Free Basil Street Blues by Michael Holroyd

servants. The family owned a carriage and pair and, after 1908 when Fraser bought an Enfield Allday, they had a car. The ex-coachman, Thatcher, drove it during the week and my grandfather took over the wheel at weekends. Then there was my grandmother Adeline, ‘one of the most accomplished backseat drivers in the country’, according to my father. Fraser himself did not drive for long: the new technology did not suit him. The Enfield Allday, for example, having no self-starter, had to be ‘wound with a starting handle’, my father remembered. ‘There was too a petrol tap which had to be turned on to allow the petrol to flow from the tank to the carburettor. This small point my father always overlooked. My brother and I used to hide behind the garage and listen to him trying to start the car. It was rare entertainment.’
    My father’s time at Scaitcliffe ended abruptly. In his account he wrote: ‘When I was twelve Vickers made me sit for the Common Entrance examination. He did so, he said, to accustom me to sitting an exam. He made it abundantly clear that I hadn’t the faintest chance of passing, so it was to everyone’s dismay that I achieved the bottom form at Eton.’ He was still in the lower half of Scaitcliffe and had been there little more than two-and-a-half years. He had obviously longed to get away, but did so just as he was beginning to enjoy the place.
    What he had endured at Scaitcliffe, he now endured again at Eton, only it was worse because his brother was not simply a glowing memory but a very obvious presence in the school – ‘one hell of a big fellow’. And he was not pleased to see his younger brother turning up so unexpectedly. Kenneth was ‘in the library’ which meant he was among the elite of their school house. He played for the ‘twenty-two’ (Eton’s second cricket eleven) and also had his Field colours (which meant he was in the top team of that peculiar Eton game which somehow fails to combine the qualities of soccer and rugger). Above all Kenneth was a member of the fabulous Eton society known as ‘Pop’ which meant he could wear fantastically coloured waistcoats and ‘stick-up’ white collars that dazzled younger boys. In the school hierarchy it was impossible for such a swell to talk to a lower boy. Not understanding the social oligarchy of the school, Basil was hurt that his brother with whom he sometimes stole apples from the potting shed roof at Brocket had no word for him at Eton. ‘My brother actively disliked me and avoided as much as possible having anything to do with me,’ he remembered. He obviously embarrassed Kenneth. ‘As usual when nervous I gave my half-witted display,’ he concluded with a Thurber-like touch, ‘and set a seal on my misery.’
    In his diaries, the novelist Anthony Powell, writing some seventy years later, remembers being in the same division as my father, whom he described as being ‘red-faced, hearty, one would say boring’. But he adds that he ‘did not know him at all’. Since there was two years’ difference in age between them, this Holroyd seems more likely to have been my uncle who was closer in age to Powell and, by Etonian standards, far more boringly successful.
    Basil forgot the trick he picked up at Scaitcliffe of keeping ‘out of the way’ and reverted to his nervous habit of talking ‘my head off’. That was the voice my mother was first to hear on board the Suecia when she sailed to England, the voice which was so raucous on bad days and, on good days, could ‘talk anybody into anything’. That he did not relearn the discretion of his late Scaitcliffe period may have been due to his removal from Eton after a little over two years. ‘I got double pneumonia and was taken in an ambulance to Brocket.’ After an examination by the family doctor and a period of convalescence looked after by Nan, he was sent to Leysin in Switzerland. ‘I was pronounced in good order within a few weeks,’ he wrote. ‘Then came the