A Sort of Life (17 page)

One day I took Paddy for a walk to the sooty neo-Gothic Cathedral – it possessed for me a certain gloomy power because it represented the inconceivable and the incredible. There was a wooden box for inquiries and I dropped into it a note asking for instruction. Then I went back to my high tea of tinned salmon and Paddy was sick again. I had no intention of being received into the Church. For such a thing to happen I would need to be convinced of its truth and that was not even a remote possibility.

The impossibility seemed even more pronounced a week later when I returned to the Cathedral and met Father Trollope. I was to grow fond of Trollope in the weeks which followed, but at the first sight he was all I detested most in my private image of the Church. A very tall and very fat man with big smooth jowls which looked as though they had never needed a razor, he resembled
closely a character in one of those nineteenth-century paintings to be seen in art shops on the wrong side of Piccadilly – monks and cardinals enjoying their Friday abstinence by dismembering enormous lobsters and pouring great goblets of wine. Poor Trollope, his appearance maligned him. He led a very ascetic life, and one of his worst privations was the rule which, at that period, forbade him to visit the theatre, for he had been an actor in the West End – not a star, but one of those useful reliable actors who are nearly always in demand for secondary roles. First he had become converted to Catholicism (Dr Fry, that former ogre of Berkhamsted, had persuaded his family, who lived in Lincoln under the shadow of the deanery, to oppose his conversion), and then he was driven further by some inner compulsion to the priesthood. There were many plays on his shelves among the theological books – reading them was the nearest he could get to the footlights.

It was some weeks before he told me his story, and it came like a warning hand placed on my shoulder. ‘See the danger of going too far’, that was the menace his story contained. ‘Be very careful. Keep well within your depth. There are dangerous currents out at sea which could sweep you anywhere …’ Father Trollope had been swept a very long way out, but the turbulent sea had not finished with him yet. He held a high position in the Catholic Nottingham world: he was Administrator of the Cathedral, well-placed to rise into a hierarchy where men of business ability are valued, but he was deeply dissatisfied with any future which could be represented as success – he hadn’t yet sacrificed enough, and a few years after I left Nottingham he wrote to tell me that he was entering an Order, an Order which was to my mind the least attractive of any, the Redemptorist. What had these monks, with an obligation to dwell in all their sermons and retreats on the reality of hell, in common with this stout cheerful man who loved the smell of greasepaint and the applause at a curtain-fall? Perhaps nothing except the desire to drown. A few years later he was dead of cancer.

It was quite a while before I realized that my first impression was totally false and that I was facing the challenge of an inexplicable goodness. I would see Trollope once or twice a week
for an hour’s instruction, and to my own surprise I came to look forward to these occasions, so that I was disappointed when by reason of his work they were cancelled. Sometimes the place of instruction was an odd one – we began our lesson, perhaps, with a discussion on the date of the Gospels on the upper deck of a tram swaying out to some Nottingham suburb where he had business to do and concluded it with the significance of Josephus in the pious pitch-pine parlour of a convent.

I had cheated him from the first, not telling him of my motive in receiving instruction or that I was engaged to marry a Roman Catholic. At the beginning I thought that if I disclosed the truth he would consider me too easy game, and later I began to fear that he would distrust the genuineness of my conversion if it so happened that I chose to be received, for after a few weeks of serious argument the ‘if’ was becoming less and less improbable. Bishop Gore in his great book on religious belief wrote that his own primary difficulty was to believe in the love of God; my primary difficulty was to believe in a God at all. The date of the Gospels, the historical evidence for the existence of the man Jesus Christ: these were interesting subjects which came nowhere near the core of my disbelief. I didn’t disbelieve in Christ – I disbelieved in God. If I were ever to be convinced in even the remote possibility of a supreme, omnipotent and omniscient power I realized that nothing afterwards could seem impossible. It was on the ground of a dogmatic atheism that I fought and fought hard. It was like a fight for personal survival.

My friend Antonia White many years later told me how, when she was attending the funeral of her father, an old priest, who had known her as a child, tried to persuade her to return to the Church. At last – to please him more than for any other reason – she said, ‘Well then, Father, remind me of the arguments for the existence of God.’ After a long hesitation he admitted to her, ‘I knew them once, but I have forgotten them.’ I have suffered the same loss of memory. I can only remember that in January 1926 I became convinced of the probable existence of something we call God, though now I dislike the word with all its anthropomorphic associations and prefer Chardin’s Omega Point, and my belief never came by way of those unconvincing philosophical
arguments which I derided in a short story called
A Visit to Morin
.

‘Oh,’ it may be said, ‘a young man is no match for a trained priest,’ but in fact, at twenty-two, fresh from Oxford and its intellectual exercises, I was more capable of arguing an abstract issue or debating an historical point than I am today. The experience of a long life may possibly increase one’s intuition of human character, but the mass of memories and associations which we drag around with us like an over-full suitcase on our interminable journey would weary me now at the start with all such arguments as we indulged in then. I cannot be bothered to remember – I accept. With the approach of death I care less and less about religious truth. One hasn’t long to wait for revelation or darkness.

Although I was not received till early February 1926, I must have made my decision some weeks before, for I wrote flippantly to my mother in January, in the course of a letter full of other concerns, ‘I expect you have guessed that I am embracing the Scarlet Woman.’ The flippancy was fictitious: the fun of the intellectual exercise was over. I had reached the limit of the land and there the sea waited, if I didn’t turn back. I was laughing to keep my courage up.

The first General Confession, which precedes conditional baptism and which covers the whole of a man’s previous life, is a humiliating ordeal. Later we may become hardened to the formulas of confession and sceptical about ourselves: we may only half intend to keep the promises we make, until continual failure or the circumstances of our private life, finally make it impossible to make any promises at all and many of us abandon Confession and Communion to join the Foreign Legion of the Church and fight for a city of which we are no longer full citizens. But in the first Confession a convert really believes in his own promises. I carried mine down with me like heavy stones into an empty corner of the Cathedral, dark already in the early afternoon, and the only witness of my baptism was a woman who had been dusting the chairs. I took the name of Thomas – after St Thomas the doubter and not Thomas Aquinas – and then I went on to the
Nottingham Journal
office and the football results and the evening of potato chips.

I remember very clearly the nature of my emotion as I walked away from the Cathedral: there was no joy in it at all, only a sombre apprehension. I had made the first move with a view to my future marriage, but now the land had given way under my feet and I was afraid of where the tide would take me. Even my marriage seemed uncertain to me now. Suppose I discovered in myself what Father Trollope had once discovered, the desire to be a priest … At that moment it seemed by no means impossible. Only now after more than forty years I am able to smile at the unreality of my fear and feel at the same time a sad nostalgia for it, since I lost more than I gained when the fear belonged irrevocably to the past.

I
WAS
earning nothing and learning very little on the
Journal
, and I had begun again to draw an allowance from my father who could ill afford it. I decided, between one high tea of tinned salmon and another, to leave Nottingham and try once more to find a job in London. I thought I was leaving Nottingham without regret, and I would have disbelieved anyone who had told me then that the city was embedded unforgettably in my imagination, and that the memory of it would stay with me over the next forty years like a photograph of a woman which one preserves in a drawer one doesn’t know why, even when the relationship has seemed a long time dead.

Ten years passed before I wrote in a book called
A Gun for Sale
a description of my first morning in the city.

There was no dawn that day in Nottwich. Fog lay over the city like a night sky with no stars. The air in the streets was clear. You had only to imagine that it was night. The first tram crawled out of its shed and took the steel track down towards the market. An old piece of newspaper blew up against the door of the Royal Theatre and flattened out. In the streets on the outskirts of Nottwich an old man plodded by with a pole tapping at the windows. The stationer’s window in the High Street was full of prayer books and bibles: a printed card remained among them, a relic of armistice day, like the old drab wreath of Haig poppies by the war memorial: ‘Look down, and swear by the slain of the war that you’ll never forget’.

The card, with its quotation from Siegfried Sassoon, had been in the window when I arrived in Nottingham in November and it was still there when I left in February.

In 1945, when the second war was over, I began to plan a novel set in Nottingham, and I revisited the city on the excuse of refreshing my memory, though it wasn’t a ‘necessary’ journey, the only kind which in those days we were expected to make. I found the essentials were still the same, though the ‘boots’ had
disappeared from the Black Dog Inn. I wrote no more than the first chapter of the novel before I turned instead to
The Heart of the Matter
, but in 1957 I adapted the idea into an unsatisfactory play,
The Potting Shed
, in which I gave an off-stage part to my unsatisfactory dog. Our walks together along the River Trent and down to the goose-market forced their way into the play, and ‘My landlady has a penchant for tinned salmon,’ I remarked through a character’s mouth. ‘My dog likes it, but it often makes him sick. He’s not a very good dog – parents unknown.’ No, whatever Tynan might think, Paddy was never intended to be God. He was just himself.

I was to continue my effort to write romantic novels for some years to come, but when I finally realized their futility, it was to my memory of the solitary months in Nottingham that I returned for help; there I found a different subject. The furnished room in All Saints Terrace drew me back, like the Common at Berkhamsted, the abandoned trenches, and I made it the home of a libidinous clergyman who, unlike my grandfather, had been unfrocked against his will.

Time since I left Oxford had moved as slowly as the unemployed bands of those days, shifting, with hands spread out, along a pavement edge: the British-American Tobacco Company, the tutoring in the Pennines, the long evening hours on the
Journal
with little to do, the five hundred words a day on a novel which I was half aware belonged to the past and would never be published. Suddenly the hands of the clock swung round as though a hand were correcting the hour. I left Nottingham at the end of January, and in the first week of March I had been accepted on trial as a subeditor by
The Times
.

I was happy on
The Times
, and I could have remained happy there for a lifetime, if I had not in the end succeeded in publishing a novel, but not the one I was about to finish when I left Nottingham. My regular hours were from four in the afternoon to eleven at night, though occasionally I was forced to stay later. But more often, while my services remained as little valuable as they had been at Nottingham, I would be sent away before my time, and this worried me. It seemed to me only too likely that I would not survive the period of trial, but finally the leisurely life of the home subeditors (there must have been about ten of us) calmed my nerves and I began to realize I was as safe as though I had entered the Civil Service. No one on
The Times
was ever known to be sacked or to resign. I remember with pleasure – it was a symbol of the peaceful life – the slow burning fire in the subeditors’ room, the gentle thud of coals as they dropped one by one in the old black grate.

Ivy House, All Saints Terrace, and my sour widow had been exchanged for a bed-sitting-room in Battersea and a far from melancholy landlady. She was untidy, exuberant and absent-minded. Articles of furniture regularly disappeared from my room towards the end of a month to reappear a week later; she had put them in hock to overcome a temporary difficulty. When I went out in the evening to Battersea Station to catch a train to Blackfriars I would pass an imposing building with a notice hanging on the railings: ‘It is forbidden to throw stones at the Polytechnic’. Wandering along those streets I was passing unconsciously through the scenery of a future book,
It’s a Battlefield
.

My five pounds a week was quite adequate to keep a single man. I was charged, I think, thirty shillings a week for my room and breakfast, and my dinner in
The Times
canteen seldom cost me more than elevenpence – for elevenpence I got two kippers, a pot of tea, and a slice of syrup roll.

Paddy I could no longer retain. I left him at Berkhamsted without regret. Luckily he had wormed his way into my mother’s affection. He was the first dog she had ever cared for – perhaps because like a difficult child he was both nervous and independent. He never quite recovered his mental equilibrium after a picture in the drawing-room fell down beside him, and in those days there was no psycho-analyst for dogs.