Problem parents
ED BEHRENS Charley’s Woods by Charles Duff Zuleika £12.50 Oldie price £11.12 inc p&p
The negotiations and difficulties of adopted children are well documented; the negotiations necessitated by a father who loathes you and would rather dress up as Queen Mary, rather less so. However, that is what Charles Duff had to contend with. Charley’s Woods, Duff’s memoir, recounts the riveting story
of his upbringing in the household of his adoptive parents, Caroline Paget and Michael Duff. It’s possible they weren’t cut out to be perfect parents.
Paget has many shapes. She was a beauty, muse, actress and lesbian. The scholar David Cecil said she was ‘like the moon, cold and out of reach’. She was part of a set that, in today’s classconscious way, is easily dismissed, and yet beneath the veneer of amateurism was a rigid determination to produce something of value: as you can see in the works of her friends Cecil Beaton, Rex Whistler and Malcolm Sargent.
Michael Duff moved in the same circles, and fell in and out of relationships with men; sometimes artists, sometimes not. He inherited a ‘cold damp house’ called Vaynol, in Wales. The estate included slate quarries that paid for the staff, and for parties that he loved to throw for favoured guests, most favoured of all members of the royal family.
It’s no wonder that Duff refers to the ‘weirdness of my upbringing’. His father loathed him. The book opens with an account of Michael’s attempt to hex David by leaving scraps of paper with David’s name in the top drawer of chests around the house. ‘My father’s intention was not clarified until my teenage years, when I read Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love and learnt of Uncle Matthew’s belief in the consequence of putting names in drawers.’
Typically, the ambiguity of his situation is revealed in prose of the clearest poise. His mother abandoned the house, but not yet David, to live with her lover, the actress Audrey Carten.
Duff’s story is not as bleak as it might be. He records meeting both the monsters and the charmers of the period, mostly friends of his mother. Tallulah Bankhead told David, ‘I must always do what I felt like in life, if I knew it to be true to myself.’ While there’s no doubt she always did what she felt like, Duff seems to have resisted the urge, often.
One of the few things that was consistently reliable in Duff’s life is his love of music, especially opera. He struck up friendships with conductors as well as actors. He was given a baton by Karajan.
About halfway through the book, Duff narrates the final crisis of his relationship with his father. In a scene reminiscent of Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights trilogy, their two dogs savaged one another in the drawing room. ‘Vindictiveness replaced spite, slander replaced mild unpleasantness and hatred replaced coldness.’ It was a breach that could never be reconciled.
The second half of the book races over events faster than the attention Duff gives to his childhood. Trips to Tangiers where he and Joe Orton had sex in a changing cubicle, running through theatre jobs and drink, his father’s continual slanders and the growing froideur of his beautiful, spoilt mother add up to a choppily compelling portrait of a loveless young man struggling to gain a purchase on his own life.
There is a single description of an act of kindness from his father. At the age of five or six, Duff is lying ill in bed at Vaynol. His father comes in ‘with a glass of brandy which he suggested I drink: “Always good for tummies.” I did and it was.’ That final sentence is characteristically lacking in otiosity. It is simple and precise. But it goes beyond that. There is an intelligence and nobility in the clipped, unselfish attitude on show in this book that reveals something of a way of being that is fast fading from the collective memory. It is, in many ways, a gift of a book.