Carnforth's Creation

In 1969 when I was working in BBC TV Features Group, I co-produced a documentary about the business side of pop music. Most of the documentaries with which I had previously been concerned had been on troubling subjects such as the impact of mental illness on a whole family, and the dilemmas faced by parents whose other children were adversely affected by living with a Down’s Syndrome sibling. So this new film was very different, to say the least. Among the stars we interviewed were Mick Jagger and Pete Townshend, and we filmed Pink Floyd performing at night in a vast plastic bubble lit from within. It was a weird experience to meet these immensely famous and rich young men, who were my age but seemingly living on another planet – certainly too weird to write about at the time.

There’d been no doubt about the idealism and creative vigour of the early and mid-1960s but by the time I and my colleagues made our film, a wider mood of uncertainty and confusion was creeping in along with ‘flower power’, protest songs, acid rock and psychedelic mysticism. Most groups and promoters seemed to be following existing trends rather than creating new ones. One didn’t need to have a crystal ball to predict that the 1970s would turn out to be more concerned with the manufacture of pop novelty acts rather than with helping the talent that was actually around to find a market.

Thirteen years after the documentary was transmitted
on BBC2, I began to write a novel set in this field. The book owed something to my disappointment with a close Oxford friend who, after graduating with a poor degree, limped off tamely to the City despite being a talented artist, a brilliant orchestrator of unusual entertainments, and a scarily exciting companion – free, moreover, from financial worries since his family owned a merchant bank. Within ten years he would be an alcoholic. My book was partly my way of getting over this. Someone with his unusual talents and wealth surely
could
have done something remarkable in the world of ‘happenings’ and celebrity.

There had also been a number of peers at Christ Church, one of whom, guitar-strumming Lord Ancram, heir to the Marquess of Lothian, could have provided me with inspiration. But I think I really chose to make my impresario an aristocrat because that class had been made to look especially
passé
and irrelevant by the new aristocracy of pop and fashion. So I reckoned it would have been particularly gratifying for a young peer to gain a Svengali-like hold over a working-class rock star in an era when the social pyramid had been suddenly inverted.

As it happened aristocrats and pop stars had not been complete strangers in the decade before I wrote my book. The singer Georgie Fame had married the Marchioness of Londonderry, after an affair, and Lord Dundas had written and performed a number-one hit, ‘Jeans On’, that had started life as an advertising jingle – a wheeze which I gratefully appropriated. Nor had there been anything proletarian about the well-connected upper-middle-class Kit Lambert, who began to make a film featuring a group that would become the Who, whose manager he would become.

This, however, had not been in my mind when I decided to involve a middle-class university friend of my peer in the making of a TV documentary about his lordship’s rock star. My own experience of working in television
had counted for more. I had also intended that when the ‘creation’ eventually outgrew his creator and turned on him, my peer’s entire circle of friends, and not just his immediate family, would be sucked into the maelstrom.

Tim Jeal
June 2013

When Eleanor decided to accept Paul Carnforth’s proposal, she found her parents’ opposition infuriating. They had always wanted a ‘brilliant’ marriage for her, and now, on the verge of getting one, they were objecting to a man who was not only a marquess, but one rich enough to have nothing in common with popular mythology’s typical peer, clutching his tin cash box, while coach-loads trailed dripping
ice-creams
past tables laid for fantasy feasts.

Adoring Paul as she did, Eleanor ridiculed her father’s pessimistic forecast that Paul would always be something of a misfit. The very facts he considered proof of this, in her opinion merely underlined Paul’s adaptability. Disinherited by his father, for openly siding with his mother at the time of their cruelly publicized divorce, Eleanor had thought it greatly to Paul’s credit that he had been spirited enough, while still at Eton, to taunt rich young peers-to-be with jibes about their predictable fates as dreary business lords or obsolete rural buffoons. At Oxford he had gone on making a virtue of necessity – choosing for his closest friends middle class boys with ambitions in fields like journalism and broadcasting, rather than banking or bloodstock. Yet from the way her parents talked, Paul might almost have rejected his own class as a matter of deliberate choice.

At times her parents came close to implying that the heart attack which had unexpectedly removed Paul’s father – making him the direct heir of his octogenarian grandfather – had been at best a mixed blessing. Perhaps it
was
a little ironic that the family fortune should have come winging back just when Paul had convinced himself he would do very well without it, but Eleanor still thought her father misguided to read so much into the failure of Paul’s new friends to come to terms with his wealth. Seven years into the Sixties, Paul
might in any case have been sucked into the maelstrom of London’s à la “Mod” trend-setting community. Plenty of other young peers had been, without Paul’s excuse of
reacting
to an astonishing change.

Eleanor shared her parents’ incredulity at the amount of publicity recently lavished on models, photographers, and semi-literate singers, but she saw nothing particularly
reprehensible
about Paul’s name appearing in gossip columns largely devoted to their goings-on. Believing that few
reputations
were wholly undeserved, her father tended to credit much of what he read about Paul’s ‘womanizing’. Eleanor told him it was absurd to expect any bachelor with Paul’s advantages to turn down
all
the propositions that were bound to come his way.

But, in the end, the justice or injustice of remarks about his past did not seem crucial. Eleanor had a simple and effective answer to all criticisms. Paul would never have asked her to marry him, unless already determined to change his way of life.

*

On a fine April morning, eight months after her wedding day, Eleanor was at Castle Delvaux discussing with her head gardener how best to regenerate the Jacobean knot garden. Should the gaps between the interlocking bushes be filled with herbs or with brick-dust for greater contrast? Paul’s interest in such matters was less marked, but Eleanor was delighted by his adaptation to country life. Before marrying her, he had spent most of his time in London, apparently considering Delvaux little use to him except as a setting for parties. Now he only left it for three or four days a month when his presence was required by his legal and financial advisers, who were still grappling, five years after his
grandfather’s
death, with the complicated arrangements framed to ease payment of massive death duties. He was in town today, and as usual Eleanor was impatient for his return.

Being sure that Paul would excel in anything he set his hand to, the moment he set his hand to anything, Eleanor was not worried that he seemed no closer to a career. She was
still enjoying their protracted honeymoon too much to want to hurry him. Since many of his memories of Castle Delvaux were over-shadowed by his parents’ troubles, he would need time to regain his sense of belonging. By hunting with her, pottering in the gardens, and browsing in the library, he was surely pursuing the course most likely to heal old wounds. Already it seemed wonderfully clear to Eleanor that her father’s warnings had been alarmist nonsense.

As she caught sight of the gatehouse, framed by two of the tallest and most enigmatic yews in the topiary repertoire, Eleanor felt a surge of happiness. As a girl her first glimpse of the stone bridge across the moat had summoned up images of noblemen in feathered hats, riding out with hawks on their wrists, and a crowd of liveried retainers scampering after their richly caparisoned horses. The place still bemused her. How could it contrive to be at once severe, yet homely? How combine palatial size with unassuming domesticity? Yet Delvaux did both with ease; its mellow brickwork softening the starkness of crenellated walls and towers, its gentle Dutch gables and Tudor windows setting a smile on a fortress once mistrustfully closed against the outside world.

Though well aware that snobbish dissatisfaction with her own antecedents had once increased her interest in both house and occupants, Eleanor felt unrepentant. Her father was probably right that the peerage had long ago become a thinly disguised plutocracy, but that, in her view, only set apart a family like Paul’s. Their first titles had been conferred by Henry VII as reparation for sufferings at the hands of Richard III, and Delvaux itself had been bought by the second Earl of Carnforth in 1609. Although no longer
dismayed
that
she
had been born ‘her ladyship’ only because, seventy years ago, her great-grandfather had given to
Conservative
party funds enough of a fortune made in tin to net a peerage, Eleanor had not become so down-to-earth that her new home and title gave her anything less than immense pleasure.

As she left the Topiary Garden and entered the broad Statue Walk, one of many eighteenth century additions to
the gardens, Eleanor was suddenly faced with an astonishing sight: Mr Hankin, the butler, hurrying towards her at a speed most unsuited to his years. Since she could not recall him ever coming into the gardens with a message for her (such tasks usually being delegated to one of the
housemaids
), she was alarmed long before learning that a police officer was waiting to speak to her in the South Parlour.

Standing a little self-consciously beside the powerful torso of a caryatid, bearing half the weight of the marble
chimneypiece
, Sergeant Andrews was soon regaling her with a description of a brawl that had taken place outside the village hall in nearby Frimpton on the evening of the weekly ‘hop’. Already confused, she could not help laughing, when given gratuitously irrelevant information about the four worst offenders being members of a ‘group’ that had ‘stood in for a local band’.

‘I’m sure this is very interesting, sergeant, but how can it possibly concern me?’

The policeman stopped admiring the array of swords and daggers above the doorway, and explained that one of the young men had given the police an address on the estate. Since Lord Carnforth’s agent had been unable to deny or confirm this, Sergeant Andrews wondered whether Lady Carnforth or his lordship could help him.

About to demand whether it were likely that her husband would rent or lend property to young hoodlums, Eleanor hesitated. Two weeks ago Paul had mentioned, very much en passant, that he intended to allow some musicians the use of one of the half-dozen unoccupied tied-cottages. Since she had then been preoccupied with the logistics of a house party, Eleanor had not thought to enquire what manner of musicians they might be. The cottage in question was tucked away in the remotest corner of the home farm, and she had not anticipated having anything to do with these temporary occupants.

Finding it hard to accept the transformation of people she had vaguely supposed to be serious instrumentalists with cellos and violas, into a quartet of guitar-twanging louts,
Eleanor asked edgily, ‘Did you say they were fighting with the band, or
playing
in it?’

‘They’re members of a pop group. Lady Carnforth.’

Even in her distressed condition Eleanor noticed the emphasis he gave the words ‘pop group’, as though she might never have heard of such a thing. She now recalled Paul letting slip that his ‘musicians’ needed seclusion to prepare themselves for some kind of performance. Could this have been said to stop her asking them to the house? Though shaken that Paul seemed to have been keeping things from her, she managed to sound calm as she asked the sergeant why the young men had been fighting.

‘An argument about a girl. She’d been going steady … regularly involved with a lad in the village. Quite often happens when visiting groups play. The extra glamour, you see.’

‘I don’t come from Mars,’ she remarked tartly. ‘Are you charging them?’

‘I’d like to know if they’re trespassing on your property.’

‘The answer to that,’ she replied, ‘is … I’ll have to let you know.’

Half-an-hour later Eleanor was hurrying into the stable yard to see whether Oliver, her favourite hunter, had been tacked-up. April was normally a time of year she enjoyed, but on this fresh morning neither the swiftly moving clouds, nor the blur of misty green among the branches, caught her eye. Unable to escape the conclusion that Paul had been doing more than meet his lawyers on his monthly visits to London, she still could not bring herself to accept that he could have any serious interest in young men of the kind Sergeant Andrews had described. Possibly they had been homeless and he had taken pity on them. But in that case why keep quiet about generosity which she would have been sure to applaud? Desperate to find some explanation that would excuse Paul’s secrecy, Eleanor rode on towards her
destination
.

Tethering her horse out of sight, she approached the cottage cautiously. The heavy condensation on the windows
prevented Eleanor seeing inside, but the front door, which led directly into the main room, was ajar. Deciding it would be wise to glance in before knocking, she did so and recoiled. What she saw rivalled the scenes of debauchery in ‘The Sleep of Reason’ – Hogarth’s famous cautionary series in the library at Castle Delvaux. But the sluggish immobility of everyone present, and their bovine indifference to one another, gave an impression altogether more depressing. Slumped on the floor lay a sturdy girl, wearing nothing but a T-shirt too tight to cover her hips. There was something familiar about her; though it would take Eleanor some time to work out that, minus the heavy make-up around her eyes, this fleshy adolescent would be indistinguishable from Linda Mudge, the postmaster’s daughter. The ill-nourished man resting his head in her groin seemed less interested in her than in a wizened little cigarette that was adding to the foulness of the air. Also on the floor sat a man with
painful-looking
pimples and a wispy beard. Oblivious to his
surroundings
he was picking at the label on a clear-glass bottle with his thumbnail. Someone else was sleeping on a
campbed
, wearing nothing but a pair of striped underpants. The whole room was littered with cigarette-butts and unwashed plates and glasses. Not knowing whether to risk going in, Eleanor flattened herself against the wall just outside the door. A moment later she heard somebody crashing into the room.

‘Wake up jerks. We may have got ourselves a visitor.’

‘The pigs?’ gasped a scared voice.

Realizing she had lost her chance of slipping away, Eleanor steeled herself to knock.

‘Not the pigs,’ said the first speaker irritably. ‘Not the bulls or cows either, just a bird dolled up like something out of the Horse of the Year Show. Saw her from the kitchen; her horse is out the back.’

Relieved laughter; then someone said, ‘Hear that, Linda? No pigs … relax.’

‘Snowpigs,’ agreed a slurred female voice, lapsing into feeble giggles. A crash and loud swearing came from inside.
Eleanor guessed that the campbed had collapsed. She verified this hunch before rapping on the door.

The young man who let her in, stood staring at her with a grin that could have been apologetic, but might just as well have been insulting.

‘I’m Roy,’ he announced. ‘Just passing by?’

There was an insolent knowingness about him that she did not care for. It reminded her of the way some young
taxi-drivers
and hotel doormen looked her up and down. There was a sweet distinctive aroma in the air, which she supposed to be marijuana.

‘No,’ she replied gravely. ‘I wasn’t just passing by.’

‘Pity you couldn’t have chosen another day,’ he muttered, kicking at a greasy sleeping-bag. ‘This isn’t our normal scene.’

In his American combat jacket he might have been an N.C.O. standing up for his defeated men. But Eleanor felt little sympathy; whatever wounds they suffered from were clearly self-inflicted. The man with the bottle thrust it at her.

‘Wansome?’

‘No thank you.’

‘I’ll getcher a glass. No bother.’

Getting up, he tripped over the up-ended campbed and dropped the bottle.

‘Fuckanshitanassoles,’ he shrieked, as his heel came down heavily on a piece of broken glass.

‘One of those days,’ murmured Roy. ‘Nice weather
outside
… so if you’ve got something you want to say, why don’t we …?’

‘Don’t stand there bleeding on me, man,’ choked the man with the wrinkled cigarette, kicking ineffectively at the one with the beard. The girl shifted her weight on to her left buttock and gasped as she saw blood oozing from the sock.

‘Can’t do nothing, Gary. He’s hurt really bad.’ She rose, casting about for something to use as a bandage. Her gaze rested on Eleanor’s boots, then jerked upwards, via jodphurs and hacking jacket, to a face she seemed to recall. A red flush spread across the girl’s moon face, as Eleanor’s eyes met hers.
As a lazy hand stroked her inside thigh, she moaned, ‘You won’t say nothing to my dad, will you. Lady Carnforth?’