Growing Up In a War (46 page)

Straight theatre in Paris made less impression on me, chiefly because I disliked the style of acting, which was inflated and rhetorical – operatic, in fact. It was melodrama, the actors shouting and posturing. The only thing I now recall is Racine’s
Britannicus
performed by the Comédie Française. What made more impression was the cheapness of the cheapest seats, costing less than sixpence in English money. This was also true of the Opéra, though you would not necessarily be able to see the stage. It made me realise the potential of national theatre.

The paintings of Paris opened up a new world. For me the visual arts were being newly discovered, and I was in the first flush of my enthusiasm for them. The Impressionists came as a gift from heaven. Their paintings had recently been separated out from the others in the Louvre and given their own museum in a smaller building in the Jardin des Tuileries. I went back to it again and again. The celebration of life, of colour and light, above all of seeing, shouted from the canvases. Some of them, with their
direct
emotionalism, moved me almost as if they were music. I loved them in a way I had not realised I could love a visual object.

A work of an entirely different sort that had a strange and lasting effect on me was the sculpture in the Louvre known as the
Winged Victory of Samothrace
. I saw the popular classics there, from the
Venus de Milo
to the
Mona Lisa
, and enjoyed them all, but apart from the
Winged Victory
they had nothing like the effect on me that the Impressionists did. But of course the Impressionists are themselves now popular classics. At that time they were still thought of as ‘modern’, or almost so.

All the walking and standing I was doing was tiring, the more so in what was abnormally hot weather. The temperature touched 100 degrees in Paris on one day that summer – something it had never yet done in Britain. When my legs ached I would find a place to sit and read. I have a special memory of sitting in a metal chair at the end of the Tuileries, looking over the Place de la Concorde and reading
Great Expectations
. I had recently seen the David Lean film, but the novel was even better. At that moment there was nowhere in the world I would rather have been, and nothing else in the world that I would rather have been doing.

Paris was still run-down from the war and Nazi occupation. Buildings were dirty, mostly grey or black, and public places neglected. Most people looked poor, and were drably dressed. All this was true even by comparison with London, which itself was drab. But the most striking thing of all was the level of aggression in public behaviour: people snapped and snarled at one another, aggressive and defensive at the same time. If you bumped into a stranger only slightly in a crowded place, he or she would quite likely round on you with startling viciousness and spit the equivalent of ‘Can’t you look where you’re going?’ straight into your face. It was always unpleasant, and, in the end, hateful. People whose job it was to serve the public were deliberately unhelpful, and took pleasure in denying their customers what they wanted.
Repressed
aggression, bristling hostility were everywhere, always ready to explode – and on a public scale as well as a private one: daily life was constantly strike-bound, and there were always public protests and demonstrations. Aggression, aggression, aggression was the air we shared and breathed; and it was the nastiest kind of aggression, not big-boned and hearty, but spiteful and mean. Ten years later I came across a quotation from Camus saying that spitefulness was a national institution with the French, and this fitted my experience exactly. By the end of my time in Versailles and Paris I loved the places but not the people, at least not in their public aspect. When I discussed these things with French friends, or at the homes of families in Versailles, the usual response was to agree that it was indeed so, and to explain it in terms of the humiliations of national defeat and Nazi occupation. Most people, I was told, had done things to survive of which they were ashamed, and this was so recent that nobody trusted anyone else.

Throughout my visit to France, all I ever saw was Paris and its environs, except for one day which I spent in and around the cathedral at Chartres. Even so, the range of things I managed to fit in was wider than I have been able to indicate. For instance I went to the Grand Prix at Longchamp, and the Folies-Bergère, and a large public meeting at the Sorbonne addressed by famous politicians. The whole experience was so multifarious, and meant so much to me in so many different ways, that I have remembered it ever since as one of the formative periods of my life, and can easily lapse into thinking of it as if it went on for months and months instead of its actual seven weeks. It was the best possible therapy for the death of my father. During it I thought of him every day, often painfully – unbearably so at
Lohengrin
, and unbearably at Longchamp. But every day I was also taken out of myself for long periods, forgetting everything else, either sunk in the struggle of having to do classwork in French or rollicking in the pleasures of Paris. However, although I was able to lose myself in
what
I was doing, or in my surroundings, for some reason I was not able to do so in other people’s company. I dealt with people in whatever way I had to, but without really taking them in. There must have been a huge disparity between the liveliness of my responses to what I was seeing and my lack of response to other people. For instance, I now know from independent sources which I have used to check my memories that several of the things I have already recounted I did with this or that companion, but even after being reminded of it I cannot recover any trace of the companion in the memory I have of the event. I recall the occasion itself vividly – the place, the atmosphere, above all the paintings, the operas, or whatever I was there for – but it is as if I were there alone.

The kind of detailed recall on which this book and my last one have been largely based begins to peter out at this stage of my life. I have always assumed that this had to do with the trauma of my father’s death; but perhaps it would have happened in any case. I now learn from other people’s responses to my work that it is quite common for individuals to retain full, detailed memories of their childhoods but not of their ongoing lives after that; and perhaps I am simply one of those people. Whatever the reason, from the time I emerged into adult life the completeness of my recall fades, and my memory becomes more like what I suppose other people’s to be. It is still quite good, still detailed and secure in many ways, but now there are gaps, some of them long, and also muddled periods, and periods when everything seems to swim into a single, homogeneous, not-very-distinct flow. In this and my last book I have treated memory as a first draft, a starting point to be subjected to detailed checking – and it is surprising how many different ways there are of checking memory when one confronts it as a serious task – but after the age of about eighteen there is no such first draft available.

The school term ended earlier in France than in England, so
when
the time came for me to leave the Lycée Hôche I went back to Christ’s Hospital. There, for the first time, I met the boys who had gone there from the lycée, nine of them, and we fell on one another and compared impressions. They looked on their time at Christ’s Hospital as a junket – getting up in the morning a whole hour later, with no prep to do before breakfast; and in the entire day only half the amount of work. There were games and sports every day, a thousand acres of open air to wander around in, pupil power in the form of a monitorial system. Life was a spree for the English boys, they thought, and terrific fun, and they themselves enjoyed it immensely – but surely no one could think that this was education? Not seriously. Surely
I
, having been to the Lycée Hôche and seen the proper thing for myself, must realise that this was not real education at all. It was just a highly organised way of having fun. What use was any of it going to be in later life? The English were notoriously not
sérieux
, and here was the explanation … At bottom, the attitude of the French boys came down to a disbelief and derision that we could take education so unseriously as to think it was
this
. That provided them with an explanation for the lack of civilisation that they found among the British generally. Like nearly all French people at that time, they tended to equate civilisation with French culture, so the general ignorance of things French that met them on every side (especially in a school where most boys did not even learn the French language) flabbergasted them, and seemed to them a form of barbarism.

When my second end of term came, and I returned home, I found that, for the first time in my life, I had a bit of money. My father had left everything to my mother except for two small but significant bequests to Joan and me. To Joan he left fifty pounds and all his books; to me fifty pounds and all his gramophone records. Joan said he had done this because he had been so upset at his father not leaving him anything, but our bequests were so
apt
that there seemed to me more to it than that. Because of mine, I have had a sizeable collection of records ever since, no matter how hard-up I have been. What came to me in addition were all the masculine accessories that were of no use to my mother or sister. It never occurred to any of us that I might wear my father’s clothes – the nature of our family business made second-hand clothing taboo for us, even if it had belonged to family or friends. We wore only new clothes. But his silver cigarette cases and leather cigar cases (he had two of each), his cufflinks, black bow ties, and other such odds and ends became mine as a matter of course at just the age when I was in sight of wanting such things. The biggest treasure trove of all was his ties. He always had an eye for these as being the only dash of colour in a man’s dress, and whenever an especially good one came into the shop he collared it for himself. He had always let me wear some of them, those he cared least about. Now they were all mine – and by the time of his death there were something like two hundred of them. Ever since, I have had a ridiculous abundance of ties, an absurdly large number. As fast as they wear out or get lost (or stolen), or become dowdy or out of fashion, they are replaced by new purchases or presents. But I still have one, nondescript (it must have survived because it was scarcely ever worn), that has the family shop’s label on it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

MY MOTHER HAD
no connection now with my staying on at Christ’s Hospital, but because I failed to understand this I misunderstood the conversations I had with her about my situation.

I told her at the beginning of the holidays that I regarded it as essential that I get a university education. It was much rarer then than now. No more than five per cent of the population went to university – even from the best public schools the great majority of boys did not go – but I was determined to get there. I wanted to go back to school for the next term in order to set about securing a university place – which, I said to my mother, I would do as quickly as I possibly could. In my mind, what I was doing was pressing her to go on paying for me to be at school a tiny bit longer, trying to bring home to her how much was at stake for me, and assuring her that I would make such demands on her for as short a time as I could manage.

To my amazement she replied that whether or not I went back to school was a matter of indifference to her, and entirely for me to decide. If I did, she said, she was not going to keep me during the school holidays. If I wanted to, I could go on staying in a room in her flat (as she put it), and she would not charge me for that; but she would not provide me with any money, so I would have to earn what money I needed. What I thought she was saying was that although she did not care whether I went to university or not she would not go so far as to take away from me
the
possibility of doing so. However, this was the furthest she was prepared to go: she was determined to make the minimum sacrifice that such relenting required of her.

By misunderstanding her in this way I was not thinking ill of her. In fact she was offering a great deal less than I was attributing to her. All she was offering was to let me go on using my own room (in what would normally have been regarded as my own home) rent-free for a quarter of the year.

My relief was intense, but still apprehensive. She had said nothing about keeping me on at school for as long as I might need, which could be for another year or more. She had not addressed herself to that point at all. She had referred only to one more term, the following term – I could go ‘back’ – and even that with an ostentatious lack of benevolence. Further than that she had not committed herself. Perhaps she happened to be in a good mood at the time. In any case, I knew from experience that she was effortlessly capable of making promises about such things and then breaking them. But that meant also that there was nothing to be gained by pressing her – in fact, to do so was more than likely to be counterproductive. So I deliberately, anxiously refrained from raising the matter further. I was holding my breath. I could go back to school for the next term, at least, that was clear. Then I would have to hope for the best. Some time, any time, she would inform me that she had stopped paying my fees and that I had left school (my grandmother had done exactly this to my aunt Peggy). I felt vulnerable, on a tightrope still, but at least upright, and in with a chance.

I kept myself that summer, as before, by working in the income tax office in Tottenham, and living in my rent-free room. Ken Connor was also working at the office, and he and I went to the Proms together. It was at the Proms that year that I heard a complete Mahler symphony for the first time, the Fourth, in which, for the only time, I saw Elisabeth Schumann. I do not remember
whether
Kathleen Ferrier sang in that season, but she was at her peak at about that time, and I went to everything of hers that I could get to. I had never heard such a beautiful voice in live performance. It had a rare mix of attributes: although exceptionally full and rich, it was not sensuous but poignant, a combination that pierced the heart. I would sit (or stand) enraptured during her performances. I have heard few better voices since.