A Sort of Life Read online

  Through a gateway by the smaller greenhouse one passed to the croquet lawn, where at the far end were apple trees and a revolving shelter which figured in my first truancy. I don’t clearly remember whether it was at this period I tried very hard to kill my brother Raymond by hitting him over the head with a croquet mallet, but I think this violent outbreak came later when I shared a room with him and we woke every morning to a quarrel. Now I shared a room uncomfortably with the baby Hugh, who cried at night and kept me awake.

  Walking across the croquet lawn (what a vast estate the whole place seems to me now, when I live, like most of my contemporaries, an apartment-life between bedroom and sitting-room), one came to a wooden fence which separated it from the kitchen-garden and a forest of raspberry and loganberry canes. Sometimes, but not often, we were allowed to pick from them and eat, and I preferred the winy flavour of the large loganberries. Beyond the kitchen-garden, on the right, was the entrance to the school quad, and on the left were the stables, which in those days contained no car, not even a horse, only one donkey called Miranda (she was employed in taking the washing to the laundry), and the cottage of the gardener, Charge. Beyond this cottage and behind yet another wall my father had built the School House sanatorium and near there, in a second kitchen-garden, we children were given small allotments of our own to tend – perhaps six feet square. (I can only remember growing radishes.) My only other gardening activity was to collect snails in a bucket and pour salt on them, so that they exploded into foam. (I was paid so much a hundred for their corpses.) I think I was rather older when I was paid a penny a dozen for killing cabbage-white butterflies with a tennis-racket. This seemed to me a very fine sport, and I can sympathize with the interest the Chinese feel when encouraged to kill flies at sight.1

  The School House stood in the street called Castle Street which ran down to the canal. On the opposite side were rather inferior shops, not up to the High Street standard: a sweet-shop (one had to climb steps to enter it) where we bought the mineral waters for our manoeuvres; a jeweller’s called Bailey’s (an old man with a white beard sat perpetually behind the window with a magnifying glass in his eye mending watches and when they read to me about Moses and the Tablets of the Law, I always thought of him); a stationer’s and a pawnbroker’s where I once tried to pawn a broken cricket-bat but the broker wouldn’t accept it.

  I had splintered the bat in a clandestine game, beating in bushes near the canal for a lost ball, and I didn’t want anyone at home to see the condition it was in. At some stage between eight and ten I had made friends with two or three town boys of what was called then the working-class, and one summer I used to meet them in secret near some rubbish dumps beside the canal. I would bring a bat and a cricket-ball, neither of which they possessed. (Cricket, even in the preparatory school, was still a game: it only became a sport and therefore feared in the senior school.)

  This is one of a few memories which remain to me suggesting some social conditioning. Why otherwise should the meetings have remained secret? There were others. During the 1914 war an old woman lived in Castle Street who prepared tripe, and I was given the idea that this was a far lower occupation than a butcher’s – it was ‘untouchable’, though we frequently ate her tripe with white onion sauce. My mother was deeply offended because the tripe-seller’s daughter married an officer in the Inns of Court O.T.C., which was stationed for a while in the town (the Corps was regarded by the citizens with some pride because it was not an ordinary regiment – every man was a potential officer as well as a potential barrister).

  In the Junior School, which I entered about ten, I became aware too of the stigma attached to those who were ‘train boys’. A day-boy was as respectable as a boarder, but a train-boy was not. (Claud Cockburn, who lived at Tring only a few miles away, avoided the stigma because he was sent as a boarder to my father’s School House.) The idea was fostered by many of the masters. Train-boys were regarded as dirty (no wonder, after half an hour on the L.N.W.R. burning war-time fuel), and the fact that many were aided by L.C.C. grants was held against them too. At a later date my father, who unlike my mother was quite without social prejudice, tried to remove the stigma by giving them a house and a housemaster and calling them Adders, but it was not a very helpful choice of name. It needed moral courage to be friends with a ‘train bug’, as they were called, but I can’t remember any feeling stronger than a certain illicit toleration which I felt towards the dirtiest of the lot. He was once caned in public in my form room by my father for some offence which was never made clear to any of us, but we were accustomed at that age to the moral confusion of adults and we didn’t trouble to ask him the reason.

  Though my father was completely free from social snobbery I noticed a certain exaggerated interest in royalty which was exhibited by my mother and by the aunts who were temporarily in waiting around her, and I was obscurely irritated; it seemed to lower our family pride, though I was ready enough to accept the glamour of royalty in fiction, in the imaginary world of Ruritania and Kravonia.

  I slept at first in the same room as Hugh, who for a long period, it seems to me now, made me pass hours of sleeplessness with his crying. When I went to bed, I had to creep by a kind of branch line on the main staircase that ran steeply up to my mother’s private lavatory, which lay in a tower over the terrace at one end of the school quad. My father never used this lavatory, I think, but the children sometimes did, and at night this narrow climbing stair on the way to bed was the point of terror: anything might lurk there in ambush.

  I shared my bed with a multitude of soft animals of which I can remember a teddy bear (the most loved), a glove bear (it came second in my affection because it could not stand alone), and a blue plush bird (it was the age of Maeterlinck). I kept the bird, I think, only for the sake of filling the bed, because I disliked the feel of plush and I have mentioned my terror of birds. When quiet had fallen on the house, the fear of fire would emerge like smoke and I would imagine I had been deserted by all my family. I would drop the teddy bear out of bed and shout for the nurse or nursery-maid to pick it up. When one of them came, I felt assured again that all was normal, and I could sleep, though once I remember getting out of bed and sitting on the top of the stairs in order that I might hear the voices from the dining-room below, the low comforting drone of dull adult conversation which told me that the house was not yet ablaze.

  My favourite toys in those days were a clockwork train and lead soldiers. When the soldiers had lost too many limbs to stand up we melted them down in a frying-pan over the nursery fire and dropped them into cold water as people do now in Sweden on New Year’s night, seeking omens of the future. (I remember well the unmistakable question mark I fished out of the water one Stockholm night which fixed in lead my doubt of the future.) When I was a bit older (about twelve) I would play with Hugh, who was six, an elaborate war game based on H. G. Wells’s book Little Wars. In the holidays we were able to use the big tables in the School House dining-hall. We would push two tables together and lay out a whole countryside. There were roads marked in chalk and cottages and forests of twigs and rivers which had to be crossed. One game might last a week, with perhaps two hundred men on either side, quick raids by cavalry and slow advances by infantry, measured on lengths of string, mêlées which led to the capture of prisoners, and bombardments with the two 4.2 naval guns. It was 1916, but war was still glamorous to a child.

  I passed too through a Meccano period, adding box to box each Christmas, but I had little skill as an engineer. For hobbies (a hobby is an almost compulsive necessity of childhood) I collected stamps. I sold my collection later to Hugh for cash which he always seemed to have easily available – he must have hoarded his weekly twopences, though I never discovered where, and bought with the proceeds books on Antarctic exploration. (The Arctic never interested me because it was all sea.) I day-dreamed of being taken on an expedition as a sea-scout, and when I was about ten I wrote to Doctor Bruce, the explorer, and criticized several stat
ements in his book on Polar Exploration in the Home University Library. I received a courteous and defensive reply.

  I collected cigarette cards too, and for a very brief period, because somebody gave me a special album for them, postmarks, but I found these rather abstract and there was no Stanley Gibbons catalogue to indicate whether Penang was more valuable than Angmering. Crests and postcards too had their appropriate albums, and I remember another toy, a monorail car. I have never seen one since. The thin steel single rails were tricky to fasten and the car never kept to them long, swaying wildly, losing balance and plunging to earth. I should be nervous today of travelling by monorail.

  The books on the nursery shelves which interested me most were The Little Duke by Charlotte M. Yonge (the memory of this book returned to me when I was writing The Ministry of Fear and when I revised the novel after the war I inserted chapter headings from The Little Duke), The Children of the New Forest by Captain Marryat, the Andrew Lang Fairy Books, the E. Nesbits, of which I liked best The Enchanted Castle, The Phoenix and the Carpet, Five Children and It (the less fantastic The Would-Be-Goods and The Treasure Seekers never meant much to me). Two incidents from these books have always remained vivid to me, one of terror and one of joyful excitement: the Ugly Wugglies made of masks and umbrellas in The Enchanted Castle who suddenly came alive and applauded the children’s play from their roofless mouths, clapping empty gloves, and the end of The Phoenix, when the magical bird has gone and a great box arrives full of everything the children have ever desired: ‘toys and games and books, and chocolate and candied cherries, and paint-boxes and photographic cameras’ – Brownies they would have been in those days. I think I read alone, but perhaps it was read aloud to us, Kipling’s Baa Baa Black Sheep, which was like a warning not to take happiness in childhood for granted. At an earlier period of course there was Beatrix Potter. I have never lost my admiration for her books and I have often reread her, so that I am not surprised when I find in one of my own stories, Under the Garden, a pale echo of Tom Kitten being trounced up by the rats behind the skirting-board and the sinister Anna-Maria covering him with dough, and in Brighton Rock the dishonest lawyer, Prewitt, hungrily echoes Miss Potter’s dialogue as he watches the secretaries go by carrying their little typewriters.

  Towards the end of this period in my life I came on Henty. We had on the nursery shelves a long run of Henty, and I particularly liked the dull historical parts. ‘The XIVth Hussars proceeded in close order to the top of the ridge. On the right flank were the Second Ghurkas …’ Rider Haggard I discovered after Henty. My favourite, of course, was King Solomon’s Mines, but the later adventures of Quatermain bored me. I fell fast in love with Nada the Lily, and because of his savagery I admired Chaka, the great King of Zululand. Later I read The Brethren (about the crusades), from which a great phrase remains in my mind to this day, ‘So they went, talking earnestly of all things, but, save in God, finding no hope at all’, The Wanderer’s Necklace (a romance of Byzantium in which the hero is blinded by the woman he loves), and Ayesha, the sequel to She. I didn’t at all care for romantic She, and found the metaphysical love story sloppy as I find it today (I have always preferred Freud to Jung). But the scene in Ayesha when the mad Khan goes hunting with bloodhounds the lord who had courted his wife held me with the strange attraction of suffering and cruelty. ‘What followed I will not describe, but never shall I forget the scene of those two heaps of worrying wolves, and of the maniac Khan, who yelled in his fiendish joy, and cheered on his death-hounds to finish their red work.’ Montezuma’s Daughter led me to read and reread a history of Mexico in the school library; the dark night of Cortez’ retreat from Mexico City along the narrow causeways haunts me still. What a happy chance it seemed in those days to be the son of the headmaster, for in the holidays all the shelves of the library were open to me, with thousands of books only waiting to be explored.

  To Stanley Weyman I must have been introduced fairly early, because I seem to remember my favourite, The Story of Francis Cludde (a story of the persecution of Protestants in Queen Mary’s reign) being read aloud to me, but it may have been during one of my periodic illnesses. (These agreeably broke up the endless years of childhood: two attacks of measles, a threatened mastoid, jaundice, pleurisy.) There were other Stanley Weymans which were nearly as important to me: Count Hannibal (with the masochism of the scorned lover who finally conquers the proud beauty) and The Abbess of Vlaye, which perhaps I valued because I had stolen it with some risk from the local W. H. Smith’s store. Other books which I have since bought and reread for old time’s sake are The Lost Column, a story of the Boxer Rebellion, and The Pirate Aeroplane both by Captain Gilson. The Pirate Aeroplane made a specially deep impression with its amiable American villain. One episode, when the young hero who is to be shot at dawn for trying to sabotage the pirate plane, plays rummy with his merciless and benevolent captor was much in my mind when I wrote about a poker game in England Made Me. I bought Chums every week and I remember in particular a fine pirate serial which rivalled Treasure Island – by what forgotten author? – and a fascinating account of a world war which began with a coolie strike in the Port of London. (I would force my brother Hugh to lie quiet on the sofa for hours while I read it to him.)

  The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves: early reading has more influence on conduct than any religious teaching. I feel certain that I would not have made a false start, when I was twenty-one, in the British American Tobacco Company, which had promised me a post in China, if I had never read Captain Gilson’s Lost Column, and without a knowledge of Rider Haggard would I have been drawn later to Liberia? (This led to a war-time post in Sierra Leone. At Oxford I had made tentative inquiries about the Nigerian Navy as a future career.) And surely it must have been Montezuma’s Daughter and the story of the disastrous night of Cortez’ retreat which lured me twenty years afterwards to Mexico. The Man-eaters of Tsavo on the other hand fixed in me a boring image of East Africa which even Hemingway was powerless to change. Only an assignment to report the Mau-Mau rebellion in 1951 and the sense of continuous danger on the Kikuyu roads was able to remove it.

  Poetry at this period meant very little to me. There were many fatuous verses in the anthology we were given in the prep school, like Allingham’s ‘Up the Airy Mountain’ and Tennyson’s ‘The Brook’. On one occasion we were told to learn any poem we chose by heart, and I got a certain undeserved credit for learning a long ballad about the brave Lord Willoughby, but it was the only poem in the anthology that I found of any interest. ‘Horatius’ had too many classical allusions, and I was too young to appreciate ‘After Blenheim’. ‘Barbara Frietchie’ was better, but ‘Lord Ullin’s Daughter’ was awful, so awful that it has crept into several of my stories, an inescapable symbol of fatuity.

  My severe attitude towards ‘Horatius’ all the same must have been adopted later at school, for I have come across a questionnaire which I answered when I was seven years old in the School House Gazette. (Apparently I received the second prize for my ‘confessions’ – twelve tubes of watercolours.)

  What is your greatest aim in life? To go up in an aeroplane.

  What is your idea of happiness? Going up to London.

  Who is the greatest living statesman? Don’t know any.

  Who is your favourite character in fiction? Dixon Brett.

  What are the qualities you most admire in men? Good looks.

  In women? Cleanliness.

  What is your favourite pastime? Playing Red Indians.

  What is your pet hobby? Collecting coins.

  What is your favourite quotation? ‘I with two more to help me will hold the foe in play.’

  Who is the author you like best and which book? Scott. The Talisman.

  Who is the cricketer you most admire? Herbert Greene.

  Which is your favourite holiday resort? Overstrand.

  Aeroplanes. I have mentioned our failure to see Blériot on the London to Manche
ster flight, so that perhaps the first aeroplane I actually saw was one I watched through the nursery window above the school playing-fields. Suddenly it nose-dived. I heard later that the pilot was an old boy of the school (his name I think was Wimbush). His younger brother was on the playing-fields, he knew his brother was in the plane, and he saw it crash. He walked quickly away down the hill to the school, saying nothing. Often since then watching planes cross the sky, I half-expect to see them fall to earth, as though it were my gaze which had caused that first crash.

  Once an airship, captained by an old boy, came down in the grounds of Berkhamsted Castle and remained there for some days on show. The stationer even made picture postcards of it. It was long before I saw another airship, though I can remember being woken and wrapped in blankets and brought to a bathroom window to see a blaze in the night sky from a Zeppelin which had been shot down over Potters Bar.

  Being in London. Once a year we were all taken to Peter Pan. I loved it wholeheartedly. My favourite scene was the one where Peter Pan fought alone against the pirates with his sword, and narrowly second to it was the moment of enjoyable horror when the green-lit face of Captain Hook appeared at a service hatch and put poison in Peter’s glass. The dying Tinker Bell touched me, but never would I consent to call out with the audience that I believed in fairies. It would have been dishonest, for I had never believed in them, except for the period of the play. There was one scene with attractive mermaids which to my great disappointment was cut, for reasons, I think, of war-time economy, from later productions. I could have dispensed more easily with the house in the tree-tops, for I never cared for Wendy, but ‘To die will be an awfully big adventure’ was a line which echoed through all my adolescence; it only really faded from my mind when death became for all of us a common everyday risk. At a later age, when I was twelve, I was taken to a revival of The Admirable Crichton. The heroine, Lady Somebody or other, who dressed in animal skins on the desert island, disturbed me for many nights, and she is one of my earliest sexual memories. Was it Cathleen Nesbitt who played the part? If so, those disturbed nights had been experienced not long before by Rupert Brooke, but it was not ‘mother comfort’ I sought even at that age. It was some years before I was again so sexually moved by a play, and then it was at Christopher Sly. The beautiful actress who played with Matheson Lang and was his wife wore a long white silk nightdress which proved just as exciting as the animal skins.