament?” I asked if he thought I should. “You should be like Sir Pryce, he used to give us five shillings to go and break the Liberals’ windows.” The Liberals were one or another member of the Hanbury-Tracy family, owners of Gregynog, a grand house, and accustomed to treating the position of Lord Lieutenant of the county or election to parliament as member for the constituency of Montgomery Boroughs as tribute rightfully due to their status. Between 1880 and 1895 Sir Pryce, a Conservative, engaged in a political contest with the Hanbury-Tracys. Sir Pryce won the majority of the elections in this period, and went to Westminster with a dozen Welsh MPs in his pocket. Thanks to this parliamentary machine, it is said, he was able to promote his interests, for instance getting the railway track to Newtown laid right up to the Royal Welsh Warehouse.

  Celebrating victory in the 1892 election, Sir Pryce and Eleanor went by train to Llanidloes, half an hour or so away from Newtown but still in the constituency. This was Liberal territory and a crowd was waiting to greet them with three cheers for Frederick Hanbury-Tracy, the loser, and to boo (“hoot” is the word in the press accounts) the Pryce-Joneses. After taking tea in the one and only hotel, Sir Pryce and his wife retreated to the station, and on the way were jostled and bruised. Losing his temper, he hit out with his stick. When he struck a little girl in the face and drew blood, a police inspector stopped him by taking hold of the stick. By the time that Sir Pryce boarded the train home, he had lost his hat and the angry crowd then burnt it.

  The Liberals then accused him of buying votes. The petition was heard by Baron Pollock and Mr. Justice Wills. One charge was that Lady Pryce-Jones had called on the wife of one John Withers, “a somewhat prominent Liberal,” and promised to get their daughter into Ashford High School for Welsh girls if Mr Withers voted for Sir Pryce. Another charge was that in pubs in Llanidloes one Abel Goldsworthy, in the employment of Sir Pryce but “a person with no money,” offered money or drinks to bribe people to vote Conservative. The local Montgomery Express was delighted by the final verdict that Sir Pryce had nothing to answer for, writing that he had gained “one of the greatest victories that has ever been achieved by any Welshman.” Years later, however, the considered opinion of the left-wing historian Henry Pelling was that this episode almost unseated Sir Pryce and he and his Conservative colleague indeed formed a corrupt political machine. In the 1895 election, Sir Edward Pryce-Jones, the eldest son (titled because he had been made a baronet), took over the seat, and the Hanbury-Tracy family retreated to Gregynog and abandoned the constituency.

  One of Sir Pryce’s four daughters had married a Powell and lived at Plas-y-Bryn near Newtown. Commissioned by a magazine to interview Dilys Powell, a relation of theirs and the veteran film critic of The Sunday Times, I discovered quite fortuitously that she was a Plas-y-Bryn cousin, and probably the last person alive able to recall visits to Dolerw before the First War. At tea on the lawn one summer day when she was still a child, she recalled, Sir Pryce had sat her on his knee.

  My grandfather Harry, the youngest of Sir Pryce’s sons, gave me the present of a toy horse and cart in wood that the estate carpenter at Dolerw had made for him. His nanny had taught him some nursery songs in Welsh, as folklore rather than genuine culture. Unlike his brothers, he played no part in the Royal Welsh Warehouse. Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, thoroughly anglicized him. His social standing changed. Popular, called PJ by his friends, he exemplified the English gentleman of his day. The gaze was firm, the manners polite, the voice reserved. The slope of his shoulders made him appear slight, at a physical disadvantage, but this was misleading. He excelled at all sports with a ball. Decades after the event, he still minded that he had played well all one summer in the Eton cricket eleven only to be dropped to twelfth man for the all-important match against Harrow. Almost every day he wore the tie of a cricket club, either the MCC or I Zingari. If ever he felt socially insecure as the son of a tradesman who furthermore was illegitimate, he gave no sign of it.

  A very good shot, he received invitations to g
rand houses for shooting weekends with grand people. According to his game book, he was regularly invited to shoot with Lord Pembroke at Wilton. Another of the guns there was Guy Dawnay, who further invited him to shoot at Beningbrough in Yorkshire, the house of his parents Colonel Lewis and Lady Victoria Dawnay. Guy had a younger brother Alan, and a sister Vere. At first sight, Harry fell for Vere though too shy to declare it to her. Lewis Dawnay and both his sons were in the Coldstream Guards and seemingly swept a willing Harry away into the regiment. He and Guy reported to Wellington barracks together in October 1899, two weeks after the outbreak of the Boer war.

  A short month later, with no preparation and even less training, and aged only twenty-one, he was in action. “We started at 4 A.M. and met the enemy at 6.30 at Modder River,” as he described the battle to his mother at Dolerw, “they were heavily entrenched, in a very strong position, about 5,000…. I personally had a rough day of it, as I swam the river twice with Colonel Codrington and a few others to find we were cut off and the Boers were on us … when it got dark, they suddenly began, they simply poured shots into us … we were simply lying in the open. I really gave up all hopes and only prayed that I should be finished off without pain. We were ordered to cease fire and retire, had the enemy advanced we must have been annihilated, as they were 800 opposite our 100 and only about 300 yards away.” As so often in that war, courage narrowly averted military disaster.