Time of Hope (8 page)

I thanked him, and took the job. There seemed nothing else to do.

When I told my mother her face on the instant was open with disappointment.

‘Oh,’ she said. Then she added, trying to make her voice come full and unconcerned: ‘Well, dear, it’s better than nothing.’

‘Oh yes,’ I said.

‘It’s better than nothing,’ said my mother. She was recovering herself. It was only another of her many disappointments. They had taught her to be stoical. And she still kept, which was part of her stoicism, her unquenched appetite for the future; for an appetite for the future was, with her, another name for hope.

She inquired about the job, the work, where it would lead. She liked the phrase ‘local government’; she would use that to the doctor and the vicar, for it took the edge off the comedown, it made my doings seem much grander.

‘How do you feel about it, dear?’ she asked, after she had been imagining how I could turn it all to profit.

‘It’s better than nothing.’ With a sarcastic flick, I returned her phrase.

‘You know I only want the best for you,’ she said.

‘Of course I know.’

‘We can’t have everything. I haven’t had everything I should like, have I? You’ll manage as well as you can, won’t you?’

‘Of course.’

She looked at me with trouble in her eyes, with guilt and with reproach.

‘There’s still time if you can see anything else to do, dear. Please to tell me. Please – if there’s any mortal person I can talk to for you–’

‘It’s all right, Mother,’ I said, and let it stop at that.

My feelings were mixed. I was, in part, relieved and glad, absurd though it seemed only a few months later; but I was glad to be earning a living, and to know that next week I should have a little money in my pocket. I was nearly sixteen, it was irksome to be so often without a shilling, and that trivial relief lightened me more than I could believe.

I disliked the sound of the job – I felt it was nothing like good enough. Yet I was interested, just as I was in any new prospect or change. I had spasms of rancour that I had been so helpless. If I had known more, if I had moved among different people, I could have looked after myself and this would never have happened. But that rancour was not going to cripple me. I was not a good son to my mother, but I was very much her son: I had the same surgent hope. Other disasters might wound me beyond repair, but not anything like this, not anything outside myself that I could learn to master, I knew, with the certainty that comes when one is in touch with a deep part of one’s nature, that this setback was not going to matter much. My hope was like my mother’s, but more stubborn and untiring. I believed I could find a way out.

Aunt Milly was violently opposed to my ‘white-collar job’. ‘That’s all it is,’ said Aunt Milly in her loudest voice to my mother. ‘He’s just going off to be a wretched little clerk in a white-collar job. I never did believe all that people told me about your son, but he seems to have more brains than some of them. Now he’s content to go off to the first white-collar job he sees. Don’t complain to me when he finds himself in the same office when he’s forty. No wonder they say that the present generation hasn’t got a scrap of enterprise.’

My mother recounted the scene, and her own dignified retort, with the humorous haughty expression that she wore when she had been most upset. For, particularly as the months went on, and I had been catching the eight-forty tram for a year, for a year and a half, she wondered painfully if we had made a mistake. She was a little better off, since I paid her ten shillings a week for my keep – but she could not see any sign of the dramatic transformation scene she had always longed for, always in her heart expected, as I came to manhood. She would have been content with the slightest tangible sign for her indomitable spirit to fasten on. If, for example, I had been working for a university scholarship, she would have foreseen fantastic, visible, miraculous success at the university, herself joining me there, all her expectations realized at a stroke. She did not mind how many years ahead the transformation scene took place, so long as there was just one real sign for her imagination to refresh itself upon. As she saw me go to the office, day following day, the months lengthening into a year, she could not find that one real sign.

She had to come to earth now and again, if her excursions into the future were to keep her going. In her fashion, she was both shrewd and realistic, though with a minimum of encouragement she could draw wonderful pictures of how her life might yet be changed. She was too shrewd and realistic to derive any encouragement from my days at the office. She took to filling in more of her competition coupons. Her health became worse, and one heart attack made her spend a whole spring as an invalid, lying all day on a sofa. She stood it all, hope deferred, illness, pride once more wounded, with the fierce steady endurance that did not seem in any way affected by her own quivering nerves.

I used to work through the long, tedious hours in a room which overlooked the tramlines. The trams ran past the office windows in Bowling Green Street; our room, three storeys up, looked down on the tram tops and the solicitors’ and insurance offices on the other side of the street. I shared the room with six other clerks and one more senior man, Mr Vesey, who was called a departmental head and paid two hundred and fifty pounds a year. The work was one long monotony for me, interspersed by Mr Vesey’s slowly growing enmity. He was in charge of the branch, which was part of the secondary school department; I made lists of the children from elementary schools who won ‘free places’, and passed the names on to the accountant’s room. I also made lists of pupils at each secondary school who left before taking the General Schools or Senior Oxford examinations. I compiled a good deal of miscellaneous statistical information of that kind, which Mr Vesey signed and sent up to the director. Our room did little but accumulate such facts, pass records of names to other departments, and occasionally draw up a chart. Very few decisions were ever taken there. The most onerous decision with which Mr Vesey was faced was whether to allow a child to leave school before the age of fifteen without paying a penalty of five pounds. He was allowed the responsibility of omitting the penalty; if he wished it imposed, the case had to go before the director.

That suited Mr Vesey very well. He had no desire to take decisions, but an insatiable passion for attracting the notice of his superiors. When I first went into the office, I rather liked the look of him. He was a spruce, small man of about forty, who must have spent a large fraction of his income on clothes. His shirts were always spotless, he had a great variety of ties, all quiet and carefully selected. His eyes, which were full and exophthalmic, were magnified still further because of the convex lenses that he wore, so that one’s first impression, after seeing his trim suit, was of enormous and somewhat baffled and sorrowful eyes. He told me my duties in a manner that was friendly, if a little fussed, and I was young enough, and enough of a stranger, to be grateful for any kindness and not overcritical of its origin.

It took me some time to realize that Mr Vesey spent fifty-nine minutes in the hour tormenting himself about his prospects of promotion. He was a departmental officer grade one, salary scale two hundred and twenty-five pounds to three hundred and fifteen pounds; his entire activity was spent in mounting to the next grade. As I came to know him, I heard of nothing else. A contemporary of his in another office got promoted. ‘Why don’t they do something about me?’ sounded Mr Vesey’s
cri de coeur
. His technique for achieving his aim was, in principle, very simple. It consisted of keeping in the public eye. If ever he could invent an excuse for calling on the director, he did so. So that every child who left school before the age of fifteen secured a visit to the director’s room; a trim, spectacled figure, holding a file, knocked briskly on the door, the director was entangled in an earnest consultation, found himself faced with enormous exophthalmic eyes. The director soon became maddened, and sent down minutes about types of case which it was unnecessary for him to see. Mr Vesey went to see him to discuss each minute.

When any senior person came into our room to inspect the work, a trim spectacled figure stood beside him, on the alert, agog and on tenterhooks to seize the chance. The visitor asked one of the clerks a question. Mr Vesey leapt in to answer it. The visitor asked me to describe some of the statistics. Mr Vesey was quicker than ever off the mark.

All lists, charts, notes of any kind going out from our room had to be initialled NCWV. For a time he experimented with hyphenating the W and V, possibly in the hope that it would make the initials impossible to miss. There were rumours that his wife wanted to be called Mrs Wilson-Vesey. However, the assistant director asked him brusquely what the hyphen was put in for. All superiors were important to Mr Vesey, though some were more important than others. The hyphen disappeared overnight.

His worst moments were when, as occasionally happened, the assistant director – instead of asking for information through Mr Vesey as head of the branch – demanded a clerk by name. Mr Vesey’s enmity towards me first showed itself after a few such calls. The assistant director found I knew my lists inside out (which was child’s play to anyone with a good memory), took a fancy to me, said maddeningly once that if I were still at school the department would make a grant to help me go to a university. Meanwhile, Mr Vesey was raising cries to heaven: how could he organize his branch if people did not go through the proper channels? How could he secure discipline and smooth working if people went over his head? Junior clerks did not understand the whole scope of his responsibilities – they might give a wrong impression and that meant his promotion would never come. There was such a thing, said Mr Vesey in a tone full of meaning, as junior clerks trying to draw attention to themselves.

So it went on, a blend of monotony and Mr Vesey. So it went on, from nine to one, from two to five-thirty, from my sixteenth birthday to my seventeenth and beyond. Often, during those tedious days, I dreamed the ambitious dreams of very young men. Walking past the lighted shops in the lunch hour of a winter’s day, I dreamed of fame – any kind of fame that would put my name in men’s mouths, in the newspapers, make people recognize me in the streets. Sometimes I was a great politician, eloquent, powerful, venerated. Sometimes I was a writer as well known as Shaw. Sometimes I was extraordinarily rich. Always I had the power to make my own terms, to move through the world as one who owned it, to be waited on and give largesse.

The harsh streets were lit by my fancies, and I was drunk with them – and yet they were altogether vague. There was a good deal of ambition, I knew later, innate within me; and I had listened since I was a child to my mother’s prompting. But those dreams of mine had not much in common with the ambition that drives a man, that in time drove me, to action. These were just the lazy and grandiose dreams of youth. They were far more like the times when, lying awake on windy autumn nights or sitting under the apple tree in the garden after my parents had gone to bed, I first luxuriously longed, through a veil of innocence, for women’s love.

Even at sixteen, however, I felt sometimes guilty, because I was only dreaming. The pictures in my mind were so heady, so magnificent – they made all practical steps that I could take seem puny. Puny they seemed, as I took the opportunity one day to talk to my acquaintance, the assistant director. He had sent for me again, inflaming Mr Vesey to transports of injured dignity. Darby was a decent pale man with a furrowed forehead, sitting in his small, plain office. He gave me prosaic but sensible advice. It might be worth while thinking of the possibility of an external London degree. It might be worth while picking up some law, which would be useful if I stayed in the office. I ought to consult the people at the College of Art and Technology.

I did so, and enrolled in the law class at the college – which everyone called ‘the School’, and which was at that time the only place of higher education in the town – in the summer of 1922, when I was not yet seventeen. The School was the lineal descendant of the mechanics’ institution, where my grandfather had learned his mathematics; it was housed in a red-brick building, a building of remarkable Victorian baroque. There was a principal and a small permanent staff, but most of the lecturers had other jobs in the town, were secondary schoolmasters and the like, and gave their school lectures in the evening. The first law class I attended was given by a solicitor from the town clerk’s department. It was a course on a dull subject, dully taught. It lasted through the autumn: I used to walk down the Newarke on Tuesday and Friday evenings after the office, wondering whether I was not wasting my time.

I was still wondering, towards the end of the year, whether to give up the law courses, when I happened to see a notice in the School, announcing a new course in the spring term – ‘Fundamentals of Law, 1. Criminal, by G Passant’. I thought I would give him a trial. Before I had listened for ten minutes to the first lecture, I knew this was something of a different class, in sheer force, in intellectual competence and power, from anything I had ever heard.

George Passant’s voice was loud, strained, irascible, and passionate. He gave the entire lecture at a breakneck speed, as though he were irritated with the stupidity of his class and wanted to get it over. His voice and manner, I thought, were in curious contrast to his face, which wore an amiable, an almost diffident smile. His head was large and powerful, set on thick, heavy shoulders; and under the amiable smile, the full amiable flesh, the bones of his forehead, cheekbones and chin were made on the same big scale. He was not much over middle height, but he was obviously built to put on weight. His hair was fair: he was a full blond, with light blue eyes, which had a knack of looking past the class, past the far wall, focusing on infinity.