NET Festival; 12; Ustinov on the Ustinovs

. . . . . . . I never started the first song before, so we learned a lesson while beaching now! If you're bored yet, the process for shooting actually is very different.

Did you better? Thank you. Did you better? Did you better? Did you better?

Well ladies and gentlemen, the music you heard in the introduction to this series was the overture to Ruslan and Ludmila by Glinka. And it so happens that my great-great-grandfather conducted the first performance of this. He was the son of the director of the Phoenicia Theatre in Venice, he was a Venetian. He himself, when he was quite young, won the competition to be the organist of St Mark's Cathedral in Venice. But then he heard that the second prize had been won by a very old man who was a destitute and who was a very bad organist.

And he voluntarily gave up his position so that St Mark should have a bad organist but one who needed the money. That shows the highest team he held the heart, the arts in. And also a certain generosity which was born out later when the collapse of the Venetian Republic took place. He went to St Petersburg, now Leningrad, and became the director of the national theatre, the imperial theatres. And he wrote an opera himself on the subject of Ivan Susanin, a life for a Tsar, and then Glinka sent in his manuscript. And my great-great-grandfather looked at the manuscript, admitted immediately that Glinka's was much better than his, and withdrew his own from the repertoire, because he was a writer of operas too, and the first Russian operas, which were very Italian. And withdrew his own opera from the repertoire on condition that he had the honour of conducting Glinka's first performance.

And he conducted that and the overture of Ruslan and Ludmila, which you've just heard. I like to think that it was this quality of modesty and self-effacement which has permeated the whole of my family. I'm very much like him, I'm modesty personified, and I had to be dragged out here, and I only really decided to do this programme, and I was promised that not more than 500 people would be present. It's difficult to explain really why I'm here, except that it has always interested me, mixed blood has always interested me, because it could hardly fail to, I can't get away from it. I'm here because of the retrievable follies of my forefathers, and this is in a way my revenge, they're all present here, and even if they're below the ground, or scattered to the winds, I am their representative at the moment, and if I have a slight affectation with one corner of my mouth, or I keep blinking one eye more than the other,

it's due to someone over here, and it's the same for you, I think really there are about 40,000 people present, because the only true guarantee of any form of immortality for anyone is really in procreation, and we're here, we're representing people that gone before, I didn't drag my children into this because I saw on the tickets that children under 10 aren't admitted, but I'm really only a link in a chain, as everybody is, while they're alive. And I've been fascinated, obviously, by the difference between rooted people and rootless ones, and perhaps I'm trying to prove that rootlessness in itself is a form of having roots. When you get writers like Sean O'Casey or John Osborne, who are very evocative and redolent of a certain kind of society and a certain kind of background, West has even written a play called Roots, obviously one is slightly jealous, one is always slightly jealous of what one hasn't got, that they're so attached to one particular place, one particular time, and one particular set of circumstances.

At the same time, really, when I reflect, I'm not really jealous at all, because I think that spread has something to offer too. My mother's family, we weren't always without roots, my mother's family, which I'll take first, ladies first. They came from a village in France called Sainte-ouin Aubrey, which is one of the most depressing villages that I've ever been into. You'll see it on the screen, and the roadside, at least, is new, but the rest of it is a place which I absolutely understood why they left. The church is locked practically permanently, there is a way in through the windows because several pains are broken, but with my corpulence I found that was impractical. I went to the town hall, and that was shut, and the clock hadn't gone for a long time, obviously it hadn't gone for two or three years, except that, say, in its favour, at one minute every day it was accurate.

I went down to the only shop I saw, and not the cafe that was shut, too. The only shop I saw, which was open in a way, there was a bell which went on ringing years after I got in there, and made conversation difficult. The shop smelled of sulphur and cardboard and dust, and it had products in it which had not been sold since the war, but they had never been bought. I explained rather like an American tourist why I was there, and I asked the lady, I said, is the church open? She said, I know. Unfortunately, the poor Cure, he has eight villages and we're the furthest away. I said, what about the mayor, the Lord Mayor? Well, she said, the town hall is open sometimes during the lunch hour. Probably the only town hall is only open during the lunch hour, and then not very often, because the Lord Mayor is the village school mistress. She occasionally, when there's a lot of civic business to be done, she goes there during the lunch hour and opens it up, but then only if she has time in the morning to make sandwiches.

And she said, she doubted very much if she'd be there today because of course exams. So I explained why I was there. I said, I'm really trying to trace where my mother's family came from, and she said, well, there is a man. He's very lucid still, he's at the other end of the village, and he's 96, but he's got a very clear mind. I don't think that's really adequate because they left during the French Revolution. And this lady didn't bat an eyelid. She said, oh no, I don't think we've got anybody as old as... Anyway, it was from this village that they went. The oldest one, on record, Nicola Deneben, who was described as a tiller of the soil, which means, of course, a peasant. His son beffered himself. He was the schoolteacher. Ironically, of that school, I don't know whether he was the mayor as well. But there are rumors that he wrote a celebrated pornographic book in code, rather like Samuel Peeps, but nobody's ever cracked the code, or indeed found the books, I don't know what they told him.

But his son, Louis Julienois, finally left during the French Revolution, there he is, and became the metredotel. It's a chef, a metredotel, to the Tsar Paul I. And he very cleverly married Fraulein Gropet, who was the midwife to the Empress, so between them they knew roughly what was going on. The Tsar Paul I, that must have been a very, very difficult job to hold, because the Tsar Paul I was, of course, mad. He played with toy soldiers in his bed, and treated real soldiers as though they were toys on the parade ground. And in that kind of intermediary period when military follies were not yet fully exposed, they had a rule for entering this particular regiment, just as we have guardsmen here that have to be a certain height. Because the Tsar Paul I had a snub nose, anybody wanting to gain access to that regiment had to have a snub nose. This is quite true, it must have been a field day for the sergeant, one can imagine when looking down the line and saying, get a nose back that man, because they were all like that.

So this must have been a very difficult job to hold down, but his son, Nicolab and Wah, who was my great-grandfather, became an architect, and married the granddaughter of the man who's conducting, you failed to hear when the program started, because that was conducted by someone else, but it was that piece of music. And her father, in other words, his father-in-law was an architect, too, and a rather good one. Leningrad, Petersburg at that time, is a remarkable city, I've only been there once, but I was immediately struck by not only its beauty, but I said at the time, and I didn't feel I'm wrong, that if Moscow is the heart of Russia, some Petersburg or Leningrad is Russia's aspiration. You feel that her quest for the sea has been gratified, and it's a very strange northern city, I felt when I was there that the sky was very low, the clouds were always going very fast, and every building seems to culminate in a semaphore or a weathercock or a mast, and you really feel at times that the whole city is in motion. And of course, a great many foreign elements congregated there, which perhaps the real Russians might have presented later on, but perhaps it also aided the real Russians to find themselves, just as a child can be educated either by obedience or by reaction.

And if it helps people to find themselves, reaction is very good. I think the children who react against education usually learn more than the children who give in obediently. So the foreigners were very good for Russia, and they richnessed the mixture, and these were examples of those people, and this uncle built the Mariinsky Theatre, which is still there today, it's called the Kyrov Theatre now. And it is a little remarkable, it seemed scandalous at the time, it no longer does to us now, that the interior of this theatre broke with the tradition of red, white and gold theatres, because it is white, blue and gold. And constantly all those are very big auditorium, and a very sumptuous one, it gives an enormous feeling of air and light. Then I come down, of course, to people I actually remember, the generation of their children.

There was my great uncle Albert, whom I actually don't remember, but he was a very celebrated gentleman with the ladies. He's got a kind of fatal look, and he used to do a lot of his seduction by means of the piano forte, which he played very well. It's a slightly cumbersome procedure, and I somehow don't think that there were very many balcony scenes in his romances, because you need too much help, nowadays it would have been quite impossible. But my grandfather, to whom I am supposed to bear a striking resemblance, in fact when I visited my old uncle, Grand Uncle Alexander, who was by far the youngest of that lot, and I had never had a beard on before, my great uncle tottered down the stairs and suddenly looked at me and had to sit on the stairs and said, Maudier, Maureur-Louis, and then he added, grow, grow. Apparently, we both had a tendency towards corporalance. I think I'm just grow. Anyway, he was a remarkable man. I remember him, because we went to visit him when he was allowed out. He was the President of the Soviet Academy of Architects, and he was allowed out to go as far as Estonia in the 1924-25s.

I was quite small, as Tonya was then an independent republic, of course, now it's part of the Soviet Union, and at that age I must have been very infuriating because I was a motor car. It wasn't a question of pretending I was, I was, and I was a motor car around the clock. At dawn I switched myself on, I went about the affairs of the day, in first, second, or sometimes third gear, and at nightfall I backed myself into bed, and at the moment that I found appropriate I switched myself off, and I can still remember all that, and I remember how I used to do it, and some mornings when I was in a bad mood I had a flat battery, and that was terrible. Those are the things they call the doctor. Anyway, I was doing this all the time, and my poor mother had a toothache, and I heard

moans from the bottom of a closed hat, and I was still going on, I seemed to profit from this, but that was the kind of claxon of the time, and for a smaller car, I was a small car, I just, and I remember driving, driving her absolutely mad, and she suddenly lost her temper and said, goodness, she stopped that noise, and her father held up a perumetry hand and said, you don't say that, it's his imagination developing. Well, at a price, too, and then he tried to cheer me up by making me a drawing of a motor car, but it gave me no satisfaction, there it is, on the screen, it gave me no satisfaction at all, because of course they had no motor cars in Russia for some time, they hadn't imported any, and the last he remembered when 1910, and I'd never seen one like that, he added the dog, I think, because he had much confidence in the car, that's the actual drawing, but he was a charming man, I also remember there were a lot of flies that summer,

and I used to go around killing the flies to keep them off the food or of me, but human nature being what it is, this can quickly turn into a vice, and I suddenly began hunting flies like a big game hunter, waiting for them and hitting them all over the place, and he was appalled, and he suddenly stopped me and said, why do you kill flies gratuitously? They have a right to their life, it's so short, and to this day I find it often difficult to keep flies or food or anything else. Now, he had, of course, his younger brother, who's Alexander Brinoir, who was one of the founders of the Russian ballet, and who had the advantage in that kind of a family of being by far the youngest, so that he wasn't really drawn into that, it isn't exactly a mutual admiration society, but the tendency of all families that do things rather well, and this was a strange family, because if you'd gone to them and said, I want to be a solicitor, they would throw up their hands in horror saying, can't you choose something safe like sculpture?

So, he being by far the youngest, he was rather neglected by the others, and so developed an individuality, which perhaps the others didn't have. And he was where he only died in 1960, at the age of 89, practically 90. I said into an old gentleman in New York that my great uncle had almost become 90, what a pity it was he died at the age of 89, and the old gentleman in New York said, I should live that long, so it's really quite an achievement, I think 89, even. Anyway, this man was of great personal help to me and to lots of other people. He designed Petruska and many other valleys and was a real landmark in not only Russian, but world culture. And he was a very sweet man, I pushed him into a corner not long before he died, and I said, look here, you're not going to get out of that corner until you've told me something about Chekhov that nobody knows about.

And he said, well, Chekhov, he's dead, I am alive, ask for me, Chekhov, which Chekhov? And I said, no, I know about you because I've written books and I've read them and I've even written a preface. He said, yes, thank you very much, I said, I would like to know something about Chekhov. And he said, I can't leave, till I tell you something from Chekhov, I said, that's right. Very unpleasant. I said, yes, but he was. And he thought for a while and then he said, this agreeable wife, let me pass, at least I know that about Chekhov. And he had a tremendous memory about what happened when he was young. I think like many old men, when he wrote his memoirs, he recollected most clearly that which happened in the first seven or eight years of his life. They suddenly became absolutely crystalline. And he wrote in his book and he told me, too, that he once went, and I think a marvelous insight into the psychology of children, that he once went playing in a larger state, which was near St Petersburg, which belonged to the Prince's Bezbarodko and where all the

windows were shattered. The children loved playing there because it had a Greek folly and mock Roman ruins in the garden and all the eccentricities of that time. But all the windows were shattered and he asked an old gardener why this was. And the old gardener said, well, because two years ago there was a firework factory area here and it blew up. So he said, from that day on, I only had two hopes. The first was, if the firework factory should blow up again, not to be there. And the second was, if the firework factory should blow up again, not to miss it. I think it's a charming insight into children. He also told me that in those days, mothers used to encourage their children to play in the railway stations, which had just been built. They were new. The train only arrived on Wednesday. They were hygienic. There were beautiful trees, plants, fountains, bandstands. And the mothers used to say to the nannies, don't go to the park.

It's too dirty. Go to the railway stations, let the little one play among the rails. So he was taken there in 1875 when he was five. And on that day, there was a German band which was playing in preparation for an appearance before the Tsar that evening. And he writes that he only found out later that this was Johann Strauss himself, conducting, rehearsing his own orchestra for this royal appearance that evening. And he adds that the music seemed to struck him as being of surpassing vulgarity, an impression which he only caused to alter later in life when his taste had become corrupted. That's not bad for a five-year-old boy. He also told me some very interesting things about the Moscow Art Theatre because I've always been worried personally about the teachings of Stanislavsky because the things in them which are valuable are valuable to all actors. The so-called method has now become detached from the obvious and is a kind of filigree

work on top of it. And I think that Stanislavsky, in fact, I'm sure, and I almost have proof that Stanislavsky considered this as a personal testament of how to act. But now it's become a cause for slowing down reflexes, for unnecessary contemplation. The theatre, after all, in its practical form, however much you think beforehand, the theatre is a sport. It's a place of quick reflexes. It's a place of excitement. And I've always held this theory, and I've always been worried about these immense discussions which take place, especially in America, where people wonder whether and who and it goes on like that for hours, and they won't keep still either. I think the best training place for an actor, really, whether he likes it or not, and this really has nothing to do with blood sports or anything, is the bullring because there at least people stand still because if you move too much, first of all the bull sees you, and secondly you lose the attention of the audience as well because if you move

the whole time you're like a map without a scale. It's quite obvious you're there, but nobody can judge the distances anymore, and an actor should be able to look and to suddenly stop all together and make the audience wonder what's going to happen next. You can't do that if you're moving all the time. Well I mentioned this to my great uncle and he said, I absolutely agree, he said, because I directed the Malia and the Goldone plays for the Moscow Art Theatre, and it was impossible because they tried to impose this method of concentration, which is fine for check-off because check-off is a dramatist about selfish people because they all talk and nobody listens. Therefore if you think of yourself all the time you can play a very good check-off because the other man's doing the same thing, and it's in a way a place about non-communication and you don't communicate, that's absolutely marvellous, but for Goldone, which is like a game of football, and especially a Venetian author who never really finished anything like the Elizabethans, who said, I've got this meeting with this masked lady on the Grand

Canal at 8 o'clock, I can't look. You can have 20% of my royalties, you just get the bishop out of there, put a mask on the candle, let the Duke go out, and you go out of there, well you can't rehearse that kind of thing too long, of course. And Sally Slavski always insisted on 60 rehearsals for these things, and after 20 they needed an audience, they needed to be fresh, and always that fanatical blue eye would appear wondering whether they were still rehearsing. My great-uncle resigned, but was consoled by the old Russian actor Artyom, who played in the original of Cheriort, that he played the part of Firs, and he drew my great-uncle aside and said, don't worry. You know, Stanislavski, he thinks I'm using his method, I'm doing exactly what I did in the old imperial teeth. This was a great consolation to me. I invited, I remember my great-uncle, he was then 86 to the first night of a player,

I wrote, called the Love of Four Kernels in Paris, and he said, you know, I'm getting on now, I don't go out anymore, I can't walk very easily, I begged him to come, he said, all right, but you must realize one thing before I leave, put me on the aisle, and show me where it is, because when you reach my age you can never be sure there are calls made upon you which are unforeseeable, and it's safer to know. I understood what he meant, I indicated where it was, and I put him on the aisle. The first act went rather well, I sat behind him, I didn't know how he'd react, but they seemed to clap, and he half turned towards me and went, fine, then he didn't move from his seat, then the second act took place, went rather better, and this time he turned a bit more, then the third act, and the third act went really, really well, and there was a lot of applause at the end, and he turned to me and he said, you see how much I enjoyed

it, I didn't even once have to… He'd put the idea in his own head, and I would even root to several people, because we moved through the audience with such rapidity. He also did a marvellous thing the first time I ever appeared on the stage myself, which was at a place called the Barn Theatre in Shere, in which I was 16 or 17, I think, and I played in a play of check-offs, the Wood Demon. I'd never confronted an audience before, I was terribly nervous, and just before I went on the stage, I got a letter from him saying, for three centuries now, our family have prowled around the theatre. We've built them, we've decorated for them, we've decorated them, we've conducted in them, we've written incidental music for them, but at last one of us has had the goal to actually clamber up there himself.

And I can imagine no greater encouragement for a young man than that. There are others, of course, his son, the tradition goes on, because his son, Nicola, is now the artistic director of La Scala, and an Italian, the Albert, the great lovers relative, Alexander Tiripnine is a pianist, and he's married a Chinese wife, so at last there's a bit of fresh blood in the family. This is a family, of course, without any political or military distinction, whatever, who tended always to gravitate away from any loud noises. They built rather than destroyed, and they possessed a very rare and precious religious tolerance. There were some of them who were Catholic, others were orthodox, others were Protestant, and my great uncle even told me that when he asked his father, at a very young age, whether Minerva and Apollo really existed, rather than disappointing his father, who was a strict Catholic, said probably.

And they were just a family, a working family, a family who decided, perhaps, that they had the goal and the courage and the discretion in a way, to make their mark in other arts apart from cheese making. Of course, there were black sheep. There was my great uncle Michael, whom I never knew, who was, there I said, a general. He was the general, commanding general of the Cosack Savage Division, and he wore a permanent earring, and he was mocked, not by battle, but because his wife was a woman of great temper and had an unhearing aim with plates. And this man ended his life as the inspector of prisons in Siberia. And there was my uncle Nicholas, whom I remember, who was an officer also, and in the first World War he had bad feet, so he was put in charge of all Russian armoured cars. I think there were three or four at the time, and he was a very sweet man, and therefore

did the traditional Russian thing after the war, becoming a taxi driver in Paris, so that we never had the usual trouble you have in getting across the town. But that was before he's left now. My father's family, with the exact opposite, they were land owners. I don't know how long they'd been going, but certainly Peter the Great insisted that all land-earning families engaged in commerce should have the nature of their commerce on their coat of arms, and we have a primitive salt press because we had salt mines, not in Siberia, but in a way. And the earliest on record is this gentleman, who had two wives and 25 children, but he was born in 1730 and died in 1838. He lived a hundred and eight years, so two wives, I think he's really rather good. And he was, it says in the regimental records, that he was a very religious man, having left his death, having built 16 churches and left 6,000 serfs.

So it's really unfair for a man like that to live so long, because his son, Gregorio Mikhailovich, his son, was a real rake. But I don't know what else you can do if you're 80, and you have to ask dad's permission to do something. I think that there's nothing for you but to react against it. And I must say that I recognize, in my own plays, a tendency to always analyze the reactions of parents and children. And I think it's largely because of this very sharp division in my own family between the virtuous and the other ones, because this man, he died of dissipation at a relatively early age. He had a very beautiful Georgian wife. He built her a house in St. Petersburg. He occupied another house and used to go there with some of the 6,000 serfs and amuse himself. There was always a table full of hors d'oeuvre. He never got out of his dressing gown and he occasionally wandered out into the hall in order to take a revivifying onion or gerkin before he went back again into the room

of sin. I know exactly how he felt, even if I didn't prove. Well, his son obviously grew up very fond of his mother and a very introspective character indeed. That was my grandfather who became an officer and who fell off his horse. That was possible all seven days and the fall was a very bad one because they had great helmets with eagles with two heads which I always thought was a terrible symbol for any government or military because it suggests that the eagle doesn't really know which way to go. And it's symbolic that the countries that had that as a symbol, nearly all Kalathe, Austria had it and it's a different country now and so is Russia, but he became very introspective. That was the period when a man was really at grips with his conscience. He fell under the influence of Tolstoy and he became a Protestant and this was forbidden in the Russian army, in certain regiments where you had to take every year as a Russian

officer and oath of allegiance to the Tsar and to the Orthodox Church and he took you to the Tsar but not to the Orthodox Church so he was exiled for 40 years. He was exiled to Siberia. He's his uncle who was the Russian ambassador to Constantinople, it's a very difficult period because it's 1860. Just after the Crimean War galloped north, Godholder of the Tsar, they had a carousing evening and he had already prepared a document suggesting that the exile might be to the west and the Tsar in his cup signed that and he went west and I'm personally very grateful that my great-great-uncle bothered to gallop all that way because I doubt was right should have been here if the exile had been to Siberia. Anyway he was a strange man as I said he was very close to Tolstoy that was a period in which men were beginning to search their consciences to ask themselves if their actions and thoughts were right.

Tolstoy decided at the age of over 70 that sex was sinful which seemed to be the right moment to choose and he was very much in the same tradition because he became a very austere, almost calvinistic, doer man who spent most of his time later on in bed, he drank nothing and ate nothing all day except a pot of cocoa and read the Bible from morning to evening, not entirely, it's exaggerating but he read a great deal of it with a help of a knitting needle, he had a defect that when he got to the end of a line he dropped two instead of one so he, I suppose that's a form of knitting too with the, and at the same time this man with this very austere reputation managed to whisper to my father towards the end of his life if you should ever marry Mary and Italian my boy because they are the most passionate, nobody knows where he got the information of, indeed how he could compare the Italians to the others but that was this, he left and again it was a very eccentric

age because having become a Protestant he decided to live in Italy that I had never understood either and he got the passport of Vertemberg which was then independent, the, I think the Tsar's youngest daughter was the queen of Vertemberg and she disliked the repressive measures of her father and so she gave automatic Vertemberg a nationality to any Russians who were exiled for political other reasons, he went, then he became extremely religious, he married a German girl, discovered she wasn't a virgin, wouldn't have anything more to do with her because it was against his principles and that became really tough for everybody I gather. Then he went to Palestine and started building a mission stations there and a hospital in Jaffa and he eventually married again, he married my grandmother and I only found this out relatively recently, my grandmother who is very much younger than he and who is Ethiopian. She was born during the battle of Magdala, the picture on your screen is the actual photograph

of their engagement in 1885 in Venice, I don't know why it was a strange period for his engagement he put on a Turkish medal, I don't know what that's for but anyway she was born during the battle of Magdala, her father was an engineer, I don't think he was Ethiopian, I think he was Swiss, he was an engineer who invented a cannon and the Ethiopians were so delighted that they tied him to the cannon to be sure that the secret wouldn't leak out and so he spent the whole of the battle recoiling and his daughter was meanwhile born in a tent and she was called Magdalena, probably after the battle I imagine and it was the battle in which the Emperor Theodore committed suicide at the end, it was the punitive expedition of Lord Napier, Lord Napier who still stands in exhibition road, very tall man and he looks even taller from the back way it seems that the horse is really, the horse's legs are really his, this has nothing to do with the program but it's quite interesting.

And I still have, as a matter of fact, a couple of great aunts in Addis Ababa and anything must be over 90 and so that when my father, who is the eldest son, he was born when my grandfather was 57, I know that it's not the habit to advertise on the BBC but I feel I must pay my, the British and my greatfulness to a particular brand because he was born when my grandfather as I said was 57, they didn't think he'd survive, he was a very small and fragile child and he was fed drops of milk through a fountain pen starper kindly supplied by the Waterman Company and this is no reflection on any other kind of pen. I'm sure that they would have just happened to be that and I always have a sort of sneaking suspicion that I ought to express my thanks in some way and he of course, he grew up with this father who was very much older than he and whom he was terrified of quite frankly

he must have been a very frightening man because he used to occasionally walk down the beach with no clothes on, no policeman had the authority to tell him to stop, he looked so forbidding and it must have been an inhibiting presence for a small boy. In fact, to show you how different the standards were in those days, they went to a hotel together in Nice when my father was 10 and my grandfather must have been 70 or most, in 192 and my grandfather always held himself very erect to show that he'd been an officer once, pulled a bag out of his pocket and gave it to the porter saying, I've got some valuable miniatures here and some diamonds and some rubies, I want you to put them in the safe and they said, very good sir and they put them in the safe the next morning they left and my father realized that his father hadn't asked for them back, was too frightened to bring his father's attention to it and then forgot all about it and they were back in the same hotel in 1913, 11 years later, but then my father had forgotten all about it but on his way out from the hotel my grandfather stopped and said, excuse me, I left here some rubies and

some Greek cameos and they said, oh yes, just no, I'm joking, no that was, so my father found himself with a vertemberg passport which is now no longer valid because vertemberg had by now become part of a united Germany, he found himself in Düsseldorf, the outbreak of the First World War and of course entered the German army and I once asked him, when did you know that the war was lost and he said, I'll tell you, I knew on August the 5th, 14, I said, very early, how did that happen? He said, well you know, one talks about the great German war machine but all I remember was entering with a whole lot of pubescent use that had full of acne and other troubles of that sort, they were very nervous, they had never heard a gunfire in anger, there is my father in his first uniform, ridiculous when you look at it now and they entered Belgium, they only got about half a mile, they

occupied a great castle and these youths sat around trembling after the first day's gunfire, there was no conversation, there was nothing in the noise of cutlery, water being poured occasionally, a throat being cleared and at the end of the table sat a German regular Colonel twitching with razor cuts and a moniker watching this in dead silence for two courses and suddenly in the middle of the desert, the German Colonel drew his sword and walked slowly around the table, brandishing the sword and saying, more atmosphere! And my father said we couldn't, we couldn't win, it was impossible. But those were the days of the First World War, the same mad Colonel in a trench, suddenly a French deserter appeared

and said he was willing to give away all the secrets, this Colonel pulled out his revolver and said, jeesh, mine! And shocked the deserter dead, my father said to him, that's a very noble gesture sir, but now we haven't got the secrets. The officer was resolved to pay for this fault himself, he said, I made this mistake, I must get them, so he crawled out in no man's land, there was no noise for about half an hour and suddenly, and the hat, the Colonel's hat landed at my father's feet with a hole-thread. So those were the days of honorable warfare, and my father's curious enough, his company commander during the First World War was Spidal, who later became the general, the NATO general, and that's the irony of that kind of thing. Then after the war, my father joined the German new service and went to the hage, where he determined meanwhile, his father, the old Russian, who was 40 years exile had been exhausted, remembered that he was an officer, and that the age of

80 reported the Russian consul general in Jaffa drew his sword and said he was eager to rejoin his regiment, and he was told to go home and he was absolutely furious. So he went back to Russia and died still trying to reach the front under his own steam. My father knew that the grandfather had gone back, so he decided to go back to Russia before he started work and went back to Russia in 1920, I think, as a Russian prisoner of war being repatriated. It was immediately arrested by the Soviets when he arrived and mustered into the Red Army to fight the Poles, which was not his idea of fun after four and a half years of the other. So he dropped out of the train going through Leningrad. He couldn't get a pass to go and find out where his parents had gone to. He got stuck in Leningrad for about a week, I think, or perhaps a bit more. He met my mother, married her. I must have left something out, but I haven't. They were engaged, I think, five or six days, and also tried to bribe a commissar with some ham, which he brought

with him. The commissar, that's the wedding picture. My father in a tennis outfit and my mother, in a night shirt, night dress belonging to her grandmother. And he tried to bribe a commissar, who happened to be my ski, who was later the Russian ambassador in London, and they compared notes many years afterwards. And I remember the first, and then he went back to London as a German prisoner of war being repatriated and became the director of the German news agency in London and afterwards the press attachate, the German embassy. My mother, who was expecting me, arrived in England for the first time in Harriage in 1921. First time in England, I couldn't speak English very well, there she is, and was very surprised that every station on the way from Harriage to London should be called Bobrill. And I remember, in 1924, Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, came to dinner, I believe. They

asked him to dinner in our two room flats, which was a little bit rash. They laid a seat for three, my father, mother, and he. But he arrived, of course, arrived with 18 members of his retinue. And I was woken up in order to entertain him. They couldn't think of anybody else. There was no repairs at all. And I had to entertain him while the cook of the German embassy was woken up and prepared a meal for 18 people and was rushed down to this three room flat. And it's rather auspicious to begin one's career with a royal command performance. That was me at the time. It was just after the performance. I was quite exhausted. And I never understood this connection with Ethiopia. And I remember coming home from school one day. It was the day that Ethiopia had been attacked by the Italians to find my father in tears, which is a very disturbing sight. And I never understood it until years later,

in fact, quite recently, when I suddenly thought back on it. And I never understood why he was so upset about Ethiopia. He didn't share a single tear about Albania. And it was very strange to be a little boy in an English school with a German passport and with a fond front of my name, which I couldn't do anything about. It was linked there. Occasionally, I still get the school magazine with that on the front. And I hide it in case anybody should see it. And occasionally boys that didn't want to be very pleasant. They were all very pleasant on the whole. But if they wanted to annoy me, they blamed me personally for having lost the First World War. It wasn't so very long afterwards. And then when they thought they would be nice to me, they consoled me by saying that dad had told them that in any case, the German trenches were much cleaner than the French ones. That didn't please me because my mother's French. It was really slightly inhibiting. I couldn't play cricket. I didn't really know what I had. The ball is much too hard by my standards. I devised a system of just before I failed to catch the ball. I cried out butter fingers myself. And I found that worked. Also being the most substantial boy in size in the school,

I was often made to play in go. And sometimes I just couldn't move fast enough to get out of the way of the ball. Also, in the cricket matches, I was an old boy so that I was supposed to be in the team. I couldn't be. So they made me the scorer. And the fact that my arithmetic wasn't too good meant that we won quite a few matches we should have lost. My father had a great sense of humor. He was a wonderfully witty man. To the extent that my mother being a professional painter entered a picture for an exhibition of a new English art group and was refused. And my father, who'd never painted before, since did one and he was accepted. I also remember on one occasion, my mother took me to paint because it's that kind of family. As I explained to you before, we were painting in lexam gardens in Kensington, I think, and I sat beside her, painting. My father suddenly came around the corner,

was horrified to see me wearing my school uniform and sitting in the street on a small collapsible stool and painting, and said, at least take your cap off. I took my cap off and later, a little bit later, a lady put six months in it. So I suppose he was... But I remember one curious incident, too, was that later, after he'd left the German Embassy and he'd become British. In about 1936 or so, I was at school with the son of Fun Ribbontrop, so that all the difficulties that were going on at the German Embassy between my father and the elder Fun Ribbontrop was really reflected in school between the younger one and myself. And I made my first money there, and I also learned the value of procrastination. Because I, the boy Ribbontrop, entered the school art competition with a Wagnerian triptych, rather badly drawn, of a whole lot of figures with horned helmets standing against the purple sky, and the motif of this was armed strength, which was written

in a shaky hand underneath. And I wrote a piece about that for the Londoners diary, and the evening standard wrote to me and said, would seven and six be in order? I never answered that, and they sent a guinea. Then I was called in before the housemaster, and he said that there'd been a big rob about it, the German Embassy had protested, and they knew that my father was a journalist, so could I help them in tracing the culprit? And after two weeks I had to admit that it was too difficult to find who'd done it. But I remember a little later, then, in 1938, coming home from school, and being asked by my father to go to the cinema, and he'd never asked me to go before, he'd prevented me from going, and he'd never give me any money to go to the movies, I suppose he hadn't got it. And on this occasion, he insisted, I said, I've got to get up early in the morning, I've got to work. He said, you are going to

the movies. Well, what's on? I said, don't ask silly questions. I didn't understand why this sudden urgency. I took the money. We lived in red cliff gardens, then, on the fourth floor, and I started going down the steps, baffled, when a whole series of elderly gentlemen began climbing, and I had to make way from them, and they grunted past me. I thought no more about it. I came home late, and I saw a bar of light under the door, and cigar fumes going to the air, and I went to bed. I thought no more about it, but later I found out what it was, and it was quite an interesting thing, was that the German military attaché had called my father from a phone box, and said, in 1938, you must simply help us. You've left a long time ago, but now with Riventrop, we've got no contacts, whatever. We must organize a meeting between the German and the British General Staffs in order to try and make the British stand firm at Munich. And this was the, that's why I had to go to the cinema. This meeting took place, and the English decided that they couldn't really risk it. But now looking back on it, and the, the meeting is mentioned

in William Sharers' book on the fall of the Third Reich, and I didn't realize until then that I knew where to take place. My father's family also, of course, has its black sheep, that there is Plato, who actually became a painter. And now, at this juncture, my daughter Tamara is up at Oxford, acting. My son, Igor, who knows nothing about all this family, I asked him the other day what he wanted to be when he grows up, and he said he wanted to be an architect, which sent a small shiver up my spine, because I have since noticed that when he goes into a room full of people who are waiting to receive him, he doesn't go straight to the people but examines the door first to see how it's constructed. My other daughter, Pavela, is painting abstract pictures. She won't do anything figurative. So I reckon that this must be the new generation. It comes quite naturally to her. She does it without, with, with conviction. And my smallest daughter, of course, wants to be an

abstract architect. So there we are. Tammy, my eldest daughter, has English and Irish blood in her veins. The first time that's happened, I haven't got a drop, but here it is now. My second wife, who's French-Canadian, has some red Indian blood, so that I'm not really letting the side down. The tradition goes on. I'm called for breakfast every morning. And I have paid homage as best I can to the traditions of both families by doing some inoffensive doodles and by serving for some time as a private, very distinguished private, to move up or down for four and a half years, which would have pleased my mother's family more than my father's. But this is perhaps what it amounts to is a plea for the mungrel. It's not so bad to be a mungrel. And I'm consoled by that. I've had many letters of protests

from ladies who breed thoroughbred dogs. And much as I like beauty, I still feel an affection and an affinity for the mungrel, because I know perfectly well that while the champion is standing on his pillow, shivering, still the mungrel outside, who's not even been let into the show, stands much less chance of being run over. He looks both ways and he is more resilient. And I like confusion at that sort. Even if I'm more at home in more places than most people, I can't honestly say that I feel absolutely at home anywhere. And I'm often touched by beauty. I'm touched by anger, by conviction, by compassion. And yet, really, there's no anthem in the world which can set my foot tapping. Carry on, you may smoke.

You may smoke. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.