Squeezing the Orange. Henry Blofeld

different paths. Grizel had thrown herself into being the country squire’s wife, while Mark had negotiated the City of London with remarkable success. Tom and Grizel were of the old school who felt that making money was intrinsically rather vulgar, and that while City slickers might be tolerated, their habits and customs should be viewed with a somewhat jaundiced eye. Uncle Mark drove a Bentley, which I think Tom and Grizel may have felt was a touch flashy. We always had fun when we came up to London, going to his house in Edwardes Square, and later on to the Grove in Highgate Village. Mark’s wife Peggy was great value too. A continuous smoker, she drank whisky, coughed and laughed raucously, and always entered into the spirit of everything. Like Uncle Mark, she was an inveterate bridge player.

      With my spell at Cambridge being cut short, and my future career looking decidedly uncertain, Tom and Grizel turned to Uncle Mark as an act of last resort. Of course, he delivered. I was signed up for three years, starting in late September 1959, as a trainee in the merchant bank Robert Benson Lonsdale, of which he was a director. So began the most boring period of my life. Uncle Mark had done his best, but there was no way I would ever have made the grade as a merchant banker, or have wanted to. For two years I tooled off five days a week to Aldermanbury Square, where the headquarters of RBL were located, before I was shoved off to Fenchurch Street after RBL had merged with Kleinworts in 1961. I can honestly say that I never came within several furlongs of doing anything within those two years that remotely quickened the pulse. I had a room in a flat in Egerton Gardens in Knightsbridge, and the early-morning walk to Knightsbridge Underground station, the change of lines at Holborn and the ten-minute walk to Aldermanbury Square still haunt me. I wore a stiff collar and a three-piece suit, carried a rolled umbrella, and topped it off with a bowler hat. I must have looked the most preposterous of oafs. I suppose that if I had kept my hand out of the till (which I did), and they had found me some backwater where I could do no harm, I might have made lots of money, with a bonus or two thrown in, who knows? But it wasn’t for me. Living like that for five days a week in order to enjoy the other two seemed the wrong way round, and a lousy way to spend my life.