The Day Gone By (36 page)

Pushing the heavy punt upstream was fairly hard work for two. I cut my hand on a projection of brick and Mike said his palms were getting scraped. The torches, after the manner of these battery jobs, were dimming, and besides that, we had to leave them lying propped in the punt; we couldn't direct the beams because we needed both hands for shoving.

After a time it seemed to me that the current was getting faster. I could hear it chattering against the sides of the punt, and also it seemed to be offering more resistance. I thought, too, that I could see the water level minutely rising, although it was hard to be sure in the dim light and without averting one's attention from shoving to take a good look.

However, quite soon a good look became unnecessary. From ahead of us there sounded a heavy splashing and falling of water, quite different from anything we had heard on the way down. Soon we arrived at the reason - or reasons. Cascades were spouting into the tunnel from inlets in the upper sides and the apex of the arched roof. The Trill was a storm-water sewer, and under the present cloudburst outside, every gutter in St Ebbe's was pouring water into it.

Several of these inlets we had no alternative but to pass beneath, for they were directly overhead and the tunnel was too narrow to permit avoiding movement to either side. The punt took in water along its length, from stern to bow, though not enough to bail. We grabbed the torches, held them clear and shoved on.

I now bethought me of a jolly eventuality. The water was rising – how fast and for how long? As I have explained, the arched roof ran in sections, some high, some low. Suppose we were to find ourselves in a high one, but unable to get forward or back because the water had risen too high in low ones ahead and behind. Well, but what to do about it? We'd already left some pretty low lengths behind us. I felt myself entering into a state of panic, for we were progressing so slowly - and were so tired - compared with our previous progress down.

Mike was admirable. Perhaps his apprehension of possible danger, more cool-headed than mine, was also more accurate, for to be quite honest I am not at all sure to this day how much danger we really were in. Could the millstream fill to the roof? If so, for how long? Could one wait safely in a high-roofed section until the level subsided? I doubt we really were in danger: but the torches were failing, the water was very noisy in a nasty, echoing, sepulchral way; pushing seemed increasingly hard, and painful too. At times like this you find out what you've really got at the bottom of you, and I fear I hadn't much. But Mike had.

I don't know how long it took to get back to the Isis: perhaps half an hour or forty minutes. It was still raining as we came out and turned off the wilted torches. We rested a while and then set off downstream for the Cherwell and Magdalen Bridge. There was a bit of reproach about the sodden cushions, but of course we attributed this to the rain - correctly. On the way back to Worcester we dropped into the Turf and each drank two double brandies, which had no intoxicating effect whatever. I wonder why: I suppose there must be a medical or physiological reason connected with stress.

Also, I still want to know in what sort of craft T. E. Lawrence successfully went down the Trill Millstream. If it wasn't a punt or a canoe, then what was it?

What, meanwhile, of my home and my family? Since October 1938, when I went up to Worcester, things had changed much, and for ever. After recovery from his illness and retirement from medical practice, my father had in effect abdicated from his position as head of the family. He now left decisions to others, and acquiesced in them. From an emotional point of view this meant little enough either to my sister or my brother. Katharine, teaching, was now twenty-eight and had not been living at home — except now and then - for some time. John, who was twenty-six, still lived at Oakdene but, as I have explained, had never had a warm relationship with my father. Emotionally, he stood to lose little or nothing from my father's diminution. I think that, although he never said so, he thought that my father had failed in his family duty and responsibilities - as indeed he had - and that for this reason he felt contempt and resentment, but little sympathy. He could feel little sympathy because he had never kept my father's company for enjoyment or from any sense of affinity. My father's merits left him cold, while his failings irritated him. He thought, too, that he had let my mother down; for John, undemonstrative though he was, had always been devoted to my mother. He felt resentment because responsibility for the family's economics, which were in a bad state - indeed, well-nigh desperate - had now devolved upon him, so that he had had to take on a rotten job, someone else's balls-up. Always pessimistic by nature - a great smeller of rats and discoverer of flies in ointment - he now had only too good cause for shaking his head and wondering what would become of us. I owe him much gratitude, in this worrying situation, for always doing everything he could to help me and never showing anything but full support - no envy - for my going up to Oxford. Although I was too young, too self-centred and irresponsible to realize it at the time, he had a pretty rough ride, inexperienced as he was, with his new family responsibilities; and he did well. I thank him much.

For me, of course, this was a time of adolescent expansion, although for the rest of the family it was a time of harsh retrenchment. My father - he must have had a bad fright – now drank nothing stronger than beer, and not a lot of that. During these final years of the ‘thirties he gradually began to assume the ways of an old man. He didn't know what to do with himself: he often said he wished it was time to go to bed, but when he went to bed he would say he wished it was time to get up. He thought ill of the state of the world - and God knows it was fully as bad as it could be - and largely gave over initiative and any sort of personal purpose or direction. Whither, indeed, could he go? He had no work and no money. While I was still at Bradfield he had derived vicarious enjoyment from my success, but Oxford he could not relate to, though he came over there to see me when I asked him. The last thing I wanted was for him to drop out of my world, and in the vacations we still enjoyed a good deal of our old relationship. It was different, though, for I was no longer a child and he could no longer be my guide and mentor, for at bottom - though he never said so - his heart was not in what I was doing. I know now, too, that he must have regarded the impending inevitable war as a terrible threat to his children and also the end of his world; as was no more than the truth. He was not a stout-hearted man by temperament and the fire had been knocked out of him. Yet I could still keep warm at the ashes.

Some time round about midsummer of 1939, when he was sixty-nine, my father was advised that he must have all his teeth extracted, or else incur further grave illness. He submitted. I well remember his return home on a beautiful June afternoon, when Arthur Klingler, my Bavarian friend (who was staying for a week or two of the long vac), and I were practising trout casts on the lawn. I called out and asked him how he was. He replied ‘Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.' Yet in those days I had little real feeling and was short on empathy: I felt sorry, but I didn't really set myself to imagine what it must be like to have all your teeth out, or what it would do to your state of mind. God forgive me.

My brother and sister had now decided that there was no alternative to selling Oakdene and installing my parents in a smaller, more economical house. After looking at a few, it seemed to them that the best course would be to move into Thorn the gardener's cottage, which was already ours. (The Thorns, of course, would perforce be leaving us anyway.) It would need a bit done to it, but not much. So during the summer of 1939 Oakdene, my beloved and life-long home, was put on the market. Like most people who have ever sold a house, my brother has spent the rest of his life regretting that we didn't get more for it. He had a true sense of responsibility, yet he was by temperament someone for whom nothing ever went quite right.

Oakdene was sold, a few weeks after the outbreak of the war, to a middle-aged couple called Balfour, who could not have been nicer to deal with or to have as neighbours. Mr Balfour, not to mince words, was a gentleman, of the same family as Arthur Balfour, the Edwardian Prime Minister. He was cultured, friendly, extremely loquacious and a pleasant man to deal with. Mrs Balfour was also pleasant enough, but had her own ideas about what she wanted to do with the property. Now, I personally began to feel one disadvantage of moving to the Thorns' adjacent cottage: you had to stand by - without a word, of course - and watch what she did. And what she did, principally, was to fell the trees. Oakdene's three acres contained plenty of trees, and several of these had individuality and had in effect been landmarks in our lives. We knew every tree in the garden, of course. I could draw a map, now. I have never been able to understand Mrs Balfour's motive in felling the trees, for having felled them she did nothing more to the sites. She felled the three silver birches along the crest of Bull Banks, and she also felled the Spanish chestnut - which made even my brother wince and express regret. Then she dug up the circular rose garden outside the dining-room windows: but she didn't convert it to something else. She just dug it up and left a mess. It all seemed very odd; but we never quarrelled with the Balfours.

I personally left Oakdene - for the last time - for Oxford in October 1939, and returned to the cottage at the end of term in December. I found living there not unpleasant, even though we were a tightish fit. My brother had enlisted, earlier in 1939, as a gunner in a territorial artillery regiment, the Berkshire Yeomanry, which mobilized upon the outbreak of war. During that winter he was stationed on Newbury race course, where he had a pretty rotten time (it was a very hard winter).

The cottage was comfortable and snug enough: I accepted the situation contentedly. The only thing I couldn't quite get used to (though I never said so, of course) was the rather explosive gas geyser for hot water in the cold little bathroom (a lean-to), which took about half an hour to trickle you a bath.

It was in this cottage that my father spent the last six and a half years of his life. I'm afraid he cannot have been happy, although he never showed as much in his dealings with me. I myself, at nineteen, was young and foolish and full of my own doings. It honestly never once occurred to me that we had come down in the world.

It may seem astonishing - even incredible - to a reader that it should not have exercised my mind that the family fortunes had failed and that my father, quite contrary to anything that ‘Dr Jarge' could have foreseen or imagined when he left Martock for Newbury with his bride in 1910, was ending his life in failure and straitened circumstances, with the local reputation of a dried-out alcoholic. I didn't feel regretful, or in the least ashamed of my family. The reasons, I now think, were three. First, the war had an obliterating effect upon private and personal troubles. Everyone's feelings at that time were primarily concerned with the war. I remember an amusing song of those days, popularized by the comedian Jack Warner, called ‘Didn't you know? There's a war on', in which the imaginary verse-by-verse protagonists, each of whom would normally have been more than justified in complaining or even in extreme anger, were always met with the bland rejoinder ‘Didn't you know? There's a war on' (e.g., the returning husband finding his wife in bed with another man, etc.).

Secondly, my parents themselves never said anything to me to suggest that they had any regrets or were at all sorry for themselves.

The third reason was my own temperament, which rendered me more or less immune to considerations like ‘What are people thinking?' or ‘Have I got as much money, or social standing, as that fellow over there?' My life was really centred upon four things: my love for my father; my friends at Oxford — friendships more enjoyable, productive and rewarding than I could ever have imagined; my work on the history syllabus, which I found enormously enjoyable and gratifying; and fourthly my imaginative life, which was in certain respects more real to me than reality.

I had always had a lot of fantasy in my life - as far back as I could remember. Once it had been the kingdom of Bull Banks, its halls and state rooms secluded among the laurels; a land-locked realm, deriving its attributes largely from King Arthur and peopled with knights, whose enemies were foxes. Later, at Horris Hill and under the influence of films and of writers like Sapper and Dornford Yates, Bull Banks had become a gay, fashionable city-state of sport and pleasure, its celebrities, my companions, forever playing cricket or football matches or dancing in champagne-flowing night clubs (like those of Ralph Lynn and Winifred Shotter; Bertie Wooster; Marlene Dietrich). At Horris Hill I had found that this Bull Banks carried so much conviction and included so much detail that other boys revealed their own fantasy countries (and one or two, I suspect, hastened to invent them). A few years ago, walking along the Embankment by Charing Cross, I ran into a friend from those days, and as we chatted, recalled those kingdoms - his and mine. ‘Ah,' he said, ‘but you had the ends much better tied up than I did.' Certainly a great deal of my time and mental energy went into the fantasies which in my infancy compensated for solitude and at boarding-school for boring features like Mr Morris and Mr Arnold.

Not the least of the wonderful things about Oxford was that it happily accepted and took on board even your fantasy potential - whoever would have thought it? - developed and transformed it, blending it with magic oils, with sounds and sweet airs that gave delight and hurt not. Christopher Isherwood found exactly this at Cambridge, and wrote about it in his autobiographical
Lions and Shadows.
Alasdair, like Isherwood's friend Chalmers (
‘Already
the crowds begin -'), would find phrases suggesting themselves as we listened to music. I recall how we derived, as surely as ever did Swann from the ‘petite phrase' of Vinteuil, a peculiar and personal meaning from the
Leonora No. 3.
(Alasdair used to sing,
I
think, he
soon,
will
really
be quite free.')