CLINGING TO THE WRECKAGE Page 8

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said my mother, who was reading out the crossword puzzle clues to him. ‘He’s back. He went to a party at Mrs Cox’s.’

  ‘A party, eh? That can’t have been much fun. Well, now you’re back, how about a settler?’

  So I sat down by the dying fire and read a poem to settle my father down for the night. I chose one of his favourite sonnets:

  The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

  Is lust in action; and, till action, lust

  Is perjur’d, murderous, bloody, full of blame,

  Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;

  Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;

  Past reason hunted …

  I read it in a world-weary voice, I thought. I knew all there was to know on the subject.

  The next day I went to her mother’s cottage to find Sarah, but she had gone back to Cambridge. Eventually she parted from her husband, and we shared a room for a while in Hampstead. I now realize that there is something I haven’t written about Sarah, suppressing it with that embarrassment which prevented our mentioning my father’s blindness. She was lame. One of her heels wouldn’t touch the ground and, while walking, she appeared to run. It was the result of some childhood disability which it became too late to correct. She was eccentric, funny and she never complained. I think of her often, and always with gratitude.

  Chapter Seven

  I am an advocate, my father was both a fine advocate and a good lawyer. He understood the law and loved it and when it was at its most obscure, as in the doctrine of the ‘renvoi’ in the cases on domicile, or of ‘dependent relative revocation’ in Probate, he found it as enjoyable as budding roses or doing the Times crossword. To the courtroom advocate, who only needs a basic instinct about the rules of evidence and the ability to look things up, law is an unwelcome mystery which only appeals to academics or those who practise in the Chancery Division. To me the law seems like a sort of maze through which a client must be led to safety, a collection of reefs, rocks and underwater hazards through which he or she must be piloted. The basic morality on which law is founded has always seemed to me crudely inferior to those moral values which everyone must work out for themselves; and the results of even the best laws, when consistently applied, are bound to be intolerable in many individual cases. Moreover the law exists when it is being lived through people’s lives and in Courts. Looked at in a book, or belted out as a lecture, it can have only a theoretical interest and hold a tenuous grasp on the attention.

  ‘I think we might run to Oxford,’ my father had said, ‘provided you fall in and read the law.’ I still felt that my time was likely to be short and my future, as the news of the war grew more depressing, uncertain. In the meanwhile I fell in and read law with no real faith in ever surviving to practise it. Again I wondered about my father’s choice. Why Oxford? He’d been at Cambridge and Brasenose was a college he’d only heard mentioned, in an apparently disparaging way, by someone in his Chambers many years before. But as he offered me Oxford like the sausages and scrambled eggs of the condemned man’s breakfast, I felt it churlish to refuse.

  Whenever I hear now of the appalling efforts, suffering and anxiety of those who are trying to get their children into the older universities, I think of my entrance examination with a pang of guilt. I went to Brasenose and was led up some stairs by a college servant. After a long, solitary wait, a bald-headed man wearing carpet slippers and carrying an encyclopaedia of gastronomy came in. He handed me a passage from Lucretius, told me to translate it and shuffled away. I sat for a while puzzled by the complicated stanzas describing the nature of atoms, and then another door opened and I found myself staring at a pair of familiar scuffed suede shoes. Looking higher I saw knife-edged grey flannels, white teeth and well-brilliantined dark curls.

  ‘Good God. Oliver! What’re you doing here?’

  ‘The same as you, but rather more efficiently.’

  ‘I’m doing a sort of entrance test. It’s not very easy.’

  ‘Is it a test of our knowledge of Latin or our ingenuity? I have chosen to look at it as a test of ingenuity.’

  ‘Look, there isn’t time for all that. What do you mean?’

  ‘The question isn’t what I mean. It’s what I did.’ And, bubbling with mysterious laughter, Pensotti held up a small Latin dictionary he had been out to buy at Blackwells. With its aid we wrote out a translation and went to find our examiner. He was having lunch, reading a recipe from the book propped up on a stand in front of him whilst he feasted on – what was it, dried egg or Spam salad? He took our work without a word and later we discovered that we had passed into Oxford. I never saw the bald gastronome again, or indeed very much of Brasenose College. It was taken over by the War Office and they sent us to Christ Church.

  Oxford, after the Fall of France, as the black-out was pinned up in the Buttery, as Frank Pakenham, not yet Lord Longford and then history tutor at Christ Church, was shot in the foot by a cook whilst drilling with the Home Guard in the Meadows, was at the end of an era and I was at the end of my extraordinary middle-class, thirties education. I can’t say that I came out of this bizarre hot-house and met the ‘real world’ at Oxford. That encounter, intoxicating, painful, invigorating, hilarious and tragic, was held from me until in the company of GIs, cameramen, electricians, aircraft workers with their Veronica Lake hairdos tied up in headscarves, continuity girls and prop-men, I stopped being educated and came, belatedly, to life. Meanwhile I lay becalmed at Oxford.

  The Oxford of the twenties and thirties was still there, like college claret, but it was rationed, on coupons, and there was not very much of it left. The famous characters still behaved as though they lingered in the pages of Decline and Fall. They were famous for being nothing except Oxford characters; once they left their natural habitat in Magdalen or The House they grew faint and dim and ended up down back corridors in Bush House, or as announcers on Radio Monte Carlo. They had double-barrelled names like Edward Faith-Peterson and Tommy Motte-Smith. By day they lay naked in their rooms, listening to Puccini or to Verdi’s Requiem. By night they would issue into the black-out, camel-hair coats slung across their shoulders, bow-ties from Hall Bros settled under their lightly-powdered chins, to take the exotic dinner (maximum spending allowed under the Ministry of Food regulations five bob) at the smartest restaurants. What did it matter if the omelette were of dried egg or the drink rationed Algerian or even black-market Communion wine topped up with spirits (Gin and Altars)? They still talked about Firbank and Beardsley and how, sometime in the long vacation, they had met Brian Howard, supposed model for an Evelyn Waugh character, itching in his ‘A.C. Plonk’s’ uniform in the downstairs bar at the Ritz.

  So at Oxford after Dunkirk the fashion was to be homosexual. It seems that it was only after the war, with the return of the military, that heterosexuality came to be completely tolerated. As it was, my sporadic adventures with WAAFs and girls from St Hilda’s, my grandly titled engagement to a student of book illustration at the Slade, were subjects I preferred not to discuss with Tommy Motte-Smith when he invited me and my friend Oliver for a five-shilling blow-out at the George.

  The high life of Oxford was something I never encountered when I first moved into my rooms in Meadow Buildings. To my dismay I found I was sharing them with Parsons, a tall man with bicycle-clips and a pronounced Adam’s apple, who tried to lure me into the Bible Society. One night Oliver and I boiled up Algerian wine, college sherry and a bottle of Bols he had stolen from his mother’s flat, in Parson’s electric kettle. When I recovered from the draught I found Parsons wearing cycle-clips and kneeling over me in prayer. I also heard, coming from down the corridor, the sound of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony like music from some remote paradise.

  In fact my memory of Oxford seems, looking back over a vast distance, to consist almost entirely of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, a piece of music of which I have become decreasingly fond, as I have lost the taste for bow-ties, Balkan Sobranie cigarettes and
sherry and Bols boiled up in an electric kettle. But that music came from someone who did affect my view of the world, and of whom I still think with gratitude and bewilderment when I remember his serene life and extraordinary death.

  My father, to whom I owe so much, never told me the difference between right and wrong: now, I think that’s why I remain so greatly in his debt. But Henry Winter, who slowly and with enormous care sharpened a thorn needle to play Brahms on his huge gramophone, became a kind of yardstick not of taste, but of moral behaviour. He had no doubts whatever about war, he knew that killing people was wrong. He looked forward with amused calm to the call-up, the refusal to put on uniform, the arguments before the tribunals and the final consignment to Pentonville or the Fire Service. He read Classics, and read them in the way I read Isherwood or Julien Green. He would sit in a squeaking basket chair, smoking a pipe and giving me his version of chunks of Homer and Euripides which, up to then, I had been trained to regard as almost insoluble crossword puzzles or grammarians’ equations with no recognizable human content. I was born of tone-deaf parents, and in the school songs had been instructed to open my mouth soundlessly so that no emergent discord might mar the occasion. Yet Winter slowly, painstakingly introduced me to music, and the pleasure I take in it now is due entirely to him.

  Winter’s rejection of violence, and what seemed to me the extraordinarily gentle firmness of his moral stance, was the result of no religious conviction. He was courageously sceptical, fearlessly agnostic, open and reasonable with none of the tormented Christianity of my ex-room-mate. Parsons had applied for a transfer after the desecration of his electric kettle and left me in solitary possession of a huge Gothic sitting-room and a bedroom almost the size of the waiting-room at St Pancras Station, with a chipped washbasin in which I kept a smoked salmon, caught by my Aunt Daisy in Devon in defiance of rationing.

  I suppose Oxford’s greatest gift is friendship, for which there is all the time in the world. After Oxford there are love affairs, marriages, working relationships, manipulations, lifelong enemies, but even then, in rationed, blacked-out Oxford, there were limitless hours for talking, drinking, staying up all night, going for walks with a friend. Winter and I were emerging from the chrysalis of schoolboy homosexuality. At first the girls we loved were tennis-playing virgins posed, like Proust’s androgynous heroine, forever unobtainable against a background of trees in the park, and carrying rackets and string bags full of Slazengers. There is nothing like sexual frustration to give warmth to friendship, which flourishes in prisons, armies, on Arctic expeditions and did well in wartime Oxford. Winter and I became inseparable and when, as time went on, I began to do things without him I felt twinges of guilt about my infidelity.

  I had more time for friendship as I found the legal syllabus enormously dull and spent as little time at it as possible. To fulfil the bargain with my father, I acquired a working knowledge of Roman Law and after a year I knew how to manumit a slave, adopt an elderly senator or contract a marriage by the ceremony of ‘brass and scales’, skills which I have never found of great service in the Uxbridge Magistrates Court. Roman Law was taught us by a mountainous old man who drank a bottle of whisky a day and who had, like the Royal Family, changed his German name for an old English one. He peered at me through glasses thick as ginger-beer bottles, and was forever veering away from Justinian’s views on Riparian ownership to Catullus’s celebration of oral sex, a change of subject which I found extremely welcome. Returning to Oxford by train from a legal dinner in London, this ancient Latinist mistook the carriage door for the lavatory and stepped out into the black-out and on to the flying railway lines outside Didcot. After his death I gave up Roman Law.

  Other subjects I found encased in a number of slim volumes with titles like Tort in a Nutshell, Potted Real Property and All You Need to Know About Libel and Slander. I read them listening to Winter’s gramophone, or as we punted down the river and the ATS in the long grass whistled You Are My Sunshine or sang, ‘Keep smiling throo, Just as you, Used to do, Till the good times come again one sunny day’. If these were not good times we were deceived by never having known anything better.

  The time came when Winter was about to face the tribunal which was to test the genuineness of his conscience. There was a man called Charles Dimont, a journalist and a character of great eminence in the pacifist world, who was said to be able to give Winter a lesson in how best to put his reluctance to kill people to a bench of sceptical and safely patriotic magistrates. Winter told me that a favourite question was, ‘What would you do if you saw a German raping your grandmother?’ to which he intended to reply, ‘Wait until he’d finished and then bury the dear old lady again.’ We went by bus to Boar’s Hill, where Charles Dimont lived. When we got to his cottage he had a bad cold and was wearing a dressing-gown. There seemed to be a large number of small children about, one of whom was dropping raspberry jam into The Bible Designed To Be Read As Literature. In the corner was a dark young woman of remarkable beauty who said nothing and looked as if she were heartily sick of the tramp of conchies through her sitting-room. Charles Dimont told Winter that it was very difficult to persuade the tribunal that you really didn’t like killing people unless you believed in God. He offered us a cup of tea, but the pot was empty and anyway we had to go.

  As we waited for the bus I had no idea that Charles Dimont was about to change his mind and obtain an infantry commission. I had still less idea that in some distant peace I would marry the dark, silent Mrs Dimont and bring up her children. And I had no sort of hint of the extraordinary melodrama of violence in which Winter himself would die. I only knew that I was determined to avoid the heroism of the tribunals. I thought I would probably end up in the RAF ground staff.

  The war was a time for poetry. I tried to write modern ballads, heavily influenced by Auden, and was very proud when one or two got into Cherwell. Since those days I haven’t attacked a poem and I hope poetry is for my old age, like spending every day in the garden. John Heath-Stubbs was a remarkable poet then at Oxford, and Sidney Keyes was a war poet who met a war poet’s tragic death. When twilight fell over Peckwater Quad a pale, dark-haired Michael Hamburger, moving past the crumbling columns where he claimed bats flitted, used to come to my rooms with a heavy but always gleeful despair and read me his translations of Rilke and Hölderlin. He was also besotted by the tennis-playing girls and seemed in constant fear that one might surrender to him, thereby breaking the spell of Gothic gloom in which he moved so happily.

  Starstruck by poets, Michael Hamburger and I used to travel up to London. Drinking beer in the Swiss Pub in Old Compton Street we might even be spoken to by Dylan Thomas or Roy Campbell, or by the Scots painters Colquhoun and MacBride who wore kilts and were inseparable, or by the surrealist John Banting who was quite bald and used to take his false teeth out and buy them a ham sandwich. Sometimes I met Mrs Cox’s daughter there, wearing her warden’s uniform and accompanied by her silent girlfriend from Bourne and Hollingsworth, and we would discuss the latest news from the common and I would try, in vain, to discover what had happened to Sarah. We would go to the pubs in Charlotte Street in which sat older women with long memories, like Nina Hamnett whose youthful torso, sculpted by Gaudier-Brzeska, stood in the Tate Gallery, but who then seemed old and rather lost in the Blitz and was sometimes, at the end of the evening, sick into her handbag.

  When the pubs were shut we went to a terrible cellar called the ‘Coffee Ann’ where Lucian Freud always sat with a beautiful girl at a corner table, and a huge Alsatian dog lay on a clapped-out billiard-table, chewing the ivory balls. A verse was pinned up in the lavatory which read, ‘It’s no use standing on the seat, the bloody crabs can jump ten feet.’

  One drunken lunchtime Dylan Thomas, telling us in his breathy, Charles Laughton voice, that he was looking for a girl with an aperture as small as a mouse’s earhole, led us to the offices of Horizon where Stephen Spender and Cyril Connolly, large as life, were sitting drinking tea with a girl wearing
wooden-soled, hinged utility shoes. I remember none of the literary conversation. Full of brown ale I was too occupied in trying to stop the room from tipping gradually on to its side.

  Oliver Pensotti left to become, thanks to his knowledge of languages, a subaltern in the Intelligence Corps. He bought a sickly-looking poison ring from an antique shop in Broad Street and wore it with his uniform, dark glasses and scuffed suede shoes. He looked less like a spy catcher than some minor member of an unsuccessful South American military junta.

  Henry Winter’s sincerity was obvious to the tribunal which tried his case and he was sent to a Pacifist Service Unit near Paddington Station. There he helped to dig bodies out of the rubble after air raids and carry the injured to hospital.

  I was examined on a number of occasions by a puzzled doctor in North Oxford. Not only could I not see distant, or not so distant, objects with any clarity, but I was painfully thin, had doubtful lungs and appeared to be wasting away, a process which now seems to have gone into reverse. It was clear that I would have to look for a job in the war, that of a divorce barrister not coming within the category of a ‘reserved occupation’.

  I did my best to enjoy what was left of Oxford. Encouraged by my mother I had always drawn a little and I went to the Slade School which had been moved to the Ashmolean Museum, and sat in the life class before large nude ladies who were pink on the side nearest the radiator and blue with cold on the other. Occasionally the teacher, a small grey-haired man in a bow-tie, would sit beside me, smelling faintly of Haig and Haig, and do a perfect drawing of the radiator aspect and leave without comment. I met a girl at the Slade and we became engaged. When I showed her my art work she suggested that I stick to writing. I realized that this was sound advice and took it. Apart from this strongly-held opinion she was very quiet and gentle and came from Wales. I took Elizabeth and her mother out to dinner at the George and, overcome with excitement and too much Algerian wine, seized a silk-stockinged leg to fondle under the table. I looked up to see the mother glowering at me over the grilled Spam. I had chosen the wrong leg.