Basil Street Blues (26 page)

It is a wild night, reader, and a storm has blown up slashing the sky with rents of lightning, with tremendous bangs and rumbles of thunder. I am at the top of the house and my attic window suddenly opens. The wind frantically agitates the glass panes, the curtains streaming in, and the commotion of the storm outside wakes me. I hear the window shivering, see the curtains flapping, the rain driving in, and feel a strange coldness in the room. Perhaps I have woken from a nightmare. Certainly I feel odd and cannot tell for a few moments whether I am really awake or asleep. I take my arm out of the bed and stretch over to turn on the bedside light so that I can get up and close the window. The thunder roars and crashes. Then, as my hand reaches the light switch I feel another hand fixed upon it, a damp, cold, unattached, inexplicable, horrifying hand. My heart gives a thump, I force the terrible thing away and switch on the light, dreading what I will see. What I see is my other hand which has completely ‘gone to sleep’ and through which I can feel nothing. I am my own ghost.

In later years I have had three or four similar experiences. An animal, perhaps a snake, maybe a rat, lands dramatically on my chest in the middle of the night a second after I have woken. I start up and fling the brute away, but it immediately lands back on me and I cannot get rid of the monster, whatever it is. What it is, of course, is my own absolutely senseless arm I am wrestling with in the dark. For some moments, without the circulation of life, it is a terrifying experience.

Eton had gradually become the most secure of all my living places, and I missed the friends I had made there, Griffy Philipps, Michael MacLeod and a few others. I continued shuttling between Maidenhead and London, Sweden and France. I was travelling to France not with my father now, but my mother. We used to speak of L’Oiseau Bleu as our villa in the South of France, though it was little more than a stone shack with a glorious view of Monte Carlo from above the Grande Corniche. I hated it. I could do nothing with the view or anything else. In my opinion there
was
nothing else – nothing that interested me. I was scared of the frogs, lizards and scorpions that leapt and scuttled about my bedroom, and I disliked the wearisome business of carrying water each day from the village of La Turbie, a mile away. While my mother lay in the sun, I wandered around doing silly things like falling down a mountain, climbing a tree and making myself ill on unripe figs, or simply getting severe sunburn. I was an awful nuisance. Eventually my mother suggested that I invite my friend Griffy Philipps to join us. We met him at Ventimiglia railway station just over the Italian border, and he stayed three weeks. ‘Apart from some alarm about scorpions,’ he writes to me, ‘nothing very controversial happened.’ But it was much better doing nothing together than alone.

On another occasion Kaja came with Birger Sandström who smoked a wonderfully long cigar and wore dazzling correspondent’s shoes. Edy brought his daughter Gay, and we all stayed in a hotel at Antibes. Gay was a couple of years older than I was, and something of a tomboy. Together, in great excitement, almost hysterics, we put on an excruciating ‘entertainment’ of music and recitations, through which everyone was politely obliged to sit.

On 16 April 1954 I began a five-year term as an articled clerk. The solicitors to whom I was articled, T.W. Stuchbery & Son, had their offices at the corner of Park Street in Windsor. So I was still very close to Eton, though my new life was a world away.

Messrs T.W. Stuchbery & Son had never entertained an articled clerk before and appeared to have little notion of what to do with me. I was technically articled to one of the senior partners, Ian Hezlett, a Falstaffian character of uncertain temper who had been a drinking companion of my father’s (signs of his beer-drinking could be detected after midday on his extravagantly frothing moustache). But I saw little of him in his grand office on the first floor after our initial encounter together with my father. ‘We’ll start him on tort,’ Hezlett announced. ‘Donoghue and Stevenson.’ My father laughed heartily, and I looked blank. Then I was sent up to a modest office under the attic where a thin, bent, sun-starved, middle-aged solicitor called Mr Owen worked, encircled by papers. An extra desk was moved into his office and I sat at it. I was also equipped with blotting-paper, pen, pencil and rubber. And that was it. All I did in the first weeks was to practise making tea and coffee. But gradually, over the months, my duties were extended. I released Mr Owen from some of his imprisoning papers, filing them in the shadowy attics crammed with documents tied in faded pink string, and covered with dust. Occasionally Mr Owen, who was a well-intentioned if unexciting man, would take me to the County Court in Windsor to sniff the legal atmosphere, and I would sit out the long days there. On one of my first visits, trying to keep awake during the afternoon, I unintentionally released from a large metal radiator a fountain of tepid water over some witnesses. I could not tell afterwards whether Mr Owen was amused or appalled, but I noticed that he began giving me increasingly odd jobs out of the office and would question me quite keenly when I got back as if hungry for some specks of entertainment. I was able to tell him how I had been shot at while attempting to serve a writ (the marksman taking aim through a caravan window as I approached, waving a white handkerchief, across a field), how I had accidentally been locked into a huge fridge among various carcasses which belonged to a litigious butcher who was, I felt, exaggerating the oven-like qualities of his cold storage. Apparently encouraged by my misadventures, Mr Owen saw to it that Stuchbery’s craziest clients, those in search of therapy rather than legal opinion, were sent up to me for consultation. I daresay that many country solicitors, before the widespread use of psychiatry, provided such services for those who could afford them. I remember one elderly woman who used to come in fairly regularly complaining of nudity among her neighbours. At twilight, she confided, and at even more revealing times, they would dance in the garden and were, she concluded from the noises she heard at night, tunnelling under her house. I made notes on my pink blotting pad, gave her some of my tea, and eventually prepared an invoice in mock-legal jargon which I think she appreciated.

My worst offence occurred in London during a complicated divorce case. I had made a summary of the husband’s and wife’s letters to each other – something of an education for me – and was allowed by Mr Owen to attend the court hearing in London. But the case took an unexpected turn while Mr Owen was in the lavatory, and our Counsel, murmuring to the judge that he needed to take fresh instructions, turned to me. By the time Mr Owen returned, the case had been adjourned and the disgruntled parties found themselves still married.

I did not know what I was doing. What I was meant to be doing was reading law under Ian Hezlett’s supervision for some of the time, and working in his legal practice for the rest of the time. In those Dickensian days, articled clerks were not paid salaries, but actually paid the solicitors to whom they were articled. This was not an obvious solution to our financial problems, though my father persuaded himself that it was an astute investment. At the beginning of my second year, acknowledging that I was receiving no training or tuition, but simply doing errands for Mr Owen, Ian Hezlett decided to pay me a modest wage. My father, ever the optimist, interpreted this as a promotion rather than surrender, and for a brief period allowed himself to feel almost happy at the way things were shaping.

The only point of law that was explained to me at Stuchbery’s was one that involved a snail in a bottle of ginger beer. ‘Do you know Donoghue and Stevenson yet?’ Ian Hezlett called out to me one day on his way to the pub. Then it was Mr Owen’s turn. ‘May I recommend that you peruse the case of Donoghue versus Stevenson?’ he said seeing me gazing out morosely at the buses which went one way to Dedworth, the other to Gravesend. ‘How are you getting on, young chap?’ a visiting solicitor quizzed me. ‘Mastered Donoghue and Stevenson have you?’ I mastered nothing else, having received the impression that if I got the hang of this famous snail which had gone in its bottle all the way to the House of Lords to establish the manufacturer’s duty of care, then I would have cracked the legal code and all would be well.

The most cheerful aspect of my legal career was that it deferred my two years’ National Service. But eventually I could endure the pointlessness and boredom no longer. I simply could not credit that people spent their lives shut up in such gloomy buildings, counting themselves lucky as they shuffled through old papers from Monday morning to Saturday lunchtime day after week after year, with only an annual fortnight’s holiday, until the long holiday of retirement and the permanent vacation of death. It seemed awful, but then I was intensely lonely, having lost touch with my companions from school and being unable as yet to replace them.

There was at the office a girl who lived on a caravan site which I used to pass in the bus that took me each day from Maidenhead to Windsor and back. She was in her early twenties, slim, dark-haired and with glittering eyes that shone and flashed in my imagination at nights. Was it only in my imagination that she seemed to be making some signal that we might see each other outside the office, in the evenings or at weekends? I will never know. In those days it was difficult for a girl to take the initiative in a relationship, and I was handicapped by poverty and paralysed by shyness.

From these legal experiences I was later able to add to my family’s foreboding of bankruptcy my own writer’s apprehension of libel. But the only law that genuinely interested me was criminal law, and that is less an interest in law than in human nature. After eighteen months at Windsor, I braced myself for another confrontation with my father. ‘I am not angry because you don’t like the law,’ he wrote to me.

I am angry because you are apparently prepared to chuck it up without an effort. The world is not an easy place & I don’t want you to miss the boat.

I have met hundreds of men of my own age who are down & out in life and the story is always the same with slight variations. They are men of good education who because of indulgent parents never settled down to any job… Heaven knows, I don’t want you to hate your work, but I don’t want to see you a drifter – for I have seen only too often the mess they make of their lives.

My father promised me that I would hate the army even more than the law. A legal qualification, he argued, would be my best insurance policy. ‘Your life must be more competitive than mine. If you pass your examinations you still have a big pull over the others because you were at a Public School, but not unless you can back it up with the necessary qualifications.’ He stressed the awkwardness of reneging on my articles, but if I was determined to chuck the law then it would be better, he told me, to join the army as a regular soldier rather than a national serviceman. ‘At 46 years of age you retire with a lump sum or pension.’ Then I could afford to write books. ‘You don’t know how hellish life can be if you get on the rocks,’ he warned me. My father was then, I calculated, forty-six. ‘Had I had a firm hand to guide me when I was young I would have been in a damn sight better position in life to-day.’ But, he concluded, if I would not continue with the law, not join the regular army, I must simply go my own way.

Things might have been a little easier if I’d known that my grandfather had left Gray’s Inn in 1900 without taking any examinations. But though I was still living at Maidenhead, he said nothing to me. In any case my father would have seen this precedent as being out of date. Nevertheless I would not have felt unique in my record of failure as I terminated my articles and, going my own way, prepared for two years’ National Service.

*

Conscription had been introduced after the Second World War partly as a reaction against Britain’s military unpreparedness during the nineteen-thirties. Both the Conservative and Labour parties supported it, and it was popular among the majority of older civilians and ex-servicemen. By the end of 1955, when I joined up, two years’ military service (followed by three-and-a-half years in the reserves) seemed a natural part of growing up though, since women were exempt, it prolonged the unnatural segregation of the sexes.

‘Some of you,’ Captain Carlton-Smith announced to our group of raw recruits, ‘will be lucky enough to see active service!’ There was a titter of disbelief and general air of incredulity. Few young men objected to military service on conscientious grounds because few of them thought they would actually be called on to fight. Ten years after the end of the war, we were still in a state of stunned reaction. Over the eighteen years of its existence, though 395 national servicemen were to be killed in action, parents did not regard National Service as dangerous until the Suez Campaign of 1956. It was generally spoken of, rather vaguely but quite sincerely, as a training for life – something that developed the character, allowed many young chaps to see a bit of the world, made them physically fit, and gave them an opportunity of finding out where their talents lay. It conferred none of these benefits on me.

I joined the Greenjackets because my Uncle Kenneth had been in the Greenjackets. That was how the army worked in those days, at least among its officers. The Greenjackets were barely tolerated by the battalions of Guards, but looked down their noses at the line regiments which in turn were contemptuous of the Royal Pioneers and the Education Corps, which hated the whole lot of us. And the regular soldiers despised the national servicemen who thought the regulars slightly mad. Such was our comradeship. It was, I now see, very much like Britain’s education system and operated as a means of keeping separate the various classes and categories in the country. I applied for a Russian course in Cornwall as an alternative to serving in the army, but after the mid-nineteen-fifties this was discontinued. So when I was summoned to Winchester for my basic training, I went like a lamb.

But the Greenjackets at Winchester were not expecting me. There had been a mistake and I was that mistake. The adjutant studied my papers critically and asked me why I had not arrived with the regular intake. I did not know. He was not best pleased, and being uncertain what to do with me, eventually ordered me to ‘clear off back home’ for a fortnight.