The Summer Isles (11 page)

All of this, by my standards, is a wild extravagance. Despite all of John Arthur’s promises, going First Class has not become any cheaper. But, with the decent salary I’m paid, the easy frugality of college life, the money I have put away from the sale of my mother’s house—and the fact that this will be the last holiday I ever take—I can easily afford it.

At ten, passing through the suburbs of Lancaster, I make my way along the gently rocking corridors towards the sleeping carriage. My name is on the door;
G. Brooke.
Another luxury this, to have booked both the upper and lower bunks in a compartment. To have had some stranger above me—even a First Class one—the breathing weight of him sagging down over my memories, would have been unbearable. We went Second Class all those years ago, did Francis and I, and I wonder as I slide my door shut and run my hands along the brass fittings, the polished marquetry, if these differences will break the precious burden of renewed love that I feel myself carrying. Yet enough is the same—from the bleached smell of the towels, the dire warnings about pulling the communication cord, the whole muffled weight of this hurrying train…

Of course, my money paid for our trip; Francis never had enough of his own. At the time we set out on our holiday together, everything was still a matter of friendship. Not that I didn’t I love him, adore him for his looks, his mind. But this was in 1914, and I was 34 by then already, and Francis was just 19. The whole idea of physical love, cheap sham that I was sure it was, made the thought of such contact unbearable.

Francis, after all, had many female friends back in his left wing set in Lichfield. And they, being no more blind to him than I was, gathered around him after meetings in cooing groups. The talk then was of libertarianism, Nijinsky, Stravinsky, Futurism, Lawrence and Proust… Even in Lichfield, and with me elevated by then to the giddy heights of Assistant Junior Master at Friary School and a house-owner by inheritance, everything was supposed to be
modern
—although there was no capital M to the word then. Watching his group from outside like some explorer encountering a new tribe, I had no idea what most of it meant. Francis seemed to have no special association with any of these women, and he always left the meetings that I found myself attending in the back rooms of pubs and hotels (as the church halls wouldn’t have us) alone. But it was hard to believe, amid all the talk, that he wasn’t privately stroking the breasts and limbs of those lovely creatures.

It was an odd situation, to begin with, that I found myself in. I had never had much interest in current affairs. Now that I was at a respectable school, teaching virtually nothing but proper history, I had allowed almost every other interest in life to drop away. But I still entertained thoughts of writing my book. And, then as now, the task proved easier in the imagining than it did in reality. After many botched attempts, I began to wonder if something else was missing. History, after all, is ever-changing. It must always be viewed from the perspective of the present. And what did I know, in my dusty home, with my bookish celibacy, of such a thing?

I decided to widen my horizons. Cycling, golf, the Doctor Johnson Society, the Town Hall Chess Club—all of these I tried. I even went through a dogged period of walking up the street each evening to share the supposedly convivial warmth of the Bald Buck up by the Tamworth crossroads. But none of this held any real interest for me; and the sudden chilling of atmosphere in the snug each time I set foot in it made me begin to wonder if I truly wasn’t odd—queer, even—in a way that people instantly noticed.

So I settled instead for something that I would never have done if I had still been under the wing of my avowedly Tory mother. I joined the local Fabian Society. I was still as neutral in politics as I imagined myself to have become sexually, yet in my efforts to take myself seriously as a historian, I decided that politics probably lay at the cutting edge of current affairs—and that, if one was to become involved instead of being a mere spectator, it was necessary to back a particular horse. Quite laughably as events turned out, I decided to go with the socialist left.

It was probably a good job that I dipped my toe into the waters of political debate without any high ideals. In the face of batty majors’ wives, social inadequates, gritty rock cakes at ghastly tea mornings, badly-organised day trips, mumbled speeches and endless back-biting, they would soon have been banished. Still, I can see with hindsight that it was an interesting time for British left wing politics—one at which it busily sowing the seeds of its own annihilation.

The younger and generally rowdier element (of which Francis was undoubtedly a member) were busily undermining the cosy nineteenth century libertarianism of William Morris—the Morris, that is, who existed before he was re-invented by Modernism. Francis and his crowd only hung around the fringes of the Fabians so that they could recruit disaffected members for their own newer organisations such as the SDF and the ILP. They believed in strikes, direct action, in attempting to persuade the trades unions, who could generally be bothered only with furthering their own narrow interests, to become openly political. A night in the cells was regarded as a badge of honour, and people who could claim to have helped in the miners strike at Tonypandy, even if they were almost certainly liars, were regarded as secular saints.

It was all naively innocent. Francis worked six days a week behind the counter of the John Menzies bookstall at Lichfield station, lived in digs, lifted his little finger when he drank tea, was secretive about his background, and spoke with a suspiciously upper-class accent. The closest he came to the working classes was in his insistence in drinking at the Scales on Market Street—a tanners pub—where the coolness of his welcome made mine at the Bald Buck seem positively effulgent. But at least he had dreams of a better world. His failing, and that of the left wing as a whole, was that he loved to argue, and hated to think that he was in the majority about anything. The only political fight I ever saw break out was between the chairman and the secretary of the same organisation.

Still, I was drawn to Francis and his ilk. I liked their youth, their enthusiasm and, frankly, their good looks. They, in turn, treated me, at 34, as a kind of elder statesman. They deferred to my views, they sought my wisdom on what they saw as the historical perspective. For a few fine months, I could pretend that I was both young and old at the same time.

Francis and I began meeting occasionally after he had finished work at the station bookshop. We would take quiet walks. We would choose neutral ground. There was, when he and I were alone, a lot less of the usual posturing. But soon, the prospect of a war in Europe began to dominate our conversation. Francis, although supposedly a pacifist, was fascinated by the idea of conflict. He was young, after all; defiantly combative. He probably thought that a war was his best chance of becoming one of the common people. He even saw it as the touch-paper for revolution. But I think that the truth is more straightforward. Francis, like so many other young men of his generation, was simply spoiling for a fight.

In a white shirt, his collar loose, he would walk ahead of me as we wandered at evening along misty canal towpaths and across muddy spring fields. His eyes were large and deep and blue. His lips were full. His thick black eyebrows almost met in the middle. His body was slight and bony, yet filled with energy. He grew his hair a little longer than was then fashionable, and I loved to watch, as he walked ahead of me, the soft nest of curls that tapered towards the back of his neck.

“You understand, Griff,” he said to me once as we stood to catch our breath amid the cows beneath a dripping tree. “I can work these things out when we walk together.”

My heart ached. I could only smile back at him.

The idea of our cycling trip to Scotland seemed to evolve naturally, gradually. That was probably a good thing, for if I had planned that Francis and I could be on our own, sharing thoughts, ideas and boarding house rooms for a whole fortnight, I am sure that love and terror would have prevented it from ever happening. But somehow, I found that we were checking maps and timetables on the basis of a vague hypothesis and an agreed love of discussion and exploring the countryside—playing with the whole idea, really—until suddenly we were talking proper dates and actual bookings and the thing had miraculously come about. And I was to pay. That, too, slipped easily under the yawning bridge of my uncertainties. Francis, bless him, probably had a far clearer idea of where he was leading me, and what was to come. But for all of that, for absolutely everything about him, I am eternally grateful.

Whatever sexual fantasies that I might have entertained about Francis were easily subsumed in the actual and amazing fact of our holiday—the first proper one that I had undertaken as an adult. I stared wistfully at my books and clothes as I packed them into my old suitcase, knowing already the treasures of memory and closeness they would soon become. Thank God, the idea of two men travelling together on holiday raised few suspicions in 1914.

We ate a meal in the dining carriage as the train pulled out of Birmingham in the rain, studying guide books and maps. The rain stopped somewhere around Stafford and the evening had become glorious by the time we changed for the overnight sleeper at Crewe. Yet we went to bed quite early, I recall, filled with that soothed, tired feeling that only a long railway journey brings.

In our narrow compartment, I tried to busy myself unselfconsciously with the contents of my suitcase on the lower bunk as Francis, chattering as he always chattered, began to undress beside me. Fully naked and with the curtains still open, his body looked both thinner and broader than I had imagined. Such was the arrangement of the mirrors that I got a vivid glimpse in this plain but shifting light of his balls and penis as, still talking about God knows what, he stepped into his pyjamas.

Trembling, alone in the compartment as Francis headed up the corridor to wash, I drew the curtains across the window and changed rapidly myself, ripping a hole in the arm of my pyjamas in the process. I felt weak and sick and angry. Looking down at the half-erection that, absurdly, was still trying to nudge its way out of my night-clothes, I cursed myself for my stupidity in ever falling for the idea of this holiday.

Francis eventually returned, his hair wet, smelling of Colgate’s Tooth Powder and Wright’s Coal Tar soap, his eyes glistening. I mumbled something with my back towards him, and shoved my way past.

I took my time at the sinks and in the toilet. On the way back, I pulled down a window and watched the fields burn with sunset as the telegraph wires rose and fell, rose and fell. Steam billowed past me, trailing into the thickening dusk as I breathed in the salt-and-country air. By the time I finally returned to the compartment, the flashing landscape had become a grainy patchwork; the glimmer of a lake; the clustered lights of villages; stars over dark hillsides; a rising moon. Francis was up in the top bunk with the light on, reading
News From Nowhere.
Muttering about how tired I felt, I climbed in below.

I stared up at the shape his body made against the bars of the bunk through the mattress. It truly was both soothing and odd, this motion of the carriage, the steel clatter of the wheels. Eventually, when Francis turned off his light and wished me goodnight, I felt ready for sleep.

Darkness. Motion. The whoosh of another train. Lights; the shape of the carriage window shifting quickly left to right across the curtains.
Clatter, tee tee
as we cross points. When, about half an hour later, Francis began to shift down from his bunk, I simply imagined that he was heading off on a final trip to the toilets. Instead, he climbed into the tiny bunk beside me.

His pyjamas shirt was already undone and he smelled of its cleanness, and faintly of the soap and the toothpowder, and beneath that of the warmth of this own flesh, like burnt lemon. “This is what you want, Griff, isn’t it…?” he said. Then he put his arms around me. He kissed me, and nothing else was ever the same.

Clatter, tee, tee
… Then as now, the onward rush of the train. That sense of the wild summer night passing. On these tracks, it must have happened. Almost on these very rails. Lying prone on this mattress with the dim shape of the empty bunk looming above me, held in a space that, even in this luxurious carriage of the future, I can easily span with both hands, I wonder how we ever managed to lie together, let alone perform the acts of love. But we did. We did. I am sure of that. As we crossed the Scottish Border, Francis and I entered a new world.

C
HANGE AT GLASGOW. THERE
are new authorisations to be collected in the fresh early morning, and the buildings look much cleaner than I remember them as I pass the time along Sauchiehall Street. The policemen wear tartan sashes. Guttural snatches of Gaelic and lowland Scots have appeared in shop windows and road signs. There’s haggis and Angus beef at the meat market, fresh trout and salmon in the fishmongers, whilst the bookshops contain nothing but Scott, Stevenson, Crompton Mackenzie, Burns. Some arcane ceremony is being rehearsed in Renfrew Square to the skirl of bagpipes, the clang of scaffolding.

The Post Office on Union Street opens at nine. By quarter to ten, my freshly-stamped papers are in order, and my journey and its purpose have been approved by a charming dark-haired lass who inhabits a small office behind the stamp machines. S
EE
B
RITAIN
B
Y
T
RAIN
, says the poster above her—a stylised painting of Arthur’s Seat like stained glass caught in the sun—F
OR
A D
AY’S
O
UTING
O
R
A L
ONGER
J
OURNEY
.

Needing to top up my early breakfast on the train of Arbroath Smokies and clayey white bread, I head back towards the tearoom at Central Station, relaxed and purposeful as I swallow only my second tablet of the day and study the somewhat distant coverage
The Scotsman
chooses to give the start of the Olympics at Wembley. Over a second pot of tea and a dry currant bun, I spread out my old maps and new passes, planning the best and least dangerous way to explore my past, whilst finding at the same time what might have happened to a part-Jewish family.