The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me by Sofka Zinovieff

‘hard of hearing, partially blind, and tortured with gout’, and there were ‘innumerable old housemaids always trotting about with cans of hot water and clean towels’. Rosa had been there since 1904 and was favoured by the Bright Young Things; she had known their grandparents as well as their parents. She was a terrible snob, favouring the ‘Three As’ – Aristocrats, Americans and the affluent – and wouldn’t hesitate to ban people she didn’t like.
    Rosa provided the perfect mix of decadence and familiarity for people in Robert’s circle. Quick to flout the rules, she amused everyone with her gossip and propensity to break open ‘cherrybums’ – jeroboams of champagne. Food had declined since her days of cooking for Buckingham Palace, when recipes included quail wrapped in slices of beef and cooked in suet pudding, but it was solid English fare, even if Evelyn Waugh described the game pie as ‘quite black inside and full of beaks and shot and inexplicable vertebrae’.91 Rosa drove around in a decrepit Daimler that was ‘even more old-fashioned and regal-looking than Queen Mary’s’.92 For a section of the well-heeled, well-connected London youth, the Cavendish was ‘like the dream nursery they had never had, presided over by a nanny in turn forbidding and indulgent, ribald and stately, pickled in Edwardiana, peppering them with her fruity vernacular’.93 Many of the people who would remain Robert’s lifelong friends were Cavendish aficionados, including the glamorous Lygon siblings, the Betjemans and Daphne Fielding. Gerald too was no stranger to the place, and had chosen some years earlier to entertain the Ballets Russes under Rosa’s eagle eye.
    Robert had the confidence of a hedonist and the fearlessness of a wild sexual opportunist. He was a natural candidate for the mad, jazz-flavoured partying that had got going in the 1920s and never stopped, and certainly belonged to the category that was viewed with scorn by Evelyn Waugh, and labelled ‘shrieking little poseurs’ by George Orwell. Robert’s older brother Alan was equally good-looking and disreputable. With an advantage of five years, he was ‘the most wicked and the most attractive’ of the four brothers and undoubtedly provided an example for his younger brother to follow. While the older two siblings remained lifelong devotees of rural activities and wildlife (particularly how to kill it), the younger two were just as dedicated to the wild life of the city. Robert later described how he had sometimes been so short of money during these times that he learned how to make one meal last three days – and if this sounded like the start of a sob story or a revelation about soup kitchens, it was not: ‘I would get a rich man to take me out to Claridge’s and order three large courses.’94
    If Gerald was pushing the boundaries through his music and creative friendships, Robert was doing the same with his own body by testing his physical limits – the epitome of the jeunesse dorée. Both men fitted into what was known as ‘High Bohemia’, with its cosmopolitan, artistic aesthetic and irreverent exuberance. Despite the memories of Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment and destruction, and the continuing threat of arrest for homosexuals, it was not such a bad time to be queer. Many of the old taboos were broken by the Bright Young Things, who refused to follow in the conventional footsteps of their parents, yet had (in the case of the men) gone to public schools where relationships between boys were the rule not the exception. A group of slightly older men had helped pave the way for Robert’s generation – talented, mannered aesthetes who made it chic to prefer men. Cyril Connolly described the ‘great homosexual trail-blazers in the arts in the early twentieth century who avenged on the bourgeoisie the latter’s killing of Oscar Wilde’, naming such inspirational spirits as Diaghilev, Proust, Cocteau and Gide. Even those who ended up