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

Dust as the Old Hundredth. It attracted the well-heeled types who were regulars at the Cavendish Hotel, and provided the glamour, pretty girls and flow of champagne that were prerequisites for dancing into the night. As at other exclusive clubs, there were membership lists, dress codes and the sort of prices that guarded against all but the most privileged becoming members; a bottle of champagne cost about 30 shillings, almost half the average working man’s weekly wage.99 Dressed in tall hats, white silk scarves, fur coats and long dresses, this ‘animated gathering of toffs in toff’s togs waiting to be raised up to the latest toff’s paradise’ was a familiar sight to Soho’s locals.100
    Mrs Meyrick managed to send her daughters to Roedean and her sons to Harrow, and they became part of the class to which she offered so much entertainment. Two daughters married into the aristocracy, becoming, respectively, Countess of Kinnoull and Lady de Clifford. But disaster was lurking. By the time Robert became involved with Kathleen, her mother had already been in prison several times. First, there had been raids on the club by ‘ruffians’ and by the police. Then, as part of a clean-up campaign, she was arrested for selling drinks after hours and jailed for six months. Kathleen was only seventeen. And then the same thing happened all over again. Worse came when Mrs Meyrick was accused of bribing a certain Sergeant Goddard at Marylebone police station after his colleagues became suspicious about his sudden acquisition of a fancy Chrysler and an expensive Streatham home. Ten-pound notes were traced to Mrs Meyrick. The upshot was fifteen months of hard labour in Holloway and a reputation in the press as ‘the most dangerous woman in London’. Although she survived, her health was wrecked. Her legal costs had been hugely damaging and it was not long before she died, aged fifty-seven, from pneumonia.
    KATHLEEN MEYRICK WITH ROBERT AT THE RACES. THE PAIR REMAINED FRIENDS AFTER THEIR ENGAGEMENT, AND KATHLEEN OFTEN WENT TO STAY AT FARINGDON. IN COUNTRY GET-UP, THEY BOTH LOOK AS THOUGH THEY KNOW HOW TO PLAY BY THE RULES AND HOW TO BREAK THEM
    Gladys and Algernon Heber-Percy were appalled. Their youngest son didn’t have a job and his life was filled with decadence and debt. There was little hope that the twenty-year-old would give up his life of metropolitan indulgence interspersed with a bit of careering around the countryside on a horse. According to Robert, his parents had already bought him a one-way ticket to Australia when he went to stay at his friend Michael Duff’s estate, Vaynol, for the life-changing weekend. ‘And he came back in a blue Rolls-Royce,’ recounted one friend who heard the story later.101
    It would be easy to presume that Gerald provided a way out for Robert: a sugar daddy for a spoilt young man. The story of the two men’s meeting has developed all sorts of variations among people who knew them, including one that tells how Lord Berners came across the Mad Boy working in his Lyons Corner House, and another that has Gerald bowled over by him in Venice. The fact that they met on equal terms at the country house of a mutual friend who had known Robert since boyhood is interesting because the younger man was not at a disadvantage. A close friend of Gerald’s, Diana Mosley, later wrote, ‘Heber-Percy’s high spirits, elegant appearance and uninhibited behaviour enchanted Gerald who no longer needed a drug to give him contentment.’102
    Gerald did not write openly about his feelings for the Mad Boy, but a fair amount can be deduced from his light if bitingly satirical novel The Girls of Radcliff Hall. In this spoof girls’-boarding-school story, the schoolgirls are based on young men in his circle and Gerald himself is the headmistress, Miss Carfax. Robert is clearly Millie Roberts, a pupil who ‘brought a new interest into Miss Carfax’s life’. The tone appears confessional: the headmistress ‘had