A Postillion Struck by Lightning (21 page)

“Poor little things … what are you going to do with that then?”

I looked down at the chewed-up old shell.

“Just chuck it away, I think.”

“Into the gully?”

“Yes … into the gully.”

We walked slowly over to the chalky edge and looked down into the shadowing little path which ran along the bottom among all the roots and tree trunks. It looked very cold and lonely there. A blackbird blundered away worriedly into the hawthorns and then I suddenly threw the shell high up into the air: we both watched it as it made a wide arc against the fading sky and then fell swiftly into the dark branches over the gully.

For a moment there was silence and then we heard it clitter-clatter-clotter down among the leaves and stones, then everything was still again.

And that was that.

In my school report for the Lent Term of 1933 Miss Polyphemus, my Housemistress, thought it necessary to observe that “He has still to learn that life is not all cushions and barley sugar.” An odd combination of delights, one might think. However, she was right.

A small, eager, middle-aged woman, rather like a Jack Russell, she dragged me unwillingly through Mathematics, applauded wanly from a deck-chair when I muffed a catch at Cricket, and sloshed about in muddy Wellingtons with a whistle in her mouth while I stood shivering with cold on the touch line during Football. I know that I tried her patience to the limits.

I hated all three. Mathematics, Cricket and, above all, Football. I found them totally illogical pursuits. I could never, and still cannot, understand why anyone should want to hit a very hard ball with a non-resilient bat high into the air so that someone else could run up and down a scrubby bit of grass until the ball is retrieved. Nor could I see, and I still cannot, the delights in kicking and hacking, and pushing, and shoving, about in mud and wet so that a small leather sphere should reach some designated area of space between two wooden poles shrouded in mist or freezing fog. As for Mathematics I simply didn't believe them.

It was no good telling me that some wise Arab, scrabbling about in the sand decided, all by himself, that Five should be Five and that twice that number should be called Ten. I couldn't accept that at all.

Miss Garlick, who took us for Botany, was marginally kinder in giving me two “Goods” for Diligence and Apprehension, although she had to add that she wished I was “More accurate, both in drawing and writing” and Dr Chanter, predictably Music, was glowing with two ‘V. Goods” and a genial comment in a flourishing pen that I was “Working very well indeed.” It was difficult, even for me, not to be able to learn the words of “The Vicar of Bray” or “Hark Hark the Lark”. The tune took a little longer.

The remainder of the report was grey. Dr Lake's final comment, in crimson ink at the bottom of the page, betrayed a good deal
of suppressed irritation and weariness. “He makes me impatient. But I am trying to be more philosophical about him. Only time will tell.” Trying, was underlined.

It just did not occur to me that what Miss Polyphemus said was not so: although I might have chosen other words than “cushions and barley sugar”. I thought life was simply splendid. I had no reason to think otherwise. My days revolved about two pivots, if one can have two pivots. The Cottage in Sussex, and Twickenham.

Not counting my home and family which was, of course, the centre anyway. My life, as far as I could make it, was a total splendour of Summer and Constant Sunshine in which nothing unpleasant was ever allowed to happen. The fact that I was not God, and that unpleasant things
did
occur from time to time, was simply not my affair at all. I had an amazing way of setting those aside, and obliterating from my mind and being, the things which were boring, dull or distressing. Like my father, I managed, quite skilfully, to set aside the disagreeable parts of life so that I coasted, cheerfully enough, from the Cottage to Twickenham without taking a great deal of notice of the things which littered that happy road. Things which, from time to time, did crack my shins or cause me a bothersome, not to say painful, stumble from my happy Seat of Grace. School, and all those who served within it, from Pupil to Teacher, was a bore and a place where one marked time until the doors opened again and one was released into Pleasures. School was Outside. And most people were Outside. And anything which was Outside was simply that. And did not affect me so far as I could help.

My family, the Cottage and Twickenham were all that mattered to me. Beyond them all else was a blank.

A sad state of affairs.

It was not that I was shielded, or cosseted, really. In fact I was not. My sister Elizabeth and I were both brought up from a very early age to fend for ourselves, to be quite self-sufficient, to work for our pleasures and physically to earn our weekly pocket money. Nothing came too easily. We were members of a young family, and they had to work hard for all they had, and we had to do the same. We lived in a world which was almost completely Grown Up. We delighted in our parents' friends who were mostly painters, writers and journalists, and found most children dull, retarded or childish. So we didn't bother with them. We
didn't need them, we felt, and they got in the way. We never made close friends, or stayed at their houses ever; and seldom asked them back to ours. Unless forced by adult politeness. We liked each other better, and our father and mother and Lally provided us with all the pleasure, excitements, and delights we felt we could possibly wish for.

A very smug attitude indeed.

A rather insular life? A little in growing? We didn't think so. Nor do I now. It harmed no one: beyond ourselves. And it was about to change.

The Report, quoted above, was alas! only one of a number. They grew very slightly better as the terms went by; but not much. I finally “made it” in Botany, Bookbinding, Metalwork and Drawing. Everything else was just “V. Fair”.

My father, who had distant ideas of sending me to Fettes and then watching me proudly follow him dutifully along the dusty corridors of
The Times
until I eventually took over his chair as Art Editor in the Art Department, began, reluctantly but clearly, to realise that his dreams were just that.

The chances of my getting into the Gas, Light and Coke Company were brighter than the possibilities of my even reaching the gates of Fettes. Let alone Printing House Square.

My idleness, my backwardness, my apparent inability to grasp the fundamentals of scholastic life were blamed, possibly correctly, on the fact that I had not been sent off to a Boarding School from the start. It had been a constant battle between my parents, she refusing, he begging. I waged a neutral war. And stayed.

Time which had now been lost for twelve years had to be regained somehow. The visions of Fettes and
The Times
, though dimmed, still gleamed like an afterthought, through my father's disappointment. He did all that he possibly could to redress the wrongs. I was sent, willy nilly, to a very expensive tutor for a year in a grey stucco house in Willow Road, Hampstead.

I can only remember that it was an unpleasant shock and one which I found a little harder than usual to obliterate quite so easily from my existence. I don't, oddly enough, remember very much about it. Obliterating was still at work whatever should befall me. I don't even remember much about the Tutor except that he was very old and wore a celluloid collar and lace-up boots. There were two other boys there with me, one older and one the
same age. But they were keener than I so I hardly ever spoke to them, and the eldest one was extremely busy with something rather complicated like Trigonometry. We sat round a green baize table. The Tutor at one end with an empty chair at the other. We vaguely wondered who it was for until one day a silent, elderly lady slid into it and sat there knitting during a long lecture on the Lowest Common Denominator. She only came once. Sensibly.

I spent most of my time gazing out of the window at the trees on the Heath, and the Tutor spent most of his sleeping, or speaking, in a low murmur, to the Trigonometry Boy. It was a lethal, dull, boring year. And did me no good at all. At the time. But as far as I was able I did try, although to little effect. I simply sat there planning books or poems or a new, and usually improbable, plot for a play.

Eventually, and despairingly, I was removed and sent back to the school up the hill. Where I prospered exceedingly after my time away by Producing, Writing, Directing and Acting in my own versions of “Just William” and the other William stories. These were done during the school breaks, and my unfortunate class-mates, bullied, cajoled and sometimes even blackmailed, into playing in them, were forced to relinquish the delights of football, marbles and cigarette card swapping for the doubtful pleasures of giving highly embarrassed performances in smaller roles than mine.

It was quite clear that the entire school staff had now considered my case hopeless, and to my simple, and gratified, astonishment, I was permitted to “do” these plays as long as they didn't interfere with the boys' working life at school.

In fact they became so popular that I even had chairs set up for the staff who actually came and watched some of the performances, thus giving me, if not the others, a first heady whiff of an Audience. Albeit they were pretty stolid and dull, they were there. And the show became For Them. Even the Headmaster vaguely approved. What else could he do?

My father by this time was now thoroughly disillusioned with me. I could sense it very well. He never made jokes any more and always seemed rather preoccupied and distant when I was in the same room with him. Lally, correctly, pointed out that he was “disappointed” in me, that it was entirely my own fault, I had been given every chance and warning, and that if I didn't set to
and pull up my socks I'd be in for a very unpleasant surprise one day. She also added that he had a great deal to worry him.

He had. After eleven years my mother suddenly found, to her despair, that she was pregnant, and life shifted imperceptibly, but firmly, into a different gear. My sister and I had noticed that she seemed to be getting rather large, and had, I remember, speculated on the very improbable fact that she might be going to have a baby. But the fact was so abhorrent to us, and we considered her so terribly old anyway, that the idea slipped easily from our narrow little minds and we thought no more about it and merely decided that she was “putting on weight”.

She settled all that easily enough one day when we were at the top of the garden picking lilac for the drawing-room.

“I'm going to have a baby,” she said. Clearly having rehearsed it for ages.

We showed no surprise, which might have comforted her, because she went on to say that it would be quite soon, that she hoped it would be a boy and that she thought it would because it kicked so much, and that she wanted us to be very, very kind to it and love it and not make it feel that it didn't belong to us all and was loved and welcome.

Later in the Nursery, where my sister now slept alone, since Lally had one day made the disconcerting discovery during Bath Time that I was “growing up”, we looked at each other with ashen faces and saw the future, correctly; hideous with crying and Nurses and a stranger in our midst whom we should have to like whether we wanted to or not. This would be no Other Child, no Outsider, but our very own; some eleven years late in joining.

We were bleak.

Everyone was bleak in fact. Eleven years is a long time in which to have forgotten the pattering of those blasted tiny feet. We had, we considered, all got Set In Our Ways. Well: now they were to be shifted a bit, those Ways, things were never to be quite the same again. A new phase was about to start. We all wondered, privately, how we should manage.

July 1934 was blazing. Roses opened and fell within the day, and the lawns turned rusty beige. My sister was dispatched to our
grandmother in Scotland for a while so that her room, the Nursery, could become one again; this time for the Baby. I was allowed to remain at home to welcome this addition. I was, it was pointed out, the eldest and it was right and proper that I should be present in the house when he arrived. The Nursery was stripped out and painted white. A cot and armchair and small table, scales and a bath with ducks on it took the place of our battered toy boxes, book cases and a gabled dolls' house. Then came Nurse Hennessy, a broad, hefty Irish Nurse who crackled like a twig fire and was less friendly.