A Sort of Life Read online

  I have an impression my father used to smack me as a child though I can remember only one specific beating at a later age, perhaps because it woke a sexual interest in me. Once I called my my maiden aunt Maud a bugger and she reported it to my father, who pulled me out from under a table and demanded an apology which I was unwilling to give, not knowing what my offence was. Indeed I never meant to offend her. I was closer to her than to any other of my numerous aunts, most of them officially maiden – Helen who ran a school of Swedish gymnastics and had passionate women friendships, dear muddle-headed Polly who lived at Harston and painted bad pictures and taught Gwen Raverat to draw and wrote ambitious plays for the village institute (the whole conflict between Christianity and Paganism in Northumbria she managed to contain in a one-act piece with fifty characters), the beautiful mysteriously gay Nora (whom we knew as Nono), Alice, the progressive, who ran a school in South Africa and was a friend of General Smuts and Olive Schreiner, Madge, an aunt-by-marriage, the pretty daughter of the Irish poet Doctor Todhunter – she sang songs about ‘Away with the gipsies oh’ in pre-Raphaelite gowns from Liberty’s.

  And somehow left out, I think, of all the children’s memories except as a figure in the remote background of the sunny garden – one had to peer to see her closer – there was Florence, who lived in her own cottage at Harston. Harston had been colonized by the Greenes almost as effectively as Berkhamsted or, as I was to discover later, St Kitts. The Greenes seemed to move as a tribe like the Bantus, taking possession. Helen, Polly, Alice and Florence were all paternal Greenes, and Florence was the only girl to marry, but as she had no children she returned to the tribe. I remember her as a thin peaky old lady, her face, which had perhaps been beautiful, hidden behind a spotted veil, tied like Queen Alexandra’s under the chin. She had none of the gaiety, fantasy and silliness of Polly; she wasn’t brusque and masculine like Helen and Alice. She hadn’t a family voice at all that one could recognize. It was as though her loss of virginity kept her apart from all the other Greene aunts – she was only Mrs Phillips, the widow of a county schoolmaster. And yet before she married she had been the most romantic of them all. At eighteen she fell in love with a young sailor who wanted to leave the navy and emigrate with her to the wilder parts of Australia, but the wisdom of older relations prevailed. Otherwise Australia might have been colonized too. Four years later a rich brewer in Lincoln wanted to marry her and gave her the Life of Charles Kingsley. He was a poor substitute for the young sailor and nothing came of that. There was a Mr Rust, but no one ever knew which of the sisters he had an eye on, so Florence finally settled for Mr Phillips, the schoolmaster. He kept a little monkey who ate oranges, dividing them meticulously, peeled paper off the walls, and put his arms tenderly round Mr Phillips’s neck. Would Mr Phillips without the monkey have been enough? Strangely, as an old lady, one thought of Aunt Florence as being always on a visit, from remoter regions even than Alice, perhaps from Australia.

  Maud, my mother’s sister, was ‘the poor relation’ who lived alone in a little house near the school and was made use of by my mother as a fourth at bridge and to take me as a convalescent child to Brighton. She vexed my mother by a nervous trick of yawning and sighing at frequent intervals which was apt to discourage her partner, if he was meeting her for the first time. Nothing that happened in Berkhamsted escaped her eye: she was a walking news-letter, and this too was a cause of irritation to my mother, who, perhaps, thought that as the headmaster’s wife she was in danger of figuring in the headlines. In later life I loved my aunt for this very quality, and would make journeys from London to have tea with her and hear the latest gossip of Berkhamsted. The headmaster, when he was no longer a Greene, was fair game, and one in particular caused a good deal of sexual scandal at which my aunt scarcely pretended to be shocked. Her ear was very close to the ground. Once I arrived with my brother Hugh unannounced, walking directly from the railway station five minutes away. She opened the door to us, saying, ‘When I heard you were in Berkhamsted I put on the kettle for tea.’

  It was after I was six and we had all moved to the School House, but before I went to school, that I began regularly to steal currants and sultanas out of the big biscuit-tins in the School House store-room, stuff my pockets full with them, currants in the left, sultanas in the right, and feast on them secretly in the garden. The meal ended always with a sensation of nausea, but to be secure from detection I had to finish them all, even the strays which had picked up fluff from the seams of the pockets. There is a charm in improvised eating which a regular meal lacks, and there was a glamour never to be recaptured in secret picnics on long sunny mornings on the roof of the Hall, our uncle’s big house. No stone of it now remains, a building estate has swallowed all – the lawns, the trees, the stables and the meadows, which were to be the scenery of my calf-love. When I see a performance of The Cherry Orchard today, it is on that estate I hear the axes falling. I would sit up there with my cousin Tooter, consuming sweets bought with our weekly pocket money (which was twopence, I think) and discussing possible futures – as a midshipman in the Navy or an Antarctic explorer – none of them to be realized, while we watched the oblivious figures in the yard and the stables below from our godlike secrecy and security. The sweets I remember best were white and tubular, much thinner than any cigarette, filled with a dark chocolate filling. If I found one now I am sure that it would have the taste of hope.

  A smell which comes back from those years was the smell of a breakfast food which I didn’t like. The same smell I noticed later from sacks of grain outside a corn chandler’s, and curiously it was the smell too of my carriers’ sweat in Liberia in 1935, and yet there in the damp heat and the strangeness, as they lay close around me at night for fear of cannibals, I enjoyed the smell; it had become the smell of Africa.

  Post-six too are my memories of being ill – it happened often, but only the dentist left unhappy memories. Till now I have never suffered greater pain than I did then. I remember rolling on the drawing-room floor in agony from an exposed nerve. I don’t think he was a very good dentist, and for years after I had left his care I would avoid walking, on the way to Northchurch and the Crooked Billet, past his house and the stained glass window representing the Laughing Cavalier which hid the chair of torture. Later I resented the fact that my parents used to visit a dentist in London – Mr Crick, I felt sure, was as painless as he was expensive.

  But of my other ailments I retain only a sense of peaceful darkness, of endless time, of privacy, a night-light burning, and of books bought by my mother for me to read, sometimes ones that bored me, like The Man-eaters of Tsavo. Apart from the tonsil operation I can remember only one unhappy illness – the first attack of hay-fever after playing in a haystack with my cousins. Nobody knew what it was, and I seemed to lie awake coughing and gasping for breath all night long. No later attack was so severe, and even the pains of pleurisy, which I had later, were more easily bearable and less frightening; perhaps it was during that night I evolved my fear of drowning – I was able to imagine the lungs filling with water.

  There are two stray scatological memories of the time. For some reason – it can only have been a convalescence – I found myself at Littlehampton alone with Nora, my mother’s favourite sister, so much gayer, more elegant and popular than poor Maud, who once burst into tears when my German aunt spoke of the beautiful hair she possessed when she was young. I was too embarrassed by her elegance to tell my aunt that I wanted to go to the lavatory and I fouled my knickers. At six too I made, perhaps it was on the same occasion, a coloured drawing of a bit of shit for the School House Gazette, a periodical in manuscript edited by my eldest brother Herbert (I had the rank of office boy). My memory tells me that the drawing was included because it was taken for a cigar, and I was a little annoyed at the misunderstanding, though I put nobody right, and yet recently I have searched in vain for my painting in the pages of the Gazette – perhaps the true meaning of it was understood after all.

  Apart
from the corpse of my sister’s pug at the bottom of my pram, the only domestic animal I can remember was a Pekinese called Bicki which also belonged to Molly, for she was the only one of us ever allowed to own a dog. We in the nursery shared a succession of canaries (one broke a blood vessel singing too loud and long), and I once owned two white mice, but when one ate the other and then died of loneliness, I was falsely accused of having starved them, so they were never replaced. My brother Herbert (but that was a long while after) brought home a baby pig which he had won at a fair and lodged it in his bedroom for the night. On the floor below, unable to sleep, I had the strong impression that he was kicking a football around – he was the athlete of the family. The pig was not allowed to stay.

  The Pekinese arrived nailed down in a box. It was in a savage temper after a long railway journey, and it remained consistently unamiable towards my sister who owned it and bit her on many occasions. Bicki and I got on well together. Once it was lost after a walk, the police were warned, and eventually many hours later, when the streets of Berkhamsted had been well scoured and messages sent to Boxmoor and Hemel Hempstead and Chesham, it was found asleep under my bed. My mother was always unfavourably disposed towards dogs, until many years later she became attached to a mongrel of my own called Paddy, and after Bicki had bitten the baby Hugh it was sold quickly into another captivity.

  The toy I remember most clearly was a fort. It was given me on my seventh birthday. It arrived dismantled, and I stuck the portcullis and walls and towers on to green cliffs by nails which fitted into holes. It was more like a medieval castle than the forts of Liège and Verdun which were soon to be so important in our lives and it was a little unsuitable for the Zulus who sometimes guarded it.

  The games we played were: French and English. This was a garden game of conflict, but I can remember none of the rules which must have dated back to the Napoleonic wars. It was played by Charlotte Brontë in her childhood.

  Hunt the Thimble. A special treat in the drawing-room when there were aunts and uncles about. At Christmas there was always an enormous number of Greene aunts and uncles, since my mother and father were first cousins of the same name, and a great many of them were unmarried and available.

  Tom Tiddler’s Ground. Played in the garden on the croquet lawn. A game of trespass. ‘Here I come on Tom Tiddler’s Ground, picking up gold and silver …’

  The Ocean is Agitated. This was played on Christmas Day when the cousins came to tea. It was a kind of musical chairs. One person promenaded round the circle calling out the name of a fish which had then to rise and follow. ‘The ocean is agitated by a shrimp … by a shark … by a sardine’ and finally ‘The ocean is agitated by all the fish’. Then came ‘The ocean is calm’ and there was a scramble for chairs. I didn’t care for this game. Even at an early age I found the chant ridiculous.

  Hide-and-Seek in the Dark. This was a game containing the agreeable ingredient of fear, and we played it on the ground floor and first floor of the School House with all the lights out and in the big school hall during the holidays.

  Hunt the Slipper. We played this rarely, but always at Christmas.

  Musical Chairs. This was a ritual part of the Christmas Day tea-party, when the rich Greenes joined us from the Hall. On such occasions we would play in the old school hall, and I don’t think anyone enjoyed it except perhaps the aunts and uncles.

  General Post. Played on the same occasion, and with as little pleasure. Party games never seemed like real games (which were games without adults). They were obligations like going to church.

  There were Charades, too, and Dumb Crambo, a kind of charade without dialogue, and a game called Clumps, which had been played in my father’s childhood.

  I have the impression that such games are becoming as obsolete as the street games described by Norman Douglas. Certainly I played none of them with my own children, for games like this demand a large family.

  There was a real game too, not a party game, played in the old school hall and invented by my eldest brother Herbert, who was always of an adventurous character until he was changed by the continual and sometimes shameful failures of his adult life. We divided into sides and each side started from opposite ends of the hall. The lights had been turned out and one side must reach the opposite wall in the darkness without being caught. Benches had been piled on benches as obstacles. We listened with agreeably tense nerves for the creak of a board, scanned the blackness ahead, and felt our slow way, hands outstretched. I imagined myself a franc-tireur of the 1870 war of which I had read in a book of Henty’s. War was still romantic, and every summer Herbert organized all-day manoeuvres with our cousins in the country lanes and fields behind the Hall. We carried sandwiches and ginger beer in bottles with glass marble stoppers, and the object of one side was to penetrate unseen to the stables and capture them. Scouting behind hedges, crawling along ditches, making heroic forays across an open space, one experienced the first hint of sexual interest for the enemy – the girl on sentry duty in the stable yard.

  There was one entertainment I was not allowed to attend until I was much older. It was given, whenever he visited my parents at Berkhamsted, by an old clergyman called Canon Baldwin, who held the living at Harston. He recited the more grisly scenes from Shakespeare, in the dark of the drawing-room, taking all the parts himself: male and female. Sometimes, listening from a discreet distance in the hall outside, I heard muffled gurgles, chokes and screams, as Duncan lay laced with his golden blood or Desdemona strangled. They were tense occasions for my parents, as a single cough from one of the privileged guests would stop the Canon in mid-speech and he would call angrily, like Hamlet’s uncle, for lights. Perhaps it was not surprising that his daughter married Doctor Dover Wilson.

  The Canon and my father were great chess-players. My father played for his county by correspondence, but he admitted that the Canon was the better man. The Canon would sometimes take my father for a walk up to the Common and play chess with him on the way. ‘I open with Queen’s Pawn Two,’ he would say, and my father would make the appropriate response, but after about ten moves he lost his sense of the board, and the Canon would announce triumphantly and irrefutably, ‘Checkmate.’

  1 Perhaps there is an understandable failure of memory here, for my brother Raymond writes to me: ‘You did in fact see the man cut his throat, standing by a first floor window, or the nurse may have obstructed your view. Anyway he succeeded.’

  2 I think this encounter must have been during the Christmas holidays of 1897–8 when his friend Bosie had departed and Wilde wrote of ‘ill-health, loneliness and general ennui with a tragi-comedy of an existence’.

  3 I think my decision was the right one. This is how my brother Raymond, who was ten, described the great day; ‘We got up at 4.15 in the morning and had breakfast. At Euston we took a cab and drove to Trafalgar Square. Then we couldn’t go on as it was such a crowd, but at last we got to the Admiralty. We waited about two hours and then the procession came by. Soldiers first, then the state carriages with dukes in ermine with coronets. Then more soldiers and state carriages and then the Royal coach and the King with his crown on. Then came more soldiers etc. After dinner it came by again and just as the crown was put on the King’s head, the street lamps lighted, 41 guns fired and then we came home and we were awfully tired’. Oh, the fatigues of childhood never to be equalled till old age.

  4 The fear of bats remains. I had to steel myself later in Angkor Wat to pass a damaged bat flapping on the floor of a passage, while up in the pineapple towers one could see small men on ropes gathering the bats’ dung. In those days there were Vietminh ambushes around Angkor, but I would have preferred an ambush to that dying bat.

  Chapter 2

  1

  SOME time in 1910, when my father became headmaster, we removed from St John’s (down the road into the High Street, turn left into Castle Street by the Norman church) to the School House, and that remained our home until my father’s retirement in the twentie
s. The new things which most impressed me were the long path from the street to the front door, on the right the red-brick Tudor school hall and on the left, divided from me only by a flower-bed, the old disused churchyard. There was a white cat which used to sit on the tombstones and it was said by my father to be the ghost of a notorious absentee headmaster in the eighteenth century. When I was sixteen I sat on a gravestone with Peter Quennell and we both read aloud to each other from The Yellow Book with a sense of daring and decadence.

  At the end of the long path, beyond the house, one reached the tennis-court, and beside the tennis-court was a small flower-garden with a pond full of tadpoles, and a buddleia which in summer swarmed with peacock butterflies. One of my early memories is of catching near the buddleia a female orange-tip which they told me was a very rare specimen, much rarer than the male. After I caught a butterfly I would put it in a poison-bottle, but a scruple always inhibited me from pinning it out in a case as my elders did, so the corpses soon became brittle and from frequent examination fell to powder, and then I threw them away. I wasn’t scared of butterflies, but I was deeply afraid of moths – something about their hairy bodies terrified me. I fear them still and I am unhappy with one in the room until I have killed it. Beyond the buddleias lay two greenhouses at right-angles: in the small one were only pot-plants, geraniums and the like, but in the larger were plants of importance, orchids, which my father brought back from sales in London, and green grapes, and there was a deckchair in which my father at leisure moments would sit smoking a pipe and blowing smoke over the grapes to kill greenflies. There were very strict rules about never leaving a door open. I had the impression that the least drop in temperature brought instant death, and indeed I was not far from the truth. Once the gardener, who had the misleadingly responsible name of Charge, got tight and forgot to stoke the stove in the orchid house. All the orchids died including one for which my father had refused three hundred pounds – the equivalent of several thousand pounds today. It must have been a severe blow as it would be for me to have the manuscript of a story carelessly destroyed, but my elder brother cannot remember him even mentioning the matter, nor was the gardener sacked.