Growing Up In a War (48 page)

I have occasionally told the story of this relationship to close friends – usually women friends who have quizzed me about my first relationship – and they have nearly always asked if I think Jill had similar relationships with other boys, before or after me. For reasons too detailed to go into here, I am certain that her relationship with me was a one-off. To begin with, it was not only about sex. From our first meetings we devoted hours and hours to talking about other things too, and with intense interest. We discussed not only ourselves and our past lives, and the individuals closest to us, and the school itself, and the people we knew in common: we talked also about books, films, whatever was in the newspapers, life in general, politics, whether or not we
believed
in God. And this meant that we got to know each other exceedingly well. If I may so put it, we became close in spirit. It was not the sort of relationship that was interchangeable. For me it was a piece of incredible luck, and I look back on it with nothing but pleasure.

In spite of this life-changing love affair I still thought it essential to secure a university place before my mother delivered on her promise not to keep me any longer – and indeed before my affair with Jill was discovered, which we feared it might be, at any moment. I had no choice but to take the examination in history, because that was the only subject I was well enough advanced in; but I was beginning to feel that I wanted to change subjects once I got to university. I was devoting two-thirds of my working time to history, and already this felt excessive. I was interested in it, but no more so than in a number of other subjects. I had chosen to specialise in it not for the subject, but to be taught by David Roberts, and now that I was not being taught by him anyway, but by Ralph Davis, I had had enough of it. I began to wonder what else I might do instead.

I assumed it would have to be one of the subjects in which I had got a distinction in School Certificate, because I would not be able to reach university standard quickly enough in any of the others, and therefore would not be accepted. But although I had got a distinction in Latin, classics was out – I had repudiated Greek anyway, and had seldom enjoyed Latin. Modern languages was a possibility, with my good French plus decent German. But this felt like a waste of opportunity. I had become used to speaking and reading French, and expected to go on doing so for the rest of my life (with increasing mastery, I assumed, though in fact the reverse has happened). Because of my passion for Wagner I intended to get into a similar position with German, and did in fact do so the following year, in Austria. It would be a waste of university, I thought, to do there what I intended to do in any
case.
My aim should be to gain something extra from university, to expand, get broadened out, learn things I would not have learnt otherwise. That scuttled the only remaining alternative, English. I was already a gluttonous devourer of poetry, novels, and performances of plays; and I knew I would go on doing that for the rest of my life. Also, I had by now developed a low opinion, something approaching a contempt, for the academic approach to such things, which I saw as point-missing in a way that was fundamental to their nature.

So what was I to do?

I took my dilemma to Ralph Davis, who invited me to discuss it with him in his study. The evening on which I did so was to have deleterious consequences for me for years to come. He referred early on to the PPE course at Oxford. I had never heard of it, so I asked what it was. He explained: ‘Philosophy, politics and economics.’ As someone interested in politics I was instantly alert, and quizzed him about it. My eagerness leapt higher when he told me that virtually none of the undergraduates who did PPE would have studied any of the three subjects at school – and higher still when he told me that the course was a recently introduced one aimed at people who were thinking of going into politics. Here was my solution, I thought, and said so, bubbling with enthusiasm. Thereupon Ralph Davis poured a barrel of cold water over me. No,
no
, NO, he said: I should on no account do PPE.

He expanded on this at length, with dismissive scorn. The most important thing a higher education could do for anyone, he said, was to lead them to the frontier of human knowledge, the frontier with the unknown, and then engage them with their subject at that point. On the way, you would do a lot of work to cover the already existing territory, and absorb a general education in the subject at a high level. In whatever specialism you selected, you would follow that path as far as it would go, until you were shoulder to shoulder with the people who were doing original
research.
It was at that point, said Ralph, that you would start thinking at the deepest level of all, grappling not just with what you did not know but with what nobody knew. From that point on you had to do everything for yourself: identify and formulate your own problems, decide on your methods, find your materials, make fruitful yet critical use of them, produce your own ideas. This was the true goal of higher education, and it was to this point that everything had been leading. It developed your capacity for independent thinking at the deepest level, the level of original thought, and in a disciplined way; and trained you in how to work hard at it. History was ideal for these purposes. It constituted an almost perfect education, even for someone who had no intention of becoming a historian. There were other subjects that could achieve it too – for instance classical scholarship, or physics (which would always include higher mathematics). Whatever the subject, the process was one that needed a long time: it could not be gone through in less than three or four years. The trouble, he said, with a course like PPE, which tried to cover three different subjects in three years, was that it doomed itself to failure from the outset. In the time available, a student could not go far enough, or dig deep enough, in any one of the subjects. He was given no possibility other than to remain at a first- or second-year level in each, being led through the sort of general introduction to it that ought to have been, but in this case was not, a transition to something deeper. So the entire course consisted of introductions. And this betrayed the students.

Ralph was passionately eloquent about all this, and heated, as if a burning resentment against PPE had built up inside him. And I accepted the whole argument. It made luminous sense to me. I had reached an age when I wanted to develop my mind, but did not know even what that meant, let alone how to do it. The school, except for David Roberts, had not done it, I knew that. But now that Ralph explained it to me I understood what I needed
to
do. I wrote off PPE as an option. It was years before I was able to reconsider that: I was for a long time convinced, because of what Ralph had said, that whatever I chose to do it would need to be a single subject. I still did not want that subject to be history, and could not decide on an alternative; but because I had to go into the army before going to university I would have a long time to think about it – and I was now, I believed, in a position to do that with understanding. I went away from that evening in Ralph Davis’s study with a light step, and not the slightest realisation that he had just sent my life off the rails for the next few years.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

THE CHRISTMAS BREAK
of 1947 was my last holiday from school, though I did not know it. Christmas itself raised difficulties about what to do, not only for me. For decades our extended family had spent Christmases together: the four of us from Arnos Grove plus what we referred to as ‘the Southgate contingent’. This consisted of two households, one of my grandparents and maiden aunt Hilda, the other my father’s favourite sister Peggy and her husband, Bill Pett. The nine of us had always gathered, with a guest or two, at one of our three homes, and had a good time. But now, within six months, both the Southgate and the Arnos Grove contingents had lost their patriarch. The family was doubly bereft, and, with that, depressed. We agreed that any attempt to hold our usual family Christmas would be painful. Nobody wanted that. So it was suggested that we put up together at a hotel where we could make our own little world but be surrounded by people enjoying themselves, and have all the work done for us by other people. I was included in this for no other reason than that it would have been embarrassing for everyone if I had been left out. We all discussed where to go. It would have to be a modest hotel, one suited to our means, yet we wanted a place with character.

It was Joan who suggested Stratford-upon-Avon. She had been there two or three times with friends to see plays, and had taken a liking to the town. It had all sorts of hotels, she said, and they were half-empty in winter – in fact some of them closed down –
so
we should be able to get a bargain rate at quite a good one. In those days there was nothing like the general demand for hotels at Christmas that there is today: quite the contrary. So it was agreed: we would spend Christmas in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Joan found the hotel. It had once been a grand private house on the bank of the Avon, with a long garden that ran beside the river to the churchyard wall of Holy Trinity (where Shakespeare lies buried). There could scarcely have been a more attractive setting, or a more convenient one.

Almost at once, dissension broke out in the family. The Southgate contingent found my mother impossible to make the arrangements with, and concluded that a Christmas spent with her without my father would be disastrous. They pulled out and made other arrangements. So only three of us – my mother, sister and me – went to Stratford. I fell in love with it, and have remained so ever since.

Scarcely any of the Shakespeare sites were open to the public in those days, but we went around looking at them all. I found it inexpressibly moving to see Shakespeare’s birthplace, and his school, and the site of the house he bought when he returned to Stratford towards the end of his life; and also the homes of people related to him; and above all his gravestone – and to think of him actually
there
. On Christmas Day, pagans though we were, we went to a service in Holy Trinity and sang carols, throughout which I thought of him lying there a little way in front of me … We did a lot of non-Shakespeare things too. On the clear, frosty morning of Boxing Day we watched a fox-hunt gather to drink a stirrup cup before setting off – a magnificent sight. Stratford in those days was quite different from the tourist centre it has since become. At Christmas the streets were empty. When I went out of doors I felt almost as if I had the town to myself.

By sheer coincidence our hotel was where I spent a whole summer five years later when, as a penniless undergraduate, I
worked
as a waiter during the Long Vacation of 1952. It exists no longer. It and its beautiful garden have been replaced by a housing estate.

That Christmas remains the only one I have spent in a hotel. The three of us got on well enough, and did a lot of things together, though I also went out alone. A fellow guest, a businessman who got into conversation with me, took me to what he said was the best pub in Stratford. It was my first experience of hearing businessmen talk about the Labour government. The sheer venom of it, even when surrounded by good Christmas cheer, took me aback. A typical joke was: ‘Why is the Labour government like a bunch of bananas? Because they came in green, they’ve turned yellow, and there isn’t a straight one in the whole bloody bunch.’

The winter of 1947–48 was a difficult time for me in many ways, and the viciousness of the weather made everything worse. My life was a mass of adolescent tangles. The death of my father hung weightily over it all like a cloud of poison gas, but in addition to that there was my uncommunicating relationship with my mother, and the secret relationship I was involved in at school – where I was also, on the basis of yet another false pretence, perceived as rejecting the teacher to whom I was most devoted. In every area things were not only emotionally dramatic but, except for Jill, intensely unpleasant. It may indeed have been that I was too grown-up now for the life I was living. Other events bore this out. Covent Garden announced that it was going to stage Wagner for the first time since before the war, but all the performances were scheduled to fall within termtime. There was to be
Tristan and Isolde
and
The Valkyrie
, neither of which I had seen, and both of which were to be staged with international star singers, Hans Hotter and Kirsten Flagstad. Her voice was the best I had heard on records, but of course I had never seen her in the flesh. It was simply unacceptable to me that this should be happening
and
I not go. So I bought a single ticket for each of the last two performances – a couple of days apart, just before the end of term – and insisted within myself that somehow I would get there. To ask to be let off school to travel up to London alone for such things (when they had not even been arranged by a senior member of staff) was not only unknown but unimaginable. I said nothing about it until the time drew close, and then asked Pongo. He was not so much disapproving as nonplussed. He said he needed time to think, and would let me know. When he did let me know he said that two such outings would be excessive. However, just this once, as a very special favour to me personally, and not to be counted as a precedent, even by anyone else, let alone me, and only because it would be near to the end of term, and because I would then be not all that far off my eighteenth birthday, I could go to one of the operas, but to one only. He left it to me to decide which.

I was thrilled and devastated. After a lot of self-torturing I plumped for
Tristan
, if only because it was a self-contained work. With limitless reluctance I posted the ticket for
The Valkyrie
to Ken Connor. It turned out to be a lucky decision, because I was able to see the same production of
The Valkyrie
at Covent Garden the following year, as part of a complete
Ring
, when I was on home leave from Austria. And the
Tristan
was unforgettable, not least because of the voice of Kirsten Flagstad. After nearly sixty years it remains, I think, the best voice I have ever heard, as sumptuous as Ferrier’s but with more bloom, more sheer beauty of sound, and also a greater variety of tone colour. She was particularly good at darkening her voice and expressing feelings and thoughts that were specific yet concealed by the words. For the rest of her career I took every opportunity of hearing her (and was therefore present at the world premiere of Richard Strauss’s
Four Last Songs
in May 1950). Her voice was so beautiful in itself, regardless of what she was singing, that I would sit there unable quite to believe what I
was
hearing. I remember thinking once: I’m nineteen now, but when I’m ninety I’ll still want to be able to relive this sound. I must impress it on my memory now for the rest of my life – and trying to do so. I must have had some success, because it gives me gooseflesh just to remember it.