Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know Read online

  And so I became an Old Etonian. I wonder if I would be a different sort of person now if I had missed out on those early years of hell. In one sense it proved the perfect preparation for the trickier vicissitudes of life, since nothing would ever be so bad again. I arrived at Eton full of self-assurance, buoyant from happy days at Sandroyd. Public school and three long years of remorseless nastiness squeezed every last trace of confidence from me. It would take a long time to get back to a balanced state. I still find myself overly sensitive to the least criticism, a direct hangover from Eton days.

  To summarise my old school: location hard to beat; facilities excellent; staff above average. My only complaint was the nature of some of my fellow inmates but all schools have their share of nasty little boys. The acid test must be: if I had a son, would I send him there? I cannot honestly say that I would not.

  2

  Young Love and the SAS

  The Eton College Corps held an annual fourteen-day summer camp and, although I had left the school, I was eligible to attend. The Norwegian Army training base at Kvamskogen, north of Bergen, was deep in mountainous country. The captain of Parr’s House, Neville Howard, led the enemy patrol and lived rough in the mountains throughout our fortnight at Kvamskogen. He was to become commanding officer of the SAS in later years. Sodden clothing and bruised bodies helped all 300 fledgling officers decide whether or not to plump for careers in khaki.

  Rather than return to England with the rest, I hitchhiked back with another boy as far as Copenhagen. There we squandered dwindling funds at Tivoli, sat in sunny parks staring with longing at the abundance of leggy blondes, and wound up on the Tuborg lager factory guided tour. There were two types of tour ticket, one for German nationals and one for the rest of the world. Our non-Teuton group went first and polished off the bountiful supplies of free lager. These were not replenished for the Germans: war-time memories were still bitter.

  Unable to cope with the lashings of alcohol, I misplaced my equally befuddled companion and did not see him again for several months. I continued alone through Denmark and Germany. That was my first expedition and, as I explained to my mother back in Lodsworth, its success proved I was quite ready to face whatever challenges awaited me in the language cramming university I was to be sent to in Aix-en-Provence.

  The challenge of the opposite sex still remained to be cracked. My first cousin, Greville ‘Gubbie’ Napier, lived in nearby Midhurst where he managed an antique shop called Keil’s. Being five years my senior, he was worldly wise about those very beings my male-only public school had hidden from me but which now loomed enormous on my seventeen-year-old horizon – girls.

  ‘France is the place,’ he told me one day, sipping tea in the cluttered backroom of Keil’s. ‘French girls cannot say no or even non. They are unrivalled in both beauty and naughtiness.’

  We determined to launch an invasion of Paris without delay.

  ‘How do we get there?’ I asked. ‘I have £15 in the world.’

  Gubbie waved his tin of Keil’s Beeswax in the air. ‘Absolutely no problem. You are the expert on hitchhiking and I am an expert on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French furniture. We will have a wonderful time.’

  The hitching went well as far as Dieppe. Thereafter, despite or because of the Union Jacks on our packs, our thumbs prodded the air in vain. Nobody stopped. We set down our packs in the steady French drizzle and applied ourselves to Plan B. We had been taught about the old Franco-Scottish entente cordiale at school, so we produced kilts from our packs and donned these. But the French truck drivers had not received the same history lessons and continued to roar past. This is where Gubbie’s brilliance came into play. Another rummage in our packs produced scarves which we wound cunningly round our heads and necks so that from behind, if not examined too closely through windscreen wipers, we just might be taken for girls. It worked. A lorry stopped. The driver was from Yorkshire and before he had time to realise his mistake, we had swarmed aboard and were overwhelming him with gratitude.

  And so, eventually, we got to Paris where we ogled the street ladies but declined their offers on the grounds that our exchequer was down to the bread-line. Gubbie, born and brought up in Scotland, decided we would recoup funds by singing Scottish ditties in cafés, wearing our kilts of course. We made just enough to travel by bus back to Dieppe, where we called upon the British consul for a £10 loan to get us back to Sussex. He agreed, providing we told him a dirty joke. Amazing though it now seems, neither of us in our hour of need could remember a single joke, clean or dirty, but the consul relented and we were able to buy ferry tickets.

  At home in Lodsworth I had long since made friends with Peter Tooth, son of the local chief woodsman. Together we roamed the countryside on our bicycles and also indulged in local roof-climbing between Lodsworth and Midhurst. We never read books or listened to music and we didn’t have television. A favourite wet-weather wargame took place in the ‘gallery’ at home where my mother had hung Granny Florrie’s portraits of Fiennes ancestors. One day my aim was poor and an arrow sped past Peter’s ear, burying itself in the left cheek of Gregory Fiennes, the 14th Lord Saye and Sele. Today he hangs in our sitting room on Exmoor and I much regret his patched-up port jowl. Peter found instructions in some magazine for making explosives. I studied these for several days and experimented with growing quantities of granulated sugar and weedkiller until our activities were brought to a halt after I had blown up my mother’s best brass flower vase and terrified the neighbours.

  One Saturday, while still at Eton, I went to the Lodsworth Village Flower Show where my mother had great hopes for her marrow entries. The village hall was full, so I wandered off to see if Peter was about. He wasn’t, but I noticed a slim girl of about thirteen wearing a blue and white skirt and a sports shirt with short sleeves. I was sure God had never designed any girl so perfectly. I sat on an onion display and watched her.

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ It was my mother.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said with enormous feeling. My mother looked at me surprised and pleased, for I did not normally enthuse over her vegetables. She had won a prize and so, both elated, we headed back to the Morris Minor. She stopped in the carpark to chat with the occupant of the next car, an Aston Martin. It was Mrs Pepper from River and beside her sat the vision.

  ‘This is Virginia, remember her?’ Mrs Pepper said. ‘She’s back from Eastbourne for half-term.’ The girl smiled politely at my mother and looked briefly at me with total unconcern. That evening I told Peter about her.

  ‘Does she like you?’

  ‘I think she couldn’t care less. I might have been a concrete gnome from the look she gave me.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Peter, knowingly. ‘That is an excellent sign. They get taught at school nowadays that the best way to attract the man they want is to ignore him.’

  The passport to success in adolescent society at that time was the ability to twist and knowing how to kiss. I achieved the former. The latter was a mystery. A life of kissing sisters and mother out of family love interfered with my zeal to kiss out of desire. Then some senior lady with little patience at a barbecue in Hook prised my teeth apart with her tongue and, after the initial shock, I learned what was required.

  A fortnight after returning from France, Gubbie had involved himself with a fuzzy-haired beauty with long legs so I went alone to a Liss party on the Vespa scooter my mother had given me for Christmas. Two of the girls decided to raid their old school, a nearby mansion where Dame Margaret Rutherford had recently filmed The Happiest Days of Your Life. The entire party, armed with fireworks and smoke bombs, drove an assortment of motor-bikes, sports cars and old bangers to Bycylla School for young ladies. The raid was a noisy success but my girlfriend of the evening was a bad scooter passenger and, by the time we tailed the escaping cavalcade to the gates, the lodge-keeper had collected his wits and taken my number.

  Two days later the police called at Lodsworth. The evidence, they said, was irrefutable and I was
to be prosecuted for ‘malicious damage resulting in costs of £8 3/6d’. None of the other raiders was caught and, at the Midhurst Court Sessions the proceedings were dropped after I had apologised to the headmistress and paid her £8 3/6d to replace an eiderdown burned by a smoke bomb. However the national newspapers were hard up for news and made tasty headlines out of the mixture of Bomber Baronet, Screaming Young Girls in Nightdresses and Margaret Rutherford.

  My mother was at her wits’ end, ashamed of her only son, and wondering where it would all lead. I was a liability and not to be trusted in England. What might I not get up to if let loose in France? She decided to find a language school rather nearer home than Aix and enrolled me, aged seventeen, at a crammer in Hove.

  It was the time of the mini skirt or pussy pelmet and the place was full of sexy foreign girls. This impeded my concentration. I took a quiet English girl called Maggie to the cinema and afterwards down to the beach at nearby Climping Sands but I did not kiss her because she was too well mannered to look as though she expected to be kissed. So my sexual frustrations grew. To let off steam I introduced some of the crammer students to the delights of climbing buildings by night. I still hated heights but darkness meant that nasty drops were unseen. Over the next twelve months, the Sussex newspapers reported a rash of flagged spires. My finest climb was the lofty spire of Hove Town Hall which housed the police station.

  Virginia Pepper kept two ponies at her father’s chalk quarry at Amberley and one of my sisters got Mrs Pepper’s permission for me to help exercise them. Ginny and I rode by way of woodland paths and long fallow fields which we both knew well. One day, before we rode back I gave Ginny a scarf I had bought especially for her in Paris. I watched as she opened the wrapping and, when I saw her smile, the whole world danced. She liked it. We left the ponies in the paddock and went in for tea. I learned that Ginny was going back to school in Eastbourne the following day so nonchalantly offered her a lift on the Vespa. To my surprise and delight her mother agreed. Her father would have been furious.

  Ginny had a school suitcase which fitted on my rear seat when she kept well forward. I felt her pressed against my back and her hands lightly around me. I was definitely in heaven. In fact, if heaven is half as good as I felt that day, it will be worth the struggle to attain.

  All went well as far as the school where we dropped off her case. She had agreed to have tea with me in town but on our way back I swerved to avoid a bicyclist. I do not remember the accident, nor the next fifteen hours. But when I woke up in hospital the nurse told me my passenger was in her bed at her school, my scooter was in good nick and the bicyclist, whose fault it had been, was unharmed. Apart from concussion and abrasions I, too, was undamaged. Ginny came to see me the following day with a bunch of flowers and I was fined £4 for riding a scooter without L-plates and carrying an unlicensed passenger. Ginny’s father, who had never liked me, was volcanic and forbade her to see me again.

  Thus encouraged, we agreed to meet by night in a bathroom at the school. For two hours I sat in the bath and Ginny, in her nightdress, sat on the loo. My cautious suggestion that we could perhaps make ourselves more comfortable were discouraged and I was determined not to risk alarming her. Towards the end of term, and daringly by day, I waited for Ginny with a bunch of other girls on their way back from lacrosse. She recognised me, despite the scooter helmet and goggles and dropped behind the others. We hid in a patch of rhododendrons.

  ‘You are wicked,’ she laughed. She was breathless. We kissed for the first time and I felt that I would love her for ever.

  The following term I perfected a drainpipe approach to Ginny’s new fourth-floor dormitory but was intercepted on the flat roof by a history mistress on night duty. I explained that I had been passing on my scooter and thought I had seen a fire on the roof, so had climbed up to extinguish it, only to find there was no fire . . .

  The mistress nodded wisely. ‘In that case, I might as well let you back down and out, don’t you think?’

  I never got my language A-levels (due to the mini skirts) but I did net a German O-level which brought my tally up to five and qualified me to attempt the Army’s Regular Commissions Board, where I was put through a series of aptitude tests more taxing on the imagination and physique than the intellect. To my delight I passed. The next step was Mons Officer Cadet School at Aldershot. Day after day we learned drill movements with and without .303 rifle, submachine-gun or sword; how to attack machine-gun nests head-on under cover of smoke; and the enthusiastic application of brasso and blanco.

  I discovered a fellow night-climber in the Honourable Richard Wrottesley, known to all as Rotters, who wore a monocle at all times and drove an E-type Jaguar. He proposed we scale the west wing of nearby Heathfield Girls’ School which he said was a challenging climb. Three-quarters of the way up we were disturbed by a clamour from below. Rotters, above me on the same drainpipe, looked downwards and the beam of a powerful torch flashed off his monocle.

  ‘We’ve been spotted,’ Rotters hissed and, gaining the horizontal guttering, he swung himself across to a fire ladder that disappeared around the back of the building. But there was no escape. When we reached the ground a uniformed officer and the school bursar, a hefty man in his sixties, frogmarched us towards the main entrance. Without warning Rotters lashed backwards with the rope coil and shouted, ‘Break.’ I ran straight for the nearest rhododendrons, scaled the fence with wings of fear and sped to Rotters’ car. I found it locked and decided to hitchhike back to Mons. First parade at 7.00 a.m. could not be missed.

  The first car that stopped for me was a police van and I decided to play innocent. They took me to Ascot Police Station and there I found Rotters demanding his rights and complaining about police harassment of an innocent ornithologist. He showed no signs of recognising me so I responded likewise.

  The police officer from the patrol van looked me up and down. ‘Sir,’ he said with heavy irony, ‘you are wearing black Army gym shoes, red Army PT shirt and you have the haircut which can nowadays only be found on young Sandhurst cadets. Our bird-watching friend over there whom you have never seen before is wearing identical clothing with the sole exception of a monocle. He has a similar hairstyle . . . Do us a favour and tell us what you were both up to at the girls’ school.’

  An hour later the van dropped us off at Mons. Heathfield had agreed with our commandant that charges would not be pressed, providing we were suitably dealt with. Rotters, who had physically assaulted the bursar, was given the boot. I was awarded fifty-six days of Restrictions of Privileges, which was two days longer than I was meant to remain at Mons. I still don’t know how I scraped through the exams. My platoon commander informed me unofficially that he suspected the authorities were not prepared to risk my presence for another five months while I redid the course.

  Now there were four free months before I had to report to tank-training camp. A chance to see the world. An old school friend, Simon Gault, agreed to accompany me to Norway for a canoeing expedition. The only problem was the lack of a canoe. The cheapest suitable model cost £80, so I set to work to earn the money by doing three jobs in rotation, exercising polo ponies in the afternoon, washing dishes at a hotel in the evening and, after snatching a nap on cousin Gubbie’s floor for a few hours, I would get up to hose down Southdown double-decker buses at 4.00 a.m. In three weeks I had the money and ordered the canoe. Maggie, whom I’d omitted to kiss on Climping Sands, came too. We arrived at Jotunheim with my double canoe and Simon’s single kayak. For three miles we negotiated minor rapids with ease. Then the river dropped into a canyon, so I asked the other two to wait while I went ahead to film them in the rough stuff. The film, which I still possess, shows my hard-earned canoe hitting a rock and splitting in two. Maggie was caught underneath a spar but Simon rescued her further down the gorge. The canoe was not insured. We returned to England the same week. I had learned two lessons: the value of reconnaissance in unknown places and the futility of paying for expeditions from one’s o
wn pocket.

  The tank gunnery school at Lulworth is carefully situated so that even the stupidest officers cannot knock off Dorset villages with wrongly aimed high-explosive shells. I remember one gunnery sergeant explaining that a reasonably proficient Centurion tank crew should be able to destroy three Soviet tanks 1,000 metres away within ten seconds of sighting. My own range results indicated that any number of Soviet tanks could safely picnic 600 yards away. Despite this I passed the course eight weeks later: I suspect no one is ever failed.

  In February 1963 I made my way to Germany to join the Royal Scots Greys. I was eighteen and had just bought my first car, an elderly Peugeot 403, for £150. As in my father’s day, the lion’s share of the officers were Scotsmen, as were over 90 per cent of the troopers and NCOs. Only two Greys remained who remembered Colonel Lugs, but the fact that he had been the CO and that Fiennes, pronounced Feens by all the Jocks, was thought to be a Scottish name, saved me from most of the mickey-taking suffered by a number of the more obviously English. I grew to love the Greys as much as I had loathed public school.