Time to Be in Earnest (8 page)

I woke at six with a feeling of vague unease, as if my mind were struggling free from the last clinging threads of a bad dream. It was another
very hot night and I had slept fitfully. Perhaps there had been a bad dream, but I had no conscious memory of it.

I found myself thinking of my first and disastrous job in the Income Tax office at Ely. The examination for entry to the Clerical Class of the Civil Service was taken at sixteen and I travelled up to London with a school friend to take the examination, staying at the YWCA in Bloomsbury. It was my first trip to London without an adult and I can remember the excitement and enchantment of the city. I suppose I must have been seventeen by the time all the bureaucratic procedures had been gone through and I was allocated to the Ely tax office. I remember, when I was successful in the examination, being sent a list of government departments to which I could be sent, and the wonder now is why I chose the Inland Revenue when the whole of the Civil Service was open to me. I could have gone to London (always my ambition) and would have been happy in any job which wasn’t entirely concerned with figures. The Inland Revenue was the worst possible choice. I can’t remember that any other possibilities were ever discussed with me by anyone. I had left school, so my usual mentors weren’t available and my father obviously wanted me to follow him into the same job. I can’t think why; he was never, I believe, really happy and would rather have been a teacher if he had ever had a chance of further education after the age of fifteen.

I can’t remember how long I stayed at Ely—no more than eighteen months, I think, before I resigned—but it seems in memory a time of misery. I began by finding a room in a boarding house where the cost, although reasonable, left me nothing over but my weekly fare home. There was one other new entrant, a boy with whom I had nothing in common. Even if we had liked each other, the friendship wouldn’t have been helped by the head of the office, who continually held him up to me as an example. The rest of the staff seemed to be old men, although they couldn’t have been much older than my father. The Cathedral was my one solace, but the little town seemed dreary and depressing. Finally I left the boarding house and started travelling from Cambridge to Ely each day. This necessitated a very early start, a long cycle ride to the station, the half-hour train journey and then a depressing trudge to the tax office.

Ely has changed now, and seems attractive, even lively, particularly the development on the waterfront. When Jane, Peter and the grandchildren were at Cambridge, we would motor over and have lunch at the Old Fire Engine House. I have been back to give a talk at the Arts Centre
and last year to give the first Ely Lecture in the Cathedral. Occasionally, too, the Liturgical Commission of the Church of England meets at Ely in the pleasant diocesan conference centre. On none of these visits have I ever been burdened by this morning’s weight of vague irritation and regret. I suppose I regret Ely because the decision to take that particular job was so stupid. And the fault was mine. Even at seventeen and with no one to talk over the possibilities, I should have known better. Those months of servitude were such a waste of youth, enthusiasm and idealism. But my time in the Ely tax office wasn’t entirely wasted. Nothing that happens to a novelist ever is.

By the time I had made my first pot of tea and fed my cat Polly-Hodge, the unease had faded. There is no point in regretting any part of the past. The past can’t now be altered, the future has yet to be lived, and consciously to experience every moment of the present is the only way to gain at least the illusion of immortality.

Has anyone discovered a really satisfactory way of reading comfortably in bed? For some of us this is virtually our only free time except when on holiday. Reading is so important, so necessary to the nourishment of mind and spirit that I feel that it should be as seriously ceremonial as a church service. Ideally we need a comfortable chair with back and arm support and good, well-directed light, a rest for the book if it is too heavy to hold comfortably, a small table with our favourite drink to hand, and silence and solitude. It is an ideal that few of us are able to obtain. I find in recent years that I read far less new fiction and more nonfiction, particularly letters, biography and autobiography, history and diaries. This is nothing to be proud of; I ought to tackle more new fiction—and the word “tackle” is appropriate—but there are still so many classics unread, so many old favourites to comfort and entertain, and indeed to find new pleasures in. I like to have one old favourite and one new by the bedside. At present the old favourite is
The Small House at Allington
and the new book—new to me only—is
Sowing
by Leonard Woolf, an autobiography of the years 1880–1904.

I came to Anthony Trollope comparatively late, certainly in my mid-thirties,
but he has provided me since then with enormous pleasure. But I wonder if he knew what a monster he had created in Lily Dale? Admittedly Crosbie is a cad, but I can’t help congratulating him on his escape. And I pity poor Mrs. Dale, destined to spend her old age with a resolutely single and masochistic Lily. Similarly with
The Golden Bowl
. I wonder if Henry James expected us to sympathize with Maggie Verver and her father, the millionaire American who first uses his money to buy a suitable husband for his daughter in the person of the Prince, and then, when her marriage results in his loneliness, buys a suitable wife for himself in the person of her husband’s ex-lover. This is to suggest that writers occasionally don’t know what or whom they have created, which is surely a nonsense.

Leonard Woolf’s
Sowing
, which in this edition is only 176 pages long and which I finished in an evening, is only the first volume of his autobiography and covers his childhood and the five years at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a friend of Thoby Stephen, Lytton Strachey, and a group of young men who were to become the Apostles and the founders of the Bloomsbury Group. He first saw Thoby’s two sisters, Vanessa and Virginia Stephen, one summer afternoon in Thoby’s rooms. They were wearing white dresses and large hats and carrying parasols, and he writes that their beauty literally took his breath away. They were staying with their cousin, Miss Catherine Stephen, who was Principal of Newnham, and who was with them, not in her capacity as cousin, but as chaperone, since in 1901 a sister was not allowed to see her brother in his rooms in a male college except in the presence of a chaperone.

The rules of chaperonage were certainly much less severe when Connor was at St. Catharine’s College, but there were still restrictions. The porter took a lively interest in any women who came and went in the evenings and we were supposed to be out of the gate by ten at the latest. An edict was issued that ladies in college when the air-raid alarm sounded must go immediately to the Master’s Lodge where they would sit with the Master’s wife in her drawing-room until the All-Clear. I am not sure whether this was because college authorities feared that the excitement of a possible air raid would induce lascivious emotions, or to prevent us staying past the allotted time on the excuse that it was far too dangerous to venture out on the streets. The first siren note was the signal for a hurried mass exodus of women. Today sex for students seems to be almost compulsory. Their lives may be more liberated, but I doubt whether they have as much fun.

I have never felt comfortable with the Bloomsbury Group, strongly disliking their snobbery, their intellectual arrogance, their selfishness and their rudeness. So why, I wonder, do they exert such a fascination for me? In the years when Woolf and his contemporaries were at Trinity, Henry James was writing at the height of his powers. As students they read
The Sacred Fount, The Wings of the Dove
and
The Golden Bowl
as they came out. They thought there was an element of ridiculousness in the novels which made it impossible to rank them with the greatest, but they were entranced and almost hypnotized by the strange Jamesian convoluted beauty and subtlety which act upon those who yield to them like drink or drugs.

Leonard Woolf describes how, after he and Virginia Stephen were married in 1912, Virginia acted for a short time as secretary for Roger Fry’s second post-impressionist exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, and Henry James came to tea, which was served in the basement. As he talked he tilted back his chair till it was balanced on the two back legs and maintained this equilibrium by holding on to the edge of the table. Henry James did this whenever he came to tea with the Stephen family and as his long sentences untwined themselves the chair would slowly tilt backwards and the children’s eyes would be fixed on it, hoping that it would finally overbalance and deposit James on the floor. Time after time he managed to recover himself, but indeed one day it did happen. The chair went over and the novelist, undismayed, was flung on the floor. He was unhurt and, after a moment, completed his characteristically ceremonious and flowery sentence.

To Oxford yesterday to be Guest of Honour at a crime weekend at St. Hilda’s College, of which I am an Honorary Fellow.

I was to have seen a friend for lunch at the Old Parsonage, but she rang to say that she has a virus so I kept the table booking and went with Alixe Buckerfield de la Roche, a friend who lives in my house in Oxford.

She was deeply concerned about two recent student suicides at Oxford. A postgraduate student hanged herself at the end of term and Alixe witnessed the terrible distress of her parents and young brother at
the Somerville College memorial service. The suicide of the young is more common now than it was in my youth. I can’t recall the suicide of a single friend or acquaintance during my childhood or adolescence. Perhaps today we all take happiness as our right and unhappiness is seen as shameful and insupportable. Or is it that some people have an imperfect appreciation of linear time? For them, the present moment is immeasurable, fixed in an eternal agony. There can be no hope that things will be better tomorrow, because the idea of a tomorrow has no reality.

Sitting in the garden in St. John Street I thought of the words of William Blake which I quoted in
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman:

It is wonderful prose, but hardly helpful in the context of self-destruction. If providence is not there we shan’t be aware even of disillusionment.

I returned to London by the 7:10 bus this morning, a good time to travel before the heat of the day. The sun was a smudged silver ball and the sheep seemed to move sluggishly through that early morning mist. Polly-Hodge wasn’t waiting for me at the door as she usually is, but came through the cat-flap into the kitchen as soon as I put on the kettle for the tea I didn’t wait to make in Oxford. She must have been sleeping in someone’s coal-house, if such a thing now exists, as the top of her head was black. She looked diminished and a little uncared-for, which she always manages to do if left for more than a day, even though provided with fresh food and water.

I read the Sunday papers with little enthusiasm. Do the public really care about the antics of the Princess of Wales and her lover? Then to 11 o’clock Mass at All Saints, Margaret Street, where Prebendary Gaskill preached on death, an unusual choice of subject. He touched on the last rites. The thought that the last physical sensation of a Christian would be the touch of holy oil on the forehead is seemly, but I wonder how often that happens in practice. Death, after all, seldom comes when invited or by appointment. We are likely to take our last breath, whether peaceful, gasping, in pain, or mercifully unconscious, in a place we
wouldn’t have chosen. And even if our loved ones have managed to manoeuvre their way through the traffic and have avoided hold-ups on the motorway to arrive at the hospital in time, essentially we all die alone. They will see us but we shall not see them. The most I hope for is a sight of the sky. The last person I watched as she lay dying had had nothing to look at during those last few days of consciousness but the wall of her hospital room and, beyond it, a claustrophobically close wall of grey London stone.