My Brother Evelyn & Other Profiles (29 page)

He lunched in Chancery Lane in the back room of an oyster shop. It was unlicensed, so he provided his own wine, a light Moselle and a tawny port. His lunch consisted of shellfish and cheese. Talking more than eating he remained at the table till four o'clock. He had nearly always a guest with him at lunch; more often than not between a quarter and half past three a friend at the end of his own luncheon would arrive for a glass of port.

It never occurred to him that this time-table was unusual, that the general lunch hour was quarter past to half past one and that many of his guests found themselves by quarter to two driven by hunger to a sandwich bar. Half past two was an hour that suited him and he expected his friends to adjust themselves to his preferences. He would be in little mood for work when lunch was ended. There would not be a great deal of work to do; letters to sign and a conference with his managing clerk. He left his chambers at five. Occasionally he would take a Turkish bath; more often he returned straight home. More at his ease as a host than as a guest, he dined out seldom and reluctantly. He had a wide acquaintance and
could be sure in his own house of surrounding himself with the people that he liked, and of eating the food and of drinking the wine that he preferred. He kept a good table; he also kept early hours. That, five days of the week, was his routine.

On Saturday, unlike the majority of Londoners in a senior position, he went down to his chambers to work as strenuously as on any other day. He left, however, at half past twelve, a walk to his club entitling him to a carnivorous lunch—butcher's meat was his description of it. After lunch he slept.

The routine of Sunday was equally time-tabled. Choosing a different companion each week, he started from his house at eleven o'clock for the same two hours' walk. Climbing Fitzjohn's Avenue, pausing to relieve himself at the Hampstead tube station, he would proceed past Romney's studio to the Whitestone Pond; turning left across the Heath to the Leg of Mutton Pond he would cross Golders Hill Park into North End Road. He returned past the Blake cottages and the Spaniard's Inn. From the middle 1920s on, he formed the practice of breaking his walk at my parents' house and taking a glass of port or beer there. He arrived home at twenty past one; while his guest was entertained by his family he would take the bath which would make him five minutes late for lunch—a typical English Sunday luncheon, a joint, a fruit tart and cream, Stilton or Cheddar cheese. There were no cocktails. The apostolic succession of drinks would be observed; sherry, claret, port, and brandy.

That was his routine when I knew him first in 1917. That was still his routine when war broke out. Haynes was then over sixty. His wife and second daughter were living in the country and he was in London alone during the blitz, looked after by a Belgian refugee who, embarking from Antwerp in the belief that he was to be taken to
Cherbourg to join the army, had found himself to his astonishment in Hastings.

The Belgian, a man of forty, an expert at sauces who wasted nothing, proved both ingenious and economical as a cook.

‘I have never been better looked after in my life,' said Haynes.

He did not allow the blitz to interfere with his routine. He lunched every day at the oyster shop with only such variations of menu as the necessities of war forced on him. He paid his Sunday visit to my parents' house, with a companion and his poodle Wuff, named after my preparatory school nickname. The evenings he arranged methodically, drawing up a duty roster of those of his friends who did not mind travelling in the blackout, and could be relied upon to arrive punctually to dinner in an air raid; each man to his own night.

He continued to sleep in his own bed, on the first floor, even after a stick of bombs, pitching in his corner of the street, completely destroyed the house adjoining his, riddling his roof, shattering every window in the house and breaking great chunks of plaster off the ceiling. His family urged him to leave and take a flat, but he refused.

‘I've lived here for thirty-five years. How many Londoners can say that about their homes? When I think of all it's seen, all the friends who've dined here—Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas, Belloc and Max and H.G.—why should I want to leave?'

His resolve to lead his private life was as strong as ever. He would explode with wrath against municipal authorities, against the various lackeys of officialdom who bothered him with forms. Once, when he was sitting in the garden after dinner, a wireless in a neighbouring garden was turned on over-loudly. He jumped up from his chair. He stamped his feet.

‘It is intolerable,' he shouted. ‘Is one allowed no peace, even in one's own garden? Wireless. If it hadn't been for the wireless that wretched demagogue, that cheap German Cleon would never have got a nation even of subservient fools to follow him. Wireless, Munich.' His face went red with anger. ‘They might, though,' he growled. ‘Germans—they'll do anything.' Then as suddenly his anger left him. ‘I'm sorry,' he said, ‘but when I think of what Germany has done—ruined my life twice. Taken all my friends from me, the friends of my youth, and now the friends that I had found to take their places. Germans,' he'd say, ‘I've always known them for what they were. I've never made a friend of one. I've never asked one to my house. When I've had for business reasons to entertain one, I've taken him to a restaurant.

‘I've only once slept with a German woman, in Chicago, and anyhow,' he added in extenuation, ‘she was a Jewess.'

I had kept in touch with Haynes while I was in Baghdad, yet it was with some misgiving that I went round to see him on my return. I wondered how he would have survived austerity. The oyster shop had been bombed out, his Belgian cook had returned to Belgium; and he with his violent attachment to personal liberty would have been irked more than most by the innumerable controls and regulations by which the existence of every Englishman was hampered.

To my surprise and my relief, however, I found him barely altered and if I had sought a figure symbolic of London's survival through the war I could not have found a better example.

American and Dominion post-war visitors to England were surprised at the small amount of apparent damage except by the docks and round St Paul's. London looked much the same to them with its squares and crescents,
except that in practically every street a house was missing, with the general effect of a mouth from which a tooth had been extracted. Built over a series of small rivers, London is a city of low houses, of parks and gardens, and does not lend itself to concentrated saturation bombing and spectacular effects of ruin. The visitor needed to look closely, to peer behind gates and fences to recognize how much damage had been done. Then he had the sense of being in an equivalent of Cairo's city of the dead; whole areas had been gutted and abandoned; the walls stood but the windows were shattered, the roofs had gone, the exposed floors and stairways were rotted with damp and mildew, the gardens were a tangle of high-growing weeds.

St John's Wood Park was that kind of ruin. Haynes's house was the only one still inhabited, and I fancy that only he could have continued to live in such a shambles. The roof had fallen in and though a tarpaulin had been slung between the chimney pots, the top floor was derelict. Every window on the front of the house had been covered over with netted plastic that filled the rooms with twilight. In the drawing and dining-rooms the plaster had fallen from the ceilings and splintered woodwork was showing through. With Mrs Haynes living in the country, disorder had spread from the bedroom to the drawing-room. Undusted books covered the chairs and sofas and the disarray of pots and bottles that had characterized his end of the table now swamped the sideboard. Anyone who did not know Haynes well would have been appalled by the general atmosphere of disrepair, but I had the cosy sense of being back in a familiar place. I had no sense of an army in retreat, but of a siege conducted gallantly. Haynes had gone on leading his own life while the skies had thundered over him.

It was on a weekday that I lunched with him. ‘I never go down to work on Tuesdays or on Thursdays,' he
explained. ‘Three days at an office is quite enough. I can see any urgent client here and my clerk comes out to report to me at tea-time.'

I asked him how business was. When I had left in 1941, he had been worried about declining revenues and rising costs. But now apparently all was going well. One or two profitable estates had needed winding up. He had received one or two personal legacies from clients; everything would be satisfactory if the Government did not worry him with forms. His managing clerk had been killed in an air raid. He could not find anyone who understood the forms. It was intolerable, he said, the way these jacks-in-office pestered him. ‘I ignore their forms. I don't even read them.'

He had invited me for half past eleven. By quarter past twelve he was ready for the walk. It was a grey cool morning. There was always the danger of catching a cold when you went out with Haynes. In his forties and early fifties he had stormed at a violent pace up Fitzjohn's Avenue. At the Hampstead tube station he had entered the lavatory and remained there for five minutes, leaving a sweating guest at the mercy of five-way draughts. Now on the brink of seventy he proceeded at so slow a pace that one might just as well have been standing still. Wuff had never been subjected to discipline. Haynes insisted on putting him on a lead every time he crossed the road, and there are several roads to be crossed between St John's Wood Park and Primrose Hill which was now his routine walk. Moreover every quarter of a mile or so, he would stop, convulsed by a fit of coughing. His health had clearly deteriorated during these last years. Sitting in his bedroom while he dressed, I had noticed how thin he had become. Before the war, because I had associated him with the pleasures of the table, I had fancied him to be heavier than he was, and since he still wore the same
shabby but voluminous clothing, he presented externally the same appearance.

I wondered with some misgiving what manner of lunch I should find waiting me after my chilling walk. I need not have. A dish of skate was followed by cold chicken, nor was there any lack of wine. The litter at his end of the table was indeed increased by the presence of several half-bottles quarter full, and curiously labelled. He was at the mercy of what his wine merchant chose to ‘give' him and he had several wine merchants. In regard to debts he had always quoted to me Dr Johnson's remark that you can dodge the cannonballs, but the bullets get you—you should, that is to say, as a debtor, concentrate on your overdraft, your tailor, your hosier and your wine merchant. I had followed Haynes's advice with the result that having only one wine merchant I was limited to two bottles of Scotch a month. Haynes had not followed his own advice, had scattered his custom and from innumerable sources small packages of diverse wines refreshed his cellar. He regaled me with Big Tree Chablis, Algerian claret, South African hock, and something from Australia, thick, sweet and yellow, that was more like Madeira than Chartreuse. By the time we had finished lunch the sun had broken through the mist and it was really warm. He suggested that we should sit out in the garden.

As the house was, so the garden was—a wilderness of flowing grass with here and there a rose bush or a scarlet runner breaking through. The gardens on either side were in a similar condition. We took out deck chairs. Haynes hesitated for a moment. ‘Let's go next door,' he said. The fence dividing the gardens had been broken down, and we pushed our way through waist-high grass to the adjacent terrace. ‘I've always wished I had this garden too,' he said. ‘Now at the end of my life I've got it.'

I asked him about the lease of his house which had expired in 1943. He chuckled. ‘They're trying to evict me,' he said, ‘and I'm refusing. They say they want to build but I know they can't, with all these war controls. No one but myself would ever think of living here. I've paid my rent, but they won't cash my cheques. If they did they'd admit my tenancy. I've lived rent free for the last three years. Will you have some brandy?'

Curious though the wines had been, the brandy was as good as ever. As I sat there out of the wind in the shelter of the ruins, I had a vivid sense of London's capacity to survive, of the deep ingrown nature of London's life. Whereas other cities have been sacked and pillaged, London's streets have remained through close now upon nine centuries untrodden by foreign feet. Kings have been dethroned, a King has been beheaded, a Commonwealth has been proclaimed, but the citizens of London, undisturbed by the passage of great events, have continued to lead their personal and private lives of clubs and sport, maintaining their own rights and privileges. Even through this last calamity, the rhythm of the city's life had beaten steadily. Cricket had been played at Lord's, football had been played at Highbury: Club committees had deliberated the claims of candidates, publishers had argued about terms with authors' agents; on Sunday afternoons lovers had strolled on Hampstead Heath. And here at the end of it all, a symbol of survival, was Haynes sipping brandy in his neighbour's garden, inveighing against the ‘intolerable' interference of the bureaucrats with the inherited rights of the individual. There could have been no firmer reassurance that the essential London had survived, that however the totalitarian bureaucrats might try to clip their liberties there would be no lack of Londoners ready to assert their rights and flout authority.

Yet at the same time I could not help feeling some
misgiving on Haynes's own account. It seemed to me that he was taking on, at his age, too much; or rather that he was opposing the forces of bureaucracy with outmoded weapons; that just as the benevolent liberalism of Asquith's day had no place in a world of sharply defined issues, the individualist of the second half of the century would need to develop a new technique if he was to get his way, if he was to preserve his independence, a technique that it was too late for Haynes to learn. It was no use in 1945 to refuse to fill in forms.