by Bryan Magee
Although I did not believe in God, and had never supposed that I did, I started to say prayers in bed at night. There were three or four of these. I made them up myself, and they were interminably long. It was essential that I say the exactly identical words every night, twice. They expressed all my wishes and fears. I remember wanting to pray that I would live for ever, but realising that this was not going to happen, prayer or no prayer, and wondering what the maximum time would be that I could hope for – obviously it would be longer than any individual had so far lived – and settling in the end for two hundred. So every night I prayed, twice, to live to be two hundred. The fact that I would still have to die all the same gave me a feeling of insecurity in the dimension of time, as if I were balanced on a narrow strip of it, and was inevitably going to fall off sooner or later, no matter what happened. There had been no me at all before I was born, and there was going to be no me after I died, so I existed only on this strip in between; and although two hundred years seemed an endlessly long time, I knew it would in fact come to an end, and then I would be dead for ever and ever and ever. Given that I was in time right now, I wanted to stay there. But I knew this was impossible.
This started me thinking about time. How had I got into it? Before today there was yesterday, of course, and there had been a day before yesterday, and a day before that, and so on, back to the day I was born. But there was also a day before the day I was born. And a day before that. Before every day there was a day before. And that meant that there could never have been a beginning – which seemed impossible. Going back for ever was just somehow meaningless, it disappeared into nothingness. It was impossible to see how its actually happening could be a fact. Anyway, if there had needed to be an infinite time before getting to now, we would never have reached now. So it must have started at some point. On the other hand, if there was a beginning, what had happened before that? If anything had happened before that, it wasn’t a beginning. I was stumped. The more I thought about it, the more stumped I became. I didn’t see how there could have been a beginning, and I didn’t see how there could not have been a beginning. One or the other had to be true, and both were impossible. I became obsessed with the problem.
At some point in all this it occurred to me that the same must be as true going forward as backward. There would be a day after tomorrow, and a day after that; and after every day there would be another day. And either time would just stop or else it would go on for ever and ever. It was impossible to imagine it stopping. How could it stop? And what would happen after that? If anything happened after that, time had not stopped, and was still going on. But how could it go on for ever and ever and ever, without ever stopping? Such a thing could not actually be, surely? Not stopping was as unthinkable as stopping.
The place where I spent most time turning these thoughts over was in bed at night. However, it was in the park behind the swimming baths that I made the discovery that the same thing was true of space as of time. I was lying on my back in the grass gazing up deep into a fathomless sky and wondering what was up there. What would happen, I thought, if I just went up like a firework rocket and kept on going? Could I keep going for ever and ever? Or would I eventually have to stop somewhere? There stole over me the creepy realisation that I had stumbled across another version of the same problem as with time. It was impossible to imagine going on for ever and ever and ever. The endlessness of it meant it could never happen in actuality. But if I came up against something that brought me to a halt, it would have to be something in space, and then what would be on the other side of it? There couldn’t be nothing, not if it was in space; there would have to be more space. But if there was more space, then whatever it was wasn’t at the end of space. I was baffled again, and it was the same bafflement.
In the opening pages of my book Confessions of a Philosopher I have gone at length into these childhood musings, and their connection with questions that came up later in my life, so I will not repeat it here. In any case, to do so would unbalance the present book, in which they are no more central than other aspects of my life. I know from experience that most people are not interested in them. Those who are can turn to the other book. The perplexities I am talking of – which admittedly I pondered for part of every day – did not dominate my life: all the other things I have been writing about were going on at the same time. The child who every day puzzled over whether or not time had a beginning also loved singing popular songs at the piano, and spending hours playing games like conkers and release.
Another of my favourite places for spending time in metaphysical thinkings was the lavatory. No one had ever taught me to pay my longer visits regularly, or indeed every day, nor did it occur to me to do so. I went when I felt like it. This was usually every two or three days. Without realising it, and without noticing that I went less frequently than other people, I may well have lived in a permanent state of slight constipation. This had the consequence that my sessions in the lavatory lasted between twenty minutes and half an hour. But they were never a physical problem for me. Something always happened immediately, and then I knew from the way I felt that I needed to wait for a second instalment. People often grumbled at me for occupying the lavatory for so long, but I thought there was nothing I could do about this, any more than I could sleep faster. That was how long it took. And if they could do it quicker, good luck to them. In any case, I quite enjoyed it: I would sit there undisturbed, in peace and tranquillity, lost in all sorts of thoughts and daydreams. On one such occasion, when I had been there even longer than usual, and two other members of the family had been waiting to go with increasing exasperation, there was an outburst of protest when I got back indoors. ‘What on earth do you do in there all this time?’ they chorused; to which I replied, with simple truth: ‘Think.’ They considered this hilarious, and there were great shouts of laughter. It was taken up into the family’s private language, and ‘thinking’ or ‘having a think’ became accepted terms for going to the lavatory.
Because my puzzlement about time so occupied my mind, I found myself talking about it to other people – to Kath and Auntie, to three or four of the boys at school, and on one occasion to Mr Hickford. I suppose I expected some sort of Gosh, isn’t that interesting response, followed by animated talk, but that is not what happened. Some said they could not see what I was talking about – which foxed me, because it seemed to me as clear as daylight. Kath said she could see what I meant, but could not think of anything to say. Mr Hickford said I ought not to trouble myself with thoughts of that kind because they might upset me: better not to think about it, he said. He may already have been worried about me because of my fainting and getting the shakes. None of them showed any inclination to think about the issue: having disposed of it with me they then, obviously, forgot about it. This puzzled me profoundly. How could they not be interested, I thought, if they had no solution to the problem? Why did they not engage in excited discussion with me? I just could not understand it. But there it was. They didn’t. After a while I came to the conclusion that there was no point in going on trying, so I carried on thinking about these things by myself.
Mr Hickford’s idea that I might find it upsetting proved to be true. That reaction started from a football match that was due to take place the next day. One side or the other was bound to win, I thought, or else there would be a draw. And there was bound to be a particular score, even if it was nil–nil. Whatever the result, that result, and that one result only, was what was going to happen. I had no way of knowing what it was until the following day, but whatever it was, for the rest of time it would be true that that was what it was. And it was true now, already. In fact it had always been true, from the beginning of time, that that was what it was going to be; only I didn’t know yet, that’s all. With the force of a sledgehammer it hit me that this applied to everything. Just as, in the past, there had been one set of events and no others, so in the future there would be one set of events and no others; and it was true already t
hat they were going to be whatever it was they were going to be. But if this was so, I thought, I could not have any freedom. I was trapped in my life, and nothing I could do would change anything. A feeling of nausea swept over me, followed by feelings of panic. It was claustrophobia. I was terrified. I wanted to run away. But of course there was nowhere to run to. I could not run out of my life. Nothing I could do would make any difference.
When Mr Hickford warned me that my thoughts might upset me I had not understood what he meant. I had always found this kind of thinking absorbing. It was frustrating, admittedly, because I did not seem able to find any answers to the simplest and most obvious questions; but this very fact made the questions interesting, kept me thinking about them, and held me in thrall to them. Out of that I got some sort of satisfaction alongside the frustration. But now I was frightened. I tried to stop myself from thinking about the future in this particular way. It was too terrifying to face. It became a taboo subject for me within myself, and I shied away from it every time it hove up on the horizon of my thoughts.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
AT THE END of 1940 the Magees and the Toombses spent Christmas together in Market Harborough. My mother was there already, my father came up from London, and my sister Joan, now fourteen, came over from Huntingdon.
My father arrived with a pile of records and our old wind-up gramophone. It was obvious to him that my passion for music was developing at an express rate, and he was concerned that I was not getting the best stuff, which in his mind was orchestral music and opera. The only classical music I was hearing was the little salon piano pieces that Kath played. If I had been living at home, he would be taking me to concerts by now, but in any case there were no concerts in Market Harborough. Nor, of course, was there any opera. So he brought records of these things to leave behind. On his previous visit he had noted the tinniness of the Toombses’ old gramophone, so he brought our much better one, which he no longer needed because he had his electric radiogram.
He also brought a Monopoly set, which the rest of us seized on and played addictively throughout the Christmas holiday. As a game it still possessed an aura of novelty. I had watched it being played in London before the war, but had never been allowed to join in, if only because the grown-ups played for real money. They had told me that first-class passengers on the transatlantic liners played not just for real money but for the sums specified in the game. I grew to love it in a way I have loved no other board game, in fact few games altogether – billiards and snooker some time later, and then poker.
For a child, I became quite good at Monopoly. The top hat was always my talisman. My favourite game plan, if the fall of the dice gave me any chance of following it, was to make a determined effort early on to buy up the property sets with Whitechapel and the Angel, because the cheapest properties were the easiest to get control of, and if you could do it quickly enough you could build up a winning position earlier than other players. The game is very educative in how to conduct negotiations, which is what it mostly hinges on.
It was a glorious Christmas, with an abundance of whatever were the unrationed foods, and music in such intervals as we allowed ourselves between marathons of Monopoly. My sister Joan kept herself a little apart from it all. I discovered when I talked to her alone that she had a different attitude from the rest of us. The girls of Highbury Hill High School were would-be sophisticated young ladies who had been ejected against their will from the capital city just before they expected to inherit it. They looked down their noses at the country folk with whom they had been billeted in Huntingdon. They were much worse in this respect than us younger boys, and Joan, then embarking on a perfectly normal phase of teenage awkwardness and self-consciousness, arrived in Market Harborough with attitudes of this kind towards the Toombses – who, of course, objected to them, just as the people of Huntingdon must have done. The result was a silent stand-off between the two parties. But the Toombses showed themselves very understanding about it, and did not allow it to impair their relationship with me.
After my father had gone back to London I found myself the keeper of some of his records, and able to play them whenever I liked. There was Wagner, of course, but all of it (I am sure by design) straightforwardly tuneful, none of it slitheringly chromatic or ‘advanced’: some of the more lyrical parts of Act III of Lohengrin, for example, and Act I of The Mastersingers. One oddity was a transcription for solo violin and orchestra of one of Wagner’s rare piano pieces, ‘Album Leaf’, a fill-up to the overture to Tannhäuser. There were excerpts from stage works by other composers too, for instance duets for tenor and baritone from Verdi and Puccini, and my old friend the ballet music from The Bartered Bride. The purely orchestral pieces were short – for instance Beethoven’s Egmont overture, and Mendelssohn’s overture to Ruy Blas. The nearest thing to a contemporary piece was Rhapsody in Blue. I realise now, thinking about it, that there were not all that many more records than I have named; but at the time it seemed like a cornucopia. I played them until I knew them by heart – and then went on playing them. Often, if I was by myself and had only a few minutes, I would pop into the front room just to play one side, which lasted about four minutes. The fact that these records were now ‘mine’, and the gramophone too, and I could play them whenever I wanted to, and listen to them by myself, made a huge difference to me. I felt I had begun my first free voyage out on to the open sea of music.
My mother, who must have been given a record token by my father at Christmas, bought a couple of records to add to this collection. Both were highlights from operas she had seen with him and enjoyed, Madame Butterfly and The Tales of Hoffmann, in each case a potpourri of some of the best tunes strung together for orchestra – or rather, in the case of Hoffmann, for military band. The Toombses were surprised at how much better their own records sounded on this new gramophone, so we all went through a honeymoon period of record-playing.
I was hearing again, after a long time, the sound of a symphony orchestra. And again, as before, it spoke to me in a unique way. My skin prickled into gooseflesh at the sound of the violins: the sound itself was beautiful, regardless of what they were playing. I formed a passionate desire to learn the instrument, and started badgering my mother about it. She kept saying no, it was too expensive: first of all you had to buy the violin, then you had to pay for lessons. But I went on and on about it, and in the end she said all right, when April came she would buy me a cheap second-hand violin for my birthday – not a good one, mind. ‘Do you promise?’ I persisted. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What about lessons?’ I asked. She laughed and said: ‘There wouldn’t be much point in giving you a violin if you didn’t learn how to play it, would there?’ This reply made me tingle all over.
For weeks and months I lived for the violin I was going to get, thinking about it several times a day, and in bed at night. I peppered my mother with questions. ‘Where are you going to buy it? Who are you going to get to give me lessons?’ – and to these she always gave wait-and-see answers, accompanied by looks and body language indicating what a wonderful surprise it was all going to be. I ticked off the agonisingly slow days to my birthday, and feared they would never pass. During the night before, I hardly slept. I went down to breakfast in the morning almost uncontrollable with excitement, my heart in my mouth, expecting to see the violin on the table, and wondering whether it would be packaged or naked. I found a different present there. Still the penny did not drop. As I started opening the present I looked up at my mother and said: ‘Haven’t you managed to get the violin yet?’
‘What violin?’
I naturally assumed she was joking. ‘The violin you’re giving me for my birthday.’
‘I’m not giving you any violin.’
She was serious. I stopped unwrapping the present. I could not take in what she was saying.
‘But you promised,’ I said.
‘I was joking.’
This was flagrantly a lie, at odds with everything that had been going on for
weeks. ‘No you weren’t,’ I said. ‘You promised.’
She laughed, snortingly and derisively. ‘Now you’re the one who’s joking. How on earth could I afford a violin? Where would I get the money from? Be serious.’ She laughed again, as if it had been obviously a joke all along.
I was reeling. Everything started moving away from me. ‘Why did you promise?’
‘To keep you quiet.’
In that moment it was as if the world stopped. She had straightforwardly lied to me, betrayed me, in what mattered to me more than anything else in the world. I was completely incredulous, except that I knew it had happened. But I could not come to terms with it. I went into a state of shock.
I had never liked my mother, but this was a historic turning point in our relationship. Before, I had thought of her as indifferent to me. Now she was behaving like an enemy. And so she was to prove at other points in the future. Only a few months later she put all her energy and determination into preventing me from being given piano lessons which my father wanted to pay for. And she was successful in that, too, for a time.
My relationship with Kath became closer, no doubt because of all this. I was growing up fast at this age, and becoming more of a companion for her. In music she had a special love for the operettas of Sigmund Romberg and Rudolf Friml, songs from which had been popular hits between the wars – ‘Indian Love Call’, ‘The Desert Song’, ‘The Donkey Serenade’ and the rest. She had the piano scores of some of them, and I sang from these to her accompaniment. The most popular of the operettas had been, and were still being, made into films, all of which she had seen. The leading stars were usually Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, and Kath had decided that Nelson Eddy was her pinup boy. He was a good-looking baritone with a fine, if hard and unvarying, voice. I went with her to the Oriental to see the films Balalaika and New Moon, and became hooked on the songs in New Moon. I had been given some money for my birthday, so I decided to buy the records from the soundtrack. When I told my mother this she forbade me to do it. I was taken aback – it was my money, and I thought I could do what I liked with it. She said the songs were rubbish, and that I wanted to buy them only because of the influence of Kath. It was too much money to spend on records, she said – and records were far too expensive, anyway. I knew that my wanting to buy the records had nothing to do with Kath, and I insisted that it was my money to spend as I liked. We ended with a compromise: I could buy two ten-inch records, but no more.