The Moon’s a Balloon Read online

  David Niven

  The Moon’s a Balloon

  An autobiography

  1971, EN

  Reminiscences by David Niven.

  Takes readers back to David Niven's childhood days, his humiliating expulsion from school and to his army years and wartime service. After the war, he returned to America and there came his Hollywood success in films such as "Wuthering Heights" and "Around the World in 80 Days".

  About the Author

  David Niven was born in London in 1910 and died in 1983. He was seen as the quintessential English gent.

  Table of contents

  INTRODUCTION

  1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6 · 7 · 8 · 9 · 10 · 11 · 12 · 13 · 14 · 15 · 16 · 17

  ∨ The Moon’s a Balloon ∧

  INTRODUCTION

  Who knows if the moon’s a balloon, coming out of a keen city in the sky-filled with pretty people? And if you and I should get into it, if they should take me and take you into their balloon, why then we’d go up higher with all the pretty people than houses and steeples and clouds: go sailing away and away sailing into a keen city which nobody’s ever visited, where it’s always Spring and everyone’s in love and flowers pick themselves.

  E.E. Cummings

  Evelyn Waugh penned these words: ‘Only when one has lost all curiosity about the future has one reached the age to write an autobiography.’

  It is daunting to consider the sudden wave of disillusionment that must have swept over such a brilliant man and caused him to write such balls. Nearer the mark, it seems to me, is Professor John Kenneth Galbraith of Harvard University who wrote: ‘Books can be broken broadly into two classes: those written to please the reader and those written for the greater pleasure of the writer. Subject to numerous and distinguished exceptions, the second class is rightly suspect and especially if the writer himself appears in the story. Doubtless, it is best to have one’s vanity served by others; but when all else fails, it is something men do for themselves. Political memoirs, biographies—of great business tycoons and the annals of aging actors sufficiently illustrate the point.’ The italics are mine.

  I apologise for the ensuing name dropping. It was hard to avoid it. People in my profession, who, like myself, have the good fortune to parlay a minimal talent into a long career, find all sorts of doors opened that would otherwise have remained closed. Once behind those doors it snakes little sense to write about the butler if Chairman Mao is sitting down to dinner.

  ♦

  David Niven

  Cap Ferrat A.M.

  ∨ The Moon’s a Balloon ∧

  ONE

  Nessie, when I first saw her, was seventeen years old, honey-blonde, pretty rather than beautiful, the owner of a voluptuous but somehow innocent body and a pair of legs that went on for ever. She was a Piccadilly whore. I was a fourteen-year-old heterosexual schoolboy and I met her thanks to my stepfather. (If you would like to skip on and meet Nessie more fully, she reappears on page 41.)

  I had a stepfather because my father, along with 90 per cent of his comrades in the Berkshire Yeomanry, had landed with immense panache at Suvla Bay. Unfortunately, the Turks were given ample time to prepare to receive them. For days, sweltering in their troopships, the Berkshire Yeomanry had ridden at anchor off’ shore while the High Command in London argued as to the best way to get them on the beach. Finally, they arrived at their brilliant decision and the troops dutifully embarked in the ship’s whalers. On arrival they held their rifles above their heads, cheered, and gallantly leaped into the dark waist-high water. A combination of barbed wire beneath the surface and machine guns to cover the barbed wire, provided a devastating welcome.

  Woodpigeons were calling on a warm summer evening and my sister, Grizel, and I were swapping cigarette cards on an old tree trunk in the paddock when a red-eyed maid came and told us our mother wanted to see us and that we were not to stay too long.

  After a rather incoherent interview with our mother, who was French, and had trouble explaining what ‘missing’ meant, we returned to the swapping of cigarette cards and resumed our perusal of endless trains lumbering along a distant embankment loaded with guns and waving young men…1915. I am afraid my father’s death meant little or nothing to me at the time; later it meant a great deal. I was just five years old and had not seen him much except when I was brought down to be shown off before arriving dinner guests or departing fox-hunting companions. I could always tell which were which because the former smelled of soap and perfume and the latter of sweat and spirits.

  I lived with Grizel in a nursery presided over by a warm enveloping creature, Whitty.

  Rainy days were spent being taught Highland reels by a wounded piper of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, and listening to a gramophone equipped with an immense horn. Our favourite record had ‘The Ride of the Valkyrie’ on one side and, on the other, a jolly little number for those days, called ‘The Wreck of the Troopship’. We were specially fascinated by the whinnying of the horses as the sharks moved in (the troops were on the way to the South African War).

  Occasionally, I was taken to the hospital in Cirencester to ‘do my bit’. This entailed trying not to fidget or jump while VADs practised bandaging any part of me they fancied.

  The war days sped by and the house in Gloucestershire was sold. So, too, was one we had in Argyllshire. Everyone, my mother included, was under the misapprehension that my father was very rich. He had cheerfully gone off to war like a knight of old, taking with him as troopers his valet, his under-gardener and two grooms. He also took his hunters, but these were exchanged for rifles in Egypt en route and my father, his valet and one groom were duly slaughtered.

  It transpired that he was hugely in debt at the time.

  We soon moved to London to a large, damp house in Cadogan Place. Straw had been laid in the street when we arrived to make things quieter for someone dying next door. The sweaty, hearty, red-faced, country squires were replaced by pale, gay, young men who recited poetry and sang to my mother. She was very beautiful, very musical, very sad and lived on cloud nine. A character called ‘Uncle Tommy’ soon made his appearance and became a permanent member of her entourage. Gradually the pale, gay young men gave way to pale, sad, older men.

  ‘Uncle Tommy’ was a second line politician who did not fight in the war. A tall, ramrod straight creature with Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt. Liked to be known as the mystery man of the Conservative Party. Contested Portsmouth Central in the Election of 1926.

  Immensely high, white collars, a bluish nose and a very noisy cuff-link combination which he rattled at me when I made an eating error at mealtime. I don’t believe he was very healthy really. Anyway he got knighted for something to do with the Conservative Party and the Nineteen Hundred Club, and Cadogan Place became a rendezvous for people like Lord Willoughby de Broke, Sir Edward Carson, K.C., and Sir Edward Marshall Hall, K.C. I suppose it bubbled with the sort of brilliant conversation into which children these days would be encouraged to join, but, as soon as it started, Grizel and I were sent up to a nursery which had a linoleum floor and a string bag full of apples hanging outside the window during the winter. Grizel, who was two years older than me, became very interested during this period in the shape and form of my private parts; but when after a particularly painful inspection, I claimed my right to see hers too, she covered up sharply and dodged the issue by saying, ‘Well, it’s a sort of flat arrangement.’

  The Germans raided London. High in the night sky, I saw a Zeppelin in flames.

  One day my mother took me to buy a pair of warm gloves. Some Fokkers came over and everyone rushed into the street to point them out to each other. Then as the possibility of what might be about to drop out of the Fokkers dawned on
them they rushed back indoors again.

  My mother didn’t leave the’ glove shop. She was busy giving a discourse on the superior quality of French gloves when the manager said, ‘This place will come down like a pack of cards.’ By this-time the Fokkers must have been fifty miles away but I was nevertheless lugged across the street and we joined an undignified Gadarene swine movement down the steps of the Knightsbridge Tube station. One woman had a parrot. Another had hysterics and between screams, ate handsful of marmalade out of a stone jar, a spectacle I found highly enjoyable.

  Uncle Tommy’s marriage to my mother coincided with my sixth birthday. The wedding took place at All Saints, Sloane Street. Purple with embarrassment, I was press-ganged into being a page and pressure-fed into a primrose coloured suit with mother-of-pearl buttons, a white lace collar, shorts and socks.

  I did everything I could do to wreck the show and fidgeted and picked my nose till an aquiline creature, later identified as the famous Margot Asquith, came and knelt in the aisle to comfort me. I decided she was a witch and again and again informed the congregation of this discovery in a shrill treble.

  I was removed and Uncle Tommy, forever politically sensitive, treated me from that moment on with frosty distaste.

  My eldest brother, Henri (known as Max), was a naval cadet at Dartmouth, longing to get into the war. My elder sister, Joyce, was at home helping my mother and Grizel had gone away to boarding school in Norfolk. I was the youngest. And, overcoming my mother’s apprehensions, ‘Tommy’ soon saw to it that I was packed off to a boarding school near Worthing.

  Apart from the Chinese, the only people in the world who pack their sons off to the tender care of unknown and often homosexual schoolmasters at the exact moment when they are most in need of parental love and influence, are the British so-called upper and middle classes.

  I had not long been at boarding school before I discovered that life could be hell. There was a great deal of bullying and for a six-year-old, the spectacle of a gang of twelve-year-olds bearing down, cracking wet towels like whips, can be terrifying.

  For the most part, the masters were even more frightening. It would be charitable to think that they were shell-shocked heroes returned from the hell of Mons and Vimy, but it seems more probable that they were sadistic perverts who had been dredged up from the bottom of the educational barrel at a time of acute manpower shortage.

  One, a Mr. Croome, when he tired of pulling ears half way out of our heads (I still have one that sticks out almost at right angles thanks to this son of a bitch), and delivering, for the smallest mistake in declension, back-handed slaps that knocked one off one’s bench, delighted in saying, ‘Show me the hand that wrote this’, and then bringing down the sharp edge of a heavy ruler across the offending wrist.

  He took the last class on Friday evening and I remember praying every week that he would die before then so that I could somehow reach the haven of Saturday and Sunday and the comparative safety of the weekend.

  I don’t think I have ever been so frightened of a human being in my life. Once he made me lean out of a fourth floor window—a stupefying height for a little boy—then he shut the window across the small of my back, ordered two equally terrified boys to hold my feet and laid into me mightily with a cane. All this for some mistake in—‘common are saceredos dux vates parens et conjux…’

  Years later, when I was at Sandhurst and playing in the Rugby football fifteen, big enough and ugly enough to take care of myself, I had an overpowering urge to see the bastard again, face to face.

  I went down to the school, filled with vindictiveness. I don’t know what I intended to do really, but when I got there I found the school deserted; its prison-like exercise yard full of rubbish and old newspapers. The fourth floor window, out of which I had dangled, was broken and open to the rain—it didn’t even look very high.

  My mother, at the time, however, would not believe my tales of woe or rather Uncle Tommy persuaded her that they were nonsense, telling her that all boys exaggerated and that anyway she could not be expected to know anything about English schools.

  After two years of this purgatory, I got a large and painful boil as a result of the bad food. ‘Oh!’ said the matron, ‘that’s nothing, don’t make such a fuss!’, and lopped off the top of it with a pair of scissors. The ensuing infection was pretty horrible and put me in hospital.

  The next term, I was removed and sent to Heatherdown at Ascot.

  At this point, I don’t believe my mother was actually taking in washing, but, as sure as hell, she was sending very little out, and it must have been a fearful drain on her resoutces. Heatherdown was far more expensive than Worthing; certainly only a token subscription to the family coffers was being made by Uncle Tommy and she still had her thumb in the dyke of my father’s debts, but I was blissfully unconscious of all this and wallowed in my good fortune.

  Heatherdown was a very different cup of tea, very carriagetrade, very protected and, compared to Worthing, very soft, very snobbish. Everybody went from there to Eton. Gone were the sadistic masters and the school bullies tying small boys to hot radiators; no more scissor-wielding matrons; no more ex-naval cooks with finger nails like toe nails doling out their nauseous confections; and, receding like a bad dream, were the flinty playground and the evil-smelling doorless lavatories, open to the elements and to the helpful advice of schoolmates.

  Instead, I found a world of cleanliness and kindly masters; motherly matrons; green playing fields; a lake; delicious food and a swimming pool. In short…schoolboy heaven.

  The only grown-ups who hit me were the headmaster who, under great provocation, occasionally uncorked a dose of the cane; and a dear old gentleman who taught divinity, called Mr. Hodgson, who sometimes brandished a clothes brush known as ‘Dixon and Parker’ because if, as rarely happened, he hit someone with it, the name of the maker was left imprinted on the bum.

  After the appalling apprenticeship of Worthing, I could not believe that life could be so perfect. Released from fear and oppression, the whole thing went to my head.

  Almost nine, I became something of a clown. This was hastened on when, for some strange reason, my balls dropped three years earlier than they should have done.

  I was in the choir at the time, the possessor of a voice of guileless purity. Sometimes I was entrusted with solo passages and it was on such an occasion, and in front of a full house, that disaster struck.

  Ascot Sunday—parents staying for the race meeting in smart country houses nearby had filled the chapel to capacity. Alone, I was piping my way through ‘There is a green hill far away, without a city wall’…Suddenly, on the word ‘wall’ a fearful braying sound issued from the angelic face of the soloist. I tried for the note again: this time it sounded like a Rolls-Royce klaxon of the period. The paperthin discipline of the choir quickly disintegrated…repressed laughter became contagious and finally, general.

  Immediately after chapel, I was caned by the headmaster—Sammy Day. He had once played cricket for England and still had one of the best late cuts in the business. It hurt a lot and, considering the medical evidence that was from then on permanently with me, was rather unfair.

  Boys are terrible snobs and I was annually unnerved when the school list came out, to see some of my contemporaries sniggering because in between the young marquesses and dukes with their splendid addresses, was—Niven, D. Rose Cottage, Bembridge, I.W.

  It had become necessary for the house in London to be sold and our permanent address was now as advertised—a converted fisherman’s cottage which had a reputation for unreliability. When the East wind blew, the front door got stuck and when the West wind blew, the back door could not be opened—only the combined weight of the family seemed to keep it anchored to the ground. I adored it and was happier there than I had ever been, especially because, with a rare flash of genius, my mother decided that during the holidays she would be alone with her children.

  Uncle Tommy was barred—I don’t know where h
e went to the Carlton Club, I suppose.

  After the sudden descent of my testicles, I was removed from the choir as a bad risk and became the ‘bellows man’ and the musical success of each service (we suffered through two a day) depended entirely on my prowess behind the organ. This was a position of great trust, but the newly found clown in me could not resist the opportunities it offered. For a small price—two chocolate whirls, one Cadbury’s Milk Flake or a brace of Turkish delights—I could be bribed to let the air out of the bellows on important occasions. The whole school, on the selected day, would be in the know and would sit through an endless sermon hugging itself with delicious anticipation.

  It took careful preparation but I could generally arrange matters so that a rude noise could be subtly injected into the proceedings, usually just after an Amen. I could redress the situation rapidly by quick pumping and only the connoisseurs could detect that it was not a mistake…the boys were all connoisseurs.

  Once I tried it when the Bishop of Ripon was in the middle of a special address. This was my masterpiece and also my downfall but the bribes were mountainous.

  It was a highly technical job and involved surreptitiously and noiselessly keeping the bellows half-filled for several minutes after the end of the preceding hymn. I had intended to let this air out in a series of well-spaced small squeaks and trills thus keeping the boys happy during what promised to be a long, trying period, but something went wrong and it all came out at once and on a most unfortunate cue…a quotation from Proverbs 7, ‘I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes and cinnamon…’

  It was as if the bellows could not contain themselves any longer—a tremendous fart rent the air. All was confusion.

  The school was infiltrated with informers and I was soon dealt with once more by the long-suffering Sammy Day.

  I loved Heatherdown and tried hard to uphold the agricultural standards of the landed gentry with whom I was rubbing shoulders.