A Sort of Life Read online

  At the far end of Berkhamsted at the Hall, the great house of the town, lived the family of Greene cousins. The mother was German and the whole family had an intimidatingly exotic air, for many of them had been born in Brazil near Santos, on a fazenda which was also the name of the coffee we drank. There were six children, the same number as in our family, and in ages they were inserted between us, our family starting first, as though my uncle, who was the younger brother, had suffered from a competitive spirit and wanted to catch my father up. My own particular friend was Tooter, though it was with his younger sister Barbara that I was years later to make the rather foolhardy journey through Liberia which I have described in Journey Without Maps.

  My uncle’s children were the rich Greenes and we were regarded as the intellectual Greenes. We would visit them on Christmas Eve for the Christmas tree, my elder siblings staying for dinner. I used to be embarrassed by the carols in German round the tree because I was afraid I might be expected to sing too. The whole affair in our eyes seemed rather Teutonic, for to us the eve of Christmas had no significance at all. Christmas only began the next morning with the crunchy feel of a heavy stocking lying across the toes and a slight feeling of nausea, due to excitement, which bore the family name of ‘Narcissus tummy-ache’. I don’t remember any Christmas tree in our house, and mistletoe was an embarrassing joke played by our elders. Kissing had no appeal, and I kept well away from the mistletoe if anyone else were around.

  On Christmas Eve, at the Hall, the children all had their presents laid on separate tables which were identified by names on cards. I remember being bitterly disappointed once when an adult present, a leather writing-case, on my table, turned out to be there in error: it was intended for my uncle, who bore the same name and who was the Permanent Secretary of the Admiralty and a Knight of the Bath – a title which I found impressive and not funny at all.

  Very remote my uncle Graham seemed, and the more important for his dryness and his taciturnity and the glasses which dangled over his waistcoat on a broad black ribbon. Even today I find it difficult to think of him as a little boy riding to school in Cambridge on a donkey. His speech was all ‘ehs’ and ‘ahs’. Perhaps he felt ill at ease with anyone but a civil servant. He died unmarried in 1950 at his home in Harston at the age of ninety-three, looked after by his two old sisters, Helen and Polly, both in their eighties. At the age of eighty-nine he fell under a tube train owing to failing eyesight on his way to attend a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence which was to discuss the import of reindeer into the north of Scotland. He lay, quiet and self-possessed, beside the live rail while the train moved back and it was found that he had only bruised a rib. With difficulty he was persuaded to return to Harston. There, when he was ninety-one, he fell out of a tree (he was pruning the branches) and for a while he had to take to his bed, but a more humdrum accident proved the fatal one, a year later, when he tripped over a chair on the lawn. He survived quite a while even then, though bed-ridden, having The Times leaders read to him every morning, and the first sign of his approaching end was when my old aunts while undressing him removed a toe with his socks. He was a remarkable man, if we had only known it. Having been drummed out of the Admiralty after Jutland by Lloyd George and the Northcliffe Press, he joined his friend Winston Churchill at the Ministry of Munitions. Only recently in a volume of the Dictionary of National Biography did I learn of his connection with the world of James Bond – he was one of the founders of Naval Intelligence. Carson told how ‘I met Churchill in the prime minister’s room and congratulated him on his knowledge of men. “What do you mean?” said Lloyd George. “Well,” I said, “Winston has the wisdom to choose for a much bigger job the man you dismissed from the Admiralty”.’

  My uncle lived in a big house at Harston in Cambridgeshire, and as children we would go there for the summer holidays, though later my elders went away to the Lake District to climb and I was left with my mother and the baby Hugh. (Finally my sister Molly fell off a mountain and got married to the man who photographed her fall – perhaps she admired his presence of mind.)

  Harston House was – at least in part – a lovely William-and-Mary house, and it had a large old-fashioned garden very suited to hide-and-seek, with an orchard, a stream and a big pond containing an island, and there was a fountain on the front lawn. We would fix a cup to the handle of a walking stick, and the water so obtained tasted very cold and very pure. The fountain was about two feet deep and a yard across. Once my elder brother Raymond fell in at the age of three, and when asked how he had got out he replied with bravura, ‘I struck out for the shore.’ The smell of apples seemed to fall everywhere over the garden and the smell of box hedges, and there was a buzz of bees in the hot summer weather. I remember the funeral of a dead bird which was coffined in a Price’s night-light box. My elders, Herbert and Molly and Raymond, buried him in what was called the Shady Walk. I was only a minor mourner, being the youngest, too young and unimportant to be priest or grave-digger or chorister.

  My uncle was never there when we were. He stayed safely away from any family turbulence in his bachelor flat off Hanover Square. I had a very possessive feeling for the great rambling garden, and I was furious one year when my mother invited another small boy called Harker, the son of the school doctor, to share my summer there. I treated him as a pariah, I wouldn’t play with him, I would hardly speak to him. I never showed him how to get water from the fountain, and I knew hiding places that he would never find, so that he was left ambling aimlessly without a companion, bored sometimes to tears. The experience of that terrible long August was never repeated and thereafter I was allowed to stay alone.

  It was at Harston I quite suddenly found that I could read – the book was Dixon Brett, Detective. I didn’t want anyone to know of my. discovery, so I read only in secret, in a remote attic, but my mother must have spotted what I was at all the same, for she gave me Ballantyne’s Coral Island for the train journey home – always an interminable journey with the long wait between trains at Bletchley. I still wouldn’t admit my new talent, and I stared at the only illustration all the way to the junction. No wonder it so impressed itself on my memory that I can see with my mind’s eye today the group of children posed on the rocks. I think I feared that reading represented the entrance to the Preparatory School (I went through the grim portal a few weeks before my eighth birthday), or perhaps I disliked the sense of patronage which I always detected when I was praised for something others did quite naturally. Only a few years ago at an Edinburgh ceremonial my memory was confirmed by Doctor Dover Wilson, the Shakespearian scholar, who told me that my parents often spoke to him of the difficulty they found in teaching me to read. I detested that absurd book with the engravings which now seem so charming, Reading Without Tears. How could I be interested in a cat who sat on a mat? I couldn’t identify with a cat. Dixon Brett was quite another matter, and he had a boy assistant, who might easily I thought, have been myself.

  I particularly resented my father’s interest. How could a grown man, I argued, feel any concern for what happened on a child’s walk? To be praised was agony – I would crawl immediately under the nearest table. Until I had grown up I think my only real moments of affection for my father were when he made frog-noises with his palms, or played Fly Away, Jack, Fly Away, Jill, with a piece of sticking-plaster on his finger, or made me blow open the lid of his watch. Only when I had children of my own did I realize how his interest in my doings had been genuine, and only then I discovered a buried love and sorrow for him, which emerges today from time to time in dreams.

  I think that my parents’ was a very loving marriage; how far any marriage is happy is another matter and beyond an outsider’s knowledge. Happiness can be ruined by children, by financial anxieties, by so many secret things: love too can be ruined, but I think their love withstood the pressure of six children and great anxieties. I was in Sierra Leone, running ineffectually a one-man office of the Secret Service, when my father died in 19
42. The news came in two telegrams delivered in the wrong order – the first told me of his death – the second an hour later of his serious illness. Suddenly, between the secret reports to be coded and decoded, I unexpectedly felt misery and remorse, remembering how as a young man I had deliberately set out to shock his ideas which had been unflinchingly liberal in politics and gently conservative in morals. I had a Mass said for him by Father Mackey, the Irish priest in Freetown. I thought that if my father could know he would regard the gesture with his accustomed liberality and kindly amusement – he had never disputed by so much as a word my decision to become a Catholic. At least I felt sure that my method of payment would have pleased him. The priest asked me for a sack of rice for his poor African parishioners, for rice was scarce and severely rationed, and through my friendship with the Commissioner of Police I was able to buy one clandestinely.

  Both parents have known someone the children have never known. My father had known the tall girl with the tiny waist wearing a boater, and my mother the young dandyish man who appeared in a tinted Oxford photograph on their bathroom wall, with a well-trimmed moustache, wearing evening dress with a blue waistcoat. More than ten years after his death my mother wrote to me. She had broken her hip and she had dreamt unhappily that my father had not come to see her in hospital or even written to her and she couldn’t understand it. Now, even when she was awake, she felt unhappy because of his silence. Oddly enough I too had dreamt of him a few days before. My mother and I were driving in a car and at a turn in the road my father had signalled to us, and when we stopped he came running to catch us up. He was happy, he had a joyful smile as he climbed into the back of the car, for he had been let out of hospital that morning. I wrote to my mother that perhaps there was some truth in the idea of purgatory, and this was the moment of release.

  For me this dream was the end of a series which had recurred over the years after his death. In them my father was always shut away in hospital out of touch with his wife and children – though sometimes he returned home on a visit, a silent solitary man, not really cured, who would have to go back again into exile. The dreams remain vivid even today, so that sometimes it is an effort for me to realize that there was no hospital, no separation, and that he lived with my mother till he died. In his last years he had diabetes and always beside her place at table there stood a weighing-machine to measure his diet, and it was she who daily gave him his injections of insulin. There was no truth at all in the idea of his loneliness and unhappiness, but perhaps the dreams show that I loved him more than I knew.

  The only separation that really existed was from his children. As a headmaster he was even more distant than our aloof mother. At the Easter holidays we would go to the seaside at Littlehampton, travelling with our mother and nurse in a reserved third-class compartment with a hamper-lunch, but my father wisely would always come down alone a few days later second-class. Sometimes he took a winter holiday alone in Egypt or in France or Italy with a friend, Mr George, a clergyman and headmaster. They remained very formal through all the years, calling each other by their surnames, though naturally George has a less formal sound than Greene. I think their holidays were more intellectual than convivial, for I remember my father naming some place in France visited many years before and saying to his friend, ‘You remember, George, that was where we drank a bottle of wine.’ Once – it was in Naples – they had a curious encounter. A stranger hearing them speak in English asked whether he might join them over their coffee. There was something familiar and to them vaguely disagreeable about his face, but he kept them charmed by his wit for more than an hour before he said good-bye. They didn’t exchange names even at parting and he left them to pay for his drink which was certainly not coffee. It was some while before they realized in whose company they had been. The stranger was Oscar Wilde, who not very long before had been released from prison. ‘Think,’ my father would always conclude his story, ‘how lonely he must have been to have expended so much time and wit on a couple of schoolmasters on holiday’. It never occurred to him that Wilde was paying for his drink in the only currency he had.2

  My mother’s remoteness, her wonderful lack of the possessive instinct, was made much easier for her to achieve by the presence of Nanny, an old woman who came first to look after my elder sister, some thirteen years before these memories begin, and by a long succession of nursery-maids (who never endured very long, for perhaps they represented a threat to Nanny’s future). I remember her bent over my bath with her white hair in a bun, holding a sponge. Her temper deteriorated before she retired on a pension, but I never remember being afraid of her, only impressed by that white bun of age.

  Before I was old enough to be taken on these holidays to Littlehampton, when all I knew of the sea was from the gossip of my elders, I used to assume that a pile of sand in a timber yard by the canal bank at Berkhamsted was the seaside; it seemed quite unremarkable to me, and I saw no reason to envy my brothers and sister. Indeed I was very content in those days to remain in one place (a contentment which I envy now). On the occasion of King George V’s coronation, when I was six, I was given the choice of going to London with my parents and the three elder children to seats procured for them by my uncle Graham or of watching the local Berkhamsted procession in the company of my maiden aunt Maud who lived in the town. The more economical alternative carried with it the right to choose a toy from the toy-shop, and to the relief of my parents I chose to stay.3

  The toy I chose was a table croquet-set, and I remember with irritation how difficult it was to make the hooked hoops stand straight on a tablecloth. In the local procession somebody rode in armour on a horse, impersonating probably the Duke of Cornwall, and this recalled the picture of a knight in a big bound volume of some girls’ magazine in the dining-room. (Later I loved Ivanhoe and Maurice Hewlett’s The Forest Lovers and the first stories I tried to write were of the Middle Ages.) The toy-shop was kept by the old woman called Figg in the High Street. One climbed down a few steps into something like a crowded cabin, where on bunk over bunk lay the long narrow boxes of Britain’s toy soldiers, quite inexpensive in those days, in an amazing variety which recalled all the imperial wars of the past century: Sepoys and Zulus and Boers and Russians and French. From memories of those first six years I have a general impression of tranquillity and happiness, and the world held enormous interest, even though I disappointed my mother on my first visit to the Zoo by sitting down and saying, ‘I’m tired. I want to go home.’

  There were terrors, too, of course, but they would have been terrors at any age. I distinguish here between terror and fear. From terror one escapes screaming, but fear has an odd seduction. Fear and the sense of sex are linked in secret conspiracy, but terror is a sickness like hate.

  I inherited from my mother a blinding terror of birds and bats. Even today I loathe the touch of feathers, and I remember how one night at Harston a bat came into my bedroom from one of the great trees on the lawn outside. I saw it poke its furry nose first around the curtains and wait to be observed. Next night I was allowed to keep the window shut, but a bat – I was sure it was the same one – then came down the chimney. I shrieked with my head under the sheet, until my brother Raymond came and caught it in a butterfly net.4

  Another recurring terror was of the house catching fire at night and I associate it with sticky coloured plates in the Boys’ Own Paper recording the exploits of heroic firemen. There always seemed to be fires in those days, and yet I never actually saw a fire until I witnessed too many of them in the winter of 1940–41. I think it was later, when I was seven, menaced by the approach of school and a new sort of life, that I was terrified by a witch who would lurk at night on the nursery landing by the linen-cupboard. After a long series of nightmares when the witch would leap on my back and dig long mandarin finger-nails into my shoulders, I dreamt I turned on her and fought back and after that she never again appeared in sleep.

  Dreams have always had an importance for me: ‘the finest en
tertainment known and given rag cheap’. Two novels and several short stories have emerged from my dreams, and sometimes I have had hints of what is called by the difficult name of extra-sensory perception. On the April night of the Titanic disaster, when I was five and it was Easter holiday time in Littlehampton, I dreamt of a shipwreck. One image of the dream has remained with me for more than sixty years: a man in oilskins bent double beside a companion-way under the blow of a great wave. Again in 1921 I wrote home from my psycho-analyst’s: ‘A night or two ago I had a shipwreck dream, the ship I was on going down in the Irish Sea. I didn’t think anything about it. We don’t have papers here as the usual thing, and if was not till yesterday, looking at an old paper, I saw about the sinking of the Rowan in the Irish Sea. I looked at my dream diary and found that my dream had been Saturday night. The accident had happened just after Saturday midnight.’ Again in 1944 I dreamed of a V.l missile some weeks before the first attack. It passed horizontally across the sky flaming at the tail in the very form it was to take.

  3

  Memory is like a long broken night. As I write, it is as though I am waking from sleep continually to grasp at an image which I hope may drag in its wake a whole intact dream, but the fragments remain fragments, the complete story always escapes.

  I must have been still under six years old when we all waited through a sunny afternoon in the St John’s garden – on the English side of the road – for the chance of seeing Blériot making his London to Manchester flight, but he never passed overhead – it was a long afternoon wasted, when we might have been across the Channel in France, in the holiday-garden.

  I hated the very idea of children’s parties. They were a threat that one day I might have to put to practical use my dancing lessons, of which I can only remember the black shiny shoes with the snappy elastic and the walk down King’s Road, between the red-brick villas on winter evenings, holding someone’s hand for fear of slipping. The only children’s party I can actually remember was up near Berkhamsted Common in a big strange house, where I never went again; a Chinese amah asked me if I wanted to make water and I did not understand her, so that always afterwards I thought of it as a Chinese expression. Many years later I wrote a short story about a children’s party, and another about dancing lessons, and perhaps there are memories concealed in them too.