Growing Up In a War (45 page)

At the Gare Saint-Lazare I was met by the headmaster of the lycée. This impressed me: it was unthinkable that the corresponding thing would have happened at Christ’s Hospital, despite the fact that the school had its own railway station. His title was Monsieur le Proviseur, his name Casati, and he looked like Humphrey Bogart, complete with fedora – which made him un-headmaster-like, conferring higher status. He had taught French for many years (I think twenty) at one of the Scottish universities, so he felt at home in Britain and spoke the language effortlessly. He led me straight to another train in Saint-Lazare, a suburban commuter train between Paris and Versailles, which was to become my lifeline.

The Lycée Hôche is regarded as one of the best lycées in France. It has quite a grand set of buildings on one of the three great avenues that converge on the front gates of the Palace of Versailles, and is only a few hundred yards from the palace. It was built as a convent in the seventeenth century, but the French Revolution liquidated the monasteries, and some time after that the buildings were turned into a school (whose origins are therefore quite like those of Christ’s Hospital). It has, or had when I was there, no playing fields or gardens, and only one open courtyard, so the boys – of whom there were at least as many as at Christ’s Hospital – were indoors nearly all the time. Many were day boys with homes in Versailles; but many came from other parts of France, and some from Africa: all these were boarders. There were no such things as separate houses, dayrooms or studies. If you wanted to be by yourself you found an empty classroom. The amount of time we spent working was exactly twice what it had been at Christ’s Hospital: there, on our heaviest days, we had done five and a quarter hours’ work, whereas here we did ten and a half. We got up at 6.00, did an hour of supervised prep from 6.30 to 7.30, and only then had breakfast. From 8.00 to midday we had four one-hour classroom periods, with breaks of three minutes between
each.
At noon we had lunch. From 12.30 to 1.30 we were free. From 1.30 to 2.00 we had prep, and then two one-hour periods. From 4.00 to 5.00 we were free again. Then we had three hours of prep, followed by dinner at 8.00. At 8.30 we were free for half an hour, and then went to bed.

There was no sport, no organised games of any kind. Nor was there a monitorial system, so none of the boys had any responsibility. This resulted, inevitably, in their behaving irresponsibly, especially since the boarders were not allowed out of the school between Sunday evening and Saturday lunchtime, and had nowhere to let off steam except in the classroom. Most of the masters found it an unending struggle to keep order, though a few had natural authority. Outside the classroom they had no contact with the boys: all other organisation and discipline were in the hands of a separate profession, the
surveillants
(supervisors), who did not teach, but ruled over the boys and kept them in order, shepherding them from one place to another, and doling out punishments.

There was no bath in the lycée, but we were allowed one shower a week. The only sit-down lavatories were in the dormitories, but there was no toilet paper in them (nor in any of the others, which were Turkish-style – you crouched over a hole). The dormitories were kept locked during the day, so one could never change a garment.

The first thing we did when we got out of bed in the morning was shake hands with one another, all of us, standing around in our pyjamas. Hand-shaking between boys went on perpetually: two friends would shake hands each time they met, so it was normal to shake hands with the same person several times a day. The boy in the next bed to me came from Algeria, and while we were shaving in the morning he taught me to write obscene Arabic words on the mirror in shaving soap. The food, of course, was better than I was used to, but we had the same plate throughout
a
meal and ate successive courses off it; even with meat and vegetables we were given first the one and then, when we had finished it, the other. At dinner red wine was set out on the tables in giant carafes, and this seemed wonderful to me. It was the cheapest institutional
vin ordinaire
, so sour that until you were used to it a single mouthful clenched your face into a fist. The smaller boys would drink it heavily watered, and then slowly reduce the proportion of water as they got older, until in their mid-teens they were drinking it neat. I went through a telescoped version of the same process: it was three weeks before I was able to drink the wine neat. By then I was enjoying it, as you might enjoy a rough and powerful cider.

The classroom work was so challenging that at first I found it tiring, an unprecedented experience for me. In Latin periods we naturally translated Latin into French, and French into Latin; mathematics was, again naturally, mathematics in French; and so on. Even English lessons were not the walkover I had anticipated, because the French boys had been taught English grammar, which I never had, and they and the master were perpetually astonished that I did not know things about the English language that they regarded as elementary. It amazes me now that I was able to keep up in all these subjects, but I just about did, though by the end of each day I was exhausted. And of course I was all the time living my ordinary daily life in French. The English boys had deliberately been put in different classes, so we saw little of one another, and I was speaking French all day. By the end of that term I was talking French with a fluency I have never recaptured.

Two of the boys in my class were from one of France’s central African colonies, and were the first blacks I ever talked to. At first it gave me culture shock to hear them bubbling over in voluble and perfect French. One, Coulibali, was very black indeed, and gravely serious; the other was lighter both in colour and personality. They gave the impression of being integrated into the
surrounding
community with few hints of the racism that would certainly have existed in the Britain of that day. I soon discovered that, because of this difference, Paris was in the process of becoming once more a haven for black Americans, as it had been before the war.

The best of the teachers taught the older boys and were given the title Professor. They were indeed professorial, with thick three-piece suits even in summer, bow ties, and in many cases little pointed beards. The one I liked most was the Latin teacher, a handsome, austere, acridly intelligent man who commanded perfect attention without raising his voice. He was compelling to listen to, and I suppose must have been the first charismatic French intellectual I encountered. And he was the genuine article: unlike most of those I was to come up against later in the world of philosophy, he was a person of real intellectual seriousness and integrity.

I only just missed studying philosophy at the lycée. The boys a year older than me, the eighteen-year-olds, were doing it for their
baccalauréat. Philo
, they called it, and what it meant (quite rightly) was reading Descartes. At that time philosophy was not taught to schoolchildren in England, and I was impressed.

The young are uncannily adaptable. Ever since I was nine years old I had been plunged into one new world after another, and had always adapted quite happily. The Lycée Hôche was no exception. But once I got used to it I began to feel that in one important respect the whole arrangement was point-missing as far as I was concerned. The heart of Paris was twelve miles away, twenty minutes on the train: surely getting to know it would do immeasurably more for my education than would mastering the French vocabulary in mathematics? Little opportunity of doing so had come my way. I decided to take action.

I went to see the headmaster, whom I had always found sympathetic, and put it to him. He took the point at once, but was
doubtful
whether anything could be done without causing trouble with other people in the school. We had more than one meeting, and he made enquiries, and then shifted his ground. What moved him, I think, was not so much anything to do with me as the fact that any concessions to me would have to be made to the other Christ’s Hospital boys, some of whom were proving unable to cope with the ten-and-a-half-hours-a-day, all-of-it-in-French work. Typically, at the Christ’s Hospital end, they had not been chosen with that in mind. (Nor had I.) They were floundering, and in need of rescue. Perhaps what I was pressing on him would provide a solution to their problem.

Once Casati decided to change our schedule he decided boldly. He summoned all the English boys to his study and told us that, since much of our supervised prep was for examinations that we were not going to sit, we would be excused two hours of it every day, out of the four and a half of prep. These would be the hours from 5.00 to 7.00, thus giving us three consecutive hours of freedom every afternoon, from 4.00 to 7.00. We could also ask for the whole of each Thursday off, provided it was for a purpose of approved educational value, such as visiting museums or art galleries in Paris. And we could go into Paris on Saturday evenings to a performance by any of the national companies, which would mean classical drama, opera or ballet. We would have to account for where we had been, and be ready to describe what we had seen. We would do this to Mr Rogers, a congenial and very young Scottish student-teacher at the lycée who had been in France for more than a year and spoke excellent French. We would spend two classroom periods a week with him, in which we would raise whatever questions we had about the lycée, and French life generally – manners, customs, food, clothes, transport, politics, anything, and especially the language.

It was an astute arrangement. We would still be doing eight and a half hours of schoolwork on four days of the week, plus
Saturday
mornings, but we now had a real chance to get to know Paris. And get to know it I did. At first I rushed in there every afternoon, to spend a couple of hours just wandering the streets and avenues. Paris is significantly smaller than London, much easier to walk across and around, and to get to know. On my wanderings I would go up or inside anything I walked past that was free – monuments, churches, museums, art galleries, department stores – or at any rate free to me as an
étudiant anglais
. Often I would devote the whole afternoon to going back to a place that had caught my fancy the previous day. The entire experience was a feast, and I lived in a state of satisfied greed. It was the only city
I
had been in that could begin to compare with London, and yet it was fascinatingly different. The cost of these daily excursions was no more than that of a tube journey from Arnos Grove to Piccadilly Circus, which I was used to doing on a daily basis. Once in Paris I rarely took a bus or metro, but walked everywhere.

However, I was taking in so much during these three-hour afternoons that the time limit became more and more irksome. Getting back to the lycée became a scramble. Sometimes I was late, and began to receive warnings from the
Surveillant-Général
, Monsieur de l’Eau, that my permission to go out would be curtailed. Holding his wristwatch under my nose, and beating time in the air between the two with his fingertips, he would say, with dramatic emphasis and pauses worthy of the Comédie Française: ‘
Vous êtes – en retard. Il ne faut pas être – en retard. Il faut prendre un train – qui arrive – à l’heure
.’ And stalk off. That was it. He meant it. So I changed my habits. There was also another consideration. I had so little money that I was beginning to feel the need to reduce even my small daily expenditure – I needed to have quite a few days when I spent nothing at all. So I stopped going in to Paris on most of those short afternoons, and left my visits for Thursdays and weekends when I had more time. Instead, I went to the Palace of Versailles, or rather to its park, which was huge. The summer of
1947
was one of the hottest on record, and I found it wonderful to be able to get out of the lycée and go somewhere nearby where I could wander around, or lie about, in a vast and beautiful park, and do that every day. I would usually take a book, or something to write with. I remember the deeply satisfied disgust with which I hurled a hardbound diary that I had been keeping for months into one of the ornamental canals.

The whole experience of being in France turned from being a partially frustrating one to being something wonderful. I loved Paris. And friends among the day boys were now inviting me to their homes in Versailles. Lunch parties were given for me, which was a new experience. One was given by the headmaster, at which I was entertainingly taught the basics about wines and brandies – and given food of a quality I had never experienced. At one such party, which was in a Paris restaurant, I saw a steak for the first time. I thought it a clever idea – I must remember, I thought, to alert people to this when I get home. There were several operas I saw for the first time:
Rigoletto
and
Il Trovatore, Thaïs
(for the only time) and my first Wagner opera,
Lohengrin
. This last was an extraordinary experience for me. Since I had been an impassioned lover of Wagner’s music for half my life, and never seen any of his operas on the stage, simply seeing one was an epoch-making event. In addition to that,
Lohengrin
had been my first love with Wagner’s music, and for that reason had always had special significance for me. And here it was – being sung in French. I had never heard Wagner in French before, and rarely have I heard it since. It does not sound at all well. Since I knew only the extracts I had heard on records, or as bleeding chunks in concert programmes, to begin with I knew every note of the prelude, but then came a very long stretch of music I had never heard before – followed suddenly by Elsa’s Dream, which I knew well. This disconcerting pattern was repeated all evening, and was at its most extreme in the last act. A long outpouring of wonderful music
that
I had never heard in my life would suddenly become four minutes of music that I knew by heart, which would then issue in more music that I did not know, followed by another four minutes that I knew by heart – and so on, over and over. It was almost disorienting, an experience I was to live through with each of Wagner’s operas in turn over the next few years. It caused me to hear music I knew already in a new way, because hearing it in context for the first time. The supreme revelation was the moment-by-moment integration of orchestra with stage action. Sometimes the orchestral music seemed to be radiating out of the characters. Up to now I had taken in Wagner as music alone, but from this time onwards I was to experience the music as part of a larger whole. The conductor on this first occasion was Inghelbrecht, the leading interpreter (and a personal friend) of Debussy: he gave the music an eloquent combination of forward drive and delicacy. Delicacy was something I was not used to in Wagner.