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

up as statues – so much the better.
    GERALD AGED FIVE , 1889
    Gerald’s love of the aesthetically pleasing was dominated by the visual element, and yet his great passion was to be music. However, ‘even to music I was at first attracted by its graphic symbolisation … My imagination was strangely moved by the sight of these black waves of notes undulating across the pages.’20 As a young child, he quickly began to write imitation cadenzas on the page, creating make-believe music. His description of how he was first attracted to the aural charms of music is unusually precise. When a young female visitor played the piano, the romantic strains of Chopin’s Fantaisie-Impromptu ‘burst like a rocket in my imagination’. It was the beginning of a devotion that lasted all his life. The small boy tried to pick out the notes of the dauntingly fast piece and became fixated on it. Later, he was allowed to play the uncared-for upright piano in the billiard room – a gloomy, cold place away from the main house that ‘bristled with antlers, wart-hogs, elephant tusks’ and various barbarous weapons. Hardly the scenery this sensitive child would have chosen for his conversion to musician, but remote enough to give him the privacy he always appreciated.
    For many years, Gerald remained largely self-taught as a pianist and he describes how his mother’s reaction to his ‘unexpected penchant for music’ was ‘an attitude of alarm, tempered with pride’. She was pleased enough to make him play to visitors, but his talent was not nurtured. Later, at prep school and then Eton, he was allowed lessons, but he felt the permission was given grudgingly and that his tuition was never enough to allow him to become a seriously trained pianist. At Eton, the older boys encouraged him to play light music at little private evening concerts, and his love of Chopin was replaced with a feverish passion for Wagner. Again, he recalled that it was the visual sense that came first; merely seeing the vocal score of Das Rheingold in a shop window made his heart beat furiously, while some years later, the sighting of a Richard Strauss score was as exciting as ‘meeting the beloved one at a street corner’.21 After much waiting, Gerald persuaded his father to buy the expensive item for him, and The Rhine Gold transported the teenager into his own Wagnerian legend. He would play the music every evening on the dining-room piano at school and his fervour for Wagner lasted many years. However, it was only after he had left school and was able to make more decisions for himself that he was able to pursue music more seriously.
    N SPITE OF his many advantages in life, Gerald was dogged from a young age by melancholy. Those who claimed that their childhood days were the best of their lives he suspected of having been particularly unfortunate later on, and he made it clear that he was not in that category: ‘black care can sit behind us even on our rocking-horses.’22 To an extent this was inherent in his character, and it appears that he was prone to misery as a child. However, it was also provoked by his experiences at school. At the age of nine, Gerald was sent to Cheam, a prep school to which his father and other male relations had preceded him. It is easy to believe Gerald’s description of Cheam’s horrible food, the lack of interest in the arts, and compulsory games. This was bad enough for a sensitive, creative, solitary child who didn’t like sports. Worse, the headmaster was a sadist who terrorised the boys with caning and threats. Gerald’s ironic depiction of the situation doesn’t hide the fact that the psychological wounds never entirely closed. ‘Nobody will deny that the majority of small boys between the ages of nine and fourteen are horrid little beasts and deserve to be frightened and bullied. But I find it difficult to believe that it is necessary for them to be tortured and terrorised to the extent that we were tortured and