The Day Gone By (7 page)

Another neighbour, whom my father did like, was ‘Uncle' Urling. Uncle Urling was also a stockbroker. I remember him as a portly, ruddy-faced, genial man, who enjoyed spending money. He had two daughters, Mary and Sheila. Mary was my own age and a friend and playmate - my best friend, I think, next to Jean Leggatt and Ann Lester. (Ann was the daughter of the manager of the Newbury Waterworks.) I would dispute any idea that I preferred the company of girls to that of boys. It was just the way things fell out. Mary played the piano well and my mother wanted me to do the same; but somehow I never could take to it. (More of this anon.) The Urlings had a hard tennis court, the very latest thing, with a loose, green-granulated surface, not an asphalt red one. (The early hard courts were quite smooth and had a surface like maroon asphalt.) Mary was a kind-hearted, slightly nervous little girl, who never said a cross word and made me feel protective. (‘Am I doing it right, Richard?') She had a wind-up gramophone, and by its means I became acquainted with ‘Coal Black Mammy', ‘It Ain't Gonna Rain No More, No More', ‘All By Yourself in the Moonlight' and other hits of the ‘twenties.

When I was about ten a tremendous thing happened. Uncle Urling was hammered on the Stock Exchange. I didn't in the least know what this meant, and I was carefully not told, but it was plain enough that the Urlings were in trouble. My father was sympathetic and did all he could to help. Uncle Urling arranged with him that we should, by private arrangement, ‘borrow' his (Mary's) beautiful grand piano - a Steinway - to save it from being sequestered (or whatever it's called). So our good old upright - the pianola - was put away and the Steinway, which seemed to fill half the drawing-room, was installed. My brother, of course, was delighted, and used to play even more. I felt almost in awe of the instrument, which was mostly kept closed and covered with a thick, heavy, brown cloth embroidered in gold braid with elephants and lions. It stayed with us for about five years, I think, before Uncle Urling was in a position to take it back. When, ten years later, I read
Emma
for the first time, I was able to respond exactly as Jane Austen would have wished to the moment when Jane Fairfax receives the mysterious piano.

It was a bit of a limitation in one way, though. From my earliest days (well, say four or five) I had loved playing the pianola. When I first began to play it I was so small and light that someone had to hold my chair firm; otherwise my feet, pressing the pedals, slid me bodily backwards. The rolls were what you would expect:
Cavalleria Rusticana,
Chopin's
Valse Brillante, The Russian Church Parade, Pagliacci,
‘Where My Caravan Has Rested', ‘Lilac Time' and many more. I realize now how lucky I was to have this sort of introduction to instrumental music.

I
responded
to music all right; almost over-sensitively, as a matter of fact. My brother, too, had a wind-up gramophone, and I recall that one day, when I was about six, he played me the
Unfinished Symphony.
The quality of the reproduction, of course, would today be beneath contempt, but it was more than enough for me. The opening theme, in the ‘cellos and basses, at once seemed to me to convey menace and dread. It frightened me. Something terrible was going to happen. I think now that this was perfectly valid. It does. The second movement was no better. The pizzicato opening seemed grim and dire. I felt (although, of course, it hadn't yet been written) like Simon, in William Golding's
Lord of the Flies,
confronted by the pig's head on a stick. It assured him that life was a bad business. But Schubert seemed not to be trying to frighten me as a bully would. ‘I
know
this is frightening,' he seemed to be saying. ‘I can't help it. It frightens me, too.' I have gone on finding a lot of Schubert frightening from that day to this - the
Octet,
the
A minor Quartet,
the big piano sonatas: so frightening that I prefer not to try to think it out further. Let's drop it.

Surely a good teacher could have made a player out of a child as sensitive as this? I'll always maintain that it was as a result of hidebound, insensitive teaching and regime that I never could make a go of learning to play the piano. I think this is worth mentioning here, not in order to excuse me, but because it may possibly help other parents. My first teacher, at my kindergarten, was a decent but distinctly limited woman, who also turned an honest penny by driving her car for hire. Her teaching was boring and uninspired and as far as I remember she never played any music for my enjoyment or praised me for anything I did. I was with her for about two years or thereabouts. Then I went on to prep. school (boarding school), and here I came under the tuition of a lady who was, even at that date (1929), an anachronism. Miss Jarvis (not her name) was the archetypal Victorian governess: a maiden lady in later middle age, grave and admonitory in manner, she taught French and Arithmetic to the smaller boys and the piano to all those who were ‘put down' for it. She seldom smiled and never made a joke. The two essentials for a teacher are warmth and humour, but Miss Jarvis possessed neither. Her best quality was her sense of duty. Upon her death (which occurred when I was about twelve and still at the school), the headmaster made a moving speech about the long and honourable service she had given, including, during the First World War, extra duty, for which she had refused to take a penny. She was certainly a worthy and, I suppose, rather a sad lady; she made you work, but one thing she could not communicate (I doubt now whether she really possessed it herself) was the joy or magic of music. I see her clearly in memory, her slightly aquiline features fixed severely upon a pupil as she reproved him for his own good, looking out from under the broad-brimmed, dark-blue straw hat which she always wore indoors. She wore it quite straight, of course, and it was fastened by a big hat-pin which was so low that you would have sworn that it must go through her head and not just through her white hair. I have a memory of her at the school concert. Three boys were to play a trio on one piano. They sat down to play, and Miss Jarvis stood behind them throughout, tapping their shoulders and whispering (you could see her lips moving) ‘One two three four,
One
two three four.'

During all the six years that I learned the piano, no one ever told me anything about the great composers, no one played any great piece of music and explained it or invited me to love it as they did, no one ever represented the piano to me as a wonderful, glorious accomplishment which would one day be mine; no one ever took me to a recital. At my prep. school, practices and lessons with Miss Jarvis were all conducted in what was, for other boys, play time. The pianos were situated in the different classrooms, and it wasn't always easy for a junior boy to make his way into a relatively senior classroom, where there might be ten or twelve bigger boys none too pleased that he was come to play the piano badly. Nor was it any fun coming in on a fine summer half-holiday afternoon, when others were out of doors, to sit in a queue and wait, perhaps for nearly an hour, while Miss Jarvis took each in turn. No wonder that when I was eleven I persuaded my mother, with tears, to let me give up the piano. It was nothing but drudgery without reward even held out in prospect.

Years later, I saw to it that none of this took place with my elder daughter. Everything was done to encourage her, help her to love music, build up her morale and convince her that she was doing better all the time. She finished school a Grade 8 pianist.

Although I liked ‘having a friend to tea' (usually Jean, Ann or Mary) and playing in the garden for the afternoon, big children's parties were another matter. There was no lack of fairly wealthy (and some really wealthy) families round Newbury. Several of these regularly gave children's parties, and naturally the family doctor's children were invited. As I was so much younger than my sister and brother, I used to get asked to different parties, for smaller children - alone. Of course, my father didn't like the invitations to be refused. If it was Ann's or Mary's party this wasn't so bad, but some of the big parties at wealthy houses, among a crowd of rich children who were mostly strangers, were unnerving - quite as bad as a parachute jump was to prove later. I was socially timid, used to solitary play, and nervously uneasy among the rather reserved and self-possessed boys and girls, well equipped to fulfil the roles expected of upper middle-class children in those days. For the most part I got on badly.

One of these parties was for me the occasion of a genuine Freudian trauma, the origin of a behaviour pattern of cracking under stress which has remained with me all my life: I know it well and can spot it whenever it turns up. This was a big party, given by the parents of a boy I hardly knew (he later kept wicket for Eton), and it was fancy-dress. I went as a Red Indian, though you could hardly have guessed it. The costume, such as it was, was old and shabby and had been lying in some cupboard since before I was born. It did fit, but what it amounted to was a crumpled jacket and trousers of thin, brown cloth, edged with strips of red and blue canvas. You couldn't wear it with any swank, which is surely the whole point of fancy dress. I could just about get by in it — and perhaps not even quite that. We hadn't the money for smart fancy dress.

I knew hardly anybody at the party. Most of the children were a little older than I. There were some splendid costumes. I remember a fairy, with wings and starry wand, to take your breath away. There was also another Red Indian, finely attired, with a tomahawk and a head-dress of coloured feathers half-way down his back. He didn't speak to me.

After a while we were assembled to watch the Punch and Judy show. I had never seen this before and had no idea what I was in for — a series of brutal and savage murders. I watched in mounting panic. Surely there must be some way out of this? Eventually Punch took the baby, Judy exited and Punch began banging the baby's head against the side of the box.

That did it. I was quite near the back. I got up and slipped out of the room. I didn't care where I went, as long as it was away from Mr Punch. No one seemed to have noticed me go, and in the hall there was no one about. I went upstairs, into a long, cool, empty corridor with closed doors on either side. It seemed to me that one would be as good as another. By this time I was in such a state of horror that I had the fancy that it was quite likely that Mr Punch would come and get
me. Credo quia impossibile est.
I could, of course, have been reasoned out of this, but there was no one to do it. Since then I have seen grown-up people give way to fears as absurd.

I opened a door at random. It was a bedroom, with the bed, head to the wall, aligned just to the left of the hinge side of the door. I got between the bed and the door, and then pulled the door wide, to an obtuse angle, till it touched the bed, thus forming a thin, hollow triangle - door, bed, wall. Here I felt myself in a place of refuge, a place of hiding and protection - a womb, of course, as we have all learned to think since then.

‘Aha!' I kept murmuring silently to myself. ‘Mr Punch can't get me here! Mr Punch can't get me here!' I had no idea of consequences: I mean, any idea that obviously this couldn't continue indefinitely. I just felt that where I was, I was safe from Mr Punch. That was enough.

After a while - I don't know how long - the search began. I heard footsteps, and voices calling ‘Richard!' Some passed by the open door. Then a grown-up - I couldn't see who - actually came into the room, looked round and went out, saying to someone else ‘No, he's not in there'.

I stayed put and never made a sound. I don't know why, since the calling voices were kind enough. I suppose my fear had somehow extended to include all the strangers in the house. Also, as I think we all recognize, panics and escapades possess a kind of in-built impetus. It is like being on a roller-coaster. You can't get off. Someone else has to stop it.

Eventually someone - a lady - came into the room again, swung back the door and found me. They were all far too much relieved to be cross, and also, of course, I was their guest. I can't remember the rest of the affair, though I remember trying to explain my fear. I think I just rejoined the party, which by now had got on to ‘Nuts in May', ‘Hunt the Slipper' and similar harmless activities.

But although I was not to realize it consciously for years, something fundamental and seminal had occurred. A behaviour pattern had formed. It might be described like this. First, I knew and accepted that it was possible for me to be genuinely and in all truth driven beyond the point of endurance by something that evidently didn't bother other people at all (or perhaps something that they
could
endure). Secondly, I could get out of this by taking solitary action, involving some sort of retreat into hiding; possibly an actual, physical refuge or else an infantile state (illness, breakdown, etc.). Thirdly, if only I could keep it up, heedless of its effect on my standing or reputation, it would get me out of the situation, whatever it might be.

This, however, didn't turn into a really bad neurosis. My home was much too supportive for that, my family too kind and understanding and the world too full of exciting, happy things. But it had come to stay; and under any relatively heavy strain, up it has been popping ever since; sometimes controlled and pushed back into its cage, sometimes not. Also, the notion of the enclosed refuge has remained as a permanent fantasy. ‘I'm all right: I'm hiding in here.'

Not all the big, rich parties, however, were frightening. One I always looked forward to and enjoyed was Mr Behrend's annual firework party. Mr Behrend was a wealthy man who lived out at Burghclere, a village a few miles away, and he and his family were patients of my father. Mrs Behrend had been a Miss Sandham, and had lost her brother, Harry Sandham, in Mesopotamia in the First World War. It was at this time that the Sandham Memorial Chapel was built by the Behrends at Burghclere - where, under their patronage, Stanley Spencer was executing his big mural paintings and smaller canvases depicting scenes from the First World War in the Near East. We - my brother, sister and I - were sometimes taken to watch him at work on the murals.