A Sort of Life (8 page)

¹
I noticed with pleasure one year when I was travelling in the restaurant-car between Hankow and Pekin that there was a fly-swatter beside every place, but alas! there were no flies left to swat. I remember a glorious day in Freetown in 1942 when I closed the windows of my little office and slaughtered more than three hundred flies in a timed four minutes.

²
I plead guilty to ingratitude. Thirty years later Noyes threatened me with an action for libel when I wrote a review of his autobiography.

I
HAD
passed thirteen and things were worse even than I had foreseen. I lay in bed in the dormitory of St John’s, listening to the footsteps clatter down the stone stairs to early prep and breakfast, and when the silence had safely returned I began trying to cut my right leg open with a penknife. But the knife was blunt and my nerve was too weak for the work.

I was back in the house of my early childhood, but the circumstances had changed. The garden across the road, France across the Channel, was now closed to me: I could no longer set foot in the chintzy drawing-room where my mother had read aloud to us and where I had wept over the story of the children buried by the birds. In those early days I had not even been aware that there existed in the same house such grim rooms as those I lived in now. Even the door by which I entered the house was a different one, a side door like a service entrance, though no servant would have endured the squalor we lived in.
¹
There was a schoolroom with ink-stained nibbled desks insufficiently warmed by one cast-iron stove, a changing-room smelling of sweat and stale clothes, stone stairs, worn by generations of feet, leading to a dormitory divided by pitch-pine partitions that gave inadequate privacy – no moment of the night was free from noise, a cough, a snore, a fart. Years later when I read the sermon on hell in Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist
I recognized the land I had inhabited. I had left civilization behind and entered a savage country of strange customs and inexplicable cruelties: a country in which I was a foreigner and a suspect, quite literally a hunted creature, known to have dubious associates. Was my father not the headmaster? I was like the son
of a quisling in a country under occupation. My elder brother Raymond was a school prefect and head of the house – in other words one of Quisling’s collaborators. I was surrounded by the forces of the resistance, and yet I couldn’t join them without betraying my father and my brother. My cousin Ben, a junior prefect, one of the rich Greenes, had no such scruples and worked covertly against my brother, gaining much popularity in consequence, so that I felt the less sympathy for him when he was later imprisoned, without warrant or reason, in the second German war under Regulation 18b. Injustice had bred injustice.

Though children can be abominably cruel, no physical tortures were inflicted on me. If I had possessed any skill at games I might even have won a tacit acceptance into the resistance movement, but I hated rugger only one degree less than I now hated cricket – a sport which at six years old I had loved as a game. ‘Runs’ I enjoyed, for then I could be alone in the solitude of the countryside, and at this period of my life I loved the country. It was my natural escape-route. On the wide stretches of Berkhamsted Common, seamed with the abandoned trenches of the Inns of Court
O.T.C
. among the gorse and heather, and in the Ashridge beechwoods beyond, I could dramatize my loneliness and feel I was one of John Buchan’s heroes making his hidden way across the Scottish moors with every man’s hand against him.

I grew clever at evasion. Truancy was impressed as the pattern of my life. To avoid fielding-practice I invented extra coaching in mathematics after school; I even named the master who I said was teaching me and curiously enough my story was never investigated. I would slip out of St John’s with a book in my pocket while others were changing and make my way a little up the hill where a small lane branches off into the countryside. It was one of the most solitary lanes I have ever known; not even courting couples were to be seen there, perhaps because it was hardly wide enough for two to walk abreast. On one side was a ploughed field: on the other a ditch with a thick hawthorn hedge which was hollow in the centre and in which I could sit concealed and read my book. What book? I cannot be
sure now. The days of Henty were over – my body was leading my brain in unfamiliar directions. I found extraordinary beauty and passion, I remember, in Sir Lewis Morris’s
Epic of Hades
, and perhaps I was reading lines like these spoken by Helen of Troy:

Was it love

That drew me then to Paris? He was fair,

I grant you, fairer than a summer morn,

Fair with a woman’s fairness, yet in arms

A hero, but he never had my heart.

It was not he seduced me, but the thirst

For freedom, if in more than thought I erred,

And was not rapt but willing. For my child,

Born to an unloved father, loved me not,

The fresh sea called, the galleys plunged, and I

Fled willing from my prison and the pain

Of undesired caresses, and the wind

Was fair, and on the third day as we sailed,

My heart was glad within me when I saw

The towers of Ilium rise beyond the wave.

Today the lines seem pinchbeck, and yet they retain the secret smell of my hiding-place.

One comes to literature by devious routes, and it was often Stephen Phillips’s
Paolo and Francesca
which I carried with me into hiding, just as another boy may be playing truant now with the verse-plays of Christopher Fry. There
were
lines in that banal drama which faltered on the edge of poetry: ‘The last sunset cry of wounded kings’, ‘the childless cavern cry of the barren sea’, and I was not critical in the hawthorn hedge.

The danger of discovery lent those hours a quality of excitement which was very close to momentary happiness. Scent to me is far more evocative than sound or perhaps even sight, so that I become attracted without realizing it to the smell of a floor-polish or a detergent which one day I miss when I open my door and home seems no longer home. So in my sixties I seem able to smell the leaves and grasses of my hiding-place more certainly than I hear the dangerous footsteps on the path or see the countryman’s boots pass by on the level of my eyes. I remember how in 1944 I spent a rather guilty night of security in Berkhamsted away from the fly-bombs and the fire-watching with my brother
Hugh. Asleep in the Swan Inn I dreamt of the W. H. Smith bookshop down the High Street from which I had stolen
The Railway Magazine
all those years ago, and I smelt the individual smell of the shop which was like the smell of no other Smith’s that I have ever known. In my dream I found a book for which I had long been searching on a particular shelf, and so in the morning, before I had breakfast, I walked down the street to see whether my dream might prove true. I was disappointed, the book was not there, but what I noticed at once on entering the shop was that the familiar smell had gone, and without the smell the shop was not the same. I inquired after the manager whom I remembered well: he had died the year before, and I suppose the new manager had changed whatever was the source of the smell which had so long haunted my imagination.

On Sundays we would go for walks, by order, in threes, and the names had to be filled up like a dance programme on a list which was hung up on the changing-room door. This surely must have had some moral object, though one which eludes me today when I remember how deftly the ‘Emperor’s Crown’ used to be performed by three girls at once in a brothel in Batista’s Havana. Three can surely be as dangerous company as two, or were the authorities cynical enough to believe that in every three there would be one informer?

The housemaster in my first year was Mr Herbert, an old silver-haired bachelor, whose formidable sister cared for him better than she did the boys. To add to my inextricable confusion of loyalties he happened to be my godfather, mysteriously linked at my birth to look after my spiritual well-being with that formidable gouty Colonel Wright of Number 11, who owned the chamber-pot in the dining-room cupboard. Mr Herbert was certainly not a cynic. He was an innocent little white rabbit of a bachelor, dominated by the dark Constance, his sister; he must have possessed a passion for birds because he later became the private secretary to Lord Grey of Falloden in that statesman’s blind retirement. My only memory of him is seated at a desk in the St John’s schoolroom on the first evening of my first term there, while each boy in turn submitted to him, for censorship or approval, any books he had brought from home to read. The danger
was in the source – home, where dwelt unreliable and uncelibate parents. Anything in the school library was acceptable – even the inflammatory blank verse of Sir Lewis Morris from whom I later learned of the carnal loves of Helen and Cleopatra.

The methods of censorship are always curiously haphazard. In the 1950s I was to be summoned by Cardinal Griffin to Westminster Cathedral and told that my novel
The Power and the Glory
, which had been published ten years before, had been condemned by the Holy Office, and Cardinal Pizzardo required changes which I naturally – though I hope politely – refused to make. Cardinal Griffin remarked that he would have preferred it if they had condemned
The End of the Affair
. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘you and I receive no harm from erotic passages, but the young …’ I told him, and it was true enough, though I had forgotten the evil influence of Sir Lewis Morris, that one of my earliest erotic experiences had been awoken by
David Copper-field
. Our interview at that point came abruptly to an end, and he gave me, as a parting shot, a copy of a pastoral letter which had been read in the churches of his diocese, condemning my work by implication. (Unfortunately I thought too late of asking him to autograph it.) Later, when Pope Paul told me that among the novels of mine he had read was
The Power and the Glory
, I answered that the book he had read had been condemned by the Holy Office. His attitude was more liberal than that of Cardinal Pizzardo. ‘Some parts of all your books will always,’ he said, ‘offend some Catholics. You should not worry about that’: a counsel which I find it easy to take.

School rules, like those of the Roman Curia, are slow to change, however temporary the ruler who inspires them may be. I think the censorship of books from home (which was strictly enforced only, like a customs examination, when one passed the border – parcels from home were exempt) was dropped with Mr Herbert’s retirement, but other relics of his government remained – the lavatories without locks, where each newcomer, anxious to perform his morning duty, had to call out ‘Number off’ in order to learn which of the compartments was empty; and that rule for Sunday walks which made certain that no one, under any circumstances, would ever walk dangerously alone.

But I was not a member of the resistance – I was Quisling’s son. I had often to go begging that my name might be included in groups who had no desire for my company, until at last, after a term or two of purgatory, I received permission from my parents to spend Sunday afternoons at home. It was a relief for which I paid dearly in my nerves – a kind of
coitus interruptus
with the civilized life of home, for as evening fell I had to rejoin my companions tramping into the school chapel and afterwards climb the hill to St John’s, and then at night the stone stairs to the dormitory – where at this moment in my memory I have lamentably failed to saw open my knee.

Unhappiness in a child accumulates because he sees no end to the dark tunnel. The thirteen weeks of a term might just as well be thirteen years. The unexpected never happens. Unhappiness is a daily routine. I imagine that a man condemned to a long prison sentence feels much the same. I cannot remember what particular item in the routine of a boarding-school roused this first act of rebellion – loneliness, the struggle of conflicting loyalties, the sense of continuous grime, of unlocked lavatory doors, the odour of farts (it was sexually a very pure house, there was no hint of homosexuality, but scatology was another matter, and I have disliked the lavatory joke from that age on). Or was it just then that I had suffered from what seemed to me a great betrayal? This story at least was to have a satisfactory though remote ending.

While I was at St John’s I must have read Q’s novel
Foe-Farrell
three or four times. It was the dramatic story of a man’s revenge, and I very much wanted an opportunity for dramatic revenge. As I remember the tale a political demagogue ruined the experiment of a great surgeon by inciting a mob to wreck his laboratory where it was believed that he was practising vivisection. From that moment the surgeon Foe (or was it Farrell?) pursued Farrell (or was it Foe?) across the world and through the years with the sole object of revenge – I think he even found himself alone in an open boat on the Pacific with his enemy, improbable though this may sound. Then, under the long-drawn torture of the pursuit,
the characters changed places: the pursued took on nobility, the pursuer the former vulgarity of his enemy. It was a very moral story, but I don’t think it was the moral which interested me – simple revenge was all I wanted.

For there was a boy at my school called Carter who perfected during my fourteenth and fifteenth years a system of mental torture based on my difficult situation. Carter had an adult imagination – he could conceive the conflict of loyalties, loyalties to my age-group, loyalty to my father and brother. The sneering nicknames were inserted like splinters under the nails.

I think in time I might have coped with Carter – there was an element of reluctant admiration, I believe, on both sides. I admired his ruthlessness, and in an odd way he admired what he wounded in me. Between the torturer and the tortured arises a kind of relationship. So long as the torture continues the torturer has failed, and he recognizes an equality in his victim. I never seriously in later years desired revenge on Carter. But Watson was another matter.