‘John. I know that you and I share certain values. About democracy, for instance. And the Republicans in Spain.’
I didn’t know whether to throw my fist in the air, embrace Mr Lamb, kiss him on both cheeks and call him ‘Camarada’. Instead I said weakly, ‘Yes, sir.’
‘So I have thought you might be a stabilizing influence if you shared a room with young Tainton. I’m sure,’ the archetypal English liberal muttered with hopeless optimism, ‘that there’s much good in the lad.’
I have not read, in my wildest divorce cases, of marriages as violent as my cohabitation with Tainton. As soon as I entered the room a flung chair splintered against the wall; Tainton was in an evil mood and crouched for a spring. His rages were terrible, totally unpredictable and extremely destructive. He would tear up my Van Gogh reproductions, spit in my Virginia Woolf and once he poured a bottle of green ink over the manuscript of my Aldous-Huxley-type novella. At night he would groan, have nightmares, subconsciously re-enact his birth on the hunting-field or, tireless and in solitary fashion, prepare himself for the rigours of married life. At rare moments he would show unexpected charm, when he leafed through his large collection of photographs of Sonja Henie or cultivated mustard and cress on the silken surface of his top hat. My life with Tainton might be described as days of anxiety and nights of fear. I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen next.
We used to be settled down for the night by George the butler, who entered our room in a tailed coat, said, ‘Goodnight, Sor!’, seized the poker, raked out the fire and departed switching off the light in one fluent gesture. One evening Tainton hit on the expedient of heating the poker’s handle until it was just not red hot and put it ready for George to seize and burn off several fingers. Spot on cue George entered, said ‘Goodnight, Sor!’ and astounded us by seizing Tainton’s striped Sunday trousers as a poker-holder, thus burning a large and smouldering hole in the seat. He left us in the darkness and Tainton lay awake until the small hours, grinding his teeth and swearing a hideous revenge.
In fifteen years you canter through evolution, dash through history, covering the development of man from anthropoid ape to medieval monk in the course of a few birthdays. The child has no sooner finished its bikkipeg and had its nappy changed a couple of times before it seems to be standing up in the school debating society, proposing that, ‘This House Sees No Alternative to the Economics of the Market Place’, or writing essays on ‘The Politics of Feminism’. We are all like insecure Third World Republics, granted Constitutions and Bills of Rights before we have banished tribalism, given up eating our enemies or producing Budgets planned on the signs of the zodiac. Ideas are clapped on us as top hats were once set on the grizzled heads of African chieftains; they make us all look more or less ridiculous.
I read to find new characters to adopt on lonely runs round the periphery of football pitches. I read aloud to entertain my father and when we had got through Shakespeare’s sonnets, Browning and The Shropshire Lad, we went on to Fragments of an Agon and Sweeney Among the Nightingales. I added Murder in the Cathedral (the truncated version) to Ivor Novello’s Glamorous Nights as another play suitable for solo performance on the dining-room stairs. We went, after a prolonged dinner at the Trocadero, to see an Auden and Isherwood verse drama, it must have been The Ascent of F.6, at the Mercury Theatre, and what entertained my father most about the evening was the presence among the incidental musicians of a lady drummer called ‘Eve Kish’. Eve Kish became a subject of his sudden gusts of uncontrollable laughter; he would imagine her patrolling the country lanes with her kettledrum, and he would look in the programmes of all other plays to see if he could find the longed-for announcement ‘Percussion: Eve Kish’. I remember him sitting down a quarter of an hour late at The Seagull, calling out loudly, ‘What? No Eve Kish on the drum?’
In spite of this unpromising beginning it would be hard to overestimate the effect Auden had on me and my generation of middle-class schoolboys. He wrote about what we understood: juvenile jokes about housemasters, homosexual longings, the Clever Boy, the Form Entertainer and the Show Off. And yet his poems brought extraordinary news of a world outside the stuffy common-room and the headmaster’s study; the vague but heroic struggle to do great things which were also stylized and in capital letters, like Building the Just City. We had been so near a war: I was born less than five years after the Great War ended, and we had grown up with Flanders poppies and pictures of tin hats on innumerable war graves and I knew a boy whose father promised to tell him about the horrors of Passchendaele if he went straight to bed. Now another war was coming so that we too, I sometimes thought with acute depression, would end as being remembered only by an embarrassed silence on a soggy school playing-field on Poppy Day.
All the same, the idea of the new war was a different and clear one. The gloomy ex-jockey who drove my father’s car in the country had told me about Italian Fascists dropping their Abyssinian prisoners-of-war out of aeroplanes. At my prep school I turned over pages of the Illustrated London News and saw photographs of Spanish villages shattered by German bombs. There were pictures of young Republican militiamen, going up to the front grinning and sucking cigarette-stubs ready to fight a new and unmistakably evil military machine. They had, moreover, the poets on their side, whereas the Fascists were supported by people like Keswick. I knew almost nothing about life, but I knew perfectly clearly that I couldn’t stand people like Keswick. So a whole political attitude can grow from a handful of books and a strong loathing for the Head of the House. Naive as these beliefs were, trivial as their origins may have been, I cannot say they are attitudes I have ever lived to regret, and it seems to me that those who now write their best-sellers denouncing the treacherous iniquities of the Cambridge Communists show little understanding of the emotions of the thirties, when good and evil seemed so unusually easy to distinguish and the Russians appeared simply as allies in the war against Fascism.
I don’t know how the invitation to join the Communist Party came. I know that Esmond Romilly is supposed to have started a network of public school cells, but I can’t imagine who can have recommended me as a likely candidate. When I joined I formed, so far as I could see, a one-boy communist cell in a sea of Harrovian capitalist enterprise. For a while I received puzzling and contradictory instructions from the Party Headquarters in King Street. When the Stalin–Hitler pact was signed, the Russians lost their enthusiasm for the coming struggle and I was urged to go down on to the factory floor and persuade the workers to go slow. I couldn’t, I thought, do much about it except put the word around the classroom that Virgil should be translated as lethargically as possible, a ‘go-slow’ which needed no particular encouragement. Later, when Hitler attacked Russia, we were urged to go down on the factory floor and step up production. Again, all I could suggest was the stepping up of the translation of Virgil. After these contradictory commands from King Street I stopped taking the Party’s literature and told my friends that the only political views worth having were those of Prince Peter Kropotkin who believed in anarchism, Mutual Aid and the essential goodness of human nature, opinions which were not easy to hold when you were sharing a room with Tainton.
In the flight from Tainton I spent more and more time alone in the high, marmoreal, Victorian library, chasing books in dark corners and up step-ladders, finding in unexpected places like dictionaries, medieval histories or collections of obscure eighteenth-century poetry, ideas which filled me with hilarity, gloom or almost unbearable lust. I found Lord Byron’s Turkish slippers in a glass case, and set myself to follow his uneasy pilgrimage round the school, from the tomb of John Peachey where he lay to write poetry, to the grave where his daughter is buried outside Harrow Church to teach her a sharp lesson for being illegitimate.
Then, as now, I found Lord Byron deeply sympathetic. His potent mixture of revolutionary fervour and crusty conservatism, his life of a Puritan voluptuary, of a romantic with common sense, was intoxicating to me. I spent afternoons
in the library drinking imaginary Hock and Seltzer, swimming the Hellespont or limping round Newstead Abbey with a harem of housemaids. I stayed up late gambling with Dallas, and awoke to find the chamber-pot overflowing with banknotes. Then I read of Byron’s Harrow friendships, especially that with Lord Clare. Years after he’d left school, Byron met Clare by chance on the road to Bologna and was deeply moved, feeling, apparently, his heart beat at his fingers’ ends. I tried to imagine a chance encounter with Tainton on Western Avenue in twenty years’ time and decided that my fingers’ ends would remain unexcited. Life in the intervening years for Lord Byron had not, perhaps, been all that it was cracked up to be.
When war was declared, when we waited, in that far-off and hazy autumn, for the first attack, Oliver Pensotti and I spent a good deal of our time wondering if we would be slaughtered before we had actually been to bed with any sort of lady. This understandable concern was combined, in Oliver’s case, with a deep anxiety as to whether he would ever be able to ‘take breasts’, those additions which he found hugely embarrassing and which distinguished Deanna Durbin from Ryecroft Minor, the school tart, who was readily available for a box of chocolate biscuits.
Meanwhile the whole nation was in readiness for the shock of invasion. Oliver’s mother left her flat in Charles Street and went to live in the Dorchester, which was built of concrete and believed to be impregnable to air raids. As humble privates in the Harrow Officers’ Training Corps, Oliver and I were sent to Aldershot on manoeuvres organized by the Brigade of Guards. We had chosen a peaceful spot, far away from the action where Tainton, having got hold of a box of flares, was staging his own display of pyrotechnics and setting fire to the undergrowth.
‘I suppose we’ll be really doing this in a year or two.’
‘You may be doing it. I’ll have a different sort of job, I imagine. Not that I shall be able to tell you much about it.’
‘That’ll make a change. I suppose you mean you’ll be in the Secret Service, because of the languages they know you speak.’
‘And because of the languages they don’t know I speak. And because of the languages they know I don’t speak.’
I was getting bored with the constant problem of decoding Pensotti. I went back to reading The Doll’s House, which I had brought with me on manoeuvres.
‘My Ma’s leaving the Dorchester,’ Oliver surprisingly volunteered some information. ‘She’s going to America. It’s the end of civilization as we know it. Chap in the Government told her that.’
Civilization as I knew it consisted of Keswick and keeping all your buttons done up for three years and being put to bed by a butler and the slow, meaningless translation of Latin poetry. I said that I couldn’t wait for its destruction. Oliver got out his wire brushes and, swishing them against the top of his cap, crooned our favourite Deanna Durbin number:
‘I love to climb
An apple tree,
Those apples green
Are bad for me,
They make me sick as sick can be,
It’s foolish but it’s fun!’
A tall Guards officer wearing a white armband rode up to us on a huge horse. ‘Bang, bang, you fellows!’ he said. ‘You’re dead!’
‘I know that’s going to happen,’ Oliver grumbled as we went back to the riding-school to get a mug of sweet tea, ‘I shall be dead before I get a real chance to find out about breasts.’
The rumblings from Europe grew louder. Sandy Wilson joined our form and took to knitting long khaki objects, socks, mufflers and Balaclava helmets, comforts for the troops. When our form master protested at this click of needles, which recalled, in a somewhat sinister way, the foot of the guillotine, Sandy Wilson rightly said that it was the patriotic duty of all of us to do our bit for the boys at the front. The future composer of The Boy Friend also organized trips to London to see a play called The Women by Clare Boothe Luce which had not a man in the cast. Oliver and I saw it several times. He hired opera-glasses and took a careful view of the cleavages of the cast, but seemed to come no nearer reassurance.
We practised for air raids, going down to the cellars and wearing our gas masks while Gracie Fields sang Wish Me Luck as You Wave Me Goodbye on Mr Lamb’s wireless. Our housemaster took a gloomy view of the situation. ‘War is hell,’ he said. ‘I remember the Somme and we never thought we should have to go through that again. Of course we could have nipped this one in the bud, if we’d only fought in Spain. Or even Czechoslovakia.’
‘You mean, sir,’ I asked, intolerably, ‘that war is hell except in Spain or Czechoslovakia?’ As a matter of fact I agreed with Mr Lamb entirely, but I had inherited what my father would call the art of the advocate, or the irritating habit of looking for the flaw in any argument.
‘School songs’ were a great and proud feature of Harrow life. We would assemble in the Speech Room and sing the compositions of long-dead housemasters and music masters, songs redolent of vanished boys playing cricket in knickerbockers, enjoying romantic friendships on summer evenings and going out to die in Afghanistan or on Majuba Hill: Forty Years On; Jerry a Poor Little Fag; Byron lay, lazily lay, Hid from lesson and game away, Dreaming poetry all alone, Up on the top of Peachey stone. That was the repertoire and then a new boy with a childish treble would pipe,
‘Five hundred faces and all so strange
Life in front of me, home behind …’
And the gravelly-voiced, hairy-chinned, spotty seniors would trumpet in chorus,
‘But the time will come when your heart will thrill
And you’ll think with joy of your time on the Hill!’
Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, came down to this strange ceremony which he apparently enjoyed. After the songs were over Mr Churchill climbed with difficulty on to the stage. He cannot have been more than sixty-five years old, but his ancient head emerged from the carapace of his dinner-jacket like the hairless pate of a tortoise, his old hand trembled on the handle of the walking-stick which supported him and his voice, when he spoke, was heavily slurred with brandy and old age. He seemed to us to be about a hundred and three.
‘If they ever put him in charge of the war,’ I whispered to Oliver, ‘God help us all!’
‘Oh, they won’t do that,’ he assured me. ‘They’ll never do that. Chap in the Government told my Ma.’
There were some excellent masters at Harrow and I shall be ever grateful to a large and rather unctuous cleric who taught us English. He read poetry in a fruity voice and used to congratulate himself on his sensitivity.
‘You know, boys,’ he used to say after reading us Blake’s poem about heaven’s wrath at caged birds, ‘I once took out a gun. It was a fine, dewy morning and I saw a little hare sunning itself on a grassy knoll. I lifted my gun and took a careful aim and do you know what I did then?’
‘Yes, sir,’ we chorused, having heard the story from him fairly often. ‘You spared its life.’
‘That is right,’ the Reverend Gentleman would smile complacently. ‘It was, like me, one of God’s humble creatures and I spared it.’
However, he introduced me to the Romantic poets who didn’t figure in my father’s anthology, and above all to Wordsworth. I think the Reverend Arthur Chalfont and I were the only people in the class who got any pleasure out of the old Sheep of the Lake District and we used to read each other long passages from The Prelude and Tintern Abbey to the fury of Tainton who said we sounded like a couple of expiring goats, and read Titbits under the desk with his hands in his pockets. I could see why Wordsworth was unpopular. He was clearly short on humour and capable of writing some of the silliest lines in the English language. I also knew that my great friend and ally, Lord Byron, couldn’t stand Wordsworth for many years and objected to his frequently hamfisted way with a stanza and his distinct lack of breeding and panache. All the same, in those endless afternoons when the Reverend Arthur Chalfont and I read to each other I came, slowly and reluctantly, to the conclusion that as between Wordsworth and Lord B., the
old fumbler from the Lake District was by far the better poet.
Brought up in a strictly agnostic household I was not only unmusical but without a religious sense. When we had been forced to kneel by our beds at my prep school I had found it embarrassing to pretend to talk to God, to whom, if he existed, I felt I should have nothing very polite to say, and so I counted up to twenty-five and then climbed between the sheets. On Sunday, singing the hymn,
Only believe and you shall see
That Christ is all in all to thee
I thought I would try it. I dug my nails into the palms of my hands, stood quite alone in the playground and forced myself to believe for at least ten minutes. Even so I couldn’t see it. Our house in the country was all in all to me; my strange father, my friends, my theatrical ambitions and my chances of being chosen to act Richard II. Christ, however hard I made myself believe, I could only see as a remote and historical figure, far from my immediate concerns. And yet there is, I am sure, a religion in everyone which struggles for its own mystical satisfaction. I began to feel that my own came nearest to expression in whatever it was that Wordsworth felt he believed in:
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