In my teens, eager to get out of 12 Balliol House, I went regularly on the 14 bus to the second-hand shelves in the Charing Cross Road. From the diagonal rack beside the entrance to Joseph’s cavernous bookshop, I picked up the works of Byron and Tennyson, in green boards, for sixpence each, and the Nonesuch edition of Hazlitt’s essays for a shilling. I also acquired a prize copy of the often lauded Jeremy Taylor’s 1651 Holy Living, with the front board detached, for thruppence. I bought it to see why Somerset Maugham had scoffed at it.
Having paid dawdling dues to English literature, I went up the street to Foyle’s. There I passed not too quickly from history and fiction to the medical section, where it was possible to scan a few pages of Dr Van der Velde’s Perfect Marriage before one’s presence stuck out. The text informed me that, in the right position (‘see fig. opposite’), the female genitals could be raised or lowered for more penetrating pleasure. A couple’s clinching rapture was to arrive at simultaneous orgasm. It appeared to take a bit of doing, but practice made for perfection, after which what Jeremy Taylor called ‘mutual endearment’ would contrive a permanent bond.
The anatomical diagrams in Perfect Marriage were as salacious as the London Underground map, but they served to make me glad to be wearing my blue mackintosh as I walked past shady, half-curtained premises that sold Damarrhoids and trusses, to Leicester Square Tube station. During the long ride to Putney Bridge station, detumescence was assisted by Idylls of the King, though they too carried an erotic charge. What did not?
I quit Charterhouse without regret or gratitude. I had gone there, in the autumn of 1945, as a last resort. Earlier that year, midway between VE Day and the Japanese surrender, I sat the Winchester scholarship exam with a prep school friend, Richard Bird. A couple of months younger than me, Richard had spent most of the war years in America. After all the papers had been evaluated, I was fourth in the number of gross marks, Richard eleventh. Our prep school headmaster, ‘Skete’ Workman, promised that, even after the examiners had allowed ‘weight for age’, I was odds on to receive one of the twelve scholarships on offer. I set about learning Wykehamist slang. There was, I discovered, one way into the school grounds known as ‘Non Licet Gate’, because it was not lawful for boys to pass through it. I could hardly wait not to use it.
After the examiners’ final conclave, I was seen to have descended from fourth to thirteenth in the published roll. Relegated to proxime accessit (a free translation, in the modern style, would be ‘close but no cigar’), there was to be no place for me at Winchester. Richard had risen to sixth. He was in; I was out. My abiding suspicion is that the headmaster, Spencer Stottesbury Leeson, a canon of the Church of England and later Bishop of Peterborough, put his heavy, although not yet episcopal, hand on the scales, thus adding disqualifying weight to my age. During my interview with him and his formidable colleagues, Leeson had asked how I felt about going to chapel. I gave an honest trimmer’s response: going to chapel had never bothered me at Copthorne School and would not bother me at Winchester. The sideways twitch of his mouth might have become a smile but it snagged into a wince.
Old Wykehamists have denied that my elimination could have had anything to do with anti-Semitism. Nothing excites charges of paranoia more quickly than the evidence of an accurate memory. Who will now believe that in the summer of 1945, after the recent discovery of the German concentration camps, a great English school was inflected by a policy which echoed, however discreetly, that of the defeated Nazis? In fact, in 1945, Winchester’s rival, Eton College, announced its intention to operate a numerus clausus. My father’s old school, St Paul’s, with its long tradition of admitting any number of Jews, followed suit. Non licet sed perpaucis Judaeis (none but a very few Jews allowed) was the new slogan on their gates. Protests led by the Old Etonian A. J. Ayer, a leading Oxford philosopher (and ex-Guards officer), and by Isaiah Berlin, an Old Pauline of equal academic and social distinction, impelled both schools publicly to rescind the proposed measures. It would be nice to suppose that they ceased to operate them. Life in old England was dominated by those who composed not only its small print but also, if pressed, its invisible writing.
By the time Skete Workman learned of my rejection by Winchester, Charterhouse was the only major school whose scholarship examinations had not yet taken place. Despite blurring tears, I did my educated stuff and was given a £100-a-year scholarship. Two years later, it was increased by another £40 when I gained a ‘senior scholarship’ at the same time as taking the despised ‘School Cert’. Arrogance and submission were the clever boy’s systole and diastole. Part of the English education was to learn, by indirection, of the link between brains and money; a first-class degree gave a man access to enviable emoluments, but one must never talk about them and certainly not wave one’s hands around while doing so. By the age of eighteen, I had been laced into the ways and manners of the middle of the English middle class towards the end of the last season of its high opinion of itself. The British and their king-emperor had been sent victorious by a manifestly Anglophile Almighty. Even if He seemed to specialise in close-run things, few doubted that He was still in His heaven.
Austerity and rationing were the outward and visible signs of patriotic taxes that had to be paid for post-war Britain to stay on top. Life under Clement Attlee’s trustworthy, pipe-smoking, thin-voiced chairmanship was a grey vale of warnings and prohibitions. From her desk in the Home Office, the stern daughter of the voice of God warned us to ‘Keep Death Off the Roads’ and proclaimed ‘Clean Living the Only Real Safeguard’ against the unspeakable ills conveyed by the fell initials V. D. There were few activities about which we should not feel guilty. Good citizens were warned that ‘Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases’; we should ‘Trap Them in Our Handkercheases’. The traveller might still find himself sitting under a sign asking ‘Is Your Journey Really Necessary?’ Civilians of the 1940s were consigned to patriotic immobility.
According to John Raymond, a New Statesman pundit, post-war England was ‘on the anvil’. The drama of the Berlin air-lift had proved that our 1948 and George Orwell’s 1984 were distinguished only by a quirk of the pen. Russia had replaced Germany as the heavy hammer that threatened to come down on everything that the civilised world held dear. The war was over, but hostilities might begin again at any time. Why else did Carthusians blanco belts and burnish brasses before parading in the Junior Training Corps? In the second lustrum of the 1940s, I spent every Tuesday afternoon ‘doing Corps’. I was neither keen nor slack; I conformed. I was conscious, at the same time, that conformity entailed an element of irreconcilable difference. Was that why I bit my nails?
In my third year at Charterhouse, the JTC’s commanding officer, Major Morris, alias ‘Magger Mo’, announced a ‘promotions exam’. With the competitive docility that a good education fostered, I dealt with the questions set before me as well as I could: I rehearsed the infantryman’s mantra, ‘Down, Crawl, Observe, Sights, Fire!’; I defined an ‘O-group’ and its duties; my sketch map was complete with ‘church with steeple’ and ‘bushy-topped tree’, and I inserted an unambiguous arrow to indicate the proper line of march; I was even practical enough to dismantle and reassemble a Bren gun (real soldiers were said to do it blindfold) before jumping up and standing to attention. If a condition for promotion had been that I should itemise the details of the Sullan constitution, I should have done it with equal zeal. There were no hurdles like English hurdles. What counted was to clear them cleanly, never mind whether they led to anywhere one really wanted to go.
As a result of gaining good marks, I leapfrogged from private to ‘acting-corporal’. The Napoleon of Godalming Hill was launched on his unlikely ascent. Shortly afterwards, command of the Lockite house platoon was wished on me by the incoming head monitor, Jeremy Atkinson, the other senior scholar in the house (if only a natural scientist). Jeremy, whose naval officer father had been killed in action off Singapore in 1941, had more urgent administrative things to do than to ‘play soldiers
’. He later became head of the school and was awarded the Holford Scholarship to Christ Church the year before I was disqualified from presenting myself as a candidate.
Leadership, I discovered, was akin to acting: imposture was easier, and more enjoyable, to sustain than sincerity. With calculated riskiness, I invited an unenthusiastic platoon to relish the comedy of excelling at something that neither they nor I wanted to do. My Tuesday afternoon squaddies responded with eager complicity: pretending to be keen turned conformity into performance. In my last Quarter, seconded by Sergeant James Cellan-Jones, I marched ‘Lockites’ into a tie with ‘Robinites’ for first place in the school drill competition. Which of the adjudicating officers could guess that our snappy uniformity carried a stamp of irony?
Promoted to under officer, I joined the only other Carthusian of the same rank, David Vansittart, a curly-haired, blond, blue-eyed Robinite. We two alone were entitled to wear officer’s uniform, carry a leather-encased swagger stick and sport a Sam Browne belt. We also had the exalted right to parade in brown rather than black boots, a privilege I lacked the means to exercise. I could, however, look forward with some confidence to selection as an officer when the time came to do National Service. My khaki future was postponed by a government ordinance that allowed scholars first to go to university. It must have been intended to increase the military intake of young men with serviceable degrees in subjects such as engineering, medicine and current foreign languages.
Although competence in Latin and Greek was likely to be of small utility on the battlefield, one band of classicists was known to have played a notably gallant part in the war. A visiting lecturer had told us how knowledge of ancient Greek had qualified Stanley ‘Billy’ Moss, Patrick ‘Paddy’ Leigh Fermor, C. M. ‘Monty’ Woodhouse and Xan Fielding to lead guerrilla operations in Crete and on the Greek mainland. Seen from a distance, the adventures of those latter-day philhellenes furnished one of the few romantic episodes of the Second World War.
While at Charterhouse, Stanley Moss had been the fag-master of my friend Peter Green, probably the greatest, certainly the most versatile, of modern classical scholars. In 1950, Moss published the bestseller Ill Met by Moonlight. A film version, in which Leigh Fermor was played by Dirk Bogarde, embellished its real-life hero’s Byronic renown. Moss himself, a Jew who was Leigh Fermor’s 2 i/c in the great adventure of kidnapping the German general Heinrich Kreipe, derived little kudos or satisfaction from his success. ‘Paddy’, on the other hand, acquired iconic standing in Greece, and an elevated literary reputation in England, for the rest of his long life. He had been at the same school, King’s Canterbury, as Somerset Maugham. Common Old Boyishness may explain how come, as a guest at the Villa Mauresque, Leigh Fermor offended his host by daring to tell a funny story about someone with a very b–bad s–stammer.
Moss was never at ease in the post-war world. In Peter Green’s words:
Bill was a charmer de luxe: very handsome, enormous natural grace. But he was also the absolutely classic example of the romantic Mediterranean expat with a Peter Pan psyche … he simply couldn’t, wouldn’t grow old, or indeed up. Billy was the one who actually married his Polish countess, but drank himself to death at about the same age as Dylan Thomas.
Perhaps Moss, the rolling stone, could never forget the hundreds of Cretan hostages who were shot in reprisal for his and Paddy’s audacious, award-winning exploit.
For non-combatants, the transcendent quality of literae humaniores was illustrated in the story of how, as his kidnappers led him through the Cretan mountains, General Kreipe glanced at snow-capped Mount Ida and then, perhaps in order to pull educated rank on his captors, recited the opening lines of Horace’s Ode 9, Book One:
Vides ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte, nec iam sustineant onus…
When Kreipe hesitated over the next phrase, Leigh Fermor took the cue and continued, without pause, to the end of the poem. The general looked at him and said, ‘Ach so, Herr Major!’ Who would not wish to have been as superbly prompt as ‘Paddy’ at that moment? I wonder with what eyes Billy Moss, whatever kind of a Jew he was, observed this time-out-of-war exchange between his commanding officer and a Wehrmacht general.
I had been as diligent and house-spirited a Lockite as dread and ambition could contrive. When in office as a house monitor, I called my colleagues by their first names, but after what had happened a year or so earlier, I trusted none of them, even those innocent of overt malice. The version of myself seen or heard in public was carefully edited. I learned from Jeremy Atkinson how to tighten the lips in order to instil dread in the lower deck, as it were; but I was careful not to reveal to him, or to anyone else, anything that might be used against me. I kept a straight enough face to seem to be one of them, and a straight enough bat to get my house colours; but I walked alone, myself and my double.
Cicero’s favourite clausula carried the concluding phrase ‘esse videatur’, which we construed as ‘that he may seem to be’, whether one thing or another. While appearing to be a proper Carthusian, I was primed by Mr Maugham to take unforgiving note of my fellows’ forms of speech and personal habits. I did so in a wide spiral notebook, ruled feint, that I had bought in New York City. A Writer’s Notebook had shown me how neatly and surreptitiously a man might can his beans before opportunity came to spill them.
II
DURING HOLIDAYS FROM Charterhouse, I had contrived to kiss a few girls, on unparted lips. English girls furnished a passive and interminable assault course: one got as far as one could, in a given time, before being stalled. Mona had the biggest, most enticing breasts. I never surmounted them. Two New York girls I dated during ten days in their city in the summer of 1949 were more accessible. Necking in the American style had its limits, but they were elastic. I sailed for England, on the Queen Mary, convinced that I was passionately in love with freckled Mary Jane, whom I had kissed deep into the early hours.
After I had returned to my Carthusian monastery, Mary Jane wrote me scented letters, in pale blue ink, on petalled paper, promising full-length proximities when we met again. In the interim, I convinced myself that my true love was the pretty Hilary Phillips, whom I had met, when we were sixteen, at the Liberal Jewish synagogue in St John’s Wood. In a surge of ancestral allegiance, my father had sent me to be prepared for ‘Confirmation’, an anglicised form of Bar Mitzvah, appropriate for assimilated Jews. No Hebrew was required, apart from the ritual Shema Yisroel. More ardent in pursuit of Hilary than of hereditary solidarity, I had learned only with disappointment, in 1948, of the foundation of the state of Israel. Hilary’s family celebration of the end of 2,000 years of Jewish homelessness obliged her to cancel a date on which I was hoping to proceed a button or two lower down the front of her nicely frilled, and filled, blouse.
My parents had chosen to live in SW15 not least because they did not care to be identified with ‘north London’. Golders Green, with its Jewish connotations, stood for everything from which they wished to be discrete. My father neither denied his Jewishness nor was he at pains to declare it. He flinched when called ‘Rayfle’, a pronunciation that he took to insinuate that he was an alien. He insisted on our Raphael being said in the same way as the name of the Renaissance painter and the anglicised archangel. Out in Putney, we did not celebrate the foundation of the state of Israel. Zionism made no call on my father, although he would be pleased when, in 1952, his friend Sir Frank Evans was named British ambassador to Israel. My parents had met Frank and Mary in the 1930s, when Evans was British consul-general in New York. Mary was what my mother called a ‘character’. At a post-war reception at the UN, she was being presented to the guest of honour when her pants fell down. She stepped out of them, handed them, between thumb and forefinger, to her husband – ‘Here, Frank!’ – and proceeded with the polite formalities.
My brunette mother was beautiful enough not to be taken for what she did not deny that she was but would as soon not be called. Irene (the final ‘e’ silent, as in
Goodnight, Irene) never lost her American accent, but she showed little nostalgia for New York, still less for Kansas City, where her mother continued to live until the mid-1960s. In an access of daughterly loyalty, Irene then persuaded Fanny to cross the Atlantic and spend her remaining years, of which there turned out to be more than a few, at 12 Balliol House.
In 1930s New York, my mother’s bankrupt father, Max, had separated from his wife and come to live in our spare room at 30 W 70th St. Cedric never complained then, nor did he when his deaf mother-in-law moved into the back bedroom that I had vacated in 12 Balliol House. She often took offence at what she thought she had overheard. My father nicknamed her ‘Canasta-puss’ on account of her addiction to the game, which she had played regularly with ‘the girls’ back in K. C. In exile, the skeletal Fanny smoked incessantly; but even in her nineties she would jump up when I came to the flat. ‘Want a cup of coffee?’ She made quantities of wide, flat, nutty and delicious cookies, in accordance with an allegedly Lithuanian recipe that existed only in her head.
Cedric hated cigarette smoke. Yet he treated Fanny with implacable politeness. Was his self-restraint a form of penance? As we were sailing back to England from New York, when I was already eighteen years old, my mother disclosed that, in his dancing twenties, Cedric had fathered a daughter on a certain Molly Hall, who had been a member of the Baltic Exchange, a rare distinction for a woman in those days. Molly had promised her lounge-lizard lover that she could not have children. A few months later, she informed him that she was pregnant. Cedric’s father Ellis paid for her to go away, less because of the shame of the imminent bastard than because its mother was not Jewish. At some stage during the war, Molly opened a hairdressing salon in Surbiton called Chez Raphael. After 1945, she emigrated to British Columbia with her daughter, Sheila, and took the name Raphael-Hall. I have no clear idea why Irene waited so long to break the seal on that previously well-kept secret.
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