Growing Up In a War (42 page)

All this was, as it had been developed to be, a training in growing up, because it was learning to accept responsibility and exercise authority. My friends and I had our own views about this, and we ran the house in what was really rather a grown-up way, allowing the boys more individual freedom than in other houses (and in return being regarded by them as ‘slack’). We became a house known for personal rather than shared attainments: we were the individualist’s house. It was during this period that Richard
Cavendish
and I became particular friends. Almost inevitably, given his interests, he became a history specialist like me and entered David Roberts’s kingdom in the school library. Because David did not teach his specialists in the classroom that had been allotted to him for that purpose, he turned it into something approximating a junior common room for his older pupils, and now Richard and I were the only two members of it from Barnes A. Back at the house we came to be thought of as the two ‘intellectuals’, though people were still well disposed towards us. Unlike me, Richard was quite good at sport, and this helped, I think.

The newness of our regime was underscored by the fact that our old housemaster, Snugs Burleigh, had retired at the same time and been replaced by an air force officer newly back from the war, Eric Littlefield. His nickname, which he brought with him, was ‘Pongo’, the genus name for orang-utans, and an armed services word for an ordinary chap, a bloke. I fell foul of him in the first few days, in a way from which I never recovered in his estimation. On his first tour of the dormitories he had been sitting on the end of a boy’s bed chatting, and idly fingering the number card at the foot of the bed, when he noticed some handwriting on the back of the card. He looked closer, and found himself reading an obscene limerick about the boy he was talking to, about him being the object of another (named) boy’s lustful desires. Without showing it to the boy, Pongo asked him if he knew what this writing was, and the boy said no, he had not realised it was there. Pongo – who believed him, on the grounds that if he had known it was there he would have erased it – said nothing more, but slipped the card into his pocket. During the next couple of days he hunted around to find whose handwriting it matched. It matched mine.

I was summoned to his study. The conversation went something like this.

‘Have you been writing anything, er, shall we say indiscreet recently?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Search your mind. Can you think of anything, er – well, I’ll be blunt,
indecent
, that you’ve been unwise enough to commit to paper?’

I was baffled. ‘No, sir.’

Pongo produced the card and handed it across to me. ‘Is this your handwriting?’

I was discombobulated. I went lobster red. I had written that limerick a full two years before, in a different life. At that age, and in a school, two years is an aeon, and I had long ago forgotten all about it. Obviously I had written the limerick on the boy’s bed card for him to stumble across at some future time, but he never had, and then I had forgotten about it myself.

Almost lockjawed with embarrassment, I explained this to Pongo, who told me in return how he had found the card. At the end of it all he said: ‘I believe you. I accept that you wrote this a very long time ago. In fact I think I can see the difference in your handwriting. But the question is, is it true?’

‘What do you mean, sir?’

‘Is what you’ve written on the card true? Did these things actually happen?’

This was a shock. I was trapped. And I was tongue-tied. What I had written contained much truth, if exaggerated, but our schoolboy code made it impossible for any boy to say such things about another boy to any master.

Pongo tried to help me out.

‘The boy has no idea what you’ve written here, still less who has written it. If you tell me, I give you my word I’ll never say anything to him about it. But I want to know if it’s true.’

‘No, sir, it isn’t.’

‘Not any of it?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Not a word of truth in any of it?’

‘No, sir.’

I could see he was angered and frustrated by the fact that he had no way of knowing whether what I was saying now was true or not. He decided to put the boot in.

‘What you’re telling me is that all this is nothing but the product of your dirty mind?’

‘Yes, sir.’

The lobster blush, which had started to fade, came back more intensely than before. But Pongo was not going to let it go at that. To me standing pillar-box red in front of him he said: ‘You made it all up? It’s all lies – entirely the creation of
your
filthy imagination?’

‘Yes, sir.’

As ordeals go it was quite a prize-winner, with me a brand-new monitor and him a brand-new housemaster. For starting off on the wrong foot with a new boss in his and your first few days it would be hard to beat. Pongo always disliked me after that, disapproved of me and distrusted me; and if it comes to that I was never a fan of his. But he never said anything to the boy. For obvious reasons I did not do so either. So no harm came of it, to anyone except me. But I felt myself to have been disastrously unlucky.

To complete the total clear-out at the top of the house, we acquired a new junior housemaster called Ronald Styles. He was a young teacher of music with an ambition to become a concert pianist. His playing was so good that this would have been a worthwhile hope but for his personality, which was too neurotic and unstable to thrive in the stressed, competitive world of international music-making. He had the worst stammer I have ever come across: when talking to him, one had to wait for what seemed like an endless time while he repeated the same ghastly, gasping sound
innumerable
times in his attempt to get a word out, his lower jaw flapping right down to his chest. It was painful. But he took his ambitions seriously, and worked hard at them. At the time of his arrival he was teaching himself to memorise the solo part of Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto, a massive work, unusually difficult as well as unusually long. He would often seek me out in the dayroom and invite me to his study to listen to him play it: he said it helped him to have someone listening, because he played differently if projecting to an audience, even an audience of one. I would turn the pages for him, but since he was trying to avoid looking at the music he never prompted me, and I had to concentrate. I learnt the work almost by heart myself. Being a music teacher he could hardly stop himself from instructing me, so in addition to the score-reading and his performances I was given a lot of analysis. It all added up to quite an intensive study of the concerto on my part, and I found this hugely satisfying. It was already a work I greatly loved. Just as my favourite violin concerto was Brahms’s, so this became my favourite piano concerto.

I still carry in my mind another performance of it, by Claudio Arrau, that I heard at about the same time, on the radio in the dayroom. Under Snugs Burleigh we had not had a radio, because he would not allow it, and this had been a source of some bitterness on our part; but then, to our astonishment (and, I must say, exasperation), he made us a present of one when he left. It made a huge difference to my life. My new-found freedom to stay up late meant that I could listen to concerts when almost no one else was around – and a lot of the classical music on radio was broadcast late in the evening. The starvation of orchestral music during term-time that had plagued me throughout my time at Christ’s Hospital came to an end.

Another of my important new freedoms was the freedom to go out of bounds by myself. With money I got from my father I bought a clapped-out old bicycle from a boy who was leaving, and
spent
hours cycling around the villages in the surrounding countryside. (This, incidentally, was the only time in my life when I have had a bicycle.) My studies in medieval history were giving me an interest in village churches, and I was learning to read the history of a village from its church. The sheer number of medieval churches in England is unique, simply because no large-scale war has ravaged its countryside for nearly a thousand years. And it was always villages or towns that I was most interested in, not the scenery that I cycled through in between. Other people were always going on about how beautiful the countryside was, and I liked it well enough, but countryside has never been an object of much interest to me in itself. I am, I know, an excessively urban person, and I wish this were not so, but the only natural surroundings that set fire to my imagination are large-scale things – waterfalls, lakes, deserts, mountains, and heavenly bodies outside our orbit altogether. Otherwise, the only things in my environment that switch me on are human activities.

I suppose it was during this period of my life that I began to find my feet as a person – to become myself. Obviously my age was the central factor in this, but there were other things too – a combination of freedom and responsibility which, though they came because of the age I was, might not have come in other surroundings. I was well educated, which again could easily not have happened. I knew I was lucky. I remember one day standing in the school library and thinking: I can choose any path in life that I want, do anything I’m capable of. If I want to be a doctor, I can be a doctor. If I want to be an architect, I can be an architect. If I like, I can be a lawyer – or a teacher – anything. It’s up to me. I’ve got the choice. All doors are open. I won’t be in this position always, and it may not last for long, but I’m in it now. I was past the age at which my father had had to leave school and start work, in a job that bored him; and here was I, no more deserving than he, enjoying a life full of all the opportunities that
he
had been denied. This was one of the things that helped give me a sense of my own differentness, a sense of self, a feeling that I was on a path of my own. I was even beginning to look like a young man now, nearly six foot tall, still growing. People were beginning to talk to me as if I were a grown-up.

Because of my greater freedom, the difference between life at school and life at home narrowed. Instead of being two different environments to which I belonged equally, and adapted alternately, it was now more a case of me being the same me in both places regardless. I did not yet know Nietzsche’s injunction: ‘Dare to be who you are,’ but it was what I was beginning to do, with increasing confidence.

It was unlucky for me that, just as I was finding my feet in this way, the ground beneath them was shifted permanently by two earthquakes in quick succession. Within six months of one another the two people I loved most in the world died; first my grandfather and then my father. It was like two shocks of the same earthquake, and it created a chasm in time, such that for years afterwards I was inclined to think of life before and life after my father’s death as two different lives, both of them lived by me, the first in a welcoming world in which I was growing up and which contained this person that I loved so much, the second in a colder world that did not contain him and in which I was a grown-up myself. In a way it was as if I replaced him. But I was not an improvement, and the loss was irreparable.

Something about my father changed during the last full year of his life, which was 1946. Looking back, it seems fairly clear that he fell into a depression. It might have been the earliest symptom of the cancer that was going to bring his life to an end in May 1947, but I do not think so. It was more like what is now called a mid-life crisis, the male menopause. The challenges and tensions of wartime were over, but for him a return to normality meant a return to boredom. Everyone was talking about the brave
new
world we were going to create, but to him the future offered nothing either brave or new, merely a reversion to the rut he had been in between leaving school and the war. His youth was over, he had been too old to serve in the armed forces, yet at forty-four he was still an employee of his father, on a weekly wage. And when, in due course, he should inherit the shop, the work itself would go on being the same. His marriage had been a long-running disaster, and was now falling to pieces. His children were becoming grown-ups, increasingly independent. It could even be that he felt I was overtaking him: I was now as tall as he, with the youth he had lost, and better educated, and was apparently moving into a future rich with opportunities – a future that at the same time offered him nothing. It would be little wonder if he was depressed. Before his own father, whom he dearly loved, was diagnosed with cancer, my father had already become quiet and withdrawn. My grandfather’s death sentence added one more grisly fact to his life.

To me, living away from home, my grandfather’s illness was something that happened at a distance. I would receive occasional bulletins but be unaware of day-to-day realities. Some of the information reaching me was misleading. It is difficult nowadays to get people to understand this, but at that time serious illness was a taboo subject – especially mental illness and cancer – even within families: people simply did not talk about it, if they could avoid it. When they did talk about it they used euphemisms and evasions: they would hint and imply, and expect you to understand what they meant, without them having actually to say it. It was considered especially necessary to shield the old and the young from bad news. It was not the exception but the rule for a person dying of cancer not to be told – perhaps even not to want to be told – although his next of kin would be informed. All this has now gone, or most of it, but it was then the atmosphere that we all lived in. To me it seemed as if my grandfather
had
died before I really knew what was going on. It came as a great shock.

It happened in November 1946, and he was seventy. I was sixteen. He was buried in St Pancras Cemetery. I went to the funeral in my Christ’s Hospital uniform because those were the only clothes I had that were suitable for such an occasion. I remember the stony misery that filled my heart on the way to the cemetery as I sat in the undertaker’s car with Bill and Peggy Pett. When I turned away from the graveside my eyes filled with tears. Bill, moving alongside me, gripped my hand and squeezed it painfully hard. Only that prevented the tears from flowing. This was unprecedented in my experience within my family, a physical gesture of emotional understanding. I was astonished by it, especially coming from Bill, whom I had never liked. I looked on him differently after that.