Squeezing the Orange. Henry Blofeld

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       FIVE

       Mad Dogs and Honeymoons

      Grizel and her younger brother Mark were the joint products of my maternal grandparents, Kit and Jill Turner. My grandfather was a smallish man whom, if you were sensible, you treated with the greatest care. He had white hair when I knew him, and he spoke in a rasping voice, as if he was firing machine-gun bullets at all and sundry. He was easily irritated, and I remember him having no obvious love for children beyond what passed for duty. Before the war he had worked in the House of Commons where he became Deputy Clerk. He was, by all accounts, a difficult man to work with and did not make friends easily. This is probably why he never got the top job. He was also for time Clerk of the Pells at the Exchequer. Jill, who was close to Grizel, was a dear, but died of leukaemia while I was at Sunningdale. Mrs Fox told me the news, and made me sit down there and then and write letters to Grizel and to my grandfather, whose grief was prolonged, dreadful, and perhaps a trifle stage-managed. Kit loved Switzerland, and every day he received a copy of a Swiss newspaper written in German, a language he spoke fluently. He gave everyone in the family a crumpled pound note in a brown envelope for Christmas, although I think I probably started off with a ten-bob note which I am sure was just as crumpled. He even gave Uncle Mark, who had made a lot of money in the City, a pound note along with everyone else.

      After Jill had died I never much enjoyed the visits to ‘Greenhedges’ in Sheringham’s Augusta Road, which was about as ghastly as it sounds. We would go over for lunch, and the food was some way from being haute cuisine. Mrs Fenn, the diminutive, bespectacled, straggly-haired, middle-aged cook, was an eccentric character. She spoke with a deep voice in the broadest of Norfolk accents, and had only a rudimentary knowledge of cooking, although she did make excellent marmalade. When I was very young I would have lunch in the kitchen with Nanny and Mrs Fenn. Afterwards I would be taken off to swim in the North Sea, which I loathed because it was always appallingly cold. I would put on my swimming trunks in the family bathing hut, which stank of stale seaweed and salt water. To get to the beach I had to walk down a huge bank of painful pebbles in my bare feet, which made the prospect of shuffling slowly out into the sea, getting colder as each step took me an inch or two deeper, seem even more appalling, but I was shamed into it. Sheringham put me off swimming for life, just as Sunningdale made sure that I never again ate porridge. The only time I enjoyed it at all was when, with the help of Nanny, who holding up her skirt was an inveterate paddler, I was allowed to catch shrimps. Pushing the shrimping net along in the sand where the water was about eighteen inches deep, I always netted a few, which were taken triumphantly back to Hoveton and boiled for tea. The North Sea also produced a good haul of cockles and winkles. Winkles were great fun, mainly because I used one of Nanny’s hatpins to winkle them out of those curious twisted shells. They were delicious, as long as you didn’t get a mouthful of sand at the same time.

      My grandparents would always come over to Hoveton for lunch on Christmas Day, in their austere black saloon car with Kit at the helm. They arrived soon after we had got back from church, and we waited with bated breath for those crumpled one-pound notes. Kit, who just managed to reach his nineties, drove almost until the end with steady 35mph purpose. About twice a year he went to stay in Huntingdonshire with Aunt Saffron, my grandmother’s much younger sister, who was a great ally of Grizel’s. The old boy drove himself there and back. Once, well into the 1950s, he was asked why he always drove in the middle of the road. He dismissed the silly question with a brusque ‘In order to avoid the nails from the tramps’ boots.’ You could see where Grizel got some of it from.

      During the Second War Uncle Mark had been one of the more important brains in the Department of Economic Warfare, for which he had been knighted. He was a delightful man, with an open, smiling, enthusiastic face, and I don’t think I ever saw him disgruntled about anything. Both he and Grizel were extremely bright, but their lives followed completely different paths. Grizel had thrown herself into being the country squire’s wife, while Mark had negotiated the City of London with remarkable success. Tom and Grizel were of the old school who felt that making money was intrinsically rather vulgar, and that while City slickers might be tolerated, their habits and customs should be viewed with a somewhat jaundiced eye. Uncle Mark drove a Bentley, which I think Tom and Grizel may have felt was a touch flashy. We always had fun when we came up to London, going to his house in Edwardes Square, and later on to the Grove in Highgate Village. Mark’s wife Peggy was great value too. A continuous smoker, she drank whisky, coughed and laughed raucously, and always entered into the spirit of everything. Like Uncle Mark, she was an inveterate bridge player.

      With my spell at Cambridge being cut short, and my future career looking decidedly uncertain, Tom and Grizel turned to Uncle Mark as an act of last resort. Of course, he delivered. I was signed up for three years, starting in late September 1959, as a trainee in the merchant bank Robert Benson Lonsdale, of which he was a director. So began the most boring period of my life. Uncle Mark had done his best, but there was no way I would ever have made the grade as a merchant banker, or have wanted to. For two years I tooled off five days a week to Aldermanbury Square, where the headquarters of RBL were located, before I was shoved off to Fenchurch Street after RBL had merged with Kleinworts in 1961. I can honestly say that I never came within several furlongs of doing anything within those two years that remotely quickened the pulse. I had a room in a flat in Egerton Gardens in Knightsbridge, and the early-morning walk to Knightsbridge Underground station, the change of lines at Holborn and the ten-minute walk to Aldermanbury Square still haunt me. I wore a stiff collar and a three-piece suit, carried a rolled umbrella, and topped it off with a bowler hat. I must have looked the most preposterous of oafs. I suppose that if I had kept my hand out of the till (which I did), and they had found me some backwater where I could do no harm, I might have made lots of money, with a bonus or two thrown in, who knows? But it wasn’t for me. Living like that for five days a week in order to enjoy the other two seemed the wrong way round, and a lousy way to spend my life.