One of our best family legends (I am now the last guardian of them all) told how my brother, aged perhaps three, suggested one lunchtime to the rest of the family, “Why don’t we all go down to the club for a drink?” He did not do this in a babyish or even childish accent, but as if he were an adult and quite fancied a sharpener to brighten an otherwise dull afternoon. I was in my pram and had no choice in the matter. But I expect my mother, and perhaps my naval officer father—if he was there—would have eagerly accepted the suggestion.
The phrase “drink at the club” is so appealing, isn’t it? It promises so much more than a mere bar or pub. My brother, many years later, would observe with astonishment our parents’ heroic consumption of the duty-free gin which was in those days one of the Navy’s privileges. Not that they let it show, though my father was sometimes a little bloodshot at the breakfast table. I was living in a dream world of contentment so perfect that the Freudians ought to look into it, and I was totally oblivious to all this. I remain puzzled as to how I turned out to be the only member of the family who couldn’t take his juice—and still can’t.
At the time of the suggested drink at the club we were on the small island of Malta, a place of warm golden stone buildings and rocky shores, still guarded by the remnants of His Britannic Majesty’s Mediterranean Fleet, which had held the island against all comers since wrenching it from the hands of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1800. The future Queen Elizabeth, not yet crowned and having no idea that her father would die so soon, was also living there, for the only time in her life, much like any normal naval wife, while her husband zig-zagged about the Mediterranean in a destroyer. How exhilarating it must have been for my mother and father to be there, just then.
What can this club have been like? I picture it on a summer’s day when officers would have been dressed in the imperial splendor of Mediterranean rig, all white and gold, and their wives would have done their best to live up to their husbands’ magnificence. How very different from the dreary civilian suits of home. The posting, not long after the end of hostilities, was enviable in many ways, an escape above the clouds into bright airy freedom. Back home were austerity and rationing, a world of gray and brown. Here, by the Grand Harbour of Valletta, were clear skies, sea glitter, royal glamour and the great relief of recent victory in war. I picture the imaginary club as spacious, with polished stone floors scattered with tasteful rugs, lined with stern portraits of admirals, and a view, from high above, of one of the most glorious natural harbors in the world, full of beautiful warships riding at anchor, their brass gleaming and their awnings a dazzling white. The members and their wives, sweeping down to the club in their convertible cars, sank into deep brown armchairs, while discreet waiters took their orders. Some lean, sunburned men would be gathered, standing round the bar in the corner, longing for action. But for everyone else it was luxurious soft calm, no threats, no rush, always time for another glass, the long, slow sweet afternoon of the victorious and contented, and no money to pay just now, just a penciled signature on the steward’s pad.
I have of course made all this up, partly because I am sorry to have missed it. I was unconscious at the time, but have twice been back to visit the land of my birth and find it easy to imagine.
My own first experience of going for an actual drink at the club (a modest glass of tomato juice) was at an establishment in Portsmouth, that bruised and scarred old seaport, called the Nuffield United Services Officers’ Club. The building, or a sad portion of it, could still be found a few years ago, incorporated into the campus of one of our sad new universities. But no passer-by could have guessed at the lost magnificence, the uniformed porters, the great pale entrance hall, the vast dining room with its high windows looking towards the sea. When we lived in Portsmouth we would sometimes go there for a treat. It was like a grand hotel, but we could afford it. When we lived elsewhere and returned to the city to visit my father’s family, we would stay there in rather greater comfort than we often had at home. I remember one September evening watching, from a lofty bedroom, American sailors on a run ashore in the street far below, and having it patiently explained to me that their dollar wages made them far richer than their British equivalents, an early lesson in real economics.
The club’s staff and members, who I think were all current or former servicemen and women, must have been amazingly tolerant. My brother and I would race down its cork-tiled corridors, entranced by its spacious modernity (we were more used to shabby rented houses from the Victorian age, or the Spartan austerity of boarding schools). I fear we may even have played in the lifts. There were glass swing doors with brass handles. There was a writing room, and a green-carpeted reading room. I think there was even a wireless room for listening to that device. Television might as well not have been invented. This was an age when the British military classes regarded T.V. as a vulgarity. If they had sets at home, they had wooden doors which closed over the screen when not in use. A plaque commemorated the club’s opening, in 1951, by the same Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen whom my parents might have crossed paths with in Malta. There is film of the ceremony, its accents and manners as distant from today’s Britain as those of some remote Pacific Islanders.
The club had a generosity of design that, in that era of scrimping and second-rate economy, felt like a journey into the pre-war past. How I loved it. Some of the windows were actually excitingly round, like the portholes of ships. There was even a bowling alley, though not of the American type. We had to pick up the fallen skittles ourselves, but the great heavy brown bowling-balls rumbled most satisfactorily. And in an era when modernity was still rare, a shining snack bar, all chrome and high stools, serving the greatest of all foods, fried potatoes, along with fizzy drinks and what then passed in England for ice cream, which—I was solemnly told by my mother—was made from whale blubber. It seemed perfectly possible that this was true, judging by the strange substance itself. Was she teasing me? She had a loathing for the products of the whale, which had nothing to do with any conservationist sentiments, but resulted from having been more or less compelled to eat them during the endless rationing during and after the war.
The snack bar contained a fruit machine which we were probably not supposed to use, but which once rewarded my brother’s persistent efforts by emptying an avalanche of silver sixpences, that happy little coin, onto the floor at his feet. The establishment was the gift of Lord Nuffield, or Billy Morris, as he had once been known, a bicycle repairman who later became England’s Henry Ford and a great philanthropist (I believe he was a genuinely kind man). We could never have afforded such comfort otherwise. I always look back on it as a brief chance to enjoy the opulence we knew existed, but which had largely escaped my parents and most of their friends in their post-war years.
In the late summer of 1963, when Lord Nuffield died, black crape was hung on his portrait in the dining room, the only time I have ever seen this done. I don’t know what happened to the club after that. I suspect a slow decline as the Navy shrank and the old servants retired, and the cost of maintenance rose, and new people wanted something less staid and formal. They always do. Very soon after Lord Nuffield’s death, we moved far inland. The family’s seafaring connections dwindled and our visits to Portsmouth dwindled with them. I believe the club carried on for another fifteen years or so, but I think it might have made me sad to see its final years.
The only club I belonged to after that was a working men’s club in what was then the prosperous industrial city of Coventry (to my shame I now can’t recall its actual name), where I worked as a reporter writing about labor unions and strikes. For years afterwards, I kept up my membership, and my card would let me into similar clubs all over the country, a useful facility which more than once helped me scoop rival reporters by allowing me ready access to labor union officials hiding in such places. But, though the beer was startlingly cheap, there were no white-jacketed stewards or deep brown armchairs.
It was only when I began working in London’s Fleet Street that my colleagues urged me to join a proper club, a place to take people for lunch and impress them. One such colleague kindly took me to the Garrick, the most fashionable of all, where, surrounded by lawyers and actors, I consumed steak-and-kidney pie and claret, and was told of the famous novelist and club member, who had rolled head over heels down the majestic staircase, so drunk that he was totally uninjured when he reached the bottom. I was also introduced to proper big, thick, round, black charcoal biscuits, the world’s best accompaniment to Stilton cheese, but have never been able to find them again. But I could not possibly have afforded to join the Garrick or endured its endless waiting list.
The charcoal biscuits are a good metaphor for the whole experience of the London club, an experience unobtainable anywhere else, at any price. Another club I nearly joined possessed the loveliest bar I have ever been in, concealed at the back of the building, with a coal fire and a feeling of seclusion so great that it was a shame to go out into the mundane street afterwards and find myself back in the late twentieth century. But after an evening at that establishment’s common table, I knew for sure that I would never be grown-up enough to belong. I was not clubbable. I never would be. I had found myself out. I still enjoy visiting these places as a misanthropic guest, not required to take part in anything. I think I have been to most of them now, though a few of the stranger ones still elude me. I expect any member of these places would get into trouble for inviting me, and I would not want that. But still, if ever I hear the words “Why don’t we all go down to the club for a drink?” I am, for a moment at least, spellbound by the possibilities they conjure up.
