The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me Read Online Free PDF

earth-coloured dogs and dauntingly tall horses that he felt took first place in his family’s heart. At Faringdon there would be birds-of-paradise strolling on the lawn and into the house. Another favourite would be the trumpeter bird, which he trained to leap from the ground to take titbits from his hand. A small, dumpy, dark-feathered thing from South America, like a hunched black chicken on tall, skinny legs, the trumpeter has stunning patches of iridescent plumage in purple, green and bronze on its chest and under its wings. It is something like Gerald himself – physically modest, without the showy beauty of other more obviously attractive creatures, but with flashes of brilliance, comic intelligence, flights of fancy, and a trumpeting call that could shock. Gerald appreciated an animal you could laugh with as well as admire, and one that could intrigue without being practical – like the eponymous camel in his 1936 novel, which arrives unexpectedly at a village vicarage one morning. Gerald liked to be surprised – anything but the practical, predictable animals of his childhood. As an adult, he didn’t mind going for a ride on a horse, and it seems likely that his attitude to hunting was rather like Antonia’s, the vicar’s wife in The Camel. Due to her great love of animals, she was ‘very much averse to blood sports, but she objected far less to foxhunting than to the other forms of harrying wild beasts. Firstly because it gave pleasure to a large number of ladies and gentlemen, some of whom were her personal friends … And secondly because foxes very frequently made incursions into her hen coop.’
    Although Gerald was wont to reject his family background, he adored his early home, Apley Park, which he calls Arley in his memoir. A romantic eighteenth-century edifice with turrets and Gothic flourishes, it was set in beautiful parkland in a valley through which the River Severn flowed. If the people surrounding him at Apley were not always caring or appealing, Gerald admitted that the place was particularly significant to him. ‘When I hear cats spoken of slightingly as being “more attached to places than to people” I always feel a little conscience-stricken.’ Wealth and luxury were taken for granted; there were twenty house servants within the crenellated walls, in addition to gardeners and estate workers.19 But these privileges are not usually the source of happiness to a child, and Gerald had detested the ‘long-drawn-out amusements enforced on me by my social position’.
    When he was young, Gerald loved creating toy theatres, but he specified that he was ‘more interested in the pageantry of fairyland than in the personality of its inhabitants … Rapunzel remained a vague and hazy figure while I could visualise clearly the tower from which she let down her hair.’ He later admitted that ‘A pretty house has the same effect on me as the sight of a pretty woman on the majority of people. Without any definite hopes or intention of acquisition, I like to have a good look at it.’ This appreciation of place and ornamentation began early – Gerald decorated his room at Eton with fashionable Japanese fans and a large coloured photograph of a wisteria-covered tearoom – and it continued throughout his life. He was drawn to establishing spectacularly lovely and remarkable homes, the three main ones being in London, Faringdon and Rome. They were among his great creative works, comparable to his painting or writing, and he took pains to achieve the perfect mise-en-scène for himself and his favoured guests, who became the actors in Gerald’s clever, stylish ‘productions’. These homes were all extensions of the man – marvellous places to which he was deeply connected and which he filled with an idiosyncratic mix of art and antiques, books and music, flowers and birds, and the best possible food. And when he could add something startling or surreal – a horse in the drawing room or guests dressed