The Sunday Times Magazine • 37Jeremy Thorpe. I think there’s so much
more than Thorpe in it [the book].” This
is the conundrum of his life. One of the
most poignant sentences in the book
comes where Scott, a gifted horseman,
contemplates life’s untrodden paths:
“I might have found employment with a
reputable dressage trainer and ridden for
Britain in the Olympics and he [Thorpe]
might have become prime minister.”
For him the events we are familiar with
are not what gave meaning to his life, but
the very thing that sent it spiralling off
course. His interest in horses was used
against him too. “I was just called a ‘stable
boy’ by the press.” The term has undeniable
homophobic overtones, the role he was
assigned in public opinion. “I was never a
stable boy, I was a working pupil learning
dressage so I could three-day event.”
What he seems to feel now is
contentment. His marriage was a disaster,
lasting just a year. But he is strangely
nostalgic about those times. “The Sixties
were great, apart from Thorpe,” he says. It
was a time when, by his own account, he
was not very discerning about who he got
into bed with. His lovers included the artist
Francis Bacon and a former lord mayor of
Dublin. “It was the Sixties,” he explains.
“Free love ...” He looks wistful.
In what is a somewhat convenient
conjunction of recollections, on the night
Newton nearly shot him dead he sought
solace in the arms of a woman, their only
night of passion, who then bore him a
daughter, Bryony. She and her four children
now live nearby and he dotes on them.
“I have a life and have had a life for years,”
he explains. “I’ve got a wonderful daughter
and four beautiful grandchildren. I’m so
lucky. I’m much healthier than most
82-year-olds.”
There is a darker, sadder side too,
however. His wife, Sue, bore him a son,
Benjamin, whom he saw once when he was
three years old, again when he was 19 and
now not at all. He began to write the book,
he says, “years and years ago as an open
letter to my son, because I was never
allowed to see him as a child. We had a
horrid divorce and in his eyes I was dead.”
Scott was not banned from seeing his
son, but the terms of his access were
strict and included a probation officer
implying he was a threat to Benjamin.
“I was given half an hour four times a year.
Would you go to see a little boy at three
years old, four times a year, with a probation
officer there ‘in case I harmed him’?
How could I go and see him? I couldn’t.”
I have two young daughters, one of them
is three. I would have gone, I tell him.
“I had this absolutely forbidding wife and
mother-in-law, nobody would speak to
me,” he replies.When Sue took her own life in 1986, long
after they had parted, Benjamin found the
letters and presents that Scott had sent him
throughout his childhood, unopened. They
met again but soon fell out. There is now no
contact between them. It is Scott’s biggest
regret. “He’s gone. He has now written to
my publishers saying he wants everything
removed from the book. He has no right to
ask that. He has changed his name. People
won’t even know it’s him.”
Does he now hope Benjamin reads the
book and understands? “I truly don’t know
what I feel. A reconciliation would be ‘jolly
nice’, but I don’t think it will happen.”
There is that element of fatalism again.
But the book is ultimately his attempt,
finally, to seize and control the narrative of
his life. There are holes galore in it. While
he remembers some events in HD detail,
the mystery of how he supported himself
is never quite answered. He wants us to
believe everything. By the end of our time
together I have ceased to care whether
every line of the book is “the truth”; the
importance to Scott is that this is “his
truth”. In his eighties he has finally pulled
that jammed gun away from his head and
shown that there were other chapters in his
life worth writing nAn Accidental Icon by Norman Scott is
published by Hodder & Stoughton at £22