A Sort of Life Read online

  When we went to London we usually had lunch with a retired colonel of the Indian Army called Henry Wright and his wife, our great-aunt Maud, at 11, Belgrave Road – always known to me as Number 11. Maud had introduced Robert Louis Stevenson to his first great love, Mrs Sitwell, who was tied to an unwanted alcoholic husband, but that, of course, meant nothing to me then. It was the vast chamberpot produced after lunch from the side-board cupboard by Colonel Wright, a relic of Victorian manners, which impressed me. He was my godfather, a bluff man, bearded like Edward VII, who walked with the help of sticks because of gout, I suspect, though he claimed to my brother Raymond that he had a cork leg. Before we left for the theatre he held out a hand to each of us concealing a half-crown piece. He died during the First World War and left me a gold watch. My mother sold it for five pounds and put the money for me into war-savings; for more than a quarter of a century afterwards this was my only inheritance.

  In later years, after Colonel Wright’s death, we were always taken to the Florence Restaurant in Soho, where to my constant surprise a black man in Oriental costume brought the coffee. I wasn’t allowed coffee and I was always afraid we would not get to the theatre before the curtain rose. Grown-ups seemed slow at eating and drinking and too blasé about the theatre to be safe companions, particularly my uncle Graham if he happened to make one of the party. I had the unhappy impression that he had come to see his family and not the play.

  Qualities most admired in men. My favourite and youngest uncle, Frank, the only uncle on my mother’s side of the Greenes, was tall and good-looking and intellectual. I used to see very little of him at this time except at Christmas which he spent with us. I felt shy of him. He understood me too well, and though I liked him, he was a danger to my privacy. He was a civil servant in the Board of Education and he married the daughter of Doctor Todhunter, the Irish poet, when I was about seven. He was the most literary-minded of all my uncles and aunts and he liked walking. When I was older, he, Raymond and I would go on foot to Boxing-day meets of a local pack, and to this day, as I write, I can feel the hard rungs of the furrows under the feet, see the fumes of the riders’ breath, and hear the horns and the shouts sharp as ice. Until the hounds moved off we were never certain that the hunt would not be cancelled and we would lose the cry when the fox was sighted and the dabs of scarlet racing over the winter fields. Frank died in the late 1920s from appendicitis, and except for my cousin St George Lake, killed in France, he was the first relative I had to mourn.

  Favourite quality in women. I think my reply to this question was probably motivated by disdain, for I find in the School House Gazette, from a Table Talk written by my aunt, that I had a good deal of undeserved contempt for my elder sister Molly and through her for girls in general – a contempt which I was soon to lose. My interjections were pointed and repetitious: ‘You are silly, Molly. Girls are so silly.’ ‘Girls wouldn’t know. They know nuffin.’ ‘Girls are always slow and always last.’

  Favourite pastime. I am mystified by my choice, for I can’t remember that I ever played at Red Indians, The Last of the Mohicans I find to this day unreadable, and it was before the days of Western films. I have a vague memory of a small bow and arrows with a green velvet handhold with which for a time I shot erratically at a target hung on the apple trees. But I was too bad a shot to continue long.

  Pet hobby. The coins were any foreign coins which came my way and they were piled together in a box which later contained other treasures: a replica of the Lusitania medal said to have been given by the German authorities to the crew of the submarine which sank her and a postcard from the Western front, written to me by my red-haired cousin St George – a form with such printed information as ‘I am well’, ‘I am in hospital’, with the inapplicable phrases struck out. He provided me too with a spiked Uhlan helmet containing a convincing bloodstain. I wept a long time at the news that he had been killed, and perhaps I have never again felt a death so keenly. In childhood eternity has no meaning – a child has not learnt to hope.

  Favourite quotation. This reply surprises me, for I remember liking better Aytoun’s ‘The Execution of Montrose’, which combined heroism and injustice. A child learns about injustice early.

  Favourite author. Scott and Dickens were available to me in an admirable series of square books published by Blackie, the Told to the Children series, with coloured illustrations. Oliver Twist was in this series and Peveril of the Peak. The original text was preserved as far as possible, but dull descriptive passages were blue-pencilled.

  Cricket. My eldest brother was the only cricketer I knew, so my praise was not exaggerated. I remember how at Overstrand I went with him to a county match, and he asked me to collect the autographs of the team, who he thought would be more amenable to the request of a little boy. The captain used my head as a desk to write on, and I experienced much more spiritual elevation than I felt at fourteen from the hand of a bishop at confirmation. Only once, on a later occasion, did I collect a signature, when I ran, in my school cap, after G. K. Chesterton, as he laboured like a Lepanto galleon down Shaftesbury Avenue.

  Favourite holiday resort. Littlehampton, where we went at Easter, was thought by my mother to be a vulgar resort in the summer, visited by the wrong people, so that we used to go to Overstrand in Norfolk instead. On the cliffs above lay Poppyland, scarlet fields of poppies known as the Garden of Sleep, and I have always imagined Swinburne’s ‘Forsaken Garden’ to have lain somewhere there. Littlehampton meant more to me, and I remember it better: the goat carriages on the green (I was photographed in one at my ambiguous curly age); the beach of silver sand where sea anemones could be found, which had to be reached by ferry, a foreign place, like the garden across the road, not to be visited every day; picnics in Arundel Park to which we set off by carriage to the sound of clopping hoofs (so that later I loved Alfred Noyes’s poem, ‘The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door’).2

  The elder children took riding lessons from a Miss Reeves and her groom Keenie, a meagre sour creature, whom nobody liked; even his name was ignoble. I started lessons when I was about eight, and I enjoyed them well enough, but fear mingled with the pleasure. The first time I was off the leading rein, as I approached the big iron bridge that spanned the Arun, my pony took fright and jumped a ditch and a hedge. I gained great credit because I kept in my saddle after the jump and fell off only after a discreet interval, the first of many credits I have received for failing.

  2

  The school began just beyond my father’s study, through a green baize door. The passage led to the old hall where we were able to play in the holidays, another to the matron’s room and the terrace. One matron, Miss Wills, embarrassed me on my seventh birthday by kissing me when I brought her a piece of my birthday cake, so that I returned to the family circle, angry and shattered by the experience. My aunt Nono wrote some verses on the subject in the School House Gazette – ‘Miss Wills kissed me when we met, As I took my birthday cake in …’ and I had the uncomfortable sense that now the incident would never be forgotten: it had been immortalized by art.

  You could get to the school also by going past the dark room and linen-cupboard on the nursery landing, through a glass door, to the dormitories. As I had the freedom of these regions only out of term, they are always empty in my memory – stony, ugly, deserted.

  I went to school just before I was eight, as my birthday came in October, after term had started. My form master in the bottom form was called Frost. Later the school was reorganized and he was put in charge of the preparatory school which occupied a house in which my aunt Maud had once lived – it was there that I first read Dracula with great fear one long summer afternoon. The memory is salt with the taste of blood, for I had picked my lip while reading and it wouldn’t stop bleeding – I thought I was going to bleed to death, one of Count Dracula’s victims.

  Frost had the reputation of getting on well with very small boys, but I was a little afraid of him. He used to sweep his black gown
around him in a melodramatic gesture, before he indulged his jovial ogrish habit of screwing a fist in one’s cheek till it hurt.

  Of my first day at school I can remember nothing except that I had to read a passage from Captain Cook’s Voyages, the set English book that term. I found the formal eighteenth-century prose very dull, and I still do. History was my favourite subject, and when I was about twelve a rather foolish master whom we all despised stated in my annual report, otherwise given up to laconic statements – ‘Satisfactory’, ‘Tries hard’, ‘weak’ and suchlike – that I ‘had the makings of an historian’. I was pleased, but considered rightly that it was an attempt to pander favour with my father.

  At this period I was not unhappy at school except that, when I was twelve and I was moved into the top junior form, I remained at the bottom of the class for a whole term and lost my confidence. Of the masters I remember a monstrously fat one called Moir with black hair which was thinly streaked across the top of a bald head. Poor man, he must have suffered from some glandular disease which rendered him unfit for military service. He married during the war to everyone’s astonishment a pretty young woman who was a temporary mistress; it seemed the mating of Beauty and the Beast. A popular master in charge of one of the junior houses was called Simpson. He was never properly shaved, the five o’clock shadow was there at morning prayers, and he had four chins, although he was not otherwise a fat man. He rubbed his hands together in a gloating manner when in form he caught one who belonged to his house in a punishable offence. He would refer jocularly to beatings and he very obviously enjoyed them. In a strange way this made him popular. It seemed to me even then that his boys were collaborators in a pleasure.

  I can remember nothing about games, except that once I teased my cousin Tooter, who ran home from the playing-fields, crying. I felt a great shame at this, I knew already in my heart that I belonged on the side of the victims, not of the torturers, and this was a betrayal of all those sunlit afternoons on the roof of the Hall. These were the old playing-fields near the railway station, beyond Berkhamsted Castle, and when war came they were taken over by what was called Kitchener’s Army and to this day they are known as Kitchener’s Fields. (My rich uncle came to the rescue of the school and lent the governors enough money to buy far better fields at the top of the hill where my sister’s pug was killed.)

  The only class I actively hated was held in the gym. I was very bad at gymnastics and all life long my instinct has been to abandon anything for which I have no talent; tennis, golf, dancing, sailing, all have been abandoned, and perhaps it is only desperation which keeps me writing, like someone who clings to an unhappy marriage for fear of solitude. I particularly disliked trying to vault or to climb a rope. I suffered in those days, like a character of mine, Jones, in The Comedians, from flat feet, and I had to wear supports inside my shoes and have massage from a gym mistress. The massage tickled a little and my soles sometimes ached, but on the whole I found the treatment agreeable, perhaps because it was given by a woman. This must have been between the age of ten and twelve, for it was the war of 1914 which brought a number of mistresses to the school in place of the masters who had joined the army.

  The memory of August 1914 is associated with my uncle’s house at Harston. The lawn in front of the house had a high wall. One could see over it only by climbing the chunky roots of old trees covered in ivy and swarming with spiders. Troops were continually passing through in these first days and they rested on the village green; once I was sent out with a basket of apples to refresh them. Herbert bicycled in from Cambridge one day with the evening paper announcing the fall of Namur. My brothers and I were delighted at the speed with which it had fallen because the prolonged defence of Liège had threatened a speedy termination of the war. As long as the war continued, we might one day be involved, and the world of Henty seemed to come a little nearer. Perhaps there would be an invasion, as in William Le Queux’s famous documentary novel, and Berkhamsted Common, I believed, would be ideal for the exploits of one young franc-tireur. Indeed there were dramatic incidents even in Berkhamsted. A German master was denounced to my father as a spy because he had been seen under the railway bridge without a hat, a dachshund was stoned in the High Street, and once my uncle Eppy was summoned at night to the police station and asked to lend his motor-car to help block the Great North Road down which a German armoured car was said to be advancing towards London. A colonel of the Inns of Court O.T.C. was also at the station. ‘Five hundred rifles,’ he lamented, ‘and not a round of live ammunition.’ My uncle was sceptical, but he lent his car.

  But the war ended too soon for us, and only Herbert became lightly involved, when he was promoted lance-corporal in the H. A. C. He never reached France and one day he returned home without his single stripe. It was only a long time afterwards that I learned the reason – a sympathetic one. He was in charge of a spy who was awaiting execution in the Tower (he added the spy’s autograph to his collection), and on the occasion of an air-raid he let the prisoner out of his cell to share the fun. Otherwise we were touched closely only twice – by the death of St George and by the disappearance of our new nurse’s fiancé – ‘missing, believed killed’. She was a kind dumpy young woman called Olive Dodge with an agreeable face like a penny bun with two currants for eyes (the most you could expect in war-time), and we were sad for her, knowing as our parents told us that there was little or no hope. Yet she never lost her hope and one day the miracle happened – he was discovered in a London hospital with shell-shock. He didn’t recognize her, he was plunged in deep melancholia, but she never despaired, and one day she was able proudly to introduce him to the denizens of the nursery, a very tall dark man with a small moustache who spoke hardly at all. They married and lived happily ever after, or so I hope, in Acton.

  At some point that year I abandoned the effort of trying to vault or climb a rope or scramble on the parallel bars, and I pretended, whenever that class came round, that I was ill. I would walk up on to the Common and stay there, hidden among the gorse bushes with their yellow flowers until school was over. Once lying flat in the bracken by the side of the road I saw the gardener Charge go by with the family donkey-cart. My parents, when I told them years later, denied that this was possible, because they said he could have had no business up there far away from the laundry and the town, but how could I have imagined Miranda? Perhaps he was out for his own personal pleasure on a sunny June day. I enjoyed the feeling of being safely hidden among the bushes while he went by, even if I were not yet hunted. The long secret trek through the heather by Alan Breck and David Balfour always for me took place on Berkhamsted Common; it almost seemed a personal adventure, perhaps because my mother was kin to the Balfours of Pilrig, and indeed first cousin to Stevenson himself.

  I don’t know how long these sporadic escapes went on. They turned at some point (I would guess when I was eleven) into a better organized and a more prolonged truancy. By this time I was having breakfast in the dining-room with my elders, and not in the nursery with five-year-old Hugh and the baby Elisabeth. At the end of breakfast I would gather up my school-books as though going across to prayers.

  I should explain that the school day began with prayers of a rather lay variety – masters on a platform, boys below – in what was called Deans’ Hall which was named after Dean Incent, the sixteenth-century founder of Berkhamsted School, but also – the position of the apostrophe was important – after Doctor Fry, my father’s sinister sadistic predecessor and kinsman by marriage, who had become the Dean of Lincoln.

  This Manichaean figure in black gaiters with a long white St Peter’s beard sometimes came to stay. After breakfast on these occasions it was my mother’s duty to clear the hall outside the dining-room of maids and children, so that the Dean could go to the lavatory unobserved and emerge again unseen by anyone. As a headmaster he had been known as a flogger, and he thus made a life-long enemy of one old Berkhamstedian, later my Oxford tutor, Kenneth Bell, who one day had his cap s
natched off by a school bully and was then beaten by Fry who saw him in the street without it. Fry as Dean of Lincoln became a popular lecturer in the United States where he went at regular intervals to procure money for restoring Lincoln Cathedral. On his last voyage, as he returned first-class in a Cunarder, fate overtook him and showed him up as the absurd figure he had always been. He had suffered a stroke before embarking which damaged his powers of speech and his neighbours at table overheard him asking his son Charley, the Vicar of Maidenhead, for certain shocking objects when all he had in mind was a soft-boiled egg. Charley, who for years vainly paid court to my beautiful aunt Nono, was a far more likeable figure. He was so fat that he looked like a black tennis-ball, and to amuse us he would put two chairs together and bounce over them – not jump. ‘Bounce for us, Cousin Charley, bounce for us,’ we would cry, while my aunt watched with cynical disdain. She couldn’t respect a man who bounced.