Growing Up In a War

by Bryan Magee

  ‘Why are you sitting up?’ she whispered. ‘Is everything all right?’

  I explained.

  ‘You mean they haven’t put you in a splint?’ she said. ‘That’s the first thing they should have done. I’ll do it now.’ And off she went.

  She came back with the splint, and keeping her words and movements quiet so as not to disturb any of the other boys she wrapped up my leg. It was all done by torchlight.

  ‘There,’ she said. ‘You’ll be able to sleep now.’

  Then, as an afterthought, she said: ‘I was just doing a round before making myself a cup of hot chocolate. Would you like some? It might help you sleep.’

  ‘I’d love some,’ I said.

  Off she went again, and came back this time with two mugs of chocolate. She sat on the settle beside me, and – there was no need now for the torch – we carried on a conversation in whispers and sips in the dark.

  Her responses had been sympathetic, and at the same time practical, and I liked that. While she was putting the splint on I had seen her in enough light to find her pleasant-looking. She asked me about myself, and then told me about herself. She was thirty-one, still unmarried, and lived in the infirmary with other unmarried nurses. One snag about the job, she said, was that the infirmary had been deliberately set apart from the rest of the school, and the life of those who worked in it was so different from that of the teaching staff that the two rarely met. With patients they were seldom able to have even the kind of conversation she and I were having now. It was all rather a cut-off existence as far as personal contacts were concerned. In fact, she said as she was leaving, this conversation had itself been a tonic, and she might look in again the following night, after the others had gone to sleep. If I was still awake I might like to have another chat, though of course, if I was asleep she would not disturb me …

  At school I was always conscious of being starved of female company, so this prospect was an attractive one. Next night I deliberately stayed awake. It was especially easy to do this, since I had been in bed all day. She came, and again we held a whispered conversation in the dark, this time for a couple of hours. And this time she brought the hot chocolate with her. I cannot now remember how long I stayed in the infirmary altogether, or why it was longer than expected – there must have been some complications with either the fracture or the treatment. I feel, uncertainly, that it was a couple of weeks. Whatever it was, she came every night, and we talked at great length … One night she gave me a blanket bath, and this involved some fairly intimate bodily contact between us. After that we necked and canoodled night after night with increasing intimacy. On my last night, when we knew I would be leaving the next day, she got into my bed.

  It was a crazy thing for us to do. We were surrounded in the darkness by other boys, and although they had slept soundly through all our previous neckings we had no guarantee that they would sleep through this. We were making a great deal more noise. Nobody stirred, though – adolescent boys, and very young men, sleep like the dead, in a way few other people ever do – and by the end we felt sure none of them had heard us. I went on believing this until, more than half a century later, at a school reunion, a forgotten acquaintance – old now like me – came up with a twinkle in his eye and a quiet, warm chuckle and told me how he had woken up in that ward and heard these unmistakable sounds coming from my bed. He had been startled out of his wits, not daring to move – hardly daring to breathe – and just lay there in the darkness listening. I asked if he had told anyone, and he said he had not, though on reflection it seemed to him very strange that he had not. Thinking about it now, he said, he realised that he had actually been shocked.

  Another bizarre aspect of the whole thing was that my right leg was encased in plaster of Paris from foot to mid-thigh. So that was how I had my first sexual experience. My leg remained in plaster throughout the early weeks of our relationship – for we arranged, of course, to go on meeting, and did so for the rest of my time at the school.

  Apart from anything else, I found the affair monumentally exciting. After dark, and after the other boys had gone to bed, she (let’s call her Jill) and I would meet in one of our secret places. I was now the deputy house captain, which meant I had a study, but this was approachable only through the dayroom, so it was impossible for us to meet there. In any case, we felt we needed to keep our meetings away from the house. At first we met in the open, in woods and copses on the edge of the school’s extensive grounds. She would bring blankets, and we would wrap ourselves together in them. After one such tryst I returned to the house to find two of my fellow monitors, Richard Cavendish and Dick Gerrard-Wright, still up. They were bending over Richard’s desk in the dayroom, discussing something that lay on it, and as I walked in Richard looked up and called out: ‘Here, look at this.’ I bent over the table, my head between theirs. Wright sniffed, unselfconsciously surprised at first, then ostentatiously, and said in astounded tones: ‘You smell of scent!’ In that moment I smelt it too.

  ‘Do I?’ I said with as much unconcern as I could muster. ‘It must be this soap someone’s given me,’ and turned away and disappeared into my study. I thought it was obvious that I had fled, and I expected Wright and Cavendish to pursue me about it later, so I prepared things to say, but neither of them mentioned it again.

  That winter, 1947–48, was one of the coldest there had ever been, with the deepest snow I have known in England. (The previous one had been exceptionally bad too, so the two last winters of my time at school were almost the wintriest of my life.) It was no longer possible for Jill and me to make love in the open. But in any institution such as Christ’s Hospital there are always disused rooms, in fact whole disused buildings, and we found it fun to explore for them, and discover safer and safer ones. She went on bringing blankets, and our meetings were very happy. We remained, so far as we knew, undiscovered and unsuspected.

  The whole relationship was a key experience in my life. We were both actively involved, and equally responsible for what we did; but if there was one rather than the other who tended to take the lead it was her, because of the difference in age. Perhaps for that reason I never felt that I was taking advantage of her, nor did I feel any guilt towards her, not then nor when we parted. The whole thing always had something of the character of a wartime relationship. We acknowledged from the start that it could not have any long-term future, and on that basis we gave ourselves up to it uninhibitedly while it lasted. After I left school I saw her only once, when I was on leave from the army before being sent abroad. Then, in Austria, I became involved with someone else – indeed, while I was away, so did she. But between us, through everything, there was always good feeling. Four or five years later, when I was in my last year at Oxford, she sent me a telegram to tell me she had got married, but gave me no address. It was obvious from this that she did not want me to get in touch with her, and I never attempted to do so.

  I have occasionally told the story of this relationship to close friends – usually women friends who have quizzed me about my first relationship – and they have nearly always asked if I think Jill had similar relationships with other boys, before or after me. For reasons too detailed to go into here, I am certain that her relationship with me was a one-off. To begin with, it was not only about sex. From our first meetings we devoted hours and hours to talking about other things too, and with intense interest. We discussed not only ourselves and our past lives, and the individuals closest to us, and the school itself, and the people we knew in common: we talked also about books, films, whatever was in the newspapers, life in general, politics, whether or not we believed in God. And this meant that we got to know each other exceedingly well. If I may so put it, we became close in spirit. It was not the sort of relationship that was interchangeable. For me it was a piece of incredible luck, and I look back on it with nothing but pleasure.

  In spite of this life-changing love affair I still thought it essential to secure a university place before my mother d
elivered on her promise not to keep me any longer – and indeed before my affair with Jill was discovered, which we feared it might be, at any moment. I had no choice but to take the examination in history, because that was the only subject I was well enough advanced in; but I was beginning to feel that I wanted to change subjects once I got to university. I was devoting two-thirds of my working time to history, and already this felt excessive. I was interested in it, but no more so than in a number of other subjects. I had chosen to specialise in it not for the subject, but to be taught by David Roberts, and now that I was not being taught by him anyway, but by Ralph Davis, I had had enough of it. I began to wonder what else I might do instead.

  I assumed it would have to be one of the subjects in which I had got a distinction in School Certificate, because I would not be able to reach university standard quickly enough in any of the others, and therefore would not be accepted. But although I had got a distinction in Latin, classics was out – I had repudiated Greek anyway, and had seldom enjoyed Latin. Modern languages was a possibility, with my good French plus decent German. But this felt like a waste of opportunity. I had become used to speaking and reading French, and expected to go on doing so for the rest of my life (with increasing mastery, I assumed, though in fact the reverse has happened). Because of my passion for Wagner I intended to get into a similar position with German, and did in fact do so the following year, in Austria. It would be a waste of university, I thought, to do there what I intended to do in any case. My aim should be to gain something extra from university, to expand, get broadened out, learn things I would not have learnt otherwise. That scuttled the only remaining alternative, English. I was already a gluttonous devourer of poetry, novels, and performances of plays; and I knew I would go on doing that for the rest of my life. Also, I had by now developed a low opinion, something approaching a contempt, for the academic approach to such things, which I saw as point-missing in a way that was fundamental to their nature.

  So what was I to do?

  I took my dilemma to Ralph Davis, who invited me to discuss it with him in his study. The evening on which I did so was to have deleterious consequences for me for years to come. He referred early on to the PPE course at Oxford. I had never heard of it, so I asked what it was. He explained: ‘Philosophy, politics and economics.’ As someone interested in politics I was instantly alert, and quizzed him about it. My eagerness leapt higher when he told me that virtually none of the undergraduates who did PPE would have studied any of the three subjects at school – and higher still when he told me that the course was a recently introduced one aimed at people who were thinking of going into politics. Here was my solution, I thought, and said so, bubbling with enthusiasm. Thereupon Ralph Davis poured a barrel of cold water over me. No, no, NO, he said: I should on no account do PPE.

  He expanded on this at length, with dismissive scorn. The most important thing a higher education could do for anyone, he said, was to lead them to the frontier of human knowledge, the frontier with the unknown, and then engage them with their subject at that point. On the way, you would do a lot of work to cover the already existing territory, and absorb a general education in the subject at a high level. In whatever specialism you selected, you would follow that path as far as it would go, until you were shoulder to shoulder with the people who were doing original research. It was at that point, said Ralph, that you would start thinking at the deepest level of all, grappling not just with what you did not know but with what nobody knew. From that point on you had to do everything for yourself: identify and formulate your own problems, decide on your methods, find your materials, make fruitful yet critical use of them, produce your own ideas. This was the true goal of higher education, and it was to this point that everything had been leading. It developed your capacity for independent thinking at the deepest level, the level of original thought, and in a disciplined way; and trained you in how to work hard at it. History was ideal for these purposes. It constituted an almost perfect education, even for someone who had no intention of becoming a historian. There were other subjects that could achieve it too – for instance classical scholarship, or physics (which would always include higher mathematics). Whatever the subject, the process was one that needed a long time: it could not be gone through in less than three or four years. The trouble, he said, with a course like PPE, which tried to cover three different subjects in three years, was that it doomed itself to failure from the outset. In the time available, a student could not go far enough, or dig deep enough, in any one of the subjects. He was given no possibility other than to remain at a first- or second-year level in each, being led through the sort of general introduction to it that ought to have been, but in this case was not, a transition to something deeper. So the entire course consisted of introductions. And this betrayed the students.

  Ralph was passionately eloquent about all this, and heated, as if a burning resentment against PPE had built up inside him. And I accepted the whole argument. It made luminous sense to me. I had reached an age when I wanted to develop my mind, but did not know even what that meant, let alone how to do it. The school, except for David Roberts, had not done it, I knew that. But now that Ralph explained it to me I understood what I needed to do. I wrote off PPE as an option. It was years before I was able to reconsider that: I was for a long time convinced, because of what Ralph had said, that whatever I chose to do it would need to be a single subject. I still did not want that subject to be history, and could not decide on an alternative; but because I had to go into the army before going to university I would have a long time to think about it – and I was now, I believed, in a position to do that with understanding. I went away from that evening in Ralph Davis’s study with a light step, and not the slightest realisation that he had just sent my life off the rails for the next few years.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE CHRISTMAS BREAK of 1947 was my last holiday from school, though I did not know it. Christmas itself raised difficulties about what to do, not only for me. For decades our extended family had spent Christmases together: the four of us from Arnos Grove plus what we referred to as ‘the Southgate contingent’. This consisted of two households, one of my grandparents and maiden aunt Hilda, the other my father’s favourite sister Peggy and her husband, Bill Pett. The nine of us had always gathered, with a guest or two, at one of our three homes, and had a good time. But now, within six months, both the Southgate and the Arnos Grove contingents had lost their patriarch. The family was doubly bereft, and, with that, depressed. We agreed that any attempt to hold our usual family Christmas would be painful. Nobody wanted that. So it was suggested that we put up together at a hotel where we could make our own little world but be surrounded by people enjoying themselves, and have all the work done for us by other people. I was included in this for no other reason than that it would have been embarrassing for everyone if I had been left out. We all discussed where to go. It would have to be a modest hotel, one suited to our means, yet we wanted a place with character.

  It was Joan who suggested Stratford-upon-Avon. She had been there two or three times with friends to see plays, and had taken a liking to the town. It had all sorts of hotels, she said, and they were half-empty in winter – in fact some of them closed down – so we should be able to get a bargain rate at quite a good one. In those days there was nothing like the general demand for hotels at Christmas that there is today: quite the contrary. So it was agreed: we would spend Christmas in Stratford-upon-Avon.

  Joan found the hotel. It had once been a grand private house on the bank of the Avon, with a long garden that ran beside the river to the churchyard wall of Holy Trinity (where Shakespeare lies buried). There could scarcely have been a more attractive setting, or a more convenient one.

  Almost at once, dissension broke out in the family. The Southgate contingent found my mother impossible to make the arrangements with, and concluded that a Christmas spent with her without my father would be disastrous. They pulled out and made o
ther arrangements. So only three of us – my mother, sister and me – went to Stratford. I fell in love with it, and have remained so ever since.

  Scarcely any of the Shakespeare sites were open to the public in those days, but we went around looking at them all. I found it inexpressibly moving to see Shakespeare’s birthplace, and his school, and the site of the house he bought when he returned to Stratford towards the end of his life; and also the homes of people related to him; and above all his gravestone – and to think of him actually there. On Christmas Day, pagans though we were, we went to a service in Holy Trinity and sang carols, throughout which I thought of him lying there a little way in front of me … We did a lot of non-Shakespeare things too. On the clear, frosty morning of Boxing Day we watched a fox-hunt gather to drink a stirrup cup before setting off – a magnificent sight. Stratford in those days was quite different from the tourist centre it has since become. At Christmas the streets were empty. When I went out of doors I felt almost as if I had the town to myself.

  By sheer coincidence our hotel was where I spent a whole summer five years later when, as a penniless undergraduate, I worked as a waiter during the Long Vacation of 1952. It exists no longer. It and its beautiful garden have been replaced by a housing estate.