When I reached the Main School I had become proficient at games. Games were in themselves enjoyable; I was fortunate not to have had them buried under a mass of subsidiary irrelevancies—such as winning matches, keeping my ghastly sexual impulses from obtruding, and preserving a fit body for the habitation of a supposedly healthy mind. I liked swimming; I enjoyed waterpolo; I could be indifferent to the rivalry with others for a place in the team. I was equally fortunate in rugger. It was soon obvious that I was good; I was first class at every game but cricket—at which I was so bad that it presented no problem. I could, therefore, come nearer to playing the game for the sake of the game than I ever came to working for the sake of work. My excellence meant that the prospects of captainship began to appear over the horizon. That would mean that games for the sake of games would no longer be a feasible aim. In fact I became a very bad captain, but by that time war had come and captainship)—but not leadership—had become irrelevant. My failure, in so far as it was noted at all, was excused in the prevailing disaster—’it’s the war’. No one had told us that the games were a prelude to war.
Before that day—dies ilia, dies irae, calamitatis et miseriae—I had one triumph, one great pleasure even though not unexpected. Athletic contests took place in the Easter Term—a bleak arrangement, inimical to athletic success, but so it was ordained. Distinguished from the rest was the Senior Cross Country Run.
16
THE day of the Run was sunny and clear. The hedges showed the green blush which in southern England I had come to expect within a day or two of March 25th. In School House lunch was over; we runners ate sparingly, believing that a big meal produced ‘stitch’. The sky was blue and cold; I felt taut in the pit of my stomach for I was expected to win. My rival was a sprinter, stories circulated about the high speeds he had reached in practice runs over the distance. They were faster than mine, but I judged it prudent to keep my mouth shut. It was time to line up. At last—the start. There were thirty or forty of us, too many for the lane to hold us conveniently, so I had to run faster than I cared for to avoid being held up half a mile from the start at the narrow gate at the top of the hill.
I was distressed by the sprint up the hill, as I knew I would be. Nevertheless it seemed more severe, more sinister than I had expected. I was first through the gate, my rival second. How smoothly and easily he rani I felt awkward, clumsy, laboured. The stitch had started; as we had drawn away from the others I felt sure he could hear my distressed breathing. I quickened my pace to draw away so he could not hear me. There was the Farm, sharp and bright in the sun. I was drawing ahead; the sound of his foot-fall was fainter. Long Meadow and the stitch gone at last; no more sound of feet to torment me. I was running easily when I saw the gate leading into the road in front of me. As I came up to it I had a sickening feeling that I had lost ground. A scrap of hedge enabled me to snatch a glance back without being seen by my rival from whom I wished to keep all knowledge of my fear of his success. He had closed right up; he must have seen my furtive glance, hawthorn hedge notwithstanding. I vaulted the gate though I felt I could hardly spare the effort. As I turned left-handed on the other side I saw him check. I fancied he had been disconcerted and had fumbled the catch of the gate in momentary dismay. I had regained a few yards I was sure; how had I let him catch up on me unawares?
The road was hard and uneven; it was much further than I expected before I reached the field where the run left it for the slope down to the Plantation. He was close behind now and I knew he would pass me. I sprinted down the slope, but he did the same. I so desperately needed to reach the shelter of the Plantation before he could pass me. He was breathing easily; I was sure he could hear my gasping distress. I hardly realized I had entered the Plantation before him, but what use was it to me? I needed to be screened from him to put my despairing plan into action.
Though the path through the coppice was a series of short winding turns I did not think they could serve my purpose. The Plantation was notorious for this path, narrow, almost overgrown and of a glutinous mud at any season. It was known that any runner would take the chance to regain his breath there where nobody could run. I decided not to take the chance. At the first twist of the path where I could be sure of being hidden from sight I would… I lengthened my pace. He was too distressed to notice. At last I had a few yards to spare, under cover, disguised. Throwing all I had into the effort I began to sprint—if I could call it that when every step was an agonizing pull to release my foot from the squelching, cloying tug of the mud.
At last I saw light at the path’s parting from the wood. If he could see me then he would know the race was his. I came into the clear light of the afternoon sun, gasping and without the energy to spare even for subterfuge. Here the path was firm and dry. I ran for the point where a left-handed turn interposed hedge between me and the path he yet had to run. As I reached it I saw he was out of the Plantation and had me in view for the second before I turned under the shelter of the hedge. Once behind it I lengthened my stride and ran as if the fiends were after me. No fiend could have spurred me more than the knowledge that my rival could not see me for at least seven seconds. I wanted to be sure that when he saw me next I should have gained so much that his hope was destroyed. I was now running up hill. Though the firmness of the ground more than compensated for the slope, I knew that this effort would punish him more than it did me. He had lost ground in that terrible Plantation; he cannot have expected me to gain on him there. I had a chance to see him again, about a mile later; he was a hundred yards behind. There were another thousand yards before the finishing line, yet I was sure I could not now be beaten. I was not.
I did not like my rival; he was the hero of his house, the athletic champion on whom they relied to defeat me. He was favoured by the classics master who was a popular man and a fine cricketer; his status as a scholar was similar—a fine classicist with a genuine passion for Virgil and Homer. He would expostulate with me in class, “What is there difficult about Latin? You have the brains; you only have to follow the rules and there are so many of them—”that”, said I finishing the sentence for him, “you cannot possibly remember them.” This pert answer annoyed and puzzled him. It puzzled me; there was more of jealousy and envy than I realized—jealousy of the boys, the athlete being one, with whom he had friendly tussles; jealousy of his glamour which dated in our eyes from Cambridge University days, and which was enhanced by his association with the senior classics master, Colman.
Colman was of established English stock; he looked like an Elizabethan statesman of the kind with which I was familiar from portraits in history books. His enthusiasm for sport was intensified as he was debarred from it by an injury reputed to be due to falling from a lamp post in a boat-race night rag. He liked me sufficiently to invite me on one of his schoolboy parties on the Norfolk Broads; on another occasion to his home in Peterborough.
The envy and admiration of English Society—so different from my ayah or dhunia—grew as it had with the Rhodeses. The religious rituals of the family surprised and impressed me. His parents, both deaf, filled me with awe and dislike. Before breakfast the whole family—domestics, visitors and any relatives who might be near—gathered for prayers. Before they all knelt, after the Bible reading, the sister whose duty it was would deftly slip the lighted spirit lamp under the egg-boiler so that the termination of the prayer—three minutes for lightly boiled—would coincide with the readiness of the eggs for consumption. This economical arrangement kept piety, gastronomy and common-sense in harmonious combination until one day the guest of the family was a gentleman of great piety and distinction whose claims to represent the family before the Lord could not be ignored. He was asked to offer up a prayer. Whether he was overwhelmed by the thought of the August Personage whom he was invited to address, or whether he was modestly aware that the family were wealthy members of his congregation, never became clear. Martha slipped unobtrusively to the egg-boiler; all knelt, and the petitioner slipped into what m
ight be called ‘top’ or ‘Jonesian’ gear.
‘Lightly boiled’ was passed easily; ‘hard boiled’, and still he showed no sign of weakening. Martha began to have a spiritual crisis: to extinguish the unspiritual lamp, or not? Martha, true to her name, was troubled about many things.
The family, knee-sore and flushed, rose; prayers were over, the eggs—boiled. They had lost their savour for the family; all refused except the guest. Unfortunately it appeared that he could not take hard boiled eggs. Could he, perhaps, he asked modestly, have a ‘soft boiled egg’? He could, and did, as he didn’t in the least mind waiting. The guest must have been spiritually inspired—perhaps by a spirit with a sense of humour.
The walls of the parental home were covered with painted leather. I was not able to see what was depicted, nor, I was surprised to find, was Colman. The home possibly had oppressive memories and the power to evoke them, for when he proposed a walk across the fens he seemed as pleased as I with the prospect. We had previously visited the cathedral. Although he and I both took an amateur interest in identifying ornaments and their styles and periods—to which he in fact had introduced me—the cathedral seemed to evoke similar feelings to those of his home.
Colman was a personality as complex as his physical body but his patriotism was simple and unwavering. It did not suggest to him the roll of drums, the clangour of martial music, but the great expanse of the fenland sky, the soft glow of hazy sun, Ely riding the landscape like a huge ship, a shadow matching the procession of clouds above. He was a man of the Fens, of Elizabeth’s England, of Hereward the Wake, of Cromwell, of Milton.
The walk to Crowland Abbey enshrined in an England which I was never to know again. It was hot; the air formed a shimmering screen between us and the landscape; the song of the yellow-hammers had crickets to form accompaniment; the bells of Crowland came over the land before we saw the remains of the abbey. The threat of war was upon us as an exciting actuality for me rather than the source of exasperation it was to Colman. The joy of fenland skating on the peculiar hooked skates, the shimmering bare landscape of summer, the small life of Wicken Fen, the glory of the skies—the thought that these were in jeopardy from robbers and violent men made his detestation of the German threat. The similarity to the Rhodes farmers, although outwardly they could hardly be less alike, was unmistakable. The Rhodes family did not read books; Colman, Oxford graduate and scholar, would not go to a performance of Shakespeare for ‘religious’ reasons. The beauties of nature were hard and bitter like hoar frost, the bleak winter scene, the slaughter and sale of animals; for Colman there was no beauty in international brotherhood, the ideals of peace on earth. These were matters for those who liked conversation.
Colman knew every inch of the Fens; his friend Will Mellows, Town Clerk of Peterborough, knew every street and alley of that city. He was able to point out that the Victoria County History had, in its painstaking survey of the Peterborough streets, made one great error—the streets described were those of Stamford, not Peterborough. The error had not been acknowledged, —nor had the receipt of his communication—perhaps a sign that the rot had gone too far. We discussed this in sight of Crowland and ate our bread and cheese.
17
THE walk to Crowland, the visit to Peterborough cathedral, Ely swimming through the heat of the unsheltered fenland—as I write of them I am distracted, aware of some change which meant ‘nevermore’. In the light of later events it is easy to suppose that it was war that brought about great changes. I do not believe that my sense of loss derived either from changes in myself or the world I knew. The expertise of Will Mellows, the fiery yet controlled patriotism of Colman, the calm security of Hereward the Wake’s country—I was dismayed, resentful of a past so filled with renown that it both stimulated and imposed a dead hand on my inchoate ambitions.
The Agadir crisis: what a nuisance these Germans were! “Wake up England!” King George V was alleged to have said. Well, what for? I was awake; so were lots of others. I would soon be going to Oxford or Cambridge—how wonderful it would be if I became an International! Wonderful indeed, but so ridiculous that such thoughts had to be kept secret.
I had no money so, I thought dully, I would have to win a scholarship. I knew no subject in which I could aspire to a scholarship except history—and that I did not like. I wrote halfheartedly to my parents, but I knew the answer so well that I could hardly bother to open the envelope or read their letter. No—I knew it—they had no money, unless €50 a year would be enough. It was awful to think that they imagined that €50 a year would do. Euston at Trinity, I told my father with such civility as I could muster, said I might be able to scrape through with €300 a year. I did not want to scrape through. I wrote, rudely, to my mother to tell her to get some sense into my father. She did not reply; even if the money was available I would need good manners too if I were to ‘scrape through’. To them I could express my ambitions while exposing the bankruptcy of my equipment; I did not anticipate a welcome from less tolerant observers.
I had to go to sit for scholarship examinations at Oxford. I was overawed by the Queen’s College hall where the exam took place.
I knew I was not worth a scholarship—it was one respect in which my estimate of my chances was correct; the result showed beyond a doubt that they could not give me a scholarship or an exhibition, even though an exhibition took into consideration the poverty as well as the worthiness of the candidate. Damn them I They said I was not even poor enough. My relief at slinking out of Oxford was tempered by despair at what was to happen to me. Without influence I could get nowhere; I had no influence.
I told Colman. “Never mind”, he said, “better luck next time.” No money, no manners and no luck. 1 despised having to depend on luck instead of on—myself? It did not inspire me with hope. Colman comforted me, not by anything he said, but by what he was. His crippling headaches could come on him so suddenly when he was in class teaching that he would have to leave, dazed and almost reeling, to return to his house and his bed; his temper, so quiet that its intensity intimidated the oldest and bravest of us, never quite obscured his gentleness and stealthy kindness. Though it was many years later before I had an idea of the extent of his benevolence, I could feel it and be sustained by it.
A new spirit was abroad which began to obtrude upon me and gradually to obscure my anxieties. The preoccupation of all the staff seeped through to pervade the senior school. At first they seemed only to be uninterested in us and our world; it was not clear why they were attaching so much importance to Agadir, the Panther, the Germans. It was interesting of course. Did they think there would be a war? They didn’t know. Probably not. Perhaps. Maybe. But it would be short. Someone—Norman Angel—had proved no one could win a modern war so, clearly, no one could be so foolish as to start one. I felt my heart sink; even a short war would be interesting and it was depressing to feel that it would be smothered by common sense. Colman thought it would be a relief to see the end of war scares. “Do you think there will be a war sir?” Our questions became more frequent, more hopeful that there would be a war; perhaps a great naval battle. ‘Your glorious standard raise again to face another foe’, we sang at the end-of-term concert. Our music master laughed. “No”, he said, “it was pure coincidence.” He had chosen Ye Mariners of England months before he had any idea that there might be a war. Still, it would have been nice if only he had owned up to some premonition, something which we could have boasted about—a psychic counterpart of the leak of gas from the torn-out gas bracket so magnificently plugged with soap.
The war became a bore. The fleet had sailed under sealed orders. Even ‘sealed orders’ was something you sailed under with the inevitability with which you conferred behind ‘locked doors’. Where the hell had the fleet gone? After a few days I stopped rushing to the paper for news of the Great Naval Battle.
Term ended. I went off for my holiday to the Thompsons’ with Laurie Lawn whose parents, like mine, lived abroad. Thompson and his wi
fe ran a prep school. He had a boat, an untidy, dirty, dilapidated old yawl which he kept tied up at a mooring in the river Deben. There was no nonsense about Thompson; he was an unpredictable, bad-tempered tyrant—unlike my loved, unhappy, ghost-haunted failure ‘Nigger’ Hirst. He hated boys who were soft, loutish, half alive, half dead—a perfect description of me. I felt he could have saved time and words if he had simply said “Bion”. Manly boys, morally clean boys, did not make a fuss about dirt. They liked his indescribably filthy boat with sails whose brownish red pigment came off on their jackets. They liked being up at the bow working the foresheet while icy cold seas broke over them. So did I, but I was determined that I would not be in debt to that hateful old fool. I liked it because nobody was there except myself alone.
The Long Week-End 1897-1919 Page 11