Once we had an English nurse in Delhi. I remember nothing of her—only a vague impression of ladylike superiority and a strong sense of my parents’ inferiority. One day a row started; it had something to do with her use of paint. My mother questioned my sister and me about what she had been doing. I was frightened; my sister may also have been frightened. My mother could not get a word out of either of us. I did not even say “nothing”.
The next English nurse, whom I liked, took us to see a sheep being killed. It was a black sheep and its throat was cut. My sister was not frightened—or perhaps she was too small to know and certainly too small to run. I was terrified and I could and did run. I told my mother and my story could not be shaken. The nurse said it was only a red scarf round the sheep’s neck. She was immediately sacked; I did not want her to be sent away. My mother was furious and the girl—very young compared with the imposing aristocrat who, despite her superiority, my mother had dared question—was packed off.
That was the end of them and the beginning of our ayah. As far as I was concerned it was the end of Nickel Sehn and Co. who beat up people like her and Dhunia whom I loved.
It was also the end of that particular Morgan. It took me a long time to learn that there were plenty more where that one came from, the source of the Morgans of this life. He was promoted to the main school because he was judged ‘too big’—that is, too big a bully—to remain in the prep. I heard no more of him though I did hear a little of his friend Pickett whose nastiness had a more durable quality than Morgan’s.
What led to Morgan’s investigation and promotion I do not know. Years later Miss Good told me that she, Mr Hirst and Miss Whybrow had no idea that anything was amiss till the day of the riot. It was supposed that we were having schoolboy fun—just a continuation of the train game which we so happily, spontaneously and voluntarily played together. How could she have known better? How indeed did she and poor ‘Nigger’, living in his private hell, come to know so much?
We used sometimes to go to the Upper Field to watch the main school play a match. The field had an iron swing gate separating it from the lane which led to the prep school. The distance was almost two miles between gate and school. Three or four of us decided to stand and swing on the bottom rail; the weight made the cast iron post snap. We looked with consternation, looked and ran wildly without stopping till we were safe in our school room.
What had we done? It fell to me some hours later to go to Nigger’s study and confess. Perhaps he was amused; if so he did not show it. We had to pay for the damage. It cost us each half a crown and since this had to be found in my case out of my pocket money of threepence a week, for ten weeks I had no pocket money. It was a small price for such enormous relief. What, we wondered for some dreadful days, was going to happen? I have not found out yet.
No school could be as bad as the horror stories we invented for ourselves. Was that the source of the dreadful storms to which we were subject? Such cataclysmic disasters cannot be described. They haunt me still; even now I am impelled to write of them, but what I have written is, as soon as it is written, a boring triviality of the lives of over-privileged brats.
6
MISS WHYBROW used to judge our gardens and award a prize to the best. Like another and more famous Order of Merit it had no merit about it. But at that time I had not become hardened to an experience which for me had all the freshness and vitality of complete novelty.
I had two ‘friends’; a hard-bitten little Yorkshire farmer’s son, Heaton Rhodes, and John Dudley Hamilton. It was understood that we were friends; it was like A and B. It was so—so help me God—and there you were, for life. Rhodes had a beautiful garden, spick and span; it was unbeatable and everyone knew he had won. Conversely, John Dudley of the Red Hair had obviously lost—that is, he would have done had anyone bothered to consider a scarecrow’s nest of such monumental non-horticulturality. Mrs Hamilton, with whom I had fallen in love, on being shown her son’s achievement, burst into peals of the most fascinating and lovely laughter. In no way disturbed, John Dudley uprooted his geranium—I think of it as the only one—and threw it, not so much at her as out of the ‘garden’.
Then came the judging. Miss Whybrow went round with acute observation, becoming more and more portentous. Finally, as one whose expertise and mastery of the arcane arts had been learned in communion with God in the Garden of Eden, she proclaimed, as if announcing the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the winner. Yes I It was none other than J. D. Hamilton! J. D. looked as if he expected trouble. Mrs Hamilton flushed rather painfully at her son’s triumph. B. H. Rhodes, who had a hot temper, waited. He told us afterwards that Miss Whybrow had seen Mrs Hamilton’s car and was “sucking up” to get a ride. This certainly seemed a possibility. The Hamiltons were the only parents who owned a car—a Leon Bollet.
Years afterwards Mrs Hamilton told me she thought Miss Whybrow was a most unsuitable matron for small boys. Was it imagination that made me think the flush on her cheek as she spoke was a reminiscence of the garden prize?
There could hardly have been two boys more different than Heaton Rhodes and Dudley Hamilton. Heaton was a very tough little boy; I cannot imagine how he put up with me. He was acute, intelligent and hard. I remember how, when the form was being taken by a master from the main school—a man with a sharp tongue who on this occasion chose to be facetious at the eleven-year-old Heaton’s expense—Heaton stood it, and the form’s sycophantic approval of what should have been his discomfiture, with steadily mounting anger and a deepening flush. Then when the flow of sarcasm faltered he turned to a boy sitting a couple of yards away and said clearly and loudly, as if the form master was only a mechanical object like a gramophone, ‘Thinks he’s funny don’t he?” It was crushing in its finality and seemed to gain in force from the diminutive size of the speaker. When arguing, his voice had an edgy tremor and his phrases were punctuated with “nays” which intrigued me because everyone else I knew, including my parents, said “no”.
Dudley was softer, larger, with a wider range of emotion and greater flexibility of expression. I never knew anyone who devoured books as he did; he did so literally as well as metaphorically. One of my earliest experiences of him was finding he had eaten large parts of every page of my Captain. He responded to my anguished wail denouncing and announcing the depredations of this human caterpillar, by blushing hotly and behaving as if I did not exist. As the rest of the boys in the school had not the slightest interest in whether I existed or not I was reduced to fighting him. As he was bigger I could make no impression on him and had to be content with watching him go on reading and eating my Captain.
At the time of his horticultural triumph we were on what passed for friendly terms. I do not believe boys at prep school age achieve more than a rudimentary love; we certainly did not. Rhodes’s and Hamilton’s ‘people’ used to ask me to their houses for occasional—I now think most generously frequent—holidays. As the unfortunate sons had to suffer for their parents’ indiscretions so the parents compromised by accepting the convention that I was a friend of theirs.
I was a conscript ally in their warfare with their parents and brothers and sisters thus:
Dudley Get out Tuey.
Stewart Shan’t.
Dudley (furious): Get out! You stink!
Stewart I don’t.
Dudley You do! Doesn’t he Will?
Self Well…
Dudley There you are! You see? We both think you stink!
Mrs Hamilton and Mrs Rhodes, both in their different ways, helped to make my last year at the prep school one in which I began to break through what I see in retrospect to have been an intolerable exo-skeleton of misery. I did not see my parents; Hirst was inaccessible in his own misery which could not be eased by us; Miss Whybrow entertained hopes of an outlet for her ambitions through Hirst’s calamitous situation and favouritized attractive boys like Freddie Sexton. I must have felt Mrs Hamilton’s personality as spring to my prep school winter.
/> Mr Hamilton was a good business man and a good employer, judging by the respect in which he was held by his employees. His shrewdness frightened me though I admired his keen, alert manner.
I remember his once describing at table that someone had gone over Niagara Falls in a barrel on some kind of money-making wager. “And if he had got through that, then the next fool would have had to go over in a paper-bag.” This so tickled me that although as a small boy, and a guest at that, I should have been seen and not heard, I laughed so undisguisedly that Mr Hamilton, Mrs Hamilton and several adult friends could not help catching the infection. “Paper bag!” I repeated, and would start off again, the others being swept in by my amusement.
That holiday was a revelation. I could not have believed I could ever be so happy. I was not pleased when the time came for me to go to Archer Hall where the Rhodes’s lived. I was taken in the car—not that it was called a car. It was referred to, that glorious cream-coloured, brass-embellished confection distilled out of Heaven itself, as The Leon Bollet—the one and only in our world, a world made radiant by its presence in our midst.
Archer Hall was at the top of a hill and was approached by a long drive which led from a lane to the valley of the river Rib, then climbed to the farmhouse. The climb seemed to exhaust the Leon Bollet which, if it were not irreverent to speak of it in such terms, laboured at the latter end; when it turned and left for the return it deposited not only me but a patch of black oil. This introduced me to a different culture, one in which the Leon Bollet literally and metaphorically ‘stank’. “Look!” said Heaton, pointing to the patch. His scorn was absolute. He said nothing else; there was no need. Suffused with guilt as if I were personally responsible I crushed back my sense of glory and was taken at once to see Prince, already known to me through Heaton’s description.
7
PRINCE was a shire-horse of gigantic proportions and exquisite grace, nine, ten, fifteen, maybe twenty hands high, noble as his name denoted and of a beauty not to be expressed in words—except by Shakespeare. Alas! He was out working, but for some minutes we worshipped at the shrine where Prince was not.
Heaton showed that the rest was anti-climax; the introduction to Kathleen, Faith, Mercy and to five lesser brothers and sisters too numerous to be bothered with, and to Mrs Rhodes who could not be so easily dismissed even by Heaton. She was plump and motherly with great dignity and a capacity for affection which did not altogether conceal an air that she was not to be trifled with. She came, as did Mr Rhodes, from an old Yorkshire family, both sides of the family tracing their descent in a line unbroken for some three or four hundred years.
Heaton did not disguise his dislike of wasting time on these members of the family and their several occupations about the house when it could be spent on Prince, but he went through with it—visiting the larder first.
Mrs Rhodes would express a shrill, explosive, but immediately muted laugh; this she did as she gave me a welcoming kiss. She asked after my parents whom I had forgotten; thinking of them was inseparable from homesickness. To all such inquiries I used to reply that they were “very well thank you”; no more ‘summer suns are glowing’ for me. In fact they were in India, my mother having returned with my sister at the beginning of the year; they were a nuisance—the cause of having to write a letter once a week.
Life at Archer Hall was austere in a way that was new to me. I always picture the Hamiltons in summer time with the lawns brooded over by their magnificent cedar. With the Rhodes family, loving and comfortable though it was, life seemed easier to imagine in hard, bitter winds of winter. On the exposed hilltop the winds were keen, except in the height of summer when on occasion Heaton and I cycled over from school. We would find the farmhouse open-doored and apparently deserted. Our first call was at the larder where we helped ourselves liberally to cake. Thus refreshed we would wander out over the farm to Heaton’s favourite haunts. In time our punctual appetites warned us it was time to return to the house and pay our respects to Mrs Rhodes.
She would greet us with her little laugh. “I heard you had come”, she would say, “but I knew from the state of the larder before anyone told me that ‘someone’ had arrived. Never mind—we have made a fresh supply.” In those days there was always ‘plenty more’. Kathleen would be glad to see us, though shy; Faith, the pretty one was sulky and unwilling to hide her dislike of our intrusion.
The table was spread for tea. “I don’t expect either of you would mind” said Mrs Rhodes with an air of diffidence, “if you had an egg to your tea?” We agreed that we did not, mentally noting that ‘an egg meant ‘two’ eggs; ‘un oeuf, but ‘deuz-er-ee’. Our hearts, heavy at the impending departure, were lightened by our gastronomic feats.
These were the summer occasions, delightful but untypical. When I see Archer Hall it is as a great farmhouse lying amidst fields, deserted, sleeping its winter sleep. Mr Rhodes, weathered, striding from field to field, stopping now and then to talk to a farm-hand, seemed to typify the ruthless and austere character of farm life in prosperous England. It was prosperous, but the prosperity did not conceal the relentless struggles with an impenetrable cloak of comfort—as did the wealth of the Hamiltons. “Smelly things” said Heaton when he spoke, with curling nostrils, of the car. But neither he nor anyone else on the farm seemed to be envious so much as aware of a different way of life. Probably I idealize them; I certainly remember feeling that I could not live up to the enjoyment of farm life which was genuine enough with them.
Heaton considered I would be sure to like seeing a pig slaughtered. I, still remembering the trouble with the sheep, knew I would never be able to stand it. This I wished to keep to myself. Kathleen said I did not want to see it. Heaton, as I feared, said I couldn’t possibly be so soft as to object—after all, he reminded Kathleen, I wasn’t a girl. In fact I knew I was worse than any girl—certainly worse than Faith or my sister, and probably worse than Kathleen who did at least stand up to Heaton and never made me think she was a coward. I went. By so doing I found I did not prove my masculinity—not with Kathleen at any rate. As I kept my eyes shut or averted I could not be sure that I had deceived Heaton.
Less personally horrifying, but of an intensity of humiliation for Heaton, was the episode of the cow. “You two boys haven’t anything to do”, said Mr Rhodes briskly one fine morning, not so much formulating and reporting an observed fact as premising a definitory hypothesis. “Just drive Curly over to Mundens for me.” Heaton, who expected to see his cousin Bob of whom he was very fond, dropped the caution which he usually observed when dealing with his father, and agreed.
Curly was in Bartram’s field next to the drive where it crossed the Rib. This Mr Rhodes told us. What he did not tell us—I can hardly believe that Heaton’s suspicion would have remained dormant had he done so—was that Curly had recently calved. If he did tell us he must have slurred it over to test Heaton’s perspicacity. At eight in the morning we duly located Curly and set off light-heartedly enough to drive her, without her calf, to Mundens. We reckoned, or Heaton reckoned as I had no views on the matter, to achieve our task in a couple of hours without much difficulty. The first fifty yards to the gate into the drive were accomplished with such ease and speed that we were not really concentrating when Curly passed through the gate, turned sharply up the hill—that is, away from Mundens—and proceeded at a brisk trot for home.
Running up-hill is no joke, but to be outdistanced by a mere cow, with whom one does not usually associate fine athletic prowess, was a nasty surprise. Curly reached the farmyard, where her darling was lodged, a considerable distance in front of Heaton and still further in front of me. For the next quarter of an hour or so she showed that she had outdistanced us mentally as well as physically; she knew her way about the farmyard with a detail which surprised Heaton who thought he had been born and bred there. Then we cornered her, or, more accurately, Heaton did with myself as a stop-gap, but one which hoped that Curly would not realize that where I stood the gap, despit
e appearance, was wide open. Vain hope. With lowered horns she came straight for me. Without a moment’s hesitation—there was no time for that—I removed myself. Curly, with frisking tail, lit out for the open spaces.
The Long Week-End 1897-1919 Page 6