A Sort of Life (9 page)

Watson was one of my few friends, and he deserted me for Carter. He had none of Carter’s
finesse
– Carter continually tempted me with offers of friendship snatched away like a sweet, but leaving the impression that somewhere some time the torture would end, while Watson imitated him only at a blundering unimaginative level. Alone he would have had no power to hurt. Nonetheless it was on Watson that I swore revenge, for with his defection my isolation had become almost complete.

For many years after leaving school, when I thought back to that period, I found the desire for revenge alive like a creature under a stone. The only change was that I looked under the stone less and less often. I began to write, and the past lost some of its power – I wrote it out of me. But still every few years a scent, a stretch of wall, a book on a shelf, a name in a newspaper, would remind me to lift the stone and watch the creature move its head towards the light.

In December 1951 I was in the shop of the Cold Storage Company in Kuala Lumpur buying whisky for Christmas which I was going to spend in Malacca. I had just got back from a three-day jungle patrol with the 2/7th Gurkha Rifles in Pahang, seeking
communist guerillas, and I was feeling very tired of Malaya. A voice said, ‘You are Greene, aren’t you?’

A foxy-faced man with a small moustache stood at my elbow.

I said, ‘Yes, I’m afraid …’

‘My name’s Watson.’

‘Watson?’ It must have been a very long time since I had lifted the stone, for the name meant nothing to me at first, nor the flushed colonial face.

‘We were at school together, don’t you remember? We used to go around with a chap called Carter. The three of us. Why, you used to help me and Carter with our Latin prep.’

At one time, in the days when I still day-dreamed, I would imagine meeting Watson at a cocktail party and in some way humiliating him in public. Nothing could have been more public than the Cold Storage Company of Kuala Lumpur during the Christmas rush, but all I could find to say was, ‘I didn’t think I was any good at Latin.’

‘Better than we were anyway.’

I said, ‘What are you doing now?’

‘Customs and excise. Do you play polo?’

‘No.’

‘Come along and see me play one evening.’

‘I’m just off to Malacca.’

‘When you get back. Talk over old times. What inseparables we were – you and me and old Carter.’ It was obvious that his memory held a quite different impression from mine.

‘What’s happened to Carter?’

‘He went into Cables and died.’

I said, ‘When I get back from Malacca …’ and went thoughtfully out.

What an anti-climax the meeting had been. I wondered all the way back to my hotel if I would ever have written a book had it not been for Watson and the dead Carter, if those years of humiliation had not given me an excessive desire to prove that I was good at something, however long the effort might prove. Was that a reason to be grateful to Watson or the reverse? I remembered another ambition – to be a consul in the Levant: I had got so far as sitting successfully for the
viva
. If it had not been
for Watson … So speculating, I felt Watson sliding out of mind, and when I came back from Malacca I had forgotten him.

Indeed it was only many months later, after I had left Malaya, as I thought, for good, that I remembered I had never rung him up, had never watched him play polo, nor exchanged memories of the three inseparables. Perhaps, unconsciously, that was my revenge – to have forgotten him so easily. Now that I had raised the stone again, I knew that nothing lived beneath it.

The last footsteps had receded a long time ago, and I had put away the penknife. If the knife had been less blunt or my nerve had not failed, I wonder how I would have explained the cut knee. But perhaps unconsciously the whole point for me was that the act was inexplicable, like a would-be suicide’s uncertain overdose of sleeping pills, something which demands prompt action from outside. Successful suicide is often only a cry for help which hasn’t been heard in time.

After a long interval the matron came up to inspect the dormitories and found me in bed. I invented reasons – a feeling of sickness, a headache – which she accepted readily. She was a young woman – though to me then she seemed like all my elders fixed in a kind of static middle-age – who radiated a sense of calm friendliness. The thermometer might accuse me of malingering, but not she. She knew that even a child reaches at a certain moment a psychological limit. I was to stay in bed until after lunch and then take tea in her room. Thus she postponed for another year or more the final act of rebellion. Kindness alas! is often false kindness, enabling one to endure a little longer an almost unbearable situation.

It was on that day that the rain came down in torrents, postponing what I had perhaps stayed in bed to avoid, the weekly parade of the
O.T.C
. I hated that uniform with the puttees I could never learn to tie with any security or neatness and I dreaded the parades where I always fumbled fixing bayonets or strayed forming fours, under the ironic eyes of Watson and Carter. There was a deadly gravity about these parades because the years of Passchendaele and Gallipoli were only just over; outside the school chapel there was the list of old boys killed, plaque after plaque in double column, to remind us of the recent years. Most of us were shocked when the Eton
O.T.C
. arrived for a joint field-day with grey uniforms in place of the sacred khaki and with an undisciplined frivolity, which seemed in our over-serious eyes to deny the virtues of the dead.
²

The water flowed in torrents down the hill; the gutters overflowed, and now it was a flood which I feared, dams breaking, reservoirs overflowing (I had read about it all in Rider Haggard’s
Lysbeth
), but even drowning was preferable to the ignoble routine of school. The matron’s kindness stood out by its rarity in that world, and perhaps because of its rarity two kind gentle people were drawn together and the assistant housemaster, Mr Dale, whom we had nicknamed Dicker, married the matron.

Dicker was a youngish man in those days (though, of course, to me middle-aged) with a bald head and gold-rimmed glasses and a drawl which sometimes became a slight stutter; a difficulty of communication, one would have said, and yet to those willing to listen he communicated more than any other master, except perhaps my father. Oddly enough he had no difficulty with discipline, and though he had little obvious popularity, like some of the hearty mud-stained members of the staff, and looked out of place in flapping shorts as he circled the scrum with a whistle in his mouth, no one imitated his drawl, his nickname was innocuous, and the worst joke ever made at his expense was ‘Where do the fleas run? Up Hill and down Dale’. Hill, a fine tennis-player and an older man, was Dale’s chief friend at the school. Later, when retired, they collaborated in difficult academic crosswords which were published in a Sunday paper under the name of Torquemada. Some of Dale’s kindness must have rubbed off on Hill, for I remember how I was once invited to tea by him and how two
hours of anchovy-toast and tea-cakes and adult conversation atoned for a week of misery and postponed again the final breakdown. Perhaps it would have been postponed indefinitely if at that period I could have comforted myself with Dale’s favourite apophthegm, drawled out in the most distressing circumstances: ‘It’s all experience.’ I remember repeating the phrase to keep my spirits up in April, 1941, as I shambled fearfully down blazing Gower Street in the footsteps of our old Jewish post warden, powerful and imperturbable in his shiny black mackintosh, like a moving statue in malachite, the stone catching the reflection of the flames and flares, one of the bravest men I have known and the most unaware of his own courage.

I think it may have been the interminable repetitions in my life which finally broke me down. A term always lasted thirteen weeks, and contained two ‘half-holidays’ as they were called, except in summer when there were three. Sundays came every seven days with terrible regularity, like Lazarus with his drop of water; there were no Saints’ Days to vary the week, and once a week came the dreaded
O.T.C
. parade.

I tried out other forms of escape after I failed to cut my leg. Once at home on the eve of term I went into the dark room by the linen-cupboard, and in that red Mephistophelean glare drank a quantity of hypo under the false impression that it was poisonous. On another occasion I drained my blue glass bottle of hay-fever drops, which, as they contained a small quantity of cocaine, were probably good for my despair. A bunch of deadly nightshade, picked and eaten on the Common, had only a slightly narcotic effect, and once, towards the end of one holiday, I swallowed twenty aspirins before swimming in the empty school baths. (I can still remember the curious sensation of swimming through cotton wool.)

I endured that life for some eight terms – a hundred and four weeks of monotony, humiliation and mental pain. It is astonishing how tough a boy can be, but I was helped by my truancies, those peaceful hours hidden in the hedge. At last came the moment
of final decision. It was after breakfast one morning in the School House dining-room, on the last day of the summer holidays, that I made my break for liberty. I wrote a note, which I placed on the black oak sideboard under the whisky tantalus, saying that instead of returning to St John’s, I had taken to the Common and would remain there in hiding until my parents agreed that never again should I go back to my prison. There were enough blackberries that fine autumn to keep me from hunger, and I prided myself on knowing every hidden trench. This time it was a quisling who took to the
maquis
. What I cannot remember arranging was any way by which my parents could communicate the news of their surrender.

There was a wonderful sense of release from all the tension and the indecision as I made my way up the long road lined with Spanish chestnuts from the ruined castle to the slope where the Common began. I had to hurry, for here on this open road I might have been intercepted, but the race against time was part of the excitement on that golden autumn day, with a faint mist lying along the canal, across the watercress beds by the railway viaduct and in the grassy pool of the castle. Then I was safely there, on the Common, among the gorse and bracken of my chosen battlefield.

I had brought a book in my pocket, but I was much too excited to read, for I had a whole campaign to plan. There were two routes a search-party might take, the one by the road I had come and another through Kitchener’s Fields which entered the Common by a flank. There was one point of vantage, an abandoned firing-butt, from which I could see anyone who approached for a hundred yards around, but there I would be exposed myself and I didn’t like the idea of my rebellion ending in an undignified chase. I wanted to be an invisible watcher, a spy on all that went on, and so I moved restlessly among the bushes on the edge of the Common, watching for the enemy, ready to retreat unseen into the depths, like the
franc-tireurs
of Henty or David Balfour pursued by red-coats or Buchan’s Hannay.

It was still too early for the invasion to begin. Immediately after breakfast my mother would be busy with the kitchen, the nursery, the linen-cupboard; my father would be shut in his study working
on the Scheme – an elaborate game of his own invention consisting of a large board with slots of vari-coloured cards. With its help he was able to ensure that on the school timetable a master was not allotted contradictory duties, to teach Latin Composition to
IV
b simultaneously with English literature to va. Visiting headmasters were introduced to this Scheme with pride, and I think my father took as much pleasure in shifting a pink card to an empty space or solving a difficult problem with a ‘free period’ in white as in moving a queen to mate at chess or suddenly disrupting an opponent’s attack by castling. He would sit over the board for half an hour at a time, motionless, in the attitude of Rodin’s Thinker. No one would surely be bold enough to disturb him, while he was bent over his essential game, with my peace-destroying note.

I think at least two hours must have passed, and I would like to know now what conferences were held, what tactics were suggested, what decisions were made. But it is too late for me to find out. All the protagonists are dead except myself – my father, my mother, my elder sister, even the head housemaid who would have known all. I can imagine the bruit extending, in spite of all precautions, upstairs to the nursery and along the passage to the kitchen quarters: what a murmur of under-housemaids and scullery-maids, and the gardener perhaps leaning in at the kitchen-window to catch the latest report. And all this time I had nothing to do but roam my battlefield from bush to bush. My resolution was quite unchanged. I had asserted my freedom. Let others clean up the mess, I was happy, and never in the future – not even when I played Russian roulette on this same Common – did I experience again the hopeless misery of the years which I was escaping now.

It was time I looked at my exposed flank – a steep clay path between oaks and beeches above Kitchener’s Fields. I moved rashly out beyond the cover of the bushes and began to descend, until, turning a corner, I came face to face with my elder sister, Molly. I could have run, of course, but that hardly suited the dignity of my protest, and so I went quietly home with her. It was a tactical defeat, but it proved all the same a strategical victory. I
had
changed my life; the whole future was decisively altered.

Perhaps I was nearer a nervous breakdown than I now care to believe, for a thick haze conceals all that happened next. Did I talk to my sister on my tramp home? I think I must have walked in silent pride. How was I greeted? I remember no reproaches, only a well-warmed bed in the spare-room next my parents’, which was used only for more serious ailments than the regular family traffic of colds and coughs. I seem to remember my father sitting on the bed and interrogating me seriously and tenderly, and from that interrogation grew a whole comedy of errors. I suppose I complained of the general filth of my life at St John’s, meaning the unlocked lavatories, the continual farting of my companions, but he misunderstood me and believed I had been the victim of some ring of masturbation, so that other investigations were now set on foot among the innocent inhabitants of St John’s. The truth was I had not yet discovered the pleasure of masturbation and didn’t even know the meaning of the word, though my father in any case probably used some vague abstract expression which was equally applicable to breaking wind.