I came across Andrew Graham — Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Graham, to give him his proper title — through his story collection Mostly Nasty (1961). I bought the book purely for its intriguing cover and lovely design, the pages filled with ornate and startling illustrations by Leonard Huskinson. Mostly Nasty reads a bit like a collection of after dinner tales told over a brandy in the comfortable leather chairs of a fine old London club — if the club included men like Roald Dahl or John Collier among its members. For there are streaks of Dahl’s delight in the absurdity of death and Collier’s spirit of jolly misanthropy. There are many deaths in its pages and most are fraught with ridiculousness.
On the other hand, Graham’s stories are told from the perspective of a man poised a rung or two above Dahl or Collier on the social ladder. He is not just familiar with fine country houses but able to spot the details that set a better one apart: “A particularly good set of busts of emperors looked down at us from the tops of the bookcases; firelight from a wood fire twinkled in the silver of the tea-tray; there was hot toast and farm butter and home-made black cherry jam; and a slight smell of vellum, Turkish tobacco and late roses.”
This is from “Dear George,” the story of a painfully well-mannered bachelor uncle who becomes the target of a thoroughly unpleasant nephew’s domestic terrorism. As George and the narrator settle down in the lounge for a bit of tea after their dusty journey, little Cedric launches his first raid: “He wore a Red Indian head-dress, he left the door open, he caught his foot in the wire of a standard lamp and brought it crashing to the ground, and, catching George (ever a slow-mover) unawares, seized hold of both ends of his moustache.” Too kind to heed the narrator’s advice “to give the child a sharp biff on the behind,” he suffers silently as Cedric attempts to extract every hair of George’s moustache by its root. “He must have suffered agony,” the narrator reflects. Little Cedric gets his comeuppance in the end, though, in a shocking if satisfyingly permanent way.
Graham’s elevated position has its disadvantages, though. His sense of fitness restrains him from taking quite the same evil relish in awful outcomes as a Dahl or Collier. This is not black humor but rather an elegantly muted shade of grey. Writing after two world wars — the latter in which Graham fought as a tank commander — where Britain took more than its fair share of losses, he is fully aware that social changes are afoot, but not yet decided whether he agrees with them:
Nowadays one is so accustomed to old ladies of eighty who do their own housework, bumble about the neighbourhood in Morris 10s, and spend the evening of life baby-sitting, that it was a rare pleasure, like sampling a wine of ancient vintage, to shake the be-ringed hand of this splendid old number, complete with curly fringe of false hair (weren’t they called “transformations”?), lace, altar-frontal held up round the neck by whalebone, locket on black watered-silk ribbon, and lace cuffs: complete, in fact, with all those trimmings which come in so handy if you happen to have a lady’s maid, but which only confuse the issue if you’re doing the washing-up
In structure, Graham’s stories betray a strong grounding in the kind of set-up/punchline structure first mastered by Edgar Allan Poe and then used for the next 100 years by writers like O. Henry and Frank Stockton. If you’re looking for that twist designed to provoke a burst of laughter or gasp of disbelief, read the first paragraph or two then skip to the last.
But what really matters here is the teller, not the tale. Graham is a man of the world, but not a man full of himself. Stick with him for the details, not the drama. If Graham’s mostly nasty tales seem to have had their cutting edges dulled a bit, it’s all in the interest of good taste. “Assuming one’s critical faculties were just a teeny-weeny bit numbed by a glass or two of really good wine,” one reviewer wrote, “these stories would be quite enjoyable.”
Graham would have been your man if really good wine was what you were looking for. He’d not only savored his fair share of the stuff in post-war military liaison posts, he spent much of the 1960s as the Times own wine correspondent — back in the days when the only wines considered worth drinking came from France bearing an appellation d’origine contrôlée. He got his start as a scribbler with a short memoir of his tour as the British Military Attaché in Saigon from 1952 to 1954 titled Interval in Indo-China (1956). The Telegraph’s reviewer praised Graham for his “light, conversational style that is often very amusing,” but I suspect his urbane and ironic account of his experiences now seems a bit ill-timed given what came after.
His skills as a raconteur, however, made him an exemplary clubman. I haven’t been able to track down a list of his memberships, but according to knowledgeable sources, it was the Conservative Club at 74 Saint James’s Street that inspired his next book, The Club (1957). Although written as a novel with a thin plot centered on the attempt of a nouveau riche manufacturer to gain access to the True Blue Club’s auspices ranks, The Club was closer to an anthropological study than a work of fiction. That is, if the anthropologist took a wicked delight in reporting the worst of his subject’s manners and customs.
Reviewers with some experience of club life took particular pleasure in reading the book. John Betjeman wrote that, “What makes this book so very well worth reading is its author’s accurate knowledge of elderly men and how much more maliciously they gossip about one another than women.” Alan Ross in the TLS found it “full of the most delicately observed character studies, of bores, complainers, retired soldiers, country gentlemen, business magnates, upstart peers, and the hereditary rich.”
One reviewer called it “a plum-cake of a book,” but praised Graham for his restraint: “Yet the joke is not overdone.” And indeed, some thought Graham’s instinct not too cut too deeply laudable. “There have been other books about the malice of men but few which so well describe their pathos,” Betjeman wrote, and Maurice Richardson considered that Graham had hit “the correct note of poignancy, so integral a part of club atmosphere which can turn the most divergent types of human frailty into desirable members of society.”
Graham returned to Southeast Asia for his second novel, A Foreign Affair (1958). Set on a fictional island split between two states in uneasy and impermanent truce — the revolutionary Cheo Republic in the north and Westward-leaning but charmingly corrupt kingdom of Parasang in the south (reminder you of any place?) — A Foreign Affair is a comedy soaked in a genial sort of Foreign Office snobbery. Coups, crises, and conflicts may come and go, but the first priority of the British Ambassador is not to allow matters to upset the peace of a predictable daily routine.
When a crisis does arise, however, the Westerners are prepared to respond: “The Englishwomen of Alassar, with their unrivalled knowledge of auxiliary services in time of war, set about imparting their skills in First Aid, Fire Watching, Ambulance-driving and the making of hot sweet tea, to their Eastern sisters.” The wife of the French ambassador offers her own form of aid: instruction “in that essential weapon in the armoury of modern French healing, the hypodermic syringe.” For the most part, however, life in Parasang is one of late mornings, sleepy afternoons, and long evening cocktail hours. The primary duties of the Parasang Army are ceremonial:
For this they had left their humble homes in the ricefields; for this they had learnt to bear without blubbing the acute pain of wearing army boots and the relatively minor discomfort and airlessness of battledress; for this they had endured long hot afternoons on the barrack square, being screamed at by bull-chested sergeant majors, while their less patriotic brothers dozed till the evening shadows fell; for this they had sloped, ordered, presented, shouldered and trailed their arms, hitting the great unwieldy rifles till, if necessary, their hands bled. This, they felt — one glance of royal recognition — this was It.
And, considering that the Army was not normally called upon to do much else throughout the year, they were not far wrong in their belief.
Graham clearly drew upon his time as a military attaché in Vietnam for the material in A Foreign Affair, but he showed himself more than willing to make a joke at his own expense. Reporting the responses around the world to one of Parasang’s occasional coups, he notes that, “One enterprising London bookseller arranged a window display of an ill-informed and now out-of-date little book called Interval in Parasang, written some years before by a junior officer with literary ambitions who had served at Alassar under the Mandate.
Graham’s next book, Love for a King (1959), is a lightweight bit of royalist nostalgia set in the early 20th century somewhere along the Adriatic in the kingdom of Quarankol. The love referred to in the title is not romantic but patriotic. Though the King of Quarankol is aging, ill, and somewhat fuzzy-minded, the people know he has only the best intentions. Unlike the Parasangians in A Foreign Affair, the people of Quarankol long for a peaceful transition of power, even if the choice of successors offers slim pickings. Graham tells a good-hearted but forgettable little fairy tale, and the most noteworthy aspect of the book may be the chapter heading illustrations by William McLaren.
Graham took a break from fiction in the early 1960s, probably due to elbow strain incurred through his work on the wine circuit for the Times. He knew he had a sweet deal, however, and seems not to have indulged in unnecessary flourishes of wine snobbery. Bevis Hillier, John Betjeman’s authorized biographer and an expert on English ceramics, for example, recalled sitting next to Graham at a fancy lunch and asking his opinion of the host’s choices in wines:
“You’re meant to know something about pottery and porcelain, aren’t you?” Graham replied. “How would you like it, if every lunch you went to, you were asked to turn the soup-plate upside down and pronounce on the quality of the ware? Well, that’s the sort of thing that happens to me with wine. So I’m having beer instead.”
Having poked fun at the ways of London clubs and the Foreign Office, it was only natural that Graham would turn in his next books to a subject he knew best: the Army. He made an exception, however, and took time to write a straightforward history of the regiment he served with through most of the War. Sharpshooters at War (1965) was an account of the wartime exploits of the 3rd, the 4th and the 3rd/4th County of London Yeomanry (the 3rd and the 4th were combined into the 3rd/4th after D-Day — who says the military can’t be efficient?).
He then spun the table and in The Regiment (1967), Graham told the story of an earnest young historian’s struggle to extract a serious history from the records of a thoroughly dishonorable unit, Queen Adelaide’s Imperial Heavy Infantry. Vernon Scannell, who’d served as an enlisted man at El Alamein and spent much of his war years as a prisoner in military jails for desertion, didn’t think much of the book: “Most of the members of the regiment have comic names, long and difficult if they are officers, but Meagre and Lumber if they are Other Ranks. There are some jokes about bed-wetting, boils on the bottom, and homosexuality.” Simon Raven, on the other hand, who’d resigned his commission for “conduct unbecoming”, however, enjoyed the richness of Graham’s insider knowledge, offering as an illustration his translation of one particularly dusty dispatch:
The Original
Z Coy [Company], till recently out of luck, has made a successful foray on a hide-out in its area and captured several suspected terrorists. Well done, Z Coy; keep it up. But all work and no play makes Jack a dull soldier, so we are happy to say that they are showing their usual resource in finding off-duty recreations. A party from the Coy recently came down to the Battalion HQ on a short visit for administrative purposes, and impressed all by their cheeriness.Translated into plain English
Z Coy, after months of incompetence, accidentally picked up two drunk natives in a ditch. Both were subsequently released, as being entirely harmless, by a contemptuous Inspector of Police. Meanwhile, native women were enticed into the Coy camp on numerous occasions and gave 37 soldiers clap. There were sent down to be treated by the MO at Battalion HQ and were delighted to get shot of their tedious duties.
Graham had such a good time with the book that he persuaded Leo Cooper, whose imprint published a long series of histories known as the Famous Regiments, to allow him to write a pastiche of the genre, The Queen’s Malabars (1970), subtitled “A Not-So-Famous Regiment.” The Queen’s Malabars were, if possible, even more disreputable than Queen Adelaide’s Heavy Infantry, having spent much of their time being shuttled off to places where they could be kept at a safe distance from anything remotely resembling armed conflict.
Graham’s books are all out of print now, but The Club, The Regiment, and The Queen’s Malabars get passed around among small circles of admiring readers. None of his books will go down in literary history, but he can always be relied upon for a good yarn and a good laugh — especially if accompanied by a good stiff drink within easy reach. And I have to admire the good nature of any author who would allow his illustrator to place his head on a plate as in this Leonard Huskinson illustration from Mostly Nasty.
