by Bryan Magee
‘Yes, sir.’
The lobster blush, which had started to fade, came back more intensely than before. But Pongo was not going to let it go at that. To me standing pillar-box red in front of him he said: ‘You made it all up? It’s all lies – entirely the creation of your filthy imagination?’
‘Yes, sir.’
As ordeals go it was quite a prize-winner, with me a brand-new monitor and him a brand-new housemaster. For starting off on the wrong foot with a new boss in his and your first few days it would be hard to beat. Pongo always disliked me after that, disapproved of me and distrusted me; and if it comes to that I was never a fan of his. But he never said anything to the boy. For obvious reasons I did not do so either. So no harm came of it, to anyone except me. But I felt myself to have been disastrously unlucky.
To complete the total clear-out at the top of the house, we acquired a new junior housemaster called Ronald Styles. He was a young teacher of music with an ambition to become a concert pianist. His playing was so good that this would have been a worthwhile hope but for his personality, which was too neurotic and unstable to thrive in the stressed, competitive world of international music-making. He had the worst stammer I have ever come across: when talking to him, one had to wait for what seemed like an endless time while he repeated the same ghastly, gasping sound innumerable times in his attempt to get a word out, his lower jaw flapping right down to his chest. It was painful. But he took his ambitions seriously, and worked hard at them. At the time of his arrival he was teaching himself to memorise the solo part of Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto, a massive work, unusually difficult as well as unusually long. He would often seek me out in the dayroom and invite me to his study to listen to him play it: he said it helped him to have someone listening, because he played differently if projecting to an audience, even an audience of one. I would turn the pages for him, but since he was trying to avoid looking at the music he never prompted me, and I had to concentrate. I learnt the work almost by heart myself. Being a music teacher he could hardly stop himself from instructing me, so in addition to the score-reading and his performances I was given a lot of analysis. It all added up to quite an intensive study of the concerto on my part, and I found this hugely satisfying. It was already a work I greatly loved. Just as my favourite violin concerto was Brahms’s, so this became my favourite piano concerto.
I still carry in my mind another performance of it, by Claudio Arrau, that I heard at about the same time, on the radio in the dayroom. Under Snugs Burleigh we had not had a radio, because he would not allow it, and this had been a source of some bitterness on our part; but then, to our astonishment (and, I must say, exasperation), he made us a present of one when he left. It made a huge difference to my life. My new-found freedom to stay up late meant that I could listen to concerts when almost no one else was around – and a lot of the classical music on radio was broadcast late in the evening. The starvation of orchestral music during term-time that had plagued me throughout my time at Christ’s Hospital came to an end.
Another of my important new freedoms was the freedom to go out of bounds by myself. With money I got from my father I bought a clapped-out old bicycle from a boy who was leaving, and spent hours cycling around the villages in the surrounding countryside. (This, incidentally, was the only time in my life when I have had a bicycle.) My studies in medieval history were giving me an interest in village churches, and I was learning to read the history of a village from its church. The sheer number of medieval churches in England is unique, simply because no large-scale war has ravaged its countryside for nearly a thousand years. And it was always villages or towns that I was most interested in, not the scenery that I cycled through in between. Other people were always going on about how beautiful the countryside was, and I liked it well enough, but countryside has never been an object of much interest to me in itself. I am, I know, an excessively urban person, and I wish this were not so, but the only natural surroundings that set fire to my imagination are large-scale things – waterfalls, lakes, deserts, mountains, and heavenly bodies outside our orbit altogether. Otherwise, the only things in my environment that switch me on are human activities.
I suppose it was during this period of my life that I began to find my feet as a person – to become myself. Obviously my age was the central factor in this, but there were other things too – a combination of freedom and responsibility which, though they came because of the age I was, might not have come in other surroundings. I was well educated, which again could easily not have happened. I knew I was lucky. I remember one day standing in the school library and thinking: I can choose any path in life that I want, do anything I’m capable of. If I want to be a doctor, I can be a doctor. If I want to be an architect, I can be an architect. If I like, I can be a lawyer – or a teacher – anything. It’s up to me. I’ve got the choice. All doors are open. I won’t be in this position always, and it may not last for long, but I’m in it now. I was past the age at which my father had had to leave school and start work, in a job that bored him; and here was I, no more deserving than he, enjoying a life full of all the opportunities that he had been denied. This was one of the things that helped give me a sense of my own differentness, a sense of self, a feeling that I was on a path of my own. I was even beginning to look like a young man now, nearly six foot tall, still growing. People were beginning to talk to me as if I were a grown-up.
Because of my greater freedom, the difference between life at school and life at home narrowed. Instead of being two different environments to which I belonged equally, and adapted alternately, it was now more a case of me being the same me in both places regardless. I did not yet know Nietzsche’s injunction: ‘Dare to be who you are,’ but it was what I was beginning to do, with increasing confidence.
It was unlucky for me that, just as I was finding my feet in this way, the ground beneath them was shifted permanently by two earthquakes in quick succession. Within six months of one another the two people I loved most in the world died; first my grandfather and then my father. It was like two shocks of the same earthquake, and it created a chasm in time, such that for years afterwards I was inclined to think of life before and life after my father’s death as two different lives, both of them lived by me, the first in a welcoming world in which I was growing up and which contained this person that I loved so much, the second in a colder world that did not contain him and in which I was a grown-up myself. In a way it was as if I replaced him. But I was not an improvement, and the loss was irreparable.
Something about my father changed during the last full year of his life, which was 1946. Looking back, it seems fairly clear that he fell into a depression. It might have been the earliest symptom of the cancer that was going to bring his life to an end in May 1947, but I do not think so. It was more like what is now called a mid-life crisis, the male menopause. The challenges and tensions of wartime were over, but for him a return to normality meant a return to boredom. Everyone was talking about the brave new world we were going to create, but to him the future offered nothing either brave or new, merely a reversion to the rut he had been in between leaving school and the war. His youth was over, he had been too old to serve in the armed forces, yet at forty-four he was still an employee of his father, on a weekly wage. And when, in due course, he should inherit the shop, the work itself would go on being the same. His marriage had been a long-running disaster, and was now falling to pieces. His children were becoming grown-ups, increasingly independent. It could even be that he felt I was overtaking him: I was now as tall as he, with the youth he had lost, and better educated, and was apparently moving into a future rich with opportunities – a future that at the same time offered him nothing. It would be little wonder if he was depressed. Before his own father, whom he dearly loved, was diagnosed with cancer, my father had already become quiet and withdrawn. My grandfather’s death sentence added one more grisly fact to his life.
To me, living away from home, my grandfather’s il
lness was something that happened at a distance. I would receive occasional bulletins but be unaware of day-to-day realities. Some of the information reaching me was misleading. It is difficult nowadays to get people to understand this, but at that time serious illness was a taboo subject – especially mental illness and cancer – even within families: people simply did not talk about it, if they could avoid it. When they did talk about it they used euphemisms and evasions: they would hint and imply, and expect you to understand what they meant, without them having actually to say it. It was considered especially necessary to shield the old and the young from bad news. It was not the exception but the rule for a person dying of cancer not to be told – perhaps even not to want to be told – although his next of kin would be informed. All this has now gone, or most of it, but it was then the atmosphere that we all lived in. To me it seemed as if my grandfather had died before I really knew what was going on. It came as a great shock.
It happened in November 1946, and he was seventy. I was sixteen. He was buried in St Pancras Cemetery. I went to the funeral in my Christ’s Hospital uniform because those were the only clothes I had that were suitable for such an occasion. I remember the stony misery that filled my heart on the way to the cemetery as I sat in the undertaker’s car with Bill and Peggy Pett. When I turned away from the graveside my eyes filled with tears. Bill, moving alongside me, gripped my hand and squeezed it painfully hard. Only that prevented the tears from flowing. This was unprecedented in my experience within my family, a physical gesture of emotional understanding. I was astonished by it, especially coming from Bill, whom I had never liked. I looked on him differently after that.
I had always taken it for granted that when my grandfather died, the family shop would come to my father. And so had my father. But it did not. After the usual brief delay, during which everyone waited and wondered, the contents of my grandfather’s will were disclosed, and it turned out that his whole estate had been left to my grandmother. I was not present when my father was told this, but the description I heard was so lurid that it has remained with me all my life, as if I had been there. He went green. And then, for just a moment before recovering control, he looked as if despair overwhelmed him. At the age of forty-five he found himself embarking on a new life as an employee of his mother.
I do not know exactly what went on within the family after that, partly because I was away at school, though most of it would have been hidden from me anyway. Certainly there was a lot of electricity in the air, and I knew that high-tension diplomacy was going on. My father made it clear that he was not prepared to carry on in this situation, except for a transitional period. My grandmother was now an old lady who had had nothing to do with the management of the shop for many years, and could not conceivably run it herself. If my father was not prepared to run it for her, her (exceedingly powerful) instinct was to sell it for as much money as she could get for it. Her other children would benefit more from this – eventually, at her death – than from any of the alternatives. On the other hand, they themselves felt that it would be unjust to my father, who had given his life to the shop in a way that none of them had, and had been in effect its manager for a long time – he would now be left with nothing, not even a job. It was one of those family situations where everyone’s honest and genuine interests are at odds. What natural justice would have decreed was fairly clear. My grandfather should have left some money to each of his daughters and the shop to my father, with the proviso that a proportion of the income from it should go to my grandmother for the rest of her lifetime – a share smaller than the one he had been drawing for the two of them, but enough for her needs. He had in any case left her the house they lived in, and the value of that could eventually have been divided between the two daughters. I believe that what my father tried to do was to broker a deal along these lines – but of course he was in the invidious, mortifying position of asking for sacrifices from everyone else while seeking advantages for himself. It was painful all round. These were, I know, bruising times for everybody: I heard some damaging exchanges and some bristling silences. We were back to family drama at its worst, as in the old days.
At what stage my father was diagnosed as having cancer is something my memory has blotted out, but while all these things were going on he was becoming more and more seriously ill. All his adult life he had been practically a chain-smoker, and now he was found to have lung cancer. In those days the two things were not known to be connected. As in the case of my grandfather, the full reality of the situation was kept from me. It so happened that the three months before my father took to what turned out to be his deathbed coincided almost exactly with one of my school terms, so I was away from home for that period and did not know what was going on. When nightmare forebodings invaded my mind, I tried to shake them off, and told myself that I was being irrational – that if things were as bad as that I would have been told something by now. When only four days of the term were left, Pongo called me into his study in the late afternoon. Our conversation went roughly as follows.
‘I’ve got some bad news for you, I’m afraid. Your father is seriously ill.’
‘I know, sir.’
‘Your mother telephoned. They want you at home. I think you’d better go tomorrow.’
I thought: why? There isn’t anything I can do about it. I said: ‘But I shall be going home on Tuesday anyway. He’s been ill all term.’
‘Your family think it would be best for you to go straight away. The doctors have just seen him, and they think he’s very unwell.’
I tried to avoid engaging with the implication of this, but it got to me just the same, and my vision swam.
Tears seemed to fill my whole head. In a voice that I heard cracking about all over the place I said: ‘Can you tell me any more, sir – what the situation actually is?’
He started fiddling with a packet of cigarettes, taking a long time to get one out. He always did this when he was embarrassed. But he was always shy when talking to a boy.
‘There’s nothing more I can tell you,’ he said. ‘The doctors are concerned, and your family want you at home. I think you ought to go tomorrow morning by the …’ and he told me what train to catch.
Whether it was that evening or after breakfast next morning I do not know, but I went to an ordinary daily chapel service before catching the train home. Being surrounded by people singing hymns and psalms was too much for me, and I stood there with tears pouring down my face. Still, no one had actually said anything – no one had said my father was dying, or even that his life was in danger. So I still struggled to tell myself that my fears were exaggerated, that they were reactions based on ignorance, that if things were really as bad as all that someone would have said something to me by this time. Yet part of me – a still-only-just-submerged part – knew what I was steeling myself against. I have been told that people who face death often go through such feelings. I was like a condemned man half aware that he was in denial.
When I got off the train at Victoria my sister Joan was on the platform. Walking up to her I made a for-God’s-sake-tell-me-what’s-happening gesture, eyebrows raised and eyes wide open, hands moving outwards and upwards.
‘Don’t worry, Bryan,’ she said feelingly. ‘He’s going to die quite quietly.’
Victoria station spun round me, then my vision blacked out (or rather greyed out) and I thought I was fainting. I groped blindly at Joan for support, and she led me to a bench in the station concourse, where we sat for some time while I cranked myself up into coming to terms with the shock. My father was not just dying, he was dying now, and I was immediately about to see him dying, and he would be dead in a couple of days.
Joan was deeply upset. ‘Didn’t you know?’ she asked, distraught. ‘I thought you knew.’
Haltingly, and with long silences, she told me what had been going on in my absence. The story ended with our father taking to his bed the day before, and the doctor saying to my mother that he would live for only ano
ther two or three days, whereupon my mother telephoned my housemaster.
‘I was the one saying all along that you mustn’t be given a shock, that you must be told,’ Joan said. ‘And now this.’
During all that time my mother had put off telling me because there was nothing I could do, and she saw no point in upsetting me to no purpose. Joan had protested to her: ‘Yes, but Dad’s going to die quite soon, and when it does happen it mustn’t come to Bryan as a total shock, a bolt from the blue.’
When, the previous day, they had decided to telephone the school, they had agreed that they would ask my housemaster to break the news to me that my father was on the point of death, and to send me straight home. After making the telephone call my mother had told Joan that she had done this. I do not know whether the failure of nerve was on her part with Pongo or on Pongo’s part with me. Both would have been in character, but I think, given the circumstances, the latter is more likely. Anyway, Joan had assumed that Pongo had told me. When she met me on the platform her first concern had been to assure me that our father was not in pain, and that I was not on the point of witnessing nightmarish death throes – she had interpreted my facial expression and hand gestures as a way of signalling shock-horror at what I was about to face. Her first words had been intended to put my mind at rest.
‘There’s nothing to be frightened of,’ she said. ‘He’s quite calm, and he looks normal. He’s being given a lot of morphine. The doctor says he’ll just drift away. If he’s not asleep, he’ll talk to you quite naturally.’
But I was terrified. To see my father and know that he was about to die was more than I believed I could bear. But there was no alternative, at this point, to going home and facing it. Dragging myself away from that bench in Victoria station was one of the hardest things I have ever done.
As it turned out, my father lived not for two or three days but for six weeks. He was dying throughout the whole of that school holiday and well into the following term, and at no point did he or the rest of us know how much longer it – he – was going to go on. It was always true that he might die next day. I was at home throughout it all, eventually coming to an arrangement with Pongo that I would return to school the day after the funeral, whenever that might be.