I felt rather defensive. ‘He’s very nice.’ I wasn’t quite sure how or why I’d been cast as protector, but apparently I had. ‘And I thought you might like him, too.’
Peter followed Damian with his eyes, as he took a drink and started to chat up a wretched overweight girl with a lantern jaw, who was hovering nervously on the edge of the proceedings. ‘He’s an operator,’ he said and turned to greet some new arrivals.
If he was an operator, the operation bore fruit almost immediately. This would not have surprised me much further on in our acquaintance, as by then I would have known that Damian would never be so idle as to waste an opportunity. He was always a worker. His worst enemy would concede that. In fact, he just did. Damian had, after all, made it into Peter’s sanctum without any guarantee of a return engagement. There was no time to be lost.
The awkward lantern-jawed girl, whom I now recognised gazing up at Damian as he showered her with charm, went by the name of Georgina Waddilove. She was the daughter of a city banker and an American heiress. Quite how Damian had selected her for his opening salvo I am not entirely sure. Perhaps it was just a warrior’s sense of where the wall might most easily be breached and which girl was the most vulnerable to attack. Georgina was a melancholy character. To anyone who was interested, and there were not many, this could be traced to her mother who, with an imprecise knowledge of England and after a courtship conducted entirely during her husband’s posting in New York after the war, had been under the illusion at the time of her wedding that she was marrying into a much higher caste than was in fact the case. When they did return to England, in late 1950, with two little boys and a baby daughter, she had arrived in her new country with confident expectations of stalking at Balmoral and foursome suppers at Chatsworth and Stratfieldsaye. What she discovered, however, was that her husband’s friends and family came, almost exclusively, from the same prosperous, professional money-people that she had played tennis with in the Hamptons since her girlhood. Her husband, Norman (and perhaps the name should have given her a clue), had not consciously meant to deceive her but, like many Englishmen of his type, particularly when abroad, he had fallen into the habit of suggesting that he came from a smarter background than he did and, far away in New York, this was only too easy. After spending nine years there he came almost to believe his own fiction. He would talk so freely of Princess Margaret or the Westminsters or Lady Pamela Berry, that he would probably have been as surprised as his listeners to discover that everything he knew of these people he had gleaned from the pages of the Daily Express.
The net result of this disappointment was not, however, divorce. Anne Waddilove had her children to think about and divorce in the 1950s still exacted a high social price. Norman had made quite a lot of money, so instead she resolved to use it to correct for her offspring the deficiencies and disappointments of her own existence. For the boys this meant good schools, shooting and proper universities, but from early on she was determined to launch her daughter with a dizzying season that would result in a dazzling marriage. Grandchildren would then follow, who would do her Royal stalking by proxy. So did Mrs Waddilove plan the future of the wretched Georgina, condemned to live her mother’s life and not her own from more or less the moment the child could walk. Which may explain the parent’s blindness to a simple truth, so clear to the rest of the world, that Georgina was hopelessly unsuited to the role expected of her. Good-looking and poised as Anne Waddilove was, she had not anticipated that nature would play a joke on her in giving her a daughter who was as plain as a pikestaff, fat as a barrel and gauche to boot. To make matters worse, Georgina’s shy nervousness invariably gave a (false) first impression of stupidity, nor was she at all, by choice, gregarious. Since she wasn’t in line for a major inheritance – the presence of two boys in a family generally knocks that on the head – the match Mrs Waddilove had dreamed of seemed what can only be described as highly unlikely by the time Georgina had completed her first few weeks as a debutante.
I have to say that when I got to know her I liked Georgina Waddilove and, while I cannot pretend to a romantic interest in her at any point, I was always happy to sit next to her at dinner. She was knowledgeable about films, one of my interests, so we had plenty to talk about. But there was no escaping the fact that she did not appear destined for success in the harsh and competitive arena her mother had chosen. There was something almost grotesque in watching her lumpen frame wandering, sad and alone, through ballroom after ballroom, decked out in the girlish fashions of the day, her hair sewn with flowers, her frock made of lace, when all the time she resembled nothing so much as a talking chimp in an advertisement for PG Tips tea. I’m sorry to say that she became, if anything, a comic figure among our crowd and, older as I am now and less impervious to others’ suffering, I very much regret this. It must have caused her great pain, which she concealed, and the concealment can only have made it sharper.
Was it an instinct for this that took Damian straight to her side, when shining beauties of high rank stood about Peter’s drawing room, laughing and chatting and sipping their drinks? Was it as a fox might scent a wounded bird that Damian surveyed the crowd, locating the ugliest, most awkward girl there, and made for her like a missile? If so, his tactic was completely successful and a few days later he dropped by my rooms to show that the morning’s post had brought his first stiffy, a thick white card bearing the proud, engraved name of ‘Mrs Norman Waddilove, At Home,’ who was inviting him to attend a cocktail party ‘for Georgina,’ on the seventh of June, by the Dodgem Track at Battersea Fun Fair. ‘How can she be “at home” by the Dodgems?’ he said.
Battersea Park has altered its position in London in the decades since the war. It has not moved physically, of course, but it is an entirely different place today from the scene of so many childhood memories of half a century ago. Built by the Victorians as a pleasure ground for the local bourgeoisie, with sculpted rocks and fountains and gentle paths by swan-stocked lakes, the park had cheerfully run to seed by the 1950s and had become instead important to a whole generation of children as the site of London’s only permanent fun fair. Erected in 1951, as part of that icon of lost innocence, the Festival of Britain, the fair flourished into the Sixties, when newer forms of entertainment began to steal its thunder. A tragic accident on the Big Dipper in 1972 hastened the inevitable and two years later came closure. The dear, old fun fair, grey and grubby and downright dangerous as it had become, was swept away without a trace, like the hanging gardens of Nineveh.
It is more beautiful today, its ponds and waterfalls and glades restored, than when I first walked there, clutching the hand of an aunt or a nanny and begging to be allowed one more ride before we went home, but it is not more beautiful to me. Nor am I alone in this rose-tinted memory and, in fact, nostalgia was already beginning to envelop the place by 1968 as we, the children who had felt sick from too much candy floss when the fair was at its height, were now in our late teens and early twenties, and for this reason it was a clever choice by Mrs Waddilove as a venue for her party. Georgina, as I have said, was not popular and she might easily have had to endure the humiliation of a sparsely attended gathering had it been held in one of the Park Lane hotels or in the coffee room of her father’s club, when half the guest list might easily have chucked. The casualness of the young, as they abandon their social commitments for something more recent and more enticing, was horrible to adults then. These days parents are inclined to shrug and roll their eyes at their children’s unreliability, but not to take it very seriously. I don’t suggest the phenomenon is new, chucking, dodging, gatecrashing and the rest, but in 1968 nobody saw the funny side. However, on this occasion Battersea Fun Fair appealed and everyone turned up.
I was quite late arriving, as it happens, so the hubbub of chatter was what guided me through the fair and past the stalls, until I came to a temporary white-painted wicket fence, where two officials guarded the entrance and a large card on a blackboard stand announced that the Dodgems were ‘closed for a private party.’ This ensured some glares from would-be customers, which Georgina’s guests affected to ignore, but these disgruntled few did not spoil things. Whatever they may pretend, the privileged classes, then and now, enjoy a bit of envy.
Some of the girls were already in the cars, shrieking and laughing and spilling their wine, as their boyfriends- for-the-night posed and preened, banging and whacking into the cars of others. Nowadays there would be signs requesting that glasses should not be taken on to the track, or there would only have been plastic cups anyway, but I do not recall anyone concerning themselves with such things as slippery surfaces or broken glass. There must have been plenty of both. A marquee with an open side had been erected to accommodate the other guests who
