Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (37 page)

The Archbishop’s definition of hell is simple. ‘Hell,’ he says, ‘is stewing in one’s own juice.’ As it turns out, this is to be Dee’s occupation for the next thirty-nine years.

A month after the show is broadcast, a courier from LWT arrives at Dee’s Chelsea house with a briefcase containing £9,000, the remainder of
what he is owed. ‘And that was it, more or less. I sort of died after that. It was the end of me.’
¹⁶⁸

Simon Dee is not seen on British television for another thirty-three years. In 2003, when Channel 4 offers him a one-off special, he suggests they invite some of his famous friends from the sixties. But they all refuse. ‘Did you tell him that it was me, that it was my big comeback show?’ he asks. The answer is yes. Dee says nothing, but looks disappointed.

Brewer’s Dictionary of Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics
defines ‘Simon Dee Syndrome’ as applying to ‘someone who is remembered for having been forgotten’.

IS PUNISHED BY

The Headmaster’s Study, Repton School, Derbyshire

May 1919

Michael Ramsey is unhappy at prep school. ‘I never were more utterly miserable,’ he writes to his mother in a letter home dated ‘Tuesday Evening just after tea’. ‘... I cannot bear it any longer ... I am just crying like anythinke. Come at once never mind anything else. I am utterly miserable.’

In 1918 he wins a scholarship to Repton, where, preferring books to sport, he is only a little more cheerful, and remains an outsider. His headmaster – distant, forceful, coolly efficient – is a young clergyman called Geoffrey Fisher. Ramsey nicknames him ‘the little snipe’. In turn, Fisher marks Ramsey down as eccentric, bookish and scruffy; he notes with disapproval his habit of endlessly hitching up his trousers with his elbows.

As Ramsey grows older, he discovers a talent for debating, and develops an interest in politics. Like his parents, who voted Labour in the 1918 general election, he has a horror of jingoism and militarism; aged fifteen, he energetically opposes a debating motion to send British troops to fight Bolshevism in Russia. But he goes too far; when an assistant master speaks in support of the motion, Ramsey turns on him, and is excessively caustic, a punishable offence. There follows what Ramsey calls ‘some unpleasantness’: he is told to report to Geoffrey Fisher, who makes him learn and recite fifty lines of Greek from the play
Medea
.

He soon gets into further trouble for refusing to parade with the Officer Training Corps. He then enters into a battle of wills with Fisher – a battle which, perhaps surprisingly, he wins. Finding a loophole in the school rules, the pupil forces the headmaster to admit that military training cannot be regarded as compulsory, and, armed with a letter of support from his father, he is excused. When he leaves Repton at the end of 1922, his final report from Fisher is notably grudging in its praise: ‘A boy with
force of character who, in spite of certain uncouthnesses, has done good service on his own lines.’

Michael Ramsey goes into the Church, and swiftly gains promotion. The paths of the two men cross again when Fisher, now Bishop of Chester, agrees to take Ramsey on as his examining chaplain. For his part, Ramsey never quite manages to shake off his fear of his old headmaster. The two men are very different: Fisher, a leading Freemason, is brisk, efficient, bossy, conservative, a stickler for correct dress, and a keen advocate of gaiters at Matins; Ramsey is dreamy, liberal,
¹⁶⁹
humorous, vague, scholarly, easily bored,
¹⁷⁰
with a tendency to walk around with his shoelaces undone.

In 1945, Fisher is appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, succeeding another old Repton headmaster, William Temple. When the time comes for his own retirement, Fisher considers his former pupil entirely unsuited to succeed him, and advises the Prime Minister accordingly. ‘Dr F is
violently
, even
brutally
opposed to Dr Ramsey,’ notes Harold Macmillan in his diary.

Ramsey delights in telling friends the story. ‘He said, “Oh, Prime Minister, I shall be retiring shortly, and I don’t think the Archbishop of York, Dr Ramsey, would be entirely suitable as my successor.” And Macmillan asked, “Why is that?” So Fisher said, “He was a boy under me at Repton, and I don’t think he’d be very suitable.” So Macmillan said, “Oh, Dr Ramsey
would
be suitable.” And Fisher said, “Dr Coggan, the Bishop of Bradford, would be
very
suitable.” So Macmillan said, “Well, Archbishop, you may have been Michael Ramsey’s headmaster, but you’re not mine, and I intend to appoint Dr Ramsey. Good afternoon.”’
¹⁷¹

Michael Ramsey is duly installed as Archbishop of Canterbury. His relationship with the retired Fisher remains prickly. When Fisher accepts a peerage, Ramsey, a great one for nicknames, dubs him ‘the Baron’. In turn, Fisher refuses to go quietly into retirement. He insists that he still be addressed as ‘Your Grace’, and from his new home in Trent, Dorset, floods Lambeth Palace with letters complaining about his successor’s decisions.

‘The Trent postmark always fills me with a feeling of doom,’ Ramsey confides to friends, claiming that Fisher’s letters always go straight into the wastepaper basket. A humorous man, he likes to picture Lady Fisher running down the street after her husband, trying to prevent him reaching the pillarbox. ‘Yes, she tried to stop him. She used to run after him down the street, but all to no avail!’

When the new Archbishop of Canterbury returns one day from modelling for his waxwork at Madame Tussaud’s, his staff find him extremely cheerful. ‘They ran out of wax and had to melt down Geoffrey Fisher!’ he exclaims jubilantly.

In 1974, when the time comes for his own retirement, Ramsey makes a witty speech at a dinner in his honour at New College. In it, he tells of a recent dream: he was in heaven, at a sherry party thrown for all the former Archbishops of Canterbury. One by one, they came up to talk to him. He met and embraced Anselm, the eleventh-century Archbishop, warming to him as a man who is ‘primarily a don, who tried to say his prayers, and who cared nothing for the pomp and glory of his position. And just as Anselm and I seemed to be getting on so well together, who should come up to us but the Baron. “Now then, boys,” said Fisher, “time to get back to work!”’

Yet his reveries about Fisher, though comical, operate as a form of defence, and spring from schoolboy fears. Secretaries at Lambeth Palace report that whenever one of Fisher’s stern letters of admonishment arrives in his in-tray, Fisher goes into a tailspin of agony, and is unable to make any decisions for the rest of the day. Sometimes they try to hide the letters from him. Years later, when Robert Runcie is Archbishop of Canterbury, he is told by officials at Lambeth Palace that they finally hid an Epstein bust of Fisher ‘because Michael trembled like a leaf every time he saw it’.

IS PHOTOGRAPHED BY

Repton School, Derbyshire

Summer 1931

Geoffrey Fisher is in retirement in Dorset when he is contacted by one of his most illustrious old pupils from Repton, Roald Dahl. Less than a month ago, Dahl’s seven-year-old daughter Olivia died suddenly of encephalitis; Dahl is distraught, and needs consoling.

Fisher invites Dahl down, and the two men talk. What passes between them? We have only Dahl’s account to go by. Apparently, Fisher tells him that Olivia is in heaven. But for Dahl, this is not enough. He wants to know that her dog, Rowley, will join her there when he dies, but Fisher refuses to give him this assurance.

‘His whole face closed up,’ Dahl tells his other children, eight years later. ‘I wanted to ask him how he could be so absolutely sure that other creatures did not get the same special treatment as us, but the look of disapproval that had settled around his mouth stopped me. I sat there wondering if this great and famous churchman really knew what he was talking about and whether he knew anything at all about God or heaven, and if he didn’t, then who in the world did? And from that moment on, my darlings, I’m afraid I began to wonder whether there really was a God or not.’

But is Dahl’s account to be trusted? The two men clearly part on amicable terms, as Dahl sends Fisher a copy of
Kiss Kiss
, his latest book of short stories, and encloses a photograph of Fisher beside a cricket pitch, looking towards the camera with an amused expression on his face. The photograph dates back over thirty years, to when Dahl snapped it as a schoolboy at Repton.

On the opening page of this copy of
Kiss Kiss
, he writes: ‘The headmaster was roaring with laughter. There was a “click” behind him. He looked round and saw the thin boy holding a camera in his hands. “Dahl,”
the headmaster said sternly, “if it is ribald you will suppress it!” Today, thirty-two years later, the boy is a little frightened that the headmaster will feel the same way about these stories. But he offers them, nevertheless, with gratitude and affection.’

The gratitude and affection are apparently still there when Dahl visits his old school in the 1970s to deliver a speech in which he praises Geoffrey Fisher, who has recently died, as a ‘thoroughly good’ man. This also accords with the view he took of him as a boy, in a letter home to his mother written at around the time he took his photograph. ‘He’s most frightfully nice but he’s a religious fanatic. Far too religious for this place.’

These warm tributes, delivered in three different decades, are hard to square with what follows.

In 1984, now aged sixty-seven, Roald Dahl publishes
Boy
, an autobiography of his childhood. A chapter titled ‘The Headmaster’ begins: ‘The Headmaster, while I was at Repton, struck me as being a rather shoddy bandy-legged little fellow with a big bald head and lots of energy but not much charm. Mind you, I never did know him well because in all those months and years I was at the school, I doubt whether he addressed more than six sentences to me altogether ...’

Dahl then tells how, after leaving Repton, this sadistic headmaster had ‘bounced up the ladder ... to get the top job of them all, Archbishop of Canterbury! And not long after that it was he himself who had the task of crowning our present Queen in Westminster Abbey with half the world watching. Well, well, well! And this was the man who used to deliver the most vicious beatings to the boys under his care!’

Dahl goes on to describe a flogging Fisher meted out to Dahl’s boyhood friend Michael. In Dahl’s account, Fisher tells Michael to take down his trousers. ‘The great man then gave him one terrific crack. After that, there was a pause. The cane was put down and the Headmaster began filling his pipe from a tin of tobacco. He also started to lecture the kneeling boy about sin and wrongdoing. Soon, the cane was picked up again and a second tremendous crack was administered upon the trembling buttocks. Then the pipe-filling business and the lecture went on for maybe another thirty seconds. Then came the third crack of the cane ... This slow and fearsome process went on until ten terrible strokes had been delivered, and all the time, over the pipe-lighting and the match-striking, the lecture
on evil and wrongdoing and sinning and malpractice went on without a stop. It even went on as the strokes were being administered. At the end of it all, a basin, a sponge and a small clean towel were produced by the Headmaster, and the victim was told to wash away the blood before pulling up his trousers ... If someone had told me at the time that this flogging clergyman was one day to become the Archbishop of Canterbury, I would never have believed it ... If this person, I kept telling myself, was one of God’s chosen salesmen on earth, then there must be something very wrong about the whole business.’

But Dahl is not telling the truth. Though Michael was beaten by a headmaster, it was by the next headmaster, a man called John Christie; Fisher had already left the school.

Why does Roald Dahl falsely identify Geoffrey Fisher as the cane-wielding, pipe-smoking, sanctimonious sadist? Is it, as some suggest, because accusing a former Archbishop of Canterbury of sadism is more news-worthy than accusing someone unknown? Or is it simply a case of mistaken identity? But if the latter is the case, and Dahl really believes Fisher guilty, why does he go to a man he believes to be a ‘sanctimonious hypocrite’ for spiritual guidance following the death of his little daughter? And why does he send him his book, with its loving inscription, and that photograph, taken all those years ago, of the man he described at the time as ‘frightfully nice’?

OFFERS WRITERLY TIPS TO

Iver Grove, Iver, Bucks

Summer 1972

Authors with money crave esteem. Authors with esteem crave money. Authors with neither crave both. Authors with both crave immortality. For these reasons, meetings between authors can be edgy.

Since the publication of
Lucky Jim
in 1954, Kingsley Amis has accrued sufficient money and esteem to arouse the envy of even his closest friends. Or
especially
his closest friends: ‘It’s not his
success
I mind so much as his immunity from worry and hard work, though I mind the success as well,’ frets Philip Larkin to his girlfriend Monica Jones in 1955. ‘... He and Hilly struck me as a pair of DIRTY RICH CHILDREN – they have no worries, they REFUSE TO SUFFER ...’

In 1972, Amis is a guest at a summer party thrown by the wealthy, esteemed playwright Tom Stoppard at his beautiful Palladian villa. Within seconds, he is bristling with irritation. This is inevitable: he has long been both the victim and the laureate of irritation. Irritation is his muse. Before the party has got going, he has already been irritated by the monotony of his fellow guest Michael Caine, and by what he sees as the wrong-footing tactics of his host. Previously, Stoppard has always greeted him with a ‘full Continental-style’ embrace. Though Amis tends to dislike this ‘when it comes from a man outside the family’, he has tried to make allowances. ‘Oh well, I had thought, the chap was a Czech, after all ... and obviously no queer, and it would be churlish to back off. So for the next couple of times, resigning myself, I had got off the embracing mark simultaneously with him. Then this time, or one like it, he stepped back from my outstretched arms with a muffled cry of shock or distaste.’