A Time of Gifts (18 page)

On one of these evenings, an accordion player set everyone yodelling. I can't bear it now, but I listened in rapture then. In the last of these villages I found myself rolling about on the floor in a friendly wrestling match with a village boy of about my own age. It ended in an inextricable clinch and a draw, from which we rose covered in sweat and sawdust, limping through acclaim towards the reviving beer mugs.

In thanks for shelter in farms, or for sojourns that the parish had imposed, I sketched the farmers and inn-keepers and their wives and presented them with the results and through politeness or lack of sophistication, they looked pleased. I will go into the merits of this output later. At one point, it plays an important part in this story.

* * *

It was different in towns.

In all those chance conversations in coffee houses and beer-halls and wine-cellars I was a most inadequate foil. Just how inadequate, I must try to convey, even if it slows things up for a couple of pages.

‘
A dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness
...' those words in my housemaster's report would have been nearer the mark if ‘sophistication' had been replaced by ‘precocity plus backwardness.' At all events, the mixture had produced nothing faintly resembling a grasp of politics and I'm forced to confess that, apart from a few predictable and almost subconscious prejudices, politically speaking, I didn't care a damn. It was still possible for people
to know each other fairly well without the dimmest idea of their opinions; and, at the King's School, Canterbury, discussion raged on every theme but this.

It goes without saying that in a small, tradition-haunted public school of such improbable antiquity—founded a few decades after Justinian closed the pagan academy at Athens—the atmosphere was likely to be conservative, and it was; but it was conservatism of an inexplicit kind, unaggressive because it was unchallenged—at least, at the age of sixteen and a half it was, which is when I vanished from the scene; but deep in the bloodstream nevertheless. There were rumours of sporadic heterodoxy higher up but they were few, and not fierce, and no firebrands like the two-man jacquerie of Esmond Romilly and Philip Toynbee had ever broken in to scatter manifestos and drive away with a carload of straw boaters. Communism, in such surroundings, still suggested the beards, the fur hats and the steaming bombs of old-fashioned cartoons; it was a concept almost too exotic for conjecture. The few boys with Socialist leanings were thought to be harmless, but a bit odd; and, where they might have seemed dashing a couple of years later, they were then thought rather dim. Socialism sounded grey and without charm and Labour M.P.s conjured up visions of steelrimmed spectacles, homespun cloth, cocoa and seed-cake and long killjoy faces bent on dismantling—what? Here an odd medley of targets would be bandied across fifth-form studies: What indeed? Why, the Empire, for a start! The Fleet! The Army! Established religion—“except Methodist chapels”; Gibraltar, the Lords, judges' wigs, kilts, bearskins, public schools (“No, steady on!” ), Latin and Greek, Oxford and Cambridge—“the Boat race too, most likely”; “county cricket for a cert.”—steeplechasing, shooting, fox-hunting, flat-racing, the Derby, betting, country-life, farming—(“I bet they'd plough up everything for swedes and beetroots if they got the chance!”) What about London? Why, the Palladium and the Aldwych would be turned into lecture halls or bloody temperance canteens. (The preceding notions were imported, rather than formed on the spot. They were fragments left over from outbursts
and lamentations at home. The level may have been higher; but I think this reconstruction is about right.) Talk would languish and a pensive gloom descend. Then someone might say: “It's a pity something can't be done about those poor chaps on the dole”; and the gloom would deepen; then: “It's rotten luck on all those miners.” Awkward silence would prolong itself while these liberal thoughts fluttered overhead. Then someone might tactfully put
Rhapsody in Blue
or
Ain't Misbehavin
' on the gramophone and steer the talk into happier channels: musical comedies, domestic scandal, Tallulah Bankhead, slow bowling or the fast passages in Juvenal.

My early days in London saw little advance on this; rather the reverse. The fellow crammers' pups from other establishments that I knocked about with at first were mostly a year older than me, or more; and their early departure from school had been prompted by backwardness rather than iniquity. They were wide-eyed, pink-cheeked and innocent boys with tidy hair; cornets and ensigns in the larva phase, cramming painfully for their exams and bent on an early mastery of the customs of their future regiments. They shunned flannel bags for whole suits and choked happily behind ties that were silk autobiographies knotted in high starched collars. Lock had helmetted them in hard hats till after Goodwood. Brigg, or Swaine & Adeney, sworded them with umbrellas that no cloud-burst would ever unfurl, and—ah! how enviably!—Lobb, Peel and Maxwell, on their fathers' accounts, had shod them in boned and gleaming shoes. With brows knit, they concentrated on not carrying parcels in London, on puffing at Turkish or Egyptian cigarettes rather than stinkers—even if they didn't want to smoke at all—and on eschewing the arcane blacklist of verbal usage that regimental traditions condemned. There was earnest talk, but it revolved round breeches-makers, gunsmiths and spurriers and hairdressers and their lotions, and the rival claims, in the evening, of carnations and gardenias. Arlen-ish anxieties! They were absurd and rather delightful. I was dazzled by all this juvenile dandyism; it seemed the height of worldly maturity and I did my best to keep
up. With expert advice on pattern and cut I pondered eclectically in shops as hushed as cave-palaces at the bottom of the sea, and bills mounted up. In the fullness of time, there was a Simla-London row about them, with bewilderment more than anger at the Simla end; how could I be quite so silly? Some of the bills weren't paid till years after these travels ended. Decorous d'Orsay-esque canters under the plane trees with these new friends, especially when Hyde Park was still covered with dew, seemed a perfect beginning to the day and, in winter I sped across country on borrowed steeds. They were very nice to me, because I was the youngest and because genuine rashness, linked with a kind of clownish exhibitionism, whose secret I had learnt long ago and sedulously cultivated, always won a dubious popularity. I was even forgiven, after diving into a lake at a ball, for only remembering when climbing out covered in slime and duckweed that my tails were borrowed.

It was about then that the first doubts about soldiering in peacetime began. Mermaid voices—the world of Literature and the Arts—were secretly beckoning. My friends, however much they might grumble about shortness of ready cash, would have enough later to enliven soldiering with all the country pursuits they loved and plenty left over for painting London red, and in a more elaborate and seemly style than our uncomplex weekly binges allowed. These would begin among the brass and the baize-curtained settles and the print-covered walls of Stone's Chop-House in Panton Street—a Leach illustration for Surtees, destroyed in the Blitz—and twice they ended in Vine Street: (“Did you have a nice time last night, Richard?” “Perfect, Aunt Kitty. Just what I like: a vomit and a brush with the Police.”) Also, if they tired of the Army, they could leave it. But what about living on one's pay, as I would have to? It might have worked had I felt utterly and exclusively vowed to a military life. But suddenly it seemed that the whole idea had taken shape
faute de mieux
; and, quite clearly, I was as ill-endowed for thrift in the face of temptation as I was for discipline. How would I manage, year after year, with no war in sight, never getting abroad, perhaps? As it happened, only one of this
small set was destined for the infantry; armed at all points with arcane footguard vetoes, he was the one who was strictest, in a voice which had scarcely broken yet, about usage and attire; but dynastic loyalty had vowed the others, practically from birth, to paternal cavalry regiments and every so often, they were cast down by the thought that, Hussars and Lancers though they would be, the cavalry was being motorized fast. Wheels, armour-plating, nuts, bolts and caterpillar-tracks were closing in and soon, outside the Household Cavalry and the two first regiments of heavy Dragoons, there would not be a whinny within earshot except from their own loose-boxes. But all their longings remained true to boot and saddle, and these feelings were catching. I was infected with their equestrian yearnings and moments of hope would spring:
Why not India?
Plenty of horses there. And with the extra allowances, why not?

After this, at regular intervals, unloosed by my voices-in-the-next-room relationship to India, fostered by long gazing at faded photographs, and almost wholly unrelated to reality, unavowable dreams intoxicatingly and fleetingly took shape. Sashed, and in chain-mail epaulettes with a striped puggaree twisted round a conical Multani cap and its fringed tail flying loose with the speed of the charge, I would be pointing along a canyon with a sabre while a squadron of irregular horse, their pennanted lances lowered, thundered behind; the bullets of ten-rupee jezails, meanwhile, consistently missing, whistled past our ears. In another scene in this secret
camera obscura
I was seconded like Strickland Sahib, thanks to an effortless mastery of a dozen native tongues and their dialects, for special duties: unrecognizable under my rags I would disappear for months into the lanes and the bazaars of seething frontier cities. The scenery of the next slide was set beyond the Himalayas: how many weeks from Yarkand to Urumchi? There, sheltered from the blizzards of the Pamirs under the black and snowladen tent-flap, narrow-eyed over the hookah and indistinguishable from the shaggy chieftains cross-legged all round me, I played out the last chukkah of the Great Game... Invariably, as
they dissolved, these deadly secret scenes made room for a final lantern-slide which was more convincing than all the rest and in much sharper focus. Squad-drill barked in the offing, recruits formed fours with a ragged triple crash, a bugler blew ‘Defaulters,' and for miles around, Hampshire drizzle soaked into the gorse and pines and streamed over Aldershot windows. The adjutant meanwhile, pointing wearily at the mess-bills and cheques on his desk, said: “You realize this can't go on? The Colonel will see you now. He's waiting for you.”

* * *

Once I dropped the idea of soldiering, the mermaid voices which had all the time been softly, and then less softly, calling me away from those friendly cornets of horse, now held me in thrall. The world of Literature and Art...I didn't find it. But through new friends and via the Cavendish Hotel, I think, I felt I had stepped through a looking-glass to wander in a bracing and brand new region. In this breezy, post-Stracheyan climate, it was cheerfully and explicitly held that all English life, thought and art were irredeemably provincial and a crashing bore and the sack from school, to my surprise, was hailed as a highly creditable feat; failure to join the Army was better still: “The Army! I should hope
not
indeed. The very idea!” I tried to explain that it had not been for ideological reasons and that I thought the King's commission a heavy honour; but, jovially overridden, I remained traitorously silent next time. An exotic radiance played over this new world. Bright with fireworks and shot with sulphuric sparks, it was an extension into real life of half a dozen books I had just read. The Left Wing opinions that I occasionally heard were uttered in such a way that they seemed a part merely, and a minor part, of a more general emancipation. This was composed of eclectic passwords and symbols—a fluent awareness of modern painting, for instance, or a familiarity with new trends in music; neither more important nor less than acquaintance with nightlife in Paris and Berlin and a smattering
of the languages spoken there. The atmosphere was far removed from cocoa and Methodism; principle never interfered with fastidious hedonism—expensive clothes and elaborate ties—and the only proletarian leanings I could discern probably sprang more from a physiological need for tough company than from dogma. How brilliantly the author of ‘Where Engels Fear to Tread'
[3]
depicts the protagonist of this particular aspect of Thirties' London! He soars from the page like a genie out of a bottle, and the symbols he leaves on evaporation are not hammers or sickles but a scattering of jewels and the tail feather of a lyre-bird. No wonder that the ‘Left Wing' and ‘Communism' seemed little more than light siege-pieces aimed at the stuffiness of the old. This was the target, and shocks the tactics along the Ritz-Café Royal-Gargoyle front and a great salient of country houses. Of course I knew that these flashes were the frivolous symptoms of an enormous political movement. But I had no inkling of the immeasurable influence that it was about to exert on people of my age and not a hint of the unquestioning ardour and the disillusioned palinodes that lay in wait for most of my later friends. I never heard communism seriously propounded or argued; perhaps I was too deeply preoccupied with my own dissipations; and, as it turned out in the end it was a way of thought that I was denied or spared by a geographical fluke. From the end of these travels till the War, I lived, with a year's interruption, in Eastern Europe, among friends whom I must call old-fashioned liberals. They hated Nazi Germany; but it was impossible to look eastwards for inspiration and hope, as their western equivalents—peering from afar, and with the nightmare of only one kind of totalitarianism to vex them—felt able to do. For Russia began only a few fields away, the other side of a river; and there, as all her neighbours knew, great wrong was being done and terrible danger lay. All their fears came true. Living among them made me share those fears and they made stony ground for certain kinds of grain.

This is a long rigmarole, but it does show how ill-prepared I was for any form of political argument. In this respect, I might have been sleep-walking.