CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE Page 7

  … I have learned

  To look on nature, not as in the hour

  Of thoughtless youth; but hearing often-times

  The still, sad music of humanity,

  Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

  To chasten and subdue. And I have felt

  A presence that disturbs me with the joy

  Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

  Of something far more deeply interfused,

  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

  And the round ocean and the living air,

  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man …

  I read that then as I do now, feeling close to tears, and with a sense of wonder which I’m sure must be known to those who are accustomed to religious contemplation and gain pleasure from Evensong on summer evenings in country churches. I shall always be intensely grateful to Mr Chalfont for teaching me about Wordsworth and can even forgive him for sparing the hare.

  There were other good things about Harrow. Martin Witteridge and I joined the Art Society and we used to go off on bicycles to make water-colour sketches of Ruislip reservoir under the guidance of Mr Nares, the wanly good-looking Art Master who used to ask us if we could ‘see anything that gave us joy’. On the way home Witteridge and I would drink gin and lime in suburban pubs and he would tell me about his mother who had, he claimed, a truly wonderful sense of humour, his beautiful cousins and his uncle who had been an equerry to the King.

  Witteridge asked me to stay with his family. His father was a redhaired ramrod of a man, dressed in the uniform of the Irish Guards, who went off to the War Office each morning with a briefcase which Witteridge and I inspected for secret documents. We found it contained nothing but a small bottle of milk and a tomato sandwich. Witteridge had told me that his mother loved practical jokes and she would be first deceived and then endlessly amused if I came to stay wearing a false moustache and talking in a thick Hungarian accent. Although I was nervous during my first stay I did this, fortified by a good many gin and limes, but Lady Witteridge did nothing but ask me polite questions about my family and life at Harrow, and the beautiful cousins, who were uniformly dressed in twinsets and pearls, didn’t speak to me at all. After lunch I abandoned the moustache and we went out for another lengthy pub-crawl on our bicycles. We took with us Witteridge’s younger brother Tom, who went to Stowe, was extremely good-looking, drew with real talent and irritated us greatly by saying that he liked to sleep next to ‘young warm flesh’ and ‘never found it at all hard to come by’.

  By the end of a year Mr Churchill had taken over the Government and began to look much younger. Oliver Pensotti and I met in London one winter evening during the holidays. We went for a drink in the bar of the Normandy Hotel where Oliver got into conversation with an ATS named Jeannie, as the bombs started to fall. The sound of breaking glass, the sweet taste of gin and lime, the peril of arbitrary thuds and the silent presence of the rather chunky Jeannie, who smiled but hardly spoke, added to the excitement of the evening. Months before, a fire-bomb had destroyed the kitchen of my father’s flat in the Temple and he now lived all the time in the country, potting up, pricking out, trying to get enough petrol to keep the grass cut and getting up early in the blackout to travel to London to deal with the rising tide of divorce. So we went back to the empty flat and sat among the dust-sheets and the ruins of the kitchen. I found several bottles of port which we drank; descending on a foundation of gin and lime they made the room lurch like a ship at sea. I started to tell Jeannie about Lord Byron and his fatal love for his half-sister, but she was looking at Oliver in a strangely fixed sort of way and whispered words I found extremely enigmatic, ‘Have you got a rubber?’

  Almost at once they moved into the bedroom. I was left alone with my memories of his fatal Lordship’s love life and pulled down, from my father’s dusty shelves, a book of his poems:

  So, we’ll go no more a roving

  So late into the night,

  Though the heart be still as loving,

  And the moon be still as bright.

  For the sword outwears its sheath,

  And the soul wears out the breast.

  And the heart must pause to breathe,

  And love itself have rest.

  The crashes were coming nearer. I had a momentary fear of my roving being put a stop to before it had even begun, my sword being laid to rest before it had worn out anything at all.

  In due course the happy couple re-emerged and the ATS went off to rejoin her regiment.

  ‘Well,’ I said to Oliver. ‘How on earth did you manage?’

  ‘Manage?’

  ‘About the breasts, of course.’

  ‘Perfectly all right.’ Oliver gave a smile of satisfied achievement. ‘You hardly notice them at all.’

  Chapter Six

  ‘You want to be a writer?’ my father said, after I had told him that I had sold my first short story to the Harrovian for ten bob. ‘My dear boy, have some sort of consideration for your unfortunate wife. You’ll be sitting around the house all day wearing a dressing-gown, brewing tea and stumped for words. You’ll be far better off in the law. That’s the great thing about the law, it gets you out of the house.’

  The war, which had removed most of the young barristers, had done wonders for my father’s practice. He rose, most days, in Court, fixed witnesses with his clear blue, sightless eyes and lured them into confessions of adultery, cruelty or wilful refusal to consummate their marriages. As soon as he could he caught the train back from London (no after Court conference with him was ever known to last more than twenty minutes) to the wonders of his garden. I don’t know if I can describe it or whether it has become, during the years I have lived here, over-familiar, like faces you see every day.

  In his twenty acres of chalky fields there were two inexplicable dells, great holes in the ground which long ago may have been burial-places, or gravel pits, and are now filled with beech trees. Near to them my father built a small thirties’ house with white walls and green tiles, a building in the sort of Spanish musical comedy tradition, handed down through the garages on the Great West Road, which pleased the architect he employed. It still has light-fittings which might have come from the Savoy Hotel. Away from the house he planned huge herbaceous borders to stretch away to a field of magnolias and rarer ornamental trees. In the spring the copses are full of daffodils and narcissi. Tall, pale green and white Japanese flowering cherries, which he planted, tremble in the twilight like enormous ghosts. He planned the large kitchen garden with fruit cages in which loganberries and white raspberries, gooseberries and melons and strawberries grew, usually in the company of some panic-stricken and imprisoned bird. It is a great feeding-place for marauders from the beech woods. Pheasants, jays and pigeons ravish the vegetables. Deer, which have gone back to nature after escaping from a nearby park, glide across the lawn in the misty mornings and eat the rose-buds. At night there is a great noise of owls, and in my father’s day we often used to see glow-worms, although they seem rarer now.

  As my father could see none of these splendours he got my mother to describe them to him and in the evenings he would dictate to her a log, a diary of the garden’s activities which also contained glimpses, cursorily noted, of human endeavour. Turning the thick volumes, written out in my mother’s clear art-school handwriting, I can find out exactly what went wrong with the peas in 1942 and how they coped with greenfly on the roses. It is harder to discover when I was married, had children, got divorced or called to the bar, although most of the facts are there somewhere, stuck at the far end of the herbaceous border. ‘A most miserable cold and wet May,’ a typical entry reads. ‘Laburnums are now at their best. Mrs Anthony Waterer and Lady Waterlow are the only roses in flower. All liquidambars appear to be dead, but remaining newly planted trees and shrubs are doing well. John left for Paris after taking his Real Property exam, which he failed.’ Or, ‘The cats have brought up two litters by stealth. Smith has planted
out the wallflowers, staked the borders and started to clean the strawberry beds. The green woodpecker flew through the French windows while we were sitting here. Now the divorce is over John is to be married in August.’

  The work in the garden, which had grown so out of proportion to the house it surrounded, was never-ending. My father sat on a wooden stool wearing a straw hat, groping for weeds and dead-heads, with my mother beside him keeping up a running commentary. We had a gardener called Mr Smith, who looked very much like the late King George VI, and a gardener’s boy who got blamed for everything and sat behind the potting-shed reading Titbits and wrote ‘The Garden of Eden’ on all the plant labels.

  I cannot discover that I did much gardening in those days. Not long after I met my first wife there is an entry which reads, ‘On Christmas Eve John and I amused ourselves by digging a hole and planting the Eucryphia in it’, but I think I must have been waiting anxiously for a letter or a telephone call, and turned to the entertaining hole for relief. There was one duty my father and I always shared, whenever I was available, and that was drowning the earwigs.

  The ceremony of the earwigs, which became, in my father’s garden, a cross between Trooping the Colour and a public execution, had its origins in my most distant childhood. My father was fond of big, highly-coloured and feathery dahlias, large as side-plates or ladies’ hats, and these blooms were a prey to earwigs. I have no idea where my father learnt to fight these pests in the way he did, or in the macabre imagination of what tweedy gardening expert the plan was born. It suffices to say that it was a scheme of devilish cunning. Stakes were planted in the ground near the dahlias and on top of each stake hung an inverted flowerpot lined with straw. The gorged earwig, having feasted on the dahlia, would climb into the flowerpot for a peaceful nap in the straw, from which it was rudely awakened by my father and myself on our evening rounds. We would empty the flowerpots into a bucket of water. On a good foray we might drown up to a hundred earwigs, which my father would pronounce, with relish, to be a ‘moderately satisfactory bag’.

  The times I most clearly remember with my father were the long walks we took together when I would guide him through the dark, insect-buzzing woods, steering him past the tentacles of bramble, keeping him away from branches where the gamekeepers had gibbeted magpies and squirrels as a warning to others. We used to sit by the fire at night, he in the wing-chair I still use, massaging his sightless eyes, and I read him what I had begun to write, another novel about Henley, the town below us in the valley, the Brewery and the Regatta. Sometimes he would laugh at the jokes. Sometimes he said, ‘Sorry stuff’, or, ‘Rather poor fooling’, and I knew, furiously, that he was right.

  In the summer after the war started I began to take a less active part in the earwig hunts and I even missed the walks. I had made friends. This was not an easy thing to do while living with my father due to his extremely hostile attitude to ‘visitors’ whom he dreaded even more than leaf curl on the peach trees or earwigs at the dahlias.

  I had met ‘Daphne’ (Mrs Cox) when she opened a bookshop in the town. She was small and seemed to me extraordinarily glamorous, like a pocket-sized Garbo or Marlene Dietrich. She moved around her shop in a haze of Chanel perfume which she must have ‘laid down’ before the shortages of war began. She wore a white skirt and shoes and seemed always, in that inappropriate setting, dressed for a stroll before lunch along the Croisette or the Promenade des Anglais. When I asked if she had a book I wanted, I think it was a novel by Rex Warner, she asked me up to her cottage, which turned out to be almost next door to my father’s house, and offered to lend me her own copy. There I met her great friend Betty (known as ‘Bill’) Baker, a tall, handsome woman who always dressed in men’s clothing (not just a more masculine version of female attire, but real men’s clothes, tweed jackets and corduroy trousers bought from a Gents’ Outfitters in Reading). From a photograph which stood on their windowsill it appeared that Daphne and ‘Bill’, at a formal dinner party before the war, had worn white mess-jackets with boiled shirts, wing-collars, black bow-ties and evening trousers.

  Looking back on it I can’t think why they had the kindness to bother with me; but they invited me to teas and dinners and parties with other pairs of ‘girls’ who lived, refugees from Bloomsbury and Cap Ferrat, in little nests dotted round our part of the Chilterns. They talked about characters who existed for me only in the world of myth: Cocteau and Lord Berners, Lytton Strachey and Colette. I borrowed books from them and bought none, filling the gaps in my entirely English education with Les Parents Terribles and Le Grand Meaulnes and Claudine à l’Ecole and encountering a now forgotten novelist called Julien Green, whose Kafkaesque stories of strange French country houses helped raise my own standards of realism a few inches above the ground. Sometimes I would meet Mrs Cox in London; she would take me to dinner at her bridge club and I sat beside her while the bombs thudded outside and she played cards with a gold-and-tortoiseshell cigarette-holder between scarlet lips and said things to me like, ‘You know who I mean by Lady Abdy?’ and I nodded deceitfully, vainly trying to give the impression that I knew exactly who she meant.

  So my life at home became split between my father’s house, where he sat at dinner with the wireless set beside him, his fingers itching to turn on ITMA or Garrison Theatre if the arguments became tedious; and Mrs Cox’s cottage, where the domesticated doves fluttered in at the window and rested on the statue of a Negro page-boy and Mrs Cox’s daughter brought home her girl-friend who was called ‘Bobby’ and who worked in Bourne and Hollingsworth, and where we turned the pages of the New Statesman and Nation and Horizon and listened to Charles Trenet on the gramophone.

  ‘How do you get on with those women who live next door. The ones you’re always visiting?’ my father asked.

  ‘They’re very interesting. They knew Jean Cocteau,’ and I added, in the hope of shocking him at last, ‘Cocteau smoked opium.’

  ‘Oh, never smoke opium,’ my father warned me. ‘Gives you constipation. Terrible binding effect.’ And he added one of his best lines, ‘Have you ever seen the pictures of the wretched poet Coleridge? He smoked opium. Take a look at Coleridge, he was green about the gills and a stranger to the lavatory.’

  So my father’s house and Mrs Cox’s became the two poles of my existence. And it was in Mrs Cox’s ornate and rural Sapphic retreat that I had my first heterosexual experience, no doubt with consequences to my psyche so traumatic that I haven’t fully recovered from them. At the time it seemed like a piece of amazing good luck.

  There was a party one evening at Mrs Cox’s to which many of the neighbouring couples of ‘girls’ were invited, together with some other Bloomsbury refugees from the cottages along the edge of the common. Among them was Sarah, who was staying with her mother, a stalwart of the Charlotte Street pubs and Gordon Square parties. Sarah had a small, heart-shaped face, and eyes of unexpectedly different colours. She wore a beret on the side of her head as though she were acting in a film with Jean Gabin, and I had totally mistaken her, in the early part of the evening, for one of the ‘girls’.

  Mrs Cox, or was it ‘Bill’, suggested a game, a party-stopper which I never played before or since. We took turns to sit blindfold on a stool and were kissed by the other players. The game was to guess who kissed you. To my astonishment I found myself being kissed with some thoroughness and, on removing the blindfold, found that it was by Sarah. We both lingered when the party was over and Mrs Cox, who had always showed me much kindness, lent us her spare bedroom.

  For the first ten minutes I cursed the liberated novelists I had been reading at school. Why the hell couldn’t they be more explicit? Aldous Huxley never talked about anything but a thousand butterfly caresses (for which there scarcely seemed the time or the demand) and then went into a row of dots. D. H. Lawrence rambled on about harebells and dark forces stirring the loins, without any clear indication of how the thing was actually done. In the course of time, however, I began to feel that the evening was not only
like an astonishing and undeserved win at roulette, a jackpot which I had done nothing to deserve, not only the end of childhood, the start of life, a day-trip to a country I only knew imperfectly from reading the guidebooks and hardly hoped to visit, but something which, without great difficulty, I might come to enjoy. I was not in that state very long, however, before the door was flung open and there stood Mrs Cox and ‘Bill’ both wearing dressing-gowns and smoking furiously.

  ‘I can’t imagine what you think you’re doing,’ Mrs Cox said. ‘This isn’t a brothel!’

  I thought that what we were doing was perfectly obvious and she had invited us to stay; but ‘Bill’ was looking at us as though we were a nasty case of slug damage among the cabbage plants. ‘What on earth would your father say?’ she asked.

  Again there was an answer: my father had never spoken to ‘Bill’ Baker and no doubt never would. If she approached him to report on my doings he would have vanished, as fast as my mother could lead him, into the shrubbery. That was the answer but it wasn’t worth giving. Sarah probably hit on the truth of the matter when she said, ‘You don’t like us because we’re not queer.’

  ‘I think,’ said Mrs Cox in the husky, unanswerable tones of Greta Garbo as Queen Christina, dismissing a couple of hundred unwanted guests, ‘you’d better put on your clothes and leave now.’

  So it was that my first experience of love-making was concluded out on the common, among the sharp, musky bracken where I had taken off my glasses to avoid a view of Iris’s knickers, and played houses with the Mullard children. As we walked home I was keeping up an unconvincing performance of someone who made love and was thrown out by Lesbians most evenings, and we said we would meet again soon, probably tomorrow.

  ‘What’s that?’ said my father when I got home. ‘Is that the boy?’