Life's a Banquet Read online

  First published in Great Britain in 2019 by

  The Book Guild Ltd

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  Copyright © 2019 Robin Bennett

  The right of Robin Bennett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  ISBN 97819132082640

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  To everyone I’ve ever known: either in the best of circumstances or the less fortunate – it’s all about how we are with others

  A note on names

  One of my concerns writing this book was I didn’t want to embarrass anyone by their inclusion – unless that was my stated intention. Ostensibly, this centred around my closest friends, who already have enough to put up with re me. So, I took the decision to change many key names of people who aren’t family, or simply not mention some by name – particularly those individuals I still see regularly and especially where literal accuracy matters not a jot.

  A further note on names

  Changing names also disguises my ineptitude at remembering them: once in a video shop in Wales I had to hide behind a giant cut-out of Kung Fu Panda to avoid a cousin whose name escaped me, and whose wedding I had been to the year before.

  Our children

  For similar reasons (relating to privacy), I decided not to indulge in any discussions about our kids – even description is a form of opinion, and their life is their own.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1 The incident with the goose

  Chapter 2 Reading 1971

  Chapter 3 Oratory Prep School

  Chapter 4 France

  Chapter 5 Downside Abbey

  Chapter 6 Downside Abbey, Part 2

  Chapter 7 London

  Chapter 8 Royal Holloway

  Chapter 9 Royal Holloway, Part 2

  Chapter 10 London

  Chapter 11 From Tooting Broadway to Soho

  Chapter 12 Shepherd’s Bush

  Chapter 13 Chelsea

  Chapter 14 Clapham to Melbourne… and back

  Chapter 15 Oxfordshire

  Chapter 16 The incident with the stag

  Epilogue

  Appendices

  Notes

  Prologue

  This is a list of helpful Life Tips I sent to my goddaughter on her thirteenth birthday.

  •A quite surprising number of electrical things can be fixed by turning them OFF and then ON again.

  •Always do what needs to be done immediately. If you’ve got time to think about it, you’ve got time to do it.

  •Never miss an opportunity to go to the loo (this one is basically the same as the last one).

  •Polite and kind ALWAYS beats clever, and will win you more friends, jobs… pretty much everything. Trust me on this (I’m relatively stupid).

  •Learn not to worry – everything sort of matters but no one thing matters that much. And the worst hardly ever happens anyway.

  •There are twenty-four hours in a day: sleep for eight, work for eight and play for eight.

  •Make friends with happy people.

  •If you don’t know what to do about a problem, it means it’s not ready to be solved. Leave it until the answer comes. You’ll feel it when it does.

  •Your parents are always on your side – which I admit is hard to remember at times.

  •Loving is a kind of giving.

  PS Always be kind to animals, as I know you will. It is the truest measure of a person.

  Chapter 1

  The incident with the goose

  How to live with an eccentric

  When I was about seven years old, my father woke one morning and told me, in all seriousness, that not another day could go by without him tasting the sweet flesh of a goose.

  He packed me, our cairn terrier Judy, and his shotgun into our rusting Morris Marina and strapped a canoe onto the roof rack. Then he set off for the river.

  I had my doubts even at the early stages of this enterprise: it was November and freezing cold. On top of this, my father had never expressed a craving for goose before, so I felt pretty sure it would soon pass if the call was left unanswered. However, at seven, you just kind of go along with things – especially if your father is anything like mine.

  We arrived at a bleak stretch of the Thames somewhere near Reading and prepared everything whilst watching the flock of Canada geese lounging about on an island in the middle of the river. Then we got in the canoe: me at the front with the dog; my father at the back, armed to the teeth.

  The few walkers who were braving the weather that morning jumped in the air and looked about in alarm as the first shot rang out. Only the goose my father had picked for his dinner seemed unperturbed, as the pellets simply bounced off the thick mattress of breast feathers from twenty yards away.

  Undeterred and completely unaware of the sharp looks he was getting from the bank, my father reloaded and paddled closer.

  When the second shot rang out, taking the unfortunate goose’s head off, people really stopped to stare.

  Several things happened rather quickly after that:

  My father (still armed) jumped out of the canoe, retrieved a limply flapping goose and threw it on my lap; he then jumped back in, sliding the shotgun down the side of the canoe; whereupon the shotgun’s second cartridge went off, with a sort of muffled bang; and we started to sink. My father panicked: he threw me onto the bank of the island, along with the dog; paddled as fast as he could across the river in a leaking boat; jumped out of the canoe with the shotgun in one hand, the dead goose in the other; and scampered towards the car.

  Then he drove off.

  It had been an eventful few minutes, but the next part of the morning went very slowly indeed as I stood on that cold island with the dog and wondered what would happen next.

  Eventually a put-upon-looking lock-keeper appeared on the opposite bank, got into a small motor launch and made his way across to where I stood. He picked me up, muttering something about a phone call, and took me back to shore to meet my father – who’d had time to go home, wash the blood off and hide the goose.

  Two weeks later, we would be sitting in front of the TV with trays on our laps watching Tom Baker being Doctor Who and stuffing our faces with goose. The whole operation was pronounced a great success.

  I sometimes think that eccentricity is being possessed of more sharply defined contradictions. Take the last point in the prologue (about kindness to animals): murdering geese in broad daylight could, very justifiably, be taken to being the opposite of that – yet it would be a task to find someone who likes animals more than my father, from our dogs to the tortoise. He even tried to bond with my sister’s snakes, with their dead, prehistoric eyes and yearning for the small rodents we kept stashed in the fridge. But he also likes shooting and eating game, and brought me up to prize such free quarr
y over the miserable, mass-produced poultry in supermarkets.

  True eccentricity is also a total unawareness of how you appear to others and the fact you are making a spectacle of yourself, and is the exact opposite of the Eccentric Presumptuous who gets up in the morning and puts on a loud bow tie precisely in order to get noticed.

  If my father sported German lederhosen to mow the lawn in our quiet semi near Reading (which he did), took his dog into Mass (ditto), or obsessed about church architecture, whilst avoiding actual church like the plague, he did it for honest reasons of practicality or genuine desire – never, ever for effect. That is the point. I remember his clog phase unfortunately coinciding with his pith helmet period: this was the closest he got to looking like a proper lunatic – most of the time I thought he looked quite cool… but that might just be a family thing. He was fortunate to have been born with enough charisma to get him out of most of the awkward situations his behaviour got him into, and he taught me that charm goes a long way.

  He had been the youngest major in the British army before he left the forces, then he went on to forge a successful career in business which ended up with him as a managing director at Remy Martin Cognac. Being a bit bonkers and having a successful career in a large, sensible company just goes to show what a liberal business business is.

  Living with him was also an early lesson in the unpredictibility of life and the absolute necessity to be able to think on one’s feet when everything seems to be going to hell in a handcart.

  My brother Charles and I suspected he was different from other dads; he did things with us at the weekend that were alarming – more often than not – but interesting. Small boys will forgive a lot if they are excused homework and something irresponsible and mildly dangerous is on the cards.

  And the truth was, we gave as good as we got. Cut to illegal potholing in Dorset, and a cave we stumbled across in a field. I dropped a hammer on my father’s head and nearly killed him as he clattered down a shaft into the unknown. On another occasion, very close to the goose incident spot, Charles and I pulled a tree branch back as far as it would go and waited for him to come around the corner. When he appeared, we let go of the branch and it hit him square on the face, knocking him – dazed and probably very surprised – into the river.

  The trick with my father’s rages was to keep out of his way for thirty-eight seconds or more. The best way to achieve this was to run like the wind itself towards any kind of cover, but also to keep zigzagging, as he wasn’t very fleet of foot. He’d catch us on a straight – but trees, old ladies with dogs on leads, and parked cars could be relied upon to slow him up long enough for him to calm down and hopefully see the funny side.

  If he did catch you whilst he was still in a rage, it would be painful but short-lived.

  This was the opposite of my mother, who would harangue you for what seemed like hours, until the infraction was long-forgotten but anything else on her mind had been given a good airing. She comes from Franco-Hispanic stock on one side of her family, so I have a lot of petite, rotund aunts who argue with each other all the time and who rush after small children in shops to cuddle them.

  Opposites do attract in the case of my parents. She is middle class almost to the point of a cult, with all the self-awareness and social oversensitivity that can go with it.

  But bourgeoise is more a state of mind than a birthright as most of her family history is inscrutable: obscured by anecdote, rumour and a middle-class angst that comes from knowing that one’s forbears are not in the least respectable.

  In my wine cellar in France there is a framed picture of a grand house in the style of an Atlanta planter’s dream home. A cellar is a great place to keep guilty secrets, and the house, which belonged to my great-grandfather and generations before him, is most definitely one of those.

  My maternal grandmother was born into a Trinidadian sugar plantation family at the start of the First World War. They had been there generations and my grandmother could trace her family back to the Tascher family – who were elevated to fame, if not fortune, by Rose Tascher, who became Josephine de Beauharnais and then shagged Napoleon.

  By 1914 things weren’t going so well for the family – presumably since the fall of the First French Republic and the abolition of slavery.

  I was brought up to believe that my great-grandfather was a scoundrel who drank and womanised his way through what little remained of the rest of the family fortune. In the last few years there has been some revisionism, but not enough to obscure the fact that the fortune did disappear and my great-grandfather was forced to flee to Britain.

  His choice of the UK was explained by the existence of a cousin who ‘owned a chain of restaurants’ in London. In reality, ‘London’ turned out to be Slough and the chain turned out to be one run-down pub in Shaggy Calf Lane that my great-grandfather was supposed to manage, whilst housing his entire family in a single room above the snug bar.

  His solution to this reversal of fortune was to die right there on the spot; though whether through grief, rage or sheer bloody mindedness, I really don’t know.

  Dying might be an emphatic way to avoid one’s creditors (and turn down a job offer), but it left my great-grandmother – a small, fierce Hispanic lady – with a large family to feed, nowhere to live and no money.

  To where does a woman in this situation turn? Well, if you are Catholic and have been brought up with a strong sense of entitlement, you go straight to your local priest and move into his house.

  Of her early years, my grandmother, who lived well into my late thirties, remembered very little from her Trinidadian roots, aside from songs her nanny sang her in creole, and some oddly francophone expressions for someone who grew up near Windsor. But there was a steel to her manner when riled that I like to think came from an upbringing that was precarious throughout her early years, followed by bringing up five children of her own during the Second World War – four of whom were daughters every bit as loud and strongly opinionated as her.

  Coming from a family of slave traders and economic oppressors, I find it amazing that my mother grew up so unexcitedly middle class. Her family history shows that bucking social requirements works; but instead she spent the majority of her life rebelling by conforming to most middle-class social mores.

  As for my father, who grew up in a comfortable family setting in Henley-on-Thames: one of two boys, with doting parents who liked gardening, keeping sheep and being members of the National Trust – I’m baffled why he isn’t the normal one.

  Chapter 2

  Reading 1971

  In which I get around to explaining why I am writing this thing. There is also a discussion of drains

  My name is Robin Bennett (for those of you who don’t read covers). I was born in Brunei and I’ve travelled about a bit. I am exactly fifty years old. For a living, I write books and start companies. Whilst people buy into my business ideas, they rarely buy my books.

  But I don’t let that bother me too much: I am one of the more cheerful people you might hope to meet in life. I am also lucky with and very grateful for my friends, who soften the sting of my fractured family.

  Accordingly, I’m a useful person to have around if you are anxious or a bit depressed. Then again, this is not something I have done on purpose: I did not wake one morning and say, Henceforth I will be trivial, yet upbeat; I will smile upon the world and have really good manners. This will be for the benefit of humankind… It is my gift. Not on your life – I’m jolly and generally nice to people because it makes me happy. It’s the opposite of a vicious circle.

  So, why am I writing this book?

  Well, to be read. However, the advice from my editor was pretty stark, so I don’t hold out much hope: ‘For an autobiography to make it, it has to be written by a celebrity… but you are of course not famous.’

  Oh…

  He went on to say, in a more hopeful tone (a
lthough I don’t know whether he was just trying to be nice at this point) that at least I am writing from ‘a good place’. By that, I assume he means that my life, by most measures linked to health, wealth and happiness, is good, and therefore I should be dishing out advice. On the face of it, this makes sense: two of the things I am proven to be any good at – making money and being happy – are worth knowing.

  ‘I think the answer to unlocking the potential of your autobiography is as a guidebook to how to negotiate your way through life – through education, through families, through business, through relationships and marriage, through failure and rejection.’

  However, I’ve given it some thought and – nope – I won’t be lecturing people: first of all, I don’t have the energy and, secondly, I might be upbeat but I’m not conceited.

  I think I can break down my writing this book into three distinct but mutually supportive goals:

  1.How I got here

  Life can be a little relentless: events (large and small) come thick and fast and there’s never enough time to pick them apart, unless you make time.

  The first time I managed to make myself well-off – in my late twenties – I did it wrong, and money was just a burden, a constant stream of demands on my time I did not really want. The next time I made a fast buck (starting with a spectacularly ill-thought-out but ultimately lucky investment in gold bullion), I managed things better, and I find it has bought me the best of all commodities – time itself… To take stock.

  2.Self-knowledge

  And hopefully a modicum of self-improvement. Understanding is not just a good reason to write an autobiography: it is, very possibly, the only reason – from the author’s point of view. Wisdom has been described as a torch by thoughtful people. Holding anything up to the beam of scrutiny is to gain perception but, then, to turn it this way and that is to give it a radically different aspect with each twist of the light. For the reader, I think we like reading autobiographies, biographies, even obituaries though because people – all people – are faceted and therefore interesting.