Shadows On the Grass

by Simon Raven

  ‘But I fear Moley rather overdid it,’ Dadie said. ‘When he said of the Provost, “Age cannot wither him nor custom stale/His infinite variety”, it will not have escaped many present that this observation was made, in Shakespeare’s text, by Mark Anthony about his leman, to wit Cleopatra. The Provost, flighty as he is and knows himself to be, may not care for the comparison, if only because Cleopatra’s story is not, in the end, a story of success.

  ‘The Provost,’ continued Dadie, ‘for all the unworldly airs he gives himself, is very keen on success. He comes of a middle class Puritan family who believed strongly in effort and reward. He was very put out when he was not made Professor of Greek, indeed he thought it must be a punishment for something. But what for, he asked himself. His life had been blameless, his appetites and diversions moderate. Was it because he had – well – tendencies? Hardly, because he had never indulged them, or not to the right true end, or if he had he could have counted the occasions on the fingers of one hand. Of course there was a little rumour about Maynard Keynes and another about Rupert Brooke, the latter of which was the more credible as the Provost was often heard to complain of the ugliness of Rupert’s legs; but all that, to paraphrase Webster, was in another era, and besides the whore was dead. Surely God had not withheld the Professorship of Greek simply because he had, in his hot youth, been very occasionally shameless of a summer’s afternoon? But then again, if it wasn’t this, what was it?’

  Dadie paused, sipped his drink, leant forward breathlessly.

  ‘Well, what it was, of course, and what he always really knew it was, was nothing to do with a punishment for past moral iniquity but quite simply the result of present academic inadequacy. The Provost was not elected Regius Professor of Greek because as a scholar he was neither accurate nor profound, indeed he was merely trivial. But how to disguise this provoking truth from himself and from the world? Answer: assume the mantle of age. For if you look and behave as if you are eighty years old, no one will blame you for not being elected to Professorships, everyone will say, “What bad luck it didn’t fall vacant a few years ago – he’d have got it then all right.” He wouldn’t have got it, of course, then or ever, but the English tradition enjoins charity and respect for the aged, regardless of their achievements or the lack of them, and it is easy to mistake this general respect for the particular respect which one would accord someone who truly might have been a Professor had vacancies fallen differently, and to mistake this in turn for the respect due to one who actually had been a Professor in his day. Thus the Provost, when he realised the election for the Professorship would go against him, aged himself overnight, in an attempt to conjure the idea if not the reality of a Professorship for the embellishment of his career.

  ‘But unfortunately it didn’t turn out quite like that. The world, instead of seeing the Provost as a worshipful old gentleman who might have been or even had been a Professor, saw him as a case of premature senility and began to doubt whether he was even fit to be Provost. In order to charm the world out of this unkindness, the Provost cultivated what he hoped would be endearing eccentricities. If he could persuade everyone that he did not really belong to his own era but was in habit, mind and spirit a contemporary of Bentley or Porson, then it would be said (he hoped) not that he was a doddering old idiot but that he was a rare and picturesque survivor from a bygone etcetera, etcetera.

  ‘And indeed to the Americans, who incline to naivety in such matters, that is what he is. They cherish him when he goes there and they worship him when they come here. They accept him in his self-appointed role to the extent that to them it is a venerable reality. It is left to the cynical eyes of Europe to see that it is fact only rather a clumsy impersonation.

  ‘The truth is,’ said Dadie, ‘that the Provost is just an old ham. He’s always been putting on acts of some sort or another – this sere and hoary old production is only the last of a long line – and he’s always hammed them. One summer before the war Arthur Marshall and I went with him to Monte Carlo, for he has a passion for Roulette. But while the passion is genuine, the accompanying acts were not only false and self-indulgent, they were played with an absolutely shame-making absence of talent or charm. Arthur and I did not know where to look. On our first night there we spoke to an Englishman who suggested we should join him at one of the Chemin-de-Fer tables where they needed three more people to make up a quorum. Now, the Provost doesn’t play Chemin-de-Fer, for the sufficient reasons that he doesn’t like card games, doesn’t care for the comparatively high stake, and in any case hankers after the long odds offered at Roulette. But instead of saying just this, he launched into a long and righteous tirade about how his conscience forbade him to play Chemmy because he could not bear the idea of winning money off ordinary private people.

  ‘“Roulette is pardonable,” he said, “because one wins from a huge, wealthy and faceless organisation, i.e. from the Corporation that owns the Casino. But at the Chemin-de-Fer tables individual persons are trying to cut each other’s throats and paying the Casino a percentage for giving them the opportunity.”

  ‘The Englishman then pointed out that anyone who played Chemmy was, after all, over twenty-one and presumably went into it fully aware of the perils. One need not, therefore, feel guilty about anyone else’s losses any more than anyone else would feel pity for one’s own.

  ‘“But look there,” said the Provost, pointing to the table we were being asked to join, “look at that tender young lady,” he said, indicating a raddled hag as tough as an alligator who was sitting behind a rampart of plaques a yard and a half high, “how could one bear to win from so frail and innocent a creature, thus bringing her to destitution and perchance to a life of shame.”’

  ‘Could he have been joking?’ asked Dickie.

  ‘Not a trace of irony anywhere. He was putting on an act as the sporty old gentleman with high moral principles and a soft heart. In fact he’s as hard as nails. He waits until he sees you are having a losing run and then deliberately backs the numbers which you don’t.

  ‘Then there was another kind of performance when it was time to come home. He kept pretending he was trying to escape us and go back to Monte Carlo – all feyness and quaint-old-fogey fun. Our part was to chase him along the platform and coax him back into the carriage. We played along at Nice and Cannes, but then we started to get fed up, and at St Raphael we took no notice whatever. So he got back into the train of his own accord when the whistle blew and sulked the whole way to Paris.’

  Dickie, who was something of a gambler, had listened with interest. Peter, who was a Scot and very Scottish about such matters, was beginning to be restless, and now put on a gramophone record – one of the old 78s, a song of Monteverdi.

  ‘Such a charming opera,’ said Dadie. ‘We were thinking of having it at the Arts Theatre in the spring, but unfortunately the only week that the Company’s free is the one that’s booked for the Greek Play. Oedipus Rex,’ he said, rather aggressively as though one of us were about to deny it, ‘I’m playing Oedipus and Joyce Carey’s coming down to play Jocasta.’

  ‘Joyce Carey?’ I said. ‘Surely, she’s the one who plays genteel tea women for Noël Coward?’

  This did not go down well.

  ‘Joyce is a fine tragic actor,’ Dadie said sternly. ‘We were hoping to engage Bobby Helpman for Creon, but he’s busy.’

  ‘This is in English?’

  ‘English this time, Greek next,’ said Dadie. ‘Alternate years. You should know that by now.’

  ‘Just so long as Joyce Carey isn’t going to talk Greek,’ said Dickie, and went into fits of laughter.

  ‘It is time you all learned,’ said Dadie, ‘that there are subjects about which to be frivolous and subjects about which to be serious. The Drama is very much a subject about which to be serious.’ He paused, then unexpectedly giggled. ‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘that Drama ceases to be serious as soon as it becomes stagy. And since the Provost is to produce Oedipus Rex, nothing in the univ
erse can prevent its becoming stagy. He will keep on and on demanding more and more “passion” until one is screaming at the top of one’s voice and waving one’s four limbs about like a rogue windmill.’

  He paused to consider this picture and then became thoughtful.

  ‘It would appear,’ he said, ‘that I’ve been very much running the Provost down this evening. In some ways it serves him right: it is an essential part of your education that you be taught to recognise the techniques of faking, whether in life or art. But there is one thing I very much wish to impress upon you all. So long as we have this Provost or someone like him as Head of the College, then absurd as he may be in many respects, we are nevertheless safe. Our values will be preserved. Festivals like this one will be properly celebrated. Honourable connections will be respected and maintained. It will continue to be recognised that it is better to give a place to an amusing or beautiful boy who will only get a third class degree (or may perhaps even fail) than to give it to some boring swot who might manage a second with the wind behind him. There will be diversity, and a certain amount of wealth. Wide interests will be encouraged as much as specialised studies; there will be tolerance and civility; in a word, there will be civilisation. The present Provost stands for and guarantees all of this.

  ‘But there is a new kind of man who will surely come to us in time. I’m not sure how soon; I suspect in about twenty years; but sooner or later come he will. This new sort of man will be a scientist, or possibly a practitioner of what I believe are called “social studies”; he will be a philistine and a prig; he will be left wing; he will wish to repudiate the past and to disown its monuments; he will be determined, as he will put it, to “cauterise” or “disinfect” the present, that is to sever all the old and well loved links, with people, with families, with institutions, so that the spirit which now obtains, having had its lifelines blocked or wrenched away, will die for want of nourishment. He will destroy and expel and pervert. For all I know, he may even let in women.’

  In these circumstances and by the most frivolous accident (simply because of the stupid tantrum which caused me to boycott John Raven’s rooms that evening) did I first meet and speak with the undergraduate who became and has remained my favourite person of all, and the don who was to be the principal influence on my behaviour (when it was sensible) and on my thought (when it was sound) during the next four years. Our discussion that evening went on for very much longer, most of it being a monologue by Dadie on this topic and on that; but on none was he more percipient than he had been in his forecast of the future fate of King’s College of Our Lady and St Nicholas in Cambridge, commonly known as King’s.

  After Christmas I applied for a part in Oedipus Rex and was very properly rejected. But the mere act of application gave me some kind of toehold in theatrical circles – a toehold which became a definite stance when, a year or two later, I was employed by The Cambridge Review to write the weekly drama column. It was therefore a matter of course that I should be present at the festival cricket match between the Amateur Dramatic Club and the Marlowe Society which was played on Parker’s Piece during the May Week of 1950, at the end of my second academic year.

  If the cricket was undistinguished, the crowd in and near the Pavilion was (by our standards) positively star-studded. Literary and dramatic lions prowled and swished their tales, hungry for applause or spoiling to strike. Christopher Layton, who had played Prince Hal back in March, sparred with John Barton (Sir Toby Belch in the 1949 production of Twelfth Night). Peter Hall (a pretty, gangling Hamlet the previous autumn) denounced Julian Slade for the tinkling banality of the songs in his operetta, Lady May, the current musical attraction. Toby Robertson (still a tyro) rolled in the grass like a puppy with Michael Birkett; and Peter Wood, the iconoclastic Producer, snarled in warning at Milton Grundy, the Editor of Granta.

  Suddenly the fauna tensed, were silent, looked in awe towards the road, where the King of the Forest (Noël Annan, no less, a sizzling Pope in the latest Webster production) was descending from Mears’ Rolls Royce with an entourage – Maurice Bowra of Wadham College, Oxford, and two Conservative Members of Parliament, Mr Robert Boothby and Captain Malcolm Bullock.

  Of Warden Bowra I have already said something in these pages, while Bob Boothby is well enough known, to the kind of person who may read this book, to need no introduction from me. Malcolm Bullock, however, is at once sufficiently obscure yet sufficiently intriguing to merit a word of explanation.

  Of shadowy origin and indifferent education (the malicious said he had been to Brighton College, though he himself claimed to have had a private tutor), he first came to notice as an Officer of Foot Guards in the 1914 War, an event which made his fortune for him. Badly wounded at the Front, he was posted on an extra-Regimental tour of duty as Assistant Military Attaché in the British Embassy in Paris, an appointment that gave him ample opportunity, which he did not neglect, to enlarge his social scope. By the time he had come up to and gone down from Trinity College, Cambridge, he was considered eligible in the highest places, so eligible that he was permitted to marry the Lady Victoria Stanley, daughter of the Earl of Derby, who presented him with the cast-iron Conservative constituency of Crosby which in those days lay in his lordship’s gift. A faithful husband and a fond father, he grieved in manly fashion when Lady Victoria was killed out hunting, and soon afterward sought discreet consolation, from members of his own sex. This predilection, rather dangerous in those days, he camouflaged cannily enough to be regularly received at Buckingham Palace and repeatedly returned to the Commons; and when I first met him, on the occasion which I am describing in the summer of 1950, he had either just become or was just about to become the Father of the House…the House in which he had uttered scarcely a score of words in as many years. For although he was in private a superb raconteur, telling his stories with perfection of phrase and rhythm, he could make no way as a public orator. Nor could he write to any effect, a great pity this, as he failed in all his attempts to transfer to the page the marvellous and manifold anecdotes of the famous and the infamous which he had collected throughout thirty years in the most august circles. When he died in the sixties his tales died with him, so that I am most privileged to have heard many of them while we sat and watched the cricket that afternoon on Parker’s Piece.

  He began by teasing Bob Boothby with a succulent selection of Boothby stories, to repeat which here would, I think, be straining even Bob’s sense of sportsmanship too far. He went on to make a satirical choice of hymns for Noël Annan’s forthcoming wedding (‘Perverse and foolish oft I strayed’) and to quote, extensively, the more injurious reviews of Maurice Bowra’s recent book on Epic Poetry. Having then embarrassed my friend, Francis Haskell, by speculating about his activities during his National Service as a Sergeant in the Army Education Corps (‘Did the boys call you “Sergeant” – or “Sarge”?’), he went on to congratulate me on winning the Member’s English Essay Prize with the remark, ‘It goes, I apprehend, to the undergraduate with the largest member.’ With this stroke he had at last finished with present company, and he now soared away to grander regions, whence he condescended to let fall a description of dinner with the reigning Duke of Wellington at Stratfield Saye.

  ‘We drove down together from London. He was very excited as he had discovered some new stuff called Froom, which I took to be a kind of hairdressing or unguent of great efficacy in certain amorous contexts. He never actually told me what it was, but kept saying, “You’ll see, you’ll see, and you’ll be delighted at the economy,” and with that I had to rest satisfied.

  ‘As we drove up to the house, we knocked over a pheasant. No, “knocked over” is not the phrase: we absolutely crushed the poor beast under the off-side wheel. He insisted that the remains be scraped off the drive and then, rather surprisingly, told his man to put them in the boot. A little later we passed a nettle patch, whereupon he became very thoughtful and asked me to remind him to have a word with the Head Gardener after tea.
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  ‘So we arrived and had tea, and I reminded him about the Head Gardener, and off he went to see him while I unpacked. Just as I’d finished he knocked on my door.

  “Time for a stroll before it gets dark,” he said, unplugging the electric fire.

  ‘“Don’t turn it off,” I said, “I’m freezing.” And I plugged it in again. ‘“I’m afraid we have to be very careful of the wiring,” he said, switching it off once more. “We mustn’t let the system be overloaded. Anyway, this thing shouldn’t be here at all. And with that he picked up the fire and carried it out of the room. “You’ll soon get warm,” he said, “we’re going blackberrying.”

  ‘And into the woods we went, with me carrying the basket and the Iron Duchess wielding a sort of shepherd’s crook to hook down the brambles.

  ‘“There aren’t any left,” I said, when we reached the bushes. “Rubbish,” he said, putting up his crook and dragging down a branch covered in tiny little red and green berries, “these will do very well.” And I was made to help him pick a basketful of wizened nasties, with an occasional berry that actually was black but had grown rotten and plopped all over my fingers.

  ‘“Time for a rest,” he said. “You won’t mind not having a bath? The boiler uses too much coal, so I’m having it replaced with a much smaller one. But to make up we’ve got some real treats for dinner tonight. I hope you’re hungry.” “Hungry and cold,” I said. “Can I have a fire of wood or coal in my room?” “Coal fires are illegal in this part of the world,” he said, “pollution.” “Wood then?” “The Head Gardener’s got the key to the Wood Shed and he’s busy with that patch of nettles we saw. But I’ll tell them to bring you up an extra blanket, though I rather think they’re all damp. The airing cupboard’s not much use, you see, while the boiler’s not working.”

  ‘In the end, I went down to dinner feeling like Scott of the Antarctic…and was very heartened to see what looked like a champagne bottle, wrapped in a napkin.