Against the Law

by Peter Wildeblood; Max Lerner

  I was, at this time, a remarkably unattractive child, exceedingly thin and clumsy, with spots and a mop of carroty hair. Once when another boy’s parents, arriving in a Rolls-Royce, had narrowly missed me as I blundered out of the front door, I heard the mother exclaim: ‘Who was that hideous small boy we nearly ran over?’ I did not expect to be liked, and only wished to be inconspicuous; but this did not seem possible. I eventually discovered, however, that there was one thing I could do which pleased the masters, if not the other boys: I could be a ‘swot’. Obtaining a scholarship to another school was grudgingly conceded to be almost as good as getting into the First Eleven, and this I set myself to do.

  Another way in which I could escape some of the miseries of school, I discovered, was by being ill. It was possible, if suspected of having some contagious ailment, to achieve a little peace and quiet and even some sympathy by being confined, ‘under observation’, in Matron’s sitting-room. Constitutionally I am quite strong, but during this period I succeeded in catching all the usual diseases and was able to produce a streaming cold or a fainting fit whenever some particularly undesirable event was in the offing. Curiously enough, this habit has persisted ever since; my only illnesses occur, like involuntary alibis, at moments of mental stress.

  We were forced, every Sunday, to sit down in the Big Schoolroom and write letters to our parents. Since these were afterwards read through by the master on duty—ostensibly to see if they were long enough—it is not surprising that they failed to convey my real feelings about the school. Several times during the term our mothers and fathers were permitted to come and take us out for the day. On these occasions the staff positively radiated wholesome charm and any signs of misery were ascribed by our parents to a perfectly natural longing for home. It is extraordinary to what lengths children will go to conceal their inner feelings from their parents; I am sure that mine never suspected how unhappy I was.

  All this time I was growing up, although nobody attempted to explain the process to me. Biological details were, of course, frequently discussed by the boys in a wildly inaccurate manner, the whole subject of sex being generally described as ‘dirt’, ‘smut’ or ‘piggishness’ by the pupils, and by the masters whenever it came to their notice. The idea that the changes now taking place in our bodies were in any way connected with the production of children, let alone with love between men and women, remarkably enough never occurred to us. Sex was something isolated, furtive and unclean, like going to the lavatory—only worse. It was only much later, just before I left the school, that the headmaster drew me aside and imparted the information which any working-class child would have acquired years before.

  The happiest times of my childhood were usually solitary ones. When I was ten we went to live in the country, in a rambling oak-beamed farmhouse on the edge of a forest. This was—and still is—an enchanted place to me. As a lonely child, I led a dream life there to which hardly anyone was admitted. At the back of the house there were fields sloping down to a stream, on the other side of which the forest began. Sometimes on summer days, when the stream was trickling sluggishly, I jumped across to the far bank where clumps of reed-mace and wild mint grew. Moorhens and water-rats scurried away at my approach. I never stayed there long, although the water was full of interesting creatures, sticklebacks and water boatmen and caddis grubs encased in ramshackle home-made houses. My objective was the forest, beyond the screen of alder-hushes that wept over the stream, their blue-black twigs whispering in the current.

  My favourite books, at this time, were The Swiss Family Robinson, The Coral Island, and The Jungle Book. There was nothing tropical, however, about my own Sussex forest except in my imagination, where I could make what I liked of it. The hidden marsh where the kingcups lifted their gold heads became a mangrove swamp buzzing with deadly mosquitoes. The slender ropes of ivy and honeysuckle that trailed from the bushes were transformed into strong lianas, on which a man might swing away from the horn of a charging rhinoceros; the wood pigeons were dazzling macaws and lyre-birds, and at any moment a leopard might step delicately through the bluebells and the bracken.

  When I walked away from the house and across the fields, I usually took a trowel or a butterfly-net in order to give an apparent purpose to the expedition. If anyone asked what I had been doing when I returned I could always say that I had been chasing moths or tadpoles, or looking for the rare pincushions of moss which had been kicked up by horses and grown green and quilted on both sides. This was partly true, but my main purpose in going to the forest was to escape. Even in the winter, it was better than anywhere else. The trees were bare and the ground hard with frost, but there were still treasures to be found, holly trees and mountain ash all afire with berries, badgers’ tracks in the snow and the mysterious spindle tree with its coral-coloured seeds. Deep in the forest there were even stranger things; once there had been a private zoo there, and sometimes in a clearing a family of wallabies could be seen, crouching in the grass like enormous hares.

  Every summer we used to spend a week or two at my grandfather’s house at Winchelsea; a different landscape, but one which also belonged to me. Here, everything was open to the winds and the clouds, and the little town rose out of the surrounding marshes like a ship with a thousand years of history for its cargo. Every time you dug a hole in Winchelsea, your spade turned up fragments of the past, and I used to hover round the Council workmen to examine what they found—thick Georgian pennies, pieces of iridescent glass, clay pipe-stems, Saxon groats and Victorian money-tokens. Once they brought me a coin of bronze, as big as a half-crown, which they had found in a place called Dead Man’s Lane. The name and profile of Antoninus Pius, Emperor of Rome, were clearly stamped on it. For the first time, the past became for me as real as the present day. It was the first time, too, I think, that I realised the true value of learning. Because I had decided to win a scholarship, I had devoured Greek, Latin and History with a parrot-like, stupid glibness; now, confronted by this antique profile of a dead king, I passionately desired knowledge for its own sake.

  I won the scholarship when I was thirteen, and went to my public school. So far, I had learned several things. Firstly, the greatest possible virtue was to be exactly like everybody else. Secondly, through some curious disability or difference which was probably my fault, I was unfitted for the role expected of me. Thirdly, I could escape from the real world of competition and failure into an invisible world of my own, which, if I worked hard enough, I could share with all the other men and women, living and dead, who had bequeathed their wisdom and imagination for people like me to dig up, like coins in a ditch.

  I cannot remember much about my first year at public school, except that the discipline was very strict and that there were hundreds of rules for new boys to memorise; not only school rules of a necessary kind, but a mass of bewildering regulations laid down by the prefects, which we all had to learn by heart. There was some rule, which I now forget, about the number of jacket buttons which a boy of any given age was allowed to leave undone, and there were all kinds of privileges—such as walking across certain patches of lawn—which belonged only to senior boys and must not be infringed. These were intended to impart an air of tradition and antiquity to the establishment, which had actually been founded in the reign of Queen Victoria.

  We wore gowns in class, and white surplices and mortar-boards in chapel. I do not know what gave me the idea that I was musical, but I joined the choir and learned to play the trumpet and the bugle. One advantage of this was that it made it possible to join the OTC band and practise in the music-rooms while the rest of the cadets were doing rifle drill. Games were, of course, compulsory, but there was a much wider choice than there had been at my preparatory school—rugby, soccer, hockey, rowing, swimming, cricket and athletics. There was also more variety in the subjects taught, and a teaching staff which included several men with a really brilliant flair for arousing their pupils’ interest. They encouraged me in my belief that learning, inst
ead of being a drudgery and a bore, could be an exciting experience with unlimited rewards, and I shall always be grateful to them. I realised, later, that they, too, must have been grateful when they found a boy who was willing to listen to them; so many of their pupils were quite incapable of profiting by the expensive education which their parents were paying for.

  There was a wonderful library at the school, and that was where I spent most of my time, sitting at a table in one of the quiet, book-lined bays, forgetting everything outside the circle of light shining on the page before me. I devoured books as other boys devoured crumpets in the tuck-shop, rushing through novels, plays, criticism, poetry and history as though I only had an hour to live and must know everything before I died. Some of my reading was suggested to me by masters; some of it was the chance result of my continuous, headlong treasure-hunt among the shelves, and I must have consumed a good deal of dross along with the gold. I have never been able, in later years, to read with such concentration or such speed, but by the time I left school I was crammed with the richness of print and have been digesting it, slowly, ever since.

  One of the immediate results was that I became at the same time intensely romantic and very, very cynical—a strange and, indeed, impossible combination. My hero at the moment was Shelley, with his incandescent vision of beauty and his disastrous effect on those who loved him. I went on wanting to be like Shelley until I discovered that Mr. Aldous Huxley, another of my heroes, had described him as ‘a fat white fairy slug’.

  By the time I had read the whole of Shakespeare, Emily Bronte and Baudelaire I knew all about love, or imagined that I did—but I still knew very little about sex. Indeed, I hardly connected the two. Love was a soaring emotion which people died for; Sex was something to be discussed in whispers. My housemaster had warned us in an end-of-term speech to beware of ‘smoking, drinking and sordid sexual adventures’, but I did not know why. It turned out later that two of the senior boys had been discovered experimenting together in the boiler-house; but, generally speaking, the school was fairly free from this kind of behaviour. There were, of course, many strong emotional friendships between boys which probably had an unconsciously homosexual basis—this happens in every school and it seems to do no permanent harm.

  The sexual feelings of ‘teen-age’ boys are very much stronger than most adults care to admit. Some biologists, in fact, suggest that they are stronger at this period than any other. It is not, therefore, very sensible to confine a boy, between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, to an all-male boarding school. The first stirrings of sex in childhood, we are told, are directed indiscriminately towards all kinds of objects and persons; it is during adolescence that they are—or should be—orientated towards the opposite sex. In co-educational schools or in large families this may be an easy transition; and the great majority of boys, even in public schools, are of course able to make it. They are the lucky ones. Others, like myself, find themselves with strong sexual feelings which not only have no possible physical outlet, but no objective to which they may be directed; and the quest for such an objective—for a person, in fact, to love—leads in many cases to homosexuality.

  It was at this stage that the pattern of my future emotional life began to develop. I was lonely and shy, so I looked for a friend with whom I could share any happiness that came my way. Secretly ashamed of my failure to compete with other boys in sports and feats of strength, I needed the friendship of someone who possessed the qualities which I myself lacked; somebody strong and self-confident and brave. Since my success in the class-room was the only accomplishment of which I felt I could be proud, I did not want anyone who would overshadow it. The companion I sought, in fact, was somebody who would outshine me physically but not intellectually; he would be the body, I would be the brain. The approach, of course, was not as cold-blooded as this and I do not suppose that I had much conscious idea of what I was looking for; but that, I can see now, was the pattern of my search.

  There were plenty of boys who fitted the description. I used to watch them rowing on the river, handsome, muscular and slightly dim, as unapproachable as gods. I would run to hold their boats as they embarked, hoping that one of them would speak to me. But it was quite impossible. Most of them were a year or two older than myself and boys of different ages simply did not speak to each other. It was not done. It was against all the rules which I had had to learn by heart during my first term. Between us, there was a gulf as wide and deep as that between a Brahmin and an Untouchable. Solitary and hopeless, I burrowed even deeper into my books.

  From them, I learned something which I had not even suspected before. I forget now which book it was that first gave a meaning to the half-conscious quest which I had been vainly pursuing; Plato, I suppose, or Proust, or some commentary on Shakespeare’s sonnets. There were men, I discovered, who only loved other men. This did not strike me as strange; indeed, it seemed perfectly reasonable. The physical perfection of an athlete had always appeared to me more beautiful than the body of a woman, and a man’s mind more flexible and strong; only a man could give me that feeling of protection against an unfriendly world for which I longed. Love, for me, meant comradeship, and I could not imagine a relationship of that kind with a woman. I wanted someone who would make me brave, and whom I would make wise. A sentence in Plato’s Symposium haunted me: ‘An army of such lovers could conquer the world.’

  This was in 1941. Leaving school at eighteen, I had won a scholarship to Oxford, and at first I intended to go there for a year before I went to war. Many of my friends were already in the Army; my cousin, a Spitfire pilot in the RAF, had been killed a year before during the Battle of Britain. I had known Oxford well, since it was near my school, but now the heart seemed to have gone out of it. I stayed in my College for ten days, becoming more and more discontented. Finally, I became ill. I left Oxford and decided not to go back until the war was over, forfeiting my Service deferment and waiting to be called up. My doctor sent me to a heart specialist, who reported I needed a rest and should on no account enter the Services just yet. He gave me a letter to give to the Medical Board to which I was due to be called.

  Instead of delivering the letter, I volunteered for aircrew duties in the RAF and was immediately accepted. The first ‘camp’ to which I was drafted consisted of several blocks of flats in St John’s Wood, containing a large number of young men of my own age; but age was all we had in common. There were a few public schoolboys, but the majority were working men, many of whom had started to earn their own living at a time when I was still cooking kippers on the prefects’ gas ring and learning German verbs. Years before, at my preparatory school, one of the masters dad remarked that it was only by the merest chance that boys like me were enjoying the advantages of education, and that there were probably many gardeners’ boys who would be better equipped to profit by it. I remembered this now. The RAF was a new and mysterious world, full of new rules which had to be learned again from the beginning. The enormous amount of information which I had crammed into my head during the last eleven years seemed, at first, quite useless. I was an extremely raw recruit, always doing the wrong thing. Having spent most of my time in the Officers’ Training Corps at school playing the bugle, I was atrociously clumsy at drill. The corporals bawled at me. My uniform did not fit. I was totally unable to recognise aircraft by their silhouettes. My boots pinched. Morse was a closed book to me. But for the first time in my life away from home, I was enjoying every minute of it.

  Instead of looking down on me for my incompetence, as my fellow-pupils at school would have done, the other cadets set themselves to encourage and help me. They taught me how to shine my boots with a hot spoon and a piece of orange-peel, and how to smoke a cigarette without attracting the flight sergeant’s attention. If we were marching along with a pile of kit in our arms and I dropped the whole lot in the road, they picked it up and carried it for me. They laughed at my public school accent and taught me to speak Cockney. They showed me how to conceal my
knife, fork and spoon inside my gas-mask case, so that I was always able to get into the head of the mess-queue. I made friends with a Scots grocer’s boy, a customs clerk from Plumstead and an ex-burglar whose normal method of re-entry to the billet was by way of a piece of rope which we left dangling from the window.

  We went to Southern Rhodesia for our flying training. It was a strange land in which to begin one’s adult life; a vast, hot and ugly country which seemed to tolerate its inhabitants, black and white, merely as an elephant tolerates flies. From the air, it was almost impossible to see any traces of civilisation. At ground-level, however, there was a good deal of scurrying about, with endless sundowner-parties to mitigate the boredom of the place. The RAF ‘other ranks’ were viewed with a certain amount of suspicion, but through introductions from friends I was able to meet a number of charming and hospitable people. I learned to fly solo, but it became clear eventually that I was, in the words of my instructor, temperamentally unsuited to war-time flying. I had a curious and expensive habit of landing my Tiger Moth on its tail, somewhat in the manner of a mallard alighting on water. After I had bent several tail-skids flush with the fuselage in a forward direction, I was advised to re-muster to the ground staff.