Slipstream (2 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Jane Howard
Bruce MONTGOMERY (1921–1978) Academic and crime writer, under the pseudonym Edmund Crispin. A long-term friend of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. He was a composer of
film music, in particular for the
Carry On
series. He fell in love with and married Barbara Clements two years before his death.
Rodrigo MOYNIHAN (1910–1990) Painter.
Vaslaw NIJINSKY (1890–1950) Russian ballet dancer and choreographer. He was the first to dance the role of Petrushka. He danced and choreographed
The Rite of
Spring
. He was diagnosed as clinically insane in his late twenties and spent many years in institutions. His
Diary
makes unsettling reading.
Ivor NOVELLO (real name David Ivor Davies) (1893–1951) Actor on stage and screen. Composer and songwriter. He became famous in 1914 with the song ‘Keep the Home
Fires Burning’. His script for the first Tarzan film,
Tarzan and the Apes
, is a camp masterpiece. He wrote musical comedies that ensured him a huge following, particularly with women.
These include
Glamorous Night
,
Perchance to Dream
and
King’s Rhapsody
.
Norman PARKINSON (1913–1990) Fashion. His photographs appeared in the British edition of
Harper’s Bazaar
and throughout his long career
he contributed to many publications, including
Vogue
,
Queen
and
Town and Country
. His work became famous for the liveliness, spontaneity and humour of his photographs.
William PLOMER (1903–1973) Poet and novelist. His novel
Turbott Wolfe
, published in 1926, about a mixed marriage, caused controversy in his native South Africa. He
wrote the libretto for Britten’s opera
Gloriana
. His poems are mostly humorous and have suffered unfairly from comparison with those of John Betjeman.
Harry PLUNKETT-GREEN (1865–1936) Irish baritone, later Professor of Singing at the Royal College of Music. He was a great advocate of song in the vernacular.
Gillie POTTER (1888–1975) Music hall comedian and broadcaster. He became famous for his monologues about the fictional village ‘Hogsnorton’. His opening line
was ‘Hello, England. This is Gillie Potter speaking to you in English.’ He first appeared on British television in the 1950s.
Patrick PROCKTOR (1936– ) Painter and writer. A contemporary of David Hockney and Howard Hodgkin, he has pursued an intensely personal career, experimenting with many
different techniques.
Marie (Mimi) RAMBERT (1888–1982) Ballet director and teacher, born Cyvia Myriam Ramberg in Warsaw. She studied in Paris, and moved to London in 1914. She married the
playwright Ashley Dukes, assumed the name Rambert and became a British subject in 1918. One of her early pupils was Frederick Ashton. She founded the Ballet Rambert in 1934. Anthony Tudor’s
masterpiece
Dark Elegies
, set to music by Mahler, and
Lady into Fox
by André Howard, are among her most important commissions.
Brian REDHEAD (1929–1994) Broadcaster and journalist, notorious for his merciless interviewing of politicians on BBC Radio 4 in the 1980s.
Henry REED (1914–1986) Poet, radio dramatist and translator from the French and Italian. Best known for his satirical poem ‘The Naming of Parts’ about gun
duty as a soldier in the Second World War. His parody of Eliot’s
Four Quartets
, ‘Chard Witlow’, is a comic masterpiece.
SABRINA (real name Norma Ann Sykes) (1936– ) Actress, model and cabaret singer, renowned for her ample bosom. She co-starred with the comic Arthur Askey and the presenter
Hughie Green on TV shows in the 1950s. She was received with great ceremony in Cuba in 1960 by Fidel Castro.
(Henry) Malcom (Watts) SARGENT (1895–1967) Conductor and organist, who first conducted a Promenade concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1921. He was a crowd-pleaser who
rarely performed contemporary music, except for works by Vaughan Williams and Walton. He was a legendary snob and was known to his fellow musicians as Flash Harry. He was knighted in 1947.
George SEFERIS (1900–1971) Greek poet, essayist and diplomat who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963, Seferis is considered to be the most distinguished Greek poet
of the pre-war generation of the 1930s.
Barbara SKELTON (1916–1996)
Femme fatale
who had well-documented affairs with King Farouk of Egypt, Felix Topolski and Robert Silvers, founder of the
New York
Review of Books
, among many others. Her penchant was for ugly, hairy men. She married Cyril Connolly, divorced him and married the publisher George Weidenfeld. She then divorced Weidenfeld and
remarried Connolly. Her memoirs
Tears Before Bedtime
(1987) and
Weep No
More
(1989) are filled with what Anthony Powell called a ‘peculiarly incisive
malignity’. They are also hilariously funny.
Mathew Arnold Bracy SMITH (1897–1959) Painter, famous for his female nudes and still lifes. Exhibited in Paris in 1911, and served with the Artists’ Rifles and
Labour Corps in the First World War. Enjoyed a large retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery in 1953. Knighted in 1954.
Stevie SMITH (1903–1971) Poet and novelist. Stevie Smith was born Florence Margaret Smith in 1903 in Hull, Yorkshire. She moved with her mother and sister to
Palmer’s Green, where they lived with her aunt. Stevie spent the rest of her life with her aunt, and worked as a private secretary. Although she had a series of boyfriends, she never married.
Stevie Smith wrote six novels and nine volumes of poetry. Her first volume of poetry,
A Good Time Was Had by All
, earned her a reputation as a writer.
Nancy SPAIN (1917–1964) Journalist and novelist. Launched the magazine
She
with her long-time partner Joan Werner-Laurie. They were killed together in a plane
crash, en route to the Grand National.
Sir Stephen SPENDER (1909–1995) Poet and critic. His early poetry – like that of W. H. Auden, C. Day-Lewis, and Louis MacNeice, with whom he became associated at
Oxford – was inspired by social protest. A member of the political left wing during this early period, he was one of those who wrote of their disillusionment with communism. He was co-editor
of the magazines
Horizon
with Cyril Connolly, and
Encounter
. Spender was knighted in 1983.
Josef or Joseph SZIGETI (1892–1973) Hungarian violinist, famous for his interpretations of the music of Bartok and Prokofiev.
Elizabeth TAYLOR (1912–1975) Novelist and short-story writer, much admired by fellow novelists. Her novels include
Angel
and
Mrs
Palfrey
at the Claremont
, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1971. But it is as a short-story writer that she excels. The collection
Dangerous Calm
, edited by Lynn Knight, contains
her best work.
Jacques THIBAUD (1880–1953) French violinist, famed for his partnership with Alfred Cortot and Pablo Casals.
Donald Francis TOVEY (1875–1940) Musicologist and critic, described by the great violinist Joachim as the ‘most learned man in music who ever lived’. His
Essays in Musical Analysis
run to six volumes. Famously called Verdi’s
Don Carlos
‘brass-band music’.
Tommy TRINDER (1909–1989) Music hall and radio comedian.
Derek VERSCHOYLE Publisher. Published the early writings – poetry and a monograph on John Masefield – of Muriel Spark.
Antonia WHITE (pseudonym of Eirene Botting) (1899–1980) Novelist and translator of Guy de Maupassant and Colette. Her most famous novel
Frost in May
describes her
own convent upbringing. She married three times in a long life plagued by severe mental illness. Her daughters Susan Chitty and Lyndall Hopkinson have written memoirs in which she appears
respectively as a demon and a misunderstood martyr.
Godfrey (Herbert) WINN (1908–1971) British actor, novelist and journalist. He began his professional career as a boy actor in the early 1920s, and his writing career with
his first novel in the 1930s. As a journalist he wrote pieces for the press that emulated the style of Beverley Nichols with its sentimental whimsy. Godfrey Winn became a star columnist for the
Daily Mirror
from 1936 to 1938, and then for the
Sunday Express
from 1938 to 1942. By 1938 it was claimed that he was the most highly paid journalist in Fleet Street (where he was
known as Winifred God). After the war he became established as a regular broadcaster on both the radio and the television. He died of a heart attack while playing tennis.
Francis WYNDHAM (1924– ) Journalist, novelist and short-story writer. His first novel
The Other Garden
was published when he was
sixty-three. It won the Whitbread Award. He was one of the founders of the
Sunday Times Magazine
.
The first thing I can remember is a dream. I dreamed I was in St Mary Abbot’s church after my brother’s christening. There was a tea party in the church with people
standing about holding cups of tea. I was given a large plate – I needed both hands to carry it – and told to hand it round to everyone. The plate was covered by small rectangular
sponge cakes with white icing, each one decorated with a crystallized violet. I longed for one, but was told I must wait until everyone had been offered the plate. Some people refused and I began
to hope that there would be one left for me, but when I approached a large lady with a brown fur round her neck, she smiled kindly and took the last cake. The disappointment still pricked my eyes
when I woke up.
I must have been between two and a half and three years old when I dreamed this, and it must have been the time when my parents moved from the first-floor flat in Clanricarde Gardens to a small
house in Bedford Gardens, also in Kensington. I have no memory of the flat, but we stayed in Bedford Gardens until I was six or seven so I can remember some small pieces from those years.
The house was part of a terrace at the Church Street end of Bedford Gardens – flat-fronted, built of brick with pretty windows and steps leading up to the front door. There was a very
small front garden in which large purple iris grew. The nursery was on the top floor – the day nursery in the front and a smaller night nursery at the back. From that back window there was a
sea of chimney-pots,
and I used to imagine that they were the funnels of large ships waiting to take me away,
I remember little of the rest of the house; in those days middle-class children lived in their nursery quarters unless sent for at tea-time. The days were filled with long walks in Kensington
Gardens when nannies would meet with Thermos flasks of Bovril, and Marie biscuits, while we were enjoined to ‘play’ not too far from them.
Sometimes we walked to the Round Pond and I was allowed to feed bread to the ducks. I remember clearly watching a horde of little ragged children, with a baby in a pram, fishing for sticklebacks
that they put into jam jars. I longed to be with them, to have bare legs and no overcoat, no gaiters with all their buttons, and to fish with them. Once, I managed to elude Nanny and join them, but
she dragged me away. ‘Those children are
not
your friends.’
‘They are!’ I wept, but I remember thinking afterwards that
they
probably wouldn’t have wanted me as a friend.
Nanny Wilshire loomed far larger in my life than either of my parents. She wore crackling aprons, smelt alternately of liquorice or pear drops, and was given to sudden rages. She told me that if
I swallowed pieces of wool or cotton they’d join together and, when long enough, wind themselves around my heart and kill me. Her justice, like Portia’s mercy, was an indiscriminate
affair – it dropped incomprehensively from the skies: it ambushed me like a jaguar, and I endured it dazed with fear and grievance. Once she shut me in the linen cupboard, dark, hot and
unbelievably frightening, because my brother Robin had cut himself on a tin motorcar when I was alone in the nursery with him. I remember shrieking with terror and pulling down all the sheets and
pillowcases I could reach and stamping on them. When my noise and the damage were apparent to her, she released me and I learned my first lesson. Robin was younger, infinitely more attractive and a
boy; in fact, youth, beauty, and his sex were unmistakable advantages, and beside him I felt inferior in each respect.
I don’t think scenes of the linen-cupboard nature ever reached my mother’s ears. Trying now to remember my parents at that time, I am left with fragments: how they
smelt – my mother of China tea and sweet hay, my father of lavender water and the Lebanon cedar with which his clothes chest and wardrobe were lined, and predominating, tobacco. They both
smoked, as indeed did practically all their friends. My mother had thick curly hair, but it was mostly grey, which worried me as I’d noticed that grey hair led to white, and white-haired
people were so old that they might die at any minute. I’d been taught that when people died they went to Heaven, but I discovered as quickly that there was no possibility of going there
alive. So if my mother died, I’d have to die too to be with her. This uncomfortable choice haunted me, at increasing intervals, for years.
We lived in the same street as my maternal grandparents, and by the time I was six, I was allowed on some Sundays to go alone for lunch with them. My grandfather would meet me just as I reached
the pillar-box outside his house and, bending down, would present me with his coarse, silky white beard and faint smell that was something like sweetbriar. Then, holding hands, we’d march
into the dark drawing room, crowded with a grand piano and little tables and large upholstered chairs. My grandmother, called Grannia, would be cast upon one of these, like a beautiful shipwreck.
She spoiled me with a magnificent carelessness that I thoroughly appreciated, allowing me drops of wine in my water at luncheon. She would discuss the life of Christ, Communism, and Japanese flower
arrangement with me as though I was any luncheon guest, elevating me to a state of triumphant, honoured ignorance instead of knowledgeable boredom that the old ropes of grown-ups with children
induce. For lunch we always had roast chicken and meringues – which my grandmother probably considered my favourite meal.