A Sort of Life (6 page)

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 Manchester 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.

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.

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.