But at this moment there came an interruption to the imperfect communion between McKechnie and myself. In hall the behaviour of the college servants had always been less that of professionally qualified waiters than of under-keepers in a zoo, concerned to get through feeding time as expeditiously as possible and in consequence putting a good deal of raw vigour into thrusting the gobbets through the bars. This code of conduct had now brought a shoulder sharply between us, its owner having been prompted to grab an empty plate from the other side of the long table. So I had a second or two in which to recollect myself. Could I retreat from McKechnie’s violin by way of a brief ludicrous account of the difficulties of the young Gavin Mogridge with his ‘cello? This idea, not too felicitous in itself, came to nothing. The nearer of the brick-faced men had taken advantage of McKechnie’s disengaged state to bark a question at him. And in the succeeding moment I was addressed by the bearded ecclesiastical dignitary on my left.
‘The Bishop and I,’ he said with grave courtesy, ‘are discussing current standards of conduct among the undergraduates. Disturbing rumours reach one.’
I felt this to be unpromising. The topic would certainly produce no gaiety. Presently the permissive society would be mentioned; I should advance the vain contention that we live in the most multifariously repressive society yet achieved by man; mutual irritation would be the result. Meanwhile, it was only a question of whether sex or drugs would be the first evil to raise its ugly head. It turned out to be sex.
‘In the rooms I am occupying for the night,’ the Bishop said across his colleague’s stomach, ‘I have found, I am grieved to say, an erotic manual and a package’—he hesitated, as if seeking some approximation to decency—’and a package of sexual engines.’
‘It sounds,’ I said, ‘as if the owner switches his interests during vacations.’
‘As he well may do, if there is anything in the saying that variety is the spice of life.’ It was the Prebendary who produced this, the Bishop having regarded my remark as meriting no direct response. But any liveliness of mind it might have suggested evaporated at once, and the Prebendary turned solemn. ‘It is hard not to feel that a great mistake has been made.’ He had a glass raised to his nose as he spoke, and became conscious of a possibility of misunderstanding. ‘An excellent madeira,’ he said. ‘A grave mistake by the dons.’
‘A grave mistake, indeed.’ The Bishop had taken another look at me. ‘Heaven forbid that I should be so muddle-headed as to treat fornication as among the gravest sins—’
‘Yet it is scarcely a venial one,’ the Prebendary said − rather to the effect of one ecclesiastical court cautiously correcting the judgement of another.
‘It is at least a cheapening activity.’ The Bishop, finishing his own madeira almost synchronously with his last spoonful of soup, again glanced at me across the Prebendary (who, as a physical barrier, was already in an expanding phase). ‘It is what I say, simply and frankly, in any confirmation address I give at a public school − at a boys’ public school, I need hardly add. I tell them that they are free to consider me an old square, but that a bishop, like any other chap, has to do his thing.’ The Bishop paused, perhaps to admire his command of expressions supposed to be popular with the young at that time. ‘The lads take it very well. I see them murmuring comments to each other.’
‘Isn’t it possible,’ I asked, ‘that they are laying wagers on how long you will continue to talk? I can remember doing just that.’ I felt instantly that this sally was rude rather than funny, and wasn’t too pleased to hear it draw from the Prebendary − who struck me as rather a coarse-fibred man − a quickly repressed guffaw. ‘As for a grave mistake,’ I went on − for I felt I could best redeem my error by speaking seriously − ‘I don’t know that it’s quite fair to charge university authorities with that. Not if what you are talking about is, as I suppose, changing sexual behaviour in a place like this. If it is changing—’
‘Of course it’s changing,’ the Bishop interrupted briskly. And he added, a shade elliptically, ‘You’d have to be an ostrich to deny it.’
‘All right, it’s changing − but to an extent which I suspect is much blown-up in newspapers. Of course if it’s really true that these young men put in an inordinate amount of time chasing young women hugger-mugger into bed, then I agree with you that it debases honest sexual currency. But the main point must be what the dons − supposing them to subscribe to traditional Christian views on the matter − can effectively do about it. I suspect them of having such scant room for manoeuvre that very little in the way of making grave mistakes is open to them. It’s as with the politicians. They’re much given to denouncing each other as making colossal mistakes. But the whole thing is no more than delusions of grandeur. You can only make quite small mistakes when you are simply being bumped around by forces over which you have no control.’
‘I rather agree with you − although the analogy is perhaps an imperfect one.’ The Bishop seemed a practised conversationalist. Tor undergraduates, after all, are not intractable economic forces. They are young people in statu pupillari.’
‘Fair enough. But there’s a limit to declaring a college, or any similar place, a closed society, to be unaffected by whatever is going on outside. And I’m not sure that a shift in sexual mores begins typically with the young. They take a great deal of their colour from their seniors. So perhaps we ought to begin by shaking our heads and wagging our fingers at our own generation.’
‘A sobering thought,’ the Prebendary said.
‘The effective argument has to be from function and purpose.’ Hearing myself say this might have pulled me up, since I am not insensible that the dinner table is an inappropriate setting for harangue. But I was too well launched on my theme. ‘Young people come to a university to study − most of them to study quite hard. I don’t assert that their motives are altogether of the scholar’s disinterested sort. They want to do well in their examinations, and so gain merit with the powerful, and so get themselves decent jobs. But it follows that they don’t want to be all that distracted by boy-and-girl stuff. From which it follows again − at least to some extent − that the problem is a statistical one.’
‘I have gone with you so far,’ the Bishop said. ‘But your last point eludes me.’
‘Admit a hundred young women on easy terms to something rather more than the fringes of an adolescent male society like this, and a considerable amount of distraction must result. But nothing like the amount you will get if the young women number only fifty. The spectacle of the males in possession − and they will be the most confident and personable ones, on the whole − will drive a fair proportion of the others mildly dotty.’ I did pause on this, conscious that it owed a good deal to my recent conversation with Plot. ‘So if you are constrained to have girls all over the place,’ I concluded rather abruptly, ‘it’s up to you to see they’re in adequate supply.’
‘On one view of the matter,’ the Bishop said judiciously, ‘your argument is perfectly sound.’
‘But it is essentially a pragmatic and utilitarian view,’ the Prebendary pronounced. ‘I should associate it with what is now so loosely called humanism. And we must have other thoughts in mind. Notably—’
‘A remarkable gathering, this.’ The Bishop, although vainly, attempted a diversion. Bating a legitimate dash of episcopal pomposity, he was a sensible man.
‘Notably,’ the Prebendary said with firmness, ‘the absolute value of pre-marital chastity.’
Not altogether surprisingly, this brought us to a halt. The Bishop turned discreetly to his other hand, and between the Prebendary and myself there was an uncertain pause. Then he appeared to remind himself of something unsaid, and turned again with some formality to address me.
‘I ought to have introduced myself,’ he announced. ‘We were up together, but scarcely acquainted, and I don’t think you remember me. My name is Killiecrankie.’
‘As I’m Pattullo, and the man on my other side is called McKec
hnie, we must sound rather a Hyperborean trio.’ This was the best I could manage by way of covering a moment of considerable astonishment. Prebendary Killiecrankie’s beard (to say nothing of his opinions) had served to obscure any memory of him. But here he was, established for the night in his old rooms. And in the enjoyment, it could be added, of his old sofa.
For some moments I couldn’t think how to continue conversing with P. P. Killiecrankie. He was presumably unaware of the scandalous and indecent use to which Tony Mumford and I had occasionally put our vantage-point in Tony’s window. (This, incidentally, recurring to me again now, suggested that I had been talking a certain amount of nonsense only minutes before; for upon Tony and myself, at least, the spectacle of the Killiecrankian conquests had been wholly without dire nervous impact.) But Killiecrankie must be conscious that a considerable number of his contemporaries present at the Gaudy could recall at least the report of his amorous courses, and this struck me as an odd piece of awareness for so obviously respectable a member of the higher clergy to carry around. His past did not, of course, impugn his present in the least, since the rolls of sanctity are alive with reformed rakes. But there was the breath of comedy in it, all the same. I wondered whether I might a little tease Killiecrankie, perhaps calling upon him to remember Plot, that useful bicycle-boy. For the moment, at least, I turned this frivolous idea down. Instead, we discussed the curious fact that, in an oecumenical age, certain professors of theology in the university were still required to be in Anglican orders. This was a most blameless subject, even if not to my mind a momentous one. Killiecrankie talked about it with a gravity which could scarcely have been exceeded by Albert Talbert himself.
It was a failure in gravity, however, that now occasioned a reassortment of interlocutors in our corner of the feast. The brick-faced men, who had again become absorbed in their own conversation while leaving McKechnie to his own thoughts, must have hit upon something highly entertaining, since they had simultaneously emitted a roar of raucous merriment. Locally, at least, the effect was startling, since the dinner, although becoming animated, was plainly not of the sort that turns rowdy. McKechnie, being the main recipient of the full acoustic effect, was more startled than most, and when he turned to me I had the absurd thought that he was going to beg me to change places with him. I must have been accustomed to think of wee Dreichie as what we called a rabbit, meaning a timid boy wholly without aptitude either for games or for ragging around.
‘Nothing so illiberal and so ill-bred,’ McKechnie murmured in my ear, ‘as audible laughter.’
There is a popular persuasion that the learned classes go in for quotation-dropping rather as the snobbish go in for name-dropping. But I have never observed this to be particularly true, and I felt that in thus invoking Lord Chesterfield McKechnie had boldly stretched a point in order to make me a sign − approximately of the order in which Freemasons communicate some sort of token of solidarity by way of a peculiar handshake − in face of the mere Boeotia represented by the brick-faced men. And now he took a step bolder still.
‘I always remember,’ he said with firmness, ‘those tall stories you used to tell us. And many boys didn’t know they were stories. It was something quite remarkable, Duncan − and, of course, it pointed to your future career. I’ve never had such an experience since.’
I glanced at McKechnie, and again caught his eye. He was trying hard. Indeed, it was almost as if he were prepared to like me, which was an attitude to which I felt absolutely no entitlement at all. But there was still something alarmed in him as well.
And I remembered, quite suddenly and for the first time in years, that I had been a pathological liar.
I must have started in Miss Miller’s form rather older than most − seven and a few days, say, over against six and a few months. It had occurred to nobody to send me to any sort of toddlers’ school before that, or to have somebody come in and teach me my ABC. In Miss Miller’s there was a boy called Douglas James, who could stand up and confidently communicate to us from a printed page such striking circumstances as that the Cat sat on the Mat. I was quite, quite certain that never in life (which I had an obscure intuition of as going on for a long time) could I beat Douglas James. By the end of the year, however, I had done this. In reading and writing, in sums and in looking after tadpoles, in mixing up the three primary colours in my paint-box until they turned to mud: in these and other lores and skills I had Douglas James where I quite ardently wanted him. In Miss Fuller’s in the following year it was just the same. I defeated even Bobbie Dalgetty, who was judged to have developed cheating to so fine an art as to be virtually impregnable.
But after this they pushed me into Miss Frazer’s. This meant skipping Miss Clarke’s − something I was glad of, since Miss Clarke beat phrenetically on a piano and screamed like a cockatoo. The idea was that I ought to be among older, not younger, boys as I moved up, form by form, through the school. This didn’t work, since it reckoned on my being an academic rather than a merely lively little boy. Latin appeared to have been happening briskly in Miss Clarke’s, and I didn’t in the least enjoy the privilege of now learning its rudiments on the side and on my own. Instead of being ‘top’ I was now regularly fourth, fifth, or sixth—a shame emphasised by the fact that we spent most of the day actually changing, minute by minute, the seats on which we sat. Whenever you successfully answered an oral question you moved up above all those who had failed in turn to do so. The move up was easy: you simply collected your books and walked. But if you moved up twelve boys had to shuffle down one. Sir Walter Scott describes the system in the Edinburgh High School when he was a boy there, and we may well have adopted it from that ancient institution. I don’t know whether such archaic educational techniques anywhere survive today. It was vastly time-consuming. It was also undeniably rather fun, just as Snakes and Ladders can be. (I was sometimes to wish that I could substitute Snakes and Ladders for Scrabble in Old Road, Headington.) I can still feel as a physical sensation the heady business of occasionally reaching top again (or, in English, of recklessly rather than doggedly defending that position day after day and week after week).
In Miss Frazer’s I entirely cracked up, all the same. I suppose I wasn’t willing to do the work; was temperamentally incapable of undergoing the discipline. So I ought to have accepted the small spectacle of boys with what I knew to be very much my own quantum of intelligence sitting confidently above me. But I didn’t manage it. And this was how my short but rather splendid career as school liar began.
My reading at that period was exclusively in what my mother anachronistically called penny dreadfuls − supplies of juvenile pulp fiction being already unobtainable at less than fourpence a time. What happened was that I simply enlisted myself in the universe of these publications. As soon as I left the school gates I became Duncan the Secret Service Boy or something equally glamorous. The fantasies must have been extremely fluent, and I conjecture that I myself was in a state in which I more or less believed them to be true. I doubt − odd as the paradox is − whether it crossed my mind that anybody else would believe them to be so. But this was to reckon without a certain hypnotic effect which a precocious verbal facility must have been capable of generating for the time; and also without the difficulty inexperienced children must encounter in distinguishing between what is credible and what is not. It is certain that a number of my companions half-believed in the prodigy they were entertaining in their midst. In fact it required a nascent intellect out of the ordinary − McKechnie’s, indeed − not to be taken in. Probably McKechnie was a little shaken himself. I was providing him with a first glimpse of the irresponsible character of what he would later learn to call the imagination. This was why, as we sat side by side as grown men, I was still capable of engendering in him a vague irrational alarm.
One person who could not be deceived was my brother. Ninian, a year my senior and both harder-headed and physically stronger, eventually took it upon himself to expel the aberration − which
he regarded as a deepening of our general family disgrace − by means of corporal persuasion. The process took him a couple of terms, since it seldom went beyond a vigorous knuckle-scrubbing of my imprisoned scalp. But it was entirely successful. My skald-like powers and proclivities eventually vanished as abruptly as they had appeared.
McKechnie and I were now talking, and we kept it up for some time. It wasn’t, however, with any real sense of increasing intimacy. There was a substantial, if grotesque, reason for my feeling discomfort in neighbouring the regenerate P. P. Killiecrankie, since with him I was rather in the position of a revived Actaeon required to sit demurely beside an elderly Artemis, or of Ham at a family party subsequent to the drunkenness of Noah. Actually, with Killiecrankie I felt no awkwardness at all. But between McKechnie and myself there was a cause of embarrassment which, lying just as far back in time, retained some vitality because it was mutual. Faintly but perceptibly, we were encumbered as we conversed by the memory of having spent three years pointlessly avoiding each other here in Oxford.
I did most of the talking, being for some reason anxious to contravert McKechnie’s simplistic view of my juvenile taradiddles as pointing the way to my eventual career as a writer. I was now totally, I explained, without the faculty of improvisation; I couldn’t even ‘tell stories’ to my brother’s children; my case was that of a total surcease of one habit of mind before the close of childhood, and the emergence of a radically different one in adolescence. McKechnie must have judged me to be on decidedly uncertain as well as boring ground, and he no doubt reflected on the egocentricity of the artistic character. But if I was talking about myself in this way it was at least partly because I quite failed to coax him into anything of the sort himself. I suppose he would have answered direct questions − whether or not he was married, for example − but he carried about with him an indefinable air that somehow discouraged challenge. It wasn’t reticence; one didn’t feel him to be, for example, the sort of man who regularly leaves something painful at home and doesn’t want his mind drawn back to it. It was almost as if, apart possibly from that violin, he had no private or personal life to be reticent about. It hadn’t occurred to him to stock up with anything of the kind. He had been, after all, just the sort of boy who develops into an obsessional scholar.
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