|
|
 |
| |
 Alan Clark at Eton |
Clarks and misdemeanours
A new biography of Alan Clark, Hampstead’s Randy Andy of the Commons, sheds light on the family behind the maverick spirit, writes Gerald Isaaman
Alan Clark: The Biography. By Ion Trewin. Weidenfeld & Nicolson £25.
YOU can blame Hampstead, if you want to.
For it was in the Christmas holidays in 1946 that Alan Clark found himself in love with Nancy Mitford – not yet the celebrated author of The Pursuit of Love – when she came to dinner at Upper Terrace House, on the edge of Hampstead Heath.
Come February 14, the then somewhat sombre Eton schoolboy sent Nancy a Valentine card, his first public exhibition of the philandering family gene that engulfed his life, as well as that of his father, Lord Clark of Civilisation fame, and his mother, Jane, for whom affairs were a familiar part of life.
And not long before that, when the Clarks lived across the road in Capo di Monte, in Judges Walk, the young Alan snaffled his mother’s unused posh Smythson diary and wrote his very first entry in it, a signal mark for a man who aspired to be prime minister and is now remembered for what he wrote about Parliament, rather than any other achievements.
And they included being a good father and kind to animals – he was a victim of parental neglect in his own childhood – despite his own displays of cruelty and deception that stamped him out as a cad, albeit one with the supreme skill of a snake charmer.
So it is truly appropriate that his life should be embalmed by Ion Trewin, who grew up in Hampstead a few years later and poignantly recalls Sybril Rang and Ap Simon, the secretarial bureau in Heath Street, which typed up the very first short stories written by Alan Clark – and the manuscripts of his own father, the theatre critic JC Trewin.
Indeed, one of those short stories was very much set in Hampstead and under his true name, which Trewin, who edited the celebrated Clark diaries, discovered in the Clark’s subsequent family home, Saltwood Castle in Kent. They provided an Aladdin’s cave of endless filing cabinets from which fascinating secrets poured out, including the other short story, a western, for which Clark chose the fanciful pseudonym Wayne Ford.
Those early days do provide the essential clues to Clark’s dashing career as a brilliant historian, enduring car lover, arrogant politician, rude gossip, carefree seducer and remarkable diarist of a life lived in a dizzy daze made all the more memorable by Trewin’s equally seductive biography. It has taken five years to complete and appears exactly a decade after Clark died a miserable death from brain cancer, his wife of more than 40 years, also Jane, lying alongside him on the bed the following night.
Yet Trewin, who deliberately makes no judgments of his own, except to decide on the evidence that Clark did not convert to Catholicism as he neared the end, hasn’t counted the huge number of those he interviewed in the process.
Nor has he estimated the number of Lolitas, teenage and otherwise, who fell under the spell of a Tory MP who became known as the “Randy Andy” of the Commons.
“Hampstead was important because it happened to coincide with Alan’s formative years,” Trewin, who now lives in Highgate, explains.
“He did discover girls while he was in Hampstead. There was one I met, now passed away, that he took back to Upper Terrace House. He told her to go inside while he parked the car. And she found Alan’s mother there in a passionate embrace with the French ambassador.”
In fact, long before that his mother had an affair with the composer Sir William Walton, Trewin finding in Saltwood a water damaged Valentine drawn by Walton with musical notes and handwritten verse on it.
He recalls how the Clark family knew what Lord Clark was up to when he suddenly announced he had to make an urgent visit to the British Museum.
The dysfunctional Clarks – a psychiatrist has recorded the Alan Clark Syndrome, which you will find in a Trewin footnote – are only part of an enthralling saga which takes in other notable Hampstead aspects.
Trewin, former Times literary editor until he turned publisher and edited some 60 other biographies, quizzed Clark’s one-time friend David Cornwell, otherwise John le Carré, as to whether Clark had spied for British intelligence on a trip to Moscow and got inside the KGB’s Lubyanka.
He also met up with Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s spin doctor at No 10, who had met Clark in his early days as a journalist in Devon, and there’s a wonderful story of Clark driving his Rolls (it had a personal AC number plate) to a dinner party at Campbell’s Hampstead home and subsequently throwing the car keys at Campbell and telling him he could keep the vehicle – for free – an offer Campbell felt obliged to reject.
Campbell, like many others, Trewin included, believes that Clark exuded a charisma that made people feel all the better for meeting and knowing him. That is one significant reason why Trewin, in his first major book, has enjoyed the satisfaction of recording his rarefied life in such uncompromising and occasionally indulgent detail. Even Clark’s father described his son, supporter of General Franco in the Spanish civil war, as a Fascist.
“Many people start on the left and move firmly to the right,” Trewin explains. “Alan didn’t do that. He started on the extreme right and moved into the centre. He needed to be loved in the club, absolutely. To be loved was very important… and not just sexually. He may have had delusions of grandeur by wanting to become prime minister. For me, Alan was a maverick in the best sense of the word.”
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
