TUTOR TO THE NOBILITY

Anthony Stille on

trying to teach English to an English lady

THE aristocracy moves in a mysterious way. I became the private tutor to Lady M's daughter after meeting a shifty little man in a flat off Kensington High Street.

`She's a bit highly strung,' he explained. I told him I was very good with the upper classes and also a dab hand at English Language 0 level. It seemed to satisfy him. 'All right then. Go round on Tuesday.' So I went round on Tuesday, met the honour- able daughter (she had a name, but to me she was always the Brat) and was given my commission: get her through the GCE exam the following summer.

Most of our lessons took place in Mayfair where Lord and Lady M had a flat the size of two ordinary houses. They also owned a country pile and an extremely grand terrace somewhere else, but for much of the time they put up with the inconvenience of living in a place that was only vast rather than absolutely immense, because it was here the action was. I would turn up on my collapsing bicycle, tie it to the railings, creep in under the disgusted gaze of dowagers and baronets and take the lift (even that was panelled like a dining-room) to the first floor.

When you stepped out, it was like the 18th century. The flat was at best a mess and at worst unbelievably squalid. Empty glasses littered every surface; Moet & Chandon crates lined the walls and most things were covered with a fine sprinkling of solicitor's letters threatening legal action for the non-payment of bills. Downtrodden Hispanic servants chattered behind closed doors, and the chauffeur smiled a knowing, contemptuous smile. A Pekinese and a Shi-tsu scampered between your ankles, pausing now and then to defile some aspect of the decor. I learned quite early on not to look behind the curtains or under the sideboards. Things lurked there.

The Brat and I were given the dining- room as a place to work in. Apart from the fact that we had to share it with an electric typewriter, two telephones and a secretary, it was an ideal place for quiet study. The Brat herself was 16, overweight and alter- nately affectionate and aggressive. Her main problem was that she was stupid. Her handwriting looked like a bird's nest and she had the articulacy of a Chelsea suppor- ter. I used to take out Mastery of English Book One and point hopefully at, say, a

poem about a pussycat. She would look at it for about half a minute before briskly telling me to sod off. So we'd try a bit of joined-up handwriting to see if that held more of an appeal, and she'd scratch away with one of the pens from her collection of expensive, broken writing implements. Strange patterns would unfold across the page which we would then interpret for hidden meanings.

`The third of July?' I might ask, inspect- ing one of her answers.

`No. Don't be stupid,' she'd say. 'A herd of sheep. Not third of July.'

`Ah. Not sherd of sheep, but . . .'. Only by then she would have picked up a copy of the Daily Express and be reading out the horoscope page.

This went on for a bit until we were moved into the library. The secretary and I had failed to reach a compromise over our relative importance: she felt that dealing with correspondence, arranging social mat- ters and fobbing off the lawyers were more essential than seeing to the education oil the kids. I think she was probably right, but it didn't stop us having ructions every time the phone went in the middle of the Brat's attempts at self-expression.

Just as distracting was the elder sister.

She generally got out of bed at ten or half-past, and would want her breakfast.

So she'd amble into the dining-room in her nightie and shovel down some toast. Un- fortunately she was extremely good- looking; so good-looking in fact that while the Brat burbled away in my ear I goggled hungrily and obliviously at the Beautiful Sister. Minutes passed, my eyes would glaze over, the Brat would lose interest and the Beautiful Sister formed the opinion that if anything I was even more witless than her little sibling. So it was the library for us.

This was better: it was lined with disin- tegrating Gobelin tapestries and cupboards hidden by false book spines. There were altogether about ten real books in there. The drawback was that the drinks were also kept there, and that meant interrup- tions from the mother, Lady M.

Lady M was fat. Very very fat. The reason she was fat was because she ate and drank prodigiously. There were plenty of photographs of her in her salad days when she was nothing more than nicely uphol-

stered, but her consumption of a bottle of champagne each day at breakfast had done bad things for her embonpoint. It was evident that this troubled her, and she used to nibble pathetically at a crispbread from time to time, as if it might take off a few pounds. She even claimed in a magazine interview once that her breakfast was no more than a slice of toast and cup of China tea, but all I ever saw being carried into her bedroom were trays of bacon, eggs and' black pudding, sizzling away beside the inevitable Moet & Chandon. Then at about noon, she would emerge in her filthy make-up-stained nightshirt and prowl around the apartment trying to take an interest in her daughter's lessons. Without her auburn wig she looked like a fat Marley's ghost. Then her eyes would light upon the drinks trolley and she'd snaffle up a bottle or two and disappear back into her room.

Of course, everyone else wanted the drinks as well, so the library turned out to be as bad in its way as the dining-room. Smart aristos in their evening dresses kept drifting in and helping themselves only to find us scowling at them from out of the darkness.

I broached the matter with Lady M one day. I said the Brat wasn't given the time or the peace and quiet to work in. I told her that there were too many distractions. I complained about the dogs (one of which had been copiously sick during a lesson). She ignored me completely. All I could; think about when I spoke to her was the mesmerising expanse of her stomach. So we left it at that. Then I approached Lord M, a shadowy figure, and rarely in attend- ance. He obviously didn't know who I was (but put me somewhere between the cook and the gardener), listened attentively, shook my hand and went back to his newspaper. I tried the deaf, half-senile family doctor who used to quiz me about the Brat's mental health. But he wasn't any use either. He just cupped his hand over his ear and muttered 'Nerve tonic.'

I think it was the Beautiful Sister who got things changed. She was doubtless so sick of bumping into me as I chased after one of the dogs or fell out of the lift that she suggested we be given the use of the basement. It turned out that as well as all their other properties, Lord and Lady M owned a large flat where they kept their left-overs. The Brat and I set up in a room ,full of furniture and belongings like a junk 'shop, where daylight never entered and everything was brown. It was like a fish tank without the water. She even found a kettle and proudly make me a cup of tea which tasted of boiled dust and was entire- ly disgusting. Down in the basement, away from the dogs and the booze, we ploughed a lonely

furrow through Mastery of English Book

One. I was sweating as June and the exam drew near but the Brat couldn't have cared less. She would while away the time much as before, reading magazines, arguing futile arguments about how much her mother hated her, even showing me a home movie of their Christmas celebra- tions, in which a paralytically drunk Lady M could be seen falling backwards down a flight of stairs. Her family clearly had so little time for her I couldn't feel much anger, just irritation. The only things she really liked were her horse and her dogs. Her father, by way of consolation for his never being at home, was going to buy heri a Golf GTi on her 17th birthday.

Finally she went off and took the exam, thus ending my relationship with wealth and privilege. A perfect example in some ways of the poor little rich girl. What surprised me was that she passed the exam. I suspect her father bought the examiners and kept them in the basement, with the rest of the rubbish.