Outrageous Fortune: Growing Up at Leeds Castle by Anthony Russell

Author:Anthony Russell [Russell, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Nonfiction, Personal Memoir, Retail
ISBN: 9781250006011
Amazon: 1250006015
Barnesnoble: 1250006015
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2013-11-26T05:00:00+00:00

11.

RECORD ROUNDABOUT

During the period when St Aubyns was beginning, valiantly and moderately successfully, to conduct my education, my burgeoning love of music and its hold on my psyche led to significant new events on the home front. Chief amongst them was a second barnstorming of the grown-ups’ tea citadel, as well as the development of a profound new connection, close to Egerton Terrace, called Record Roundabout, where I made, and almost lost, a new best friend.

I was not meant to be like this. I was not, by nature, inclined to cause a rumpus: I did not stir the pot, tie Nanny’s shoelaces together, go out of my way to frighten my mother’s poodle or defy castle way mores. I was eight and a half years old and had just completed my second, the winter term, at St Aubyns, during which we had all played a lot of football and kept up the now familiar tight schedule of lessons, meals, prep, and bed. A film was shown in the gym most Saturday and Sunday evenings, which was very good news. I could have done without the less than stellar comedies by the popular actor Norman Wisdom, but the World War II tales of heroics Reach for the Sky and The Dam Busters appealed to my advanced patriotic sensibilities. There had been the odd encounter with intimidation in far-flung windy corridors, but generally the speeding-cricket-ball-fallback excuse worked well, and the eleven weeks had sailed smoothly by.

Now, almost eleven months after my introduction to the full-blown tea ceremony, in which Lady Huntley, Guysy-Wee, and I had made toast as if our lives depended on it and I had been invited to Nassau, I was, once more, preparing to enter the lion’s den. This time I was armed not with my trusty “Glute” but with a copy of “Only the Lonely,” a pop song of breathtaking sweep and grandeur sung by an American called Roy Orbison, who had to have the most beautiful pop-singing voice ever. I had not received a formal invitation, so I considered my plan to be a bold one, akin to storming the beaches armed with a 45 rpm disc.

“Look sharp,” Nanny said. “If you’re going to go, it’s five minutes past five.”

Was my uninvited appearance at tea a gesture of defiance or my first real attempt at self-expression? All I knew was that I was fixated on a high-level meeting with both the grandees in the drawing room and the highly polished mahogany radiogram perched in the far corner, next to the Louis XV desk and opposite the Chinese screen. Entering through the double doors, I received the customary welcome of polite indifference and not the looks of surprise I had anticipated. I let this minor affront go, not wishing to stall my momentum.

“Hello, darling, how nice of you to pay us a visit,” my mother said.

“Darling, come and give me a kiss,” Granny said, “and have a piece of cake.”

I crossed the room for kisses, pleased that I

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