Growing Up In a War

by Bryan Magee

  That was that. My year of Greek left me with nothing more than an ability to read the Greek alphabet. I suppose I could, just, add to that the fact that my Greek teacher – A.H. Buck, known to us all as Buckie – was to become a friend when I was in my early forties. He had been a boy at the school, which meant that his whole life had been Christ’s Hospital. I was sitting in his class one day, in the depths of a depression brought on by a bad cold, when he appeared at my elbow.

  ‘Got a cold?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Feeling lousy?’ (I can still hear his articulation of ‘lousy’.)

  I was astounded by the question. It went against the whole way we lived. You never talked about how you felt, or asked anyone how they felt. If you had troubles, you dealt with them by yourself without discussing them with anyone else; and no one else would refer to them either, however well they knew you had them. A surge of astonished gratitude welled up inside me.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Well, you’d better go back to your house, then. You can make yourself a bit more comfortable there. No point in staying here if you feel like that.’

  This tiny bit of sympathetic concern, not only expressed but acted upon, was unique in my experience of the school – until my last couple of years, when I began to deal with masters on more equal terms.

  Decades later, Buckie made sexual overtures to a boy, who told his parents, who told the headmaster, and Buckie was out, his whole world in ruins about his ears. He was looked on as disgraced beyond redemption, and felt himself to be so. In obscurity he got a low-paid (and also, I think, part-time)job with Oxford University Press as a proofreader of Ancient Greek, and went to live in a bedsit in the poorest part of Oxford. When I found myself in Oxford too, as a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, we met several times. I was touched to find that Christ’s Hospital was still central to his inner life. Among other things, he marinaded in the books of writers who had been there, and seemed to know the essays of Charles Lamb almost by heart.

  When my voice broke I joined the choir, and found a similar problem to the one I had had at Worth. Although my speaking voice was high, my singing voice lay awkwardly between tenor and bass, so that I was not able to sing either part properly – neither the higher notes of the tenors, which is where the best bits usually were, nor the lower ones of the basses, their juiciest bits to sing. I joined the tenors to get the tunes, and simply left out the notes I could not reach.

  Rehearsals with Corks were among my most enjoyable experiences. He had a fine ear for the balance of voices within a choir, and his love of romantic harmony led him to put a slight touch of emphasis on whichever note within a chord was the least expected, so there was a trademark warmth and richness to the sound he produced. He shaped phrases beautifully. Repeated rehearsals of a work under him would make that work a special possession for me, and this happened with Handel’s Messiah and Acis and Galatea, Brahms’s Requiem, and Christmas carols by surprising composers such as Tchaikovsky. From this choral singing I learnt more about music, and about how to read music, than I did from my piano lessons with him.

  For a couple of years in my early teens my best friend was Jennings, who had been my nursemaid when I was new. Perhaps partly for that reason he usually had the edge on me when it came to taking a lead. I first heard about a great many things through him, and learnt a lot from him. His nickname was Spint, our slang word for anyone of slight build. He showed me a photograph of his father, who looked Asian, but Spint said he was Eurasian and his mother English. Spint had spent his pre-school life in Malaya, where he had been born. His father, he told me, had edited a newspaper in Singapore before the war, and had published a book under the nom de plume Southern Cross. It was Spint more than I who had the sort of personality that was supposed to go with being cockney: cheeky and chirpy, amusing in repartee, independent-minded, pleasure-loving, irreverent of authority. His approach to life was like that of a man tucking in to a gourmet meal, all smile and elbows. One of the things that pleased him most was language. He would latch on to particular words and phrases and repeat them as if they were music, his eyes lighting up as he said them. For a term he found himself rehearsing the role of Laertes in a school production of Hamlet, and during those rehearsals he absorbed not only his own part but most of the play. In the same way as a boy might suddenly start whistling, he would, apropos of nothing at all, come out with one of the ordinary, unfamous lines, like ‘It is a nipping and an eager air,’ with a look of wonderment on his face, as if this was something truly marvellous, which of course it was. I helped him learn his lines, and absorbed a lot of Hamlet myself. My father had taken me to see John Gielgud in it, so the whole play was already alive for me, and I came to think of it as the best play I knew.

  Jennings and I were schoolboy socialists. For him, I think, this was part of a general bolshiness whose chief target was the school, but my attitude was quite independent of the school. The chief influence on me in this, as in so many things, was my father. I had grown up absorbing a lot of his ideas, and now that I was old enough to understand some of them I was getting enthusiastic about them. The prevailing ethos of the school was conservative, among boys as well as masters. There were the odd few socialists here and there, especially among the older boys, but they were either smiled at indulgently or disapproved of. In a distant house there was a communist who was none other than Bernard Levin. Since we were all known by our surnames, I gave him the nickname ‘Lenin’ at our end of the Avenue. He and I got to know each other quite well in later life, and he told me he had never realised that this soubriquet was coined by me.

  Jennings and I read some of the notorious Yellow Books of that time, hard-covered pamphlets written by Labour politicians and published by Victor Gollancz in lurid yellow jackets. They expressed not so much support for socialism as hatred of the Conservatives. Because there was a wartime truce between the political parties their authors hid behind Latin pseudonyms, but the publishers made no secret of who they were. The most famous and influential of the pamphlets, Guilty Men, was by Michael Foot. Another, ineptly titled Why Not Trust the Tories, was by Aneurin Bevan. Basically, they blamed the Conservatives for the war, and argued that the Conservative Party ought never again to govern Britain. These books broke the party truce, of course, but that did not bother me, and I was a great enthusiast for them. From them I imbibed what was the standard left-wing view of inter-war history, and it informed my outlook until I found myself studying something closer to the real thing at Oxford. The left-wing view glossed over the fact that the Labour Party had persistently voted against any attempt to prepare for a fight against Hitler, and the fact that the only significant voice calling for such preparation had been that of a Conservative, Winston Churchill. It also overlooked the more general connivance of the left – communists more than socialists – with fascist power. It demonised Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour Party leader who left the party and led a national coalition government after the debacle of the Labour-led government of 1929–31. Partly on that basis, it encouraged the myth that in any large left-wing organisation the leaders usually betrayed the rank-and-file when they reached the top.

  The wartime truce between the parties was broken not only by Victor Gollancz’s pamphlets but by a new left-wing party that was formed expressly for that purpose, the Common Wealth Party. It was founded by J.B. Priestley and Sir Richard Acland. When a Conservative MP died, Labour was precluded by the truce from putting up a candidate in the ensuing by-election, so Common Wealth did, with more or less the same policy. I supported them joyfully, and wrote off to them for their literature.

  One day Jennings showed me some literature he had obtained from the Young Communist League: junior newspapers, pamphlets, brochures, leaflets – a whole parcel of the stuff, including two membership forms for us to fill in. Neither of us had seen anything like it before, and we fell on it avidly. Most of it was crude, and therefore right up our street. Then I realised that there was one aspect
of it that was deeply alien to me. This was the romanticisation of factory life. It cut right across one of the most disturbing experiences I had had, an experience that was still recent.

  My mother’s brother Len, who before the war had worked for a tea company in Ceylon, was now in London as personnel manager in a factory. During one of my school holidays he had shown me round his factory, and it was the first time I had ever been in one. I was aghast. It seemed to me the negation of life itself: soul-destroying. Individuals would sit or stand in one place for the whole of each day, at a machine or a conveyor belt, making one single repetitive movement which might be of just an arm or a hand; and they did this every day for literally years. They did it under lighting that was a dim yellow and made their grim surroundings look even more depressing than they were. There was no hint of daylight or bright colour anywhere, and not a breath of fresh air. Yet the people did not seem depressed. When I mentioned this to Len he said they were well paid, and thought of their jobs as good ones that they were pleased to have. One of the groups I had seen had been particularly jolly, and this had depressed me more than anything. They were women sitting round a table on which were two heaps, one of little screw tops to go on toothpaste tubes, the other of tiny white caps to go in the screw tops – and this was their job, putting the white caps in the screw tops. They did it by hand with a small instrument at a speed that eluded the eye, and while they were doing it there was a continual babble of conversation among them, a lot of mutual interaction and quite frequent outbursts of laughter. At any moment one or two might be distracted from the group, looking silently down at their work, absorbed in it; but after a while they would look up again and join in. That these women should spend all day every day for years and years putting caps into screw tops overwhelmed me with its appallingness, and yet the most appalling thing of all was that they were happy doing it. It induced in me a feeling of despair. My whole visit to that factory got under my skin in a way that disturbed me. It seemed to me a terrible world in which these people were living, a terrible life they were leading; and I knew that millions of people all over the world were living in the same way. I was actively depressed by it for weeks – and again, after that, whenever I thought about it. I even had one or two nightmares about it. As a young socialist I thought that one of the chief motives of political activity had to be to get human beings out of conditions like that. Yet here in a newspaper that Jennings had got from the Young Communist League was an article holding factory life up as some sort of ideal. Far from representing it as the nightmare it was, it was showing factory life in Russia as an idyll; and the photographs of sunlit factories and handsome workers were like the chorus scenes of happy peasants in some of the operas I was seeing. It was grotesquely false, and it turned my stomach over. I was perplexed. How could any sort of socialist not be against such a spirit-crushing life? How could anyone at all, socialist or not, be in favour of it, except for the factory-owners? I came to the conclusion that this political bumf must be produced by journalists sitting in an office somewhere who had never set foot in a factory.

  Jennings wanted the two of us to join the Young Communist League. I was not keen, but did not know how to put into words the way I felt. ‘But you agree, don’t you,’ he said, ‘with what they are saying against x, and against y, and against z?’ ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘why don’t we join and see what it’s like? If we don’t like it we can leave. Or you can leave if I still want to stay in.’

  We were having this discussion on an open-air bench outside the dayroom, overlooking the front lawn, surrounded by pamphlets at our sides, on our laps, on the ground at our feet. I could feel the argument slipping away from me when our housemaster, Snugs Burleigh, came riding along the path on his bike. Seeing the pamphlets, he stopped and asked what they were. When we told him he looked concerned, picked up one or two, and started looking at them. He saw the letter inviting us to join the Young Communist League, and quizzed us about that. It was not clear to me why he was taking so much interest. In the end he told us he would keep all this to read through carefully, and meanwhile we were not to get in touch with the organisation until he had spoken to us again.

  After a few days he summoned us to his study. He had come to the conclusion, he said, that this was something for our parents to decide. If they had no objection to our joining the Young Communist League we were free to do so. But we must get their permission first, and show it to him.

  The moment we were outside the study door Jennings turned to me and said there was no chance of his getting his mother’s permission. I did not think there was much chance of my getting my father’s, either. Now that the Russians were our allies against Hitler, and it was on the Russian front that the war against Nazism was being decided, he had moved away from the blanket disapproval of the Russians into which the Nazi–Soviet Pact had plunged him, and returned to being ambivalent about them. We had even started taking the Daily Worker at home as a second newspaper, to get the Russian point of view. (Everyone knew that the British Communist Party and its newspaper were financed by the Russians, and in fact it turned out years later that it had been the Russians who kept the newspaper in existence.) But my father still disapproved of Stalin and his methods: his overriding attitude to communists had become that they said the right things but did the wrong ones, and were not to be trusted. He would have been alarmed at the thought of my getting involved with them at any age, but especially as a child, and he would certainly have talked me out of it. In any case, I was not keen to join. And I would be left with no desire to at all if Jennings were not a member. So we pursued the matter no further. But I had come within a hair’s breadth of joining the Communist Party as a junior member. If Snugs Burleigh had not come along at just that moment I would have done so.

  The incident affected Burleigh’s attitude towards me. He took to addressing me as Trotsky; and once when he handed me a letter he said: ‘I knew it must be for you when I saw it had a red stamp on it.’ The masters in general seemed unable to take my left-wingery in their stride, as they ought to have done. Teddy Edwards, whom I loved, once told us to write an essay about our attitude to the British Empire, so naturally I fired off an anti-imperialist salvo in which I said all the standard left-wing things about exploitation. When the essays were handed back, marked out of a hundred, mine had a giant nought underlined several times. Sitting in my desk at the back of the class I was gazing at this with astonishment when Teddy shouted from his dais at the front, over the heads of all the other boys: ‘Yes, Magee, you may well look askance …’ and launched into a tirade that went on for several minutes. Like me, only on the other side, he said all the standard things – that the British Empire was the greatest force for good in the modern world because it brought peace and the rule of law to barbarous societies all round the globe, developing their economies and raising their standards to a point where they would be able to cope with democratic self-government, so that we could then leave them to govern themselves; and that no other empire in the history of the world had done this. Over many centuries, he shouted, thousands of boys from this school, including many he had taught personally, had devoted their lives to that cause, going out to live and work in distant parts of the world and giving their all in primitive, unrewarding circumstances. One of the most important things we were being trained in here was a conception of leadership that saw it as a form of service, so that we too could play such a role, in whatever society we chose to live. People who ran all this down, he yelled, were Enemies of the Good, and were not to be listened to. They usually had an agenda of their own that was anti-democratic.

  At the end of all this I felt as if I had been chewed up and spat out, but it did not change my views. Fortunately I was not called on to reply: I would not have been able to stand up to Teddy. I began to get used to it, though, for I became the object of a number of such public dressings-down. Lionel Carey, who taught us divinity that year, asked us to write an essay about whichever o
f the twelve apostles we found the most sympathetic, so naturally I chose Judas Iscariot. It was an act of provocation, of course, but I had a few good debating points to make, and they were fun to write. I managed quite an amusing piece, and was unprepared for the explosion that greeted it in class. Carey too shouted at me in front of everyone, louder than Teddy but not for so long, and he went redder in the face. He said he had not given my essay any mark because he did not know how such an essay could be marked, it being beneath consideration. He ended, his voice going almost to a falsetto when it got to the name: ‘This is Bernard Shaw sort of stuff!’ For me there could have been no higher praise: my current idol as a prose writer was the Bernard Shaw of the Prefaces – in fact I may well have been imitating him unconsciously.

  It says something to the school’s discredit that nonconformist opinions were publicly lashed and thrashed in this way. The school was supposed to be teaching us to think for ourselves, but in fact the degree of latitude that was accepted by most of the masters was pitifully narrow. A few years later, at university, I came to know people who congratulated themselves on their bravery in outraging convention by wearing burgundy-coloured waistcoats, and Christ’s Hospital’s attitude to diversity of opinion was something like that. Genuine liberalism was looked on as a dangerous form of radicalism that stretched tolerance to its limits. Anything more radical than that was beyond the pale. The school itself embodied classical conservative values: all power flowed downwards, and all structures were hierarchical. Each individual had his place and knew what it was, and was punished if he stepped out of it. The whole system was in thrall to its own past: the reason why most things were done in the way they were was that this was how they had always been done. Each member of it was expected to devote himself to it, and to display attitudes that sustained it. Questioning, criticism and dissent were tolerated in only the most anodyne of forms, and were otherwise taboo. Religion played an important role in all this, and was consciously used to manipulate our beliefs and behaviour in the required ways. The whole institution was essentially tribal. The school’s ancient device expressed its ethos: ‘Fear God, Honour the King, Love the Brotherhood.’ Its traditional toast took the same points in the same order: ‘The Religious, Royal and Ancient Foundation of Christ’s Hospital. May those prosper that love it, and may God increase their number.’