In fact it was a good time for him to ask for money, probably the only time in my life I could have helped, since I had a regular income from the Independent without yet having saddled myself with a mortgage. Even so it felt more like a test of loyalty (would I pass him by on the other side?) than a case of real need on his part. How could my few thousand stave off bankruptcy? — which was what he seemed to be saying. But I stumped up and he got his affairs in order, paying me back inside a year.
We had a family joke about Dad and his reverse financial acumen, wondering what would happen if he ever invested in Krugerrands. Would his fellow benchers be making panicky calls to their brokers from the Senior Combination Room, falling over each other in their rush to get out of what had for so long been a watchword for safe investment, now that it was clearly marked for destruction?
When I say ‘family’ joke, I mean only the surly confederacy of sons. We didn’t include Sheila in jokes about Dad’s reliable unreliability in money matters. She had to manage its consequences in earnest. Her judgement was better than his, just as her purely intellectual powers were greater, but without the confidence required to impose these advantages on others they go for nothing.
Only on the humble level of the chromosome did she have the power to overrule the man she had married, in the one small department of life where he could accurately be described as recessive. Her crisp brown-eye instruction overruled his tentative blue-eyed suggestion, so that there were no blue-eyed boys in the family, just the blue-eyed man.
She also threw her short sight into the mix. Dad was long-sighted and in later life wore half-moon spectacles of the sort that seem so perfectly designed for incorporation into judicial body language, particularly the sceptical upward glance at counsel over the rims, that no-one would be shocked to learn that they were worn by judges whose vision needed no correcting.
Another easy target for our jokes was Dad’s collection of busted bonds — highly decorative certificates conferring rights in abandoned ventures, such as mines and railways, that might in theory be revived and yield a return. (I would love to pretend that one of them was for the New Sombrero Phosphate Co.) In the meantime, framed up, they were attractive examples of nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century engraving. Financial dealings often have an erotic tinge, as witness those sultry, pouting tax havens, and so we decided that ‘busted bonds’ was as close as Dad would allow himself to get to busty blondes.
After his retirement Dad decided to sell the portfolio of busted bonds he had built up over a decade or more. The bonds tended to be large in format, unmanageable as objects, so he asked my help in taking them to market. He phoned for a taxi and we travelled in high spirits to the address in Regent Street of the dealers who had sold them to him. I think he was expecting grand premises rather than a small office on an upper floor near Hamleys, which turned out to be our destination.
I don’t quite know why Dad was expecting a hero’s welcome and a large cheque, except for this being the script his temperament always wrote for him. In the end he settled for about a third of what he had paid in the first place. He was crestfallen, naturally, perhaps more about having lost face in front of me than because of the setback itself. Even so he had resilience, and bounced blithely back in a matter of minutes.
If there was pathos in the dreams of wealth of a man who by most standards had done well for himself, it was part of a wider pattern of dissatisfaction in the family. Dad and his brother David didn’t exactly feel cheated by each other, but separately they felt that life had cheated them in terms of the distribution of its rewards. The tension between them never came to a rolling boil, hardly even a simmer, but that didn’t mean it was inactive. One cooking method described in Jane Grigson’s book on fish is to heat a whole salmon in a simple stock (the technical term is court-bouillon) until you see the first bubble, then turn off the flame. There is by then more than enough heat in the fish-kettle to penetrate every fibre, until the flesh is ready to fall off the bones. It was in this fashion that the brothers slowly poached in the court-bouillon of sibling rivalry.
Dad, the older brother, struck out on his own. He went to university, served in the Navy during the War, moved to London and ended up with a title. David wasn’t academic and was expected to stay out of uniform, farming being a reserved occupation. There was no need for him to reinvent himself, and the lilt that Dad had scrubbed from his voice was alive in David’s.
When their father died, the brothers inherited as many liabilities as assets. My grandfather hadn’t troubled the Inland Revenue with paperwork for many years, and the family firm (farming and distributing farm feeds) was in disarray.
David’s instinct was to follow the farmer’s code (let the Revenue smoke us out if they can) while Dad’s decision was to come clean and arrange some sort of repayment plan. This was both morally sound and practical. Dad could claim to have saved the business, but not long afterwards he endangered it all over again. Dad had no real knowledge of farming-related business, but he brought down an expert from London with him to give the enterprise a sort of audit. Perhaps it was a way of exerting some older-brotherly authority.
The firm was earning an annual profit of 5 per cent. The expert observed that it should be making 10. In fact 2 per cent was a respectable figure in that sector and that decade, the 1950s. Dad, though, was impressed by the expert’s verdict, and decided he should sell his share of what he was persuaded was a struggling business. His money would do better elsewhere.
David had the choice of buying his brother out, which would dangerously stretch his resources, or to lose control of the company. There was another person with a stake in the business, Eddy Batty, originally a refugee from Liverpool, and between them David and Eddy kept the business afloat.
Not only did the family firm keep its head above water, with one less family member on board, but it prospered remarkably. Soon David was a wealthy man. From then on there was a mild underlying resentment between the brothers, expressing itself in little jibes about status and money. If Dad mentioned going to a royal garden party, David might say, ‘Bill, your car’s looking a bit shabby. Should I buy you a new one?’
His mismanaged exit from the family business formed no part of Dad’s story about himself, and he would certainly have had a version of his own. Presumably David felt that the older brother had been disloyal, risking family prosperity by selling his own stake. Dad had his own reservations about David’s success, suspecting that sharp practice had played a part in it.
In particular he seethed when in the 1970s David bought some farms from their aunts Bessie and Minnie for much less than they were worth. According to Dad, Bessie and Minnie had told him, ‘David said it would save us trouble if we let his people do the valuation. Always so thoughtful!’ He almost choked on his ‘whisky sour’. The case of O’Sullivan and Another v. Management Agency and Music Ltd and Others was in the future, but his objections were as obvious as if they had been spelled out as a headnote from a reported legal judgment: Undue Influence — Fiduciary relationship — Sharp Practice within the family clearly constituting Constructive Fraud — Aunts were ‘sitting ducks’.
Bessie and Minnie, by the time I knew them, lived in Colwyn Bay in no great style. They were cultivated, with their piano stool containing the inevitable ‘Rustle of Spring’ and an arrangement of Delius’s ‘Cuckoo’, but not dazzlingly sophisticated. They had never married and in late life didn’t seem anything but strait-laced, but had perhaps been a little friskier in their youth. They had owned the first Hispano-Suiza in North Wales, and took the car to Paris when they travelled there in the 1920s. They were worldly enough to know that as women of means they might be targeted on this expedition by venal and unscrupulous men, and came up with a novel method of keeping out of harm’s way. They spoke only Welsh during their visit, reasoning that it was safe to ignore the risk of there being a Welsh-speaking gigolo on the prowl in Paris.