Time of Hope (13 page)

Giddy with drink, with the argument and comradeship, I walked with him through the town. We had not finished talking for the night. We ate some sandwiches in a frowsty café by the station, and then strolled, still arguing, down the streets near our offices, deserted now until next morning, the streets that had once been the centre of the old market town – Horsefair Street, Millstone Lane, Pocklington’s Walk. George’s voice rang thunderously in the deserted streets, echoed between the offices and the dark warehouses. At the corner of Pocklington’s Walk there shone the lighted windows of a club. We stood beneath them, on the dark and empty pavement. George’s hat was tilted back, and I saw his face, which had been open and happy in the heat of argument all night long, turn rebellious, angry, and defiant. The curtains were not drawn, and we watched a few elderly men, prosperously dressed, sitting with glasses at their side in the comfortable room. It was a scene of somnolent and well-to-do repose.

‘The sunkets!’ cried George fiercely. ‘The sunkets!’ He added: ‘What right do they think they’ve got to sit there as though they owned the world?’

In the next days I thought over that first meeting. From the beginning, I believed that I could enlist George’s help. His fellow feeling was so strong, one could not doubt it, and he knew much more than I. Yet I found it painfully hard to explain my position outright and put the question in his hands. Not from scruple, but from pride. I was seeing George regularly now. He took me as an equal: I was more direct than he, I could meet him on something like equal terms; it was wounding to upset the companionship in its first days and confess that I was lost.

While George, for all his good will, made it more awkward because of his own heavy-footed delicacy. He was not the man to take a hint or breathe in a situation through his pores. He needed an explicit statement. But he was too deliberately delicate to ask. It was not for a fortnight that he discovered exactly what I did for a living. Even then, his approach was elaborate and oblique, and he seemed to disbelieve my answers.

It happened, George’s first attempt to help me, on a Saturday afternoon, on our way to a league football match. George had a hearty taste for the mass pastimes, chiefly because he enjoyed them, and a little out of defiance. We were jostling among the crowd, the cloth-capped crowd that hustled down the back streets towards the ground; and George, looking straight in front of him, asked a labyrinthine question.

‘I take it that when you’ve got to the top in the education office – which I assume will be in about ten years’ time – you won’t find it necessary to make the schools in this town change over to the more gentlemanly sport of rugger?’

I was already accustomed to George’s outbursts of anti-snobbery, of social hatred. I grinned, and assured him that he could sleep easy; but I knew that I was evading the real question.

‘By the way,’ George persisted, ‘I take it that my assumption is correct?’

‘What assumption, George?’

‘You will be properly recognized at the education office in ten years’ time?’

I made myself speak plainly.

‘In ten years’ time,’ I said, ‘if I stay there – I might have gone up a step or two. As a clerk.’

‘I’m not prepared to accept that,’ said George. ‘You’re underestimating yourself.’

We came to the ground. As we passed through the turnstiles, I asked: ‘Do you realize what my job is?’

‘I’ve got a general impression,’ said George uncomfortably, ‘but I’m not entirely clear.’

We clambered up the terrace, and there I began to tell him. But George was not inclined to believe it. He proceeded to speak as though my job were considerably grander and had more future than I had ever, in all my wishes, dared to imagine.

‘It may be difficult now,’ said George, ‘but it’s obvious that you’re marked down for promotion. It’s perfectly clear that they must have some machinery for pulling people like you to the top. Otherwise, I don’t see how local government is going to function.’

That was a typical piece of George’s optimism. I was tempted to leave him with it. Like my mother, I had to struggle to admit the humble truth – even though I managed to keep a hold on it, sometimes a precarious one. It was bitter. Yet, again like my mother, I felt that I must swallow the bitterness in order not to miss a chance – to impress on George that I was nothing but a clerk.

‘I’m a very junior clerk, George. I’m getting twenty-five shillings a week. I shall be ticking off names for the next five years. Just as I’m doing now.’

George was both angry and abashed. He swore, and the violence of his curse made some youths in white mufflers turn and gape at him. He hesitated to ask me more, and then did so. Awkwardly he tried to pretend that things were not as bad as I painted them. Then he swore again, and he was near one of his storms of rage.

He said brusquely: ‘Something will have to be done about it.’

He was brusque with embarrassment. I too was speaking harshly.

‘That’s easy to say,’ I replied.

‘I shall have to take a hand myself,’ said George, still in a rough and offhand tone.

Now I had only to ask for help. I wanted it acutely; I had been playing for it; now it was mine for the asking, I was too proud to move. I turned as awkward as George.

‘I expect I shall be able to manage,’ I said.

George was abashed again. He stared fixedly at the empty field, where the turf gleamed brilliantly under the sullen sky.

‘It’s time these teams came out,’ he said.

George was embarrassed at having his interest repulsed. For days and weeks he made no reference to my career or even to my daily life. He did not see so much of me alone. Cross with myself, incensed at my own involuntary stiffness, I tried half-heartedly to open the conversation again. But George went by rule, not by shades of feeling. He had made a mistake which caused him to feel inept. More than most men, he was paralysed when he felt inept. So he studied his mistake, so as to teach himself not to repeat it.

Without any embarrassment at all, however, he plunged me into the centre of the ‘group’. That was our name, then and always, for the young men and women who gathered round George and whose leader he became. Theirs was the laughter I had envied, walking on the other side of the road, before George took me up. In the future, although we had no foresight of it then, he was to devote to them a greater and a greater share of his vigour; until in the end he lived altogether in them and for them. Until in the end, through living in them and for them, he destroyed his own blazing promise – so that he, who had led us all, came to look down into the gulf of ruin.

But George’s is a story by itself. When I first knew him, the crisis of his life was years ahead, and he was assembling the ‘group’ round him, heartening and melting everyone within it, so brimful of hope for each one of us that no one could stay cold. All the group were students at the School, and, though the number increased later, in my time it was never larger than ten. Most of them were girls – some from the prosperous middle class, who went to the School to pass their time before they found a husband, and saw in George an escape from the restrictions of their homes. Most of the group, however, were poor and aspiring – young women working in the town, secretaries and clerks or elementary schoolteachers like my friend Marion Gladwell. They went to the School to better themselves professionally, or because they were hungry for culture, or because they might there find a man. They were always the backbone of George’s group, together with one or two eager and ambitious young men, such as I was then.

That was the material George had to work on. We sat hour after hour at night or on Sunday afternoons in dingy cafés up and down the town, the cafés of cinemas or, late at night, the lorry drivers’ ‘caff’ beside the railway station. In those first years, George did not find it easy to collect the group together, but soon we developed the practice of all going to spend weekends in a farmhouse ten miles away, where we could cook our own food, pay a shilling a night for a bed, and talk until daybreak.

Under the pink-shaded lights at the picture-house café, round the oil lamp on the table at the farm, we sat while George made prophecies of our future, shouted us down for false arguments, set us on fire with hope. He gave us credit for having all his own qualities and more. I knew he was overestimating the others, and sometimes, even with the conceit of eighteen, I did not recognize myself in his descriptions, and wished uncomfortably that they were nearer to the truth. He endowed me with all varieties of courage, revolutionary and altruistic zeal, aggressive force, leadership, unbreakable resolution, and power of will. He used to regret, with his naïve and surprising modesty, that he was not blessed with the same equipment. I was inflated, and acted for a time as though George’s picture of my character were accurate, but I had a suspicion lurking underneath – for I was already more suspicious of myself and other human beings than George would be at fifty – that I was quite unlike George’s noble picture, and that so also were all living men.

Yet George gave us such glowing hope just because he was utterly unsuspicious of men’s nature and the human condition. As a child I had been used to my mother’s roseate hopes of a transformation in her life, but by those she meant nothing more nor less than a fulfilment for herself – sometimes that she might find love, always that she might live like a lady. George’s hopes were as passionate as hers, and more violent, but they were different in kind. He believed, with absolute sincerity and with each beat of his heart, that men could become better; that the whole world could become better; that the restraints of the past, the shackles of guilt, could fall off and set us all free to live, happily in a free world; that we could create a society in which men could live in peace, in decent comfort, and cease to be power-craving, avaricious, censorious, and cruel. George believed, with absolute sincerity and with each beat of his heart, that all this would happen before we were old.

It was the first time, for Jack Cotery and me and the rest, that we had been near a cosmic faith. But these were the middle twenties, and the whole spirit of the time was behind George Passant. It was a time when political hope, international hope, was charging the air we breathed. Not only George Passant was full of faith as we cheered the Labour gains in the town hall square on the election nights in twenty-two and twenty-three. And it was a time of other modes of hope. Freud, D H Lawrence, Rutherford – messages were in the air, and in our society we did not listen to the warnings. It was a great climacteric of hope, and George embodied it in his flesh and bone.

At another period he would have thrown himself into a religion. As it was, he made a creed out of every free idea that spurted up in those last days of radical and rootless freedom. He believed that it was better to be alive in 1923 than at any other moment in the world’s history. He believed – with great simplicity, despite his wild and complex nature – in the perfectibility of man.

That faith of his did not really fit me at all – though for a time it coloured many of my thoughts. In due course I parted from George on almost all of the profound human questions. For all his massive intelligence, his vision of life was so different from mine that we could not for long speak the same mental language. And yet, despite that foreignness, despite much that was to happen, I was grateful always that, for those years in my youth, I came under his influence. Our lives were to take us divergent ways. As I have said, we parted on all the profound human questions – except one. Though I could not for long think happily as he did of the human condition, I also could not forget the strength of his fellow feeling. I could not forget how robustly he stood by the side of his human brothers against the dark and cold. Human beings were brothers to him – not only brothers to love, but brothers to hate with violence. When he hated them, they were still men, men of flesh and bone – and he was one among them, in their sweat and bewilderment and folly. He hoped for so much from them – but if he had hoped for nothing, he would still have felt them as his brothers and struggled as robustly by their side. He took his place among them. By choice he would not move a step away from the odour of man.

There I never wanted to part from him. His fellow feeling had strengthened mine. There he was my master, and throughout my life I wished he would stay so until the end.

Quite soon after George took me into the group, our difference began to show. Yet I too was full of hope. I might attack George’s Utopian visions, but then at times George provoked all my destructive edge. There were other times I remembered afterwards, in which I was as unshielded as my mother used to be, in which I had learned nothing of disappointment.

I remembered the first time that Marion Gladwell asked me to call on her at school. She had been promising to lend me a book, but whenever we met in the group she had forgotten it; I could have it, she said, if I went round to her school in the lunch hour.

The school was in Albion Street, near to the middle of the town, a diminutive red-brick barracks drawing in the children from the rows of red-brick houses in the mean streets near. Marion had only taught there a year, since she came out of her training college. She was twenty-one, and engrossed in her work. She often talked to us about the children, laughed at herself for being ‘earnest’, and then told us some more.

When I arrived in her classroom that afternoon she was just opening a window. The room was dark and small, and there was a faint, vestigial, milky smell of small children. Marion said, in her energetic, overemphatic, nervous fashion, that she must let some oxygen in before the next lesson. She moved rapidly to the next window, opened it, returned to the blackboard, shook the duster so that a cloud of chalk hung in the air.

‘Sit down, Lewis,’ she said. ‘I want to talk to you.’

She stood by the blackboard, twisting the duster. At the group she was overemphatic, overdecisive, but no one minded it much from her, since she was so clearly nervous and anxious to be liked and praised. She was tallish and strong, very quick and active physically, but a little clumsy, and either her figure was shapeless or she dressed so sloppily that one could not see she had a waist. But she had an open, oval, comely face, and her eyes were striking. They were not large, but bright and continually interested. Despite her earnestness, they were humorous and gay.