I find the older I get the more time I spend thinking back to my early life which I suppose turned me into the person I have become. I have found also that by looking back on this period at the age of seventy-three, I am able to look at it from a much more relaxed perspective than when I last wrote about it fifteen years ago.
The nasty bits don’t hurt or matter as much as they did and the best bits seem to have become even more fun. There is no point in trying to blame anyone but yourself. It is much better to throw your head back and have a thoroughly good laugh. As a result, maybe, I find my first thirty-odd years much more interesting than the rest of it, when effectively the die has been cast.
My early upbringing, strange by today’s standards; my traditional education which, after a homesick start, I enjoyed hugely; a nasty accident; Cambridge; the City and then my two extraordinarily lucky starts in both journalism and broadcasting have all left their mark. I have, therefore, written at some length about my early life and tried to bring alive some of the more remarkable characters who had an influence on me as I started out.
I have spent a life unashamedly in pursuit of fun and this book is meant to be a reflection of that. I know I have been horribly self-indulgent and hedonistic and altogether pretty selfish, but I hope also that I have communicated a fair measure of enjoyment and pleasure and it is this with which I am trying to deal now.
After describing how it all began, I decided not to go on in this vein in case it developed into a boring chronology of cricket tours and matches. I have talked about our commentary box and its inhabitants and one or two important occurrences along the way, but without, I hope, failing to see the funny side of it all.
If I have developed a philosophy, it is ridiculously simple. I regard every day as an orange, from which I try and squeeze every last drop of juice before moving on to tomorrow’s. This book is an attempt to bring a glass or two of that delicious juice back to life and hence the title.
Henry Blofeld
London, 2013
According to my mother – who had drawn the short straw at the font when she was christened Grizel – my birth was less eventful than my conception. Grizel did not muck around: she was always earthy and to the point. When my wife and I were first married, she encouraged us to waste no time in starting a family, as she felt that delay might have a discouraging effect on procreation. ‘I was lucky,’ she told me, ‘because I bred at the shake of a pair of pants’ – adding, with emphasis, ‘Which was just as well, as it was all I ever got.’ That, I hope, was not entirely fair on Tom, my father, who may not have been one of Casanova’s strongest competitors, but I am sure he had his moments. In any case, this particular pair of pants must have shaken with vigour, no doubt as part of the Christmas festivities, in 1938, as late in the evening of the following 23 September I made a swift and noisy entrance into this world. Tom will have been sitting in the drawing room dealing with a whisky and soda and The Times crossword puzzle while Dr Bennett conducted the events upstairs. I dare say this was not too arduous a production for him, for on another occasion Grizel said, ‘I found that having babies was as easy as shelling peas. I can never understand what all the fuss is about.’ So that was that.
Tom and Grizel were fiercely Edwardian in their beliefs about bringing up children, and the three of us – Anthea was ten years older than me, and John seven – had a tougher time of it than children have now. Of course we were all born with whacking great silver spoons in our mouths, but I don’t know how you can choose your parents. You’ve got to get along with what you’ve got. I’m sure Anthea and John had a stricter start to life than I did. In the thirties nannies and nurserymaids abounded, and Tom and Grizel will have been even more remote figures for the other two than they were for me. I probably had an easier time of it because during the war Nanny had to go back home to Heacham in west Norfolk to look after her sick mother. As a result, Grizel, with the help of any temporary nurserymaid she could lay her hands on, had to roll up her sleeves and do much of the dirty work herself, so she and I had a closer relationship than she did with Anthea and John. I am sure the love between parents and children was just as strong then as it is now, but in those days it was not the upfront jamboree that it has become. In fact, when you look back at it all those years ago, it seems harsh and at times almost cruel. My friends were brought up in much the same way – that was just the way things were done. I should think my parents’ generation felt that life was easy for us compared to the way they themselves had been brought up in the years immediately after Queen Victoria had died. It is all part of the ever-going evolutionary process which has brought us now to the age of the free-range child. So what seemed perfectly normal to us at the time may seem shocking from today’s considerably more relaxed perspective.
While Tom and Grizel were sticklers for keeping us on the straight and narrow, they were, in their own way, loving parents who did their best to make sure that we had as happy a childhood as possible, within the constraints of the time. They were always there for us, to help and give support, although if the fault was mine, as it usually was, they did not hesitate to say so, and seldom minced their words. For years they remained a staunch last resort, and like all offspring I went running back when in need of help, usually in the form of cash, although with only modest success, as Tom and Grizel were never that flush, and guarded their pieces of eight with a solemn rectitude.
I remember when I had reached the pocket-money stage going along to my father’s dressing room to collect my weekly dose. Sometimes I arrived a little ahead of schedule and caught him in his pants, socks and attendant sock suspenders, which was an awe-inspiring sight. It was like looking at a pole-vaulter as things went wrong. There was great excitement one morning when I found I had graduated from a twelve-sided threepenny bit (a penny of which had to go into the church collection) to a silver sixpence. The handover of the coin or coins was carried out with a formality which almost suggested that the Bank of England was involved. Tom kept his loose change in the top drawer of a tiny chest with three little drawers which perched alongside his elderly pair of ivory-backed hairbrushes, which had a strong smell of lemon from the hair oil he got from his barber. As my father made a coot look as if it was in urgent need of a haircut, this all seemed a rather pointless exercise.
While he solemnly located the appropriate piece of small change in this magical drawer, I stood by the door. I don’t think it would have occurred to Tom that he was a frightening figure to a small boy. This had something to do with his height – he stood six feet six inches tall in his stocking feet – as well as his monocle and the sock suspenders, which so fascinated me. His lighter side was harder to find than Grizel’s, and his was naturally a more formal manner. The staff, in the house and on the Home Farm, treated him with a watchful respect. When crossed or let down he could be extremely angry, and would have made common cause with some of those grumpy Old Testament prophets.
Tom regarded the ancien régime as the only possible way forward, while Grizel, if left to herself, would have been happy to allow her more extravagant natural instincts to come to the surface. While Grizel laughed in a bubbling, jolly sort of way, Tom’s merriment seemed to rumble up with more control from the bottom of his throat, and the source of his humour was often harder to fathom than his wife’s. Grizel had a strong sense of loyalty to her husband, and she was always more than aware of her position as Tom’s wife, and played the role pretty well. She was a snob, but I remember it as a snobbery as of right, rather than as a contrivance. Looking back on my parents and my childhood now, it comes to me like a black-and-white, but seldom silent, movie, and from this distance I find it highly entertaining.
The Blofelds have always been a restless