CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE

by John Mortimer

  What I remember most clearly about my Uncle Harold’s house was the bath water. By a prodigious feat of engineering and much use of the slide-rule he had harnessed a stream to his will. I remember sitting on the edge of the bath, about to climb into my first dinner-jacket for the entirely grown-up Christmas festivities, and turning on the tap. Nothing whatever happened for the first quarter of an hour. Then, on a clear day with the wind in the right direction, from a distant hillside you could hear mechanical movements as of sluice gates opening. During the next thirty minutes water could be heard approaching and then a dense cloud of steam gushed from the pipe like a triumphant herald announcing the arrival of a thin brownish trickle which dripped disconsolately into a bath-tub which might have been personally designed for Tallulah Bankhead in the heyday of the Savoy Hotel.

  On Christmas Day we would go round and deliver biscuit tins, on which were portrayed the unsmiling faces of King George V and Queen Mary, to the gardeners and woodmen in the cottages. On Boxing Day we went into Brighton, a magical place to me, where the trams were decorated with fairy lights and we had seats for the pantomime. My father always joined loudly in the food song, the words of which descended on a song-sheet from the flies, to embarrass the rest of the family.

  ‘When my wife is on a diet

  I daren’t mention “Fry it”

  Wifie would only be mad.’

  ‘I do like a lovely blo-ater

  And so do my mater and pater.’

  We saw the Crazy Gang whose pale faces, battered hats and sudden cries filled me with unreasoning fear. I remember three black men, in white suits with belted jackets, who tap-danced in a way it was my ambition to achieve.

  ‘What does John think,’ my Uncle Harold said at dinner, shocked at the fact that I had wanted a checked sports coat and a silk tie for Christmas and not a catapult or a Boy’s Own Annual, ‘about the jackets of those Negro dancers? Does he admire the half-belt effect on the back, or was it a little too gigolo-like from a design point of view?’

  ‘John’s going to Harrow next term,’ my mother told them with considerable amusement. ‘He’ll have to have a tailed coat there and a boater.’

  And a silver-topped cane, I thought, for going to Lord’s. I would use it, privately, to dance like Fred Astaire.

  ‘They do roast the fags at Harrow, I suppose?’ my father asked innocently. ‘I don’t know what I’m paying all that money out for unless you get roasted occasionally.’

  ‘A great deal of money!’ said my uncle. ‘I must say, you don’t do things by halves, Clifford.’ He had been pained by my father’s extravagance ever since he heard about a barrel of oysters his clerk had been sent out to buy in Fleet Street.

  ‘I do like a lovely blo-ater.’ My father put down his knife and fork and sang very loudly, ‘And so do my mater and pater.’

  ‘Whatever made you choose Harrow?’ my Aunt Daisy interrupted him to ask. When it had vaguely occurred to my father that the time had come for me to go on to a public school Noah had immediately said ‘Harrow’, a choice for which he gave no sort of explanation. Which of the old boys of that school, I wonder, did he think I might grow up to resemble? Lord Byron, Cardinal Manning, Winston Churchill or the Mayfair playboys who had recently been flogged in prison after a robbery with violence? My father had, in fact, no more chosen Harrow for me than he had chosen to spend Christmas with his superstitious brother-in-law or to suffer from glaucoma. These things happened in the mysterious cause of evolution and at the wayward direction of the Life Force, and that was that. Darwin could probably explain it all.

  ‘When my wife is on a diet

  I daren’t mention “Fry it”,

  Wifie would only be mad.’

  My father sang loudly, whilst the others peeled their peaches and tried to pretend that he wasn’t happening.

  Chapter Five

  Sex, like love, my father thought, had been greatly overestimated by the poets. He would often pause at tea-time, his biscuit halfway to his mouth, to announce, ‘I have never had many mistresses with thighs like white marble.’ And I was at a loss to tell whether he meant that he had not had lady friends with particularly marmoreal thighs, or that he had had few mistresses of any sort. Like most children I found my father’s sex life a subject on which it was best to avoid speculation. He had had, in his past, a fiancée other than my mother, whom he always referred to as his ‘poor girl’ and who had died young. I never discovered her name or the cause of her death.

  ‘Love affairs aren’t much of a subject for drama really,’ he told me at an early age. ‘Consider this story of a lover, a husband and an unfaithful wife. The wife confesses all to her husband. He sends for her lover. They are closeted in the living-room together. The wife stands outside the door, trembling with fear. She strains her ears to discover what’s going on in the room. Some terrible quarrel? A duel or fight to the death perhaps? At last she can stand the suspense no longer. She flings open the door and what does she see? Blood? Broken furniture? One of them stretched out on the carpet? Not at all. The two men are sitting by the fire drinking bottled ale and discussing the best method of pruning apple trees. Naturally the woman’s furious. She packs and leaves for her mother’s.’

  Was my father any of the characters in that unromantic story? Not the husband, but was he, perhaps, the lover? I never asked him and now I have no means of finding out.

  However, my father would often recite, and usually at tea-time, poetry of a sensual nature. Swinburne had been his undergraduate favourite and he often repeated, with a relish of rolling r’s:

  ‘Can you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you?

  Men touch them, and change in a trice

  The lilies and languors of virtue

  For the raptures and roses of vice.’

  ‘Poor old Algernon Charles got it wrong as usual,’ he would add by way of commentary. ‘The roses and raptures of vice are damned uncomfortable as you’ll certainly find out. You have to get into such ridiculous positions.’ And he would go on with the recital as my mother cut more bread and butter or spooned out the home-made marrow jam:

  ‘We shift and bedeck and bedrape us,

  Thou art noble and nude and antique;

  Libitina thy mother, Priapus

  Thy father, a Tuscan and Greek.

  We play with light loves in the portal,

  And wince and relent and refrain;

  Loves die, and we know thee immortal,

  Our Lady of Pain.’

  ‘Sorry stuff, as it so happens,’ my father commented, ‘but I like the sound of it.’

  It follows from all this that my father’s advice on the subject of sex was not of much practical value to an eleven-year-old boy. At about that age the whole business hit me like a raging epidemic, causing me to seek constant opportunities to embrace myself passionately among the dead flies and dusty, outdated law books and moth-eaten blankets in our loft, or in houses in the bracken which I now ran as bachelor establishments. At my prep school I fell in love with Jenks, but this love was largely unconsummated, apart from a clumsy hug in the school museum, a place where the air was polluted by the prize exhibit, a large and inadequately cured elephant’s foot which had been turned into a waste-paper basket. I loved Annabella and Ginger Rogers when she wore jodhpurs and a hacking jacket, and Deanna Durbin and Greta Garbo when she was dressed as a boy in Queen Christina. I was lately talking to an elderly, but still bright-eyed, General who said, ‘I first fell in love with Cherubino with his nice white breeches and dear little sword.’ It was years before I got to know Figaro, but the image for my prep school years was about right.

  The truth was that from the time when I stopped keeping house in the bracken with Iris Jones to the end of my time at Harrow, seven or eight years when I might as well have entered a Dominican order for all the female company I enjoyed, I knew absolutely nothing about girls. In one-sex schools and during lonely and isolated holidays I was in a chrysalis of vague, schoolboy homosexuality. Even
when I got to Oxford, and did make some expeditions away from the safe dormitory base, the girls I preferred were still boyish. Betty Grable was less my style than Veronica Lake and Katherine Hepburn who, so Frank Hauser assured us, acted in Philadelphia Story as the natural bridge into the heterosexual world.

  The sight of a woman at my public school was almost as rare as a Cockney accent in class; and if we spotted one it was, as often as not, a fierce and elderly matron. We were waited on at table by footmen in blue tailed coats and settled down for the night by a butler called ‘George’. Our homosexuality was therefore dictated by necessity rather than choice. We were like a generation of diners condemned to cold cuts because the steak and kidney was ‘off’.

  Harrow-on-the-Hill is in the middle of the suburbs: the tomb in the parish churchyard where Byron once lay and composed poetry as he looked over rolling meadows now commands a fine view of the semis of Hillingdon and Pinner. It was only a few stops from Baker Street on the Metropolitan Line and we used to sit in the smoke-filled carriages to be jeered at as we went up to Lord’s, dressed in top hat, pearl-grey waistcoat, morning coat and silver-topped stick with a dark-blue tassel. We weren’t allowed to speak to the boys at the bottom of the hill, although a Prefect might occasionally give one of them sixpence to carry up his suitcase at the beginning of term. We were isolated and put in quarantine both on account of sex and class, although once again I found myself educated above my situation, among various ‘Honourables’ who were called ‘Mister’ in roll-call. Within our group we were again strictly segregated. There were the ‘one yearers’ who had to keep all their buttons done up, ‘two yearers’ who could undo one jacket button, ‘three yearers’ who could undo two and ‘four yearers’ who could wear fancy waistcoats and put their hands in their pockets. ‘Five yearers’ were said to be allowed to grow moustaches or even marry a wife if such a thing were available. If ‘four yearers’ mixed with ‘one yearers’ the worst was suspected and very often turned out to be true.

  I cannot say I found Harrow brutal or my time particularly unhappy, but life there never approached the Elizabethan splendours and miseries of my prep school. Harrow’s great advantage was that we had rooms of our own, although in the first year these had to be shared with one other boy, and these did provide a sort of oasis of privacy. Each room had a coal fire and a wooden bed which let down from the wall on which various political slogans were burned in pokerwork, such as ‘Death to the Boers’ and ‘No Home Rule for Ireland’. You could bring your own furniture and set out your own books on the shelves and enjoy some of the privileges of a long-term, good conduct prisoner (it’s rightly said that the great advantage of an English public school education is that no subsequent form of captivity can hold any particular terror for you. A friend who was put to work on the Burma railway once told me that he was greeted, on arrival, by a fellow prisoner-of-war who said, ‘Cheer up. It’s not half as bad as Marlborough.’)

  The first boy I shared a room with was called Weaver. He had smooth dark hair which he slicked down with ‘Anzora’ (‘Anzora masters the hair’, I had heard about it on Radio Luxembourg). His parents, he told me, were extremely wealthy and had a large house in the New Forest. I was impressed with Weaver until I met a boy called Marsh who told me, ‘Weaver’s really extremely common. His parents have side-plates at dinner.’

  ‘Side-plates?’

  ‘Yes. Side-plates. To put your bread on. Not at luncheon. Everyone has side-plates at luncheon. At dinner.’ He explained carefully, as though to a backward foreigner, matters which seemed to him perfectly obvious.

  ‘But if you don’t have side-plates at dinner what do you put your bread on?’

  ‘You crumble it. On the table.’ Marsh looked at me with great pity. ‘Don’t you know anything?’

  ‘Not very much.’

  It was clear that I didn’t.

  ‘Properly shined shoes are the mark of a good regiment and a decent Classical Shell. It gives me little pleasure to listen to Virgil being construed by a boy with shoes the colour of elephant’s hide. Look down, and when you can see your faces in your toe-caps you shall inherit the earth. You shall wear shined shoes at Speech Day and enjoy the delights of strawberries and cream and salmon may-on-naise! You shall wear your shined shoes in the Classical Fifth and in the Classical Sixth also shall you wear them. And if your boots are shined and your puttees neat on parade you shall pass out of the school Corps into the Brigade of Guards.’

  It was strange that so many of my schoolmasters seemed to have been permanently affected by the Old Testament as seen through the prose of Rudyard Kipling. My first master at Harrow was a charming retired Major of the Brigade of Guards. He inspected our shoes and fingernails each morning, but otherwise treated us with great gentleness.

  My Harrow friends stayed longer in my life than those I had met at earlier schools. We were thrown together in the lower regions of our House, we ate together with our faces to the wall, and Keswick, the Head Boy, would shout at us if we turned round. We loitered in one another’s rooms and ‘took exercise’ by changing into running clothes and sitting gossiping or reading Roger Fry in the lavatories below the Fives courts. My closest friend was Oliver, known to his many enemies as ‘Oily’, Pensotti, who had about him the vaguely seductive aura of holidays in Bandol and bedrooms in Mayfair. He wore scuffed suede shoes and used a sort of dead white face powder to cover his spots. He used to accompany Radio Luxembourg with the soft musical scrape of a pair of wire brushes played on the top of a suitcase. He came into my life, and indeed left it, shrouded in an aura of mystery. If I asked him any questions about himself he would look vaguely amused and avoid giving anything away.

  ‘Where do you live, Pensotti?’

  ‘Where do I live? Ah. That’s what I’m always asking myself. Would you like to help me with a few suggestions?’

  Or, ‘What does your father do, Pensotti?’

  ‘What does he do? You mean what does he do, exactly? A lot of people have wanted to know the answer to that, especially my Ma.’

  I subsequently met an elderly lady who claimed to be Pensotti’s mother. She had bright red hair, carried a poodle and spoke in what she alleged was a South American accent. She lived in a flat in Charles Street with glass-topped tables and a lot of wrought-iron furniture. I never met Pensotti père, nor did I learn any more about Oliver’s childhood. It seemed to have been spent around the world and he could speak French, Spanish and Italian.

  The other friend, who lasted in my life for many years, was Martin Witteridge. He was a large, rather clumsy but extremely kind and good-natured boy. He would always laugh at our jokes, buy us great plates of egg and chips in the school shop and consented to listen as I read out page after page of the novel I was writing about Harrow in the nearest possible approach to the style of Aldous Huxley.

  On the fringe of our group, yelling abuse at us or occasionally kicking his way into our midst, was Tainton. Tainton was a phenomenon. I have never since met anyone in the least like Tainton. I had always hoped that his kind died out with cock-fights and bear-baiting.

  The first thing to be said about Tainton was that he was extremely small. However, he was as tough and leathery as a jockey. He boasted that his mother had given birth to him on the hunting-field, after which minor intrusion into a day’s sport she went on to be up with the kill at Thorne Wood according to Tainton, but then Tainton was, on many matters, a most unreliable witness. His habitual expression was a discontented scowl, after which his face would become bright red and suffused with anger. He had yellow curls which stood up on end, and ears like jug handles. On certain very rare occasions he smiled, and his smile had a sort of shy innocence and even charm.

  At all times and in all places Tainton was a source of continual trouble. Before a breathless audience he tried to cross the lake by swinging from a sort of trapeze, made up from his bed-linen, and fell in. He broke windows, used unspeakable language to the matron, set fire to the Morning Post as Keswick was rea
ding it, put stray cats into people’s beds and, at home and during the course of a hunt ball, shut a Shetland pony in the ladies’ lavatory, having first dosed it with castor oil. Tainton was apparently born without a sense of fear and was quite impervious to the consequences of his outrages.

  Among his other distinctions Tainton was a prize, you could say a champion, masturbator. No doubt we all did our best in this direction, but with Tainton masturbation reached Olympic standards. There was a story about him which earned him considerable respect; but as it depended on the uncorroborated evidence of Tainton himself, it may not have been true. It seems that the school Chaplain, Mr Percy, called on Tainton in his room, surprised him at his usual exercise and said, deeply shocked, ‘Really my boy, you should save that up till you are married.’ ‘Oh, I’m doing that, sir,’ Tainton answered with his rare smile, ‘I’ve already got several jam jars full.’

  Our House was presided over by a gentle English liberal called Mr Lamb. This housemaster was given hell at lunchtime by Keswick, who warmly espoused the Fascist cause in Spain, whereas Mr Lamb was of the opinion that the Republicans were really doing their best and behaving quite decently, all things taken into account. Like many English liberals, Mr Lamb had his blind spots, including a wish-fulfilling liking for real bastards, such as Napoleon, about whom he spoke with servile admiration in the history class. However, there was absolutely no harm to Mr Lamb. He believed that all laws were founded on common sense and natural justice and, when I suggested to him that might mean I could undo all my buttons during my second year, he attempted a distinction between social conventions and the law of nature which caused him visible pain. It was this gentle creature, devoted to reason, the Webbs, Gladstone and Macaulay who had thrust upon him the appalling task of educating Tainton.