He had become the only active (though none of his activities was very active) director of a peat company – his young partner committed suicide. He would disappear suddenly from Bedford, the large house and the large garden and the large family, leaving no money behind, and the next they would hear of him was from the overseer’s hut, the only human habitation among the black bogs (which perhaps recalled the black volcanic sands of the island). He took no genuine part in the enterprise, but he would take long walks with a book in his pocket, and then return at night to the unfinished tramway-line, the half-built hydraulic plant, the rough food, the uneducated conversation in the lamplight and the narrow camp bed. He wasn’t made for the family life in Bedford, the games of clumps and snap, the exciting visit of a Mr Rust who set the girls in turmoil. There was a barrier between him and his children. He would sit alone in his study, reading and marking his books. Only his daughter Alice had something of his frustrated romantic nature which would lead her, after his death, to a career in South Africa from which she rarely returned to England with her tales of new exotic friends, Olive Schreiner and General Smuts. I can just remember her with her square kindly sensible face, turning a little masculine with age, an impression of gaberdine. At twenty-two she was writing to her brother Graham: ‘When I think of the countries I want to visit, the mountains I want to climb’ (her father had written a little book which was printed in St Kitts about his ascent of Mount Misery), ‘the rivers, forests and valleys I want to explore, I feel half frantic at the thought that I am getting older and older and am no more likely to travel than I was ten years ago.’
Suddenly in May 1881 – the worst time of year to set out to the Caribbean – my grandfather decided to pack up and leave. Graham saw him off in London and wrote to his mother: ‘Did father send you a line from Southampton? I left him at 1 a.m. on Tuesday morning at the Charing Cross Hotel, endeavouring to finish a large cigar. He told me he intended to take very little rest that night, as he wished to be very sleepy on the following, the first night on board. I hope this plan succeeded but I have strong misgivings thereon. If the sea was rough in addition to the seasickness he would have all the additional discomfort of weariness. Our theatre was, after all, badly chosen. We went to The Lady of Lyons. A most mournful piece, not at all calculated to raise the spirits of an intending voyageur.’
He wasn’t much missed, judging from Alice’s letters to her brother Graham in London. Life in Bedford was as exciting as ever, with birthday treats and excursions and tea in the garden and walks by moonlight and the seductive behaviour on a tricycle at Barford of my other grandfather’s curate, Mr Humble, and a further visit from the alarming Mr Rust (‘He is so utterly inscrutable in his looks, words and deeds, that I know no more what his feelings are than if he were the Sphynx’).
In spite of her longing for adventure, when the chance came Alice turned it firmly down. ‘Thank you so very much, dear Papa, for your wish to have Florence and me with you for a time, but indeed, it cannot be. It was so very good of you to propose it that it seems ungrateful to refuse it point blank, but I really could not go unless we all went too. Like Mama, I do not like the thought of you being all alone; it seems so dreary for you. But as Mama, I suppose, has written to you all the Pros and Cons for your projects, I think I need not say any more, except to hope that we shall all meet again somewhere or other.’ ‘Somewhere or other’, it must have seemed a chilling phrase to the middle-aged man who had failed to relive his youth under Mount Misery. Less than two months later he was dead of fever.
His grave is the same shape and size as his brother’s, but he has failed to leave any impression on the island among all the coloured Greenes. It is Charles, dead at nineteen, forty-one years earlier, who is remembered. Perhaps the legend of his thirteen children is not wholly untrue, for when I visited the island two years ago, in the features of one would-be cousin I thought I saw a close resemblance to my Uncle Graham.
2
I don’t know by what process of elimination my father and brother chose Kenneth Richmond to be my analyst, but it was a choice for which I have never ceased to be grateful, for at his house in Lancaster Gate began what were perhaps the happiest six months of my life. Active happiness depends to some extent on contrast – a lovers’ meeting would not be the same without the days of deprivation, and those breakfasts in bed on a tray neatly laid, brought by a maid in a white starched cap, followed by hours of private study under the trees of Kensington Gardens, seemed all the more miraculous after the stone steps, the ink-stained schoolroom, the numbering-off at the bogs, the smell of farts around the showers. And London was there just down the road. I was independent. I could take a bus or tube to any destination. Films and theatres depended only on the management of my pocket-money. There were no Sunday walks in unwanted company. I was growing rapidly into an adult without the torments of puberty.
Only once something happened to disturb the quiet and restful routine. A guest was describing an accident at dinner, and my mind went back to Harston ten years before, a story of two ladies on the Royston road in a carriage: the horse had run away, and one had fallen out and her long hat-pin had pierced her brain. I found myself on the dining-room floor. I had fainted as sometimes I had fainted at early service in the school chapel. I wasn’t worried; my imagination had a way of showing me the details of an accident though they were never described, and then I would faint like a medical student at an operation. I was surprised when Richmond took me to a specialist in Harley Street, but I thought no more of it. The incident was forgotten for four years.
Often of an evening I found myself in the company of authors. Richmond himself was one, if only of a book which I found rather dull reading, on educational theory. Walter de la Mare came to the house – the poet I admired most at that time – and wrote his spidery signature in my new-bought copy of The Veil. Often with him was his close friend; Naomi Royde-Smith, the editor of the Weekly Westminster, who had published Rupert Brooke’s early poems; she was too kind to me, so that a year later I began to bombard her with sentimental fantasies in poetic prose (she even published some of them). J. D. Beresford came too – a novelist crippled by infantile paralysis. The Hampdenshire Wonder remains one of the finest and most neglected novels of this period between the great wars, although it was an inferior novel, Revolution, which appealed more to me then. One evening we played a game in which each guest in turn had to imitate a vegetable, and I remember how we all simultaneously recognized de la Mare’s stick of asparagus. Such evenings were far away from the hours of prep in St John’s musty schoolroom. My only duties were to read history of a morning in Kensington Gardens and at eleven o’clock to go in for an hour’s session with the analyst.
Kenneth Richmond had more the appearance of an eccentric musician than anyone you might suppose concerned with curing the human spirit. A tall stooping figure in his early forties, he had a distinguished musician’s brow with longish hair falling behind without a parting and a face disfigured by large spots which must have been of nervous origin. There were two little girls who were brought up on the principle that children should never be thwarted, with the result that they were almost unbearably spoilt. On Sundays I was left in charge of them for an hour, while Richmond and his beautiful wife Zoe went to a church in Bayswater of some esoteric denomination, where the minister asked the congregation to decide by vote whether they would prefer that evening a sermon or a lecture on a psychological subject. Meanwhile at home I was seeing to it that for one hour a week the children learnt what it was to be thwarted.
I kept perforce a dream diary (I have begun to do so again in old age), and fragments of the dreams I can remember still, though the diary has been destroyed for nearly half a century. There was one dream of which I remember colours of great beauty; there were towers and pinnacles which might have come out of Miss Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle, and I heard a bodiless voice intoning, ‘Princess and Lord of Time, there are no bounds to thee’; and I remember a nightmare
in which I was pursued by sinister Chinese agents and took shelter in a hut with an armed detective, but, just as I felt the relief of security in his company, I looked at the hand holding the revolver and saw that he had the long nails of a Chinaman.
Sitting in Kensington Gardens, reading of the Carolingians in a dull blue volume of Tout, I kept one eye alert for possible adventures among the nursemaids, but the only adventure I had was not of the kind I desired. An elderly man, with an old Etonian tie and a gaze unhappy and shifty, drew a chair up to mine and started to talk of schools. Was there corporal punishment at my school, and did I suppose there were any schools left where girls were whipped? He had an estate, he told me, in Scotland, where everyone went around in kilts, so convenient in some ways, and perhaps I would like to come for a holiday there … Suddenly he sloped away, like a wind-blown umbrella, and I never saw him again.
When eleven struck in a Bayswater church tower I would cross the road, turn a corner and go into the little house in Lancaster Gate. If I couldn’t remember the last night’s dream I would be asked to invent one (for some reason if I invented a dream it always began with a pig). Richmond belonged to no dogmatic school of psycho-analysis, so far as I can make out now: he was nearer to Freud than Jung, but Adler probably contributed. There had been a tragedy twenty years before when a patient had killed himself and the coroner had been brutally unsympathetic, and I have the impression that he proceeded very carefully, very tentatively. My life with him did me a world of good, but how much was due to the analysis and how much to the breakfasts in bed, the quiet of Kensington Gardens, the sudden independence of my life I would not like to say, nor whether the analysis went deep enough. In any case, as Freud wrote, ‘much is won if we succeed in transforming hysterical misery into common unhappiness’.
There he would always be, sitting behind the desk with his marred musician’s face, stop-watch ready, waiting for my coming. Was there a couch, the stock-subject of so many jokes? I can’t remember. I would begin to read out my dream, and he would check my associations with his watch. Afterwards he would talk in general terms about the theory of analysis, about the mortmain of the past which holds us in thrall. Sometimes, as the analysis progressed, he would show little hints of excitement – as though he scented something for which he had been waiting for a long while. But so far as my own dreams and associations went, he told me nothing; he patiently waited for me to discover the long road back for myself. I too began to feel the excitement of the search. Perhaps, in spite of all the good it did me, the excitement was too heady for a boy and fostered the desire to turn up every stone to discover what lay beneath, to question motives, to doubt – no love would be simple afterwards or free from dusty answers.
The classic moment approached, as in all such analyses, when the emotion of the patient is due to be transferred: a difficult period for the analyst. Perhaps Richmond was trying to provide a subject away from home, for one of the evening callers proved to be a girl who was a ballet-student and one night we went to see her dance. With the added glamour of the stage around her, I nearly fell in love. Exploring London I had found a little bookshop on the Embankment near Albert Bridge and I bought a first edition for a few shillings of Ezra Pound’s early romantic poems, Personae – he displaced Walter de la Mare in my admiration. So, under the influence of Personae, I wrote three sentimental imagist lines to the girl, whose romantic name was Isola (‘a future Pavlova’ I wrote to my mother), but I never showed them to her, the relation never went further, and I did not see her again. The transference took a more inconvenient route, settling on my analyst’s wife, and the moment I feared at last arrived when, sitting in Kensington Gardens, I found the only dream I had to communicate was an erotic one of Zoe Richmond. For the first time I dreaded the hour of eleven. I could, of course, say that I remembered nothing, and Richmond would tell me to invent, and I could trot out the habitual pig, but I was caught sufficiently by the passion for analysis to be repelled at the thought of cheating. To cheat was to behave like a detective who deliberately destroys a clue to murder. I steeled myself and left the Gardens and went in.
‘And now,’ Richmond said, after a little talk on general theory, ‘we’ll get down to last night’s dream.’
I cleared my dry throat. ‘I can only remember one.’
‘Let’s have it.’
‘I was in bed,’ I said.
‘Where?’
‘Here.’
He made a note on his pad. I took a breath and plunged.
‘There was a knock on the door and Zoe came in. She was naked. She leant over me. One of her breasts nearly touched my mouth. I woke up.’
‘What’s your association to breasts?’ Richmond asked, setting his stop-watch.
‘Tube train,’ I said after a long pause.
‘Five seconds,’ Richmond said.
Towards the end of my stay with the Richmonds my rich Greene uncle, Eppy, who perhaps did not wish to be outdone by his intellectual brother, sent his elder daughter Ave to be analysed, and she too stayed in the house. Perhaps if she had come a little sooner my transference would have been directed towards her, for she was a very pretty girl, who, a few years later, was courted by all the Greene brothers, except Hugh who was still too young. Herbert and I particularly entered into rivalry. Tennis on summer evenings, exciting car-rides to the King’s Arms in the neighbouring town of Tring … there were even moments when my German aunt became worried: another first-cousin marriage in the Greene family would have been a disaster. Now in London with all the opportunities open nothing occurred. In those days at sixteen a boy was still very young. With daring I took her to the first London production of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie (her family, I learnt afterwards, considered it an unsuitable choice). I was still so heartfree that I could wonder, with cynical amusement, how long it would be before her emotions began to be transferred towards our bizarre and spotty analyst. But I was not there to see. Before that happened (if it ever did) I was returned – repaired – to the world of school.
Chapter 5
1
IT was a life transformed. I was no longer a boarder at that hated brick barracks called St John’s, which had become so mysteriously changed from the home of a happy childhood, and I had no fear of the old routine of classes. Classes, when once I had outwitted and outgrown the gym, I had never hated, and I returned to them with the proud sense of having been a voyager in very distant seas. Among the natives whom I had encountered there, I had been the witness of strange rites and gained a knowledge of human nature that it would take many years for my companions to equal, or that was what I believed. Had my grandfather returned to England from the long morning rides among the sugarcanes and the black labourers of St Kitts with the same exhilarating and unbalanced sense of superiority? I had left for London a timid boy, anti-social, farouche: when I came back I must have seemed vain and knowing. Who among my fellows in 1921 knew anything of Freud or Jung? That summer I invited Walter de la Mare to a strawberry-tea in the garden with my parents. He had come to lecture in Berkhamsted and I posed proudly as the poet’s friend, though I wished my father had been more impressed by his poetry. ‘It lacks passion,’ he argued with me, and to refute him I showed him a poem in The Veil.
‘Poor hands, poor feeble wings,
Folded, a-droop, O sad!
See, ‘tis my heart that sings
To make thee glad.
‘My mouth breathes love, thou dear.
All that I am and know
Is thine. My breast – draw near:
Be grieved not so!’
He shook his head sadly, remembering Browning. ‘Tenderness,’ he said, ‘not passion.’
I found it easy now to make friends. The domination of Carter was over for good. He belonged to another geological age, a buried stratum of school society. A school has many backwaters, but I was at last in the main stream. Instead of those petty gangsters of St John’s there were Eric Guest (later a distinguished Metropolitan magis
trate), Claud Cockburn, Peter Quennell. I escaped in company with Quennell the loathsome O.T.C. on condition that we both took riding lessons from the gym master, an agreeable red-faced ex-cavalryman called Sergeant Lubbock. I was always a frightened rider and later, when I had left school, I would take a horse out only in order to scare myself with jumps on the Common and escape the deep boredom which I had begun to suffer, a belated effect of the psycho-analysis, or so I believed then, not knowing it would pursue me all my life. Quennell always rode a far more spirited horse than mine, galloped faster, jumped higher. Sometimes returning at a walk down the long road from the Common – the road of my escape – we would pass on a hot summer’s day the sweating trudging ranks of the O.T.C. singing a gloomy military song, ‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here,’ like a line of Gertrude Stein, and I felt the same compassionate contempt a cavalryman must have felt in the old days for the poor bloody infantry. I no longer ride, but the smell of a horse’s coat brings back at once the sense of pride and tension.
A Sort of Life Page 8
