The hill was topped with four barrows filled with dead Vikings. The Breton fisherman told me frightening stories about how the Vikings wouldn’t sit still in their graves. He wanted to keep me close to the vicarage, but though I was scared, I still hung about the barrows, on which one day I found a perfect circle of horse-mushrooms. There was also a dead sheep. His worn white skull poked through his own fleece, which hung around him like a bed jacket.
On the wall near the old lighthouse was an object which fascinated me: a glass bottle filled with ants. Moss had grown over two-thirds of its roundness, but inside I could see tunnels with insects wandering up and down, twittering their antlers. Grubs in their white pith shells moved when joggled by other ants. I watched this vase of jewels for hours, but one day, to my shame, I smashed it with a stone. Immediately I ran from the field as if giant hairy whiskered ants with shields and bucklers might billow out of the wall after me. But the landscape remained indifferent. The seagulls mewed as usual and the wind did not soften.
I felt badly about this act for years. To destroy something beautiful was surely evil. Yet the ornithologist had killed a bird, which was just as beautiful; and moreover it was bigger. The two acts, pinned together by the crumbling lighthouse that was never lit, were part of the same thing.
Baths were obligatory. A galvanized iron tub was half filled with cold water, topped up with a hot kettle, and into it I was dropped. The iron had a raspy bottom and the usual cuts down this small boy’s legs, painted with gentian violet, itched in contact with the water.
One day when I came in for my bath, I found it full of lobsters. The tub was their temporary home between the large cold sea and the small boiling pot in the kitchen. The water I was scrubbed in was sea water. That’s why it itched. No longer fancying the rasping iron tub, I refused to get in, but the Breton sailor was fed up with me. He removed the lobsters and put them casually on the floor. His huge hand came down from the ceiling. Then he left the room.
I clung to the sides of my sinking ship and looked out at the lobsters prowling around, occasionally bursting into wild clacketing in protest at the unusual feeling of flagstones and air. Their legs were like the oars of Viking ships. They crawled, they paused. They were blue. In shadowy corners they ceased to exist. Lit by the dwindling fire, it was certain they were waiting in cunning stillness for me to leave my bath – their bath, their hidey-hole of salt water that smelled of iodine. And at that moment, I finally missed my mother.
When, at the age of thirty-five, I tried to tell the lobster story to Mum, she jerked the steering-wheel in fury and shouted, ‘We’ve heard this story of your miserable childhood from soup to fish. You were a much loved child, and if you choose to remember differently, it’s no bloody business of anyone but you.’
Actually, I sympathized. By that time I was a parent myself and it had occurred to me that childhood belongs to the child, miserable or happy as the whim takes the little bleeder. If I’d ever felt abandoned at having been dumped on a Welsh island while Mum prepared for a concert in London, time had qualified the trauma of the lobsters and turned it into a funny story – a story which even now was in the process of being reshaped by the complaints of my proto-adolescent daughter. But Mum was driving too fast. We were negotiating a wicked gap in the Alpilles between Saint-Rémy and Maussane. Carved square stones edging the gully were flashing past the window much too close. The curves were cantilevered the wrong way and the flexible pines that used to protect the sides had burned down the year before. A bitter scent of herbs blew into the car but I did not feel we should die in this place. I told her that if she didn’t slow down we’d have to get out and walk.
11
DREAMING ONE’S WAY THROUGH LIFE
WHEN WE CAME back to London from Bardsey Island, we brought the two Siamese cats with us. Mag and Fitsi were their names, and all day they chased birds. They were so wild Mum decided that they had to live in the garden. A speech from Shakespeare’s Henry V that I was learning at the time has the line ‘What feats he did that day’. I always thought of this as ‘What Fitsi did that day’. Fitsi, the bird-slayer. She killed my canary. Dad wrote a poem about it.
Tony Hyndman was given the task of building a hutch for them in a corner of the garden. He was often around the house at that time, his life being in one of its down moments. I enjoyed watching him working on this simple carpentry job and we began to make friends. He could say the weirdest things. Such as, slyly: ‘Well, Matthew, and so there you are. Who ever would have thought of Stephen as a family man.’
Tony insinuated that the work he was supposed to be doing was a mere formality. Pulling weeds? Hutches for cats? ‘They’re half wild anyway,’ said Tony disparagingly. ‘They’ll never stay here,’ he said, as if he knew a thing or two about freedom. ‘Stephen should just have said no to bringing them back.’
I said nothing. I felt he was trying to form a conspiracy between us regarding Dad, and I resisted. He was crouching over the boxes. I was on my feet in my neat Hall School uniform with a Maltese cross embroidered in black thread on a pink blazer. I was looking down at him and he was looking up at me.
His own deferential pose annoyed him. He stood up abruptly.
‘Got any money, Matthew?’
The question took me by surprise. ‘No.’
‘Nothing at all?’
‘I’ve got half a crown. My pocket money.’
‘I don’t suppose you’d consider handing it over, would you?’
‘No.’
‘I thought not. Well, it was worth trying.’
And he grinned.
His grin put me on the spot. If I’d grinned back, it would have placed us in an equal position with regard to my father, the dispenser of half-crowns. We were both my father’s dependants, otherwise he’d never have dared to ask.
When Dad heard about this, he was so furious he rang Tony and told him never to come round to Loudoun Road again. His anger gave me another clue. Cadging pocket money off his son was low, certainly. But Dad’s anger showed there was more to Tony than a reluctant gardener. It showed that Tony had some claim over him.
Tony could ask Stephen for money. He wouldn’t say no, though he wanted Tony to work for it, but cadging his son’s pocket money was unacceptable. My father was an extremely tolerant man, but if he felt someone was attacking his persona he reacted violently. In this case he evidently thought that Tony had overstepped the line.
Tony at that time had been through some bad years, and it wasn’t certain he’d ever pull himself together. A lover in Paris had introduced him to drugs. He’d stolen from his friends, and as a result he’d been arrested at various times. Eventually he was taken in by an Order of Franciscan Friars in the East End of London, but in the end – I think this was a few years after the pocket-money incident – he betrayed them too.
From time to time in the late Fifties, Loudoun Road was burgled; and without anyone saying anything, it was assumed Tony was responsible. ‘An inside job’, as the police would have said. I lost two clarinets that way, one after the other. Bandsmen in the army always needed clarinets. Mum on these occasions would go around the house and make sure the locks were in working order, then she’d claim the insurance. She was good at insurance claims. It was part of her frugality.
In the autumn of 1954, my father toured India as a representative of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. He was immediately faced with a problem that caught his imagination. Several students told him that the United States was behaving very generously with its wealth, but the way in which it spent its money showed that its gifts were not disinterested. Therefore, the recipients did not have to feel grateful. They could take the money and reject America with a clean conscience.
Stephen wondered for several days whether ‘disinterested’ charity was possible. As he put in his journal: ‘an act “outside” historical materialism and therefore disproving of it’. American largesse was a bribe, and to be bribed was to be insulted. ‘Just as in the old days your
English old ladies used to collect six pennies in order to clothe the poor natives, so today the Americans think that they can distribute a lot of money with which, ultimately, we’ll buy not loin cloths but refrigerators, we’ll resist Communism.’ He added: ‘resolved to see that Encounter really is disinterested’.
Indian independence was recent history, and Indian intellectuals were aware that the United States was taking over from the British. It made them uneasy. The Americans could unexpectedly choose to support some other local politician or political group. Several times Stephen had to listen to nostalgic speeches about the British in India. ‘Prof. Guptan Nair wishes that the British would try to use more political influence in India instead of leaving this to the Americans.’
On 24 October, in Sri Lanka, Stephen was taken to a beautiful Buddhist temple by a charming young man with an impossible surname. In the distance, he glanced at the young women in turquoise saris working against a background of dark-green fields. Beautiful! Afterwards, they had tea. The young man ‘strongly attacked the Congress. I defended it miserably. He and a Turkish anthropologist consider my sincerity compromised by the Congress backing, and recorded their disappointment.’
In Madras, Stephen found himself in the opposite predicament. ‘As soon as I arrived I was handed a printed sheet with information about the institution called Democratic Research. The sheet said the purpose of this was anti-communism.’ His host gave a speech saying that the aims of this group ran parallel to those of the CCF. Stephen felt he was being forced into taking a stronger anti-communist line than he wanted. ‘I refused to let him get away with this, saying in my own speech that I had never heard of Democratic Research but felt that, as an aim, it was unexceptionable provided it was objective and did not attempt to make propaganda.’ He’d hardly defended himself in front of the two young men. He’d have looked worried and said ‘yes’ and left it at that. But if he were cornered in public, he’d fight. ‘I am wretched about these National Committees of the Congress, in Australia and India.’
Throughout this time, he was also giving speeches on behalf of the British Council and the PEN Club. It made him an ambiguous representative for the Congress for Cultural Freedom: doubting its propaganda, and speaking on behalf of other associations.
Perhaps to escape from the stresses of all this, he took time out to visit the studios of local artists. He liked painters and always listened respectfully to their explanations of their work. Two of those whom he visited were Jamini Roy and Newton Souza. He bought several of their works, and they were grateful for this. Because he carried the aura of so many institutions on his shoulders, it gave them the air of having acquired that mysterious thing, an ‘international’ reputation.
Whenever Dad was away for a long period of time, Mum would fade. It was hard for her to establish a rhythm if my father wasn’t there, for his expansive social life gave her something she had to fit around, like a vine around a tree. Alone in the house, there were moments when she would get to the piano room and just sit there.
Her natural pessimism wasn’t based on anything philosophical, such as the transience of human glory. It was more of the variety of ‘I told you it would end like this.’
Once, in the kitchen when I was about nine years old, as my mother was telling me off for something I’d done – or perhaps not done – the cupboard behind her, containing all our family plates, slowly came away from the wall. Dishes began to fall out, cascading past her head. I waited for her to turn, lithe as a snake, and push the thing back in place. But no. She stood there with head and shoulders bowed while porcelain halos travelled past her and shattered on top of one another on the painted cement floor, as if all her life she’d expected this to happen.
Auden wrote a poem once, containing the line ‘And the frowning schoolgirl may be dying to be asked to stay.’ When I first read it, I assumed he was thinking of Mum. He was in and out of the house so often. It was definitely her. I could see that my mother’s frown might have even been attractive when she was a schoolgirl. Hands behind her back, her breasts pushed forwards with the indifference she always seemed to have about her body, a dark pigtail falling down the back of her frock; frowning yet longing for affection was a perfect description of her. The will to be loved was part of her conviction that she would surely be rejected.
My mother’s will to be loved consisted of a kind of expectancy. She could charm, she could amuse, she liked being admired, but her standards were so high that whoever was on the receiving end of her approaches – and they were rare – had to accommodate himself to what she was. She knew this was brittle, but she couldn’t help it. She knew she was all-or-nothing; and anyone who treats the Other in this way must accept the high risk of rejection.
My father’s will to be loved had two aspects: a magnificent generosity of spirit that exploded in any social circumstances, hoping to strike a spark from whomever was on the receiving end. And a totally different spirit which was exclusive, binary and secret, a shared understanding which – and this was most mysterious – didn’t necessarily require the presence of the Other in order to flourish. Indeed, too much of the Other got in the way.
In the background, so far back that my father cannot have been aware of it, the Information Research Department kept an eye on Encounter and shielded it from too much interference from its American owners.
The IRD was an affiliate of the Foreign Office set up to work in collaboration with the BBC. Its main job was to transmit news bulletins towards the Soviet bloc. The news had to be reliable, so the mechanism of debriefing refugees, analysing foreign newspapers and other aspects of intelligence work was involved.
One of its guiding lights was Christopher Mayhew, whom Stephen may have known at least by sight, as he was a friend of Philip Toynbee. Mayhew had seen Russian propaganda at close quarters and he decided it had to be challenged. He thought that ‘social-democratic Britain was better placed than capitalist America to take the lead’. It would have to be secret, because anti-communist propaganda ‘would be anathema to much of the Labour party’. Mayhew was a member of the Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell’s inner circle, in a position to help set up a department within the Foreign Office, in contradiction with the left of his own party, and in secret.
One of the tasks of the IRD was to persuade its American counterparts that, when it came to propaganda, it was a bad idea to be too aggressive. An IRD ‘draft brief’ of 1953 defines the British position.
We regard the Stalinist communists alone as the enemy, and all other shades of political opinion and peoples, other than fascism or Nazism, as potential allies. In policy therefore our aim is to drive a wedge between communist parties and those most likely to support them, i.e. leftwing socialists, pacifists and certain intellectuals in Europe, and nationalists in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. We make no emotional appeals to those already converted, and we regard propaganda issued by right-wing elements as dangerous to us and helpful to the enemy.
The US intelligence officers who came once a year to review the situation insisted that the Brits were ‘soft on communism’. Curiously enough, the American Committee for Cultural Freedom took the same view. Encounter ‘has created an especial resentment and dissatisfaction for its apparent unwillingness to offend what it presumes are English sensibilities with explicit anti-communism’. Encounter should have become ‘a counterweight to the New Statesman & Nation, both as regards forthright opposition to Communist totalitarianism and support of America’s role in the free world’. Instead, it had allowed itself to become distracted by publishing literature, ‘often of questionable merit’.
But the ACCF continued to be divided by constant bickering over Senator Joe McCarthy, whose self-appointed task it was to conduct a crusade against communists inside the institutions of the US government. Some ACCF members drafted letters to university presidents about teachers who’d lost their posts, while others said Senator McCarthy was doing a fine job. Arthur Schlesinger, a noted liberal historian lat
er connected with the Kennedy administration, resigned from the ACCF in disgust. ‘I had assumed that we were writers, artists, professors, intellectuals, people who have made, or hoped to make, some contribution to culture and had therefore an especial stake in its protection.’ An association such as theirs should not be so sectarian. ‘We have better things to do than pay off old scores.’
Now and again among the minutes of their general meetings Auden appears. The only time he registers an opinion is when the ACCF commissioned a book on Soviet Russia and then found it couldn’t pay for it. Auden says that if articles had been commissioned and written, they should be paid for, whether or not they were published. Typical Auden! The rules were there to be respected. Everything else could come later. The question was academic, as there was no money. Fractious to the last, the ACCF died for lack of funds.
12
SCANDALOUS GOSSIP
ON THURSDAY, 21 April 1955, Raymond Chandler came into our lives.
My mother sat next to him at a party given by Jamie Hamilton, who was both my father’s publisher and Chandler’s. Grey-faced, drunk, slow in speech, he ‘yammered’ at her – as she put it – on the theme of ‘The Blonde’ in American culture.
If she did not already know the background, Yvonne Hamilton would have told her afterwards. Chandler’s wife Cissy had died late in the previous year and he was desperate. He’d tried to commit suicide not long before – the most incompetent attempt ever, in a bathroom with a pistol, missing with two shots and with a policeman outside politely knocking on the door.
A House in St John's Wood Page 14