Shadows On the Grass

by Simon Raven

  ‘Nor in ours,’ I apologised. ‘Tristitia post coitum setting in rather heavily, I’m afraid.’

  It set in even heavier during the next fifteen minutes. The rain got harder and our nerves got tauter. Andrew began a long discussion on our chances of having caught the pox. By the time he had finished they seemed about 66 to 1 in favour. Just as he was concluding this lowering exegesis Jack Ogle appeared at last, looking self-conscious. We hustled him straight out through the pretty Gothic Gate and not until we were a quarter of a mile away did anyone speak.

  ‘What on earth were you doing?’ I said. ‘Having another round?’

  ‘I could only just afford the first.’

  ‘You certainly spun it out,’ said Andrew.

  Jack giggled.

  ‘Not on purpose.’ He giggled again. ‘I didn’t mean to tell you,’ he said, ‘but I can’t not. Just as I was getting there in fine form, the wireless by her bed started playing ‘God Save the Queen’. For some reason, you see, she was tuned into the BAOR network. As soon as she heard it, she started barking orders like a Gauleiter. “Up get,” she shouted. She made me get off the bed and stand to attention, then she clamped on her knickers and hung a towel on my John. “Him we do not see while your Anthem die orchestre do play,” she said. But of course all this was so off-putting that it went straight down and the towel fell off when there were still two bars to go. “To the wall turn,” she shouted, and whisked me round and stood me in the corner. God, I did feel a prick.’

  ‘What was left of it.’

  ‘As soon as the bloody thing stopped, she flew out of her knickers and on to the bed, all ready to go again. But I just couldn’t get tuned up. All that shouting. I was worried about you chaps too.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘She showed me some pictures. Goings on in a girls’ orphanage. Junior matrons with senior inmates. The gardener’s boy with the whole lot. Still no good.’

  ‘How very depressing.’

  ‘You still haven’t heard the worst. I’ve only just realised it myself.’ He opened his coat and examined his shirt, closely and despairingly, as if willing it to change colour or something of the kind. ‘After we’d given it up as a bad job,’ he said, ‘I was in such a hurry to get out to all of you that I forgot to put on that sweater I was wearing.’

  ‘Pity. But not the end of the world.’

  ‘My mother gave it to me. Oh God,’ wailed Jack. ‘It took her three months of loving care and labour to knit it – and I’ve gone and left it in a Kraut knocking shop where I couldn’t even come.’

  Remembering, after twenty-six years, Jack Ogle’s description of the pornographic pictures vainly produced to him at Brunswick, I am reminded of the series which was hung round the room in which the Beef Steak Club at Cambridge drank sherry before dinner. I was never a member of the Beef Steak Club, but my name was put up for it and on one occasion (about three years, I suppose before the little outing in Brunswick) I was invited as a guest for inspection.

  As I was in those days unversed in such matters, the Beef Steak collection shadoWs on the grass of Erotica stirred me from the very fundament. The series started with the arrival of a mischievous little maid in the hotel room of a large and soignée lady of mature years. Looks of approval and mock timidity are at once exchanged by the couple, after which the tableaux proceed (if they are still extant) through seven stages of mounting enormity to ecstatic oral consummation.

  It is not surprising, then, that I went into dinner in a state of some excitement which did not fully subside for a good hour. My host was sympathetic to my condition but my neighbour on the other side, a dreary Old Etonian called Owen Ives, subsequently denounced me to the President as having ‘fingered himself all through dinner and being in an unfit state to drink His Majesty’s health’. The President allowed that this was unseemly and was clearly inclined to rule that it constituted good reason for removing my name from the list of candidates, despite my defence, that I had only been checking my fly, and my host’s contention that it would have been nothing out of the way even if I had been doing what I was accused of; for, said my host (a considerable classical scholar) susceptible members had often been known ipsas mentulas educere et ad maximam voluptatem titillare under the table during the soup. Anyway, my host concluded, Owen Ives was a fart.

  The debate was interrupted by the collapse into the fire, face forward, of a member who was afterwards asserted to have been pissing into it. I never found out how the matter of my candidature was resolved, as I decided not to press it but to join instead a dining club called the True Blue, the Liberal answer to the diehard Beef Steak, more flexible in its membership, more imaginative in its menus and more various in its conversation. True, it did not have a collection of rude pictures to randify one before dinner, but it had something much more valuable than that: Noël Annan.

  Noël Annan was at that time (1951) a young, bald and brilliant don, reputed to have run a spyring during the war, of great influence, both political and intellectual, in his college and mine (King’s), a vivacious not to say stagy lecturer, newly married but with a long previous record as gay bachelor, party-giver and social impresario. I was never quite sure of Noël’s precise office in the True Blue Club, but he seemed, in some vague way, to be responsible for providing the liberal esprit. To this end he conjured up a series of rather louche guest speakers, perhaps the louchest of whom was Alan Pryce-Jones, in those days still editing The Times Literary Supplement – when, that is, he wasn’t lunching with dowagers or tinkling among lady novelists’ teacups. As far as I know, Alan had only ever published one book, and that under the pen name of Arthur Pumphrey, a mediocre account, called The Pink Danube, of what happened to a precocious adolescent when he went on his travels after being sacked, like Alan, from Oxford. On the strength of this undistinguished but agreeably pert performance, pseudonymous for legal reasons but widely attributed to Pryce-Jones by well coached friends, its author enjoyed considerable literary prestige and unquestioned access to ducal drawing rooms. Clearly, a man who had won such flattering accolades with so little exertion of mind and body might have something helpful to say to a lazy but clever boy like myself, eager as I was to grasp the fruits of success without the tedious preface of planting and growing them.

  I was therefore all ears when Alan rose to sing for his supper and (I hoped) to ease and accelerate the mechanism of my advancement with his lubricant worldly advice. As I should have known, Alan was much too shrewd a number to share the secret of effortless success with thirty odd greedy and unscrupulous young men; but what he said, though not what I had longed to hear, has nevertheless remained with me till this day as a matchless piece of civilised wisdom.

  The True Blue Club, he said, purported to be a society of liberal men; let us therefore hear in what liberality consisted. This was nothing to do with any particular political or intellectual theory, it was simply a matter of practice. For the liberal three things must be paramount: the right to travel without let wherever he wanted; the right to occupy himself as he saw fit, always provided he was prepared to foot the bill, of whatever kind, himself; and the right to speak his mind aloud. These freedoms, said Alan, were practical matters, depending on facility and regulation; so long as we were vigilant they would prevail; but let us once take them too easily for granted or forget their primacy, then there were people who, often with the highest ostensible motives, would gladly steal or wrest them from us (as indeed had become very apparent after five years of Socialist rule). So let us be watchful in our generation; and let us never be deceived by smooth-tongued or loud-mouthed assertions that the ‘sensitive nature of the circumstances’ or the ‘collective will of the people’ or ‘the sanctity of equality and social justice’ required our three freedoms to be modified, qualified or waived.

  Much impressed by all this, I voiced my enthusiasm for Alan Pryce-Jones and his message to Christopher Laughton, a fellow member of the Club and of King’s, a tow-haired urchin for whom I enter
tained a kind of sentimental lust which he resolutely refused to assuage. What a splendid speech, I told Christopher; just what we all needed to hear, twenty times over and in full round voice.

  ‘Some of us,’ said Christopher primly, ‘have got beyond that kind of thing.’

  ‘What on earth can you mean?’

  ‘I mean that some of us are aware that there are more important things than the freedom of the upper class to amuse itself – which is what Pryce-Jones was really on about. He was talking about travel for pleasure and rich living.’

  ‘And paying the bills oneself.’

  ‘Easy enough for the rich.’

  ‘He also spoke about freedom of speech.’

  ‘By which he meant freedom to pervert the truth and hoodwink the masses into continuing to serve their capitalist masters.’

  ‘Oh. Can we stop this dreary discussion and go to bed?’

  ‘Certainly. Goodnight.’

  ‘I meant together.’

  ‘Certainly not. I have Keynes and Engels in the morning.’

  ‘Lucky Keynes and Engels…’

  Oddly enough, I had been introduced to Christopher by a totally non-political and non-intellectual acquaintance called Micky Tollman Green. Micky, who was all peaches and cream, I had met at a cricket match the previous summer: we had been on opposing sides and had not spoken, but we had, as the saying goes, ‘spotted’ one another – and did so again when we found ourselves sitting together in a lecture on Roman History the following October. Micky was much more responsive to sentimental lust than Christopher was, though he suffered hideously from guilt – not exactly moral guilt but shame at letting down his manliness (‘What would the other men on the XI think?’). Even my carefully prepared little lecture on the behaviour of the Greek male, and its probable emulation by ‘the other men on the XI’ if he did but know, failed to reassure him. Each time with Micky was ‘absolutely the last’ until the next. Eventually he found himself a nice but rather clinging girl, and by way of compensation he had introduced me to Christopher, with whom he had been at School.

  ‘I know you’ll like him,’ Micky said, ‘he’s just your type and very intelligent. The only trouble is that I’m not sure that he’ll – er – do it.’

  Christopher did not – er – do it. Furthermore he wasn’t nearly as much fun in other ways as Micky, who took uncomplicated pleasure in days out and sporting assemblies, which Christopher despised. Inevitably, Christopher refused to accompany me to the Varsity Match at Lord’s the following summer, but Micky, who had got a few days off from his girlfriend (‘Her beastly mother’s ill’), agreed to come with me instead.

  ‘But you mustn’t try to – you know – because Maureen wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘She need never hear of it.’

  ‘I tell Maureen everything.’

  At Lord’s we met, by arrangement, a friend called Dickie Muir, with whom Micky sometimes used to play Lawn Tennis (oh, those white flannel shorts – I can almost feel them after thirty years) and with whom I did a lot of drinking and giggling. And still do, I’m happy to say, after all this time, although Micky disappeared totally from our lives as soon as we left Cambridge. But back to Lord’s. In those days the Universities had players like Hubert Doggart and Peter May, whom you could recognise by their style from a mile off. For this reason, as well as the fact that Oxford and Cambridge were still attended largely by proper chaps from proper schools with a proper sense of priorities instead of by lower class swots from Tyneside and Newcastle, the match at Lord’s was pretty well subscribed. On this occasion in the early fifties the stands were quite as crowded as they would have been for an important county game, and so we had some trouble in finding Dickie. By the time we ran him to earth at last, in one of the squalid bars on the North side of the ground, it had started to rain. To make matters worse, a message now came out of the tannoy system for Mr Michael Tollman Green, who was to telephone Miss Maureen Fletch at once. Micky went as pink as a hunting coat and started to sweat from under his short blond hair.

  ‘She’s found out I’m here.’

  ‘But if you tell everything, she surely knew,’ I said.

  ‘I only told her I was going to London. I didn’t mention Lord’s. She thinks games are childish, and anyway they make her jealous.’

  ‘Silly bitch,’ said Dickie.

  ‘Oh, please don’t say that. Who can have told her?’

  The end of it was that Micky went to ring up Maureen at her mother’s house in Potter’s Bar only to find out that Maureen had had no idea at all he was at Lord’s and had not, of course, at any stage telephoned the ground. The whole thing was a hoax – and the damage, from Micky’s point of view, irreparable, because now that he had rung up Maureen and announced (naturally enough in the circumstances) that he was speaking from Lord’s at her request, she (a) knew that he had gone there and (b) held him guilty of deceiving her.

  What punishment was in store for him he could not tell. But he agreed, as he was not on Maureen-duty again for another four days and there was no point in making himself miserable in the meanwhile, to accompany us (since the rain continued) to Kind Hearts and Coronets, a film with Dennis Price and Alec Guinness which was currently drawing large and hilarious audiences to the Leicester Square Theatre.

  ‘She must never know I’ve been to the Cinema,’ Micky said. ‘She thinks they’re full of germs. Lord’s and the Cinema would just about finish her off.’

  But hardly had the film started when a message was projected on to the screen by means of a slide (they still did that in those days) to say that Miss Maureen Fletch was waiting in the Foyer for Mr Michael Tollman Green.

  ‘Please come with me,’ Micky said. I can’t face her without someone to support me. Oh dear, what can have happened?’

  So we went together to the foyer, where I was staggered to see Christopher.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said fiercely; then seized my arm and swept me away and into a taxi before either Micky or I could open our mouths. It swiftly transpired that Christopher, though he had hitherto heard my suit only with contempt, had been made so jealous by the notion of my little ‘Memory Lane’ outing with Micky that he had followed us to London, engineered the hoaxing and torment of Micky by way of revenge, and was now, as a result of my temporary neglect, perversely possessed of that same lust for me as I had suffered all these months for him. I took him to my Club, smuggled him into my bedroom against all the rules, and did my very best for him; but all I could think of was poor little Micky as we left him in the foyer, bright pink with confusion and very near to tears, with the consequence that my first and last bout of amour with the delectable Christopher was a total and humiliating flop.

  The next day at Lord’s Dickie and I met Giles Peregrine, who had served in the Rifle Brigade with Dickie and had instructed me while I was a Cadet at the OTS at Bangalore in 1946. Christopher and Micky had both gone their ways, which was something of a relief, and the skies had cleared as if in celebration. Giles was getting very worked up by Doug Insole’s habit of pulling balls that were on his leg stump, and although Dickie pointed out that Insole did this only when the balls were full tosses or pitched pretty short, Giles still went grinding on with his thesis that Insole was a cross-bat player who would be rendered quite useless by the slightest deterioration in his sight – i.e. in a very few years at the most.

  The combination in Giles of ball-aching persistence and sanctimonious utterance (he spoke as if cross-bat strokes were some hideous evil which he had been divinely appointed to search out and damn) reminded me of an occasion at Bangalore, some three years previously, when both he and I were playing for the Garrison against a scratch Mysore XI in a so-called ‘Mysore State Trial’, the first of its kind to be held since the end of the war. We were playing on the OTS ground, one of the few in India to have a grass wicket and one of the most amiable I have ever played cricket on: the boundaries were shaded by palm and casuarina; a distant view of the big wheel on the Cantonment Fairg
round lent an incongruous charm; the pavilion was cool and ample, with long, cavernous verandahs of the finest colonial fashion; and in the late afternoon the sound of the silly temple bells came rippling across the outlying paddy marshes.

  As I remember the incident, Giles and I were sitting in the pavilion waiting to bat, while James Prior, an old school friend of mine who had luckily been sent out as a Cadet in the same draught as myself, came up and offered us a drink. I should explain that intercourse between white Cadets and white Officers (Giles was then a Captain) was very easy at the OTS at Bangalore, which had been founded in order to turn mature planters and the like into Officers with the minimum of fuss or formality and therefore had a tradition of treating its students as if they were more or less commissioned already. So lackadaisical were the proceedings of the School that it was said that a man could fail the course only if he died, went mad, or had to be treated more than three times for the Pox. What with all of this, then, there was nothing out of the way in James’ inviting Giles to have a drink without even bothering to call him ‘Sir’: they were, after all both gentlemen and both Greenjackets.

  ‘Thank ’ee, no,’ said Giles, ‘I shall have to bat at any moment.’

  ‘Thank ’ee, yes,’ said I, ‘Tom Collins.’

  ‘You,’ said Giles, ‘will be going in to bat next wicket down but one. You cannot bat on Tom Collinses.’

  ‘Walter Hammond,’ I said, ‘is rumoured to bat on nothing else.’

  At this stage someone put ‘These Foolish Things’ on the pavilion gramophone. For some reason it was the only record in the building and although there must have been another tune on the reverse it was never played. ‘These Foolish Things’ and the drifting temple bells: they were the music of that season, monotonous but magical, at least in kind memory’s ear.

  A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces,

  An airline ticket to romantic places…