AN INCORRIGIBLE LOVER’S REAL-LIFE 20th CENTURY ROMP

Oh, What A Lovely Century Roderic Fenwick Owen Sphere £20

★★★★

At the opening of his entertaining autobiography, the travel writer, society player and incorrigible lover Roderic Fenwick Owen makes something abundantly clear: ‘I would be most unhappy to think that any parts of this long memoir should be cut on grounds of “decency”.’ He needn’t have worried: there are sexual jaunts with men, women and couples in guest rooms, saunas and shacks all over the globe. There’s even an unusual room service from a Berlin maid.

Owen proves something of a romantic spread-better, embracing all sexes, classes and nationalities. Remorse, however, is not a bedfellow: his only admission to moral laxity arrives when he runs up a tab on his mother’s account at Harrods.

Owen was born into a grand, wealthy Lincolnshire family in 1921. It wasn’t an idyllic childhood: there was the obligatory nasty nanny and the headmaster’s cane and his father eloped with the governess (he missed the latter more). Eton and Oxford gave young Roddy connections and a nascent interest in the male form.

As a pacifist, Owen began the war as a Quaker medic before joining the RAF as a flight control officer (directing squadrons in North Africa). These years are particularly vivid, punctuated with pungent details, from the gauntlet of desert latrines to the weight of an amputated leg. His post-war years were shaped by two great escapades. First there was a year spent in Tahiti as a beachcomber with a trust fund

(during which he, improbably, married a Polynesian princess). And then a period in the Middle East, where he became a court poet to the ruling sheikh of Abu Dhabi. In later life he settled down – sort of – in a huge lodge in Kensington, which he shared with an Italian barman from his local squash club.

Encounters with the famous, from M. R. James to Eisenhower, are captured with an undazzled eye. Supposedly, he enjoyed some ‘mild goings-on’ with a young Sean Connery following a fancy-dress ball. And in

New York he lodged with Jackson Pollock – ‘looking like a balding backwoods-man’ – whom he liked far more than his abstract works.

But it is the forgotten figures – the dancer turned ship purser, the colonial doctor who plays his recorder among the mangroves – who really leap off the page.

Owen, who died in 2011, wrote numerous travelogues and biographies of dignitaries and a pulp mystery titled, tellingly, The Flesh Is Willing. But he was also a natural at revealing the amorous aspects of his personality. Recounted in old age, these adventures are faintly nostalgic for a time when intimacy required secrecy.

Although it would have benefited from a photo section, the book is well edited. The result is a portrait not so much of a century but of a lively character who romped through it, encountering both the awful and the awfully nice. Eventually history allowed him to tell all.