A Sort of Life (10 page)

At this date my brother Raymond had started to study medicine at Oxford and he was hastily summoned home for consultation; my father found the situation beyond him – perhaps he even believed the popular fable of his generation that masturbation led to madness, a threat already existing on both sides of the family. His own father, buried in St Kitts, had been a manic-depressive, and my mother’s father, an Anglican clergyman, suffered from an exaggerated sense of guilt and, when his bishop refused his request to be defrocked, proceeded to put the matter into effect himself in a field. We were never told anything about that grandparent and I had always assumed he was dead before I was born. Only a few years ago, in reading Swinburne’s letters, I learnt from a footnote that he had not died until 1924, so he must have seemed a living menace at this moment in our lives.
³

My brother, who felt great pride at the trust reposed in him (he was only three years older than myself and in his first year at Oxford), suggested psycho-analysis as a possible solution, and my father – an astonishing thing in 1920 – agreed.

¹
Memory often exaggerates, but some twelve years ago, because I had started a novel about a school, I revisited the scene and found no change. I abandoned the novel – I couldn’t bear mentally living again for several years in these surroundings. A leper colony in the Congo was preferable so I went to Yonda in search of a burnt-out case.

²
The
O.T.C
. bred in me a permanent dislike of uniforms. There was a time in 1942 when the authorities at home wished to put me into a naval uniform. I pointed out that to have proper privacy for my secret work I would have to bear the rank of commander. They suggested the Air Force. In that case I must be a group captain, I replied, and then they surrendered. I could call myself
C.I.D
. Special Branch, they said, and the danger of a uniform was over.

³
As an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, he had been part-author of a favourable review of the first shocking volume of
Poems and Ballads
. ‘Please send me
at once
,’ Swinburne wrote to the sinister Hotten in 1867, ‘the January number of a Cambridge Magazine called “the Light Blue” containing an article on my Poems.’

I
N
age I find myself with an interest in my forebears which I never felt when I was young. In psycho-analysis I was led to think no further back than to my childhood, and my relation with my father and mother. I sought the cause of my rebellion in myself, in my loves and my fears. I didn’t see it as only one of a long series of rebellions stretching back into the years before I was born. An ageing clergyman had undressed himself in a field, another had left his family abruptly to seek some golden memory of a time when he was sixteen years old and alone without parents on a Caribbean island. My father and mother too must surely have rebelled, though I do not know the nature of their rebellion, unless perhaps it was in the loving folly of their marriage.

Of my grandparents, it is to my father’s father that I feel the closest now. He went out to St Kitts as a boy of fourteen to join his brother in the management of his father’s sugar estates, and his brother Charles died of yellow fever two years after his arrival, in 1840. William was alone on the island, in charge of the estates. It was a situation Ballantyne might have taken for one of his boys’ books, though I doubt whether he would have included the legend that Charles had left thirteen children behind him when he died at the age of nineteen. William went home after a dose of yellow fever himself. We always leave too soon the Coral Islands where we have been happily wrecked, but the memories of Mount Misery with its head buried in the clouds, of the green wastes of sugar-cane, the black sands of Dieppe Bay, of the little church of Christchurch outside which his brother lay under a grey slab of stone were powerful enough to draw back the middle-aged man from the family life at Bedford with eight children and enough money to live on in reasonable comfort (though the sugar estates on the distant island were producing less and less). For twenty years he had done very little, unlike his energetic brothers who had never lived a Ballantyne life – one was Governor of the Bank of England, another a Tory
MP,
the third a successful solicitor. William tried a little scientific farming and gave it up; he passed his examinations as a solicitor but he never practised. The only occupation he followed for any length of time was based on a place he called on his letter-heads ‘Bleak House, the Plains of Desolation’.

He had become the only active (though none of his activities was very active) director of a peat company – his young partner committed suicide. He would disappear suddenly from Bedford, the large house and the large garden and the large family, leaving no money behind, and the next they would hear of him was from the overseer’s hut, the only human habitation among the black bogs (which perhaps recalled the black volcanic sands of the island). He took no genuine part in the enterprise, but he would take long walks with a book in his pocket, and then return at night to the unfinished tramway-line, the half-built hydraulic plant, the rough food, the uneducated conversation in the lamplight and the narrow camp bed. He wasn’t made for the family life in Bedford, the games of clumps and snap, the exciting visit of a Mr Rust who set the girls in turmoil. There was a barrier between him and his children. He would sit alone in his study, reading and marking his books. Only his daughter Alice had something of his frustrated romantic nature which would lead her, after his death, to a career in South Africa from which she rarely returned to England with her tales of new exotic friends, Olive Schreiner and General Smuts. I can just remember her with her square kindly sensible face, turning a little masculine with age, an impression of gaberdine. At twenty-two she was writing to her brother Graham: ‘When I think of the countries I want to visit, the mountains I want to climb’ (her father had written a little book which was printed in St Kitts about his ascent of Mount Misery), ‘the rivers, forests and valleys I want to explore, I feel half frantic at the thought that I am getting older and older and am no more likely to travel than I was ten years ago.’

Suddenly in May 1881 – the worst time of year to set out to the Caribbean – my grandfather decided to pack up and leave. Graham saw him off in London and wrote to his mother: ‘Did father send you a line from Southampton? I left him at 1 a.m. on Tuesday
morning at the Charing Cross Hotel, endeavouring to finish a large cigar. He told me he intended to take very little rest that night, as he wished to be very sleepy on the following, the first night on board. I hope this plan succeeded but I have strong misgivings thereon. If the sea was rough in addition to the seasickness he would have all the additional discomfort of weariness. Our theatre was, after all, badly chosen. We went to
The Lady of Lyons
. A most mournful piece, not at all calculated to raise the spirits of an intending voyageur.’

He wasn’t much missed, judging from Alice’s letters to her brother Graham in London. Life in Bedford was as exciting as ever, with birthday treats and excursions and tea in the garden and walks by moonlight and the seductive behaviour on a tricycle at Barford of my other grandfather’s curate, Mr Humble, and a further visit from the alarming Mr Rust (‘He is so utterly inscrutable in his looks, words and deeds, that I know no more what his feelings are than if he were the Sphynx’).

In spite of her longing for adventure, when the chance came Alice turned it firmly down. ‘Thank you so very much, dear Papa, for your wish to have Florence and me with you for a time, but indeed, it cannot be. It was so very good of you to propose it that it seems ungrateful to refuse it point blank, but I really could not go unless we all went too. Like Mama, I do not like the thought of you being all alone; it seems so dreary for you. But as Mama, I suppose, has written to you all the Pros and Cons for your projects, I think I need not say any more, except to hope that we shall all meet again somewhere or other.’ ‘Somewhere or other’, it must have seemed a chilling phrase to the middle-aged man who had failed to relive his youth under Mount Misery. Less than two months later he was dead of fever.

His grave is the same shape and size as his brother’s, but he has failed to leave any impression on the island among all the coloured Greenes. It is Charles, dead at nineteen, forty-one years earlier, who is remembered. Perhaps the legend of his thirteen children is not wholly untrue, for when I visited the island two years ago, in the features of one would-be cousin I thought I saw a close resemblance to my Uncle Graham.

I don’t know by what process of elimination my father and brother chose Kenneth Richmond to be my analyst, but it was a choice for which I have never ceased to be grateful, for at his house in Lancaster Gate began what were perhaps the happiest six months of my life. Active happiness depends to some extent on contrast – a lovers’ meeting would not be the same without the days of deprivation, and those breakfasts in bed on a tray neatly laid, brought by a maid in a white starched cap, followed by hours of private study under the trees of Kensington Gardens, seemed all the more miraculous after the stone steps, the ink-stained schoolroom, the numbering-off at the bogs, the smell of farts around the showers. And London was there just down the road. I was independent. I could take a bus or tube to any destination. Films and theatres depended only on the management of my pocket-money. There were no Sunday walks in unwanted company. I was growing rapidly into an adult without the torments of puberty.

Only once something happened to disturb the quiet and restful routine. A guest was describing an accident at dinner, and my mind went back to Harston ten years before, a story of two ladies on the Royston road in a carriage: the horse had run away, and one had fallen out and her long hat-pin had pierced her brain. I found myself on the dining-room floor. I had fainted as sometimes I had fainted at early service in the school chapel. I wasn’t worried; my imagination had a way of showing me the details of an accident though they were never described, and then I would faint like a medical student at an operation. I was surprised when Richmond took me to a specialist in Harley Street, but I thought no more of it. The incident was forgotten for four years.

Often of an evening I found myself in the company of authors. Richmond himself was one, if only of a book which I found rather dull reading, on educational theory. Walter de la Mare came to the house – the poet I admired most at that time – and wrote his spidery signature in my new-bought copy of
The Veil
. Often with him was his close friend; Naomi Royde-Smith, the editor of the
Weekly Westminster
, who had published Rupert
Brooke’s early poems; she was too kind to me, so that a year later I began to bombard her with sentimental fantasies in poetic prose (she even published some of them). J. D. Beresford came too – a novelist crippled by infantile paralysis.
The Hampdenshire Wonder
remains one of the finest and most neglected novels of this period between the great wars, although it was an inferior novel,
Revolution
, which appealed more to me then. One evening we played a game in which each guest in turn had to imitate a vegetable, and I remember how we all simultaneously recognized de la Mare’s stick of asparagus. Such evenings were far away from the hours of prep in St John’s musty schoolroom. My only duties were to read history of a morning in Kensington Gardens and at eleven o’clock to go in for an hour’s session with the analyst.

Kenneth Richmond had more the appearance of an eccentric musician than anyone you might suppose concerned with curing the human spirit. A tall stooping figure in his early forties, he had a distinguished musician’s brow with longish hair falling behind without a parting and a face disfigured by large spots which must have been of nervous origin. There were two little girls who were brought up on the principle that children should never be thwarted, with the result that they were almost unbearably spoilt. On Sundays I was left in charge of them for an hour, while Richmond and his beautiful wife Zoe went to a church in Bayswater of some esoteric denomination, where the minister asked the congregation to decide by vote whether they would prefer that evening a sermon or a lecture on a psychological subject. Meanwhile at home I was seeing to it that for one hour a week the children learnt what it was to be thwarted.

I kept perforce a dream diary (I have begun to do so again in old age), and fragments of the dreams I can remember still, though the diary has been destroyed for nearly half a century. There was one dream of which I remember colours of great beauty; there were towers and pinnacles which might have come out of Miss Nesbit’s
The Enchanted Castle
, and I heard a bodiless voice intoning, ‘Princess and Lord of Time, there are no bounds to thee’; and I remember a nightmare in which I was pursued by sinister Chinese agents and took shelter in a hut with an armed detective, but, just as I felt the relief of security in his company, I
looked at the hand holding the revolver and saw that he had the long nails of a Chinaman.

Sitting in Kensington Gardens, reading of the Carolingians in a dull blue volume of Tout, I kept one eye alert for possible adventures among the nursemaids, but the only adventure I had was not of the kind I desired. An elderly man, with an old Etonian tie and a gaze unhappy and shifty, drew a chair up to mine and started to talk of schools. Was there corporal punishment at my school, and did I suppose there were any schools left where girls were whipped? He had an estate, he told me, in Scotland, where everyone went around in kilts, so convenient in some ways, and perhaps I would like to come for a holiday there … Suddenly he sloped away, like a wind-blown umbrella, and I never saw him again.

When eleven struck in a Bayswater church tower I would cross the road, turn a corner and go into the little house in Lancaster Gate. If I couldn’t remember the last night’s dream I would be asked to invent one (for some reason if I invented a dream it always began with a pig). Richmond belonged to no dogmatic school of psycho-analysis, so far as I can make out now: he was nearer to Freud than Jung, but Adler probably contributed. There had been a tragedy twenty years before when a patient had killed himself and the coroner had been brutally unsympathetic, and I have the impression that he proceeded very carefully, very tentatively. My life with him did me a world of good, but how much was due to the analysis and how much to the breakfasts in bed, the quiet of Kensington Gardens, the sudden independence of my life I would not like to say, nor whether the analysis went deep enough. In any case, as Freud wrote, ‘much is won if we succeed in transforming hysterical misery into common unhappiness’.