Pursuit: The Memoirs of John Calder

by John Calder

  Summer was the best time at Gilling. When the weather was warm, we could ramble through the woodland and rolling hills surrounding the Castle, a few miles from Ampleforth, the main school, and not far from Fountain’s Abbey, which we would sometimes visit by bus to picnic. There were more frequent half-holidays in summer and a few religious feast days, such as Corpus Christi in July, when parents and relatives were invited to attend and a lavish tea was served to everyone present. On one such occasion I was visited, I think by my father, but it may have been another relative such as an aunt. I made myself quite sick by eating too many cakes.

  There was early Mass every day, High Mass on Sundays. We slept about twenty to a dormitory, and I had the bed nearest to the door. Outside it was a long room, where we all had lockers and drawers in a kind of recreation area. It was here that I would sit and read when I could. The bed was icy in winter when I got into it, and I waited to get warmer under the blankets before sleep. On being woken by bells we went downstairs to wash, then to the chapel for the daily Low Mass, then breakfast, and then the academic day began. One was expected to go to communion at least twice a week and each boy confessed his sins to a priest, who would be one of the masters, on Saturdays. As one had to be in a state of grace before taking communion, nothing was to be swallowed between bedtime the night before (for adults it is midnight) and the communion wafer. On one occasion, unthinking and thirsty, I drank a little water while washing and then had communion. Realizing too late what I had done, I was in misery for days. I had committed a mortal sin and must expect eternal damnation. When I finally confessed it, the priest laughed and absolved me. It was not deliberate.

  I learnt to serve Mass, carrying the vessels around the altar, giving the correct responses in Latin, most of which were “et cum spiritu tuo” to the priest’s various injunctions and blessings. In 1962, at my grandfather’s funeral in his own chapel at Ardargie, I was able to remember it well enough to go through the motions with my great-uncle, then ninety-four, as the other “altar boy”, although I had long left the church.

  As a bookish boy who took religion naturally and was hardly aware that any other religions existed, I thought at one point that I might have a vocation to be a priest. The monks, of course, were always on the lookout for someone who might grow up to join them. They were not all priests: about half of them were brothers, some of whom might be preparing for ordination. By the time I left Gilling Castle, I had shaken off that vocational impulse.

  The extreme prudery of the school must seem incomprehensible to a modern reader. None of us had ever heard the word “sex”, and everything to do with procreation was not only never thought about but never mentioned either. Twice a week we had baths, carefully supervised by the school matron or a master, and no boy ever saw another in the bath. We saw each other in the shower after games, but that too was always under the eye of a master. Showers were rapid affairs, and you were soon dry and clothed again. Another detail will seem strange to the reader. I could not tell the time until I was thirteen, possibly fourteen, because no one had ever taught me. At Skendelby Hall I was called in to meals, or if out of earshot my stomach would tell me it was time for lunch or tea. At school, bells rang to bring you into class or tell you it was finished, and for every other activity you followed what the other boys did. I did not learn to read a clock until at school in Canada at the end of 1940, or possibly even later. Boys did not own watches in those days.

  There was one shameful incident that I still blush to remember. Charles Osborne used to say, years later, that I was the greatest procrastinator he had ever met. The following anecdote demonstrates that I started young.

  One day at Gilling I had terrible diarrhoea and was unable to get to the lavatory in time. I somehow removed my underpants, heavy with liquid faeces, and put them in the drawer of my locker outside the dormitory where I slept. I intended, at a quiet moment, to take them downstairs to wash them, but somehow never did. They sat in the drawer for weeks and were eventually discovered. My shame, which the whole school knew about, remains with me to this day.

  My early holidays were back at Skendelby Hall. As a public-school boy now, even though only on the prep-school level, I was allowed to spend more time in my father’s company and would sit with him when he listened to the six o’clock news, and tell him about the school. He was working in Boston on the Wash at the pole-and-sleeper yard, where these heavy soft-wood timbers were cut and shaped and then creosoted. I am fairly certain however that he spent more time imbibing pink gins at the local hotel bar than doing whatever he was meant to be doing in the timber yard. Years later I was to work there myself and met some who remembered him, but only in the hotel bar.

  Summer holidays were spent mainly at Ardargie, where my grandfather carefully questioned me about every aspect of the school. As a Scottish Catholic from a family that had never converted during the Reformation, he knew he belonged to a beleaguered minority – and he was proud of it. He would on occasion write to the Scotsman, putting the case for the “old religion”, which Scotland should never have abandoned, and also attacking the “grave error” of James VI (James I of England) in recognizing the Tudors’ Church of England in order to gain the English crown, as well as denigrating the Act of Union a century later in 1707, which created a united Protestantism and was the main cause of Scotland’s subservience to England. He was especially proud of belonging to a club, limited to twenty, which met and dined together once or twice a year, consisting of prominent Catholics, and also of the fact that he was the only commoner in an assembly of peers headed by the Duke of Norfolk.

  He had a certain concealed bitterness at not having received a peerage himself. The whisky families, and in particular his nearest neighbours the Dewars, who had acquired two peerages, had nearly all bought these during Lloyd George’s time as prime minister, when they were sold fairly openly to raise funds for the Liberal Party. He had expected to receive one without payment, purely because he deserved it on merit. Had he paid the going price, and I am sure that he later regretted not having done so: I should eventually have acquired a barony.

  There were occasions, during the shorter holidays, when there was no one who could take me – my mother being in Canada and my father out of the country – and I had to stay at school. There was one such Easter holiday, not too bad as I remember, when I had the run of the school and was looked after by the matron and treated as a member of the community by the monks – and another at Christmas, when I had measles and remember being confined to a small bedroom in the school infirmary with plenty to read and, wonder of wonders, a fire going all the time in the grate. Another holiday that I remember was part of a summer at Skegness, where we had a bungalow on the beach. I was recovering from whooping cough, quite the most unpleasant of childhood diseases, which I had contracted at Boston on the Wash at the time of a funfair there, the first I had ever seen, with looping the loops, dodgem cars and shooting galleries. My mother turned up occasionally, otherwise I was at Skegness with a young lady who was I think a registered nurse, and great fun to be with. I paddled in the sea, built sandcastles and went to my first musical theatrical performance: The Mikado.

  Then one day at school, in July 1937, shortly after the Corpus Christi garden party mentioned above, I developed a terrible stomach ache. It was only after a day or two that the school doctor visited and diagnosed appendicitis; I was taken to the York Infirmary, where I began to feel better. The reason was that my appendicitis had burst and I was developing peritonitis. While the school said prayers for my life, the hospital was trying to find one of my parents to get a signature authorizing the surgeon to operate. My mother was in Canada and my father could not be found for some days. Eventually he telephoned, said he was on his way, and asked them to operate at once. They did, apparently at the last minute. The surgeon was a Doctor Lister, a descendant of the famous Doctor Joseph Lister, who had discovered antiseptics. For two months I stayed in the infirmary wit
h a tube, or rather two tubes, sticking out of my wounds, and I was syringed out several times a day. The bells of York Minster, only a few yards away, sounded throughout the night every hour, making sleep difficult. It was very hot that summer, and as I began to recuperate I was forbidden ice cream because my mother, who visited me after returning from Canada, told them that it always made me sick – which had been true on only one greedy occasion. Eventually I was able from time to time to go out for an hour or two, and on one occasion to a Shirley Temple film.

  My memories of Gilling Castle are patchy. My best friend was called Nicholas Ghika, a Romanian prince. I never saw him again. The only boy I was to see in later years was Richard Huggett: I remember my father, on one holiday occasion, taking him to tea with me at Gunther’s, a famous tea shop off Park Lane. Richard, who became an actor and the author of theatrical books, was later to live in Soho, not far from my office there in the Sixties and Seventies. He was still a devout Catholic. I remember cold winters and hot summers, especially the long evenings on the cricket field, and a performance of Aristophanes’s The Birds, performed in Greek by the oldest class in front of the cricket pavilion. I was just starting Greek when I left the school in 1940 because of the war.

  My father was for a time, in the middle Thirties, given the post of a military attaché at the British embassy in Vienna, but I have no idea how this came about. He was there at the time of the Anschluss. I remember visits to Austria and learning to ski at Kitzbühel at Christmas, but am not sure of the year, either 1936 or 1937. I loved skiing and eventually was to become quite good at it. On one occasion my father took me, without the rest of the family, to a hostel on a mountain top, where we spent the night. I found an English book there, a murder mystery. I started to read it, and the next morning I was told I could keep it. Returning to Kitzbühel and the hotel where the rest of the family were staying, I continued to read it after bedtime, but my mother confiscated it and I never found out who the murderer was in the case of The Cobra Candlestick. I was proud of my father in later years when I learnt that the Nazis had made him persona non grata for creating a fuss over the vandalization of a tea shop owned by a Jewish woman which he frequented.

  I particularly remember the summer holiday of 1939. I was at Skendelby Hall and my father was listening avidly to the news through the time of the Munich crisis, hoping to be able once again to “fight the Hun”. The gassing of the First World War, however, had weakened his lungs, and he knew he would never be accepted for the army again as a combatant. He did eventually join the Home Guard and spent many cold and lonely nights during the first years of the war guarding bridges and looking out for parachuting German invaders, when he was known as Lance-Corporal Captain Calder.

  I was not sent back to Gilling that autumn, although rural Yorkshire should have been safe enough: the whole family, my father excepted, moved to Orchill, the Dawson house near Braco in Perthshire, where my Aunt Juliette was our hostess. My mother would never have gone to Ardargie, even if invited. I got to know my Dawson cousins, Peter and Marcel, boys older than myself and engaged in such domestic blood sports as hunting bats with tennis rackets in barns and attics, and rats with golf clubs and dogs. There was a younger brother, Rupert, who was autistic and had been taken several times to Lourdes in the hope of a miracle cure; but he was soon to die. There were also three girl cousins, all much older, with the eldest shortly to be married to a Glasgow stockbroker, Sandy Buchanan, who was considered by the Dawsons to be socially inferior. The two younger girls, Luce and Dorothy, were very pretty, but inseparable, and they never married. They both would have received substantial dowries from their rich father, and not surprisingly they were much invited out by young men from the local lairdocracy, but Dorothy would not go out without Luce and vice versa. My grandfather would later remark that if my Uncle Rupert had put his foot down there would have been two Lords in the family instead of two spinsters.

  We were not at Orchill very long, mainly because my mother did not like living in other people’s houses, and we moved to Pitlochry, where we stayed over Christmas and New Year 1939 at the very grand Atholl Palace Hotel. When my father joined us, largely I imagine for reasons of economy, we moved to the more modest Fisher’s Hotel, next to the station. For a short time I went to the village school, and at one point had a tutor. I cannot remember what he taught me, but I do remember bicycling with him all over the surrounding countryside and climbing the local mountains, especially Ben Vrackie. There was little awareness of the country being at war from what I remember of the atmosphere around us. There was talk of rationing, but I cannot remember anything being in short supply at the time. I was eventually sent back to Gilling, where I had now fallen behind my classmates, and stayed there until the end of the summer term of 1940. I remember suggesting to my classmates that Britain might lose the war – it must have been about the time of Dunkirk – and I was sent to Coventry as a result. It had never occurred to anyone else in the school that there was any such possibility and that we might find ourselves under German occupation, a fate about to befall the French.

  On the day that Italy came into the war, I was still in Pitlochry and went one day to the village shop to buy my boy’s weekly paper and an ice-cream cone, only to find the place smashed up. The owner had an Italian name, and local vandals had used that as a pretext to do their worst and ruin his livelihood. It was perhaps my first encounter with violent prejudice.

  I spent a few days in London during the Blitz. I think my mother was trying to arrange a passage to Canada. Many children were being evacuated, but it was dangerous. I know that we were booked at one point to sail on the Lusitania, but at the last moment my mother changed her mind, presumably because she didn’t want to leave my father. The boat, as everyone knows, was torpedoed and sank. We did however sail a little later, somewhere near the end of 1940, on a Cunard boat in a convoy. Margot Buchanan, the eldest of the Dawson girls, whose stockbroker husband was now in the army, came with us, as well as my mother’s elder sister Marcelle Winkworth and her son Peter. We at any rate knew many of the people on the boat, and from our point of view the crossing on a very crowded vessel was uneventful.

  We had not been long in Montreal when my Canadian grandfather, Senator Joseph-Marcellin Wilson, died. He had been ill for some time, confined to bed, and I am still not sure what the lingering malady was, because it was never discussed in front of children and I had been brought up not to ask questions – or at least not to expect to have them answered if they did not concern my everyday existence. His was a public funeral, with a long procession of mourners following the coffin, led by a large number of his relatives. Three small boys, myself and two cousins of about the same age, came first, followed by other descendants, his daughters and their husbands, and the multitude that followed stretched back for a mile, wending its way to the Cathedral of St Jacques, with many onlookers watching from the pavement.

  I was then sent to a Church of England school near Sherbrooke, some hundred miles away, because it was an English-speaking boarding school, and I was one of several refugees from Britain who would otherwise have been at public school in their own country. We mostly gradually developed Canadian accents, which we lost again as adults. Although I was old enough to go into the third form, I was put for another year in the prep school of Bishop’s College School, where I redid classes I had already taken, being years ahead in Latin (although with boredom I soon relapsed to the level of the others). From there I went through the school to the end, detesting it heartily. I had been much happier in Yorkshire.

  Although I did not realize it at the time, as one of the few Catholic boys, I was in a kind of ghetto, lumped together with a similar group of Jewish boys, some also from Britain, like Leo de Rothschild of the banking family and George Hurst, who was already a young musician. Religion in the Province of Quebec was, as in Ireland, a matter of great importance, socially and culturally. Although I was very like the Protestant boys in class an
d general outlook, I had to go to a separate church on Sundays, whereas the others, including I think the Jewish boys, went to the chapel at Bishop’s College, the nearby university to which the school was attached. The village barber, who came to give haircuts at the school, had the additional responsibility of keeping an eye on the Catholic boys, about seven of us, who went to a church in Lennoxville, a mile or so from the school, where the Mass was long and deadly, conducted of course in Latin, with much Gregorian chant from the choir and an interminable sermon in French. The priest was fiercely anti-English and anti-war, and he went on for at least half an hour. A constant theme was that women should stay at home with their families and not take part in war-work in a war which did not in any way concern French-Canadians. As the years passed, I was not the only Catholic boy to evade the barber’s watchful eye and skip church to go to the local ice-cream parlour instead.

  The school was modelled on Dr Arnold’s Rugby. The pecking order among the boys went from the prefects, who had the right to cane all the others, down through the senior class to the third-formers, who were picked on by everyone; everywhere the stronger bullied the weaker. Third-formers were not allowed to use the front entrance to the school, had to stand to attention in line against a wall before the bell rang for meals, and various pretexts were used to make one get out of line, which meant a caning. At the end of my first term as a third-former (I had of course moved up from the prep school by then), I was summoned to the Headmaster’s office – he was a stern immigrant from Scotland called Dr Grier, who also taught history to the senior boys – and told that I had been caned more than any other boy that term. Nearly all those canings had been the result not of deliberate misdemeanours, but either of ignorance of some arcane and sadistic rule, or of mischief on the part of boys in my class or senior to me. Dr Grier, having scolded me, then caned me again, presumably to set an example. If later, and throughout my life, I sided with the rebels and the underdogs against the establishment, the foundations of my attitudes were laid down in that school. In my last and senior year I plucked up the courage, whenever another school came to play Bishop’s, to cheer for the other side, and was willing to suffer the consequences afterwards.