A Sort of Life (16 page)

Again I was without a future, for I had no confidence in those five hundred words a day on single-lined foolscap. What did I know of Carlist Spain or Spain at all except from the pages of Conrad? And yet I returned to the place and period three years later with less happy results, because the book was published and can still be found in second-hand catalogues under the title
Rumour at Nightfall
. As for the London refugees my only material lay in Carlyle’s
Life of John Sterling
– the one book by Carlyle which I have been able to read with pleasure.

There was the problem of money. I had dropped my allowance when I took my job and I couldn’t live at home, for the house was closed and my family at the seaside. It was Sackville Street or nothing. To the young men of my generation, down from the university without work, recourse to Sackville Street was like recourse to the pawnshop in earlier days. Among the ‘gentlemen’s tailors’ stood an office with the Dickensian name of Gabbitas & Thring. I have always, most unfairly, thought
of the interview between Nicholas Nickleby and Mr Squeers as taking place there.

There was a Dickensian mustiness about Sackville Street in those days, in the old-established tailors’ shops on either side, where prostitutes kept flats on the second floor. The office of Gabbitas & Thring (chief rival of the equally Dickensian Truman & Knightley) might have been that of an old family solicitor, with strange secrets concealed in the metal file-boxes. It was not the cream of educational aspirants which trickled through Sackville Street. I doubt if many young men ever reached Eton or Harrow with the aid of the ‘partners’, for a man with a first-class degree did not require their help. They were the last hope of those needing a little temporary aid. You pawned yourself instead of your watch.

I had a horror of becoming involved in teaching. It was a profession into which you could so easily slip, as my father had done, by accident. He had intended to be a barrister, had ‘eaten his dinners’ and taken on the job of temporary master only to tide him over a lean period. Had he been afraid of feeling the trap close, as I was now? I wanted nothing permanent, I explained in near panic, to the partner. Was there not, perhaps, some private tutoring job which was available just for the summer? He opened his file with an air of disappointment: there were certainly good opportunities, he suggested, in the coming school term, for an exhibitioner of Balliol with an honours degree. As for private tutoring I was too late in applying, such men were needed immediately the schools broke up (he whisked over page after page), there was really nothing he could offer for someone of my qualifications … I would hardly be interested in this (he had detached a page with the tips of his fingers), a widowed lady living at Ash-over, a village in Derbyshire, who required someone to look after her son of eight during the holidays. I would not be asked to live in the house: I would have a room in a private hotel with all my meals, but there was no salary attached. When I accepted, he looked at me with disappointment and suspicion – there must be something disgracefully wrong in my background.

The position suited me, for I had the evenings free when I could work at my novel. The country was beautiful with the grey Pennines standing all around, a few wandering
sheep on desolate deserted hills, loose stone walls and occasional cottages with an Irish air of dilapidation. The widow was undemanding. She didn’t want her son to be overworked. A little mathematics perhaps in the morning (I had forgotten all I ever knew), a quarter of an hour of Latin (equally forgotten), some games after lunch … I had what I thought the bright idea of teaching him a little carpentry, though I had never practised it myself. There was a large shady garden which reminded me of my uncle’s at Harston with lots of out-houses in which I discovered wooden crates, nails, hammers. I suggested we should build a toy theatre. My pupil agreed readily enough: he was a boy without initiative: he was quite ready to stand around holding the nails. Unfortunately the toy theatre failed to take even a rudimentary shape, so that after two days’ work I decided that what we had been making without knowing it was a rabbit hutch. He was quite satisfied, even though there was no rabbit; he was as undemanding as his mother.

Back in the private hotel, which was called Ambervale, I plodded on till dinner time, among the Carlist refugees in Leicester Square, but the oppression of boredom soon began to descend. Once on my free day I walked over the hills to Chesterfield and found a dentist. I described to him the symptoms, which I knew well, of an abscess. He tapped a perfectly good tooth with his little mirror and I reacted in the correct way. ‘Better have it out,’ he advised.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but with ether.’

A few minutes’ unconsciousness was like a holiday from the world. I had lost a good tooth, but the boredom was for the time being dispersed.
³

The only other distraction lay in the old ladies – a gay crowd who insisted on playing paper games they didn’t properly understand after dinner under the direction of an elderly gentleman: ‘Famous general beginning with the letter B’, the sort of thing to which family life had accustomed me. They were regarded with cynical impatience by the only other young people, a pale slang-ridden
schoolboy and a girl with bobbed hair who wanted a hotel flirtation. She went with me to the pub where the landlord showed us into a private room, where we sat gingerly on the edge of a table and kissed dryly, then took refuge in a half of bitter and a gin and lime. She offered me a mongrel wirehaired terrier as a souvenir, which was to be sent by rail from Leicester to Berkhamsted and was to prove the bane of my life. Later the dog played an off-stage part in a play of mine,
The Potting Shed
, and Mr Kenneth Tynan, for reasons which remain mysterious to me, believed that he represented God. At lunch I would share a table with the flapper and her fat mother because the manageress thought it would be nice for the young people to get together. The mother was too shy to talk and whinnied like a frightened horse whenever I spoke to her.

The afternoons were the worst, for then there was not even the pretence of lessons. When I was tired of hide-and-seek for two I invented a game of pirates which involved a lot of physical activity on the walls of the vegetable garden. Luckily my pupil fell off the wall and cut his leg. This, in the eyes of his mother, made mathematics impossible, so now I could read to him all day while he lay stretched in a deck-chair. And so my second job came slowly and undemandingly to an end. My family returned from the seaside, the mongrel dog, called Paddy, arrived by train in a highly nervous condition from Leicester, and I was back at square one in Berkhamsted.

Three months of blank days went by, and then I arrived one wet night in Nottingham and woke next morning in the unknown city to an equally dark day. This was not like a London smog; the streets were free of vapour, the electric lights shone clearly: the fog lay somewhere out of sight far above the lamps. When I read Dickens on Victorian London I think of Nottingham in the twenties. There was an elderly ‘boots’ still employed at the Black Dog Inn, there were girls suffering from unemployment in the lace trade, who would, so it was said, sleep with you in return for a high tea with muffins, and a haggard blue-haired prostitute, ruined by amateur competition,
haunted the corner by W. H. Smith’s bookshop. Trams rattled downhill through the goose-market and on to the blackened castle. Against the rockface leant the oldest pub in England with all the grades of a social guide: the private bar, the saloon, the ladies’, the snug, the public. Little dark cinemas offered matinée seats for fourpence in the stalls. I had found a town as haunting as Berkhamsted, where years later I would lay the scene of a novel and of a play. Like the bar of the City Hotel in Freetown which I was to know years later it was the focal point of failure, a place undisturbed by ambition, a place to be resigned to, a home from home.

¹
I came down from Oxford with heavy enough debts for those days. I admitted a hundred pounds of them to my father who paid them with hardly a complaint – the rest I worked off slowly during the next year and a half.

²
Years later he did publish one of dubious authenticity called
Secret Agent in Spain
– almost a family title.

³
André Breton once wrote to Cocteau: ‘All my efforts are for the moment directed along one line: conquer boredom. I think of nothing else day or night. Is it an impossible task for someone who gives himself to it wholeheartedly? Do understand that I insist on seeing what lies on the other side of boredom.’

I
HAD
come to work on the
Nottingham Journal
unpaid because no London paper would then accept an apprentice. One entered the office through a narrow stone Gothic door, stained with soot, which resembled the portal of a Pugin chapel, and the heads of Liberal statesmen stuck out above like gargoyles: on rainy days the nose of Gladstone dripped on my head as I came in. Inside was a very ancient lift with barely room for two which creaked up a rope to the editorial offices.

The subeditors were kind to me, though I cannot remember that they ever gave me any instruction. Half-way through the evening we had a sweepstake on the football results, to which each contributed threepence, and the winner would stand chips for all and pocket the change. I was unreasonably lucky, so that around eight, more often than not, I would get a breath of fresh air while I fetched the chips from a fish-stall. They were wrapped up in an old copy of the
Journal
, but never in the
Nottingham Guardian
: the
Guardian
was the respectable paper.

In the offices of the
Journal
, unlike the Asiatic Petroleum Company, I found it a positive advantage to have published a volume of verse. The editor of the weekly book-page, a Methodist minister, was kind to me and sometimes gave me a novel to review. The
Journal
prided itself on its literary tradition: the paper might be considered vulgar but at least it was bohemian. Sir James Barrie had once been a member of the staff, and this fact in those days perhaps impressed me more than it would do today. There were the memories of
Peter Pan
, those early stirrings of sexuality aroused in me at
The Admirable Crichton
, and I had even in my omnivorous childhood read
The Little Minister
which stood on the bookshelf in the dining-room at home in an elegant black buckram binding. (Childhood is not afraid of sentimentality.)
Mary Rose
, too, which I had seen with my parents, had left behind a sense of fading poetry like a scent in a drawer and of deeply
buried emotions inexplicable without the professional aid of Kenneth Richmond. Mine is an unfashionable taste, but even now it seems to me that the first act of
Dear Brutus
, before the author plunges disastrously into the haunted wood, is almost equal to Wilde at his best.

My haunted and disastrous wood at this moment was Leicester Square and the neighbouring streets of Soho where my hero was wandering lost among the exiled Spaniards whom Carlyle had observed when he first came to London in the 1820’s – not in Leicester Square but Euston. I had transposed them, perhaps because the Leicester Lounge and the old Empire Music Hall in their last days were better known to me, and I now transposed them again in my mind’s eye to the goose-market of Nottingham. ‘Daily in the cold spring air, under skies so unlike their own, you could see a group of fifty or a hundred stately tragic figures, in proud threadbare cloaks: perambulating mostly with closed lips, the broad pavements of Euston Square and the regions about St Pancras new Church. They spoke little or no English; knew nobody, could employ themselves on nothing, in this new scene.’ Nor could I speak any Spanish, and the skies of Nottingham, though seldom visible, were even more unlike their own. How could they possibly have come alive on my single-lined foolscap – a word which already had an ominous ring about it?

After the first week in Nottingham I found cheap lodgings for myself and my dog Paddy in a grim grey row with a grim grey name, Ivy House, All Saints Terrace. My landlady was a thin complaining widow with a teenaged daughter, and, when my future wife, Vivien, visited me for a holiday weekend, the girl let down a cotton-reel from upstairs and banged it on my ground-floor window to disturb our loving quiet. My high tea before work consisted almost invariably of tinned salmon which I shared with Paddy, so that most days he was sick on the floor. On overcast mornings, before going on with my hopeless novel, I would take him for a walk in the nearby park where, when you touched the leaves, they left soot on the fingers. Once I took a lace worker to high tea, but she didn’t sleep with me for all that. Oxford seemed more than six months away and London very far. I had fallen into a pocket out of life and
out of time, but I was not unhappy.

Vivien was a Roman Catholic, but to me religion went no deeper than the sentimental hymns in the school chapel. ‘Lord Dismiss us with Thy Blessing’ represented the occasional mercy of God, and I enjoyed the luxurious melancholy of ‘Abide with Me’. The only prize I had ever won at school was a special prize for an ‘imaginative composition’, given by an elderly master in memory of his son killed in the first world war. It was the first time the prize had been awarded, and being a deeply religious man he was grieved that it should go to a story about an old senile Jehovah who had been left alone in a deserted heaven.

I met the girl I was to marry after finding a note from her at the porter’s lodge in Balliol protesting against my inaccuracy in writing, during the course of a film review, of the ‘worship’ Roman Catholics gave to the Virgin Mary, when I should have used the term ‘hyperdulia’. I was interested that anyone took these subtle distinctions of an unbelievable theology seriously, and we became acquainted. Now it occurred to me, during the long empty mornings, that if I were to marry a Catholic I ought at least to learn the nature and limits of the beliefs she held. It was only fair, since she knew what I believed – in nothing supernatural. Besides, I thought, it would kill the time.