It seemed to me that nothing ever happened; Dudley I suppose felt the same—we both wanted to do something.
Eventually we went off to see his paternal grandmother. She was being given oxygen; otherwise, Mrs Hamilton said, she would die. She said ‘yaller’ instead of ‘yellow’, which I thought was very uneducated. Mrs Hamilton said it was not; some people said ‘yaller’; and ‘laylock’, instead of ‘lilac’. They were not uneducated but were pronunciations used by people who were very well brought up. I asked Mrs Hamilton about “at’; my mother had told me when we were going aboard ship not to talk like people whom I should hear saying “ear’ when they meant ‘hear’, and “at’ when they meant ‘hat’. But ‘yaller’ and ‘laylock’, though wrong, were all right.
The Hamilton house was very big and full of nice things—nicer even than the pianola which looked so funny when the keys went bobbing up and down though no one was touching them. There was a large garden with some fine lawns and a huge cedar tree.
We played a lot in the garden. One day we bought some bird lime because Chums said that if you spread it carefully on twigs you could catch birds that got entangled in it. For ages and ages we caught nothing except the gardener whom we did not want because he was bad tempered and did not like our smashing his biggest flower pots; we did not like his not liking it because it spoiled our otter hunts. For these—years later at Oxford I read an account of the game by Kenneth Grahame in Dream Days, but at the time it was our own invention—you needed the co-operation of the cat. At first it used to like us, came up in a trusting way and started purring when Dudley or Stewart or I took her in our arms and made much of her. Then, while she sat and purred and smiled, one of us would fetch one of the largest pots from the gardener’s shed. The next stage was a bit tricky, even from the first, because the cat seemed to think it was time to go for a walk when the one holding her put her on the ground and continued to stroke and pat her. However, without using much force it was possible to get the flower pot over her. Then she got agitated and when she had, as it were, come to the boil, one of us who had brought a croquet mallet crashed it down on the top of the pot thus shattering it and releasing the cat. So she got off to a good start—as Dudley and I tried to explain to Mrs Hamilton who said it was cruel to chase the cat round the garden as we did. We said we would not mind and set out to prove it by using Colin instead of the cat. We decided to use a big—enormous would be a more accurate term—ornamental vase for Colin as the pots were not big enough. The scheme came to nothing because Colin had been the youngest brother for too long; his suspicions were fully alerted the moment Dudley or Stewart began to say anything friendly or to use any terms of endearment less offensive than ‘stinker’. The game died because the gardener complained about his pots, and the cat had become very unco- operative. As Dudley said, “It wouldn’t run properly anyway.”
We did have some success with the bird lime. One day when we had given up hope we found a sparrow on a bush behaving in a very peculiar way. It kept fluttering but could not fly. We thought it was ill and we were filled with compassion, determined to catch it and nurse it back to health. Colin caught it at last but immediately let it go with cries of disgust—it was covered with horrible sticky stuff which he tried fairly successfully to wipe off on his clothes. Dudley suddenly realized “It’s the bird lime!” Of course! it was our first success! Getting the fatuous Colin out of the way we quickly retrieved our bird. Gone was our compassion; it was but an instant’s work to wring its neck. We decided it was not really game and would not require to be hung.
Colin was sent to collect firewood while we three set about plucking the bird. At first the bird-lime was a hindrance, but after a quarter of an hour or so the feathers became a kind of amalgam and really assisted in keeping them under control. When we had finally plucked and cleaned the bird there did not seem much meat left; even what there was looked unappetizing. But we cut off the more useless parts—’beaks and works’—and cooked it. Colin wouldn’t touch it, and “anyhow he had practically let it fly away”— so that left three of us to share. I chose a leg because that seemed less revolting. We ate our portions which we pronounced delicious.
10
MRS HAMILTON always had a sparkle and a smile in her eye. With her three sons she required no instruction on the need for discipline; looking back now I wonder how she preserved her sanity and her lively sense of the ridiculous. I think the cook and two housemaids used to keep her well informed of our wilder excursions. Otherwise I could not explain how she appeared on the roof just as we were about to test our essay in aeronautics.
We had built an aeroplane. The venture was surrounded by the utmost secrecy chiefly because unlike mine, Dudley’s ideas about his mother had been developing in a quite different direction; he considered her to be losing her capacity for fun; in his view she was losing her nerve. Indeed her attitude to the cooking and eating of the sparrow lacked warmth. Furthermore, her appreciation of me, which was unmistakable, appeared to be based almost entirely on my least admirable qualities.
There was the incident of the rubber for catapults. Dudley and I had been given our pocket money—sixpence a week it was then—and both were stoney broke by the end of the day. Called upon to explain this circumstance Dudley pointed out that the catapult rubber had cost that amount. Mrs Hamilton said it was ridiculous to waste money in such a profligate manner, and added in an unfortunate moment, “I am sure Wilfred would never spend his money on anything so silly.”
“But he has!” whooped Dudley in unconcealed triumph.
Blushing hotly I had to admit that I was in fact just that kind of ass. Mrs Hamilton’s revelation of her opinion of me served to formuate Dudley’s suspicions that I was really ‘wet’—as his mother and everyone knew—and that his mother likewise suffered from some kind of kink that deflected her judgement in the direction of fundamentally ‘wet’ people. I had lost caste both ways.
Then there was the episode of the Toy Soldier War. We both had a small number of tin soldiers which we regarded as so idiotic that we did not consider them worthy of the time which would have to be spent on setting them out. Then one day we saw some little brass cannon in the window of an otherwise undistinguished toy shop. We went in to buy some sweets—cocoanut ice at one penny for a quarter of a pound of pink and white was a ‘must’ largely for economic reasons—and Dudley idly asked about the cannon. They were twopence each, real solid brass, “and look”, said the shopkeeper, “you can fire them!” So you could! Incredible though it seems, they were pierced at the breech; through this small hole you could insert from inside the fuse of a Chinese cracker or jumping jack. The crackers were extremely inexpensive. You could buy a whole mass, perhaps a pound, for sixpence. Having detached one of these little cylinders you could place it, fuse first, in the gun barrel which was exactly the right length, coax the fuse through the vent in the breech, and—the shopkeeper showed us— light the fuse. For this of course you had to have a match. In a moment the fuse ignited the tiny charge, there was a gratifying bang and the remainder of the fire cracker was ejected in a most realistic manner!
That settled it. “No cocoanut ice”, as Goring might have said. “Two cannons please, a pound of crackers and a box of matches.” The last item was a momentary problem because we were not allowed to have them. Dudley was in favour of my buying them because I was his mother’s favourite and so wouldn’t “get into a row”. I demurred and Stewart hit on the obvious solution which was for Colin, who was not present to object, to buy them. We raced home and up to the attic.
All this was done in the utmost secrecy although how anyone could have failed to notice the stampede up the stairs and the immediate silence following our arrival in the attic I do not know. We set out the soldiers in two opposing armies and then Dudley said, “Can I borrow your matches Colin?”
“I haven’t got any matches.” But of course we took no notice of him.
“Thanks very much.” He must have been surprised to
be thanked at all, but his suspicions were lulled by the start of the battle.
It was truly a grand affair and though at first it seemed to take rather a long time to load and fire the cannon, this was compensated for when I landed a shot, still glowing, in Dudley’s magazine. It did not catch at first, but when it did the attic seemed to become an inferno of flying crackers augmented by my magazine which had now caught. Colin, “dirty little sneak,” shouting in tones of lively indignation, “my matches!”, made for the door yelling for his mother. Luckily he bumped into the cook and a scared housemaid who had come, originally to see what the silence was all about, but now could smell gunpowder.
They put it out. Mrs Hamilton showed the first signs of her declining sense of humour by saying, with a tight lipped expression, that we might have set the house on fire. She did not seem disposed on this occasion to favour me. The three of us were too annoyed with Colin to bother even when Mr Hamilton confiscated our cannons. Colin, who had not allowed for the dangers of shrieking “my matches!”, was, we were glad to notice, spanked for his contraband. So, we reflected, there was some justice in the world.
It can be seen that the deterioration in Mrs Hamilton’s sense of humour and Dudley’s augmentation of his capacity for secrecy proceeded on parallel but non-Euclidean lines which sloped to terminate in an eighteen-inch balustrade between us and the garden some thirty feet below. Our aeroplane was constructed from the gardener’s bamboo canes, the disappearance of which he had noted and duly reported to Mrs Hamilton. The canes were tied together in such a way that they “could not possibly come loose”. There was no fabric on body or wings for the sufficient reason that we could not afford any, but Stewart also pointed out that it was only the appearance that was affected; it was accordingly decided that we should delay no longer but launch it from the roof as it was. Colin was the obvious choice for passenger had he not already shown in the matter of the matches that he was a sneak and could not be trusted. We decided that the three of us would hold it above our heads, gripping firmly so as not to let go before the plane had landed us all softly on earth below, and then at a concerted signal launch ourselves from the roof. Colin, from whom we were hidden by a chimney stack, was waiting on the lawn by the cedar where he “would see something”. This stirred him up so much that he nearly wrecked everything with his questions and bad temper.
We were just settling the final details when the attic door opened behind us where it gave on to the roof, framing Mrs Hamilton, a serious faced Mr Hamilton and the cook. What, they wanted to know, were we up to on the roof? Although it was lunch time, and therefore a period during which Mr Hamilton was usually back at home, his presence gave a very definite air of solemnity to the procedings. I began to wish I was not there.
Did we not know we were not allowed on the roof? Well, of course we did, but it did not sound as if the question required an answer. We had to come down “at once!” We went. I felt especially foolish; the “at once!” applied to me just as much as it did to the others. I was one of them, but this time it did not console me because I was not at all sure that anybody really thought I was ‘one of them’; far from it. Later in the day, when Mrs Hamilton was talking ‘in tranquility’ and asking Dudley if he hadn’t realized that the three of us would probably have been killed and certainly very badly injured, she ran her fingers through his hair sadly and as if she missed him. Stewart, Colin and he were very near to her. I felt I was more of a liability than an asset though she had not directly said anything to me. For the first time for a long while I remembered my mother and father and sister, and felt homesick. I even felt, for the first time, that I would rather be with Mrs Rhodes who frightened me, but had been upset when Freddie Sexton died. Though he died at school it was believed that the appendicitis which killed him had been contracted at Archer Hall one week-end when he stayed there. Who could want to go through such guilt and heart-searching on account of the son of absent parents? I never realized at the time what a responsibility I must have been to my hosts.
It must have been about this time when the unco-operation of the cat, the limited field for explosive experiments in warfare, aeronautics and cookery pressed heavily on our imaginative resources, that we dug a cubical hole in the orchard, big enough to hold the four of us, and built a small fire-place in one clay wall. We roofed it over with boards. Perhaps it was the stifling heat when we were all inside with the fire burning brightly that led to the discovery that the indignant Colin stank. He was kicked out. He was, however, good at billiards and this endeared him to his father. This time it was the three of us who were excluded; we did not, or could not, play.
We dragged Mr and Mrs Hamilton to see our ‘house’. They were genuinely and understandably impressed. The next day, by Mr Hamilton’s orders and without reference to us, the hole was filled in—the roof made it a skilfully disguised man-trap for anyone who had to work in the orchard.
This was a blow to us and contributed to a note of ill-will between us and the Hamilton parents. Something peculiar was happening to us all. Life was dull. Was there nothing interesting to do?
Dudley persuaded a disreputable character called Duck to buy us a packet of Woodbine cigarettes which we smoked in a field adjacent to the Hamilton grounds. The thrill was impaired by an estranging sense of guilt made worse because we were sick. ‘Common diversions divert us no longer’. In short, we were bored.
11
I WAS aware that the boredom was lessened from time to time, or the mixture of guilt and boredom changed to become more interesting. A religious would have said, The Devil entered into us’, or, at an earlier stage, ‘Satan found work for idle hands to do’ if—as the implication was—we did not find something to do ourselves. It was clear that the ‘something’ should not be interesting. But it is difficult, when you are bored, to set out to find something ‘different’ but equally boring.
One night when I was lying on my bed with pyjamas on waiting for Dudley to get into his bed, he suddenly discarded the towel he had round his waist and jumped astride me as if challenging me to wrestle. “Now how do you feel?” he said. I felt nothing physically; mentally a sense of boredom and anti-climax, which soon communicated itself to Dudley who, after a few futile attempts to provoke a struggle, got off. I was bitterly disappointed. I had no idea what I wanted, but I did know—and the realization grew with time—that I wanted it badly. I wished I had encouraged Dudley to go on and then I would have found out what he was going to do. But now I think Dudley did not know any more than I did.
When I expressed this to my psycho-analyst years later he was convinced I knew. This seems to me now to be a failure to understand the horrible and painful nature of frustration, its powerful contribution, with fear and guilt, to an absolute hatred and loathing of sexuality in any shape or form. Furtiveness, guilt, frustration, in alternation or all together—such was my experience for many years, the most impressionable years of my life, the matrix from which passionate love supposedly will spring.
Dudley and I continued to duel and wrestle with a growing sense of pointlessness. The only overt and unmistakable emotional experience was when futility flared into mutual dislike, or more correctly, hate. I did stay with him again—a visit which differed from the past in our avoidance of any tantalizing situation. We met again, once, after the war; it was the last time. At school we kept our distance.
Living with the Hamiltons typified luxury, warmth, almost sybaritic pleasure though Mrs Hamilton discouraged any idea that we should be provided with ready-made pleasures. The Rhodes family was no less well-off; they had a farm in Yorkshire, one on the Isle of Wight and the family dwelling in Hertfordshire. “In those days”, Mr Rhodes said to me after the war, “you could make farming pay. Now Heaton cannot, and I’m sure I couldn’t.” I doubt if that was strictly true; there was nothing lacking of comfort and luxury in the farmhouse on the hill. But in summer it was not difficult to imagine that the soft expanse of field and hedgerow could change to harsh and crude un
der the bitter winds of winter. Heaton and his father had that winter in their characters. Bob over at Mundens had it too.
At the Rhodes’s I felt a need for one particular girl in a way which would have seemed strange at the Hamiltons. Kathy was a pretty girl, tall and slender. She spoke straight; she was fiery tempered. I remember her contrasting sharply with her mother who sat by the fire-light, with her calm Mona Lisa expression, watching Kathy confronting her father with eyes ablaze.
Mrs Rhodes I feared; there was something timeless about her capacity for maternal love. But the tender feelings which I expected between mother and child took no form that I could recognize in her contact either with her sons or her daughters. Kathy with flushed face and sparkling eyes I could understand; the cold scrutiny of her mother was something I could expect to see in the farmyard outside rather than indoors in the welcoming glow of the fireside. What I might have learned at Archer Hall, but did not, was that breeding is ruthless. The graces and civilities play like a beautiful irridescence on the surface when feelings are absent or in abeyance. With Dudley our friendly tussels turned to frustration and hate; with Heaton there were no friendly tussels. Slaughter, bloodshed, cold, and Kathy’s flashing eyes alive with love or hate—those were things I could see and know. But I did not know the meaning of what I saw. The Hamiltons and the Rhodes’s were providing an education that was not in the timetable. I saw: and was conquered. I did not understand.
The Long Week-End 1897-1919 Page 8
