Biography Of Peter Cook Read online

  Charles Mayo loved humorous writing of all sorts, and his study was lined with leather-bound copies of Punch. His daughters Joan and Margaret (Madge for short) grew up into tremendous gigglers, both of them notably pretty and rather popular with the chaps down at the tennis club. Margaret was academically brilliant – she had cut quite a swathe through St Winifred’s School for Girls – and it was a source of eternal regret to her that at the time, her family had not yet amassed enough money to send her to university. For the rest of her life she was assiduously f-taught, immersing herself in everything from the violin to the works of Edward Gibbon. She had left England, instead of pursuing further education, and had become governess to a wealthy Jewish family in Prague. When events in Europe began to deteriorate, she returned home, to divide her time between the trim lawns of the Golf Club and bravely squeamish volunteer work as a Red Cross nurse at the Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Home in Upperton Road.

  Alec Cook’s clever mind and exotic lifestyle appealed to Margaret’s intellectually frustrated side. They suited each other well. They were both warm, kind, conservative, respectable people with a shared sense of humour. Their differences – she was deeply religious, he less so, she was rather untidy, he precise and meticulous – were of a sort that they would successfully work to overcome. They married on 20 June 1936 at St Mary’s, Eastbourne, in a flurry of feather boas and big hats. Colonel and Mrs Church contributed a set of trays, Captain and Mrs Carpendale gave a flower vase, Colonel and Mrs Garwood donated a mirror, while Sir Alexander and Lady Maguire chipped in with some dessert knives and forks. The contribution of Perkins, who also attended, was not recorded. Margaret and Alec bundled the whole lot up into their luggage, and set sail for Nigeria on 1 July.

  Margaret was not to spend long in the Nigerian bush. Within a few months of her arrival she fell pregnant, and returned at once to England. It was deemed officially that West Africa was no place to bring up a European child, and so began a long and complicated pattern of separations that were to bedevil Cook family life for the next twenty years. While Alec sadly presided over his miniature kingdom alone, Margaret made the journey not to Eastbourne, where her friends were, but to a new life in Torquay. Her parents had separated while she was in Africa, and by an amazing coincidence her mother’s family home in Devon, long since sold, had recently come back on the market. Caroline Mayo had snapped it up using money from an inheritance, and set about sprucing it into a suitable home for her daughter and her imminent grandson.

  ‘Bythorn’, standing in Bronshill Road, Torquay, was a large, boxy, substantial and slightly gloomy house, too big to be ordinary, too hemmed-in to be grand, at the end of a dark, mysterious driveway. There were mullioned windows, a verandah, a monkey-puzzle tree in the garden: altogether, a place with recesses and hidden depths for an infant to explore, but a slightly intimidating house perhaps, not the kind you could imagine ringing with the sound of childish laughter. Its new occupant, Peter Edward Cook, was actually born at St Chad’s nursing home, on 17 November 1937. He was a striking baby, possessed of memorable, startling, dark eyes, that gazed out and transfixed you from under beautiful thick lashes which would one day send his sisters into agonies of jealousy. Peter had inherited a perfect combination of his father’s elegant bone structure and his mother’s soft, feminine face, tempered slightly by Alec’s somewhat inelegant 1930s ears.

  Madge wrote to her husband, who had been promoted to District Officer in her absence: ‘Darling, once more I salute you as DO. Even more however I salute you as the father of the most beautiful baby that ever happened. I have entered the ranks of doting mothers, and really speaking without fear or favour, he is rather a nice one. I do so wish you were here to see him. He was an enormous creature – 8¾ lbs, so gave me some unpleasant moments, but one soon forgets all the horrors. He has quantities of mouse coloured hai wively deep blue eyes set quite far apart, quite long eyelashes, and the beginnings of eyebrows which he lifts rather cynically at the world. He is long in the body and has lovely dimples on his knees. Aphra said he had a very brainy forehead . . . Take great care of yourself darling and come back soon, love from Margaret. P. S. I cried when I read your letter that came with the flowers, but they were tears of happiness such as you read about in books. Thank you again so much, sweetheart.’ With her letter, Madge dispatched a selection of rich Christmas puddings to keep Alec fortified on hot, lonely nights in the bush. Madge’s mum wrote to him as well, congratulating him on his beautiful son and sending him a useful selection of Christmas puddings.

  Alec was due home on leave in February 1938. Early in January, Margaret wrote to keep him informed of their son’s precocious developments. ‘Darling, I can think of very little else except your arrival. A refrain jigs in my head to the tune of ‘The Campbells are coming’ – ‘Alec is coming, hurray, hurray.’ Our son is still practically perfect. His only fault is that he makes a most fearful din between his 6 p.m. and 10 p.m. feed. He appears to have lungs of brass. I let Nannie go out on Sunday night and he really excelled himself. I was very relieved to see her back again. He grows more and more intelligent. I hope he isn’t too forward because he really is rather remarkably so. He now goes out for a walk in his pram every afternoon. Nannie thought the wind rather cold so we dressed him up in a blue bonnet with bows under the chin. He looked very comical and was simply furious!’

  At the age of three months, Peter was finally introduced to Alec, who recorded the event in Margaret’s baby book: ‘First viewed by father. Showed slight apprehension, but soon became gracious and accepted strange phenomenon. Some resemblance to said father now noticeable in shape of head and ears.’ Alec’s leave was an idyllic four months, but as it drew to a close Margaret had to face the moment she had been secretly dreading since her pregnancy had first been diagnosed. It was time for her, as the dutiful wife of a District Officer, to accompany her husband back to Nigeria to resume his duties, and to leave her baby behind in England. Before the summer had even started, they were gone.

  Truth be told, Margaret detested Nigeria, not that Nigeria ever had a chance – for it was Nigeria and the Colonial Service that were responsible for this most agonising of partings. Peter’s sister Elizabeth Cook remembers that her mother ‘really hated the place – the fact that it separated her from Peter and later on from Sarah was really heartbreaking for her.’ There is no doubt that her utter devotion to her son was fortified and intensified by the distance involved, and that despite the baffling and dislocated nature of Peter’s early childhood, he returned her affection with fierce intensity as he grew up. She later confessed to her son the lifelong feelings of guilt she had endured as a result of leaving him behind.

  Granny Mayo, a quiet, gentle, frail, elegant and occasionally anxious woman with rheumatism, lavished maternal dedication on baby Peter in her daughter’s stead, but not having any acquaintances with similar-sized offspring in the area, she found the business of importing friends for him to play with elaborate and difficult. Peter’s first birthday party was almost entirely attended by adults: Granny Mayo wrote to Margaret in Nigeria to tell her that Aunt Joan had given him a tambourine and a toy truck, Dorothy and her husband had provided a teddy bear, Mrs Reade had donated some handkerchiefs and Miss Perrett had chipped in with a doll. ‘I asked Miss Perrett to bring Mrs Denham’s boy but they were engaged,’ she offered. A distant relative eventually managed to rustle up a little girl called Mary, and the two children sat there surrounded by a ring of grown-ups. The upside of this lifestyle was a pleasing degree of precocity. ‘The baby has gone’, wrote Granny Cook to her daughter-in-law. ‘In his place an alert, interested small boy. So like his father at this age.’ Then, remembering her own separations from the young Alec, she added wistfully, ‘The years roll back as I look at his dear little face, and I am a mother again, with a small son to whom I was the world.’

  Alec and Margaret’s next home leave came round in the summer of 1939. It took Peter a week to accept his mother, a lot longer before he would go
near his father. Alec was a keen cine enthusiast, and exorcised the frustrated artist within himself by making his son the star of a series of elegant little films. He would cut dramatically from the ironwork of Peter’s stout Victorian pram to the enormous treetrunk legs of the nanny coming down the gloomy stairs. A finger moved the hands of the clock while the levels fell in Peter’s milk bottles. The child’s tiny hands strayed ineptly across the keys of a Bechstein grand piano.

  Viewed sixty years later, the small boy toddling through the grainy celluloid is instantly recognisable: the familiar sweep of floppy hair across the forehead, the elegant features beginning to emerge from the podgy face. He is prodigiously well-wrapped, in one shot trussed and buttoned up in a woollen coat of the Hardy Amies variety favoured by the Queen, elsewhere in a little double-breasted jacket, jodhpurs and a pixie hat, like a Teutonic garden gnome. In fact Peter spends much of the film tottering after the gardener, a tall rigid figure dressed gravely in cloth cap, waistcoat and ankle-length black apron, a spade ever-present by his side. Peter apes his movements using a miniature trowel.

  The gardener was Peter’s principal friend, not least because of all the other interesting friends that were literally turned up by his work – worms, snails, beetles, ants, newts, lizards and the like. Peter was utterly fascinated by creepy-crawlies of every description. Most fascinating of all were bees, although this was something of a love-hate relationship. He knew that these were little creatures to be feared – ‘does not like bees’ recorded his father in the baby book – but at the same time their little stripy bodies mesmerised him. As time went on the tiny living creatures of the garden came to supplant the teddy bears and toy trucks and handkerchiefs he had been given to play with.

  Alec and Margaret’s return to Nigeria was overshadowed by the prospect of war, and the knowledge that even the limited access to their son they had so far enjoyed was about to be curtailed. When hostilities broke out, Alec was ordered to arrest any Germans he found in the neighbourhood. Margaret was appointed as a cypher clerk in a government office in Lagos, on ten shillings a month: the contract pointed out sternly that ‘Your appointment does not render you eligible for leave.’ Peter would not see his mother for several years.

  Once the front railings of ‘Bythorn’ had been taken away to be melted down and made into Spitfires, the war in Torquay was largely uneventful. Only two bombs fell in the area. One would have killa child, had its mother not had the foresight to borrow Peter’s old pram – the pram met its end, but its St Pancras-strength ironwork protected its occupant. The other, a doodlebug, landed on a house down the road and blew the householder, a Mrs Jean Gatty, unharmed into the middle of the street, together with the bath she was in at the time. The incident turned up, somewhat adulterated, in a later Not Only . . . But Also sketch, when Sir Arthur Streeve-Greevling (as he was then) was asked how he met his wife:

  I found her during the war. She blew into the sitting room with a bit of shrapnel and became embedded in the sofa. One thing led to her mother, and we were married within the hour.

  For the young Peter, however, the war’s most dramatic incident came when he went to sleep with a jar of tadpoles by his bedside, upset it by accident during the night, and woke the next morning to find ten dead ones lying like dried currants on his pillow.

  As it turned out, Alec managed one solo trip back to England early on in the war, and took his son for a fortnight’s farm holiday at Chagford, where he noticed that Peter had become ‘very observant, and fond of making running commentaries when out for a walk’. Alec and Margaret were also jointly allowed a brief trip home in 1943. But for the most part, entertainment was in the hands of Aunt Joan, when she wasn’t driving ambulances, her husband Roy, who taught Peter to ride a bike, and Granny Mayo. She tried taking him to a panto, without much success – ‘I had to be bound and gagged – it was almost as bad as English folk-dancing, and that was the worst’3 said Peter many years later. The housekeeper, Mrs Brimacombe, fared better with a trip to Plainmoor to see Torquay United play in 1944. ‘I became a complete fanatic,’ remembered Peter. ‘I used to queue up an hour-and-a-half beforehand to get in the front row by the halfway line. By the time the players came out, I had to rush off to the gents, so I always came back to find I’d lost my place.’4

  Most of the real entertaining, however, was done by Peter himself. Like her daughter, Granny Mayo was a great giggler, and her grandson realised very early on that he possessed the capacity to make her laugh. This cheered them both up immensely in the absence of his mother and father, and he found it easy to keep her entertained with a string of silly voices and jokes. When Granny Cook came to tea, for instance, he would balance an ink bottle on top of the door, which the grown-ups had to affect not to notice, to keep the possibility of a spillage alive. He was an avid reader, and loved A. A. Milne, Alice in Wonderland (chunks of which later turned up wholesale in Not Only . . . But Also) and Babar the Elephant. His Babar book, which he was given in 1941, featured a vivid and memorable passage in which Babar falls asleep on a long, dark evening and has a nightmare. ‘Tap! Tap! Tap!’ goes a hideous old woman at the window, who is surrounded by a crowd of ugly creatures – another passage that found its way into a familiar Pete and Dud sketch.

  At the tail end of 1944 Peter was joined by his mother at last. She had become pregnant with her second child, Sarah, who was born in January 1945, and had ‘hastened home through U-boat infested s to prevent her child being an African’ (this at least was how Peter recounted the story, while transferring it to himself, in the promotional material for Beyond the Fringe). It was now Alec’s turn to suffer the misery of separation, and the joys of having to entertain himself. He made a short film – a dramatisation of the song Frankie and Johnnie – and also set about writing a book, which was never finished or published, about the District Officer’s lot.

  ‘A European can feel pretty lonely in Nigeria’, he wrote, ‘lonely for his own civilisation, for art, music and the theatre, for gaiety and good talk, for the sight of a beautiful woman conscious of the perfection of her gown, for femininity, mildness and the gentle way of life. For weeks on end the D.O. may not see another European, unless he is fortunate enough to be accompanied by his wife. [This is] the main drawback of life in Nigeria, the tragic division of a wife’s time, the portioning of her life between her husband and her children. I do not underestimate the climate and the bugs that breed in it, but the average bout of malaria is no worse than a bad cold or a slight touch of ’flu in England. It is the mind and not the body that is most severely tried [here].’

  By this time Alec Cook was in sole charge of a thousand square miles of territory containing almost half a million members of the Ibo tribe, and was about to be promoted further, to Assistant Secretary. One of his principal tasks was to help set up the Native Authority, a forerunner of the Independent post-colonial government. He and his colleagues were in effect being asked to prepare the Colonial Service for dissolution, and to sign the death warrant for their own species. It was not a task that disturbed him unduly – he believed that the British legacy would be a sound one. The democratic councils and law courts going up across the country ‘would symbolise a declaration of relentless warfare against fear and darkness, against trickery and juju and the evil and revolting practices connected therewith.’ Nigeria, he pointed out, was administered ‘not by Huns but by Britons’.

  He remained apprehensive, however, that independence would almost certainly arrive prematurely, before a sufficient level of moral integrity had ingrained itself in Nigerian society. He wrote of his fellow District Officers that ‘honesty comes naturally to them, they have imbibed it with their mothers’ milk . . . to such men the graft and corruption indigenous to West Africa causes great mental distress.’ He would, nonetheless, when the time came, don for the last time ‘his white uniform with the tight collar, gird his ceremonial sword about him, pull on his black shiny boots with the assistance of the domestic staff, and gingerly descend the iro
n steps to deliver a suitable address on the privileges and duties of being British.’ The hint of amused irony behind the genuine conviction that he was doing something worthwhile is unmistakable.

  At the end of the war, Alec Cook returned to England, to be reintroduced to his son for the first time in Peter’s living memory. Peter recalled the moment: ‘I suppose I first realised who my father was when I was seven, when he came back with some very black bananas from Nigeria. And I thanked him for those. But I didn’t quite know who he was and I was told he was my father. So we shook hands and agreed on it. He was a total stranger to me.’5 Throughout the remainder of their lives Peter utterly adored his parents, and they too ached with affection for their son; but the physical distance between them was matched by a slight distance in emotional understanding, a gap that was bridged by great love but not always by true intimacy. ‘I never really knew my father,’6 Peter admitted, in a sad echo of his father’s own complaint.

  The reunion between Peter and his parents was to be short-lived. Alec was posted suddenly to Gibraltar, to take up the job of Financial Secretary to the Colony. Margaret went with him, and because the Mediterranean was considered officially suitable for young children, so did baby Sarah. Peter was to be left behind again, but this time he was also to be separated from Granny Mayo, and Aunt Joan and Uncle Roy. With only a few terms’ sporadic education at a Torquay day school under his belt, it was time for Peter to go to a proper boarding school. St Bede’s was chosen, an Eastbourne prep school in the process of returning home from its wartime exile in Exmoor, that would be close to Grandfather Mayo should any emergency arise. When it was time to say goodbye, Peter sobbed uncontrollably on the platform.