III
Jill was in fact begun that autumn, when I was twenty-one, and took about a year to write. When it was published in 1946 it aroused no public comment. Kingsley, who by that time was back at Oxford, wrote to say he had enjoyed it very much, adding that its binding reminded him of Signal Training: Telegraphy and Telephony, or possibly Ciceronis Orationes. Later he reported that he had seen a copy in a shop in Coventry Street between Naked and Unashamed and High-Heeled Yvonne.
On looking through it again in 1963 I have made a number of minor deletions but have added nothing and rewritten nothing, with the exception of a word here and there, and the reinstatement of a few mild obscenities to which the original printer objected. It will, I hope, still qualify for the indulgence traditionally extended to juvenilia.
IV
Looking, after twelve years, at this introduction and the story it introduces, I am struck by the latter’s growing claims as a historical document—not only on obvious points such as John’s thinking that a pound would be sufficient pocket-money for two weeks, but as recording a vanished mode of Oxford life itself. Christopher and his friends would not now have to bother about wearing gowns, or fear molestation by the Proctors when on licensed premises, nor would Elizabeth’s visits be limited to between two and seven o’clock in the afternoon. College authorities today have been known to turn a blind eye to girls actually living in college, aware of the outcry disciplinary action would produce; some colleges, indeed, have begun to take women students, in consequence of the lack of places for them in women’s colleges. One wonders, in fact, how long the collegiate system will last: legislation of a succession of socialist or quasi-socialist governments has severely diminished college incomes from investment or property, while the rise in labour and other costs in running these academic hotels has been equally damaging. Furthermore, nobody really wants to live in them: dons and students alike prefer domesticity, houses and wives on the one hand and flats and mistresses on the other. Finally, left-wing agitation is striving to unite all Oxford students into a single political force that would be hostile to the collegiate system and the spirit it engenders. Recently a fellow of my own college said he gave it ten years.
My original purpose in writing an introduction of this kind was to make clear that my own Oxford life was rather different from that of my hero; nevertheless, over the years I can see that I have been to some extent identified with him. A later Oxford generation, according to one writer, liked my poems because they ‘found a voice for those in the painful process of transforming themselves from petits bourgeois or hauts bourgeois.’ Though this implication of enterprise is flattering, I think the time has come to disclaim it; thanks to my father’s generosity, my education was at no time a charge on public or other funds, and all in all my manner of life is much the same today as it was in 1940—bourgeois, certainly, but neither haut nor petit. Perhaps in consequence I may receive a few more degrees of imaginative credit for my hero’s creation.
Lastly, since the book’s original publisher is now dead, I can explain that it was probably his imprint that won Jill a place in that Coventry Street shop. Reginald Ashley Caton, mysterious and elusive proprietor of the Fortune Press throughout the Thirties and Forties, divided his publishing activity between poetry and what then passed for pornography, often of a homosexual tinge. My dustjacket advertised titles such as Climbing Boy, Barbarian Boy, A Diary of the Teens by A Boy, and so on; the previous year he had published a collection of my poems (Dylan Thomas and Roy Fuller were also on his list), and I had rather despairingly bunged the novel at him, as no one else seemed interested. He must have accepted it unread, since the printer’s objections appeared to take him by surprise; our only meeting was in a teashop near Victoria Station to discuss this, when he assured me that to find yourself in the dock on a charge of obscenity was ‘no joke’. (That cup of tea was my sole payment for both books.) All the same, as a publisher of poetry at a time when such an activity was even less remunerative than usual, he deserves a footnote in the literary history of the time. An interesting study might be written of the crusading activities of the Fortune Press in the Forties, and of the Fantasy and Marvell Presses in the Fifties, and their effect on English verse. It occurs to me that I am probably the only writer to have been published by all three. 1975 P.L.
The main location of this story in time and place—the Michaelmas Term at Oxford University in 1940—is more or less real, but the characters are imaginary.
As, despite its length, it remains in essence an unambitious short story, chapter-divisions have been dropped, leaving it merely as a narrative with breathing-spaces.
John Kemp sat in the corner of an empty compartment in a train travelling over the last stretch of line before Oxford. It was nearly four o’clock on a Thursday in the middle of October, and the air had begun to thicken as it always does before a dusk in autumn. The sky had become stiff with opaque clouds. When they were clear of the gasometers, the wagons and blackened bridges of Banbury, he looked out over the fields, noticing the clumps of trees that sped by, whose dying leaves each had an individual colour, from palest ochre to nearly purple, so that each tree stood out distinctly as in spring. The hedges were still green, but the leaves of the convolvuli threaded through them had turned sickly yellow, and from a distance looked like late flowers. Little arms of rivers twisted through the meadows, lined with willows that littered the surface with leaves. The waters were spanned by empty footbridges.
It looked cold and deserted. The windows of the carriages were bluish with the swirls of the cleaner’s leather still showing on the glass, and he confined his eyes to the compartment. It was a third-class carriage, and the crimson seats smelt of dust and engines and tobacco, but the air was warm. Pictures of Dartmouth Castle and Portmadoc looked at him from the opposite wall. He was an undersized boy, eighteen years old, with a pale face and soft pale hair brushed childishly from left to right. Lying back against the seat, he stretched his legs out and pushed his hands to the bottom of the pockets of his cheap blue overcoat. The lapels of it curled outwards and creases dragged from the buttons. His face was thin, and perhaps strained; the expression round his mouth was ready to become taut, and a small frown lingered on his forehead. His whole appearance lacked luxuriance. Only his silky hair, as soft as seeding thistle, gave him an air of beauty.
He had been travelling all day and was hungry because he had had no proper lunch. When he started out that morning from his home in Lancashire, he had had two packets of sandwiches in his pockets, made the night before by his mother. The egg sandwiches were wrapped in white paper and the ham in brown; they were each tied firmly, but not tightly, with string. But at a quarter to one he was sitting in a full compartment, with no prospect of changing for fifty minutes, and as he was shy of eating in front of strangers he looked anxiously at the other passengers to see if they were going to produce food themselves. They did not look as if they were. One man pushed out to take lunch in the dining-car, but the others—two elderly ladies, a beautiful girl and an old clergyman who was reading and annotating a book—all sat on placidly. John had not travelled much before and for all he knew it was considered bad manners to eat in a public carriage. He tried to read. But at one o’clock he had grown desperate and had slunk along to the lavatory, where he locked himself in and bolted a few of his sandwiches before a furious rattling at the door made him cram the rest out of the ventilator, noisily flush the unused water-closet and go back to his seat. His return might have been a prearranged signal: the shorter and fatter of the two old ladies said: “Well!” in a pleased way, and produced a leather shopping-bag, from which she took napkins, packets of sandwiches, small fruit pies, a thermos flask, and they both began to eat a small picnic. Meanwhile the beautiful girl took out some coarse-looking rolls and cheese in silver paper, and even the old clergyman was crumbling biscuits into his mouth, with a handkerchief stuffed into his collar. John hardly dared to breathe. He could sense the old ladies exchanging gla
nces, and sat miserably turning the pages of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, waiting for what he knew must come—the charitable offer of food. And sure enough, in five minutes he felt a nudge, and saw the shorter and fatter of the two leaning across, holding out a packet in a napkin. She had a rosy face and her false teeth were bared in a smile.
“Would you care for a sandwich, my boy?”
The beat of the train obliterated some of her words, but her gesture was eloquent.
“Er—no, thank you—it’s very kind of you—no, thank you—I——”
He could not explain that he had thrown his own lunch out of the lavatory window, and she continued to hold the bag out, shaking it determinedly:
“Go on, my boy … plenty … you’ll be hungry …”
She wore a cream blouse under her beige travelling-coat and a steel brooch set in the collar. As John continued to show by signs and words that it was very kind of her, but he really wouldn’t, she withdrew the sandwiches and unsnapped her handbag.
“You’re not feeling ill, are you?” One chubby hand fumbled inside the bag, among letters, keys, a lavender-scented handkerchief and a bottle of tablets. “I have some smelling-salts, if you’ve a headache … lie down.…”
But by this time he had taken a sandwich, for anything would be better than being dabbed with eau-de-Cologne, or made to sit by an open window. The beautiful girl was staring at him amusedly as she licked the tips of her fingers, and even the clergyman, paring a russet apple with a silver penknife, paused to gaze at him cheerfully. In the end he was forced to accept not only three sandwiches from the ladies, but a piece of cake from the girl and a quarter of the clergyman’s apple. He kept his eyes fixed on the dirty floor as he chewed, utterly humiliated.
So now, four hours later, he was hungry, but so near the end of the journey his restlessness prevented him from wanting to eat. And as if the train knew his destination was near it seemed to quicken speed, plunging on with a regular pattern of beats. He looked from the window and saw a man with a gun entering a field, two horses by a gate, and presently the railway line was joined by a canal, and rows of houses appeared. He got to his feet and stared at the approaching city across allotments, back-gardens and piles of coal covered with fallen leaves. Red brick walls glowed with a dull warmth that he would have admired at another time. Now he was too nervous. The train clattered by iron bridges, cabbages and a factory painted with huge white letters he did not bother to read; smoke dirtied the sky; the train swung violently over set after set of points. A signal-box. Their speed seemed to increase, as they swept towards the station round a long curve of line through much rolling-stock, among which John noticed a wagon from near his home. Then the eaves of the platform, hollow shouting, the faces slowing down as he dragged down his heavy suitcase from the rack, the shuddering halt and escape of steam.
“Oxford,” cried a porter, “Oxford,” walking the length of the platform because all the nameplates had been removed in time of war. John got out.
He did not hurry through the ticket barrier, and when he walked out of the station all the taxis had been taken. He stood on the pavement, not sorry to be delayed a little, for he was coming to reside at the University for the first time and was so afraid that even now, if he had had the chance, he would have turned and fled back into his previous life. The fact that he had worked for years for this moment made no difference: if he could not run back home, he at least would prefer to loiter about, getting nearer by degrees only to the college on whose books he was enrolled as a scholar.
During this last hesitation he stared down towards the town, aware that behind him a young man was arguing with a porter about a lost bag of golf-clubs. What he could see did not look very remarkable; there were hoardings advertising beans and the ATS, people pushing towards a red bus, a glazed-brick public-house. A pony and cart creaked down the road, the man holding the slack reins, a bowed figure in the faint dusk. John looked about for colleges and old buildings, but could only see distantly a spire or two, and watched a woman buying some sprouts at a greengrocer’s fifty yards away. His bag stood beside him on the kerb.
It was because he had crammed everything he had into that bag that it was so heavy and forced him to take a taxi, a thing he had never done before. Only his china had gone before him in a little crate: everything else had been packed in his case, which was like a small trunk with a handle. He could hardly carry it twenty yards, it was so heavy.
Anxiously he waited. The driver of the first taxicab back grinned and switched off his engine as John gave him the address of his college.
“Sorry, sir, I’m goin’ to ’ave my tea.”
“Oh.”
He went back to the kerb again. The second driver was willing, and after a short, blurred ride, set John down at his gates for two shillings. John gave him half a crown, and, afraid that the man would try to give him sixpence change, stepped quickly through the gate into the college porch. He heard the taxi drive away.
Already the sound of traffic receded a little. He recognized the quadrangle (for he had been there once before) and looked about him.
I must ask the porter where my room is, he told himself to quell his rising bewilderment, that is the first thing to do.
So he left his bag stand and turned into the doorway of the set of rooms at the gates that was given over to the porter as a lodge. Here the post was laid out and a few tattered railway time-tables and telephone-directories hung for the use of the students along one wall. John remembered the porter, a fierce little man with ginger whiskers and a regimental tie, and saw him leaning against the inner door talking to two young men. He was better dressed than John himself.
“Don’t tell me that. Don’t tell me. That’s what I was saying all last term.”
“Anyway, no one’ll bother to do it,” said one young man languidly. “No one in their senses, that is.”
“I’ll tell you what it is,” the porter began in an even crosser voice, but broke off when he saw John. “Yes, sir?”
John swallowed, and the two young men turned to look at him.
“Er—I’ve just arrived—er—can you—er—my rooms——”
“What, sir?” snapped the little man, bending an ear nearer. “What d’you say?” John was speechless. “A fresher, are you?”
“Yes——”
“What name?”
“Er—Kemp—er——”
“Kent?”
The porter picked up a list and ran his thumbnail down it: the two young men continued to look at John as if he held no particular significance for them. It seemed hours before the porter exclaimed:
“Kemp! Kemp, are you? Yes, room two, staircase fourteen. With Mr. Warner. That’s you, sir,” he repeated as John did not move. “Fourteen, two.”
“Er—where?——”
“Founder’s Quad—second arch on the left. Staircase fourteen’s on the righthand side. You can’t miss it.”
John backed out, murmuring thanks.
Who was Mr. Warner?
This was something he had dreaded, though not very intensely because there were other more immediate things to shrink from.
He had thought that once he had found his rooms, he would always have a refuge, a place to retreat to and hide in. This was apparently not so.
Who was Mr. Warner? Perhaps he would be quiet and studious.
The news upset him so much that he forgot to ask the porter if his crate of china had arrived, and instead, picked up his case and set off in the direction indicated. The quadrangle was gravelled and surrounded by sets of rooms on three sides, with the Chapel and Hall on the fourth side. The windows were dark and hollow: archways, with arms and scrolled stone, led off into other parts of the college, and one or two pigeons flew down from high ledges from among the rich crimson ivy. John, panting under the weight of the bag, passed through one of the arches where a tablet commemorated the previous war, and found himself in a set of cloisters with the statue of the Founder in the middle, surrounded b
y iron railings. His footsteps echoed on the stone, and he walked on tip-toe, unaware that the sound would become casually familiar to him in a very few days. In this inner quadrangle silence was almost complete, only broken by the sound of a gramophone playing distantly. He wondered who the Founder was and who Mr. Warner was—perhaps he was a poor scholar, like himself.
There were three staircases on the right-hand side of the quadrangle, and the last one was number 14: the numbers had been newly painted. New also were the names of the occupants painted in a list at the bottom of each stair: he read them apprehensively, Stephenson, Hackett and Cromwell, the Hon. S. A. A. Ransom.
The next was 14. Kemp and Warner.
What alarmed him was not so much the sight of the door (room number 2 was on the ground floor), but the fact that he could hear laughter and the sound of teacups coming from it. There were people there! He listened, first at one door, then at another, but it was undoubtedly coming from his own room: cautiously he put his suitcase down, and was just preparing to creep away—for he would as soon have intruded as rung the doorbell of a strange house—when the door suddenly opened and a young man came out holding a kettle.
John retreated. “Er—I——”
“Hallo, did you want me?”
The young man was taller and stronger than John, with dark dry hair brushed back from his forehead, and a square, stubbly jaw. His nose was thick and his shoulders broad; John felt a twinge of distrust. He wore a dark grey lounge suit and dark blue shirt and on his right hand was a square-faced gold ring. There was a swagger in his bearing, he held himself well upright.
Jill Page 2