Appetite for Life : The Education of a Young Diarist, 1924-1927 (9781551996776)

by Ritchie, Charles

  Still, I had just settled down to work when I looked out of the window and there walking up the drive was Katherine herself with the two little girls. She was wearing a pale pink dress and swinging a straw hat on her arm, coming out of the green tunnel of the trees in to the sunlight onto the gravel in front of the house. I called out to her and she looked up at my window, tossing back her hair like the girl in the sonnet. I went down to talk to her. We sat together on the porch steps in the sun while the children played on the lawn, pretending they were horses. She said, “I was so surprised to find you in” (although she knows perfectly well that I never go to lectures on Tuesday). I gave her an envelope with the poem in it but asked her not to open it till she got home. She said, “Take your specs off and let me look at your eyes. You look quite different without specs, like another person. Put them on again.” I said, “You have my ring and I haven’t got anything of yours,” so she said, “You can have this hankie if you like,” and she gave me a tiny handkerchief smelling of that lily-of-the-valley scent she uses. I asked her if she really knew how much I loved her and she said, “I suppose you say that to all the girls.” I could have hit her. She spoils everything by pretending not to understand. Then she began calling to the children, who were playing perfectly contentedly, and they came running up and asking questions, so I said, “I must get back to work but I will walk with you down the drive.” She let me take her arm. It was like a piece of wood. She made herself so unresponsive and looked so sulky, I said, “When will I see you again?” and she said, “Oh, I don’t know. I am going to the movies with Peter tonight and I’m busy all day tomorrow.” So we parted at the lodge gates and she didn’t even turn round to say goodbye but bent down with her back to me and began fussing with little Lale’s hair and kissing her. She says she doesn’t know what to make of me, but I certainly don’t know what to make of her. Does she love me even an inch, or is this all a game?

  16 March 1925.

  I got a very sweet note from Katherine this morning saying that she loves the poem and that she never had a poem written to her before and that she had shown it to her sister, who said how beautiful it was. Then it dawned on me that she thinks I wrote the poem myself as I didn’t put Rupert Brooke’s name to it. It had never occurred to me that she would think this, especially as last month I lent her my copy of Rupert Brooke’s poems and she said how much she enjoyed them, but I can’t explain to her now that I didn’t write it. It would spoil everything.

  I am going to take up fencing. Rodney Wilmot has talked me into it and I am to go three times a week to the Dalhousie gymnasium starting tomorrow.

  I had decided last week that I would intervene in the college debate on the future of India despite the fact that I know nothing whatsoever about India, but I could not know any less than that stupid dolt Anderson who has been holding the floor on the subject. I felt very nervous beforehand and went over my speech walking up and down in my bedroom about a hundred times. Then I tore up my notes and threw them in the wastepaper basket as I despise reading a speech from notes. All the way to King’s along the railway cutting I was sweating, really sweating, with the fear that I was going to make a fool of myself, but the moment I got to my feet my self-consciousness vanished. I felt as though I were on the stage, not myself but another person, quite at my ease. In my speech I argued that India should remain under British rule, that it would be worse off free than it is now. I chose this line because Anderson was bleating about freedom. Professor Walker said afterwards that he disagreed with everything I said but that it was an exceptional speech and that I had a great future before me.

  19 March 1925.

  Georgina, the maid, is somewhat peculiar. Three times this week she has stepped on the bell on the floor under the dining-room table and then rushed to the front door to open it, thinking it was the doorbell ringing. You would think that by now she would have caught on to the fact that the dining-room bell rings in the kitchen. Perhaps she is thinking of her “fellow.” Yesterday she was trying to decide what to wear to go out with him and she said, “I guess I look better into a tam-o’-shanter than I look into anything else.”

  Wouldn’t it be nice if for one day and night I could stop thinking of sex. I wonder if other people think of that one subject as often as I do, and not only thinking it. I sometimes wonder whether I am a bit crazy and this spring weather makes it worse. What would it be like to be castrated? A jolly good idea I should think, then I could concentrate on my work, pass my exams, save money, and have a brilliant career. People say that playing games takes your mind off it: “A healthy mind in a healthy body” and all that stuff. Certainly I don’t think fencing will make much difference. Anyway I have not got a healthy mind and I am not sure that I want to have one.

  I went for my first day’s fencing today. It is quite hard work. The first thing I had to learn was to keep my arm straight as everything is done with the wrist and I began by lunging about the way I have seen duels in the movies.

  24 March 1925.

  I devoted the whole day to my thesis on government and my head whirls with town councils and municipal by-laws.

  Today our cat was chloroformed out of mistaken kindness because her leg was broken. I knew her better than anyone and I am sure she was still interested in life.

  In the evening old Mrs. Cady began talking about her youth. Her father, although the eldest son, was an impoverished clergyman, so he gave up Mount Uniacke to his brother. Then all her family of seven went to live in a tiny house in Halifax. Her uncle, Norman Uniacke, was eccentric. Even in the daytime he always wore a red cotton night-cap and a long dustcoat. My mother said that once when she was a child visiting them he passed through the drawing-room carrying a pot of boiling water and she asked what he was going to do with it and he said, “If you must know, child, I am going to wash my buttocks.”

  30 March 1925.

  Mother has started raking the gravel in front of the house, which is a very bad sign as it shows she is bored and impatient – sick of having all these people in the house. She gets these spurts of energy and sometimes cleans and polishes all the shoes in the house. On the other hand, she cannot cook an egg and never goes near the kitchen if she can help it.

  2 April 1925.

  I spent the morning at the polling booth as a volunteer helper for the elections. The voting took place in a big wooden shed. I had to rush about with cards with electors’ names on them. Meanwhile, motorcars were being sent out in all directions to bring in voters who had no other way of getting here. We heard later in the day that the Conservatives had made a clean sweep, which was very satisfactory. Of course, the family have always been Conservatives and so I am, though I don’t know much about politics. Also, all our friends and relations are very much against the Americans. Mr. Whitman says he would “prefer even the Russian Communists to Americans,” and he is the most conservative person I know. As for Cousin Susie, when her sister’s child died (she had married an American) Susie said, “Well, it is sad, of course, that he died, but if he had lived he would have grown up an American,” but then she is a bit crazy on the subject of our Loyalist ancestry as if the American Revolution had happened yesterday. What we all believe in is the Empire, but my father, when he was alive, believed in Canada, and my great-uncle John was what they call a Father of Confederation. My mother’s family were against Confederation and wanted Nova Scotia to be on its own as part of the Empire. I find it hard to think of Canada. It is so enormous, all those prairies and mountains and cities and open spaces. Nova Scotia is small enough to understand and even when I want to get away from it I know it is my country and I can’t do anything about that even if I wanted to.

  Reading Swinburne’s Mary Stuart all morning when I should have been preparing for my mathematics exam. Mother’s favourites are Byron and Keats in poetry and Scott in prose, but Swinburne is my discovery. The colour and music carry me into an enchanted haze. I am reading Chastelard’s Love for the Queen. It is the most sensuous poetry I
have ever read. I am waiting for a girl on whom I shall hang Chastelard’s passionate words and be ready to die for her.

  Cousin Reg came to tea today. He is a kind man, but what hell it would be if my mother died and he became my guardian.

  4 April 1925.

  I do not believe that Peter is the least in love with Katherine. That is all put on, partly to show off and partly to tease me. I expect he does like kissing her, etc. – who wouldn’t – but he doesn’t love her. All the same, he gets further with her in some ways than I do just because he really doesn’t give a damn and she knows it.

  We were just starting out today for little Lale Almon’s birthday party when who should arrive but Cyril in a very lachrymose mood and began talking religion. He started on the evangelicals and the Low Church in general, how narrow and ignorant they are, and then Mother came in and said to hurry up to be at the Almons’ on time, and Cyril went right on about Christ’s death being blood sacrifice and that auricular confession is sanctioned in the prayer book, until Mother exploded with irritation and practically shooed him out of the house. He couldn’t have chosen a worse subject, especially in Mother’s mood in the last few days, and as she always particularly disapproves of the notion of blood sacrifices and is not at all in favour of confession, auricular or otherwise.

  5 April 1925.

  Mother continues in a very irritable mood. I think it is all these people who infest the house for lunch, tea, and dinner. Yet she makes them all welcome and in fact is really quite glad to see them and charms them with her interest in them and her warmth of welcome. But then she gets bored, and when they have gone her mimicry of them is merciless. Yet if they were in trouble there is nothing she would not do for them. She expects more out of life than it offers and so do I.

  I went into Miss Stewart’s for tutoring in maths. I would rather break both my legs than face the algebra paper. As I was walking into town wearing my new beige-coloured Oxford bags some village boys followed me along, calling out names. I turned round on them and told them to shut up. At first they looked quite abashed but the minute my back was turned they began again, one red-headed boy imitating the way I was walking and pretending to smoke a cigarette. To throw them off my tracks I went in by the gate to the Gorsebrook field but they leant over the stone wall and kept on calling. I walked slowly through the field trying to seem unconcerned and not to hurry in case they would think I was running away from them. It was a most humiliating experience. Is this going to happen every time I go out of our gates, and wouldn’t it be awful if it happened while I was walking with Katherine?

  Dear old Miss Stewart thinks I will pass the exam but she is wrong. She loves mathematics the way I love reading. She is a fine person, a high-minded Scotswoman, endlessly patient, wears an old-fashioned black silk blouse, with glasses that snap on an attachment on her breast, and has white hair done up into a bun. As I walked home I thought that everyone was looking at me as though I were peculiar. When I got home Mrs. Fitzgerald was here for tea – she has goitre, one eye gone and the other very much popped out – also an Englishwoman, whose name I forget, who said that she feared that a play she and her young son had seen “would put certain ideas into his head and in that way she did not like the play.” Quite a good tea but the chocolate cake was stale.

  Cyril joined us at tea. He says the new curate “is so good with fallen women and that the Dean would horsewhip them.”

  Professor Falconer talked to me after lectures today. He is a splendid person, so cultivated and civilized and calm. He seems miles away from me. How do people get to be so calm? I want to do so infinitely much, read so much and write so much, and love and travel and adventure.

  15 April 1925.

  I took my algebra exam today in that great bare gymnasium-like room that I know too well. There were five problems to solve in two hours. My brain seemed to seize up like a car does. Instead of thinking of the problems I kept thinking: what if I fail as I have done three times before? How disappointed Miss Stewart will be after all her work.

  17 April 1925.

  The Fleet is in. What a day! Peter and I were invited aboard and taken into the wardroom and each had a tremendously potent cocktail and heard some wonderfully funny stories, quite unprintable.

  Then in the evening to the much-talked-of Government House ball for the Navy. I did not enjoy it as much as I hoped, as I danced mostly with Sue, who wore a pale green dress and had a bad toothache. Government House has been redecorated and lost all its old-fashioned atmosphere. The ballroom looks like a hotel or the saloon of a liner. I was getting quite tired, especially as from vanity I had not worn my glasses, when an extraordinary thing happened. There was a most stunningly beautiful girl there, an American from out of town, just like a movie star, wearing a sequined dress, very close-fitting to her figure. All the naval officers were after her, waiting in rows to dance with her, so I thought, “Oh well, I’ll have a try,” so I went to the buffet and drank two glasses of champagne in quick succession and then I went up to her when she was dancing with a senior Navy man and tapped him on the arm and said, “May I cut in, please?” He looked quite astonished but she said, “Why not,” and swayed out of his arms into mine. We danced a few steps and she said, “I am tired of dancing; let’s go into the garden,” so we did. The garden was dark apart from a few coloured lanterns strung up and we stood side by side, looking over the harbour with its glimmering lights. Then she suddenly turned round and kissed me full in the mouth. Such a kiss. I was stunned with surprise and absolute delight. Then she said, “I suppose we must go back to that boring dance.” As we walked up the stone steps leading into the hall she kissed me again and put her body against mine and whispered, “You are a sweet kid.” When we got back into the lighted ballroom there were the Navy men waiting for her and she blew me a kiss and danced away. Sue said, “Who was that American girl you were dancing with? She’s drunk.” She may have been a little, but nothing can take away from the fact that the most attractive girl at the whole ball kissed me of her own accord.

  18 April 1925.

  I have accepted a part in the college play. There were rehearsals all morning. It is a Booth Tarkington comedy called Tweedles, very whimsical and not very comic but “clean fun,” suitable for the audiences we are likely to have in the small towns where we hope to raise money for King’s University, which is perennially broke. It is planned that wherever possible the members of the company will be put up by well-wishers of King’s, often the Anglican clergyman and his wife or a lady church-worker. My part in the play is that of the heroine’s rich uncle, a gruff old codger who turns out in the end to have a heart of gold. At first he opposes the girl’s marriage on the ground that the hero, who comes off the farm, is not good enough to marry his beautiful niece and future heiress. In order to underline my wealth and social status I am condemned to wear a morning coat throughout the play and am made up with what appears to be putty-coloured butter in which are drawn lines to indicate my wrinkles. I wear a very hot and heavy horsehair wig and a white handlebar moustache which so far cannot be made to stick properly. I carry a cane and hobble about the stage with bent back, wheezing and chuckling in what I hope is an old-mannish manner, although I have never met an old man who was at all like my version. All the actors and actresses are students at King’s. The heroine is acted by Alice Prouse. She comes from Newfoundland, has fair hair, a very pale complexion, light blue eyes, and a rather long nose. I think she is definitely attractive. The hero is played by Malcolm Dymock. He is a second-year student, handsome in a heavy way, with disgustingly wavy blond hair, and is much too pleased with himself. The clergyman who finally weds the happy couple is acted by Henry Ross, a charming, humorous character. The only thing I have against him is that his ambition in real life is to be a schoolmaster. My counterpart, the hero’s farmer father, is Max. I went to school with him and have always liked him, although we could not be more different. He never reads a book and is interested only in sport and girls. He dri
nks quite a lot and is deaf in one ear. Then there is Hunter, also a second-year student. He is supposed to be the “business manager” of the company. He is a most peculiar character and if I had a business I would not like him to manage it. He is dirty, ugly, and aggressive. There are two other girls in minor parts: Miss Sullivan, who takes offence readily but is quite fun if she lets herself go, and Miss Caducci, who is pale, composed, and intelligent. The girls are under the chaperonage of Mrs. Macrae, who will accompany the tour. She used to be Dean of Women at the college and looks, as P. G. Wodehouse would put it, “like a sheep who has had bad news.” She is fussy and ineffectual and revels in getting one aside and confiding, or being confided in. Her hair is her great problem. She is always doing it up in different ways but it never stays because she says “It is too fine.”

  20 April 1925.

  Our tour has begun. The whole company packed into the train to go to Windsor. We went straight to the theatre for rehearsals only to find that there was no stage furniture as the manager had made no arrangements for it. I can see that this is going to be a problem throughout the tour. We have our own stage sets but no furniture and will have to borrow from well-wishers in the towns. I felt nervous all day at having to be on stage for the first time. I lunched at King’s Collegiate, the first of the many boarding-schools I have attended in my life. Roley was only eight years old when he went there. Today we ate in the school dining-room but at a table apart from the boys with the headmaster and his sister, Miss Judd. The headmaster was just the same, or rather he was the same as he always used to be with visiting grown-ups, quite different from when you were waiting to be beaten by him, or when he came swirling through the halls of the school with his black gown flying. He seems a nice little man and you wonder what you were frightened of. Miss Judd still keeps the art of making you feel uneasy. I suppose it is a habit she formed to deal with the boys. She kept talking of how untidy I was as a boy and how my glasses used to be done up with string, and repeated the jokes the sergeant-major used to make about my performances on the bar in the gym, saying that it was “better to watch Ritchie major on the bar than to watch Charlie Chaplin.” I felt as if at any moment I might be bewitched back into being one of the grubby little boys at the long tables and would never be able to escape, and that my being grown-up was a kind of dream. I could hardly believe my ears when, as I was leaving, the boy who was detailed to show us to the door called me “Sir.”