One of the delights of this memoir is the way in which half-forgotten figures
are beckoned from obscurity and shown in a new light of significance and
strangeness. When the young Ferdinand Mount becomes Selwyn Lloyd’s bagman in
1962, the former Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer has been
ruthlessly ousted from No 11 Downing Street by Harold Macmillan and is
exiled in a dismal bachelor politician’s flat in Westminster. His reckless
marriage to a much younger woman has just ended in disaster too. Instead of
the dim and loyal plodder in the background, which was always Selwyn Lloyd’s
public image, Mount comes face to face with a far more formidable and
interesting character, a man of stalwart principle and unfathomable sexual
ambiguity, whose eyes light up with longing when the dazzlingly boyish
Jonathan Aitken comes into the room.
Mount sets forth with his master on a quasi-J. B. Priestley journey through
the freezing winter. Officially they are reviewing Conservative Party
organization, but what they discover are the remnants of old England as they
trundle by train through the Midlands and the North, Selwyn deep in a
Georgette Heyer. At far-flung stations such as Crewe, the stationmaster
waits to greet them in his bowler hat and red carnation. They stay at shabby
big hotels – the Black Boy at Nottingham, the Blossoms at Chester – where
they dine on prawn cocktail and tournedos Rossini, “the rusty claret and the
ancient camembert served from an enormous sideboard carved with motifs of
local legends – Robin Hood or Chevy Chase”. It is a wonderful passage,
precisely evocative of provincial life in the immediate aftermath of Suez,
hanging on to ancient rituals with a kind of desperate heroism.
Ferdinand Mount has described himself elsewhere as a man of total privilege:
“I was educated at independent schools. I live in a very nice house in a
conservation area, I have a languid upper-class voice and a semi-dormant
baronetcy”. This is only half or less than half the story, giving the
impression of a settled personality. Had it been so, his book would have
been duller. As it is, this is the story of a man who flitters from one
admittedly nepotistic posting to another: society children’s nanny;
journalist on the Daily Sketch (his expensive classical education proving
itself perfect training for the writing of pithy 250-word tabloid leaders);
political columnist for the Spectator; head of Margaret Thatcher’s Policy
Unit; before sinking back into what he describes as his easiest job ever,
editing the TLS from 1991 to 2002.
He has written eleven novels, among them the six-volume sequence A Chronicle
of Modern Twilight, a later twentieth-century equivalent of Anthony Powell’s
A Dance to the Music of Time. That Powell turns out to have been Mount’s
wife’s uncle by marriage need be no surprise, for these novels and this
memoir are suffused with just such moments of tribal recognition. The
triumphs and anguishes of networking are at the very centre of Mount’s
imaginative world.
Sir William Robert Ferdinand Mount (as he prefers us not to call him)
certainly has some fine credentials. Even in the womb this was a
well-connected creature, “going to a bazaar with Unity Mitford, out on the
razzle with Dylan Thomas and Philip Toynbee, possibly Burgess and Maclean
too”. He speculates that his prenatal indoctrination into raffishness could
explain his lifelong quest for respectability. Ferdy’s mother, Julia, was a
Pakenham, a tribe of high intelligence but bad at physicality. The family’s
attempts at breakfast-time embracing resulted, in the words of his Aunt
Violet, in “the crash of skull against skull”.
Lady Julia had the job of celebrity endorsement for Pond’s Cold Cream, to
which she claimed in the ads to owe her “flawless complexion”. She got Ferdy
to apply lashings of cold cream to her face with his little stubby fingers,
the memory of which provides the title of this book. It was a reciprocal
ritual which (oh dear) set up a lasting horror in Ferdy of sitting still,
having things done to him. “I was brought up all wrong and so was my
mother”, he bursts out at an emotional moment in this memoir. “We should not
have needed a jar of cold cream to touch one another’s cheek.”
His father was much better at kissing. Far too good. “How can someone your age
possibly understand adultery?” the father asks the fifteen-year-old Ferdy
rather nervily. Ostensibly they are discussing Anna Karenina, but really his
father has his mind on a dashing Wiltshire neighbour, Diana Newcastle.
Diana, a superb steeplechaser and in all senses a huntress, is a Duchess all
too ready for adultery, having recently been deserted by the Duke in favour
of the harbourmaster’s wife in Kyrenia. Ferdy’s portrait of his father,
Robin Mount, the jockey, is as entertaining and as subtle as that of Selwyn
Lloyd. Mount père, with his 4th in military history, was a man of great
charm and considerable willpower exerted in evading employment and delaying
paying bills. His priorities were “finding a decent ride where he could and
finding a drink almost anywhere”.
There are sharp, lovely descriptions of life in “Hobohemia”, the insiders’
definition of that louche amusing subsection of the upper class the Mounts
inhabited, a kind of Happy Valley of the Wiltshire Downs. Ideas of
responsible parenting were minimal, almost every parent being in any case
divorced. At grown-up weekend parties the children would be despatched up to
the nursery, to rub along together as best they could, with the smells of
gin and cigarettes and echoes of risqué conversation wafting up the stairs.
Soon the reign of terror started. At the age of eight and a half, the child
who had been taught sitting cosily beside his mother on the drawing-room
sofa was sent away to school. First to Greenways, a day prep school whose
owner, Mrs Gibbons, is described by the author as “by some way the most
terrifying woman I have ever met, leaving far behind, for example, Dame
Antonia Byatt, Margaret Thatcher and Baroness Mary Warnock”. Next he goes as
a boarder to ultra-snobbish Sunningdale, a prep school set in “dripping
woods near Ascot”. The school is a production line for sending boys to Eton
“or at worst Winchester”.
Eton, when he gets there, is still a cruel school, “an inferno of corporal
punishment”. We have been here before, with all the thwacking and the
bullying rife in such establishments, but never quite like this, for Mount
has the novelist’s depth of observation which allows him to convert the
isolated incident into the compelling general truth. His description of the
so-called liberal headmaster Dr Robert Birley ceremoniously beating young
Lord Shelburne, for some minimal offence, implicates Ferdy as an onlooker,
the Captain of the School, standing by simpering at this torrid scene “in my
fancy waistcoat with a sanguine carnation in my buttonhole”. For anyone
still puzzled by the complex loyalties and conspiracies of memory that bound
the old-time British ruling classes, all will now be clear.
One of the chapters is entitled “Difficulties for Girls”. Those of us who were
Mount’s Oxford contemporaries can vouch for what he calls his lack of “the
elementary techniques of chatting up, or even chatting”. One dreaded being
stranded at a drinks party with this modern incarnation of Sir Flopsy
Bashville, the tongue-tied booby in a Restoration play. There was a hopeless
purity about him. It is not at all surprising to discover from this book
that while other Oxford freshmen were stocking up with Durex, he went out
and bought himself a surplice costing £1 17s 6d. Infiltrated into a now
rather famous flat in Woodstock Road, inhabited by four sex goddesses from
Somerville, our inhibited hero does not know where to look. One of these
alarmingly liberated girls, Margaret Callaghan, is now transformed into
Baroness Jay of Paddington. Mount is fascinated by such changes worked by
time.
The 1960s did not suit him. He was anything but swinging. In the hedonistic
frenzy he seems a displaced person, shifting from flat to flat around
Chelsea and Earls Court. He gets an absurd job teaching English history and
cricket to the three children of the American ambassador, sometimes with
extra duties as spare man at Evangeline Bruce’s lavish dinner parties. Ferdy
– or as she used to call him affectionately “Ferdl” – started feeling like
the tutor in a Chekhov play. Again in this chapter there are precise
descriptions of the mood of the time, the sense of improvisation in a London
still not completely recovered from the war, the bumbling amateurism
pervading public life. For the country, as for Mount, nothing much is
working out.
Up to now it has been upper-class misery lit. Mother dies, friends kill
themselves, one of them with Ferdy’s gun. Journalism is his saving. “Edmund
will give you a job like a shot”, one of his ever-optimistic contacts tells
him. Edmund is Lord Rothermere and the job is on the soon-to-be-defunct
Daily Sketch, and then on the Daily Mail. Being a journalist was not hard
graft in those days. Working on the Guardian at that period, I remember how
the office was deserted as soon as the pubs opened. Mount found his niche
within “the cluttered squalor common to all newspaper offices in Fleet
Street”. He loved the roguishness of it. Perhaps it was a reconnection with
his feckless father. In any case, in the lurid camaraderie of Rothermere’s
old empire, this problematic person now relaxes, opens out. By the late
1960s he is actually married, to a second Julia. His frozen heart unfreezes
and his readers cry thank God.
Nothing succeeds like failure if your blood is blue enough. By the time Mount
gets summoned to run Margaret Thatcher’s Policy Unit in 1982 his failures
are legion. He has failed to impress as Captain of School at Eton. He has
failed, through his own drunkenness, to carry to a meaningful conclusion a
one-to-one exclusive interview with Edward Heath. (“I didn’t realise this
was going to be such a superficial interview”, Heath had told him icily.) He
has failed to be selected as a parliamentary candidate, Sir Richard
Sharples, his assessor, judging him to be “one of the wettest candidates he
had seen”.
He has even previously failed with Mrs T., when he was still in the
Conservative Research Department, working with Keith Joseph on policy for
public health, and she, aged thirty-nine, was an ambitious junior minister,
“both a little cross and unmistakeably pretty”, with the bloom of “one of
the over-age milkmaids in the chorus of the Bath panto”. Her first
impressions of him as “an idle and effete youth” were now conveniently
ignored, as she flattered and cajoled him into writing her
leader-of-the-nation speeches for her. “But you’re such a wordsmith.” She
respected expertise.
So here he is at No 10, “the ill-advised adviser”. In constant attendance both
at Downing Street and Chequers, self-invited observer at Cabinet meetings,
author of what he now describes as the “dreadfully dull” Conservative
manifesto of 1983, he is perfectly placed to provide a vivid picture of
Thatcher and her entourage in action. He develops some admiration for “this
strange, tense, ruthless but usually honest woman”. But he never becomes
fond of her, as he does of Denis, who, when his son Harry wants to ask Mark
Thatcher for an autograph, discourages him charmingly. “I wouldn’t bother if
I was you”, says Denis, “the boy can scarcely write his own name.”
Mount conveys perfectly the bizarre, part-official, part-domestic atmosphere
of Thatcher’s Downing Street. From the Prime Minister’s flat just above his
office comes “the aroma and the kerfuffle of the Prime Minister making
shepherd’s pie”. He never quite gets over the implausibility of being there.
He still feels a person “tiptoeing along the edge”. And it is just this
detachment, this quality of wonderment, that distinguishes Mount’s memoir
from the more banal self-serving political insider memoirs of that time.
Though apparently meandering, this book has a powerful and haunting inner
structure, built up of coincidence and echoes of the past. Geoffrey Howe’s
adviser Adam Ridley had been Mount’s fag at Eton. Our potential new leader,
self-confident young David Cameron, is revealed to be the son of his cousin
Mary. Couldn’t we have guessed it? They even have a nanny in common, as one
does. Ferdinand Mount has a fine sensitivity for anecdote and dialogue, and
in Cold Cream he arrives at an impressive panorama of Britain’s fairly
recent history, poignant, even tragic and fabulous good fun.
Ferdinand Mount
COLD CREAM
My early life and other mistakes
384pp. Bloomsbury. £20.
9780 7475 9507 6
Fiona MacCarthy’s Byron: Life and legend, was first published in 2002.
Last Curtsey: The end of the debutantes appeared in paperback last year.
