The Virgin in the Garden (3 page)

Partly because he had finished the play, he felt a great sense of loss and aimlessness when the King died. He took a group of Middle School boys to hear the Crier proclaim the accession on the steps of Calverley Minster. “The King is dead: long live the Queen.” And the trumpet sounded, thin and clear. The boys shuffled solemnly, expecting to feel something. This death marked a period to the first brief part of their existence, that must have seemed eternal: rationing, the end of a war, utility. Alexander remembered the King, prodding bomb rubble, on newsreels. A disembodied voice, on the radio, announcing war. Nervous and pastoral. He imagined a nation, attempting to imagine this known figure, dead alone in his bed, and failing in the attempt. That was what kings were for. His personal grief was both ludicrous and natural.

It was Matthew Crowe who gave Alexander’s play literally a local habitation, and a cultural and financial reality. Crowe owned and lived in Long Royston, architecturally a relation, further north, of Hardwick Hall, though without the spread of glass and the weight of towers: it was a large building made both for living in and for display, but with slightly more emphasis on the living. Alexander was already indebted to Crowe, a natural entrepreneur and patron of the arts. It was Crowe who had engineered a short run at the Arts Theatre for Alexander’s first play,
The Buskers
, of which Alexander was now slightly ashamed, since his new hopes of bold realism reinforced his belief that plays about plays and plays about actors were one of the signs of general debility in the theatre. It was Crowe who provided the grandest and liveliest part of Alexander’s social life, outside Blesford Ride. He was a strenuous believer in local culture, local loyalties, local talent, and, although he had had a brief career as a West End director as a young man, now spent his time putting on festivals and play-cycles in churches, music-halls, village barns. He was, and said he preferred to be, a huge fish in a reasonably small pond. He was very rich. He rarely went South.

When he had read the play, he invited Alexander to dinner, declared great enthusiasm for the work, and over coffee and brandy by his study fire, told Alexander some political secrets and made some revelations. Crowe enjoyed politics, secrets and revelations. He leaned forward into the firelight out of his high-enfolding leather chair and described briskly and gleefully to Alexander the machinations and inner workings of the powerful bodies who were labouring to devise the New University. There was the very strong Adult Education Movement, which had first proposed the University, the ladies’ teacher training college, St Hilda’s, the theological college, St Chad’s, which were to be incorporated into it, and Cambridge University, the original sponsor of the extension lectures for adults. Crowe spoke intimately to Alexander of the Bishop,
the Minister, the man from the Treasury, the graspings and compromises, and Alexander, who had little political sense, failed frequently to admire the true brilliance of some concession or manoeuvre or piece of timing. Crowe spoke of the long business of syllabus-planning; the attempts to make this peculiarly local, peculiarly for adult students, or, like Keele, the only then existing exemplar, founded a few years earlier, to make the students acquire all kinds of knowledge before specialising, to make them become, as the Renaissance ideal had required, complete men. Crowe spoke of his own part in this: the tactical revelation, at the right moment of impasse, of his intention to make over Long Royston, house and grounds, on condition that he had a right to live in his own corner of it in perpetuity.

The point was, Alexander must see, that all this was most timely; the inauguration of an Appeal, the announcement of the Gift, the Royal Charter, in Coronation Year, all could coincide, and be celebrated, amongst other things, by a performance of Alexander’s wholly appropriate play in summer evenings on the terrace of Long Royston itself. It was a play ideally suited to raise the countryside – in the sense of providing work, cultural employ, for armies of local people. There must be a cast of thousands – with a bit of tinkering – and musicians, and scene-builders, and costume-designers and sewing-ladies –
all
the people of the locality. It was not a pageant, Alexander said. No, said Crowe, it was a work of art, which would with luck have the good fortune to have justice done to it. He would himself be in his element, setting it up. Alexander should see.

The speed of the setting-up left Alexander a little dazed. He was summoned shortly to meet the Festival Committee, again at Long Royston: this consisted of the Bishop’s Chaplain, the man from the Treasury, Miss Mott from the Extension courses, Councillor Barker of Calverley, Crowe, of course, and Benjamin Lodge, the director from London. Alexander’s play had further solidified and proliferated: everyone present had his or her own duplicated script. Everyone present congratulated Alexander on the brilliance and topicality of his work. Crowe presided benignly: the Committee discussed dates, costs, publicity, supporting events, possible casting, sanitary arrangements. Alexander was never sure at what point, or by whom, it had been formally decided that his play would be put on: he was faintly troubled by Lodge, who once or twice spoke of “this pageant” and said it would need cutting. Crowe, clever enough to notice these doubts, held back both Lodge and Alexander to have a drink, elicited compliments from Lodge for Alexander’s verse, and from Alexander for Lodge’s excellently stark production of the Wakefield plays, which he had seen, and had
indeed greatly admired. Lodge was a heavy, taciturn man in a monstrous mustard-coloured sweater, whose black hair was thinning, and was compensated for by a huge, bushy-soft beard. Crowe himself, in his sixties, had a crimson cherub-face, something, still, of an unfinished boyish look. He had wide pale blue eyes, a little curled sensual mouth, and a tonsure of finely-floating silver hair. He was a little rounded by age, still this side of portly. Whilst Lodge and Alexander were still glowing, presumably, with fine malt whisky and a sense of achievement, Crowe whisked Alexander away, declaring that he would drive him home to Blesford Ride.

Crowe drove an elderly Bentley, rather fast. He took Alexander across country, between drystone walls and rough fields, the edges of the moor, down into Blesford Vale, up the long school drive, lined with limes. He stopped the car just outside the school’s red Gothic arch.

“You should be pleased with this day’s work. And with yourself.”

“I am. I am. I hope you are. I can never thank …”

“You’re worried by Ben, I can see. Don’t be. He won’t make a pageant out of it. For one thing, I shan’t let him, and for another, he’s no fool. Just likes to be sure he’s doing creative work of his own. Likes to slap your text about a bit, until he feels it’s got his mark on it. You noticed that, of course. But you can trust me to keep an eye. You can. And you must keep your own eye. Will they let you have time off this awful place?”

He cocked his head up at the clumsy, louring archway.

“My ancestor’s godawful Folly. How long d’you mean to stay in this place?”

“Oh I don’t know. I like teaching. I suppose I’d like to think of writing full-time.”

“Well, go and find yourself a first-rate school. With a first-rate Head of Department. That man’s remarkable, but he’s a horror.”

“Oh, I’m easy-going. And he’s a first-rate man in his way. We do very well.”

“You amaze me,” said Crowe. “And what will he say to this enterprise?”

“I dread to think. He’s not keen on verse drama.”

“Or on me,” said Crowe. “Or on me, I assure you. Or, it is said, on the University, at least as it’s projected at present.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“Brave man.”

“Well, I must, mustn’t I?”

“I wouldn’t,” said Crowe. “I’d quit. But I know you won’t. Have a good talk.”

The Bentley swung away in a spurt of gravel. Alexander wandered, still dazed, into the school.

The school cloisters, across a lawn under the arch, were thick and red, with Perpendicular arches somehow made squat. They were peopled by rough neo-Gothic stone figures, impartially selected from some universal Pantheon: Apollo and Dionysos and Pallas Athene, Isis and Osiris, Baldur and Thor, horned Moses, Arthur of Britain, St Cuthbert, Amidha Buddha and William Shakespeare.

Blesford Ride School was public, progressive and non-discriminatory. It had been founded in 1880 by Matthew Crowe, the present Crowe’s great-grandfather, who had made a fortune in linsey-woolsey and was a distinguished amateur comparative mythologist. He had built the school largely to ensure that his six sons should be educated neither at home nor in any contact with believed Christianity. Agnosticism was laid down in the Founder’s Charter which expressly forbade the building of any “chapel, retreat, quiet Room or other apology for ecclesiastical institution”. The cloisters and Pantheon did not count, since they were Art. During this Crowe’s lifetime the school had flared briefly with pure eccentricity, which possibly explained why two of the six sons had become itinerant preachers and one a prison governor. Of the other three, one inherited the wool business, one taught classics in the school, and became an archivist, President of the Blesford Historical and Topographical Society. One died young. Matthew Crowe, who had been sent to Eton and Oxford, was descended from the archivist, whose eldest brother had died without issue.

Blesford Ride was never more than moderately successful. Geographically it was somewhat desolate, up in the Yorkshire Moors miles from anywhere except the minor Minster town of Calverley, which was neither as civilised as York nor as grandly self-contained as Durham, and dwarfed by both. Historically, it had been tactless. Eccentric when conformity was a powerful force, the school had grown more conformist and cautious, owing to financial difficulty and milder leadership, at a time when its original oddity might have given it a certain cachet. Now it was recommended to parents who did not want their sons to have to join an Officers’ Training Corps; who were against fagging; who had been frightened in sensitive childhood by roasting boys’ flesh in
Tom Brown’s Schooldays;
who were not above gentle mockery of Flag and Empire; who lived locally. It was equally recommended to parents who disliked dirt, sandals, cigarettes, alcohol, sexual licence or vehement sexual instruction, do as you please, learn as you go, and intellectualism. It was inhabited largely by middle class children whose frugal and
conscientious parents had hoped and believed they might pass the II+ and had felt unable, in the event, to expose them to the howling hordes in the local Secondary Modern. There were Founder’s Bursaries for non-ecclesiastical minority groups: Jews, epileptics, orphans, woollen-workers’ children, bright boys from overgrown families. The school was theoretically run by a Parliament of boys and teachers selected by a complex system of proportional representation devised by a recent headmaster. The staff were of three kinds: bright young men who came in search of academic and moral freedom, stayed briefly, and left for Dartington, Charterhouse or journalism; bright young men who came, somehow never went away, and grew imperceptibly older; and Bill Potter, who had been there for nearly twenty years. The school was a reasonably usual liberal school: all things to all men, middle of the road, minor.

Bill Potter was Alexander’s Head of Department. He was generally agreed to be a first-rate teacher, inspired, dogged and ferocious. He was respected by University Selection boards, and feared by the headmaster. Although he had been offered a House, he refused to do anything but teach, and lived still in the red-brick semi he had brought his wife to – one of an isolated line of small houses put up for married teachers at the edge of the furthest rugger field, the Far Field. This was called Masters’ Row. Alexander now set out to call on Bill Potter, not without misgiving.

Bill was in many ways a reincarnation of the original spirit of Blesford Ride. He proclaimed the weighty agnostic morals of Sidgwick, George Eliot and the first Matthew Crowe. He worked ferociously at his own version of Ruskin’s and Morris’s popular culture, with a dour respect for real workers and their lives and interests more akin to Tawney’s work in the Potteries. The vigour behind what local cultural life existed in 1953 was in large part his. He gave University Extension lectures to which people travelled miles in all weathers, in vans and country buses, from moorland villages, seaside resorts, wool towns and steelworks. He ran a Settlement in Blesford Church Hall, and was a power behind the continuation of the Literary and Philosophical Society in Calverley. He could make people do things, themselves, that were durable and worth doing. The Settlement dramatised, and put on a series of Lawrence’s Tales with a grimly manic perfectionism recognisably his. The Lit. and Phil. had accumulated and catalogued its own series of “papers” on local literature and culture, from a study of rhyming games by a singing teacher, through a study of the symbolism of the drawings of the patients in Mount Pleasant Mental Home done by a menopausal amateur painter who had spent time there, to scholarly essays on the sources used by
Mrs Gaskell in
Sylvia’s Lovers
. There were informed amateur studies of speech patterns, and researched interviews with writers who lived and worked in the North, done by shopkeepers, teachers, business men’s wives. Bill’s distinction was to stamp the work not as pupil-work but as Work worth doing, and to give the collection, and the community that collected it, a sense of identity. He was a slave-driver, but also a listener: he could give an inarticulate woman the right hints about the direction in which her clumsy sentences might be twisted to make a pleasantly idiosyncratic style. All this without neglecting the Blesford Ride boys, whom he drove through exams, harassed, taunted and stretched.

He had made a not very vigorous attempt, when Alexander first arrived, to draw him into all this local work. But Alexander, reasonably good with boys, had less touch with adults. And even then he considered himself an embryonic metropolitan professional writer, and recognised with a mixture of arrogance and humility that he was unable to add anything to the energies of this communal, provincial, amateur striving. If he had wanted to, he would have had trouble, since his literary priorities bore little relation to Bill’s. Bill accepted his lack of apparent enthusiasm surprisingly equably. Bill was bad at delegating power or authority, and Alexander, who saw himself as poet first and schoolteacher second, wanted neither. Bill inspired fanatical devotion in most good pupils and some bad ones. Alexander, despite his spectacular good looks and enthusiasm for the subject, did not. He was genuinely shy and unassuming, and perhaps finally for this reason Bill seemed to like him.