A Traveller's Life (18 page)

Yours sincerely,                                

Evelyn Waugh                                 

I replied that I would be happy to do so, but I never pursued the matter and had no intention of going, even if I was invited, and I am sure if he had known this he would have applauded my decision. It would have spoiled our relationship if we had met. Nevertheless, in 1959, when my publishers asked him for his views on
Something Wholesale
, the book about my life in the rag trade, he sent them another enthusiastic quote to use on the jacket, unasked. I hope the wine was good if and when he eventually opened it.

Altogether I saw him four times. Once was in March 1957 at the Law Courts, which curiosity impelled me to visit during his fantastic lawsuit with the
Daily Express
and one of their columnists, Nancy Spain. This lawsuit was brought about by Miss Spain's ill-advised attempt, together with Lord Noel-Buxton, to enter Waugh's house uninvited, which led to her writing things about him which were libellous. I am not sure on the day I was there whether or not he was wearing a false moustache. I am slightly more sure that he was using an ear-trumpet. Spain herself was wearing one of the nearly full-length mink coats that the Beaverbrook Press used to keep in mothballs for their female staff to wear when appearing on such occasions, but over trousers, which was eccentric then. He was awarded £2000 ($5580) damages plus costs, and the
Daily Express
settled out of court for a further £3000 ($8370) when Spain continued her hostile comments in another context, which also extended to Graham Greene.

On another occasion I saw him on the steps of White's Club,
at the top of St James's Street, trying to hail a taxi. Apart from the fact that by then he was much older and wearing a fearsomely checked suit, he was exactly as he appears in a caricature by Osbert Lancaster, done in 1947, which he himself bought in order, so he said, to frighten his children.

The third time he nearly bowled me over turning into King Street from St James's Street, probably en route for Christie's or the London Library. That time I think perhaps he recognized me, or possibly he thought I was something from his Pinfoldian past. He not only looked at me intently but turned round after he had passed for a further look, just as I did, so that we were like the two Englishmen in Kinglake's
Eothen
who passed one another in the Sinai Desert in the 1840s. The only difference was that they were mounted on camels, and they did eventually retrace their steps to speak to one another. We, on the other hand, continued on our different courses.

The last time was one afternoon when I was having tea
en famille
at the Ritz. Seated in a corner under a niche containing a piece of statuary, he was dressed in one of his indestructible, immensely checked suits and eating buttered toast (or it might have been muffins, it was difficult to see through the murk in that vast room on an autumn afternoon). He looked exactly like a drawing by Phiz in
Mr Sponge's Sporting Tour
. ‘Go on,' said my children, when I told them who it was, ‘speak to him.'

I would have liked to but I was afraid that when I introduced myself he might say, ‘And what does that mean to me?', as he could well have made one of his characters say, such as Ivor Claire, the idle, elegant Captain of the Blues (The Royal Horse Guards) – in
Officers and Gentlemen
, the second novel in Waugh's wartime trilogy – who deserts his men in Crete and is later saved from disgrace by the Establishment and shipped off to the East as a kinsman of the Viceroy, where he wins the DSO in Burma. Claire's
particular butt in the commando of which he was a member was Trimmer, a rather caddish, one-time barber who, through no fault of his own, gains an unmerited decoration, and becomes an undeserving hero. Like Trimmer, I had been an Englishman in a Highland regiment; like Trimmer, I had gained an unmerited decoration. But, unlike Trimmer, I did not have the constitution to accept such a rebuff if it was offered, although I admired Waugh's writing and I was extremely grateful to him for what he had done for me. So I did not speak to him.

The only incident worth recording here, hilarious as much but by no means all the time I spent with Secker & Warburg undoubtedly was, is one during which I had my first and probably last encounter with a Tibetan Lama. This took place in Southern Ireland in the course of the unravelling, or rather an attempt by numbers of people more or less competent to do so, to unravel what came to be known as ‘The Great Lama Mystery'.

In 1955 Fred Warburg was instrumental in acquiring from an agent the autobiography of T. Lobsang Rampa, a Tibetan Lama, entitled
The Third Eye
. On publication it became a tremendous and instant success, receiving enthusiastic notices from the most eminent reviewers, although some of the more erudite were frankly sceptical; and indeed – whether it was true or not – it was a most vividly written and fascinating work. It was subsequently published in numbers of other countries and its sales were, and continued to be after the events which I now propose to describe, enormous. The real mystery was the Lama himself, who had adopted the name of Dr Kuan-suo. Although photographs of him existed and were in fact used for publicity purposes, few people apart from publishers and literary agents claimed to have met him, although
he was reputed to be resident in Britain. Then, at the moment when the Lama's book was at the height of its success at the end of January 1958, the
Daily Mail
fired off what was to prove a bombshell. It published an article which said that Lobsang Rampa was not a Lama. And not only was he not a Lama but he was, in fact, Cyril Henry Hoskins, son of a plumber from Plympton in Devonshire, married to a lady who had been a state registered nurse in Richmond. If what the
Mail
said was true, the future of
The Third Eye
, and the Lama with it, looked bleak.

On the Sunday following the day on which the affairs of the Lama had reached this stage of dénouement, I was at home in Wimbledon trying to get on with a book (which in fact meant that I was just sitting, feeling terribly cold and wondering if we could all emigrate), when the telephone rang. It was Fred, asking or rather ordering me to go to Ireland at once. Apparently the Lama had fled the country and had taken refuge in a house near Howth, a seaside resort on a peninsula on the north side of Dublin Bay. There he had been discovered by the press of the world, who had surrounded the building, and he was now barricaded inside it. My job, Fred said, was to gain admittance to the building and ask the Lama for an explanation. He was unable to go himself as he had promised to take part in a broadcast from Birmingham the following day in which he was to cross swords with the Secretary of the Public Morality Council, or some such body.

Secretly I was delighted to be entrusted with this mission, which was just the thing to break the tedium and, after collecting my passport, which proved to be unnecessary, and putting on a sheepskin coat and a pair of sheepskin boots – it seemed likely to be pretty cold taking part in a vigil on a headland near Howth – I went to Fred's flat in St John's Wood where he gave me some money and a letter of introduction to the Lama, the gist of which was that I was acting as an emissary on behalf of the publishers
and that he must make some statement about himself and his book.

By this time the
Daily Express
had been on the line to Warburg. They were furious at having been scooped by the
Daily Mail
and were anxious, if it was at all possible, to prove that the Lama was a Lama and not the son of a plumber in Plympton. They wanted one of their reporters to accompany me to Ireland for this purpose and Warburg thought this would be no bad thing. At such a moment it must have seemed to him that any allies were better than none.

At the
Express
office I was given a large sum in £5 notes for my expenses, which I was never asked to account for and which was a great help with the next term's school fees. By the time we had flown to Dublin and had reached Howth it was much too late to call on a Lama or anyone else, and I spent much of the rest of the night listening to the reporter telling me about life on the
Daily Express
who, he said, were generous employers, especially in times of adversity; a sentiment with which, with a great load of £5 notes in my pocket, I thoroughly agreed.

We both woke the following morning with terrible headaches and quite early set off for the Lama's house, which was situated on the edge of a cliff with a stupendous view over the sea. It was a medium-sized villa surrounded by a wall and also by representatives of the press of various national and other newspapers.

I had never seen the gentlemen of the press in action before – and frustrated gentlemen at that – and now doing so I found it difficult to believe my eyes. Some of them had constructed primitive periscopes, using bamboo poles with mirrors attached to them, with which they were trying to look in through the windows of the upper floor, presumably trying to discover what a Lama looked like in his bath. Others were apparently happily engaged in going through the dustbins to see if they could find
any interesting material, and the approaches to the house were littered with paper and other rubbish which they had rejected. When I arrived, this body of persons rather surprisingly fell back to allow me to get as far as the front door.

After repeated bangings on it Madam Kuan – it sounded like Kwamph – the wife of the Lama, came to the door but refused to open it, and we had a difficult conversation through the letterbox, the gist of which was that I should come back later.

When I came back later I was allowed in to the hall of the house, which was furnished with a wooden Buddha and a brass tray made in Birmingham on a rickety black ebony stand. It was a depressing room, rather like the set for an oriental interior in a play to be performed in a village hall. Madam K. herself was plumpish, middle-aged with greying hair done up in a bun, vaguely foreign-looking. With her was a fresh-faced, very English-looking girl who told me that she had left her husband (who was a member of Lloyds) and her three children in order to live as a disciple in the Lama's house. She was ‘upset' at being, like the Lama, subjected to a lot of undesirable publicity.

The Lama, Madam K. said, was dying. He had suffered a coronary thrombosis and it was unlikely that he would live for more than a couple of days. Nevertheless, he felt that he should make a statement, and would I come back the following morning.

I passed another dissipated night, this time with a whole band of journalists, and the following morning went back to the house, to which no one had up to now succeeded in gaining admission except myself.

Once again I found myself in the hall, beyond which I was not allowed to penetrate, and in it, without seeing the Lama, I listened to two tape recordings which he and his wife had made, apparently for my and Warburg's benefit. The Lama's statement, which was remarkable for its fluency, described how Cyril Henry
Hoskins had become a Lama. At the age of about thirty-four Hoskins received advanced warning, presumably by some process analogous to mental telepathy, that his corporeal integuments were going to be taken over by a Tibetan Lama and that the actual take-over would occur on 13 June 1949. He then went on to give an account of the events leading up to the moment of actual incorporation. Some time during the latter part of the war, it must have been in 1944, the Lama, whose name was Lobsang Rampa, left Lhasa and travelled to Chunking where he worked in a displaced persons camp as a doctor (he had a medical degree). While he was there he performed a number of major operations, some of them on American and English women, who were among the inmates. Eventually he became a prisoner of the Japanese and was in Hiroshima when the bomb exploded. In the resulting chaos he stole a fishing-boat and managed to reach Vladivostock by way of Korea. He then crossed Asiatic Russia by the Trans-Siberian Railway, some of the time hanging to the tie-rods beneath the flat-cars and supplementing a starvation diet by eating the grease out of the axle-boxes. Eventually he arrived in Moscow; there he was arrested and taken to the Russian-Polish frontier where he was deposited on the Polish side of it. From Poland he travelled to Germany where he took a job as a worker in what I think he said was the Daimler-Benz factory. From Germany he made his way to England and to Woking for his tryst with Hoskins who, at that time, was living in a house opposite the Cottage Hospital.

Hoskins was keen on photography and on that particular day – 13 June 1949 – he was up a tree trying to photograph an owl. While endeavouring to obtain a close-up the branch on which he was extended broke, and he fell. The statement gave a vivid account of this fall. How green the lawn looked and how many ladybirds and other insects he could see walking up and down the blades
of grass as the earth zoomed up to meet him and he hit the ground with a terrible thud.

The next thing he knew was that he was outside his body, looking down at his own supine form to which, advancing across the grass, but with its feet just clear of it, was a Lama dressed in saffron robes. When the Lama was quite close to Hoskins he said, ‘I want your body.'

‘Why?' Hoskins asked.

‘Because I haven't got a passport and if I don't have it I shall be deported,' the Lama said.

At this moment, the one which presumably Hoskins had been awaiting, he made an act of acceptance and the Lama passed into the body of Cyril Henry Hoskins and possessed it. And from this time on Hoskins was the Lama and Hoskins was no more.

I took the tapes but I told Madam K. that I was not going to leave Howth until I had seen the Lama. And on the afternoon of that day I was admitted to the room in which the Lama was supposedly dying. It, too, was sparsely furnished: a bed in which the Lama was tucked up with only his head visible, a couple of chairs and a popular encyclopaedia in one corner. The view was splendid over the water to Ireland's Eye, an island just off the coast. The wind was easterly and very cold and the sea was smooth. The Lama's face made a powerful impression on me. He had a long nose, a beard which made it difficult to see his mouth and teeth, and rather red lips. His head was bald on top and he had a high, domed forehead in which there was a slight dent which could have been the result of the ‘third eye' operation he described in his book, or could equally well have had some more mundane cause. But his eyes were his most impressive feature. They were very luminous and powerful. Altogether the whole feeling the Lama gave me was one of great power and although it may sound imaginative, I could not help thinking of Rasputin and how
difficult it had been for his assassins actually to kill him. What I was looking at was a man who looked as if he, too, would resist death strongly. He certainly didn't look as if he was on the point of it, although he didn't look particularly well, and next to him on a side table there was a hypodermic syringe with one or two spare needles on a tray.

The Lama's breath was coming in a halting, gasping fashion.

‘I've been taken for a ride,' was the first thing he said to me, enunciating with difficulty. ‘Now go back and tell Fred that the next ride I'll take will be in a box with glass sides.'

He had a very strange voice. If the accent was Devonian it had other, more urban overtones. It certainly wasn't oriental in any way, neither were the expressions which came from his lips those of an oriental person.

‘I never took any money from anybody,' was the next thing he said. (It had been suggested that he had taken money more or less under false pretences for horoscopes, advice, things like that; but one of the strange things about the whole affair was that, although these suggestions were given wide publicity, no one ever came forward, as they might have been expected to do, to say that he or she had sent a three-and-sixpenny postal order with a stamped, addressed envelope to the Lama and got nothing in return.)

Then he said, ‘The book is a true book,' and continued to do so during the entire time I spent with him. And when I asked him to autograph a copy of it for me he wrote ‘This is a true book' in it and signed it ‘T. Lobsang Rampa'. And with this I had to be content. He implied that he was dying. His wife said that he was dying, he obviously wanted me to think that he was dying and it was impossible to harry a man in that condition. So, having expressed the hope that he would soon recover, I left.

The Lama's recovery was far more rapid than I would ever have dreamed possible. Madam K., convinced by the reporter from the
Daily Express
, who by now had a staff photographer from the Manchester office with him, that his paper was intent on displaying the Lama in more favourable light than he had been by the
Daily Mail
, had admitted them to the house, and as I left they were preparing to enter what they, too, had been led to believe was the death chamber.

What then happened was this. As soon as they went in, the Lama allowed Madam K. to prop him up with some cushions and he then had a number of photographs taken of himself with a cat perched on one shoulder. What the journalist wrote about this encounter I cannot now remember. What I can remember is being back in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin and the photographer, a cheerful, extrovert sort of fellow who would have been equally at home at a post-mortem or a Royal garden party, going off somewhere to get his pictures developed. The next thing I remember he was on the telephone to us in the hotel where we were wondering what to do next, with the words: ‘You know those pictures I took of the Lama? Well, I've printed them oop and do you know what? There's a ruddy great 'alo round 'is 'ead!' And indeed subsequent examination did demonstrate that there was a certain phosphorescence around it.