My Father and Myself (10 page)

My father had sent my brother and me to Rossall School, preparatory and public, in Lancashire, his own territory, partly because he believed it to be a good, healthy, roughish school where we would get plenty of exercise and have “the corners knocked off us,” partly because his own North Country friends, such as Captain Bacon, sent their boys there, partly to put us out of reach of the “mollycoddling” influence of the women. I was a cherubic little boy with large blue starry eyes; my first nickname was “Girlie,” and at the public school older boys soon began to make advances to me. In my very first term there the head of my house, who seemed to me more like a man than a boy, used to sit on my bed in the darkness, night after night, begging to be allowed in and whispering into my ears things that terrified me almost to tears. He never got his way with me, whatever his way may have been, and for long after he left, happily for me at the end of that term, I continued to hate his memory and think of him as the devil. I don't remember when I started to masturbate, but this was my first introduction to love. Later, a ginger-headed boy used to crawl across the dormitory floor to my bed after lights out and, lying on his back on my strip of carpet, beseech me in whispers to let him in, or, failing that, to stretch down my hand. Him too I resisted for a time, but he was more my own age than my previous wooer, less alarming, and I was eventually cajoled into stretching down my hand. I remember that I found the touch of his hot flesh and the smell of his stuff on my fingers more repugnant than exciting; for a long time I disliked the smell of semen, unless it was my own; I have never been able to enjoy other people's smells—farts, feet, armpits, semen, unwashed cocks—as I enjoy mine. Later still I became more accustomed to the prevalent depravities of this excellent school, so discerningly selected by my father, in which I was never bullied or, when my first too mysterious and monstrous wooer had gone, unhappy. A shameless and amusing boy named Jude, who sat beside me in class, had opened the seams of his trouser pockets, so that his own hand or that of any willing friend could have ready access to the treasure, not hard cash but hard enough, that stood within. My left hand was sometimes guided through the open seam on to Jude's body as we sat poring over our books—though I remember wishing that it could have been the body of his younger brother instead, who was more attractive but not in my form. This led to holes being made in
my
pockets, but whether Jude's hand or anyone else's, except my own which was frequently there, was ever permitted to enter I don't recall. Indeed, when I try to think back to my schooldays, I remember only my hand, not often and always by invitation, upon a few other boys, not their hands upon me, and if this is true I can suggest a physical reason for it to which I shall come later. I see myself, then, gazing back, as an innocent, rather withdrawn, self-centered boy, more repelled by than attracted to sex, which seemed to me a furtive, guilty, soiling thing, nothing to do with those feelings I had not yet experienced but about which I was already writing a lot of dreadful sentimental verse, called romance and love.

This, then, returning to my father, was one of the young minds to which he addressed himself in the billiard-room of Grafton House in 1912. He admitted, I remember, his own early participation in the practice in which he thought it advisable to counsel moderation, then took occasion to add—getting it all off his chest in one and providing for the future as well as the present—that in the matter of sex there was nothing he had not done, no experience he had not tasted, no scrape he had not got into and out of, so that if we should ever be in want of help or advice we need never be ashamed to come to him and could always count on his understanding and sympathy. That this was an excellent and friendly speech I realized when I was older; that I never took advantage of it is the whole point of this book; even at the time, my brother thought that the “old man” (my father was then forty-eight) had behaved “very decently”; but I myself was embarrassed and shocked. I had never associated my father with sex, indeed it was hardly more than a couple of years ago that I had innocently failed to associate him with the production of myself. Deprived of my stork, I was brought to understand, without ever pondering it, that many years ago my parents had come together to create a family; that was all. It was what people married for and they had achieved it. Since then, of course, there had been nothing more for them to do but raise and protect us and work for our good.

To hear my father now complacently admitting to, even boasting of, extensive sexual misconduct was disconcerting and distasteful. Indeed it had absolutely no reality and I put it aside. My brother and I never discussed it, and for a great many years I did not think of it again or wonder what exactly my father had meant or what he had done. Whatever it was it lay in a remote past, and there it remained. It made no difference whatever to my present view of him, and of my mother, as staid, elderly people who, all passion spent, had fulfilled their lives in the creation of ourselves. Physical love belonged to the young. It did not enter my head even that my father might still be having congress with my mother, let alone with anyone else; all that belonged to the past; they slept now in separate bedrooms; their sexual day was done.

IF SUCH INNOCENCE looks odd in a schoolboy of sixteen (and I don't know if it does), I shall seem odder still when I say that these somewhat inhuman views I took of my father in his middle age as a sexually abdicated man persisted almost to the day of his death, more than fifteen years later. It must be remembered, however, that our lives together were interrupted by the war, which kept me from home almost continuously for four years; when I returned after the Armistice, adult and enlightened, there were reasons for consigning him, without much thought, to the sexual shelf. One of these was health. But first of all I must describe him as I recall him best, during the 'twenties.

He was a very large man, tall and heavily built, the heaviness of his frame increasing with age. As a trooper he had been almost perfectly proportioned, I believe, according to Army standards, able to hold sixpences between his thighs, knees, calves and ankles when he stood upright with his legs close together, but the broad shoulders sagged forward more and more in late middle age until he acquired a top-heavy, unwieldy look. Upon these shoulders was set a large head, which may be called grand, with a wide, intelligent forehead, a prominent supraciliary ridge, and the strong features of an elder English statesman. My mother called him “Punch,” but that suggests an exaggeration of feature he did not possess; his nose and chin were both strong but there was nothing nut-crackery about them. His face was fleshy and venous, becoming rather jowly; his complexion ruddy. Thin on top, his greying hair was full at the sides and back; a thick mustache adorned a pleasant mouth in which, most of the time, a Jamaican cigar was tucked. I don't remember him as a smiling man, though he was a cheerful one; he would laugh and chuckle, but his mien generally was serious and attentive; the smile, if he were pleased or amused, was conveyed more by voice, manner, and small facial movements than by any display of teeth. In one of his eyes, which were wide and blue and greatly magnified by his horn-rimmed spectacles, he had a pronounced cast.

Strangely enough, considering the condition of his own, my father held decided views, often stated, of where eyes should be placed and what they ought to do. He was liable, in the early 'twenties, to come out with a number of maxims, old adages common to his generation, perfectly absurd for the most part and out of which we managed to joke him, a process to which he was easily amenable. Among them were two “chaps” who came in for very severe strictures: there was the “chap who doesn't look you straight in the eyes” and there was the “chap whose eyes are too close together”: neither could be trusted. These quaint fancies, which I reported among my friends, had upon us all a somewhat self-conscious effect: should we pass muster? I have said elsewhere that I did not find it altogether comfortable to look my father in the eye; this was partly due to his maxim, partly to the fact that I myself don't much like looking people straight in the eyes, and partly to his cast or squint which made it difficult, in his case, to do so. The consequent tests were sometimes unnerving. His own gaze, which perhaps he supposed straight, was ever full, thoughtful and prolonged, and it was his habit, according to the distance from him one happened to be sitting, sometimes to lower his head and regard one over the rims of his spectacles, a cross-examining look, sometimes to tilt back his head for a better focus. Thus with his magnified blue eyes swimming behind the lenses, he fixed one, yet not, as it were, quite in one's place, his cast causing the beams of his lamps to intersect too soon and pull one in, so that one sometimes felt not merely scrutinized but trapped at an uncomfortable distance, at too close quarters. My own eyes, I remember, when I was younger, often felt as though they were starting from their sockets under the strain of bravely meeting his; if my self-conscious gaze so much as wavered, I thought, the game would be up, my guilt established.

His general physical effect, then, may be described by such words as “impressive,” “authoritative,” “commanding,” but in fact, at any rate in domestic life, he exerted little authority and did not command. To what extent he directed his business I do not know; he certainly did not direct his home. Even in family quarrels, the only ones we ever had, the jealous disputes that broke out between my sister and mother, he seldom intervened, he did not take sides and put people in their places, though there were many times when he should have done so. Whatever he thought, and it was easily guessed, for the faults were easily seen, he kept to himself until, later, he might give it private expression to me in some rueful comment. I think myself that this massive and commanding appearance really sheltered a timid, unassertive, tolerant spirit, rather child-like and secretive, often obstinate, but diffident rather than self-confident, one who preferred to stand outside of life and observe it, not (as he would have phrased it) to “put one's oar in.”

A short dialogue from one of my notebooks sets the prevailing domestic tone. My father and I are drinking an aperitif with some guests before dinner, awaiting the appearance, always late, of my mother and sister who are dressing upstairs. The butler brings in the first course, and my father says:

It might be thought to follow from all this—and, when one remembers the end of the de Gallatin affair, it seems to me revealing—that he deeply disliked and carefully avoided being emotionally upset. It was perhaps to protect himself that he interfered so little in my sister's stormy affairs; he did not know how to cope with tempers and tears. He would not read the books or see the plays I sometimes recommended if he knew them to be at all tragic and harrowing. Once I trapped him into seeing Masefield's
Nan
, telling him it was a comedy, and he was wary of me afterwards. He went to the first night of the 300 Club's presentation of my own play
The Prisoners of War
, harrowing enough in all conscience, but would not join my party. He took a ticket all by himself at the back of the dress circle so that he could get out quickly and unseen. He had already read the play and knew what he was in for. The Palladium and the Tivoli, where he could have a good laugh and an eyeful of chorus girls, were his mark, Sexton Blake his favorite reading. To finish him up, his manners were always courteous, he was kind. He had very beautiful large hands, and the only lack of refinement I remember in him was an unconscious habit he had, while reading his newspaper in his armchair, of picking his nose abstractedly and rolling the little bit of snot between his thumb and forefinger.

The cast in my father's eye was caused by pain.
¹
He was in pain so frequently during the 'twenties that it has become, in my recollection of him, almost a part of his personality. We knew it as neuritis; he usually referred to it as his “jumps,” “twinges,” or “twitches.” It was not a continuous pain, I think, unless it was always with him in, so to speak, a lurking way. At any rate there were periods, days at a time, when he seemed free from it. But in the course of years it became more frequent. It might arrive at any moment and he knew when it was coming. Sometimes it was mild, sometimes it was agony. It attacked him everywhere, but its favorite seat, oddly enough considering its effect upon him when it was bad, was in the basic joints of his little fingers. It was the commonest thing to see him, every ten minutes or so when his “jumps” were on him, suddenly grip this finger with his unaffected hand and, hanging on to it, shake all over for a moment until the spasm passed—so common indeed that in course of time we scarcely noticed it unless it was particularly bad. Then he could not hide it or stifle exclamations of pain. He might be presiding over the dinner-table in his usual genial, debonair manner when, with a “Damn” or “Drat the thing,” he would drop his carving knife or fork and vigorously chafe the offending digit, while a profuse perspiration would break out on the brow of this huge man momentarily mastered by a pain in his little finger. I asked him once what the pain was like; he said it was as though a red-hot needle had been jabbed deep into the very bone. Yet he never complained, never spoke of his “jumps” unless asked, and never, except for the occasional curses involuntarily wrung from him, allowed the agony he was plainly enduring to interrupt for more than a moment whatever he was saying. My notebooks give me the following conversation: