Christopher Uptake

by Susan Price

  CHRISTOPHER UPTAKE

  BY

  SUSAN PRICE

  This fully revised e-book edition

  © Susan Price 2011

  First published in UK, Faber and Faber, 1981

  cover art © Andrew Price 2011

  Susan Price has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the copyright holder.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PART ONE: THE UNIVERSITY

  PART TWO: THE TOWN

  PART THREE: ALSTON

  NOTES: Portraits and priestholes

  Notes on the cover

  PART ONE

  THE UNIVERSITY

  THE UNIVERSITY

  My father did not want me to become a joiner as he was, and sent me away to be educated at a school several miles from home, where I had to lodge almost all the year round, since there was not enough time on Sundays and the occasional half-day holidays for me to go home and return.

  I was seven then and, for a while, I was frightened and bewildered, and wanted to go home; but schoolwork began and went on regardless of the feelings of the pupils.

  Lessons started at six in the morning and continued until eleven, when we ate; began again at one in the afternoon and continued until six; altogether, ten hours of verbs and nouns and prepositions and vocabulary. Inattention, talking, giggling and mistakes were punished by the cane, and people who were dreaming about home were punished more often than others and, since I could only reach my home through my dimming memory, while the school reached me every second of the day through my ears, eyes, nose and finger-tips, I soon lost my homesickness. I settled in so well that when I went home for Christmas, I was homesick for school, although I quickly became used to the greater freedom and comfort in my father's house and hated my return to school until the Easter holiday - but by the time Easter came, I had settled at school again.

  I was never sure whether or not I liked going home. I always started the journey enthusiastically, but when I reached Hawksmere my parents tried so hard to please me that I was embarrassed. I thought: This is not the way for parents to behave. After a day or two days they would be used to having me at home, and I would begin to feel at ease with them; and then I would return to school.

  I could never be sure, either, how many brothers and sisters I had. I would leave for school having one sister and a brother; but on my next visit would be told that my little brother had died while I had been away. ‘We didn't write to tell you, Chris, because you might have been upset.’ I would not have been. I had seen, for a week, a baby in a cradle; it had meant very little to me. But they looked so unhappy when they told me, and they were so solemn when they showed me the grave, that I was made to feel guilty and miserable without really understanding why.

  Then I would go away to school again, knowing my one sister a little better, and return the next year to find that I now had one sister and another brother - who had died by the time I came home again. They hadn't told me about the birth because they had wanted it to be a surprise.

  At school I slowly moved up through the forms, still working for ten hours a day and six days a week, at translation and Bible-study, and sentence analysis. We read poetry, and Caesar's histories in Latin, but only as words to translate; the masters would not answer questions about what we read because, I began to suspect, they could not answer them. On Sundays we had no lessons and, in the afternoons, were allowed to play in the school-yard-at tag, knights and races - although the masters preferred us to practise archery or to play chess, because it was quieter. On Sunday mornings we had to read the Bible, in silence, and we also had to attend church, as on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Some of us sang in the choir.

  I enjoyed going to church because it meant walking through the streets of the town and seeing all the people who were not at school, as they went in and out of their houses, called to each other, ran after their children and chatted with neighbours. I used to wish that I was one of them. I didn't like school. I didn't know why I was there; and I was insufferably bored. I learned my lessons because they were repeated so often that I could not help learning them; but the only reason for wanting to learn them was a wish to avoid being caned.

  In the year I was fourteen, my mother died, and I was allowed to go home to attend her funeral. Five days after leaving school, I was back at school again, unhappy, and very confused between what I ought to have felt and what I did feel. Now, strangely, I find that I can remember much more about the years I spent with my mother before I went to school than I could when I was fourteen, and now I feel real grief for my mother's death, because I do not even know what she looked like, which is the least of all that I should know about her. But then I remembered her far less well than I remembered the masters at school when I was away from them. Again, school work helped. After two or three days of work, it seemed that my mother had been dead for ever. The routine was too dull to encourage grief or guilt.

  I knew that when I was fifteen I should have to leave school, and I looked forward to that day. I thought that I should go home to Hawksmere and help my father to run his business. Obviously that was why I had been educated. I imagined myself learning the trade and able to talk casually, but knowledgeably, about woods and joints, as my father did; and learning the names and families and problems of everyone in the district, and doing my share of spreading the gossip and news. But when I went home at the Christmas before my final term, I carried with me a letter from my headmaster, which suggested to my father that, with his permission, a place might be found for me at university - a scholarship place, of course, since his circumstances were understood. I was not asked what I thought of the idea. My father took the letter to church, and asked the parson to read it to him after the service; then, when we were home, he told me what it had said, and that he thought it an excellent opportunity, and, when I went back to school, I carried with me a letter from my father, giving permission to the headmaster to seek a university place for me.

  I still did not understand why such an extensive education was considered necessary for me, and I could not think of another three years of grammar, and canings, and masters watching everything I did, with any pleasure - but I did not say so, because I knew that no one would listen. Instead, during my last term at the Grammar School, I found out all that my classmates knew about universities and even questioned the Under-master about them. I was told that university tutors were far better educated than grammar-school masters, and taught a much wider range of subjects; that all the grammar I had learnt had simply been a preparation for everything that I would learn at university. This made me like the idea of going there better. Perhaps university learning might even be useful. Perhaps the tutors, being so well-educated themselves, would not make the lessons so dull. Going to the university became my fixed idea of the future, and I accepted it.

  I left the grammar school after Easter, and spent a year at home, waiting until my old headmaster wrote to say that a place had been found for me. I would have spent the time helping my father in his workshop, but he had become impatient and irritable, and I couldn't please him. So I spent a lot of time wandering along lanes and across fields, and following the river into Hawksmere village. I did no reading; there was nothing to read in any case. The last ten months or so I spent in teaching my elder sister to read and write. She learned much more slowly than I had done because I could not make her pay attention when she did not want to, but by the time that a letter came to say that a university place had been found for me, she could read short, simple sentences and wri
te her name. I promised to teach her more when I came home on holiday, and she helped me to get together the things I needed for my journey and my stay away from home.

  When I reached the town, I found that the colleges of the University were surrounded on all sides by thin, muddy, dirty and noisy streets. The smell was worse than anything I had ever known; worse than muck-spreading season. It was sickeningly sweet and over-ripe at times, as thick as porridge and unbreathable at others, and I had to go with one hand over my mouth and nose. The streets were full of carts and coaches too, so that all of us on foot had to walk close to the walls amongst the piles of softening rubbish; and the noise that these vehicles made as their timbers creaked, and their iron-shod wheels bounded over the stones and ruts, added to the noise of many people chattering on the street corners, or bawling from shop doorways, or banging with hammers in back-yards, or filling buckets at wells and pumps, was altogether so tremendous that it ceased to be a noise at all and became a force striking at the head*. At first, I only wanted to hurry on and get away from the stink and the din, but even they were new, and there were things being sold, and people dressed in a style that I had never seen before - besides, I should have to get used to the town if I was to live there. I decided that after I had reported to my college and left my belongings there, I would come back and walk round the streets. I passed trustingly through the one gate in the college's high wall, only to find that the wall and the gate were not there to keep the inhabitants of the street out, but to keep the students in. I was told this by the master who was waiting for all new arrivals in the dining-hall, and he also read to me the University's other rules.

  As a scholarship boy, I was entitled to lodgings in my college, a new suit of clothes every Christmas; a hair-cut whenever it was judged necessary, two meals a day in the dining-hall, and the grant of a shilling a week. I was expected, by my general attitude, to show myself properly grateful for all this (as if the college were paying for it and not some charitable, dead old man).

  I was to rise every morning without fail at the required time, and I was to attend prayers in the chapel; I was to arrive punctually at classes, lectures and the dining-hall; I was to complete all set work and study diligently. I was always to treat the fellows of the college with courtesy and deference, and never to speak until given permission to do so.

  I was to wear, at all times, the clothes given to me by the college. The wearing of anything costlier, and especially the wearing of fashionable clothes, was most strictly forbidden, and I was to understand that the breaking of this rule might endanger the conditions of my scholarship.

  The University did not permit the reading of any books, pamphlets, plays or poems, other than those approved by its governors; and students were strictly forbidden to visit any theatre, tavern, drinking-house, market, shop, fair, or any other place of public entertainment in the city.

  It was not permitted for any student to indulge in the practice of writing poems, plays or essays, unless they were set by a tutor, and this rule would be strictly enforced.

  If any student was caught breaking any rule, his name would be added to the punishment-list, and he would be birched before the assembled college in the dining-hall on the following Thursday evening.*

  I could not help but feel crushed when I heard all this; it was worse than the grammar school. I cursed my father and my old headmaster, who had been responsible for sending me there. The obvious - that most of the rules simply weren't obeyed - did not at that time occur to me.

  At ten minutes to five in the morning, at that damned place, two old men were employed to go from room to room ringing a bell as hard as they could pump their ancient arms up and down. On hearing this signal we had to rise immediately, wash, dress, and get ourselves to the chapel by five. Prayers then went on for an hour, until six.

  I started in the winter term, and there was no heating in the chapel or in any of the students' rooms. There wasn't even a place to make a fire unless you built it on the floor - which I often considered. The cold was intense, and there was nowhere to go to escape it. Sometimes I could have cried.

  After prayers, we had breakfast, the first of the two meals the college provided for me. We had to be in the dining-hall by a quarter past six; if we were late, the kitchen staff were forbidden to serve us. The breakfast - and the evening meal - were always the same. For six days of the week they consisted of a fairly large portion of boiled beef served in a dish and covered by a thin, greasy porridge, made by adding oats to the water in which the beef had been boiled. Once a week we had boiled fish. On my first evening in the dining-hall I was told that we were always fed on rats stewed in pig's blood. After three hundred and thirty-eight days of boiled beef and porridge, or boiled fish, twice a day, I would have been perfectly willing to try rats in pig's blood, if it had ever been offered as an alternative.

  After breakfast we spent the morning either in private study or in being taught by one of the tutors. For each subject an approved doctrine had been laid down and we were taught only that, and never allowed to question it. If we did, the stricter tutors told us we were ignorant and impertinent, and reminded us of the rule which stated that tutors were to be respected. The milder-tempered men made excuses; the question wasn't relevant, or else we should not expect there to be an answer for everything.

  But I did not want an answer to everything so much as an admission that the University's dogma was not the only answer, and that perhaps we could have been taught something more practical than Rhetoric and Dialectic.

  When it grew warmer, I enjoyed the periods of private study more. I would take books from the college library and read them in my rooms; books about foreign countries, medicine, ships, witchcraft, warfare, politics, astronomy . . . There was another, unofficial library, too, which circulated amongst the students just those plays, poems, essays and pamphlets which the University banned. I borrowed and read a good many of them - some were about Judaism, some about the prophet Mohammed; some wanted everyone to pray in the open fields and ditches, others wanted everyone to turn Papist. Some wanted everyone to be atheists. The University authorities disapproved of them all equally.

  In the afternoon those of us in our first year continued with our lessons or, when we were given the chance, attended the disputations in which the second-year students took part before a committee of fellows. Every student, during his second year, had to take part in at least four of these disputations and, with this in mind, the first-year students paid attention.

  One fellow took the part of Moderator and named the propositions. One student from each pair had then to defend the proposition, and one to attack it - which might have been interesting if the fellows had not interrupted continually to correct some fault in reasoning or theory, or to scold for some quite irrelevant thing, such as badly repaired shoes, long hair or slumped shoulders. But the worst thing a student taking part in a disputation could do was to use something in his argument which he had not been taught. A shiver of gowns and sighs would then run through the fellows on the platform; they would lean backwards and forwards in their chairs to see each other's faces. Who taught this student on this subject? How does he come to say this? No student could hope to get away with it. The fellows knew every fact, every argument and theory word by word, because they had taught them in those unvarying words for year after year. At any differing from the arguments they were expecting, they started, as if at a loud noise. The student responsible would be examined on the spot, and if he was weak-spirited enough to admit that he had read it in some banned book or other, our rooms would be searched, and any of the banned works that were found were burned.

  I sometimes wonder if this strictness was deliberate, in order to force us to think for ourselves. We either had to break the rules or see ourselves becoming as pallid and lifeless as the grey beef-porridge we ate every day. Perhaps the fellows understood that; but I doubt it. They understood so little else.

  The disputations began at one in the afternoon
and went on until five, although there was an hour's break from three till four, during which we could have something to eat and drink.

  From five until six we prayed in the college chapel, and by a quarter past six we had to be in the dining-hall, or we would miss our evening meal. If it was a Thursday, and you had been caught breaking rules during the previous week, you would be called from your seat to the head of the room, and birched by one of the fellows. No one except the very richest students could avoid this; there were so many rules that you could not help but be caught breaking one of them at least once a fortnight. In order to have any peace, it was best to accept that you were going to be beaten at least that often and then, if you weren't beaten for three weeks you considered yourself lucky.

  After the meal had been finished, the tables were cleared and we had to complete any work set for us that morning, while the two fellows on duty watched us with birch rods in their hands. This work finished, we were free, from eight o'clock onwards, to do as we pleased - provided that we did not break any rules and were in bed by nine.

  That part of the college routine which I resented most was the hour wasted, morning and evening, in prayer. Perhaps if the chapel had been heated I should now be devout, but the chapel was never warm, even in summer.