This Much Is True

Mummy used to say, ‘You don’t know what life was… what we had before the war.’ That phrase ‘before the war’ implied a kind of paradise time when everything was as it should be. It was clearly a way of life that had disappeared for ever.

We Are a Fortress Family

Our ‘fortress’ was a ground-floor and basement flat on Banbury Road, between Beech Croft Road and Moreton Road. It was awful — very damp and dark; Mummy called it ‘the hovel’. She hated living there and from the moment they moved in, she planned and schemed to get out of it. But Daddy didn’t make enough on his own to rescue them.

In those days, doctors in general practice were paid per capita; leaving Plaistow had meant saying goodbye to a profitable practice. It wasn’t easy to start from scratch. As soon as they arrived in Oxford, Daddy put up his brass plate on the door of the surgery he rented in Cherwell House, a fine Georgian residence backing on to the river at St Clement’s, and hoped that patients would come. Eventually, they did, but then Magdalen College decided to demolish the house (Robert Maxwell’s publishing empire, Pergamon Press, replaced it — a hideous concrete structure). For a while, Daddy had no surgery at all and saw patients at our house, but Mummy fought Magdalen College on his behalf and, after a fierce struggle, secured a small but pleasant property opposite the back door of the college at 4 Longwall Street. That was where Daddy practised medicine until he retired.

Gradually, single-handedly, Daddy built up his practice. Later on, in 1948, when the National Health Service came into existence, my father welcomed it wholeheartedly. Despite voting Conservative, he believed in the principle of social welfare, in the idea of looking after his patients from the cradle to the grave. The hierarchy in private medicine enraged him; everybody bowed down to the hospital consultant. Daddy reaped satisfaction from treating his patients, and had no further aspirations. He was an old-style family doctor carrying a little Gladstone bag, complete with stethoscope and otoscope; he took time to listen to his patients; he got up in the middle of the night to attend house calls because it was his vocation — making money was never Daddy’s objective.

Mummy might not have had a formal education, but she understood people. She was shrewd; she was businesslike. Daddy was none of those things. He was a high-minded physician with a love of words and scholarship. So, while I was still a baby and they were still trying to establish a proper living in Oxford, Mummy was constantly thinking of ways to make money and escape from ‘the hovel’. She asked herself: ‘What is it they have here that they don’t have in other places?’ The answer? Students. Thousands and thousands of students. She knew that not all students live in college, and those that didn’t needed accommodation.

Mummy requisitioned the upstairs rooms in Daddy’s surgery at Longwall Street for letting to students, carrying out her favourite maxim: ‘Make every post a winning post.’ Then Grandpa Walters gave her a loan and she started out with one house in Old High Street, Headington, eventually going on to own about seven — all rented out to students. Mummy was considered to be the best landlord in Oxford. (She was adamant that she was never to be called a landlady — she was a landlord.) Much later, when I was in my teens, I became her cleaner. I used to have to go and scrub the houses out between tenancies. Some of the students were tidy and some were not. I remember that Tariq Ali left owing Mummy £100. I keep meaning to tell him, and one of these days I’ll get hold of him. (Or maybe he’ll pay up if he reads this book!)

We had a classy list of tenants, including the writer Ferdy Mount — in his autobiography, Cold Cream, I feature, along with my mother. We also housed Jacob Rothschild, 4th Baron Rothschild, OM, GBE, CVO, FRCA, the British peer and investment banker; Rachel Pakenham, the third daughter of the 7th Earl and Countess of Longford, who became Rachel Billington (Mummy particularly loved her); Paul Betjeman (son of John); and Robert Maclennan, the future MP. There was also Francis Hope, a very wonderful writer, who died in the Turkish Airlines plane crash in 1974.

Mummy always knew immediately if someone was lying, whereas Daddy was more trusting of people’s inherent good character. She was very canny in all sorts of ways: a fascinating mixture of business acumen and emotional sensitivity.