I have spoken of the ‘old shellbacks’ who formed the hard core of the Senior Common Room. However, few of these taught at fifth- and sixth-form levels. (They wouldn’t have been able to.) A lot of the higher-level teaching was done by clever young masters who were on their way through - up the career ladder to appointments at more illustrious schools. Such a one was Mr James Hunt, whose speciality was Classics, and whose form was the Classical Fifth.
The upper-school system at Bradfield was that when you began to specialize you were hived off for your special subject - historians to Moulsdale and Whitworth, modern linguists to Monsieur Le Grand and so on. However, your actual form, for all official purposes, was held to be the form in which you did English literature. This, for me, was the Classical Fifth and the master was Mr Hunt.
At this time Mr Hunt would have been, I suppose, about twenty-six or thereabouts. (He completed his career as second master at Rugby and, now retired, teaches Classics extra-murally at Cambridge.) His teaching style was free-and-easy to a degree quite unknown both to Bradfield and to me. All the same, there was no disorder in his class. Anybody was free to say anything and there was a lot of banter and laughter, but he couldn’t half teach English literature. I had, of course, already made some acquaintance with Shakespeare (The Tempest and Macbeth) and had read a fair bit of poetry on my own account, but now I found myself in the hands of a born teacher of outstanding talent. Mr Hunt made you feel that nothing was more exciting or mattered more than English poetry. Chaucer, John Donne, Gray, Cowper, Keats, Shelley, John Clare; and that controversial contemporary whose name was steadily growing, T. S. Eliot; Auden, Spender, MacNeice. We had to read them aloud. We found ourselves required to write sonnets, rhyming couplets, limericks, ballads in the Border style, short lyrics. We were asked to give individual assessments of poems out loud in class. I had never received such exciting and stimulating teaching in my life: I had not imagined that teaching could be like this. That ‘other world’ which I had frequented alone — the world of Walter de la Mare and Thomas Hardy — now opened wider every week, and was frequented by others; notably by Mr Hunt. Life was beginning to make sense in a new way.
With personal poems, Mr Hunt was always ready with friendly criticism and advice. I made, through him, the acquaintance of Hal Lidderdale, the boy (before Anthony Jacobs) who edited the school magazine. Although three years older than I, he was quite ready to let me come to his study and talked to me like an equal. I learned a lot from him. I remember being arrested with delight by his repeating from memory of ‘Take, O take those lips away’. I had never read or heard it before. Here is a short poem of mine which found its way into the school magazine about that time.
Profunda
Fathomless are the things which are known by instinct, not by reason.
The flaring of a flame, the fly-fall of a leaf,
The tinkling of a nail that rolls along the road.
Things fathomless as glass, and soundless in their sound as water breaking over stones:
The sound of apples falling to the ground,
The sound before a shot is fired,
The sound of clocks before they strike the hour.
Sights to the eye like skimming trout in shallows.
The butterflies, whose wings flash in the sun:
The opening of a bud which knows not why it opens:
We know not whence we come.
They know not who they are.
It knows not how it came to be.
Now that I look back on them, the generosity and tolerance of Mr Hunt amaze me. After College tea in the evening I (no more a fag) and like-minded others were free to stroll down to his lodgings by the Pang, to listen and talk about poetry and literature to our hearts’ content. Sometimes I was late for prep., and then Mr Hunt would give me a note, which Mr Arnold, perforce, would have to accept grudgingly. (‘What is it that you do, exactly?’) I fear I must have let my contempt for him and his house show a little too plainly. The truth was that while I had hitherto endured what I had supposed to be the only life at Bradfield, I had now discovered another - life in the Classical Fifth, life under the aegis of Mr Hunt and, increasingly, among friends in other houses. Had I only known, however, I’d seen nothing as yet. The following academic year, 1936—37, was to blow a hole in my psyche a mile wide and change everything for ever.
Chapter IX
Meanwhile - that is, during this time of the mid-’thirties - things were changing at home. My sister had graduated very well in history at Cambridge - she got a Second in the first part and a First in the second - and was now teaching. One of her first appointments was at Exeter, and once I accompanied her when she drove down there in her rather Toad of Toad Hall-like Fiat (an open tourer); a terrific trip for those days. (It was actually she and not Mr Hunt who first put me on to the avant-garde T. S. Eliot.) To me she didn’t seem any more absent from home than before, since she, like myself, was based there in the holidays.
My brother passed his Law Finals honourably, winning something called the Berks., Bucks, and Oxon. prize, and became articled to a solicitor in Newbury; John Louch, a distant relation of the family. These academic successes by one’s elder siblings were a bit daunting. I certainly didn’t look like doing anything comparable, but at least no one suggested to me that I had to.
I now have no alternative but to include in this story something painful and distressing. It didn’t distress me personally at the time, but all the same it can’t be left out. During these years of the mid-’thirties my father gradually took to drinking too much whisky. I have often, since then, wondered why. After all, he had a fine intellect (including a delightful sense of humour), a beautiful home, a loving and faithful wife and three children of whom two at any rate had done well at the outset of their careers. Reflecting today, I think I understand. First of all, I am told - it is common knowledge, is it not? - that doctors, as a profession, are somewhat prone to drink. It is largely to do with the continual exposure to anxiety, sorrow and grief unavoidable in a doctor’s life. (‘And could I have saved the patient?’) Together with this, my father had grave money worries. I think he had really had them, more or less, ever since he had bought our beautiful home and garden and set up what was perhaps, for our means, a rather ambitious establishment. Then, he had been in his forties. Now he was in his sixties and no doubt the strain of the job, the scarcity of money, the pressure of competition from younger doctors and simply the weight of the years had begun to get him down. (But the whisky, which I would estimate at roughly half a bottle a day, must have cost quite a bit.)
I sadly fear that in this situation my poor mother didn’t take what I would reckon to be altogether the right line. Though not teetotal or puritanically down on anyone having a drink, she had, with reason, a fear and horror of its effects in excess. She had been brought up a Methodist; and as a young nurse in her twenties in Bath had come to dread Saturday nights, when the battered wives and beaten-up pub. fighters were brought in. I need hardly say that my father was never violent or even noticeably different in his manner. Nevertheless adults (if not I) could tell that he was drinking. My mother reacted with anger and condemnation, where perhaps a more sophisticated woman might have taken a different and helpfully sympathetic line. I don’t know: how can anyone judge after all these years? Whenever she found the half-bottles of whisky - in drawers or elsewhere about the house - she would take them away. This meant, of course, that further ones would be locked up in the triangular Jacobean cupboard (the Marie Stopes cupboard - I have it now) to which my father alone had a key. Naturally, my parents’ relationship suffered, though they never quarrelled openly before their children.
I, at sixteen, was largely left out of this - I mean, it wasn’t mentioned to me by my mother, sister or brother - but naturally I couldn’t help perceiving the disapproval of my mother and also of my brother. My own reaction was one of sympathy with my father, simply because I had always liked and respected him so deeply. I thought of him as t
he head of the family and it seemed to me that it wasn’t for his children, at all events, to start judging or blaming him. It also seemed to me that my brother appeared almost glad to have a valid reason for censure, but now I think that was unjust. Anyway, I wasn’t prepared to say or do anything that would damage my relationship with my father, which meant everything to me, as I believe it did to him.
In point of fact our relationship deepened during my last two or three years at Bradfield; partly, I suppose, because my father felt lonelier (and had less and less work to do), partly, perhaps, because he felt that I was one person who wasn’t critical of him, and partly because I was developing new interests and activities in which he liked to play his part. In 1936 I won the school poem prize with a sequence of six sonnets dedicated to him (Mr Hunt’s comments and criticism had been crucial), which of course pleased him very much. I was developing as something of a swimmer (100 yards breast-stroke and water polo), and my father liked to come to the matches. Quite often, too, on summer afternoon half-holidays, he would bring the car to some agreed rendezvous about a mile from College (no danger of running into Mr Arnold, who would certainly have made a fuss and whom my father had come to dislike) and we would walk and talk together. I had formed an interest in wild-flowers, and managed to get an award for my pressed collection in the school natural history exhibition.
But the best thing of all during these teenage summers was my father introducing me to fly-fishing. He himself, on the tennis court, taught me to cast, and after a bit I could do it well enough to have a stab at the water. That already-mentioned patient of my father, Mr Bertie Tull, who lived below Greenham Common, owned both banks of the Kennet for a considerable distance below Newbury, and thanks to his generosity and kindness I had access to virtually unlimited fishing - what with the side-streams and carriers, as much as a boy could possibly fish over during a long summer day. To start with I caught nothing but dace, but one evening I got a 3-lb. chub, and then, some evenings later, my first trout, which my father landed for me. From then on I was hooked for life.
The river was unstocked and untended, for Mr Tull was no plutocrat. No one else fished it. It was really a water-jungle, very different from the weed-cut, trim, lawn-mown and well-stocked reach of the Kennet which crook’t age fishes nowadays. Any trout (or grayling) you came across were wild, and you could be justifiably proud of getting one out, for the weeds were never cut and there were sunken branches, tree roots and goodness knows what else. During the summer holidays I would sometimes spend all day on the river. I saw otters (though not often), herons, kingfishers and dippers, and one hot afternoon in a heat-wave I surprised among the rushes a badger, which thirst must have driven down from the woods to drink. Since those days I have fished in Connemara, Wales, New Zealand and Virginia, but never so idyllically and happily as during those far-off, pre-war, adolescent days on the Kennet below Greenham.
At this time, too, I took up chess. Either chess exerts a fascination over someone, or else it doesn’t. Anyone who plays chess will understand my stout Cortez-like excitement as I realized that I had come upon an illimitable, inexhaustible world — the miraculous parenthesis of the chess-board. I had no dreams of becoming outstanding — that, I knew from the outset, would have required a dedication like that of a concert pianist, and even then I probably wouldn’t have what it took. No, I just wanted to play chess with grown-up people better than myself and learn to become a decent club player. (This is just about what happened, actually: I finished up in my forties playing 6th board for the Department of the Environment.) I applied myself to chess books. In those days the great name was Capablanca. He was known by repute to everyone, including those who didn’t play chess at all - to the man on the Clapham omnibus, as they say. I bought - at least, my father bought for me — Capablanca’s Primer of Chess and Chess Fundamentals, and took my coat off to them. Another vaunted chess writer of those days — now, I understand, no longer regarded — was Eugene Znosko-Borowsky, author of The Middle Game in Chess and also of an attractive little book called How Not to Play Chess. (The first maxim it contained was ‘Avoid Mistakes’.) I joined the Newbury chess club and there made some interesting friends. Another new dimension.
The members came from the respectable Newbury bourgeoisie. The top board was Mr Godwin, the tax inspector. Then came Mr Tom Webb, a grocer; Mr Franks, a tailor. Old Mr Bradfield, who was deaf, smoked a very smoky pipe, wore a black velvet skullcap and took so long to move that he never finished a game. They were all very kind to me (‘I’ll give you a game, young doctor’) and by degrees I improved. I remember the moment when it consciously entered my head that with a little more application and effort I might be able actually to beat some of these nice men. Then, one evening, something really exciting happened.
I was playing Black against a certain Mr Bance, one of the better players in the club. Mr Bance always adopted a rather off-hand manner when he played me, as though he were obliging me but not trying terribly hard. (No doubt this was true.) Whenever I played a bad or disastrous move - and this was all too often, for I hadn’t as yet assimilated the basic ideas I was later to learn from the great Nimzovitch - Mr Bance would whistle disconcertingly and then proceed to put in the boot. However, this evening I was directly attacking his king in the middle game, with a combination of pawns, two knights and the queen. All of a sudden I saw - well, I thought I saw - that if I sacrificed my queen (which his king would have to take) it followed that I could mate him in two moves with the knights alone. I looked carefully at it. Surely it couldn’t be so? There must be a snag. I went over it again and again and could see no flaw. I sat so long that Mr Bance became a little fidgety. (We didn’t use clocks.) At length I realized that if I didn’t essay the sacrificial attack I would be kicking myself for the rest of my life. I moved the queen and said ‘Check!’ Mr Bance looked at the setup briefly, shrugged his shoulders and took the queen. He had clearly not seen what I had. I was now committed: there was no point in further deliberation. I moved one of the knights and said Check. Again he hesitated only for a few moments before moving his king as I had foreseen he would have to. No apprehension clouded his brow. I made the third move, with the other knight, and again said ‘Check!’
There followed a pause. At length Mr Bance said in a somewhat bewildered voice ‘It’s mate, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ I replied. ‘I think it is.’ ‘Phew! That was pretty smart!’ said Mr Bance. He was generous, too. He mentioned it to more than one member. But I didn’t note down the position: I wish I had, though I think that to have done so there and then would not have been good form. I’ve never been able to recover it by memory.
I don’t mean that this was a great turning-point in my development as a chess-player, or anything like that. Mr Bance often thrashed me subsequently, and I went on making silly mistakes, despite Eugene Znosko-Borowsky. But it was a taste of glory. I knew now that a thing like this could sometimes be done, and furthermore I had done it - once. I have never done anything like it again, but it’s the kind of thing a chess-player doesn’t forget.
One friendship which I made at the club - a strange one, I suppose, though it never seemed so at the time - has remained a warm memory. Dr Hickman (another well-known Newbury name) was at this time well on in his eighties, with a white beard, a piping voice and one lens of his spectacles smoked. He had once been a colleague of my father (who was twenty years younger) and lived in the middle of Newbury, in a beautiful old town dwelling-house on the corner of Bartholomew Street and Market Street. He lived alone, attended by two devoted, middle-aged maids (or housekeepers). He knew who I was, of course - when my father picked me up from the club the two of them would usually chat a while; and soon he gave me an open invitation to drop in at his house any evening I liked, to play chess. Of this I often availed myself, as much for the pleasure of his company and the charm of the surroundings as for the chess.
His parlour was neat, snug and wood-panelled, with numerous bookshelves and a coal fire. On the ma
ntelpiece, under a small glass dome, stood a clock, about five or six inches high, made to look like an open book, with the hour on the left-hand ivory page and the minutes on the right. The right-hand pages, which were sprung, were held in retraction by a small metal claw: in the course of a minute this claw itself gradually retracted, until finally it released the uppermost right-hand page to flick over and join the left-hand pages, its reverse side showing the hour. Upon each hour, of course, the reverse side changed one on. I have never seen another clock like this.
Outside the French windows (also timber-framed) lay the long, walled garden, parallel to Market Street. White beehives there were, and dahlias, golden rod and antirrhinums, the bees droning and drowsing among them. You couldn’t hear any traffic. I would be let in by the housekeeper (‘Doctor’s in his room, sir’) go along the passage and open the parlour door. Dr Hickman would be reading - some small-print, Victorian book - holding it up high to the light and peering through his smoked lens. He would look up. ‘Oh, it’s you, young Richard. All right, you know where they are: get ’em out.’ And I would go to the cupboard.
He played very much for fun. If I pondered too long, he would say, ‘Come on, man, you’re not playing for pound notes!’ He had, indeed, the reputation of having been an impatient man in his day. I grew to be more than fond of him. We had some great games in that Victorian parlour; and I heard some interesting reminiscences, too, for he had been born as long ago as 1849.
The Day Gone By Page 21
