David Niven Read Free Page B

what his mother had said, and he answered, ‘I never forgot it. I didn’t understand it when she said it, but I never forgot it. Grizel also believes he was our real father.
    â€˜He once said to me, the last time I spoke to him during the war, “I’m as proud of you as any father could be.” I saw a look in his eye. It was the look of a proud father. Officially he was my stepfather. But a
real
father looks at you with a very different eye. And then he said, “You know our secret, don’t you?” and I said, “That you’re my father? Yes, I do.” And he said, “I hope you understand why we could never tell anyone, what with my position as a Member of Parliament.” I said I understood perfectly, and we parted on good terms.’
    That was in contradiction to what he had written in
The Moon’s a Balloon
when he maintained that he last saw Sir Thomas before he went off toHollywood and that there had been some unkind words from Comyn-Platt and they never saw each other again. All his life, David had kept up the pretence about the true nature of his relationship with Sir Thomas Comyn-Platt, but as he edged towards the final months of his life, David Niven was revealing the truth.
    I asked him, at that time, if he thought William Niven had known. ‘I have no idea,’ he answered. ‘I’ve often wondered that and I’ve talk to my sister about it. We just don’t know. And it’s something we agreed to keep to ourselves.’
    â€˜Then why are you telling me?’ I asked.
    â€˜Because when I’m dead, and God knows how long Grizel will live for, no one will know, and somebody should.
You
should.’
    â€˜Why me?’
    â€˜Because, as I said, you’re a friend, an author and a priest.’ And then he added, ‘But not necessarily in that order.’
    He had been convinced as a child that his mother and Tommy had done their best to get him out from under their feet. ‘I think I was rather badly behaved as a child,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t into anything criminal. But I did run riot, which is why Tommy and my mother sent me to boarding school. They thought it would instil some discipline in me. It didn’t, you know.’
    He told me that his time at a private prep school in Worthing was ‘one of the worst experiences of my life. The older boys and the masters there bullied the younger boys.’ He talked of being whipped with wet towels by the older boys and being hung out of a window by a school master.
    â€˜I was terrible in most subjects,’ he said. ‘I was terribly bad at mathematics, and I was rebelling even though I was really scared.’
    In 1979, during the ‘angry interview’, David told me, ‘I had things done to me that were simply horrifying. Younger boys were often abused by boys who would do the most disgusting things. I mean, sexual things. I call them sadistic, not sexual. Sex is a pleasure. This wasn’t pleasure. I felt that I would never forgive my mother and stepfather for sending me there.’
    He got a terrible boil from bad food which became infected when the school matron cut it off with a pair of scissors and he ended up in hospital. His mother removed him from that school and placed him, in 1919, at Heatherdown, an expensive private school at Ascot, where, he said ‘all the snobs went. But it was a good school with kindly masters and good food. I was happy there. My mother must have been up to her ears in debt but I suspect Uncle Tommy handed over some money for not just my schooling but for all of us. Max was at Dartmouth, and Grizel and I were both at boarding schools.’
    David revealed that his mother wasn’t so poor after all when I had lunch with him and actress Lynne Frederick in London in 1980. During a rather morbid conversation about inheritance – Lynne had just become a millionairess following the death of her husband Peter