Going Up (8 page)

We arrived in Plymouth by the early train and were taken in hand by the local Tory apparat. A marquee big enough for a society wedding had been rigged to receive the press, who were present in large, soon bibulous, numbers. The word must have passed in Fleet Street that the hospitality would be worth the journey. Long, white-sheeted trestle tables were heaped with sandwiches and pies. More important for old, outstretched hands, cases of beer and spirits were stacked behind the buffet.

In mid-afternoon we heard that Churchill’s train was going to be a little late; and then that it was going to be later than that; and then very late indeed. Glasses were refilled, and refilled again. The first, and likeliest,
version of the story was that the hold-up was due to a farmer having stalled his tractor on a level crossing. In trying to haul it free, some yokels had managed to tip the silly thing on its side. It seemed hardly the kind of story to garnish the front page, even of the Scottish edition. After glasses had again been freshened, someone suggested that there might be a sinister side to the accident. What if it had been part of a left-wing scheme to sabotage Winston’s campaign to get his son elected? Michael Foot’s chums on the left-wing Bevanite
Tribune
were the fancied suspects, but it would make a better story if it had something to do with the Communists: RED PLOT TO DERAIL WINNIE was the right line to spruce up the northern edition.

The great man did eventually arrive, but not before the stacks of beer, gin and brandy had been thoroughly broached. It was too late for his speech to be any use even for the London edition. I doubt whether Brocky and I stayed to hear it. It had no effect on the result: Randolph was defeated by Michael Foot, who retained the seat until he decamped to Ebbw Vale in order to take on the mantle of Aneurin Bevan, of whom he wrote a two-volume hagiography.

When the results of the general election were announced, Attlee’s majority was seen to have shrivelled but not vanished. Since honour still had some place in politics, it was possible that the Prime Minister would feel sufficiently rebuffed to be obliged to resign. During the interregnum, Brocky and I were able to walk up to 10 Downing Street, without being quizzed or frisked.

Attlee was standing, in his signature funereal rig, on the front doorstep, a polite huddle of attendant journalists and a few cameramen below him. His emaciated voice announced that he had yet to consult his colleagues and assess the results in full. The British reporters were inclined to respect the Prime Minister’s temporising. Then an American voice was heard to call out, ‘Make up your mind, Mr Attlee, you going or staying?’ Attlee was constrained to be decisive. ‘We shall carry on,’ he said, in a modest voice
that was never going to inspire anyone to fight on the beaches. The outspoken impatience of his American inquisitor announced that the leading Western power was no longer Great Britain. It was rare to hear someone who was not in fee to the British habit of deference.

My colleagues had few illusions about the merits or morals of our betters, but they were never openly disrespectful; nor, in my hearing, foul-mouthed. Effing and blinding was not yet the journalistic habit. Perhaps John Gordon’s Calvinist editorship served to moderate his underlings’ vocabulary. The only modest ‘dirty’ joke I remember hearing in the newsroom came in the form of the innocent question ‘Where is the smallest airfield in the world?’ Ever the eager candidate, I was quick with the innocent answer: ‘Athens’. ‘No,’ said Bernard Harris, ‘under a Scotman’s kilt: just room for two hangers and a night-fighter.’ Somewhat akin to this was the phrase, said to be the sub-editors’ regimental motto: ‘Snip, snip and Bob’s your auntie!’

Expressmen were content to have bylines, discreetly imaginative, untaxed expenses and a word of praise from someone higher up the chain of command. The penultimate accolade was a congratulatory word from The Country; the ultimate was to be summoned to the Beaver’s presence. The clearest intimation of favour on such an occasion was for the newsman to be asked what kind of a car he drove. It was prudent to name a modest motor, after which, one was licensed to hope, the Old Man would say, ‘Someone in your position, Mr X, ought to be driving a Wolseley.’ Mythology promised that one executive took modesty to a hopeful extreme by responding that he didn’t actually run a car at all. ‘Very wise,’ said the Beaver, ‘nasty, expensive things, automobiles, and they’re always going wrong. So … keep up the good work, Mr Y, keep up the good work.’

At the weekend, the skeletal staff of the
Sunday Express
was swollen by the influx of ‘Saturday men’: jobbing journalists who worked for the daily press during the week and came in to fatten our news and sports pages. I became friendly with a
Daily Telegraph
reporter called Ray Foxall. He had
a neat brown moustache and swift shorthand. Since he lived in Putney, we took the Tube home together after the paper had been put to bed. It was a sumptuous privilege to sit with a copy of the next day’s paper and open it wide before the other passengers’ civilian eyes.

One evening when I went to dine with Guy and Celia Ramsey in Well Road, I found them in anxious mood. The new editor of the
Daily Mail
, pressed to economise by Vere Harmsworth, had decided to dispense with Guy’s services. The previous one, Frank Owen, had been a good journalist but a laggard leader: it was said of him, ‘The editor’s indecision is final.’ Guy had been confident that something else would come along soon, but it did not. The following Saturday night, as Ray Foxall and I changed trains at Earl’s Court, he told me that the
Daily Telegraph
was taking on new staff. The following morning, before I went to play tennis with Jack and Margaret Piesse and Max Stewart, I called Guy and repeated what Ray had told me. The Ramseys always stayed in bed till noon on Sunday, reading Lord Astor’s
Observer
and Lord Kemsley’s
Sunday Times
, but my interruption was not unwelcome. A week later, the
Telegraph
hired Guy as a feature writer and deputy drama critic. He was also to fill in as deputy chief reviewer on the literary pages. In the latter capacity, he must have been one of the last people ever to use the word ‘limn’ in the popular press. I had to go and look it up. Later, the
Telegraph
bridge correspondent died and Guy was appointed in his stead. Thanks to Ray Foxall, I had been able to do Guy a good turn, at last.

B
EETLE AND I watched the 1950 election results as they were flashed on big screens in Trafalgar Square. I had considered myself a socialist ever since 1945, though my vision of socialism involved scarcely more than the abolition of privilege and racial discrimination. As a historian, Beetle had been an admirer of Peel and Palmerston, but she had no urgent contemporary opinions. Her beautiful four-years-older sister Joan was married to a Communist and appeared to go along with his convictions. Baron Moss had grown up in the East End. His father owned a cinema in the Mile End Road. He had witnessed Mosley’s marches and heard the chant of ‘We’ve gotta get rid of the Yids’. A neighbour’s twelve-year-old daughter had been thrown through a plate glass window by the Fascists. Such episodes, and the revelation that the British Union of Fascists was subsidised by Mussolini, have done little to impede the myth, propounded left and right, by Michael Foot and Enoch Powell, that Oswald Mosley was the ‘lost leader’ who might have restored Britain’s greatness.

Having been a Bevin Boy during the war, Baron became a layout man on the staff of the
Daily Worker
. He spent long hours in the office and was paid £6 a week. When we visited him and Joan in their narrow, semi-detached
house in Wembley, I was impressed, if never convinced or converted, by his faith in the coming of the classless society exemplified by Stalin’s Soviet Union. Experience underground in the Nottinghamshire coal-field lent practical force to Baron’s beliefs. My ideas came only from books.

In the early 1940s,
Guilty Men
had convinced me that the Tories were the vessels of reaction and anti-Semitism. More recently, I had read
The God That Failed
, in which Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender and others announced their disillusionment with the party. George Orwell’s
Homage
to Catalonia
, primed by his naïve decision to join the Trotskyite POUM, had the merit of recounting specific personal disgust with the Communist Party’s murderous machinations in the Spanish Civil War. Although he claimed merely to have signed up with the first available outfit, Orwell seems to have had some instinct never to line up with the big battalions. Nevertheless, he assumed it to be right to be on the left, in whatever undefined niche.

Baron relied on Karl Marx’s long-distance clock, and Joe Stalin’s rewinding of it, to vindicate the party’s wriggling line. If Baron made me feel slightly ashamed to be working for the capitalist press, it was a proud moment when I was put on salary (‘But not a word to the NUJ, Fred’). My weekly small brown envelope contained £4.10s, fattened by the unround number of my expenses. The Beaver’s pennies enabled me to take Beetle to the cinema or to the gallery in the theatre. Terence Rattigan’s
Adventure Story
had a memorable
coup de théâtre
when Basil Sydney, as Alexander the Great’s friend ‘Black Cleitus’, came in from backstage, staggered forward almost to the footlights, and then fell on his face to reveal the seven-foot lance in his back, planted there by the drunken master who had saved his life at the Battle of the Granicus.

We also saw Laurence Olivier give a mannered performance in Christopher Fry’s
Venus Observed
; Paul Scofield playing twins (one of them Frédéric) in
Ring Round the Moon
, with the beautiful young Claire Bloom; Ralph Richardson as
Cyrano de Bergerac
(autumn leaves fell on the New
Theatre stage). I imagined writing plays of similarly elaborate elegance as we had dinner after the show in old, chaste Soho. Goulash at the Hungarian Czardas cost three and sixpence. I dreaded the wine waiter. We drank water.

We first made nervous love, in my parents’ absence on holiday, on my narrow bed in the Balliol House back room, which looked out on the hazy view that had won me third prize in the Charterhouse painting competition. Unlike Hilary Phillips, Beetle seemed unfazed by the prospect of my going up to Cambridge. Since I could not imagine better, I assumed we were together for good. I never thought about marriage; nor, so it seemed, did she. Having grown up in a large Jewish family, she had none of my sense of woeful isolation. She was both clever and athletic: she had been in the gym team and almost beat me when we raced for a bus. As a St Paul’s first XI bowler, she once took five wickets for eight runs.

On bank holiday Monday, we sat on a slatted bench in the Large Mound stand at Lord’s to watch Middlesex play Sussex. Hoping, in vain, for Compton and Edrich to repeat their record exploits of the 1947 season, we rented fat, rectangular-buttoned plastic cushions for threepence. I never saw Denis make more than thirteen runs; nor did I suspect that he did not wear a cap because he was under contract to Brylcreem.

We did see Bill Edrich bowl his slinging zingers fast enough, despite his bad shoulder, to oblige Denis’s wicket-keeping big brother Leslie to stand well back, which he did not always do to the serviceable Laurie Gray. I was luckier and happier than I had ever imagined possible. Then came a small, but growing, summer cloud: in June, North Korea invaded the South. If there was full-scale war with the Communists, whose universal solidarity I never doubted, I was, I imagined, certain to be called up. I might never get to Cambridge. Ambition makes more cowards than conscience.

However British I was now pleased to be, America had a tenacious hold, especially the smart wit I associated with the
New Yorker
and the Algonquin Round Table. Beetle endured my descriptions of Thurber’s cartoons and
the relish with which I recounted the tag in
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
‘What a dumb moll I picked!’ I was glad to discover that she felt the lure of America: she had considered going to the States to work. Never had I met anyone who embraced life so gladly and so fearlessly. She seemed even to enjoy being a solicitor’s secretary. We used to meet in the Strand for the one and tenpenny buffet lunch at Quality Inn. In the evening, I waited for her under the clock at Swan & Edgar’s in Piccadilly. As she came up to me, she was always smiling, head slightly on one side. Since she was a Paulina (as well as good to look at and a good dancer), she and my father were quite easy with each other. My mother, not yet forty, was no more than polite. Like Judith, the
prima donna
in
Hay Fever
, Irene was never wholly pleased if anyone else’s happiness distracted the attention from her.

Beetle’s mother was neither jealous nor critical. Rachel, whom her three daughters called Ray or Rooky, was the oldest of twelve siblings who had grown up in Brick Lane and whose surrogate mother she had been. Her parents had eloped from Odessa before the Great War. Her grandfather was said to have cursed the runaways and prayed that their progeny would die. Their first two children did indeed die, but their subsequent children lived, and many prospered. They spilled out of the East End into shops and businesses in less cramped parts of London. Happy to be English, they felt no call to be assimilated to the point of being indistinguishable. Most kept kosher; some married out, others did not. They were what they were.

Beetle’s father, Hyman Glatt, had come from Poland when he was fourteen, after working from the age of ten in a match factory. He was dark-eyed and handsome and, although shy, charming enough to attract a regular female clientele to his ladies’ clothing shop in Marylebone High Street. Ray subscribed to
Vogue
and kept herself, unpretentiously, if never inexpensively, in fashion. She was too busy and too sociable to worry about what Beetle and I might be doing when left alone on Saturday afternoons in 84 Mount Pleasant Road. After we had made enough love for a while, we
played cricket in the narrow garden and then there was Fuller’s walnut cake for tea. We often went to the movies at the cavernous Kilburn State Cinema. It sported a luminous cinema organ that rose stridently from the pit during the interval. After the movie, I took some alien bus to Hyde Park Corner and changed to the familiar 74, which took me to the top of Putney Hill. On one such trip, I left my yellow Everyman Nietzsche on the seat beside me, Zarathustra’s funambulist halfway across the void.

Fleet Street gave me exhilaratingly disillusioned access to what I took to be the real world; but I left the
Sunday Express
, after my nineteenth birthday in August of 1950, with small ambition to return to journalism. I resumed my study of the Classics, in accordance with Mr Howland’s explicit suggestions about darning the holes in my reading. The Korean War made no call on my services and little on my attention. The condition of ‘only childishness’ makes a man both old before his time and forever, in his own mind, too young for the demands of maturity.

In early October, I packed my old school trunk and sent it PLA (Passenger Luggage in Advance) to St John’s College, Cambridge. My father’s only advice was that I should not push myself forward; better to wait for others to ‘beat a path to my door’. A Jew was wise to leave it to ‘the Christians’ to bid him join their company. Cedric gave me £6 pocket money for the term and warned me not to run up bills. His income at Shell was just too great to warrant any financial supplement from the ‘state scholarship’ for which I had qualified,
en passant
, by my Cambridge success. He undertook to pay my buttery bill, but my allowance had to cover any books I wanted to buy. Doubtless he assumed that I should have access to excellent libraries, but perhaps it said something about the priorities of 1920s Oxford that he was more willing to furnish my larder than my mind.

When I caught the train from King’s Cross in early October, I sported an army surplus duffel coat and dark-green corduroy trousers. I wore my long blue and pink striped Charterhouse scarf, not for any nostalgic reason
but because I had been told that freshmen were not entitled to wear college scarves. Thanks to Beetle, I was some kind of a man, but I was also a new boy, at once apprehensive and confident that I merited the place that I had been denied at Winchester. My secret regret was that, unlike Oxford, Cambridge did not require scholars to wear longer gowns than commoners. I was a socialist eager for distinction.

My sense of election led me to ask a fair-haired young man who shared my third-class compartment what college he was going to. When he replied ‘King’s’, in an American accent, I felt a surge of protective affinity. How long had he been in England? ‘Not too long.’ And what was his name? ‘George Plimpton.’ My mother had given me half a bottle of Scotch in case I needed to do some sophisticated entertaining. Taking him to be a stranger in a strange land, I invited Plimpton to come and visit me in St John’s, not too far away from King’s. I wished him luck, in the British style, as we walked along the long platform at Cambridge station. On my way to catch the bus, I saw him standing at ease in the taxi queue. He wore a pork-pie hat and a Burberry raincoat with tartan lining and carried a two-handled soft leather valise.

I had quit a London that still bore brave scars. Buildings sliced open in the Blitz had yet to be torn down or repaired. Empty lots (‘SECOND FRONT NOW’ still faintly visible on their low brick walls) were flagged with wild flowers. Cambridge was at once antique and pristine. Privileged pre-war England was still there. It warranted the assumption that the inalienable grace of scholarship lay in access to beautiful places and in the company of those who measured each other only by their intelligence.

My first smug pleasure was to buy a gown. Without my knowing, its shiny purchase betrayed the arriviste. A frayed, time-worn, slightly empurpled heirloom gown was the hallmark of those who had had to try less hard to get at least as far. I carried my new brown-paper parcel down Trinity Street to the red-brick gateway of St John’s. The head porter, in top hat, black
coat and striped trousers, directed me to E staircase in Third Court. The college was crowded enough for many freshmen to have to share rooms or to be despatched to live in ‘licensed digs’. Scholars, however, were allotted a set of their own.

RAPHAEL, F. M. was inscribed in white letters on a black panel at the entrance to my staircase. I climbed six flights of steep, narrow wooden stairs (past the first-floor set belonging to DR DANIEL) and up to the gabled garret that doubled for heaven. There was a sitting room, with a metered gas fire, a chapped, narrow sofa and a low-bottomed armchair. The slim desk in the window overlooked the green, uncreased waters of the Cam. When I leaned out and looked to the right, there was the Bridge of Sighs. From the mansard bedroom window, I could see across the Backs towards King’s. I put my portable typewriter and my notebook on the table and a few textbooks on the empty shelves and wondered what my neighbours, BECHER, R. A. and WILSON, D. M. might be like, and whether they were scholars.

I paraded, in my new black gown, to Chapel Court to pay the obligatory call on my tutor. A queue of freshmen dressed the stairs up to R. L. Howland’s door. Behind and below me stood a short, dark-haired, round-faced person who told me, in a singsong accent that I had never heard before, that his name was Sullivan. John Patrick was also a major scholar in Classics. He had taken the examination a year earlier than I, but had chosen to do his National Service (he emerged as a sergeant in the Education Corps) before coming up. The son of a docker, he had attended the Francis Xavier Jesuit school in Liverpool. Latin and Greek grammar had been beaten into him by sacerdotal teachers as dedicated as they were merciless in the application of the tawse.

Mr Howland was known to his colleagues as ‘Bede’. He had been effortlessly learned for as long as anyone could remember. He was also an Olympic athlete (he put the shot for Britain in Berlin in 1936) and a soccer blue. Although a noted Aristotelian, he was no intellectual. When
I was a scholarship candidate, my interview with him had been more about Shrewsbury versus Charterhouse football than about the subtle arts. He now welcomed me with a large smile, as if my award had been a credit to both of us. He suggested no particular lecturers whom I should favour, but he assigned me, for Latin composition, to a certain Professor Anderson, who had rooms in Second Court, and for Greek to Mr Crook, whose rooms could be found under the arch between Second Court and New Court. More housemaster than tutor, Howland expected me to get a First because that was what scholars were supposed to do; it required diligence, not originality. I was there to be a credit to the college and, he dared to advise me, have a good time. His genial style was at once unfeigned and a cover for the astute assessment of others. Although I knew nothing of it at the time, he was a trusted recruiter for the British intelligence services.