The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me Read Online Free Page A

barriers where everyone knows their place and where Gerald can do the subverting.
    First Childhood manages to be both revealing and obfuscating: Gerald claims to be grateful for not having had childhood traumas, or if he did, ‘they lie buried in my subconscious and I can only be thankful that they do not seem to have given rise to any very serious complexes, inhibitions or repressions’. However, his book paints a picture of an isolated little boy who suffered because of his parents’ problems and was deeply unhappy at school. It is tempting to surmise that Gerald’s lack of intimate relationships as an adult was linked to his parents’ distance from one another and what he felt was their lack of warmth towards him.
    Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt was born in 1883, the only child of a marriage between two neighbouring Shropshire families. His mother, Julia Foster, was thirty-one when she married a naval captain, Hugh Tyrwhitt (pronounced ‘Tirrit’), who was four years younger. Julia’s face is stern and, despite the heavy-lidded eyes, uncompromising. Gerald suspected it was her money rather than her charms that attracted his indebted father. Hugh might have been viewed as a catch on account of his titled ancestors; his mother inherited the Berners barony, an unusual title that could pass through the female line.
    Julia and Hugh’s ambitions were not enough to make a success of their marriage. According to their son, they were ‘like two cogwheels that for ever failed to engage’.7 Gerald rarely saw his father, who was away at sea a great deal: Hugh was decorated for his part in the Nile Expedition of 1884–5 to relieve General Gordon at Khartoum. Admiring his father’s wit and elegance, Gerald noted how, despite his small stature, he had the ‘imposing swagger’ of someone who could be taken for ‘minor royalty’. Hugh was ‘worldly, cynical, intolerant of any kind of inferiority, reserved and self-possessed’. He apparently took little interest in his son’s education or well-being, to the extent that the young boy felt almost disappointed when, after some misdemeanour, his father said he could not be bothered to spank him.
    Delving into his own subconscious, Gerald proposed that his father’s laissez-faire approach had affected him in matters of religion. ‘It is said’, he wrote, ‘that a child’s idea of God is often based on the characteristics of its male parent.’ Once, a nurse warned the young boy that if he was not careful, ‘God will jump out from behind a cloud and catch you such a whack!’ Gerald merely replied, ‘Nonsense! God doesn’t care WHAT we do.’8 Gerald’s mistrust of organised religion remained, though there were times when he wished he did have religious faith and regretted his lack of ‘aptitude’ for it, believing it to be something innate, like having a musical ear. Always keen to go against the grain, he liked to recall his hilarious misreadings of the Bible as a child, where he would automatically take the side of miscreants like Adam and Eve or Cain. Gerald used the language and trappings of Christianity to make it seem ridiculous: ‘There is a legend that Our Lord said “Blessed are the Frivolous, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven” and that it was suppressed by St Paul!’9 One of Gerald’s fictional characters announces a sentiment that seems to characterise his own lack of piety: ‘When I was a child I used to think that the Day of Judgement meant that we were all going to judge God, and I still don’t see why not.’10
    Underlying Gerald’s witticism is the pain of a boy who is ignored and made to feel insignificant and unworthy by his grumpy, mostly absent father. And yet throughout his life, Gerald held one of his father’s sayings almost as a mantra: ‘Never trust a man with a grievance.’ If the boy’s achievements were not enough to bring paternal praise and love, then perhaps the only way was by doing things that would jar and annoy. Playing the