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A family conference picked a new surname, Holland, for them out of their mother's ancestry. While the boys set to work practicing their new signatures, elders sorted their possessions, relabeling their clothes and making sure that the name of Wilde appeared on nothing. Later on, when the boys were at an English-run boarding school in Germany, they found some cricket flannels still marked with their right names and tore out the labels with the desperation of criminals on the brink of discovery. "The thought that at any moment an indiscreet remark or a chance encounter . . . might betray us," writes Vyvyan, "was a sword of Damocles constantly hanging over our heads." In time, to make security even more certain, the boys were separated, Cyril to stay on in Germany, Vyvyan to be sent to a Jesuit school in Monaco.
The Sins of the Father. Three years after the boys' exile began, their mother died and they were left to the mercies of maternal relatives and legal guardians whose only thought for them lay in an occasional reminder of their black parentage. The only word they were ever told of their father was at his death in 1899. When a kindly English schoolmaster broke the news to Vyvyan, the boy was astonished. "But," he said, "I thought he died long ago." Dutifully, the boy went into mourning, and when his schoolmates asked him why, he invented a story about the discovery of his father's body on a South Sea island after he had long been thought dead at sea. For the moment, the orphan boy "became something of a hero," at least in the eyes of his school mates.
His mother's family were prepared to grant him no such laurels. If Vyvyan took a drop too much at a party, he was promptly described in family circles as being "dead drunk." When Vyvyan Holland went to Cambridge—Oxford was out of the question since his father had gone there—his guardian was quick to warn those in charge that he was "idle, drank to excess and frequented bad company." In the years since, Vyvyan Holland has found, befriended and been befriended by many old friends of his father. He has married and has a son of his own. He has lived well enough from his own earnings as a part-time author and translator, and from his father's royalties. His memoirs, written with candor and simplicity, are free of bitterness. But even the balm of time cannot erase from Author Holland's story the cruel fact that "my life has been one of concealment and repression."
*Son of Oscar Wilde; Rupert Hart-Davis; 185.