“Song?”
“That's right. I've heard some of the boys singing it. On the train. There's a line, ‘Detur soli Deo gloria.’ It's Latin— you'll have to learn that—and it means ‘Let the glory be to God alone.’“ She grinned. “I've heard the boys singing,” and she sang herself, soft and low, like Judy Garland singing to Tootie: “Detur soli Deo gloria—Herne Hill, Brixton, and Victoria.”
She left the strange mix of liturgy and local railways hanging in the air. “You'll have fun with lads like that.”
THIRD PART
18
Ihave arranged things to suggest that Dulwich was a huge break. And so it was. It was like the army—and I was broken, or damaged, or deeply disturbed. Or whatever. But in a way Dulwich simply took advantage of my existing weaknesses. I don't want to blame the school or be unfair to it. As time passed, the school found a way to be very generous to me, and very helpful. And while I never ever got over the dread of the place and the abiding wish not to go, the school gave me the resources I needed to give it up one day. Even now I don't know whether that was the “right” decision. But my education had left me very wary of “right” or correct decisions and much more persuaded by determinations I had made. So Dulwich wrecked me—no doubt about it—but it also made me.
One day in September 1951 I turned up as one of the two hundred new bugs, raw around the collar, and tried to find a place of some security. The scale of it all was overwhelming. At least half of the intake that year were LCC scholarship boys, places traded away for government funds to build a new science block. After all, a great school in the nuclear age had to have a science building. That first day the students were assembled in the school's Music Room to be addressed by Mr. Thomas, the Deputy Master of the school. The Master himself—a man named Gilkes— was unwell.
Thomas was a Welshman; he was small, but a battleship, and very stern. He looked at us and said, in effect, “I see before me the cream of South London. It is just that this year the cream has turned a little sour.” Not one of us, I suspect, knew what he meant, or what philosophical splits there might be within the school as the postwar Labour government drew to its close. (The Conservatives, still under Churchill, were returned to power in October 1951, and in my family there was an air of relief at that, as if justice had been done.) But his sarcasm was not to be missed. The lash fell, and Thomas revealed his helpless failure to admit changing times. (Dulwich still exists, but it has reverted to the status of a private, fee-paying school. The experiment of letting gravel in the gold was brief, and I was one of its lucky recipients.)
Before Thomas stood a mongrel group that might start to change England. Consider: if some poor kids went to a toff school, and if some toffs had had to put up with a slum council school. “Daddy, there are boys who are dirty and who know no Latin!” If you wonder where the spirit of such anarchic humor as The Goon Show and Monty Python came from, don't forget the amazed attitude of some London louts that they had been sucked into the citadel of privilege. Or that they intended to change the antique place. After they'd had their nervous breakdowns.
I can no longer recall the timing or the sequence. Sometimes it occurs to me that anyone looking at films gets into the habit of reordering the timeline: it “works better,” don't you think, if we know this before we discover that? So the events that happened become items in a reconstruction. In which case, perhaps that sort of person—a film person—is unusually casual about cause and effect. He or she is ready to see the story. But be careful, for the same ten events may provide different stories depending on their arrangement. I'll go even further: What is an event? It sounds and feels like a tidy, self-contained packet delivered by FedEx. But suppose the “event” is seen more generously or openly as everything and every bit of light that came over the threshhold that day. A new baby is described as a happy event, but any parent knows that the event is a mere marker for an atmosphere and a life that has become so much more complicated.
But if I'm doing my early life as a movie then I want to impress on the screenwriter the need for a crisis. Screenwriters need little encouragement. I can see his or her eyes widening with the discovery. “Got it! Your first day at school, you're in dismay and confusion. There's a class in which the teacher is showing that classic painting, And When Did You Last See Your Father? It's a boy being questioned by the Roundheads, I think, and you have to answer, and your stammer suddenly sets in and you can't say a word! How do you like that?”
Do I have to say, “Sm-m-m-m-m-ashing!”?
It didn't happen like that. I cannot even offer a chain of events in which it happened. I am still not sure what “it” was. The school was intimidating. Many of the teachers wore gowns. There was corporal punishment in class. Prefects could beat boys—thrash them on the bottom with a cane. There were initiation rituals, like the “bumps” for new boys. But the bumps were painless and fun. The thrashings were confined to older boys. The teachers who still smacked were on the decline. And there was a new generation appearing that had heard of “child psychology.” Still, Dulwich was a self-conscious public school because it was not in the first rank (Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Winchester) and because some of its greatest defenders were alarmed by the prospect of the cream being sour.
But I do recall that first term that all boys be required to watch the school's First XV in its rugby matches with other schools. The boys were organized by house—there were six houses, and I was in Marlowe—and a roll was called. All I had to do when “Thomson” was shouted out was answer, “Here”—but suddenly I could not. My throat and mouth went into constrictions. I bubbled. I gargled. I stammered. And some boys laughed in a good-natured way. I had stammered before, and at Rosemead, where I was a star, I sometimes made fun of it myself first before anyone else. Perhaps people thought it was an act. It became noticeable. At Dulwich, I asked other boys to answer for me, but the natural disinclination to volunteer for anything made that ruse unpopular. So maybe boys avoided me, for fear of beng asked. In a way, if I hid they were left waiting for my performance. The panic spiraled. And soon I had great difficulty in saying anything at school for four or five years. (There is still a terror that it could come back—or reappear in my children.)
Misfortune seemed to hound me. I found I quite liked rugby, and I was reasonably good at it. But I found myself cast in the role of scrum half, the one person in the game who is obliged to speak. When the scrum half feeds the ball into the scrums (sixteen boys pushing hard against each other), he has to say, “Coming in blues, now!” I could not always say it. Scrums collapsed waiting for me. I was once sent off the field for having engineered such a collapse. I aspired to other positions, silent and tight-lipped, but no, I had scrum-half “material.” So the agony went on, though I know at the time I saw the joke, and I experimented with other calls that were easier to say but that sometimes had the scrum slide apart from laughing. The Ministry of Funny Walks and the tactics of absurd command were part of the same comedy of humiliation.
My father did not change much as I grew older, as far as I could see. What did that mean? Looking back on it now, I could see several possibilities. He had had a slight stammer himself as a younger man, and it could reappear. I think the parent is stricken to find a thing like that arising in his children. Whether it happens through association or unwitting imitation or genetically, there must be a load of responsibility. He never disussed it—but of course he hardly ever discussed anything. My graduation to “big school” may have made him uneasy. I think I became more argumentative with him, and he did not appreciate that. But I was learning ideas of a kind that had not crossed his mind. I wonder also whether in his talks with the other woman in his life there had not been some thought that, when I graduated, he might come clean and move more thoroughly away. Well, I can hear her making that case, and I can see him silent but nodding. Equally, my mother may have said—and I don't know how much she was ever able to, or allowed to, refer to the other woman—that his son was under stress. A
re you sympathizing with Dad yet, or do you see his weakness as the source of all the trouble? I only ask because I still ask myself.
The stress of school was not small. I was being put to many new tests—French, Latin, higher mathematics—and I was not getting much chance at things I really liked (making stuff up). In English, we worked on grammar and clause analysis (things I enjoyed), but not on storytelling or literary appreciation. I was in 1E in the Junior block, led by the likeable Mr. Booth, and I made friends in a class that included Smith E. P. (he had a twin brother, C.J.), Thor-nington, Wadey, Shroff, Perkins, Gilkes (the son of the Master of the school), Brown, Downes, Hardy, Beevers, Jenkins, Hall, and Eveleigh.
We were the midgets and the novices in a school that housed immense men. The cricket pavilion clock had been stopped, and it was said that this was in honor of Trevor Bailey, who had been to Dulwich and was by then a leading talent in the English cricket team. Had he really hit the clock and stopped it? Dulwich was an odd school, founded in 1619 by Edward Alleyn, one of the top actor-managers in the age of Shakespeare. School tradition was an important subject. Thus we learned that Sir Hartley Shawcross, a notable lawyer at the Nuremberg trials, was an old Alleyn-ian, along with a mighty and stirring trio of writers: P. G. Wodehouse, C. S. Forester (who wrote the Hornblower books, of which I was very fond), and—how could this be?—an American writer named Raymond Chandler. If you read Chandler, it is striking to find that the very cool, urbane Marlowe—a version of Humphrey Bogart—also has an old-school integrity that is horrified when wanton women throw themselves at him. The Alleynian tradition had extended to several actors, including Leslie Howard and Clive Brook. Yet it says something odd about the school or its focus that in 19 51 and the years thereafter no one told me that Michael Powell—of The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death, and I Know Where I'm Going— had been to Dulwich. But, of course, it was a similar deficiency in the school's life that it could not, among several hundred boys, nudge me and say, Look, there is someone for you. Michael Ondaatje came to Dulwich a couple of years after me, and it is a part of our friendship now that we don't believe we ever spoke to each other at school. Of course, he was younger than me, and easy ties did not reach beyond your year. He was also one of that group of pupils ushered into assembly after the C of E religious ceremonies. I don't know why, but Michael was from Ceylon, and I'm sure racism played a part in my attitude, at least.
My first year at Dulwich felt numb. I had already fallen into a deeper pattern of truancy. To get to school I took the 49 bus to Crystal Palace and then changed to the 3. I often got off the 49 around Streatham Common and the Rookery, and walked there before going home. This was a mounting cause of concern. I just about kept up with the schoolwork, but without showing any promise or individuality.
In the Michaelmas term and the first half of Lent, there was rugby. In the second half of Lent was track, and at that I excelled. In the summer on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons the grounds were turned over to cricket. I had seen cricket with Dad at Mitcham and he had bowled to me on the Common. It was only at Dulwich that I realized I had ability. I played a bit for the school's under-twelve side, and I figured for Marlowe. I started playing every evening until about ten o'clock when the summer light faded away.
It was the hard ball that did it. As a little boy I had played with tennis balls, like Henry V, which was sensible. But at Dulwich we used the real thing. Dad gave me one for Christmas, cherry red and shining from deep within, stitched in hard cream stitches that made a seam. Herein lay the ability of the ball to move, off the seam, with spin, or even in the air. But what I loved most was the way the bat trembled in your hands if you really hit and middled the ball. You could feel the tingling, and marvel at the way, if you timed the ball properly, it sped away from your bat. I loved everything about cricket. In the summer of 19 51, the South Africans toured Britain and I was taken to see their all-white side (Rowan, McGlew, McLean, Nourse, Endean, Van Ryneveld, Waite, Tayfield, Rowan, McCarthy, Melle) play Surrey at the Oval. We went with my great-uncle Sydney from Prince Rupert when he came over on a visit. I suppose that would have been a bad time for Dad to quit us—with Syd a magical patron! He had me explain cricket to him, and he gave me my first bicycle.
The Oval was intoxicating. There was a brewery nearby, and I loved the yeasty smell in the air. A large ground where the great players came and went was still in Kennington, about a twenty-five-minute bus ride from where we lived. In 1951 Surrey was approaching a period of dominance in the county game that would last for nearly a decade. Having been introduced by Dad, I would go to matches on my own in the summer holidays. I saw a great side: Fishlock, Fletcher, Clark, Constable, May, Eric Bedser, McIntyre, Lock, Laker, Alec Bedser, and Surridge, the skipper of the team and the owner of a cricket gear company. “Surridge” was written on every cricket ball we had.
Every weekend morning Dad and I would go to the Common. We had found a spot where you could play using two trees as wickets. We played liked this: Each side batted for twelve balls. We scored runs on the strength and distance of hits. We gave the bowler points for getting an out or beating the bat. We played with a hard ball and no pads. I think Dad was surprised at my ability He had nursed me along at every sport since I was a kid. But at cricket I had promise. I bowled quickly enough for him to watch out for his legs. And I could hit his bowling.
One day he hit one of my deliveries very hard. It came straight at me. Too fast for me to duck or get out of the way. I stuck out my hands and caught its roar and its searing smack. I can remember the look of horror on his face, for I think he felt he might have maimed me. Then he shouted out, “Bravo!” It lasted me years.
19
IF YOU'D ASKED ME, “Do you have a dad?” in the early ‘50s there would have been no doubt. We had been planning to see the film Ivanhoe together for some time. We had seen trailers for it and he had known the Walter Scott novel. I had toy figures of Ivanhoe, the Saxon, and Sir Brian de Bois Guilbert, the Norman, though I had only a slight sense then of how Saxon and Norman lay at the root of class differences in Britain. But a few days before the Ivanhoe weekend, I broke several bones in my foot playing rugby. In fact, I had carried on playing and was trudging to the bus stop after the game when a teacher saw my limp and sent me back to the school sanatorium. From there an ambulance took me to the hospital. By the time my mother arrived, I was in a plaster cast up to the knee. But it turned out that a medical student had applied the cast and done it wrong. So the next day I went back and a scornful doctor set me right.
But I was not supposed to walk on the plaster for several days, and we had no car. So Dad took one look and carried me on his back to Ivanhoe, as if I were the knight and he the horse. It was a boy's adventure, and I believe I told people about it with great pride. It must also have been a labor for him. I was eleven, and the plaster was the weight of another couple of years. But he was strong and made for gestures.
I was the same way. We went on one of our summer holidays to Criccieth, in north Wales. And as was his habit then, he left us—Mum and me—on the first Saturday. He went back and we stayed on together.
At Criccieth, the guest house where we stayed was some way from the railway station. The guest house had a car service that ran people in for a train, and that Saturday morning all three of us made the trip. It was only on the platform that Dad remembered he'd left the picnic lunch the guest house made up for travelers. By then, the car was gone. So I ran back and got it. Say it was a mile each way, and there wasn't much time. But I made it, and no packet of sandwiches was ever delivered with more love or more regret that he wouldn't be there the second week.
In the summer nearly every year for ten years we went a couple of times to Freshwater on the Isle of Wight, to Fal-mouth in Cornwall, to Lyme Regis in Dorset, to Harrogate in Yorkshire, to Oxford and Cambridge (as a warm-up). Dad always chose the places, and in advance he'd talk like a brochure about where we were going: the castles and the stately homes, the famous wal
ks and so on. Criccieth was the “pearl of the Cambrian coast,” even if it rained every day. But it didn't bother me because there was a very nice blond girl at the guest house and we played card games through the overcast.
We never went abroad, but that was a far-fetched venture for our class then, way beyond Dad's intense xenophobia and the prevailing currency restrictions. (I have an old passport of my father's parents, with Dad's name attached for a two-week trip to France, in 1923, entering and departing by way of Dieppe. He was fifteen. Did something happen then that made him hate foreign lands?) He thought it wrong (as in unpatriotic) to go abroad, a sign of weakness or disloyalty, and of no practical utility since it meant putting money in alien nation banks. It didn't trouble me too much because the places we went were interesting. We swam in the cold sea. We walked. We saw abbeys and ruins and historical sites. I was taught the outlines of hotel life and he was very funny sometimes in the dining room, watching the other guests and imagining the real inside story about them. (If only he'd told that story about us!) So long as I was a good audience I was all right.
The most important of the summer trips was to Stratford-on-Avon. We did the sites, of course, Anne Hathaway's cottage, Clopton House, and so on. But more important, we went to the Memorial Theater. We had advance tickets for one play, as I remember, and we had to wait in line in the early morning for tickets to two others. We saw The Merchant of Venice, with Emlyn Williams as Shylock and Margaret Johnston as Portia; we saw Love's Labours Lost, which I have never seen again; and we saw Alan Badel as Hamlet.
I was too young to fully grasp Hamlet but I'm sure that's what Shakespeare said as it ran through his own head and hands too. I was old enough, however, to register theatrical suspense, the almost insolent antic beauty of Badel, and the clear apprehension that here was a great work that would never leave you. Today, Badel may not be a familiar name, but in the 1950s, when he was in his early thirties, he was thought to have high promise. He was a chum of Richard Burton's and he had a shot at Hollywood, going there to play John the Baptist in Rita Hay-worth's Salome—more a side dish than a real chance. For me, he was a great Hamlet—he was the part—and he severely tested the conclusion I had reached at school, that I could not do the thing I most wanted to do there, which was to try out for a school play. I did an audition, and I could hardly say a word. It was like expecting to play scrum half with your leg in plaster. Sorry, old chap!
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