Growing Up In a War (47 page)

When I got back to school for the following term I told David Roberts that I wanted to sit for the very next Oxbridge entrance exam, whenever it was. He was dismayed. The normal age for candidates was eighteen and a half, and I was a bare seventeen and a half, a whole year short of peak form. He regarded me, he said, as a near certainty – but in a year’s time, not now. It would be stupid to sit the exam when I was not ready for it. As far as preparing for it was concerned, I had just missed the whole of the previous term by being in France. Why do it?

His reference to my time in France gave me an idea for an excuse. I still found it impossible to tell him the truth about my mother, I found it so humiliating. If only I had told him, I would have discovered the reality of my situation. But what I said was that my time in France had brought me to the point where I had outgrown being a schoolboy. I was now just longing to leave school. He already knew about my intensive life of theatre and concerts in London, and how much I missed those when I was at school: I now implied that the parallel experience I had had in Paris had compounded this, to the point where I could no longer bear the constraints of school life. I had to get away, go out into the adult world. Being only seventeen, I spoke in the terms typical of late adolescence, with violently uttered sentences like ‘I can’t bear this dreadful place a minute longer’ and ‘I’ve simply got to get out of here.’

David was hurt. I was rejecting him and everything he was trying to do for me. The stupidity of my attitude seemed to him unworthy
of
me, and he said everything he could to dissuade me. I was adamant. In my mind, getting a university education depended on my not giving in to him, so nothing he could have said would have made me change my mind – unless he had told me that my mother was not paying for me to be at school. Alas, he never did. I knew how silly my behaviour appeared and was deeply embarrassed. My real feelings were the opposite of what I was saying. I loved the school, and had always been happy there – more than ever now that my father had died: in fact, this was the only place where I felt wanted. I was profoundly upset at making David feel that I was sweeping him out of my life – this again was the opposite of my real feelings: I was devoted to him, and appreciated everything he was doing for me, including what he was trying to do now, with so much concern, to prevent me from damaging myself. But at the moment I could think of no other way of asserting my will. In any case, having grabbed at the straw of this excuse, I was stuck with it, and had to go through with it.

With the new academic year a new master arrived to assist David with his history specialists, and David handed me over to him to see if he, as a much younger man, could do anything to dissuade me. He was twenty-six, I think, and had just got a first in history at Balliol, having gone up to Oxford late because of ambulance service during the war. He was Ralph Davis, son of H.W.C. Davis, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. Ralph was to spend one year only as a schoolmaster, and the rest of his career as a university teacher, first as a fellow of an Oxford college, then as a professor elsewhere. He was, in fact, unfitted to be a schoolmaster, and it turned out to be a piece of ill luck that I fell into his hands. He made much worse the damage that I was doing to myself. When I was handed over to him I was making myself appear headstrong and difficult, brash, rejecting, full of false values, and he did not have the maturity or temperament to take this in his stride and brush it to one side. Instead of weighing me
up
dispassionately and thinking how he could get me to behave in my own best interests, as David had been trying to do, he took against me, and became antagonistic. From him I learnt that the next entrance examination for Balliol would be held in six months’ time, in March, and so I set my sights on that.

During the interim, something entirely unconnected with any of this happened, something that transformed my life – and incidentally constituted a new threat to my staying on at school. I became involved with one of the school’s female staff. Our relationship had to be kept a deadly secret. If we had been discovered we would both have been sacked on the spot, with no question or discussion, and we both knew this.

It happened as a result of a game of rugger. I was still, as I had always been, a bad player, though not as bad as before, and my height gained me an undistinguished place in the house XV. Because I was thin, and could run quite fast in short bursts, I played as a three-quarter. The ground on the day of the match was frozen hard as concrete. I and the winger outside me were tossing remarks to and fro about the dangerousness of this as we lined out for the first throw-in, and I, referring to my well-known hatred of being compelled to play, said: ‘Perhaps I’ll break my leg and be excused the rest of the game.’ These were to become famous last words. Within a matter of seconds I had received the ball and, twisting the upper part of my body so as to pass it while accelerating away from the pass, was crash-tackled by a six-footer from the other side and went down with an almighty smash. I had, indeed, broken my leg – a joke which had the winger chortling throughout the rest of the time I knew him.

I was carried off to the infirmary, where the doctor said they would X-ray me not immediately but the following day. Meanwhile, to keep my weight off my feet, I was put to bed in one of the wards. I quickly found that if I moved my leg in the bed, the two
broken
ends of bone ground together and gave a stab of excruciating pain. So I just lay there, moving my leg either not at all or slowly and carefully.

This was all very well until night fell and I wanted to sleep. I then found that when I nodded off I would unconsciously change position and be jerked awake by the stab of pain. After two or three repetitions of this I decided that real sleep was impossible, so I would force myself to stay awake. I sat up in the bed and made myself as comfortable as I could against the pillows. The ward was now in total darkness, and the boys in the other half-dozen beds were asleep. But there I sat, bolt upright, with my hands folded across my lap, busying myself with my thoughts and waiting for the night to pass.

After a long time, in the depths of the night – it must, I suppose, have been about three o’clock – a soft illumination appeared on the other side of the glass panels at the end of the ward. The sound of footsteps came from farther down the corridor, from somewhere out of sight. A torch was approaching. When it came into view its light plunged everything behind it into blackness, so I could not see who was holding it. It floated along, three or four feet above the ground, with footsteps coming from the darkness beneath it. It approached the door, which silently opened. It hung in mid-air in the open doorway, and from that position beamed itself on each bed in turn, revealing one boy after another curled up asleep – until it came to me, and there I was, sitting bolt upright, fully awake and gazing directly back into its beam. The torch evinced soundless surprise, and lingered on me for a moment. Then it approached me, with the footsteps below it again, until it got to my bed, and then I was able to see a nurse standing over me.

‘Why are you sitting up?’ she whispered. ‘Is everything all right?’

I explained.

‘You mean they haven’t put you in a splint?’ she said. ‘That’s
the
first thing they should have done. I’ll do it now.’ And off she went.

She came back with the splint, and keeping her words and movements quiet so as not to disturb any of the other boys she wrapped up my leg. It was all done by torchlight.

‘There,’ she said. ‘You’ll be able to sleep now.’

Then, as an afterthought, she said: ‘I was just doing a round before making myself a cup of hot chocolate. Would you like some? It might help you sleep.’

‘I’d love some,’ I said.

Off she went again, and came back this time with two mugs of chocolate. She sat on the settle beside me, and – there was no need now for the torch – we carried on a conversation in whispers and sips in the dark.

Her responses had been sympathetic, and at the same time practical, and I liked that. While she was putting the splint on I had seen her in enough light to find her pleasant-looking. She asked me about myself, and then told me about herself. She was thirty-one, still unmarried, and lived in the infirmary with other unmarried nurses. One snag about the job, she said, was that the infirmary had been deliberately set apart from the rest of the school, and the life of those who worked in it was so different from that of the teaching staff that the two rarely met. With patients they were seldom able to have even the kind of conversation she and I were having now. It was all rather a cut-off existence as far as personal contacts were concerned. In fact, she said as she was leaving, this conversation had itself been a tonic, and she might look in again the following night, after the others had gone to sleep. If I was still awake I might like to have another chat, though of course, if I was asleep she would not disturb me …

At school I was always conscious of being starved of female company, so this prospect was an attractive one. Next night I deliberately stayed awake. It was especially easy to do this, since I had
been
in bed all day. She came, and again we held a whispered conversation in the dark, this time for a couple of hours. And this time she brought the hot chocolate with her. I cannot now remember how long I stayed in the infirmary altogether, or why it was longer than expected – there must have been some complications with either the fracture or the treatment. I feel, uncertainly, that it was a couple of weeks. Whatever it was, she came every night, and we talked at great length … One night she gave me a blanket bath, and this involved some fairly intimate bodily contact between us. After that we necked and canoodled night after night with increasing intimacy. On my last night, when we knew I would be leaving the next day, she got into my bed.

It was a crazy thing for us to do. We were surrounded in the darkness by other boys, and although they had slept soundly through all our previous neckings we had no guarantee that they would sleep through this. We were making a great deal more noise. Nobody stirred, though – adolescent boys, and very young men, sleep like the dead, in a way few other people ever do – and by the end we felt sure none of them had heard us. I went on believing this until, more than half a century later, at a school reunion, a forgotten acquaintance – old now like me – came up with a twinkle in his eye and a quiet, warm chuckle and told me how he had woken up in that ward and heard these unmistakable sounds coming from my bed. He had been startled out of his wits, not daring to move – hardly daring to breathe – and just lay there in the darkness listening. I asked if he had told anyone, and he said he had not, though on reflection it seemed to him very strange that he had not. Thinking about it now, he said, he realised that he had actually been shocked.

Another bizarre aspect of the whole thing was that my right leg was encased in plaster of Paris from foot to mid-thigh. So that was how I had my first sexual experience. My leg remained in plaster throughout the early weeks of our relationship – for we
arranged,
of course, to go on meeting, and did so for the rest of my time at the school.

Apart from anything else, I found the affair monumentally exciting. After dark, and after the other boys had gone to bed, she (let’s call her Jill) and I would meet in one of our secret places. I was now the deputy house captain, which meant I had a study, but this was approachable only through the dayroom, so it was impossible for us to meet there. In any case, we felt we needed to keep our meetings away from the house. At first we met in the open, in woods and copses on the edge of the school’s extensive grounds. She would bring blankets, and we would wrap ourselves together in them. After one such tryst I returned to the house to find two of my fellow monitors, Richard Cavendish and Dick Gerrard-Wright, still up. They were bending over Richard’s desk in the dayroom, discussing something that lay on it, and as I walked in Richard looked up and called out: ‘Here, look at this.’ I bent over the table, my head between theirs. Wright sniffed, unselfconsciously surprised at first, then ostentatiously, and said in astounded tones: ‘You smell of scent!’ In that moment I smelt it too.

‘Do I?’ I said with as much unconcern as I could muster. ‘It must be this soap someone’s given me,’ and turned away and disappeared into my study. I thought it was obvious that I had fled, and I expected Wright and Cavendish to pursue me about it later, so I prepared things to say, but neither of them mentioned it again.

That winter, 1947–48, was one of the coldest there had ever been, with the deepest snow I have known in England. (The previous one had been exceptionally bad too, so the two last winters of my time at school were almost the wintriest of my life.) It was no longer possible for Jill and me to make love in the open. But in any institution such as Christ’s Hospital there are always disused rooms, in fact whole disused buildings, and we found it
fun
to explore for them, and discover safer and safer ones. She went on bringing blankets, and our meetings were very happy. We remained, so far as we knew, undiscovered and unsuspected.

The whole relationship was a key experience in my life. We were both actively involved, and equally responsible for what we did; but if there was one rather than the other who tended to take the lead it was her, because of the difference in age. Perhaps for that reason I never felt that I was taking advantage of her, nor did I feel any guilt towards her, not then nor when we parted. The whole thing always had something of the character of a wartime relationship. We acknowledged from the start that it could not have any long-term future, and on that basis we gave ourselves up to it uninhibitedly while it lasted. After I left school I saw her only once, when I was on leave from the army before being sent abroad. Then, in Austria, I became involved with someone else – indeed, while I was away, so did she. But between us, through everything, there was always good feeling. Four or five years later, when I was in my last year at Oxford, she sent me a telegram to tell me she had got married, but gave me no address. It was obvious from this that she did not want me to get in touch with her, and I never attempted to do so.