The New Confessions

7 Superb-Imperial

London. July 1922. I kissed my pregnant wife good-bye and walked down the stairs to the front door. Sonia stood and watched me go.

“Remember. Be sensible. Use your head.”

“Don’t worry.”

I stepped outside onto the Dawes Road, Fulham. A dray was delivering beer to the pub, the Salisbury, above which we lived. The weather was sultry, overcast, but not too hot. I took off my hat and resettled it on my head. Ten-thirty in the morning — it was not such a bad time to be going to work. I felt in quite a good mood. I crossed the road to the news agent and bought a copy of the Morning Post, I sauntered off down the road to Walham Green underground station. I worked in Islington and had a long journey to make across the city from Fulham. We lived in Fulham because Sonia had been born there and did not want to move far from her parents (a moderately pleasant couple: he was a retired salesman in pharmacological goods; we were never short of medicaments).

At Walham Green I bought a first-class ticket to King’s Cross. I was earning over six hundred pounds a year: I could afford to travel first class — which was one reason I preferred the underground to the more egalitarian “tube,” which had no first-class carriages.

I smoked a cigarette as I waited for the train. I felt calm, pleasantly secure, as if my life had finally reached the plateau of stability it had always been striving for.

When I returned to Edinburgh from Mainz at the end of 1918 I had possessed no such equilibrium. I have to say, though, that the side effects of my war experience and confinement had left no physical scars. My hands did not tremble, I did not start at every slamming door, I slept tolerably well with no nightmares. The immediate psychological effect, apart from the permanent one I mentioned earlier, was a curious disorienting lassitude. At first I lived reasonably happily with it, thankful that this was the sole consequence of those two traumatic years I would have to bear. But as 1919 wore on and I still found myself held in this lethargic stasis, I began to grow more worried.

But I am jumping ahead.

Was there anyone to meet me at Waverley Station in response to my telegram from London announcing my return home from the war? Answer: no. I walked across George IV Bridge towards the High Street with a thin bitter smile on my face. It was a cold, steel morning in Edinburgh with the usual frigid, scouring wind. I wore a flat felt cap, a secondhand suit of clothes provided for me at a Portsmouth hospital, and an army greatcoat. Once again my unusual status as only an honorary officer had run me foul of established procedure. I did not look like a returning hero. I had imagined myself in my well-cut coat, my jodhpurs, my glossy boots, a jaunty cap. Now I looked as if I had just been turned out of a Salvation Army hostel.

I tramped up the worn spiral stairs to our apartment and beat on the door. Oonagh opened it. It was two and a half years since I had last seen her. She was a little plumper but otherwise unchanged.

“Good God, it’s you!” she said with some surprise. “John James … my, my.”

“Yes, it’s me,” I said avidly, stepping inside.

“Your father said you’d be back today sometime. But there’s no luncheon for you. You’re too late.”

“I don’t want any fucking luncheon!”

I threw my cap down on a hall chair.

“Dearie, dearie me. What a fuss!”

I had calmed down by the time my father returned. He looked older, the eyes more deeply set, the wrinkles on his face more emphatic, his cheekbones’ tufts more grizzled. His mood was one of faint embarrassment, clearly perceptible through his halfhearted attempts to go through the correct welcoming motions. For example, he put his hands on my shoulders and said with ghastly theatricality, “Let me look at you!”

He looked.

“You’re older,” he said at last.

“Well, it has been two and a half years. Of course I’m older.” I was exasperated. “You’re older, Oonagh’s older. Everyone’s older.’

“There’s no need for sarcasm, John. It’s a most unpleasant modem tone of voice.” He turned away. “As young people, we deplored sarcasm.”

I ignored the lie.

“Minto made me pay the fee for the whole term, you know.”

“What?”

“When you ran away. I had to pay the fee for the whole term. You might have timed it better.”

Later, when I thought about his reaction, I charitably decided that it was an attempt to cover up the real emotions he was feeling. Thompson, for his part, was entirely candid: he made no effort to disguise his edginess and unease. He had changed more than anyone. He was quite fat now, almost possessing a middle-aged portliness. His features had softened, his cheeks swelling over his jawbone into his chin. He was doing well at the bank and was snug in the pinstriped uniform of his trade.

No one was especially curious about what had befallen me. Thompson had no desire to hear of my adventures — my presence alone was a sufficient rebuke to his sleek prosperity. My father was still too busy, and Oonagh, although a willing listener, was maddeningly unimpressed.

I spent a lot of time with her in the kitchen, as I had as a little boy. Then she had been amused by my stories; now she nodded a lot and made remarks like “Goodness me,” and “Well, I never.” Prison camp made the only impact.

“Terrible things for a family to have had a son in prison. Awful shame.”

Hamish was the only one who showed genuine curiosity. We met shortly into the New Year when he returned to the University, where he was doing postgraduate work in mathematics. He had completed his honors degree two years prematurely.

At his suggestion we arranged to meet in a pub in the Grassmarket. I arrived there a little late. It was dark outside and not much lighter within. There was a feeble, smoky coal fire in the grate and the bar was crowded with men in greatcoats and still wearing their hats. It took me some minutes to spot Hamish. He wore a gray homburg hat and stood at the farthest end of the bar looking up at the ceiling. He had a cigarette in his mouth and a pint of beer in his hand. I checked to see what he was staring at, but the corner of the ceiling that attracted his gaze seemed unexceptionable.

“Malahide,” I said.

He removed his cigarette from his mouth, careful not to let the ash drop. Most of his spots had gone; a few lingered around his ears and at his collar edge. His face, cleared, was terribly scarred by the acne, as he had predicted, stippled with pocks and color changes, the spectrum of pinks.

“Todd! Excellent … excellent!”

We shook hands warmly. He had grown taller; he had a couple of inches on me now. And thin. He smiled, showing his soft uneven teeth. At last, someone really pleased to see me. We found two seats not far from the fire and sat down. I told Hamish most of what had happened to me. He sat quietly and listened. He smoked constantly, keeping the cigarette in his mouth. He was scrupulous about ash falling and would ferry the cigarette to the ashtray — as if it were some fragile crystal phial — with a precautionary palm held beneath it, where it was gently and precisely tapped.

“I kept all your letters,” he said. “Did you keep mine?”

“Yes. They were in my kit. Sent back when I—”

“Good.”

I smiled. “How’s it going? The maths?”

“Incredible,” he said simply. “I can hardly go to sleep at night. The things that are happening.”

He started to explain what he was engaged on. Theories of relativity, I think he said. I could make nothing of it, but I was strangely affected by his passion. I was, for a brief moment, intensely jealous. I envied the strange world he was at home in. I said so, innocuously.

“It’s not so difficult,” he said. “You would understand the concepts. You were good at school.”

“I was good.”

“You started it all for me, you know.” He took the cigarette from his mouth and set it delicately down on the tin ashtray.

“I did?”

“Remember? Who invented prime numbers? I could do maths. But I never thought about it, what it all meant.” There was a clear subterranean glow in his sludge-green eyes. I wondered briefly if he was slightly mad — or a kind of genius.

Then he said, shyly, “Astonishing things are happening, John. The most amazing revelations. Everything is changing. Science is changing. We look at the world differently now. We thought we understood how it worked, but we were wrong. So wrong.”

“I see.”

“I’ll keep you posted.”

“Grand.” I did not know what to say. “Another pint?”

“Yes, please.”

Hamish and I met once or twice a week, the only moments of interest in an otherwise dull and featureless four months. I mooched around Edinburgh, sat in cheerless pubs, played the odd game of golf. Thompson, to his credit, introduced me to his set of friends — eager young Scots, crammed with ambition, full of getting and spending. I was poor company; after a month or two the invitations died away. For one week I developed a foolish passion for a girl who worked in the millinery department in Jenner’s and I took to following her discreetly in her lunch hour and on her journeys home to Davidson’s Mains.

In the summer we spent our usual two months at Drumlarish. Old Sir Hector was now over eighty, distracted and drooling with impending senility. I spent long afternoons pushing him in his bath chair through the blown gardens, my head probably emptier than his, to and fro, up and down, the wooden wheels of his bath chair crunching the gravel on the garden paths.

During the last fortnight Donald and Faye Verulam arrived with Peter Hobhouse. Peter had been badly gassed at Arras and could barely get half a dozen words out between appalling glutinous wheezes. The noise from his lungs sounded like gum boots in a marsh. I tried to forget the details of Captain Tuck’s gas lecture, but I found the combination of Peter’s brave smiles and cadaverous staring eyes too much to bear, and I spent a lot of time away from the house with my camera on ostensible photographic excursions.

With Faye there was intense embarrassment, but only on my side. It did not last long. She kissed and hugged me when we met, with what seemed like real affection. She and Donald were patently happy; they had been married just after the end of the war. And it was Donald, as ever, who came to my rescue. We were talking one day in the rose garden as I pushed Sir Hector around on his afternoon ramble. Donald asked me what I planned to do. I said I had not the faintest idea.

“Have you ever thought about the cinema?” he asked. “After all, you are a film cameraman.”

“No, I haven’t.”

“I’ve got a lot of contacts,” he said, “since WOCC. I’ll see what I can do.”

It took him some time. Summer passed. I sat on aimlessly in Edinburgh for the rest of 1919. My father and I began to fall out with irritating regularity. One day he offered me money to eat and drink nothing but pine nuts and goat’s milk for a week. I refused.

“What on earth use are you, then?” he shouted.

“I’m not a bloody monkey!” I shouted back.

“Well stop sitting round on your backside with your mouth open and I might believe it!”

I strode out of the room at this point, properly outraged, reminding him of what I had suffered on his and the country’s behalf. Peace was made, truculent apologies were exchanged, but it was ruptured a day or two later. Donald’s news came — fortuitously — just over a year since my return home. There was an opening for a junior cameraman. I should present myself for interview at the Superb-Imperial Film Company studios in Islington, London, Monday next. The salary was five pounds a week.

I changed trains at Earl’s Court and waited for a nonstopper Inner Circle Line to King’s Cross. I was still with Superb-Imperial, now one of two senior cameramen, and Raymond Maude had promised me that I should direct my first film “soon.” As I recalled this assurance, I frowned. This was one of the few irritants that were marring the banal placidity of my life. Maude had rejected my last four outlines for films. “Simply not Superb-Imperial,” he had said regretfully. He meant it. I knew he was fond of me. “Look what Harry’s doing,” Maude always said. “Take your lead from him.” And that was another irritant. Life did not seem so placid after all. “Harry” was Harold Faithfull, Maude’s — and Superb-Imperial’s — most successful director.…

I cracked open my paper. “Viscount Curzon said that the government only had nine flying aeroplanes in contrast to eighty-five possessed by the United States government.” I was going to present Maude with another idea today, one of Sonia’s. “Be sensible,” she had said. She was right. Her idea, the film I was going to propose, was called — I could hardly bring myself to utter the title—Wee MacGregor Wins the Sweepstakes.

Sonia … Sonia Todd, née Shorrold. I can see her now as she was then, with her short black hair held in place by clasps, parted like a curtain to reveal her oval face. The faintly puzzled expression that her round tortoiseshell spectacles gave her. The enigmatic expression was misleading. Sonia in those days had a certainty of intent and a clearness of purpose that I found immensely reassuring.

We had both started at Superb-Imperial in the same week. Her father sold chemicals to the film-developing labs there and managed to get her a job in the film-perforating department. She was bright and dexterous and was shortly moved to the editing rooms, where she became a film joiner. Our status as new employees brought us together. Soon, once or twice a week, we would go for a meal at the grill rooms round the corner from the studio.

Sonia was my age, a month or two younger. In those days she was quite a big girl, still soft, it seemed, with pubertal puppy fat. She was small-breasted with heavy hips and legs, but was always neat and tidy and dressed thoughtfully in dark colors, greens and blues. Her central parting was white and straight; her hair fell away from it in glossy brown waves. She was not pretty, exactly, but there was a quality about her I found alluring. Perhaps it was the spectacles, which she was obliged to wear for her work and reading. She reminded me of a spruced-up Huguette. And it was that association that encouraged me to ask her out one evening. We went to see Secrets at the Comedy Theatre, which she much enjoyed. I took her home to her parents’ house in Fulham, and so our relationship progressed in its utterly conventional and inevitable way.

I left the train at King’s Cross and took the Piccadilly Line one stop to York Road. She loved the theater, did Sonia, and the cinema. She was deeply affected by what she saw on stage and screen, wholly engrossed in the drama. I do not think I have ever observed such an eager, total and committed suspension of disbelief. Which was why, I suppose, she became so good at her job. She quit the editing department and was appointed a title writer for Superb-Imperial’s two-reelers. She was very good. She had an instinctive feel for the exact clichéd expression that was unsurpassed. She had to leave her job when her pregnancy advanced, but Maude told her she could have it back whenever she was ready.

Superb-Imperial’s studios were off the Caledonian Road in a converted automobile engineering works. There were two large stages, where the old workshops had been, and where the corrugated asbestos roofing had been replaced by glass. In an alley at the back were the darkrooms, printing and chemical labs, carpenters’ workshops, scenery docks, dressing rooms, a buffet, a greenroom, and the clerical and accounting offices. Everything required for the production of films.

I arrived at Superb-Imperial in its heyday. Raymond Maude had started making films before the war (backed by investments from his wife, Rosita). He had made his money and reputation on a stream of two-reelers, two series of which proved inexhaustibly successful. These were the Anna series — Anna the Milkmaid, Anna Goes on Holiday, Anna Falls in Love, etc., etc. — and the Fido series, about, naturally, a dog—Fido Saves Baby, Fido at Sea, Fido Falls in Love, etc., etc. It is impossible for me to convey just how truly deplorable these films were. It seems to me now quite inconceivable that anyone should actually pay money to see them, but they did, in their droves, and Maude and Superb Films prospered. In 1918 he bought Imperial films for its studio space and Superb-Imperial was born. Maude still churned out two-reelers, but he had ambitions to make feature-length films. He was a shrewd enough man, was Maude. After the war he hired Harold Faithfull (at five thousand pounds a year) and bought a lot of film stock from the WOCC — hence his connection with Donald Verulam — and produced a seven-reel action-adventure war film called Steady the Buffs. Eighteen months later, when I joined, it was still playing in cinemas up and down the country. Emboldened by this success, Maude created a stock company of actors and started making longer versions of his two-reelers. Gertie Royston, who had played Anna for years, became a real star. Faithfull directed her in Summer Skies, a ghastly sentimental tale about Anna on holiday saving some drowning lad who turns out to be Lord Fortesque’s son and … I cannot bear to go on. In any event, you will understand why my own suggestions were being turned down. Maude was not cynical: he was immensely proud of his company of actors. (You will have heard of some of them: Warwick Sheffield, Alma Urban, Alec Neame and Flora de Solla were the most celebrated. There were others. For the record: Harry Bliss, Violet Scott-Brown, Ivo Keene, and a dreadful old soak called Elwin Hulcup, a has-been music hall comedian who was tolerated because he owned Fido, the famous dog.)

The first film I shot — Maude himself directing — was a Fido two-reeler called Fido at the Wheel. It was shamefully dire, but I did not care. I was thrilled, excited, intensely grateful to be working. I loved the Islington studio. I was in awe of the actors and actresses. I gawped at Warwick Sheffield’s sophistication; I thought Alma Urban the most sensuously beautiful woman I had ever seen. To be allowed to mingle with these luminaries was a fabulous privilege. It did not last. When I heard Harry Bliss’s anecdotes for the third time it took a massive effort to keep the smile pasted on my face. It was not long before I detected a faint but unmistakable West Country burr beneath Flora de Solla’s “French” accent. Warwick Sheffield borrowed five pounds from me one evening after filming and never paid me back.… No matter. For a year or so I was entranced. I filmed Anna Learns to Fly, Anna Triumphant! and Fido’s Fortune and many more. Then Maude teamed me up with Faithfull and we made two 7-reelers: Sanctuary with Alec Neame and Alma Urban, and Taboo starring Reggie Fitzhamon, Flora de Solla and Ivy Pridelle. I learned my trade. Panorams, Akeley shots. How to deploy effectively the electric lights when London fogs made daylight filming difficult: the mercury vapor lamps, the sunlight arcs, the tilts, toplights and spotlights. I was happy; not even Faithfull could disturb me.

Of course Faithfull had not been pleased at my arrival. “We wondered what had become of you, Todd,” he said. His attitude was always cool, though we worked well enough together as a team. But when I saw how complacently Faithfull directed (he was at the height of his renown in the years immediately following the war), I began to have ambitions to direct myself. I went regularly to the cinema, to American and European films, and I soon realized how deficient Superb-Imperial’s product was in almost every area. I worked out a story about a young officer returning from prisoner-of-war camp to find that his fiancée has married his best friend. He tries to be brave and cope with the shocking disappointment, but, to their dismay, the two ex-lovers find their passion renewing itself. The hero ends up with two choices: kill his best friend or himself. He opts for suicide to preserve his fiancée’s happiness. I called it Love’s Sacrifice.

I took my outline to Maude after I had been with Superb-Imperial for eighteen months. Maude was a diffident-looking man with a slack innocuous face and a soft gray toothbrush moustache. He wore light-brown suede shoes and well-tailored suits. His wife, Rosita, was an overweight extravagant woman with vast breasts and a large mole on one cheek that, oddly, added a strange glamour to her. I think she was half Portuguese — or entirely Portuguese, I am not sure. The money behind Superb-Imperial came from sugar estates in Portuguese East Africa. I rather liked her. She spoke fast breathless English and smoked little black knobbled cheroots in a squat bone holder.

Maude called me into his office above the carpenters’ shops a couple of days later. Rosita stood behind his chair. I was busy on Taboo. We had been filming a downpour in a jungle. I remember my hair was wet.

“About Love’s Sacrifice,” he began. He looked doleful. “I’m disappointed, John, very disappointed that you could suggest this to me.”

“Sorry?” I was baffled.

“Is not Superb film,” Rosita added loudly. “Is dram. Melodram, yes, maybe. But dram, no. Not at a Superb.”

“Remember this, John, and you won’t go off the rails. We want people to come out of our cinemas with a smile on their faces. Happy endings, please.”

There was more of the same platitudinous nonsense. It was possibly the most sustained bout of bad advice I had ever received. I went back to the dank jungles of Taboo.

Two more of my ideas were turned down for similar reasons. I told Sonia of my troubles on a Saturday afternoon as we sat in a tearoom on the New King’s Road. It must have been October or November. Taboo was over. I was now working on Fido Saves the Day. Sonia was neat in an emerald-green suit trimmed with black velvet. She had put her spectacles on to read the menu. I noticed that she was wearing a little lipstick. I liked to kiss her when she was wearing lipstick (we had progressed that far); I enjoyed the sweet waxy taste. She was going “Tum tum tum tum” as she read through the menu. I looked at her white parting, drilled across the crown of her head, and felt a sudden weakness in my lungs, as if breathing were an effort, and a curious spiraling sensation in my groin. The waitress came over.

“Pot of tea for two. Ceylon, please. A slice of cherry cake and a rock cake. Wha’ abou’ you, Johnny?” She had a slight glottal stop in her London accent, which she was taking pains to make more genteel. I knew I was in love with her there and then.

“Cheese bun, please.”

We were married on January 18, 1922, in St. Peter’s Church, Filmer Road, Fulham. No member of my family was present. My father sent fifty pounds, Oonagh her best wishes and Thompson a set of six silver-plated apostle spoons.

I now realize that I married Sonia for sex. I was almost twenty-three years old and still a virgin. Before I met Sonia my previous sexual contact with a human being (apart from myself) had been with Karl-Heinz back in Weilburg. And with a woman? Huguette in the dim shed behind the estaminet in 1917. I will not bore you with the details of my and Sonia’s sexual apprenticeship, the gaffes and moist surprises of our wedding night (we honeymooned in Hove over a weekend — I was needed for filming on the Monday), but for two virgins we soon became quite proficient at the act. I was very fond of Sonia’s plump friendly body. She had small firm breasts with odd domed nipples, and remarkably luxuriant pudenda. She used depilatory creams on her armpits and on her legs below the knee. I pleaded vainly with her to let the hair grow again. I liked her too, I confess, because she was strange to me. English, a Londoner, almost as foreign as Huguette, and upper lower class with an uneducated accent. She fell pregnant two months after the marriage. It seemed that after a twenty-three-year delay I was now racing headlong after maturity. I wanted a girl child. I felt I was not ready for a son and heir.

When Maude rejected my reworked version of Love’s Sacrifice—the hero, about to commit suicide, learns of his rival’s death in a motoring accident and is then reunited with his former fiancée — I was on the point of abandoning all my ambitions to direct. Superb-Imperial were making their most expensive film ever, a historical-romance-adventure called The Blue Cockade, set in some Ruritanian never-never land. It was costing eighteen thousand pounds, Faithfull was to direct and I was to be cameraman. Maude, in another astute move on his part, or possibly at Rosita’s behest, went to America and hired Mary Mount at a thousand pounds a week to star. Faithfull had negotiated a bonus over his salary of two thousand pounds. Out of the goodness of his heart, Maude gave me one of five hundred. Suddenly I seemed preposterously well off and secure. It was Sonia who urged me to try one more idea on the Maudes.

I do owe her this, I admit it. I would have done nothing more without her encouragement. Looking back on my hectic life, those early years in London now appear an island of bourgeois inertia and complacency. We had our flat above the pub (three pounds a week), and I could send down for beer whenever I liked. I had a well-paid, stimulating and not too arduous job. I had a pretty, adoring wife. The fly feasting in the jam jar feels no need for a change of scene.

Maude and Rosita loved the idea of Wee MacGregor Wins the Sweepstakes. (I will not inflict the plot on you. It is all there in the title anyway.) They loved it so much, they took me off The Blue Cockade. The film could start as soon as the script was written. I set to work immediately.

For some reason Harold Faithfull took my transferral from his film as a personal insult. Maude gave me a small office next to the sprocket-punching department where I worked on the logistics of the production. Early one evening, as the girls next door were packing up, Faithfull confronted me.

Faithfull had grown sleeker since the war. He wore expensive clothes and that evening a ray of sun caused his yellow cashmere cardigan to blaze with arrogant wealth. His sulky handsome face gleamed. He was perspiring slightly, either from drink, choler or the steepness of the stairs.

“What do you think you’re playing at, Todd?” he demanded. He stood in the doorway and lit a cigarette. He glanced round my office. “What are you trying to do with your poxy little film?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Either this is a misguided attempt to ruin me or you’ve got some nasty little back-street ambitions of your own.”

“You know I’ve always wanted to make my own films.”

“But you’re a cameraman, Todd. Always will be. I’m the director.”

The patrician disdain in his voice made me angry.

“But you couldn’t direct traffic in a one-way street, Faithfull,” I said calmly.

It was not such a brilliant riposte, I admit, but it did well in the heat of the moment. Faithfull lumbered forward and swung a punch at me across the desk. He missed, but his momentum knocked some papers and an inkwell to the floor. Ink spattered the cuffs of his pale mushroom trousers.

“You fucking Scottish lumphead!” he yelled. “You make this film and you’ll never make another!” He stomped out of the room. Some of the girls looked in, giggling, to see what all the fuss was about.

I was panting with excitement. I felt strangely invigorated. I knew why Faithfull was so upset: it was an oblique tribute to my crucial contribution to Sanctuary and Taboo. Faithfull needed me and he was worried about producing The Blue Cockade without me. I replaced the papers and inkwell on the desk and blotted up the stains. For the first time I had had my own confidence in my talent and ability confirmed — and by a hostile witness, no less. I wore a modest smile of satisfaction all the way back to Fulham.

It was Sonia’s father, Vincent, who pointed out the advertisement to me. Every Sunday we had dinner chez Shorrold. They lived in a small, brown, terraced house with a good view of Fulham Palace football ground. The meal never changed — gravy soup, leg of mutton, fruit tart with custard; neither did the atmosphere of stifling boredom. After the meal, Sonia and her mother, Noreen — a decent, dull, long-suffering woman — washed up, giving the men the opportunity for a smoke. Vincent Shorrold was a small spry chap with the impressive but ultimately fragile self-assurance of a traveling salesman. He would initiate conversations with remarks of what seemed at first adamantine authority.

“No. No question. No, definitely. The Allies should take over all of Germany’s mines and forests. Every last tree.” He was reading about the reparation conference in his newspaper. “It’s the only way. The only justice.”

“But Vincent,” I said reasonably, “what we need is cash. Seizing mines and forests won’t provide any cash.”

He looked trapped, dismayed. “Oh.… Oh yes. Perhaps. I see what you mean.” He turned back to his newspaper.

Most of our discussions ran in this manner. Aggressive assertion, polite rebuttal on my part, wordless collapse. He smoked a pipe with a little perforated lid on the bowl. This attachment made me illogically irritated. I heard the clatter of cutlery on crockery from the kitchen and the indistinct noises of Sonia and her mother talking. I felt a profound inertia penetrate me; the air of the room seemed to brew with apathy. I gazed emptily ahead, a thin rope of smoke from my cigarette swaying and shimmying in front of me.

“This was your mob, wasn’t it?” He read: “Thirteenth (Public School) Service Battalion, South Oxfordshire Light Infantry.…” He folded the paper open and handed it over. It was an advertisement for a reunion parade and dinner a month hence. Former members of the battalion were invited to foregather on Wandsworth Common at 4:30 P.M. for a brief parade and address by a Brigadier General Pughe, followed by dinner in the function rooms of the Cape of Good Hope public house in Wandsworth High Street (price, five shillings and sixpence). Applications were to be sent to R.J.M. Tuck (major, ret.).

I was a little late arriving at the common, and I could see a group of several dozen suited men already lined up in front of a small dais equipped with loudspeakers and draped in Union Jack bunting. I walked across the grass towards them, feeling a little nervous. I had been uncertain what to wear and in the end had dressed soberly, as if going to a funeral: a charcoal-gray three-piece suit and black bowler hat. I even carried a mackintosh. It was a mild September day; the chestnut trees on the common were beginning to turn. As I approached I saw that a lot of the men were carrying rolled umbrellas — surrogate rifles, I thought, and wished I had brought mine.

Someone I did not know crossed my name off a list and took my raincoat (“Can’t march with one of those over your arm!”) and I joined a column of men. I greeted a few people whom I recognized and asked myself why I had bothered to come.

We were marched off a hundred yards or so and stood easy. Then we saw three motorcars bump across the grass towards the dais. Some men got out, one of them in uniform. One man strode over to us. I recognized Major Tuck. He went to the head of the column, called us to attention, shouted, “By the left, quick march!” We marched over to the dais, were halted, saluted and were inspected by the brigadier general. Then we listened to him give a halfhearted speech about how we should not allow the iron bonds of comradeship forged in the bitter tempest of war to wither and decay in the soothing balm of peace. We were assembled, I discovered, to celebrate the eighth anniversary of the founding of the battalion. The parade ended with the surviving member of the pipe band (the others were killed, you will remember, carrying stew to the front-line trenches in 1917) playing “The Bonnets of Bonny Dundee.” We repaired to the function suite of the Cape of Good Hope.

Here the atmosphere was a little more convivial. At high table sat the general, Tuck, Colonel O’Dell and Noel Kite’s father, Findlay, and beside him Noel, with a crude wooden hand. We milled around looking for friends to sit beside. I heard my name called and looked round. It was Leo Druce in a chocolate-brown pinstriped suit. He had four medals on his chest. We greeted each other with restrained but real enthusiasm.

“What’s that lot?” I asked, pointing at his decorations.

“Campaign medals. Why aren’t you wearing yours?”

“I didn’t know I was entitled.”

“You were there, weren’t you? Let’s grab a pew.”

We ate rather well: clear mock-turtle soup, boiled sole with a caper sauce, veal collops, roast ham, Coburg pudding and deviled herring roes. (I thought we had done excellently for our five shillings and sixpence. During the speeches I learned that Findlay Kite was responsible for the purvey.) Druce looked prosperous. His thick toffee-colored hair was brushed straight back from his forehead. His shirt looked to me like silk. He wore, I noticed, a large gold signet ring, which I did not recall having seen before. We ate and talked and filled in the intervening years. I had more to relate than he. Druce’s injury had kept him away from the front for months. Then he had been transferred to the Army Service Corps and had been commissioned a lieutenant in 1918. After the war he had tried various jobs and was thinking of going overseas before a modest legacy allowed him to buy a small business in his hometown, Coventry, hiring out motorcars and buses.

As the evening progressed and we drank more, we became predictably maudlin and sentimental. We sought out Noel Kite, by now very drunk, and with the inevitable nostalgia began to reminisce about the “good old days” at Coxyde-Bains and Nieuport. We drank toasts to “absent friends”: Louise, Maitland Bookbinder, Tim Somerville-Start, Julian Teague—

“But Teague’s here,” Noel Kite said.

“Where?”

Kite waved his wooden hand towards the end of the room. “With the cripples.”

A trestle table with a generous overhang had been set up for men in wheelchairs; We made our way down towards it.

Teague’s eyebrows had never grown back and his blunt burned face had a stretched, sore, permanently surprised look to it. His terraced hair grew thick and curly as ever. His trouser legs were neatly pinned up — folded, I thought, like napkins. He was tackling his Coburg pudding with his one good hand. The damaged flesh on the other seemed to have fused the remaining fingers together into a strange arthritic point, like a carved beak. I heard Kite and Druce exchange sotto voce “Good Gods” when they saw him. I sat down.

“Teague,” I said. “It’s me, Todd.”

He looked at me with his one good eye.

“My God,” he said. “You made it.”

I ushered in Kite and Druce and the reminiscing continued. I told them about Teague’s last day as a complete human being. Teague drank a toast to me: “The man who saved my life.” I got rather drunk. I remember Teague whispering to me, “I never told you, but I got MacKanness. Fixed him. Just before you and I met up.” Then Kite said, “Here we are, all that’s left of the bombers.” He looked at me with, I thought, real hostility. “And only Todd came through without a scratch.”

I walked unsteadily back with Druce over Wandsworth Bridge, the coolish breeze off the Thames and memories of Kite’s remark having sobered me up somewhat. Druce said he would pick up a taxi at Parson’s Green. We had exchanged addresses, sworn to meet again at next year’s reunion and in general run the gamut of bibulous avowals. We stood under the electric light at Parson’s Green and made our farewells. I felt a hard obstruction in my throat when I shook his hand and said good-bye. Of all the companions the war had forced on me, Leo Druce was the one I liked the best. I thought back to my miserable weeks with the bantams and felt sure that if I had been with Druce rather than Teague I would have borne up better.

“I’d like you to meet Sonia,” I said thickly. “Must try and get up to Coventry. Once I’ve made this film.”

“I say, Todd,” Druce frowned. “You couldn’t see your way to lending me a tenner, could you?”

“Of course.” I took out my wallet. For some reason I had more than thirty pounds in it. I handed two fivers over.

“Pleasure,” I said.

“Couldn’t make it twenty, could you?”

I counted out another two. “Pay me back when I come to Coventry,” I said cheerfully.

Druce smoothed his hair with both hands. He looked as if he had a dull but nagging ache somewhere inside him, deep.

“In fact …” he began. “Everything I said tonight — to you and Kite and Teague — was a load of nonsense.” He did not smile. “I’m broke. Stony. Bailiffs have got my cars, my garage. I’ve got a couple of tenseater charabancs in a friend’s yard, but I can’t afford the license fee. I came here, tonight, to see if I could tap an ‘old comrade’ or two.”

He told me more about his difficulties. I half-listened. I was moved by his candor. In the state I was in I would have emptied my wallet, no questions asked. I saw the essential decency of Leo Druce then, and I felt truly sorry for him. His appearance, his manner, his personality, seemed to promise so much. But nothing in his life had lived up to his potential. I resolved to do what I could to help him.

That did not turn out to be much of a problem. At my instigation, Superb-Imperial hired Druce’s two charabancs as cast and crew transportation for the filming of Wee MacGregor Wins the Sweepstakes. He had to wait a couple of months and had to get the vehicles up to Edinburgh, but Maude paid him half his fee in advance, which saw him over his initial difficulties and kept his creditors at bay.

We started filming in mid-November in and around Edinburgh (Harry Bliss was playing Wee MacGregor and we had to wait for him to finish his role in The Blue Cockade—hence the delay). I warned Maude about the problems of filming in limited daylight, but he needed the film as soon as possible and insisted we press ahead. I had insisted for my part on filming in Edinburgh. Location filming was then the latest fashion, but I was prompted more by my own inclinations to authenticity. In the event, it took approximately twice as long as planned owing to appalling weather, Harry Bliss coming down with pleurisy and the holidays at Christmas and New Year’s. For Leo (we were on first-name terms now) this was a bonus, as his fee virtually doubled. As the frustrating weeks went on, so his old confidence returned. As a cost-cutting exercise I was producer, director and cameraman, but I soon relinquished that first role to Leo. His experience of military logistics in the Service Corps proved highly useful. He managed to procure a small mobile generator that enabled us to deploy arc lamps while on location. He also bought three large sheets of mirrored glass, which we used to bounce light back onto the actors on murky days. Wee MacGregor, I am the first to admit, is by no means an example of good lighting, but the fact that it was lit at all was something of a miracle — whose working was almost entirely due to Leo.

One other aspect of the film is worth recording here. At a key juncture in the story, Wee MacGregor, down on his luck, his last pennies spent in a consoling pub, shambles drunkenly out into the rain and weaves his way home to his dreadful lodging house. He spots on the ground a cardboard ticket — the eponymous sweepstakes ticket — and unthinkingly pockets it. I wanted to shoot this moment from Wee MacGregor’s point of view. Recalling my experiments with a hand-held camera in the field outside Elverdinghe, I decided to try again. I broke apart a large alarm clock and, removing the cranking handle on the camera, rigged up the clockwork spring to the turning ratchet. Wound up and set going, this device gave me about thirty seconds of filming at the regular speed of sixteen frames a second.

In the completed film, we cut from Wee MacGregor bouncing off the alleyway walls to what appears to be his uncertain gaze (nice work with the focus) wandering about the cobbled lane. The camera halts at the ticket, wavers, closes up and a hand comes into frame to lift it off the ground. I claim this as the first commercial use in Great Britain, possibly the world, of an independently powered camera. Later, when small portable dynamos and compressed air bottles were commonplace power sources, I still used my clockwork device for short bursts. I never liked cranking cameras and was an early advocate of the power drive. My only regret is that it was not available to me during the first war. I could have filmed the most sensational footage.

The delay in the film upset Sonia, who was most annoyed when I told her I had to return to Scotland after New Year’s, and our marriage experienced its first truly bitter row. She was heavily pregnant and our child was due in January. I said I would try and get away. In fact I was filming in the Pentland Hills when our son Vincent, named after his maternal grandfather, was born. I remember the cable:

SON BORN JAN 5 10:30 AM STOP MOTHER AND VINCENT DOING WELL STOP VINCENT

At first I thought Vincent Shorrold was making some kind of feeble joke. It was only when I returned home two weeks later that I learned the shocking truth and discovered my son was called Vincent Todd. He had been registered and I was told it was too late now for second thoughts. I was violently opposed to the name and fell out badly with old man Shorrold when he demanded to know what my objections were. I had to give way and have always regretted my weakness. I now had a son whose name I disliked. Every time I said “Vincent,” Vincent Shorrold’s face came unpleasantly to mind. As I have said before, names are important to me. This surrender on my part proved to be a serious error.

Wee MacGregor Wins the Sweepstakes turned out to be a sizable commercial success. Even the critics were kind. The Daily Telegraph described it as “a delightful example of Caledonian folk-comedy.” The Herald said, “Harry Bliss has never been so hilarious.” Bioscope commented, “A limp comedy of shameful banality redeemed only by its technical excellence.” Close-up remarked, “If this is the best that the British cinema industry can produce, we should shut up shop and go home.” But Superb-Imperial’s audience loved it. The film made twenty-one thousand pounds at the box office in its first two months of release (the trade show was in April 1923). Maude and Rosita were ecstatic. At Sonia’s prompting I asked Rosita to be Vincent’s godmother and she happily consented.

In fact the success came at an opportune time because Maude was having terrible problems with The Blue Cockade. Thanks to Faithfull’s ineptitude it took over sixteen weeks to film and the costs escalated to twenty-nine thousand pounds, not including Mary Mount’s fee. Faithfull now cut me dead at the studios. Apparently he and Mary Mount hated each other. Originally, she had agreed to stay on and make another film for Superb-Imperial, but she left the instant Blue Cockade was over. The film itself was a box office disaster. Even with Mary Mount as its star, no American renter would touch it.

Maude sold the rights to Wee MacGregor to a film distributor, Ideal Film Renters, for ten thousand pounds to make a quick profit. Ideal, so I learned later, paid him another fifteen thousand to make two more Wee MacGregor five-reelers, and these I was duly contracted to film. For the first time I was regarded as a director proper. Maude and I drew up an interim agreement. I would complete the two films before the end of 1923 for a fee of four thousand pounds. Leo Druce was to be producer on them both.

It was not exactly what I wanted, but I could not ignore this good fortune. And, I suppose, this was a happy enough time, this summer of 1923. Leo had moved down to London and we both shared an office in the alley at Islington. Sonia and the baby were fine, and Sonia soon came up with the script for Wee MacGregor’s Holiday and had a promising idea for the third film—King Wee MacGregor!

But I was somewhat unsettled and preoccupied. The Wee MacGregor films were far from the ambitions that had been born with Aftermath of Battle. I applied myself professionally to them but my mind was barely engaged. It was as if my imagination was away on patrol, scouting the countryside for a task that was equal to it. The garrison it left behind, as it were, kept the fort running, ticking over, but life there was drab and tedious. I felt myself oddly demeaned. I was an artist; I had grand plans, fabulous conceptions. The Wee MacGregors allowed me some license to experiment technically, but I was growing to loathe them, and myself for making them. A measure of my disquiet was the fact that I had a bitter stand-up row, over some matter or other, with the irrepressibly chirpy Harry Bliss — whom I could not separate from the character and consequently detested as much. We almost came to blows. Leo told me to bide my time — soon I would be able to do exactly as I wanted. But all I could see was an endless run of Wee MacGregors. Success can confine as easy as liberate. The appalling and interminable Anna and Fido series were dire warnings.

That summer Hamish passed briefly through London. He had just been awarded a research fellowship at Oxford. We went for a meal in a chophouse on the Strand. I told him of my worries.

“I can see this rut stretching ahead of me,” I said. “It gets deeper and deeper.”

He looked at me without speaking for a while. I have never forgotten the clear force of his expression.

“Make your own rut,” he said. “It’s the only way.”

He was right and it cheered me up. I resolved that King Wee MacGregor! would be my last compromise. “Make your own rut” would become my motto.

Perhaps I should have seen the signs. Raymond Maude asked if he could pay me my fee in installments. I agreed and to my astonishment he handed me a banker’s draft for only a hundred pounds. In September, halfway through filming in Great Yarmouth, a pier owner said that a check Leo had written had bounced. Leo wrote another for him. We finished the film in five weeks and returned to London to start editing. On October 3, 1923, Maude announced to his assembled staff that Superb-Imperial Film Company was bankrupt.

VILLA LUXE, June 16, 1972

Something is in the air, these days, and it’s not just the scent from the yucca flowers. A small electric charge crackles between Emilia and me. I can’t put my finger on it. Something is different. The quality of the looks she gives me. It’s like that time with Oonagh. Superficially all is as it always was, but beneath the surface new currents are running. Something tacit now exists between us, and while I don’t know what it is, it sets me on edge.

I spend the day fretting vaguely. I try to avoid her. When I hear her motorbike disappearing up the track, I go into her WC. I peer at the shutter. I feel as though a billiard ball were jammed in my throat. My small drilled hole is neatly blocked with a pellet of lavatory paper.