Dispatches From a Dilettante (17 page)

Eventually after seeing dozens of properties I had a short list of three and a date was fixed for the ceo of the Prince’s Trust and his deputy to come up to view them. By this stage I was becoming a little blasé about executive helicopter travel and, as they were being flown from London by Toby, I arranged to meet them at the first property just outside Huddersfield. The plan was for me to then fly with them to the next two and be dropped back at the first to pick up my car as they flew back down south.

Somehow the Huddersfield Examiner had got hold of the itinerary and ran a story ‘Prince to buy house near Huddersfield’. Consequently I and a small ‘huddle’ of curious onlookers were buffeted by the rotor blades of the helicopter as it landed in the grounds of a Victorian villa. I had booked the viewing so as to reserve the best until last and so after an hour’s tour by a fawning estate agent, four of us got on board for the flight to Northallerton. I couldn’t resist a regal type wave as we rose about the treetops, banked in a gentle arc and then headed north. The second place fitted the bill but was uninspiring and so we made the short hop to Smeaton Manor just outside Northallerton. This had everything and more. It was a beautiful red brick mansion in lovely grounds complete with swimming pool. After the tour we sat by the pool for a de-brief, and it was unanimously agreed that an offer to purchase would be made, subject to a ‘Princely’ visit to gain his seal of approval.

The deputy ceo of the Prince’s Trust had a ‘new fangled’ brick sized mobile phone which went off at this point much to his surprise. It was the PA to our property multi millionaire backer who said that the helicopter was required urgently after some corporate crisis meant that he had to get to France that evening. With that they immediately summonsed Toby who was sunning himself at the other side of the pool and, with hardly an apology for not having time to drop me off en route, rose into the sky and disappeared into the blue beyond.

I was left stranded and sixty miles from my car in Huddersfield, but in the grounds of a lovely mansion outside Northallerton, which was shortly to become my place of employment. The next and rather humbling move was to phone one of my friends, who had no doubt become irked my tales of executive airborne travel, and beg him to come and pick me up.

Older readers may remember the time the Prince of Wales broke his collar bone playing Polo. That was the day before he was supposed to come to view Smeaton Manor. The Prince’s trip was postponed and days later the property market began to collapse. Invitations to our backer’s luxurious corporate headquarters in Westminster for updates on the search became less frequent and a new limit of money available was set at ‘around seven hundred thousand pounds’. Further viewing was by car as Toby and the helicopter were never seen again.

I looked at a former mental hospital where I was shown round by the original medallion man who could hardly wait to finish the tour so that as he put it, “I can shag that bird waiting in the car before going home to pick the wife up and take her for a birthday treat – she’s fifty today”. I viewed a gothic pile, where I was shown round by a gaunt man in an oversized suit who volunteered that he had been let out of prison to help ‘sell’ the house. He was in for tax evasion and I think the Revenue must have thought a sale would help him clear some of what he owed. I considered a huge and remote farmhouse on the Yorkshire Moors where I was given the tour by an armed madman on a quad bike, but all to no avail.

Within three months our financial backer had lost a good proportion of his fortune and withdrew the offer to fund the project. A month after that, as The Prince’s Trust Board voted to abandon the idea of having a residential centre, I was made redundant.

As redundancies go this one was not too bad and in fact the Trust bent over backwards to handle it well. In addition to a very generous package they immediately gave me consultancy work looking at engaging young people on the toughest housing estates in Britain. So it was that within a very short space of time, I went from being whisked about the country in an executive helicopter and enjoying lunches in the best restaurants, to walking about the Easterhouse housing estate in Glasgow and lunching with recovering alcoholics and drug addicts.

They were dramatic changes to my circumstances but I am glad to have experienced and enjoyed both. With our property multi millionaire I saw extreme greed masquerading as ambition and with the addicts and alcoholics recognised that there is not always much between holding it all together and total collapse. Pragmatically though, as the consultancy came to an end, I needed to indulge in less cod philosophy and do more in the way of urgent practical job search.

The early morning bathroom protocol in a Catholic presbytery in Kensington gave me ample time to reflect on the relative success of that search for meaningful employment. I had been given the offer of a room pro temps at the presbytery, courtesy of my cousin who was by this time a bishop. This was as a prelude to moving my family (again) down south now that I was the UK Director of London based BUNAC – the British Universities North America Club. After four tortuous rounds of interviews and much deliberation on both sides I eventually was offered the post, which proved to be a disaster almost from the off. When I started in 1991, BUNAC sent about ten thousand students to work in summer camps mostly on the East Coast of the USA.

The young staff team in the London office were a bright and friendly bunch and I was appointed to succeed the founder of the organisation who was to work with me on the handover. Unfortunately he was going through a desperate time in his relationship with his estranged wife who lived in a BUNAC owned house in Massachusetts. This meant at seven each morning when I got into the office there was a pile of fax paper on the floor, but still attached to the machine, containing details of his latest deficiencies.

On some occasions, and bearing in mind that it would have been the middle of the night in the USA, the fax machine was still actively spewing out further details of those deficiencies as I arrived. This tended to get the day off to a bad start. In many ways though it was a dream job, with leisurely days spent touring the summer camps and all without the hassle of mobile phones or blackberries. Liaising with camp directors was not too onerous and the students were often pleased and surprised to see someone checking that they were enjoying the summer.

Camp Directors are often also the owners whose main income is earned during the three months of the summer. There were camps for fat kids, camps for Jewish kids, camps for Catholic kids, camps for poor kids, and camps for rich kids. The one constant was that the word of the Camp Director was final. Watching the supervision of ten year olds being given buckets of Ritalin meant you were in a middle class camp where neurotic parental demands sometimes made life tough for the Director. By and large the UK students took it all in their stride brilliantly, which is why BUNAC did well with increasing numbers year on year.

At night, when in London, I would scuttle back to the presbytery and observe the insanity of the Catholic Church at close quarters. Because there was so much space in that building on Abingdon Road I was given a basic, but perfectly adequate, room at the end of a long corridor. It came with instructions not to hog the bathroom in the morning as visiting priests were often dashing off to get flights. This was the executive wing of the church and they flew business class to Rome on the early flight from Heathrow. Permanently in residence were a strange mix of clerics, served by and fussed over, by two Filipino women and occasional visiting nuns.

The eldest resident, who was also the parish priest, was a sad man. He neither understood the human condition, despite building his whole daily routine around East Enders and Coronation Street, nor showed much genuine empathy for his parishioners. His party trick if anyone, such as an occasional tramp, knocked on the presbytery door when the housekeepers weren’t around, was to put his coat on before answering and pretend he was on the way out to minister to a dying parishioner. Thus he avoided any contact with the great unwashed.

His comments about women were truly pathetic. The perfectly respectable dating agency Dateline, had its’ headquarters directly across the road from the main door of the presbytery. The parish priest made a point of apologising to those visitors who did make it through the door by describing it as a ‘notorious pick up place’. I’m pretty confident that the staff at Dateline brought more happiness to more people in the world than the combined efforts of the clerics on the other side of the road.

A young snobbish and effete priest from the north east who was in Kensington because he ‘felt his ministry was better served in the capital’ spent a good proportion of that ministry in top restaurants or raiding the wine cellar at the presbytery. An exception was one extremely pleasant, delightfully well spoken and genuinely humble young priest who had a vocation which he pursued with energy and compassion. He also had a penchant for David Bowie’s music and one night we both got blotto while listening to it in his room after a rooftop barbeque.

I had agreed to help with this Saturday evening event, to which quite a few of the local Kensington glitterati had been invited, because I had to stay in London for a board meeting which BUNAC insisted on holding on a Sunday. The volunteering offer obviously involved me spending most of the night behind the barbeque grill or serving drinks to the guests, most of whom assumed I was part of the housekeeping staff or a hired hand. The parish priest behaved like a Hollywood socialite boorishly ordering the both Filipino housekeepers and me about with unnecessary instructions delivered at volume.

There is a great scene in ‘The Border’ - an early Jack Nicholson classic. At a barbeque by the small pool of his new duplex in El Paso, that his acquisitive wife has forced them to buy even though they can’t afford it, Nicholson who plays a border patrol guard in a corrupt operation, surveys the horrible drunken, shrill and shallow guests while serving them food from the grill. He loses it completely and tips the whole barbeque still laden with food and sizzling, into the pool and stomps off.

The temptation to off load the barbeque into Kensington High Street three stories below, was something I almost succumbed to that night on the presbytery rooftop.

After calming down and repairing to the young priest’s room, we continued drinking and listening to Bowie before I went to bed at around two am. I got up the following morning, jogged round Holland Park to sober up, went to the Board meeting, endured further bickering between the estranged founders, and then drove home to Wales. When I next saw my priestly drinking buddy a few days later I remarked on what a good evening I had enjoyed with him chatting and listening to music. He looked sheepish and said that he had been so hung over the next that he had to beg a colleague to say the eight o’clock morning mass for him, and had also missed taking confession that afternoon even though he had been unable to find a stand in priest. I was, at this point, clearly hearing his confession, and quite liking it, because I could easily paint a mental picture of the sinners of Kensington becoming angry and frustrated at not being able to unburden themselves of their weekly transgressions when faced with an empty confessional.

As our friendship grew we occasionally went out for a meal or to the cinema. He’d expressed an interest to go and see the new film about The Doors with Val Kilmer getting rave reviews as Jim Morrison and no sooner than he said the words we made a snap decision to go there and then as it was showing round the corner. It was such a quick decision that he had no time to change and still had his dog collar on as we made our escape from the presbytery. Our luck was out when, seeing us leaving, the snobbish priest from the north east invited himself along although he clearly had no idea what he was going to see. He too had his dog collar on so this peculiar threesome took our seats in the cinema but minutes later.

The film charts the rise of The Doors and their initial breakthrough on the west coast of the USA. There were some fairly graphic scenes of Jim Morrison’s prodigious drug abuse and lively sexual encounters. I had, on either side of me, two priests who had signed up to a life of celibacy. One was handling it quite well while our man from the north east was looking distinctly uneasy which I felt served him right for forcing his company on us.

About half way through the film when The Doors have established a cult following, with Jim Morrison as the iconic face of the band, there is a scene with him getting into a lift on the ground floor of a Los Angeles hotel. A young attractive woman gets in with him and by the time they emerge it is clear that she had given him a blow job on the way up (It must have been a tall building but I and the rest of the audience were prepared to suspend disbelief). As Jim is zipping his flies I could see that the man to my left was already reassessing whether ministry “was better served in the capital” as he had so pompously offered when we first met.

On the mercifully short walk back to the presbytery we discussed the film which two of us had enjoyed and then it was never mentioned again. I say never mentioned but it wasn’t quite the last of it. The only other time the three of us were ever together subsequently was a couple of weeks later when a general invitation to an arts event at the nearby Kensington Roof Gardens popped through the letter box at the presbytery. We were the only ones around, apart from the parish priest who had his Coronation Street and East Enders commitments, and so we toddled along.

As the three of us got into the lift which was unoccupied I pressed the button for the fourth floor. Just as the doors (pun intended) were closing an attractive and rather immodestly dressed woman got in. Two of us could barely suppress giggles and one priest emerged with a crimson face that took several minutes to return to its’ normal palor.

Back on the BUNAC front senior communication was breaking down and although we had made genuine offers on houses I was still stuck at the presbytery during the week and outstaying my welcome. A friend of mine once said, after I had thanked him for an overnight stay at their large house that ‘real hospitality is when someone gives up their own bed for a guest to sleep’. On that basis it was never full house at the presbytery and the rent I paid in cash went into a TV upgrade for the parish priest. Nonetheless I was grateful to stay there even though the madness of it all made me feel like the little boy in the story of the Emperor’s new clothes.