by Denton Welch
The only thing I could not quite understand was the ‘educated’ voice. It struck a slightly jarring note, yet made communication much easier and more ‘natural’. I started the eternal game of placing people and fitting them into their right pigeon-holes. He could not be ordinary ‘gentry’. Nobody would wear quite such dirty clothes or such hobnailed boots unless they were really working. Besides, he had come, as if from home, from that ancient farmhouse, which, by its untouched appearance where no single beam was exposed, proved that no ‘improver’ had been near it since the eighteenth century.
On the other hand he could not be an ordinary farm hand. I was just deciding that perhaps he was the farmer’s ambitiously educated son when he stopped all my dreary surmises by saying that he was down here learning farming—at least I think he said this, but I am not absolutely sure for at that moment he started undressing.
With the words, ‘If there are any women round here they’ll get an eyeful!’ he started to pull his shirt over his head. I was shocked at the whiteness of the skin on his chest and upper arms when he stood up in only his trousers. They were junket-white, but matt, as if powdered with oatmeal. The long gloves of his burnt arms and hands and the bronze helmet of his face and neck joining this whiteness did something curious to me. I could only gape and wonder as he stripped his wonderful body. He unlaced his boots and kicked them off, then peeled down his thick and sweat-sticky stockings. The breeches he pulled off roughly, and stood revealed with the gold hair glinting on his body as well as on his head.
As I say, I could only watch. This was not just an ordinary man taking off his clothes for a swim—and yet it was. It was this prosaic, mundane quality and the bubbling-up spring of some poetry which held me enthralled.
He flung back his hair with the gesture which is considered girlish when used by effeminate men. (When used by others it has, of course, a quite different effect.) Then he dived into the muddy water and came up spitting and laughing. ‘Bloody filthy water,’ he shouted and spluttered, ‘bloody filthy water, but it’s lovely.’
He stood up near the bank, so that the water gartered his legs round the middle of his calves. The hairs on his body and legs dripped like sparkles of water. He looked like a truncated statue fixed to a base in the bowl of a fountain.
He whirled his arms round, dived, and swam about for some time; then he crawled up the bank and lay down beside me on the grass. As he lay with his face to the sky and his eyes shut I watched the rivulets coursing off his body. The main stream flowed down his chest, between the hard pectorals, over the mushroom-smooth belly, to be lost in curly gold hair. I could just descry the quicksilver drops weaving a painful way through the golden bush.
He opened his eyes and saw me staring at him; he didn’t seem to mind. He sat up and started to rub his arms and chest brutally with a dirty towel.
‘I’m working down here at the moment. What do you do?’ he asked, abruptly but without giving offence.
‘I, I’m at an art school,’ I got out with difficulty. The shame and fear of sinking in his estimation were very real.
‘Oh—my sister’s a very clever artist, too,’ he said confidently. ‘She’s been studying for some time and has got a scholarship. She’s going abroad.’
He continued talking about his sister and his family. I got the impression, perhaps wrongly, that he was a little in disgrace too. This thrilled me. I felt I had found a brother. When he talked of being drunk and brawling, I was tremendously impressed and horrified—to be so cool and casual about it all! Then I had the fear that the beer would decay his teeth or that they would be knocked out in the fights. This caused me the sort of pain one feels when some beautifully-made and intricate thing is threatened.
He asked me what I had been doing all my holidays and I told him that I had been for one walking tour down to Devonshire and would soon be going for another, as my aunt obviously did not want me at my grandfather’s.
‘I’d like to do that too,’ he said decisively. ‘I’d like to go abroad, walking and paying my way wherever I went. My parents wouldn’t give me anything, you see,’ he added in explanation.
‘I wouldn’t like to go alone though,’ he mused.
Thoughts, hopes, fears were all seething together in my head. The idea was too exciting to be considered seriously. Here, I longed to step in and say that I would go with him whenever he wanted to go, but I was much too clear-sighted not to see the difficulties of money and also of temperament. I felt that I would fall short of his daring and careless sense of power. When I would be tired or timid, he would be vigorous and scornful, and when he would be drunken and brawling I would be frankly alarmed and irritated.
‘I’d like to do that too,’ I said. ‘Fine if we could go together some time,’ I added boldly.
If there had been the slightest reluctance I would have been ashamed, but he took me perfectly seriously, saying, ‘I wonder if we could ever fix it up.’ We exchanged names. He pulled on his khaki shirt and caked breeches and lost some of his magic, thus becoming more comfortable.
I knew that I would never go with him. I felt cowardly for not making it happen in some way.
He held out his hand and I shook it, wondering as I felt the horn on his palm.
‘You can always get hold of me there,’ he said, pointing to the farmhouse. Then he turned and walked back along the banks.
I watched him the whole way. The legs and the shoulders and the dirty towel swung in rhythm until he passed through the little gate into the garden.
At the last sight of him I felt unbearably angry and frustrated. I jumped up and ran over the tussocks. I jerked my bicycle out of the hedge and pedalled viciously, cursing God and everybody, pouring scorn and pity in a deluge all over myself.
Now stranger, whose name I have quite forgotten—where are you now? Even if you are not dead in battle, that ‘You’ is dead and nowhere, for at most it could only have lasted a year or two—that animal magic.
BACK TO REPTON AS AN OLD BOY
Nine years ago, in November 1933, I went back to Repton for an Old Boys’ Celebration Day or whatever it may be called. It seems perhaps a curious thing for me to have done, and yet not curious at all. Although I ran away and hated it so much, my eyes and my heart often look that way. At any moment of the day a picture may flick up in my mind of the street outside Brook House with the high wall of the games yard and the little gate piercing it. The high wall looks like a prison wall and the little gate is wicked too, yet they still hold their sort of frightening glamour.
At the art school on the Friday evening I told Johnny Lewis that I was going and asked him anxiously if he thought that my blue checked shirt was too conspicuous. He hesitated for a moment and then said gently, ‘I think perhaps it is a little.’
This determined me to wear it, although I had misgivings. I was always defiant, feeling it cowardly not to persist, if surprise was expressed at my clothes.
I got into the train at St Pancras and sat with two men from the Midlands. They were strangers to each other but soon got into conversation. It seemed to be a curious mixture of business, food and betting. I heard remarks about hardware and goods and rice and form.
I sat gazing out of the window as the passing landscape gradually lost its colour. Soon it was quite dark and I could no longer say the names of the different counties to myself, trying to discover differences.
Changing into the little Willington train at Derby, I found myself in a compartment with two older men. I soon learnt that they were also Reptonians, but of an earlier vintage. They did not speak to me, only to each other, but I listened carefully to every word.
The most interesting and the most diffident one began by talking rather pretentiously. There were questions about Paris and other places, which he could answer far better than his companion, one felt. In spite of this, the rather boorish companion still seemed to have the upper hand. He occasionally grunted or said a word or two; and I felt sorry for the other one who was obviously the mo
re intelligent and yet was showing up to so little advantage.
I lost them on the platform at Willington and did not see them again. I drove to Brook House and let myself in to the boys’ part. It was not quite two years since I had left and gone to China with Paul. It seemed far longer than that, of course, and yet, when I smelt that mixture of scrubbed wood, sweaty football socks and shirts from the ‘Dryer’, and hair oil and toast, I was back again in a moment, dressed in an Eton suit, frightened, stifled, full of revolt, feeling that I would never be young and happy again.
Now the remembrance of my pain gave a sort of fillip to everything I did and saw. ‘Green’ Anderson was the Head of the House now and he came and rescued me before I could feel embarrassed by the eyes of unknown, younger boys.
He took me to his study and I tasted the privilege which had been denied me as a schoolboy. He told his fag to make me two pieces of buttered toast for tea and I remembered how I had had to do this every night.
Now, whenever I see toast I judge it by those rigorous standards of my study-holder. It must not be burned even in the minutest degree. It must be golden, honey, amber brown all over, but not hard-crisp with a fluffy centre. The butter must be smoothly spread and gently sizzling as you rush it into the dining-room.
Oh, the agony of producing this dainty every night on a difficult fire for someone you would gladly choke if you could!
I felt as guilty as the poor boy settled again at the fire. His face was crimson from the heat. And he looked curiously pleasant and attractive, because, although he seemed strong and sensible, yet he was submissive. This is always flattering. He did not mind making toast for the old boy; he even seemed pleased. Anyhow it was his duty to do what he was told and he did it without question.
It is difficult for anyone who has not experienced it to realise the cast-iron convention of submission in English schools. If you do not bow the knee willingly and with good grace you are an outcast and a cad. In some subtle way, independence is made to appear low, ‘canaille’. Hence, if you are a prefect (or an old boy down for the day) you have the extraordinary and rather wicked pleasure of being waited on by boys who are in every way your ‘equal’ except for the number of years they have lived. Their deference must make after life seem flat and rough to the person who has been successful at school.
I was so filled with pleasure and the sense of comfort that I jumped up and said that I was going across to Taylor’s to buy something for tea. Other people who knew me had collected by now and I asked them what they would like.
‘Pilchards!’ they said, and a thrill went through me that I could buy lovely pilchards in tomato sauce for my school fellows who liked me now and treated me with affection and respect because I was ‘grown up’ and free.
I ran across the road and smiled at the girl. She knew me but I did not dare talk to her for long, for fear that she would muddle me with someone else and so hurt my pride.
The sleek oval tins and the Bourbon biscuits seemed to hold more pleasure in store than was decent.
‘Oh, I’m so happy,’ I thought. ‘Don’t spoil it, God, don’t spoil it, by letting me think of other terrible things.’
We had the pilchards heated and put on to our delicious pieces of toast. I sat at the high table with the prefects and felt utterly satisfied. I was treated with that mixture of respect and comradeship which is so soothing. Their gratefulness for the pilchards and the chocolate biscuits was touching. I had made a little feast, an occasion, by providing them.
Afterwards I trudged up to the San’, where I was supposed to be staying. I would soon have to change into my dinner-jacket for the Old Boys’ Dinner in the gymnasium.
‘Spooney’ Walker had been put into the same dormitory as myself. He was already changing by his bed. He gave me a studied, casual greeting as if we had seen each other every day for years. He was now up at New College and was going to be a doctor.
I asked him to tie my tie. I was still very incompetent at this. He fiddled about with it and produced some sort of bow.
We walked together through the cold street to the Gymnasium. I was so pleased that I had found someone to give me moral support.
The room was already fairly full and dinner soon began. We sat at a table near the door. There seemed to be some arrangement by which one went to fetch one’s own drinks from a bar. At the end of the meal Spooney kept on leaving me to fetch glasses of port. I refused them and drank nothing, so he drank for two.
I was thinking of the Gym on punishment drill days when one sweated round with dumb-bells, and of the days when I would let myself in and would swing alone on the ropes, climbing higher and higher until I nearly touched the beams, when a climax of fear and pleasure would pass through me.
Christie, the new headmaster, stood up and said something about a concert. Then there was half-hearted singing and a lot more drinking. Indeed the behaviour was getting quite childish and skittish. People chased each other, and there were skirmishes and collisions. Christie looked on and smiled with a sort of pained and understanding expression—very insulting. I hated to be included in such a smile.
‘Let’s go,’ I said to Spooney.
‘My dear young Welch,’ he answered, ‘by all means, if I can stand up. Will you give me a little inconspicuous support?’
‘Don’t be silly, Spooney,’ I said, ‘you’re not as drunk as that.’
But I linked my arm through his as carelessly as possible and we moved to the door. He lurched a little and leaned on me, but I thought that he was probably acting. Outside in the cold he turned away from me for a moment and, when he had finished, we passed on up the village street, leaving the chapel, the arch, the music schools behind.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ I said. ‘It’ll sober you up.’
‘All right, but you must guide me. Where shall we go?’
‘Crew’s Ferry,’ I decided at once. ‘You can lean on me as much as you like. Is that all right?’
He was so much taller that I seemed to fit into the niche under his arm, and in this way I also gained support.
Soon we were out of the village, between the fields. It was so still and serene and wet and misty that we began to sing. We both sang in hoarse, croaky altos, pretending that we were little choir boys. Spooney told me about Oxford, and I told him about the art school.
When we got to the Crew’s pond we leant over the stone balustrade of the bridge and spat into the misty, woolly surface of the water. It looked thick and pearly, like paste.
We came back by the footpath which follows the stream through the fields. The trees dripped and the clots of autumn leaves stuck to our thin patent leather shoes. Spooney’s black silk scarf waved about, and I wound it round both our necks to tie us together more securely.
We were coming to a dangerous bit where the ground shelved steeply to the little stream.
‘Lean on me and be careful, Spooney, else we’ll both overbalance in the water,’ I said.
‘Oh, why did I drink so much?’ he asked, and with a specially manoeuvred lurch brought us down.
We rolled in a heap to the edge of the water where we lay. One of my feet went under the water.
‘You devil!’ I hit out, laughing, dragging myself up, and trying to drag him up with me. But his large bulk was too heavy and he sat there trying to defend his head with his arms.
I pulled at him again and he staggered up and clung on to me. ‘You did it on purpose,’ I said, ‘and you’ve ruined our clothes.’
We walked on, not minding now whether we stood or fell as we were already covered in mud.
What fun it was to sing and bawl through the streets where we had lately had to behave so dully and correctly!
Back in the Sanatorium, the dormitories were buzzing with an extraordinary glamour. The Old Boys, rather the worse for wear, were indulging in horse-play. Very exuberant and rather peculiar in some cases. Spooney and I were some of the youngest there. I think I was quite the youngest.
For some reas
on our appearance caused a diversion. A plump drunk came up to me and made a curious suggestion in mockery and fun. I was extremely non-plussed and flustered. Everyone laughed and shouted, and two sporting-looking creatures, with flattened noses and straw-coloured hair, began to roll the white chambers down the long corridors.
‘Can’t we shut ourselves into our own dormitories?’ I asked Spooney.
We went in and shut the door firmly. When I turned round who should I find but Riley undressing by his bed on the other side of the room. Riley, who had in some ways been the evil genius of my schooldays.
He gave me a superior smirk and said, ‘Still exactly the same young Welch.’
I remembered the last day of my first term when he had dragged me on to his knee and I had burst into tears, which seemed to please him all the more. I remembered the awful nights in the dormitory when he ordered me to come and stand by his bed after I had come up from practising for the House singing competition. I would stand by his head and he would reach out his rather ‘hungry’ hand and grip hold of me. How I disliked him! Not so much because of his acts, which were bad enough, but because of his body and face. He was well built, but his skin had a repulsive tone and touch and all the features of his face seemed thickened, like those coarse black-eyed portraits on Alexandrine mummy-case lids.
Now, as I gazed at him in his shirt and pants, he had the strange sort of fascination frightening things have. I laughed and joked with him a little too much, with too much emphasis on words and gestures. He did little to veil his eyes, which wore the viper-glare that Francis Bacon’s were supposed to have. Indeed, take away the intellectuality and blunt the features and you have something of Riley in Bacon’s pictures.
We turned out the lights at last and soon Spooney was snoring almost inaudibly. I could still feel the alertness of Riley in his bed. He turned and let out sighs of breath. I waited with dread for what might happen. Everything was wiped away of the last two years and I, now at his mercy again, a fag in the dormitory of which he was head.