As we had arranged, we took the steamer to the Scilly Isles and stayed there a week. At Hugh Town there was a good hotel, with excellent beer and a waiter with discreet Mortmere tones, who murmured: ‘Plenty of young ladies on this island, sir.’ In the visitors’ book were the names of people who had stayed at the hotel after their ships had been wrecked on the surrounding rocks. Looking out of my bedroom window, one morning, across the harbour to the peaks of Tresco and Bryher, I knew, with exquisite relief, that I needn’t go on trying to write The Summer at the House. It was sham all through. Walking down deep grassy lanes between wallflower fields, sheltered from the Atlantic breeze, we began, at once, to plan my new book. It was to open, of course, on Scilly. Two young men, one of them a would-be painter and writer, the other a medical student, are staying at the Hugh Town hotel. The painter has defied his family and run away from an office job in the city: the medical student has egged him on to do this. Also staying at the hotel is a Cambridge Poshocrat-athlete, whom the medical student loathes. And there is a girl of fourteen, in whom both the student and the Poshocrat are romantically interested.
‘And then,’ said Chalmers, ‘I think there’s some kind of accident … Yes, my God, that’s it! The Poshocrat insists on taking her out climbing, and she gets killed.’
The accident was to be in the best Forster tradition, ‘tea-tabled,’ slightly absurd. The girl slips from a rock a couple of feet high, breaks her neck and dies instantly. At the enquiry which follows, the student publicly blames the Poshocrat and there is a violent scene. Later, they all go back to London. The painter returns to his office. The student and the Poshocrat are rivals: they both want the painter’s sister. The Poshocrat gets her, chiefly by using his cash and social position to dazzle the painter’s mother and aunt. In his status as fiance he begins to boss the household (resembling, more and more strongly, his original in Howards End): he also tries to pack his future brother-in-law, the painter, off to a job in an African colony. The painter, in desperation, runs away for the second time. The Poshocrat, feeling sure that the student is at the bottom of it, goes round to see him: there is an argument, a jealous scene about the sister, and finally, a fight—in which the student kills the Poshocrat with a poker: this last episode, said Chalmers, would have to be written as almost pure farce.
In the intervals of discussing all this, we wandered about the island, went out in a launch to see the seals, talked to the boatmen about wrecks. Enough dollar bills had been washed ashore to build a whole terrace of houses; also several ladies in full evening dress with diamonds, and a whole cargo of lead pencils. We landed on Tresco, where the Abbey stands, in the middle of a sub-tropical garden: a flamingo-like bird came out to meet us, threateningly, from beneath the cedars. Chalmers quoted: ‘This castle hath a pleasant seat.’ The days passed only too quickly, in the excitement of literary composition and the pleasant haze of beer. When the time came for our return to the mainland, I had already started on the first chapter of the novel: I had decided to call it Seascape with Figures.
The General Strike, which everybody in Cheuret’s circle of friends said was impossible and sure to be called off at the last moment, began without any visible fuss at midnight, after a concert at which Forno had realized his ambition to conduct a small string orchestra. They had played Bach, Vivaldi, Purcell. Forno himself, immaculate as a bridegroom, with his white carnation and brand-new evening tails, had struck out powerfully through the Vivaldi, like a swimmer breasting a strong sea. When it was over, he had received the squeaky congratulations of Arnold Bennett. As I took my ticket home on the bus, the conductor said: ‘’Fraid you’ll have to drive this thing yourself, tomorrow, sir.’
And, sure enough, next morning, the tremendous upper-middle-class lark began: by lunch-time, the Poshocrats were down from Oxford and Cambridge in their hundreds—out for all the fun that was going. And the medical students—‘spoiling for a fight,’ as elderly Kensington ladies admiringly said of them—paraded the streets in their special constables’ armlets, licensed to punch at sight. Every bus and underground train was a ragtime family party: goodness knew where you were going or how long it would take. If you fussed because they took you to Mornington Crescent instead of Hyde Park Corner you were a spoil-sport, an obstructionist, even a trifle unpatriotic. Not that anybody talked about patriotism—this wasn’t 1914. Everything was perfectly all right, really. The strikers were all right—except for a few paid agitators controlled by Moscow, and some gangs of professional roughs. The great mass of working class entered ‘into the spirit of the thing.’ Why, wasn’t there the case of Sandy Ross, the son of a friend of the Cheurets, captain of his college first fifteen? Sandy had volunteered to bring supplies every day from the north of London in his racing sports car: he had to go through a ‘bad’ district, in the neighbourhood of Paddington: the first day a crowd wouldn’t let him pass. Sandy had hopped out of the car with a spanner in his hand. Things had begun to look ugly; and then Sandy had shouted, with his best accent: ‘Are there no Scotsmen here?’ And, at once, a dozen voices had answered: ‘Aye, laddie, we’re with ye.’ And every day, the story concluded, these compatriots had formed a bodyguard for Sandy’s car, till he was safely through the district. Such anecdotes, people agreed, were very reassuring. They showed that the Englishman’s heart was still in the right place.
Philip, swept along in the crowd from his medical school, had volunteered for national service on the first day of the strike: they made him conductor on an underground train at four pounds ten a week. My friend Eric became a docker. Most of the young men I knew were special constables: the girls worked in canteens. Those who had cars drove round the streets, offering interesting-looking men ‘a lift.’ The professional prostitutes, like the rest of the working classes, found themselves being blacklegged on their own beats. That special kind of hysteria known as ‘Business as usual’ manifested itself in the least unexpected places: a comic actress, one of the Cheurets’ oldest friends, went tragic about the danger to the British Constitution and denounced all those who had failed to ‘do their bit.’ Only the Cheurets themselves remained calm, regarding, with civilized amusement, the antics of their circle. ‘Oh, dear,’ sighed Madame, sinking comfortably on to the divan after washing up the lunch plates, and reaching for a cigarette; ‘Why do they have to do this sort of thing? It’s so un-cosy.’ (She would have been considerably surprised if she could have seen herself, exactly ten years later, addressing a co-operative women’s meeting on the necessity for helping the Government in Spain.)
But, despite her example, I couldn’t laugh at the strike. From the first moment, I loathed it and longed for it to end. It wasn’t that I seriously expected street fighting or civil war. But ‘war’ was in the air: one heard it in the boisterous defiant laughter of the amateur bus drivers, one glimpsed it in the alert sexual glances of the women. This was a dress rehearsal of ‘The Test’; and it found me utterly unprepared. I wanted to lock myself away in a corner and pretend that nothing was happening. For the first time, I knew that I detested my own class: so sure of themselves, so confident that they were in the right, so grandly indifferent to the strikers’ case. Most of us didn’t even know why the men had struck. I didn’t know, myself. I couldn’t think about such things: I could only shudder with fear and hatred; hating both parties: my female relative announcing briskly at breakfast: ‘But of course I take sides!’—looking fresher and more alive than she’d looked for years; and Rose, gloating over the bus-wrecking in Hammersmith Broadway: ‘That’ll teach the bloody, damn blacklegs!’ I hated myself, too, for being neutral. I tried to get on with my novel; instead, I found myself opening Wilfred. He, at least, had understood what I was feeling: ‘Waving good-bye, doubtless they’d told the lad …’ But Wilfred hadn’t buried his disgust in the cushions of a Kensington drawing-room: or tried vainly to pretend that as an intellectual he belonged to some mystical Third Estate, isolated above the battle. If I had known a single person connected with the Labour Movem
ent; if Chalmers, even, had been with me—I might have been able to get my ideas into some kind of order. But Chalmers was back at his job in Cornwall, unreachable even by letter. There was nobody I could talk to. After a miserable week of doubts and self-reproaches, I sneaked round shamefacedly to the Chelsea Town Hall and volunteered for duty. ‘What kind of work would you like?’ my lady recruiting officer asked me brightly. ‘Which kind do you get least application for?’ I said. ‘Well …’ she made a little grimace: ‘I suppose … help on a sewage farm.’ ‘All right,’ I said, reflecting that this, at any rate, had a sort of spurious Mortmere flavour: as so often, I had an instantaneous picture of myself writing about it to Chalmers: ‘Please put me down for that.’
However, before I could be called up, the strike had ended. The Poshocracy had won, as it always did win, in a thoroughly gentlemanly manner. And, just as on the college feast evening in Chalmers’ rooms, so now it was quite prepared magnanimously to pretend that nothing more serious had taken place than, so to speak, a jolly sham fight with pats of butter.
5
At my preparatory school, during the last two years of the War, there had been a boy named Hugh Weston. Weston—nicknamed ‘Dodo Minor’ because of the solemn and somewhat birdlike appearance of his bespectacled elder brother—was a sturdy, podgy little boy, whose normal expression was the misleadingly ferocious frown common to people with very short sight. Both the brothers had hair like bleached straw and thick coarse-looking, curiously white flesh, as though every drop of blood had been pumped out of their bodies—their family was of Icelandic descent.
Although Weston was three years younger than myself, he had reached the top form before I left the school. He was precociously clever, untidy, lazy and, with the masters, inclined to be insolent. His ambition was to become a mining engineer; and his playbox was full of thick scientific books on geology and metals and machines, borrowed from his father’s library. His father was a doctor: Weston had discovered, very early in life, the key to the bookcase which contained anatomical manuals with coloured German plates. To several of us, including myself, he confided the first naughty stupendous breathtaking hints about the facts of sex. I remember him chiefly for his naughtiness, his insolence, his smirking tantalizing air of knowing disreputable and exciting secrets. With his hinted forbidden knowledge and stock of mispronounced scientific words, portentously uttered, he enjoyed among us, his semi-savage credulous schoolfellows, the status of a kind of witch-doctor. I see him drawing an indecent picture on the upper fourth form blackboard, his stumpy fingers, with their blunt bitten nails, covered in ink: I see him boxing, with his ferocious frown, against a boy twice his size; I see him frowning as he sings opposite me in the choir, surpliced, in an enormous Eton collar, above which his great red flaps of ears stand out, on either side of his narrow scowling pudding-white face. In our dormitory religious arguments, which were frequent, I hear him heatedly exclaiming against churches in which the cross was merely painted on the wall behind the altar: they ought, he said, to be burnt down and their vicars put into prison. His people, we gathered, were high Anglican. As a descendant of a Roundhead judge, I felt bound in honour to disagree with him, and sometimes said so: but I could never work up much enthusiasm, even in those argumentative days, for ritualistic questions.
Weston and I met again, by purest chance, seven years later. Just before Christmas, 1925, a mutual acquaintance brought him in to tea. I found him very little changed. True, he had grown enormously; but his small pale yellow eyes were still screwed painfully together in the same short-sighted scowl and his stumpy immature fingers were still nail-bitten and stained—nicotine was now mixed with the ink. He was expensively but untidily dressed in a chocolate-brown suit which needed pressing, complete with one of the new fashionable double-breasted waistcoats. His coarse woollen socks were tumbled, all anyhow, around his babyishly shapeless naked ankles. One of the laces was broken in his elegant brown shoes. While I and his introducer talked he sat silent, aggressively smoking a large pipe with a severe childish frown. Clumsy and severe, he hooked a blunt dirty finger round the tops of several of the books in my shelves, overbalancing them on to his lap and then, when his casual curiosity was satisfied, dropping them face downwards open on the floor—serenely unconscious of my outraged glances.
But when my acquaintance, who had another engagement, had gone, Weston dropped some of his aggressive academic gaucherie: we began to chatter and gossip: the preparatory school atmosphere reasserted itself. We revived the old jokes; we imitated Pillar cutting bread at supper: (‘Here you are! Here you are! Help coming, Waters! Pang-slayers coming! Only one more moment before that terrible hunger is satisfied! Fight it down, Waters! Fight it down!’) We remember how Spem used to pinch our arms for not knowing the irregular verbs and punish us with compulsory fir-cone gathering. We tried to reconstruct the big scene from Reggy’s drama, The Waves, in which the villain is confronted by the ghost of the murdered boy, seated in the opposite chair: (‘The waves … the waves … can’t you hear them calling? Get down, carrse you, get down! Ha, ha—I’m not afraid! Who says I’m afraid? Don’t stare at me, carrse you, with those great eyes of yours … I never feared you living; and I’m demned if I fear you now you’re—dead! Ha, ha! Ha, ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!’) Weston was brilliant at doing one of Pa’s sermons: how he wiped his glasses, how he coughed, how he clicked his fingers when somebody in chapel fell asleep: (‘Sn Edmund’s Day … Sn Edmund’s Day … Whur ders it mean? Nert—whur did it mean to them, then, theah? Bert—whur ders it mean to ers, heah, nerw?’) We laughed so much that I had to lend Weston a handkerchief to dry his eyes.
Just as he was going, we started to talk about writing. Weston told me that he wrote poetry nowadays: he was deliberately a little over-casual in making this announcement. I was very much surprised, even rather disconcerted. That a person like Weston (as I pictured him) should write poems upset my notions of the fitness of things. Deeper than all I. A. Richards’ newly implanted theories lay the inveterate prejudices of the classical- against the modern-sider. People who understood machinery, I still secretly felt, were doomed illiterates: I had an instantaneous mental picture of some childish, touchingly crude verses, waveringly inscribed, with frequent blots and spelling mistakes, on a sheet of smudgy graph-paper. A bit patronizingly, I asked if I might see some of them. Weston was pleased, I thought. But he agreed ungraciously—‘Right you are, if you really want to’—his bad manners returning at once with his shyness. We parted hastily and curtly, quite as though we might never bother to see each other again.
A big envelope full of manuscript arrived, a few mornings later, by post. The handwriting, certainly, was all I had expected, and worse. Indeed, there were whole lines which I have never been able to decipher, to this day. But the surprise which awaited me was in the poems themselves: they were neither startlingly good nor startingly bad; they were something much odder—efficient, imitative and extremely competent. Competence was the last quality I had been prepared for in Weston’s work: he had struck me as being an essentially slap-dash person. As for the imitation, it needed no expert to detect two major influences: Hardy and Edward Thomas. I might have found Frost there, too; but, in those days, I hadn’t read him.
Here are four which I now think the best—chiefly because they most successfully resemble their originals:
THE TRACTION ENGINE
Its days are over now; no farmyard airs
Will quiver hot above its chimney-stack; the fairs
It dragged from green to green are not what they have
been
In previous years.
Here now it lies, unsheltered, undesired,
Its engine rusted fast, its boiler mossed, unfired,
Companioned by a boot-heel and an old cart-wheel,
In thistles attired,
Unfeeling, uncaring: imaginings
Mar not the future; no past sick memory clings,
Yet it seems well to deserve the love we r
eserve
For animate things.
THE ENGINE HOUSE
It was quiet in there after the crushing
Mill; the only sounds were the clacking belt
And the steady throb of waters rushing
That told of the wild joy those waters felt
In falling. The quiet gave us room to talk:
‘How many horse-power is the large turbine?’
‘Seventy. The beck is dammed at Greenearth Fork:
Three hundred feet of head. The new pipe-line
Will give another hundred though, at least;
The mill wants power badly.’ He turned a wheel;
The flapping of the driving-belt increased
And the hum grew shriller. He wiped a steel
Rail with a lump of waste. ‘And now,’ he said,
‘I’ll show you the slimes-house and the vanning
shed—
This way.’ He opened a small wooden door
And the machinery leaped into a roar.
RAIN
This peace can last no longer than the storm
Which started it, this shower wet and warm,
This careless striding through the clinging grass
Perceiving nothing; these will surely pass
When heart and ear-drums are no longer dinned
By shouting air: as surely as the wind
Will bring a lark-song from the clouds, not rain,
Shall I know the meaning of lust again;
Lions and Shadows Page 14
