My dread was more apparent than it was when I was aware only of sadness and nof-sad, when I was taken by my father on a visit to Gwalior, the fortress and home of an Indian ruler. I was aware, partly because my father impressed it upon me, that we were visitors to an Indian state and under the laws of that state. I was shown an image, carved in wood, of an Indian god. This, I was told, was a heathen god. As I looked upon its deeply carved features, the black more intense and forbidding because the brilliant sun made the shadows so harsh, I was afraid. Was the Indian Ruler like that? I didn’t like it; I didn’t want to go further into Gwalior. I had learned to keep my mouth shut so was able to keep it more tightly shut when I felt impelled to ask questions or say ‘“and, ‘and”, or that I was afraid.
On our nearer approach to Gwalior we came upon a stoutly built wooden cage. It must have been fifteen feet long, ten feet high and four feet wide. This could be entered by treading on a platform which released a wooden, heavily built portcullis. I was not frightened by this tiger trap till our Indian guide pointed out a small flimsy crate which was outside, but attached to the main structure where it was furthest from the trap door. Why ever would the tiger go in? Because, my father said, tigers were lazy creatures. When they saw a kid in the crate—so that was what the crate was for—it would not burst its way into the kid but would walk round to the open end of the trap, enter and bang! it would be caught when the portcullis came down. See? I did. What did the poor kid do? I faltered. Well, of course, it didn’t have to do anything, you see, for it wasn’t in the trap with the tiger… This was enough for me. Couldn’t I go home? I want to go home. But… couldn’t I see? The kid was quite safe…
Not only did I think it would be awful to be the kid, I also knew I was an awful cry-baby and I would start to cry if we went any nearer to that fortress. My poor father! He was a famous big game shot who hunted with Corbett and King George V and General Ironside… and there was I, a sniveller who was frightened even by the sight of a tiger trap. How could my mother and father possibly have produced such a… such a… Well, such a what? I didn’t know; must be to do with wiggling; that always led to something dreadful.
So much for Gwalior. No more talks about tigers; something to do with irrigation and dull enough not to frighten me—till I got home at least. By that time I would have forgotten. But I have not.
ENGLAND
1
DELHI, motor cars, rich people, English women with loud voices—”fancy! the Kingdom of Heaven filled with people like…” like my ayah and my friend Dhunia the sweeper? I hoped so but in fact I knew it would not be low caste, untouchables, like that, but ‘untouchables’ like that beautiful, laughing English Lady. Now I know that they were unspeakables too, but that I learned too late to be much help. Not even Miss Whybrow and Mrs Thompson could teach me that; I had another twelve years to go before I would even have a chance to learn.
But Delhi: New Delhi! Isn’t it splendid? If only I hadn’t got to go to school…
The train worked steadily, sometimes painfully over the stiffer gradients of the Western Ghats till it drew in to the terminus at Bombay. The railway station, like other architectural monuments of the British Raj, was a mixture of tawdry provincialism and Imperial domesticity which even in retrospect can evoke in me nostalgic feelings of great poignancy. I came in time to believe that these feelings were the substitute for what others called ‘homesickness’. But I had no home for which I could feel sick—only people and things. Thus, when I found myself alone in the playground of the Preparatory School in England where I kissed my mother a dry-eyed goodbye, I could see, above the hedge which separated me from her and the road which was the boundary of the wide world itself, her hat go bobbing up and down like some curiously wrought millinery cake carried on the wave of green hedge. And then it was gone.
Numbed, stupefied, I found myself staring into a bright, alert face.
“Which are you—A or B?” it said. Other faces had gathered.
“A”, I said hurriedly in response to the urgency I felt in their curiosity.
“You’re nor! You jolly well say ‘B’. You know nothing about it!” This was only too true.
“B”, I said obediently.
“You dirty little liar!” said the first one. Appealing passionately to the rest, “He just said he was A. Didn’t he7” That I had to admit.
“You can’t go back on that”, said the advocate of B. “You must stay B or you’ll be a beastly little turn-coat!” he cried heatedly.
“All right. I’ll stay B.”
A fight developed. I heard the first one shouting, “He is a beastly turn-coat; and a liar anyway. We don’t want him. Do we chaps?” The crowd had grown to formidable proportions, say, six or seven. “No”, they shouted.
“Don’t mind them”, said the second boy. “You stick to B.” And I did—for the rest of my life—though it took a long time before I discovered, and even then did not understand, that the main school was divided into Houses. School House, being bigger than all others, was divided into School House A and School House B—rivals. That was the immediate issue which had been solved by my becoming for ever B.
The storm subsidied as if it had never been of the slightest interest to anyone. B, not A; not A—B; that was what I had to remember.
At last the ghastly day ended and I was able to get under the bedclothes and sob.
“What’s the matter?” asked one of the three boys who shared the dormitory with me.
“I don’t know”, I wailed. He seemed sympathetic. He considered the matter for a moment.
“Are you homesick?”
“Yes.” At once I realized what an awful thing I had done. “No, B”, I hurriedly said. He got into bed. This time the day was over.
I learned to treasure that blessed hour when I could get into bed, pull the bedclothes over my head and weep. As my powers of deception grew I learned to weep silently till at last I became more like my mother who was not laughing, and was not crying. It was a painful process; I failed often in my attempts to climb each step of the ladder. Sometimes the problem was familiar—as with lying. “I’m not lying!” I had said brightly, hoping for my father’s approval of my floral arrangement. My mother would have known at once that such a mess could have been made by no one else; my father, though a brilliant engineer, was curiously dense when it came to Electric City and Simply City. So, in a luckless moment, my greed for reiterated admiration had led me to add “I’m not lying”. In that moment the glorious morning was obscured, the sun stopped glowing, became darkened and scorching, his words a torrent flowing over, beyond and below me. Tears did not cool and refresh—they scalded. Where had I got such an idea? I did not know. I had plucked them in the garden; I thought they would be nice.
Experiences—’deja vu’ phenomena—had provided me with a vocabulary thus:
Q What have you been doing?
A Nothing
Q Where have you been? /Where are you going7
A Out/Nowhere (discrimination required)
In my new world, peopled with Nickell Sehns, Hodsons, Havelocks, all disguised as little boys, the questions—like the questioners—were often deceptively familiar or incomprehensible, like “Are you A or B?” Sometimes the questions could not be met by my armoury of answers,, and my improvised answers led to further troubles.
“What’s your sister’s name?”
“Edna.”
“Edna?” repeated with bleak incredulity, followed immediately by a gale of scornful and contemptuous laughter, not quite ‘arf, arf but pitched in a sharper higher key—Havelock with a touch of jackals at night-time.
“What does your father do?”
“Engineer.” As I braced myself for the response I was deflated by sudden and unexpected tones of respect.
“No! Really? You lucky swine! You mean he really drives an engine?”
Fool that I was; why, oh why did I have to explain? The splendour faded from his face. Canals? Water? Obviously as wet as
his job and as anyone who produced me could be.
“Never mind”, he said generously as he realized we had now touched bottom and could sink no lower. “Have a sweet?” I was to discover he was B too—a friend for life. It was painful to discover, an hour or two later, that he had forgotten me. For some time I continued to hope he would remember he had offered me a sweet; I don’t think he ever did.
2
ON Wednesdays the bells of St. Michael’s Church on the neighbouring hill pealed for a service or, as some said, “choir practice”. They filled me with dread, a reminder of Sunday yet to come. In Eric or Little by Little which I had begun to read, the bell was always tolling. Or the World of School it said, and in that school it seemed that the boys died off like flies. Every Wednesday I remembered someone was dying; on Sundays I nearly died myself—every Sunday. I still feel ashamed that I was so utterly miserable, but so it was; I could not know that religion was being born.
On Sunday morning we went to church wearing Eton suits, mortar boards with bright blue tassels, our shoes polished before breakfast miraculously worn out by church time.
“What have you been doing to them?” the vixen who was our matron used to ask. “Your parents are poor; they cannot afford to buy you new shoes every term!”
Who had said they were poor? They hadn’t told me. It was like Eric or Little by Little; or Little Meg’s Children. I began to whimper.
‘You crying? A great big boy like you! Playing trains were you?”
Yes, but there was no dust, only gravel.
“Don’t let me catch you doing that again! The idea—just look at your shoes! Nearly worn right through and new only a week ago!”
She was smart, petite and… well, God rest her soul, I knew I was a horrible child and God would never make me a good boy however hard I prayed. I don’t think He ever listened. I really don’t.
The other boys stood around and watched; watched with their big, round eyes and hard, expressionless faces. ‘Come not in terror as the King of Kings, But kind and good with healing in Thy wings’. Please God, make me a good boy. He never did, never, never, The inspection by the matron ended always with me tearful, horribly brushed and neat, indescribably scruffy.
Church was all right; even the sermon, never less than forty minutes, was a respite from tormentors. I remember the relief when I learned that the text ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth and shall stand at the latter day upon the earth’ really should have been translated ‘For 1 know that my Avenger liveth and that he shall stand at the latter day upon my grave’. When church was over—and sometimes there were lovely hymns like ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and ‘Art thou weary, art thou languid, art thou’ something ‘sore distressed’—the trouble started. For half an hour we did ‘Search the Scriptures’. These were booklets in which texts from a book in the Bible were printed with blank spaces; we were to fill in the chapter and the verse where they were to be found. I could not find them; other boys could. God was worse than useless. I used to pray. One day, in a sermon, the mystery was solved. “Sometimes we think”, said the preacher, “that God has not answered our prayers but he has”. I pricked up my ears at this. “It means”, he went on, “that the answer is ‘No’”. I unpricked my ears.
After dinner of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding—very good I thought, but spoiled by what was to come—we went into the gymnasium where our tuck boxes were kept. We usually had no ‘tuck’ in them, but one fat boy with fishy green eyes and red hair always had. High off the ground, vertiginously high it seemed to me, was a horizontal pole that ran the length of the room; the smaller boys were made to crawl from one end of this to the other. For an age I was one of the small boys. As I gazed fearfully at the concrete far below and inched my way along, the eager faces of the boys below watched to see if we would falter and fall under the missiles showered at us. No one was injured while I was there so it cannot have been very bad in fact. But in my dreams—Oh God, my dreams!—the goggle-eyed parrots and pink round faces swam around me and I woke with a shriek. Whoever was that screaming?
One small boy who was crippled by polio escaped for one whole day because he had got his parents—who were poor—to provide him with a full tuck box for just one Sunday. For that day, as he handed out his goodies with nervous, shining eyes, he was voted “jolly decent”. The tuck lasted the hour; with the ending of the hour so ended his glory.
I would like to think that I had nothing to do with the tormenting—I was so terrified that it is just possible that my preoccupation with my coming turn saved me. Certainly it was not through any superior decency.
Another feature of our Sunday was The Walk. It was conducted by our head-master, a tactiturn, frightening man called Hirst. It was always the same—about three miles. To prevent loitering he had a rule that any laggards were punished according to a scale by which those who came in at the gate more than two minutes after him had to do ten squares; five minutes after him, it became twenty squares. No one in my memory exceeded, and only rarely approached, the five minutes. The misery of starting Monday with a load of ten squares—four figures multiplied by themselves—was so awful that it overshadowed the walk—till I learned to imagine that I owned a beautiful little railway that ran along the side of our walk. Its coaches could just hold my friends. I myself was the engine driver of course. Ever after that I had no difficulty, no fatigue, no boredom, no squares to do on Monday. I don’t think God had anything to do with this; I thought it up by myself. But if it was God who put the idea into my mind I can only say it was jolly decent of Him and a first class idea. For that three miles every week I was infallibly and unmistakably a ‘good boy’.
At six o’clock we went to Chapel at the main school for an hour. I liked that. We did not have ‘Art thou weary, art thou languid?’—which was a pity—but once we had ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and the music master, who played the organ, interposed the stirring strains of ‘Come to the cook-house door boys, come to the cook-house door’ as part of the accompaniment. The effect of this authentically military music made the occasion extremely moving. I also liked the hymn with the lines ‘A noble army, men and boys, the matron and the maid’. I could have done without the Matron, and it seemed a bit mean to have only one maid; otherwise it called up splendid visions. ‘Borne on angels’ wings to Heaven, glad the summons to obey’ was also a favourite till I became big and powerful, and the centre or ribald glances when I was singing about the angels’ wings.
The day Thou gavest Lord is ended. Bed at—nearly—last. But first we had to say our prayers. Each knelt in prayer at the end of his bed. I must have thought of engines during this necessary but tiresome interlude. Unlike the dust, the glorious dust for ever gone, unlike the concrete and gravel of the playground, more safe even than the Walk which could be interrupted by some fool wanting to talk, one could emit clouds of steam and smoke without scuffing up one’s heavenly boots and bringing financial ruin on Little Meg’s parents. Shod with the gospel of peace, which the moth could not corrupt nor gravel wear out, I was going to sleep. I would leap into bed and there, if the bed did not creak too much, I could start wiggling. This was so delightful that a new danger crept in—I might laugh. The danger was real because no one had ever known me to laugh.
One day in class the master noticed that I was wiggling; it seems hard to believe now that I could ever have supposed he didn’t, for my wiggling could hardly have been more anonymous than the Indian bear’s progress through the forest. He was very gentle. “Don’t do that Wilfred”, he said, “or you will have to be sent away.” I could hardly believe my ears. The other boys, witnesses of my rebuke, stared at me in stony innocence like the gods in the caves at Elephantine.
One evening Freddie Sexton and I were late in joining the devotional parade. At the end of every bed, except his and mine which were at one extreme, were kneeling boys. The sight of seven pairs of pink upturned cherubic feet was too much for Freddie; he, unlike me, was a lively, cheerful boy with a keen sense
of the ridiculous. Suddenly he limped down the row, one foot on the floor, the other placed firmly on the upturned soles. Each time, as if he had been recalled by the accident of his clumsiness to the sacredness of the occasion, he said “Ooh—sorry! Ooh—sorry!. Ooh—sorry!” I saw his point; I laughed.
God, taking a leaf out of the Devil’s book, entered into the seven little hypocrites praying in a row. But Freddie could hold his own.
“And you were laughing!” one boy said indignantly.
“No, not laughing”—but certainly not crying either.
“How do you know?” said Freddie, coming to my rescue. “You should have had your eyes shut!”
Like a well placed bullet this stopped him—for a moment—but he was a quick-witted Welsh boy of strong revivalist tendencies.
“I heard him!” he countered, but he was too late.
“You had your eyes open!” said Freddie, afire now, moral warmth glowing in his face and eyes. “You had your eyes open!”
Bevan collapsed. His smooth, soft, gentle, religious nature was something I had not encountered; later it led to my downfall. Freddie’s bright eyes were something Bevan had not encountered either.
I was afraid of Freddie, but this incident aroused feelings of glee which were never wholly quenched even in the hours of great moral and religious superiority. Poor Freddie was quenched for ever by an undiagnosed acute appendicitis.
3
A YEAR later I was on an errand that took me through the churchyard where Freddie was buried. A figure—it was Bevan—was kneeling in prayer at his grave. He stopped as I came up, saw me, and explained smoothly in his beautiful voice that he often prayed at Freddie’s grave.
The Long Week-End 1897-1919 Page 4