Mr Cattermole’s Successors

In the autumn of 1991, I started working for the Royal Society of Literature, one of the strangest and most beguiling organizations in London. Nobody, not even Roy Jenkins, its President, seemed to have much idea of the RSL’s purpose, and so in the evenings, after work, I took to exploring the archives. They lived in a small room over the front door of the Society’s home, 1 Hyde Park Gardens, stuffed into lever arch files whose spines read like a register of literary ghosts: Barrie, Beckett, Beerbohm, Blunden, Brooke . . . The yellowing letters inside the files did not, on the whole, concern matters of great intellectual weight – one Fellow had left his kid gloves after a lecture and wanted them ‘sent down’ to him in the country; another, suffering from lumbago, offered his apologies for the next Council meeting. But among them I found something that made me sit up. It was a list of my predecessors as Secretary: ten of them, beginning, in 1820, with Mr Cattermole. On average, I calculated, they had each served seventeen years. Never! I thought. Not me!

It took a while to understand that time moved differently at the RSL. In the first-floor office – a room roughly the size and shape of a tennis court ‒ Rip Van Winkle might have woken from a fifty-year doze to find little changed. I worked at a roll-top desk on a manual typewriter. There was only one electrical point, and no central heating, so in the winter I huddled over a free-standing gas heater which, on ignition, belched flames like a dragon. Ranged around me on the shelves were supplies of stationery that must have been laid in when the Society moved here, on a fixed rent of £500 per annum, just after the war. There were sticks of sealing wax, ox-blood red and embossed, curiously, ‘BANK OF ENGLAND’. There were boxes of dip-pen nibs from a Birmingham company called C. Brandauer & Co. Ltd. I have one in front of me as I write. ‘These pens neither scratch nor spurt,’ it boasts on the side, ‘the points being rounded by a new process.’ Next door, in the library, the clocks had stopped in the mid-1970s. The glass-fronted bookcases were filled with volumes by Fellows, who had once been able to spend time here, sunk in deep leather armchairs, reading one another’s work. But one Fellow, I discovered in the archives, had taken to calling wearing two pairs of generously tailored trousers, sewn together at the hem. On each visit, he posted a few books in at the waist and walked away with them. When his felony was discovered, the library was closed. It was here, amid the dust and silence, that I discovered the work of the Orkney poet George Mackay Brown. His poetry was dazzling: fresh and spontaneous, and yet so natural as to seem almost inevitable. It led me to travel north to meet him, and to form a warm, unlikely friendship that changed my life. Before the RSL moved in, 1 Hyde Park Gardens had been home to General Sir Ian Hamilton, leader of the Gallipoli expedition. The General as a young man, in full fencing fig, gazed down from two life-size portraits on the stairs over the lecture hall, formerly a ballroom, where he and his wife had held parties between the wars – parties, Compton Mackenzie wrote, where ‘the present and the past were always in urbane accord’ and ‘decade met decade as gracefully as dancers meet in a quadrille’. He might have made similar observations had he attended an RSL Council meeting in the early 1990s. Sitting around a gigantic mahogany table, in the panelled dining-room just off the lecture hall, Council members in those days included John Mortimer, who chaired meetings with a cunning mixture of discipline and hilarity, P. D. James, John Carey, Isabel Quigly, Sybille Bedford, Gavin Ewart, Penelope Fitzgerald, Victoria Glendinning and Peter Vansittart (Peter tended to arrive tousled, in a pair of gumboots, having tramped miles across Suffolk in order to catch the train to London). They drank tea and crumbled cake on Spode plates, and everyone was very kind. Lecture evenings were equally civilized, and baffling. Once, my predecessor Pat Schute told me, Anthony Storr had given a paper entitled ‘Writers and Recurrent Depression’. Fellows and Members were forced that night to queue for seats; the hall was packed. But, by 1991, to get as many as twenty at a lecture was thought pretty good. They sat on metal-framed chairs with very old blue canvas seats that sometimes gave way during meetings with a terrible flatulent rip. They tended to keep their coats on – 1 Hyde Park Gardens had a way of retaining its winter chill well into early summer – and quite often they fell asleep. But, although almost all were elderly, some were much more formidable than they looked. The programme for the autumn of 1991 kicked off with a debate about censorship, chaired by P. D. James, with Roger Scruton on the panel. As it was opened to the floor for questions, Elma Dangerfield, Secretary of the Byron Society, raised her hand. ‘I have a question for Mr Scruton,’ she said. ‘I wonder if he’d be good enough to tell me why it is that the younger generation spend so much of their time copulating?’ Scruton winced. ‘Please don’t turn away, Mr Scruton,’ she persisted. ‘I live in South Kensington, and I know.’ What might have become of the RSL had the staff not grown I do not know. I was joined first by a recent English graduate, Julia Abel Smith, and then by the novelist David Hughes’s wife Elizabeth. Together, the three of us set about gently shaking the Society from its long slumber. Elizabeth organized Fellows’ lunches, transporting crockery and glasses and whole poached salmon from her home in Kennington in the boot of her Saab. David, meanwhile, decided we had all had enough of the Society’s dour bi-annual publication, Essays by Divers Hands (‘like a jeu d’esprit by Jacques Cousteau’, one friend noted), and replaced it with a lively magazine, Letters. John Mortimer, fed up with warm white wine, donated a twelve-bottle fridge. And the Hon. Treasurer, Sir Richard Faber, agreed to go halves with me on a computer. It was an Amstrad, from Ryman’s in Edgware Road, and very out of place it looked at first. Quickly, however, it seemed not only to absorb but also to contribute to the eccentricity all around it. One afternoon, I asked it to ‘spellcheck’ the minutes of the AGM. Roy Jenkins was our President, and Michael Holroyd had just taken over as Chairman. Quick as a flash, the Amstrad altered their names to ‘Jerkin’ and ‘Hotrod’, like a pair of ne’er-do-wells from Blackadder. It was the biographer Jeremy Treglown who suggested that, rather than being packed off into the Bayswater night, speakers might be offered a ‘light supper’ after lectures; and it was he who set about enlivening the programme and encouraging the Council to invite a series of world-class speakers. I have memories of talks, and moments within talks, that I will treasure until I die: Harold Pinter, all in black, reading from ‘Betrayal’; Colin Thubron ‘in conversation’ with a rascally and not-easily-to-be-drawn Patrick Leigh Fermor; Seamus Heaney telling us of the tragic death of his younger brother at the age of 4, before reciting ‘Mid-Term Break’. In the porch I met my father crying . . . At moments like this, I thought I had the best job in London. My friends were not so sure. ‘You’re not exactly going to find a husband here,’ one said, glancing around my cavernous office. But she was wrong. Around the corner, at 45 Hyde Park Square, lived Dr Fergusson, Hon. Physician to the RSL. And one evening he came to listen to Muriel Spark read from Curriculum Vitae, bringing with him as his guest his son, Jamie . . . Jamie and I held a wedding party in 1 Hyde Park Gardens, and on 1 September 1999 our elder daughter, Flora, celebrated her first birthday there. The Council table groaned with jelly and cake. The lecture hall, so often the setting for brilliant speakers in the evening of their lives, rang with the cries and gurgles of toddling infants not yet able to talk. By then time, which had seemed so plentiful for so many years, was running out. Just before Christmas that year, I felt for the last time the clunk of the heavy door in my hand, gave back the keys to the caretaker, and prepared to move the RSL east, to Somerset House. ‘It will never be the same again,’ Roy Jenkins said mournfully; and I agreed. But I think, in a way, we were both wrong. In the office now, we are surrounded by reminders of our old home – one of the portraits of General Sir Ian Hamilton; the Mortimer fridge; the sealing wax; the pen nibs. But the spirit of the RSL runs much deeper than its chattels. I am not sure it is possible to capture it in words, but perhaps Compton Mackenzie inadvertently got close when he talked of past and present embracing one another ‘in urbane accord’. And all the while the average tenure of Mr Cattermole’s successors gets longer and longer. I hope it will continue to do so for a few years yet. Membership of the Royal Society of Literature is open to all. For more details see www.rsliterature.org.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 50 © Maggie Fergusson 2016