He described his training: the bayonet practices, at which the sergeant had shown them how to twist the bayonet in the body and extract it with the help of your foot; the jumping of trenches in full equipment; the bombing course, with its accidents—one man had lost an arm, two had been killed. He described the first journey to France—the night crossing with darkened lights, the troop trains, the trenches, the first attack: ‘It’s not so bad, especially if you’ve had some rum first. You just do what the others are doing. You mustn’t think about it too much, that’s all …’ People who ‘thought about it’ went mad, or wounded themselves with their own weapons, or stood on the parapet until they were hit—according to their temperaments. Lester had seen a young officer shot ‘for cowardice’ after being in the line for five days without sleep. Another officer, also found guilty of running away, was sent back to the front while awaiting sentence; two days later, a colonel who did not know of his record recommended him for the Victoria Cross. When the earliest tank units were being formed, Lester had volunteered. The first tanks had barely room for their crews; you crouched on boxes of ammunition with your shoulders against the roof, jarred sickeningly by every explosion, sweating in the heat and fumes of the motor, scarcely able to breathe. ‘The first thing we all did when we got out was to go and brush our teeth.’ Lester had been in one of them when a shell exploded beneath it, killing or burning everybody else, and throwing him out of the door with a small wound in his little finger. This was the only physical injury he had ever received.
He never suspected, I think, how violently his quietly told horribly matter-of-fact anecdotes affected me. I had heard plenty of war stories before, from older men, and the war novel was just coming into fashion; but Lester alone had the knack of making all those remote obscenities and horrors seem real. Always, as I listened, I asked myself the same question; always I tried to picture myself in his place. But here, as ever, the censorship, in blind panic, intervened, blacking out the image. No, no, I told myself, terrified; this could never happen to me. It could never happen to any of my friends. It was physically impossible. It wouldn’t be allowed. Nevertheless, Lester had shaken my faith in the invulnerability of my generation; for, in his eyes, we were not invulnerable; what had happened to him could easily happen to us. ‘Oh, you’d have been all right,’ he reassured me, when I tried to tell him something of my feelings: ‘We all had to go through it, you know.’
Yes, they had all had to go through it; and one day, perhaps, it would be our turn—Chalmers’, Weston’s, Philip’s, mine. Our little world which seemed so precious would burst like the tiniest soap bubble, unnoticed, uncared for—just as Lester’s world had exploded, thirteen years ago. And now Lester had no world. With his puzzled air of arrested boyishness, he belonged for ever, like an unhappy Peter Pan, to the nightmare Never-Never-Land of the War. He had no business to be here, alive, in post-war England. His place was elsewhere, was with the dead. Alone in his tent, camping like a refugee on the fringe of society, he seemed too puzzled to be bitter, was grateful, even, for the grudging scraps we threw him, a few pounds of pension money and free tickets to London to report himself to the medical board. The doctors had agreed in certifying him as totally disabled; he was to live an open-air life, they said; avoid alcohol and all excitement. They couldn’t cure his headaches, or his insomnia, or his chronic constipation; they couldn’t even suggest one good reason why he shouldn’t commit suicide immediately. But he continued to visit them because, if he didn’t, his pension would probably be cut off altogether.
I came to regard Lester as a ghost—the ghost of the War. Walking beside him, at midnight, on the downs, I asked him the question which ghosts are always asked by the living: ‘What shall I do with my life?’ ‘I think,’ said Lester, ‘that you’d make a very good doctor.’ His answer took me completely by surprise: I laughed. ‘Imagine me as a doctor! And, anyhow, that’s hardly a compliment, coming from you!’ Nevertheless, I felt obscurely flattered and pleased.
Ghosts need the company of the living—otherwise they cannot exist—but they are never intrusive or possessive; they can establish contact, if necessary, from a distance. Often, when I was writing under the veranda, Lester would pass the garden gate, noiseless on the toes of his gym shoes, raising his stick for an instant in salute. We seldom met except in the evenings, but I was vaguely aware of his benevolent presence, just out of sight, throughout the day. I knew that he liked to see me working, just as he liked to watch the fishermen or the men in the fields. He wished us well. Since getting to know Lester I had felt, strangely enough, a renewed interest in my novel. I began to double and treble my daily output. I spent less time gossiping with Muriel and Mr Peck, Bruiser and Tim.
Towards the end of July, I finished my revised version of the Seascape with Figures. I had improved it, I hoped. Certainly, it was livelier: what Chalmers called ‘stage-directions’ (‘he said,’ ‘she answered,’ ‘he smiled,’ ‘they both laughed,’) had been cut down to a minimum—indeed, it was now very nearly impossible to guess which of the characters was supposed to be speaking: and there were several ‘thought-stream’ passages in the fashionable neo-Joyce manner which yielded nothing, in obscurity, to the work of the master himself. The murder was cut—‘tea-tabled’ down to an indecisive, undignified scuffle; and the ending was an apotheosis of the Tea-Table, a decrescendo of anti-climaxes. My two chief characters, the medical student and the dilettante artist, now resembled Chalmers and Philip more strongly than ever. For my nasty Cambridge undergraduate, I had received some valuable new hints from my observations at the hotel bathing-pool.
Rewriting the Seascape had taught me a great deal; I had begun to discover my limitations, to know what I could do and what I couldn’t. I was strongest on dialogue, weakest on abstractions and generalizations: I must never try to address the reader—whenever I did so, I uttered platitudes or tied myself up in knots; I must stick to the particular and the special instance. My characterization was flashy but thin; I was a cartoonist, not a painter in oils. Love scenes I had better avoid—until I knew something about them.
I thought of the novel (as I hoped to learn to write it) essentially in terms of technique, of conjuring, of chess. The novelist, I said to myself, is playing a game with his reader; he must continually amaze and deceive him, with tricks, with traps, with extraordinary gambits, with sham climaxes, with false directions. I imagined a novel as a contraption—like a motor-bicycle, whose action depends upon the exactly co-ordinated working of all its inter-related parts; or like a conjurer’s table, fitted with mirrors, concealed pockets and trapdoors. I saw it as something compact, and, by the laws of its own nature, fairly short. In fact, my models were not novels at all, but detective stories, and the plays of Ibsen and Tchekhov. War and Peace, which I read for the first time a few months later, disarranged and altered all my ideas.
Lester came down to Yarmouth to see me off. The morning was blazing hot. Lester, standing a head taller than anybody else in the flannelled quayside crowd, his gaunt body draped in an immense military overcoat (he was always complaining of the cold), looked more than ever like a visitor from another world. As ‘The Workhouse’ churned away from the pier, he raised his stick and shouted: ‘Remember!’ It seemed to me, at the time, that I knew what he meant.
London was stifling; Romilly Road, in the sunshine, looked shabbier than ever. The heat had brought out the smells. The stench of yesterday’s cooking, when you opened the front door, nearly knocked you down. I found Mrs Partridge in low spirits. She was having trouble with her lodgers, an Irish couple; they wouldn’t pay the rent, she complained, they kept their room like a pigsty, and the baby squalled all night.
She was right about the baby: it kept me awake for hours. It seemed to have lungs of leather and an inexhaustible supply of breath. I began to wonder whether its parents didn’t keep pinching it, just to annoy Mrs Partridge—for the difference about the rent had developed into an open feud, carried on by the lodgers with all the inge
nuity and humour of their race. Their acts of domestic sabotage varied from making holes in the rubber feed-pipe of the kitchen gas-ring to unscrewing the handle of their landlady’s bedroom door. One morning, coming into the bathroom half asleep and automatically pulling the lavatory chain (always a necessary precaution) I discovered, too late, that a blanket had been carefully stuffed into the drain. The resulting flood covered the floor an inch deep and immediately began to drip through into the kitchen below. Mrs Partridge rushed out on to the staircase, crying: ‘This is more than I can bear!’
The end came, two days later. The Irish lodgers departed, while we were both out, taking with them in a taxi a selection of Mrs Partridge’s vases and pictures, a number of cooking utensils and my portable gramophone. Mrs Partridge, not unnaturally, insisted on informing the police. The lodgers were traced, without much trouble—they had only gone as far as Pimlico—and the vases recovered, all smashed. The gramophone had been sold to a second-hand furniture dealer: I eventually got that back too, but something went wrong with the works and it would only play at twice the normal speed. The Irish husband was sent to prison, which did no good to anybody, and merely meant that I had to give his wife some money to live on until he was let out again.
The following week, I left Romilly Road for good, and returned to live at home. The New Life had ignominiously failed.
That autumn and winter, I pottered about unhappily, writing nothing, earning a little pocket-money at temporary halftime tutoring jobs and drinking a great deal of gin. Chalmers had approved of the revised Seascape but disliked its title. We toyed with several others: ‘The Family of the Artist,’ ‘The Old Life,’ ‘An Artist to Us Circle.’ Finally, I remembered a quotation from a Shakespearian speech learnt at school:
All the conspirators save only he
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar …
All the Conspirators … It sounded grand. True, there was no Anthony in my story, much less a Brutus, and the life of Julius Caesar couldn’t by any conceivable stretch of ingenuity be related to the squabbles of a middle-class family in North Kensington—but considerations of this sort weighed very little in 1927. All the Conspirators was duly sent off on its round of the publishers. By Christmas, two had already refused it, with polite regrets.
My gin-drinking was done chiefly in the company of Bill Scott, the Cheurets’ friend. Bill was a painter—a great painter perhaps: I only know that his pictures excited me more than any other modern landscapes I have seen. He painted trees as monstrous, terrifying vegetables, pushing up out of the ground, with soft naked trunks. Two of them would confront each other, like vast mysterious personages, between whom all speech is unnecessary. A hillside would be built up out of coloured geometrical blocks, so that you seemed to understand its structure and looked into its very depth. If there were houses, they were square, like dice, and without windows, furiously white against a burning blue sky. There were never any human figures, or animals, or birds, or flowers.
Bill was a dark sunburnt little man agile and quick as a lizard, with naughty, prominent blue eyes. His smile had an immediate, touching warmth: he always seemed pleased to see you. He would take infinite pains over anything which might please or amuse his friends, a dinner, fireworks, charades. If there was to be a party at his studio, he worked all day, preparing salads, goulasch and Mediterranean fish soup. At charades he was brilliant, mimicking French generals, Russian aristocrats, opera singers, nuns, performing burlesque ballet, juggling with plates. He expended all his energy, all his resources lavishly, to the point of absolute exhaustion. After making us laugh the whole evening, he would suddenly drop down on to the sofa and lie there motionless, like a cast-off glove, too tired to speak.
Drinking with Bill was a unique, a kind of psychic experience, like passing gradually on to another plane of being. I don’t think that he himself ever got drunk at all; but he acted on those who were with him like a medium, transferring sensations, transmitting visions. After two or three of his special cocktails (he would never tell you how they were mixed) I used to wander about his studio examining different objects—an ink-pot, a paper-knife, the petals of a flower—and thinking: ‘How wonderful! This is glass, this is metal, this is alive. I see now, for the first time, its essential nature: I see why it is formed in this particular way: I see what it represents. Until this moment, I have merely known its name, its label. Until this moment, I have never really looked at it at all.’ I was, in fact, seeing through Bill’s eyes. He was hypnotically directing my vision, even though he might be standing at the other end of the room, joking with the Cheurets or handing around a dish of fruit. He was well aware of his powers and of my suggestibility. It amused him, sometimes, to frighten me. He was an adept at inducing terror. He would tell ghost stories horribly; or he would get us sitting round the big table, with the tips of our fingers on the wood, waiting for a ‘message’; these seances always started half humorously, Bill deadly serious, the rest of us giggling, but it wouldn’t be long before even the most sceptical members of the party quietened down, and, presently, the rapping would begin. Of course, we assured each other later, Bill had been kicking the table with the toe of his shoe; but we had to admit that we had felt thoroughly uncomfortable, all the same. One evening, when he and I were alone together in the studio, he told me that he had noticed ‘something very odd’ about the big oak cupboard which stood in the corner: ‘I think, if we sit quite still for a few minutes, the doors will probably open.’ ‘Really?’ I nervously tried to laugh this off. ‘And what do you suppose will happen then?’ ‘One never knows …’ Bill gave me one of his quiet, frightening smiles: ‘Something might come out …’ And so, in the gathering twilight, we sat together on the sofa, staring at the cupboard doors. My heart was making a noise like a big drum. At the end of three minutes, I could stand it no longer, and insisted on switching on all the lights, starting the gramophone and throwing the cupboard wide open. There was nothing inside, except a pile of canvases and some old clothes.
Bill had a big car which he drove expertly, at terrific speeds. Sometimes, towards midnight, he would exclaim: ‘Let us get out of here!’ and we would leave immediately, roaring away through the suburbs, to find ourselves when dawn broke, already far on the road to Cornwall or Wales. These suddenly undertaken excursions exactly suited my escapist temperament; I could never see a train leave a platform for any destination without wishing myself on board.
One evening, we left Bill’s studio even more abruptly than usual. ‘We’ll drive down to Southampton,’ he said, ‘and take a boat to Greece.’ But, in the Cromwell Road, we found ourselves turning north. We didn’t stop again until Catterick Bridge, where we had breakfast. By lunch-time we were in Edinburgh. I had never been in Scotland before; my mind was a blank screen for the projection of Bill’s hypnotic suggestions. He showed me a city of steep crooked streets, mysterious archways and stone stairs, as foreign as Le Havre, above which the washing hung from the windows on horizontal poles, like flags. After dark, we tried to take a short cut to the top of Arthur’s Seat, and soon found ourselves spread-eagled on a nearly vertical slope, clinging desperately to tufts of grass: Bill made our scramble seem as dangerous and exciting as an ascent of the Matterhorn. Later, we slithered down to the gates of Holyrood and had supper in an eating-house full of scarlet soldiers, and an argument about Art. Bill said that the pattern evolved from the reality is more important than the reality itself: I disagreed, partly because I didn’t understand what he meant, partly out of perversity, because I was drunk.
During the next few days, I was drunk almost continuously. Drunk at Stirling, where we inspected the two martyred virgins under glass; drunk at Blair Atholl, where, pushing open a glass swing-door in the hotel, I thought, with a wonderful pang of joy: ‘My life is a journey. I can never go back. Whatever becomes of me, I shall never use this lavatory again.’ Very drunk indeed at Inverness. We drove out, next day, to Culbin Sands. The whisky at the hotel was like perfumed soap,
the most delicious I had ever tasted: after drinking three-quarters of a bottle, I wandered away, muttering to myself, over the sand dunes. It was a brilliant sunny morning, with a high wind blowing off the Firth. As I fought my way down towards the sea, the wind assumed a physical shape. It was the Enemy, the Laily Worm, Cambridge; it was the embodiment of my most intimate and deadly fears. It was mocking me. No, it squealed, you shall never escape! You shall be my victim, my prisoner, my lover—always! ‘Never,’ I yelled, and flung myself upon it. We swayed for a moment, locked together; then I tripped it and we fell, rolling over and over, down a steep bank of shale. Bill, suddenly appearing at the top of a sand dune, cheered me on. I punched and kicked and tried to throttle my antagonist. ‘Come and help,’ I gasped, to Bill. Then, all at once, I was alone, sprawling on my stomach on the ground, with bleeding knuckles and my hair full of sand.
We drove on and on. In Helmsdale, we stopped at the Commercial Hotel for tea. In the parlour, there was a water-colour painting of a fish, against the background of a highland river and a little bridge. Bill, tremendously excited, exclaimed that it was a masterpiece; better than anything Matisse had ever done. The picture was signed: J. Mellis. The landlady, when questioned, told us that he was a local man and that he had been killed in the war. When Bill offered to buy the picture, she refused, laughing, thinking perhaps that he wasn’t serious: ‘Oh, I wouldn’t like to part with it. It amuses the travellers. Why, the fish is larger than the bridge!’
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