Читать книгу Fault Lines - David Pryce-Jones - Страница 12

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 down 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 grand 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.

The idiom in which he often writes has since passed into something close to parody, but it served as understatement to those reading his letters. “The line was awfully cut up by Boers…. The Boers gave us a warmish time…. I had a ripping bathe in the dark … fighting really is an awful game.” But already by April 1900 he was complaining, “It is too annoying this war going on as it is. I really don’t see how it is going to end. We seem to be losing instead of gaining ground.” Ten months later he had had enough: “I feel as though I have been out here all my life.” On two pages he lists the novels he has been reading, all long forgotten with the exception of those by Mrs Humphrey Ward and George Meredith. When the Coldstream took up quarters at Graaff Reinet he spent a lot of his time shooting duck and playing polo.

Gideon Jacobus Scheepers was a Boer commandant born the same year as Harry. A tribunal sentenced him to death on seven charges of murdering Boer loyalists, aggravated by additional charges of arson and train wrecking. On 17 January 1902 Harry wrote home to say that he had “the doubtful pleasure” of commanding the firing party. In his mind he was certain that the man deserved to be shot. A photograph captures the moment of execution with Harry at the centre of the drama and the regiment lined up at attention on three sides of a square. Next day he noted in his diary that only fifteen of the twenty men had loaded rifles, and jotted down the requisite orders in capital letters, “Firing Party –Volleys – Ready – Present – Fire!” He never mentioned this episode to me. Once in my hearing he said with a certain visible distaste that in South Africa he had witnessed Field Punishment Number One. This involved tying to the wheel of a field gun a soldier who had disobeyed orders in action. The man might end up with his head on the ground when the gun took up a firing position. This was the equivalent of a death sentence. Otherwise all he would say was that he wished he had bought a farm in the Karoo and settled there.

That December, the authorities at Newtown planned a reception to celebrate his return. The local Montgomery Express announced that this was cancelled: “Modest to a degree, the gallant Lieutenant would rather that we simply said he did his duty, and having done it, it was his wish to return home without any demonstration.” A band nevertheless greeted him at the station, playing “See the Conquering Hero Comes.” The mayor, Mr T. Meredith, presented a silver cup “of exquisite workmanship” and in a speech to “a vast multitude” hoped that in time to come Harry’s name “would be as well known in military circles as Sir Pryce’s had become throughout the known world (loud cheers).” Some of that vast multitude then dragged him through the town in the Dolerw carriage, and the newspaper describes him rising from his seat to say among other tactful things that, “In South Africa, Montgomeryshire men had served their country very well, and he was always pleased to meet them out there.”

Reticent, he glossed over his courtship at Beningbrough. “Delightful evening with Vere. She said goodnight to me,” or “My own darling Vere,” is about as far as he allows himself to go in his diaries. May 28, 1903 is the date of their engagement, to judge from Vere’s inscription to Harry on that day of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese:

I write with ink; thou need’st but look,

One glance need’st only dart –

I write my name within thy book,

Thou thine upon my heart.

Six months after becoming engaged, he felt obliged to postpone marriage for the sake of soldiering abroad again. “I must go to Northern Nigeria for heaps of reasons – still it may prove the turning point in my career (if I have one in store!)” Seconded to the West African Frontier Force, he was to command two companies of the First Battalion of the Northern Nigerian Regiment. His father gave him an allowance of £1,200 a year, which made him rich, though not by the standards of Coldstream officers. He passed on to Vere his mother’s assurance that with care they could live a married life on this money, “with five servants, allowing £300 for a house, but can one be got for that?”

Once again he found himself in the thick of things without any training or preparation in a mission for the Empire with only commonsense to rely on. Arriving at Lagos in February 1904 he dined at Government House with Sir Frederick Lugard (later Lord) who for all his reputation struck Harry as “an insignificant little man.” In April he set off for Katagum with sixteen Yorubas and eighteen Hausas. These carriers nicknamed him “The White Man with the big nose.” On the trek he was soon put to the test. “Some natives attacked us and insisted on a palaver! I tried to pacify them till they came so close and one arrow going through Musa my boy’s hat. I fired three shots over their heads and then dropped a man at 80 yards! This apparently settled them, tho’ I was very anxious.” He acted in self-defence but one wonders what the judgment of the ladies at Beningbrough could have been when they read about this fraught encounter.

At Katagum, he noted that the mere presence of a white man is “such an excitement.” When a colleague with the name of Barber turned up, he and Harry sang the Eton Boating Song. On his own and out of touch, responsible for law and order as though judge and district commissioner rolled into one, he was empowered to lash whoever he thought deserved punishment. Finding a private by the name of Andu Kontagora guilty of assault, for instance, he decided that he himself would give the man twenty-four lashes and fine him five shillings. He and his carriers were also covering a wide area on behalf of a boundary commission, reaching remote places whose names he records – Zogo, Zungero, Hadeija, Tubzugna. The Morning Post that May carried a report from Zungero: “Cannibalism and human sacrifice were on the wane, and the natives were daily becoming more desirous of co-operating with the Government in the development and welfare of their country.” Addressing Lady Victoria Dawnay, his future mother-in-law, as “My dear little Mother,” he threw in some local colour, “My house is very uncomfy, being a round mud one about four yards in diameter and full of white ants which eat everything.”

I possess a pocket notebook in which he listed the men under his command, the medals he awarded, and the live ammunition he issued to each of them, with brief comments, mostly approving, on their character. He played polo with the Muslim emirs in the north. Nigeria was another country in which he would have liked to live, and he regretted leaving. Gamba, his orderly, cried at their parting and said over and over again, “Sai Wale Rana” – Goodbye till another day.

Back in England in April 1905, he lost no time marrying Vere. “We give you our darling child without a misgiving, knowing what she is to you,” Lady Victoria had written to him a year previously on hearing of Vere and Harry’s engagement. She followed this up: “One line of greeting on his wedding morning to our beloved Harry knowing well that he will prize the great treasure we are giving him today, with God’s blessing.” The fulsome style of his dear little Mother surely contains something cautionary.

In his autobiography, The Bonus of Laughter, Alan shows more affection for Lady Victoria than for his parents. During one Christmas holiday he insisted that he and I invite ourselves to lunch with the current tenant of Beningbrough. During the meal he made sure this lady, herself a dowager Countess, appreciated how glorious the background of the Dawnays had been. Alan’s grandmother was a Grey, descending from Prime Minister Grey of the Reform Bill; his grandfather a son of Viscount Downe. Lady Victoria’s sisters were Mary, wife of Lord Minto the Viceroy of India, the Countess of Antrim, and Lady Wakehurst, known as Cousin Cuckoo. “I imagine that any intellectual interest I have inherited comes from the Greys,” he writes, and the next sentence pins down his emotional ratings, “The Pryce-Joneses certainly had none.” What the Greys and Dawnays truly had were titles, connections and standing.

Twenty-one when she married, Vere knew hardly anything of the world. In a portrait painted of her at about that age, she looks demure, but the artist, Ellis Roberts, also catches the wariness of someone who would assume that the experiences of life were likely to prove demanding if not unpleasant and she would wish to be excused from anything like that. Out of affection, and also in the manner of that day, her two brothers, Guy and Alan Dawnay, helped to make sure that she had no chance of moving outside the protective but limited social circle of their family and friends. All her life, they began their letters to her with the proprietary address, “Dear old thing.” As a properly brought-up child of the Victorian era, Vere kept albums, she collected autographs and crests, especially those of royal persons; she copied out uplifting poetry and she even played the violin and wrote the six verses and music of a hymn. One unconventional activity was competitive swimming and diving. For several years leading up to her marriage she won gold medals at various London clubs with swimming pools. It was a topic for the more genteel gossip columns. As a “Society Mermaid,” in the words of one magazine, The Lady’s Realm of June 1904, she was “wonderfully pretty and graceful.”

Once married, Harry returned to regimental soldiering with the Second Battalion of the Coldstream Guards stationed at Victoria Barracks in Windsor. In the interests of his career, he and Vere set up a London house in Buckingham Palace Road. Promoted captain in 1909, he was appointed ADC to General Sir Charles Douglas, then GOC Southern Command. When Douglas became Inspector-General of Home Forces, Harry went with him as Private Secretary until April 1914. Peacetime routine was formal, even boring, right up to the scare of war. “Isn’t this Austrian Tragedy dreadful?” was Harry’s reaction to the assassination in Sarajevo of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at the end of June 1914. The declaration of war on 5 August happened to coincide with Vere’s wedding day. “I feel I am slowly dying by inches,” she noted, “one manages to bear up in public, though in private one is absolutely overwhelmed with waves of despair.” Six days later, Harry’s battalion marched out of Victoria Barracks. The adjutant was Alan Dawnay, his brother-in-law who had been engaged and just had time to find a vicar to rush through a wedding service. After parting, Vere went home, “feeling like a stone, and crept into bed and laid my head in the dent of Harry’s pillow where his own dear one had been – all was over! They had no idea where they were going, not even the Colonel had a notion.” To his mother Harry wrote, “Take care of yourself and don’t worry about me.” On 12 August, the day the battalion sailed for France, his stiff-upper-lip tone was hardly modified for Vere:

I still cannot quite realize what is happening, and feel as if I have been through a succession of awful nightmares. I do realize what a dreadful time it is for all of you who have to go on living the same life from day to day and all the time having this dreadful blackness hanging over you, but I know you will realize it is really for the best and that we must come out alright in the long run.

At the start of this war, Harry was thirty-six. Within days he was sleeping on straw in a farmer’s shed, and by the end of the month he was in action, soon confessing to have cut buttons embossed with a crown off the uniform of a dead German and handing one of them to a fellow officer as a souvenir. In France for the entire duration of the war, he kept a diary and wrote letters to Vere that are vividly descriptive yet free from anything like literary effect. With extreme modesty he does not dwell on the occasions when he was mentioned in dispatches. “Found a pair of new boots and 25 cigarettes in each boot from Vere. Boots v. comfy,” is a typically restricted entry. He asked her to send fifty cigarettes every other day, and also, “some Brand’s meat lozenges and chocolate and acid drops and tobacco each week.” Vere quoted another Coldstreamer telling his wife that “H. P-J. comes down here every other night from the Trenches. He is always splendidly cheery about everything.” Vere’s nerves soon went. “I cannot any longer stand the thought of you remaining in those trenches.” She would lobby to get him a safer posting. “You can trust me not to say anything I ought not to say … you are having a million million harder time than dear old Alan.” The latter was soon imploring him to accept the offer of a staff job “in fairness to Vere. When you consider the intense relief it would be to her, I feel that your personal feelings ought not to weigh … take it, do, old boy.” As a staff officer at headquarters of the 38th (Welsh) Division he found himself at Amiens. The Eton College Chronicle published a list of 209 Old Etonian officers from the top ranks downwards who held a dinner at the front in October 1917, and his name appears at Table 7. When the Second Coldstream returned to Victoria Barracks on 25 February 1919 many of the officers including the colonel had been killed and of the thousand or so non-commissioned officers and men who had marched out only fifteen survived and just two had served with the same company throughout the war.

Alan Dawnay made his name as a member of the Arab Bureau, the wartime think-tank in Cairo influencing British policy in the Middle East. He was the liaison officer between the Egyptian Expeditionary Force commanded by Field Marshal Allenby and Faisal, the son of Sherif Hussein and leader of the Arab revolt in the desert against the Ottomans. Faisal’s champion was Lawrence of Arabia. Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence’s account of this campaign, is a masochistic psychodrama that has established the lasting misperception of Arabs as victims of betrayal and the British as traitorous victimisers. He achieved this effect by describing his British colleagues in language that compacts praise with denigration. Alan Dawnay, for instance, was “Allenby’s greatest gift to us – greater than thousands of baggage camels…. His was a brilliant mind, understanding to a degree, feeling instinctively the special qualities of rebellion, and developing them.” “To a degree” conveys “not at all.” Writing from an address in Heliopolis on 10 July 1916 to congratulate Harry on his Military Cross, Alan Dawnay came clean about Egypt as he found it. “This is not a nice country, the people are too loathsome and one gets so tired of the desert.”

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.