Appetite for Life : The Education of a Young Diarist, 1924-1927 (9781551996776)

by Ritchie, Charles

  Geraldine is leaving here today to stay with the Kennedys and I must say it is a relief to me. I am tired of talking about the kind of love I don’t feel and making the kind of love I do feel.

  Anan has arrived to stay. She used to be my father’s secretary and before that Roley’s governess and so she is like a member of the family. She has had her hair shingled, which is a great mistake. In the evening we played bridge. It was not very successful as Mother got into an argument with Mary Binney. I don’t know how she managed it as Mary just keeps on agreeing and agreeing and agreeing. After that we abandoned bridge with some ill feelings all around. Then Anan told our fortunes. Tony says he distrusts Anan’s fortunes, which always contain “the offer of a well-paid salary with family discussions connected with it.” He says he cannot imagine why there would be any discussion about a well-paid salary.

  17 September 1925.

  Katherine telephoned me this evening and asked me to come and see her as she had something to tell me. When I got to the Almons’ they were all out and the children in bed upstairs. Katherine met me in the hall. I noticed that she had on my signet ring, which she has not worn for a long time. We went into the big empty drawing-room and turned on the lights and sat down side by side on the stiff sofa. I had not seen her to talk to for weeks and I felt as though we were acquaintances who had met at a tea-party. Then she said, “This will be a surprise to you and I am telling no one but you because I am very fond of you and am afraid I have often been beastly to you. I am going to be married.” I was thinking, “I suppose it’s Tommy,” but she went on, “To an older man.” Before I could stop myself I said, “Not David Martineau?” “Yes,” she said. “How did you guess? He has written proposing to me. I sent him a letter today accepting. I am going out to British Columbia next month to join him on his farm.” I thought, “She is not in love with him.” I was completely certain of it. I know what she is like when she is in love and when she is not in love. All I could think of to say was, “I hope you will be very happy.” “Now,” she said, “you must take back your ring. Remember you said it was only a loan? Anyway we were never really engaged, were we?” She took off the ring and handed it to me. I put the ring in my pocket and went out into the hall. As she was opening the front door she turned and kissed me on the lips. I began trembling and felt a sob coming and said, “Don’t do this. You know I love you,” and she said, “Yes, I know you did but you are going to Oxford and that’s what you always wanted. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right.” As I walked down the drive I started crying and could not seem to stop. It is such a waste – a waste of her life to marry this old crackpot, a waste of my love for her, a waste of everything. I would far rather she had married Tommy, but I suppose he did not ask her. Of course, as she said, we were never really engaged, and she never loved me, and I did not love her enough to give up Oxford, but I did love her and no one else.

  22 September 1925.

  Tomorrow is my nineteenth birthday. My life is slipping away so fast. I shall be an old man before I have accomplished anything. This time next year I shall be at Oxford. One chapter finished … another begun. I can’t help seeing my life as a book and myself as a character in it. Here everything is changing: Peter gone to Cambridge, Katherine soon away and married to Martineau. I hardly ever think of Katherine now. It would be like trying next morning to remember a dream you had the night before – you just cannot concentrate on the memory.

  The biggest change and the saddest one is that The Bower is to be sold. Mother cannot cope with the expense of it any longer. I cannot believe that anywhere else will ever be home to me again.

  PART 2

  OXFORD

  1926–1927

  22 September 1926.

  I have been re-reading my last year’s diaries. How long ago all that seems. I think I have grown up in this last year. I have worked much harder at college, but have I changed? I can only hope so. It would be too awful to remain the way I was then. Anyway, everything else around here has changed: Peter at Cambridge, Tony back in England, Katherine away and married to Martineau. (I have had one note from her since she left, enclosing a snapshot of herself. She looks different, but it may be a bad snapshot.) The biggest change is that I leave for Oxford in two weeks’ time. It is actually going to happen. Every time I think of it a kind of tingling of excitement goes through me and I cannot sit still in one place. I shall be a different person when I get there as there will be no one there who knows what I have been like till now. It will be a new page with nothing written on it, and the beauty of Oxford itself, the knowledge to be absorbed, the exchange of ideas and impressions with brilliant witty new friends – all this wonderful opportunity is thanks to my mother who is making so many sacrifices to find the money for my allowance and the college fees. I owe everything to her and I shall never forget it.

  I find in my diaries how often I have written that I was restless and discontented here. How I have wanted to get away. Now that I am going I begin to think how much happier I have been than I have realized at the time, and how much I shall miss this beloved house, my home, The Bower.

  2 October 1926.

  On board ship. The first day up after four consecutive days and nights of seasickness. How this boat rolls and pitches. I don’t know which is worse, the shuddering roll or the vicious pitch that half throws you out of your berth. It is a small boat, 9,000 tons, and the steward says the weather off the Grand Banks is the worst they have had for years. It is the season of equinoctial gales. I have spent my time being sick, recovering from being sick, and waiting to be sick again.

  If I open my eyes I see my overcoat swaying as it hangs on the hook and that is enough to start me off again. I haven’t even thought of Oxford. I have sincerely wanted to die. I have nothing to read but J. M. Barrie’s The Little Minister and if I ever see it again it will make me seasick. A kind cross-eyed steward brings me brandy and tells me not to go near the dining-saloon, where he says the passengers are “stoofing themselves with dookling and vomiting all over the place.”

  4 October 1926.

  Walked on deck. How this boat stinks! They have just been painting the old crock and even the funnels smell of fresh white paint. Then there is the smell of frying grease coming through the grills from the galley. I try to forget the smells walking around with Dr. Grenfell, the medical missionary in Labrador, a most magnetic and idealistic man. When I heard of the hardships of the people and snow blindness, etc., I felt ashamed of making a fuss about seasickness, but still I felt decidedly queasy.

  5 October 1926.

  Weak and empty as an old paper bag, but better. I got into conversation with a graduate student, also on his way to Oxford. He is a fine intelligent young man called Forsey. He has read all the serious articles in political science magazines and attended sessions of the House of Commons in Ottawa and taken notes of the proceedings. He will probably be a figure in Canadian public life. Why can’t I be more like him?

  9 October 1926.

  There is a plump girl or young woman with black curly hair, cut short, who has the next chair to me on the promenade deck. We have been chatting together for the last day or two over the watery cups of bouillon the deck stewards pass round in the morning. She is going to study at the London School of Economics and has written a thesis on Guild Socialism. She seems very earnest, but this morning she pressed my hand under the steamer rug. After dinner I asked her into the smoking-saloon and we had a couple of brandies each. I am getting quite addicted to brandy since I got aboard this boat.

  Then we went up on deck. There was a rough sea and we slithered about the wet deck arm in arm and came to stop against one of the funnels. The boat was rolling so much that our embrace was almost impossible, but not quite. All she said afterwards was, “Oh, I have got white paint on my coat.” Then we went in and had another brandy and she began talking about Guild Socialism again as though nothing had happened.

  10 October 1926.

  There was a heavy fo
g as the boat came up the Mersey and we hung about in the river for what seemed hours. When the fog lifted I missed the first glimpse of England as I was down in my cabin trying to calculate the amount of the tips I should give to the different stewards: the cabin steward, the deck steward, the dining steward, etc. I should like to give the whole lot to my cabin steward; he probably saved my life with the brandy when I was seasick.

  In Liverpool it was raining. I took the cross-country train to Cheltenham to stay with Great Aunt Zaidée. It was a long trip. I had a carriage to myself and pressed my face to the window gazing at the flooded fields and trying to feel excitement at being here at last, but I was longing for a pee and it was not a corridor train. I thought I should burst but fortunately the train stopped long enough at some station en route for me to get out and back in again.

  When I got to Aunt Zaidée’s house it was past midnight and she had gone to bed, which was disappointing as I had looked forward to talking to her, but she is old – eighty-seven – and has not been well. Her maid, Elizabeth, waited up for me. She has been with Aunt Zaidée since she was a girl forty years ago and is a wonderful woman, highly intelligent. Mother says that if she had had a chance she would have been capable of running a successful business of her own, but she seems completely devoted to Aunt Zaidée.

  I was exhausted when I got to bed and half wished I was back at The Bower.

  11 October 1926.

  It is odd being back in this house where I have not been since I was a boy on my first visit to England ten years ago. Nothing has changed here: still the same three maids and the same cook whose husband, the coachman, taught me how to ride a bicycle circling round the flower beds on the gravel path in this garden. Aunt Zaidée came down to the drawing-room this morning after breakfast. She has hardly changed either. She has been a charmer and she still is with her soft voice, the sparkle of her blue eyes, and her rose-leaf complexion, encouraged by touches of rose-leaf rouge worn in an old-fashioned way high up on her cheeks. She has little ringed hands. On one finger she wears a ring made of three bands of stones: each band is the engagement ring given her by each of the three husbands she has outlived – the first, from the days of her Nova Scotian girlhood, was a gambler and a bankrupt; the second, a bishop; the third, a general. When she came to England she changed her name from plain Sadie to exotic Zaidée. She has had no children and thinks of my mother as a loved daughter. I wish I felt more at my ease with her. I never have since I was a boy, when she could not conceal her distaste for my hay fever, my eyes oozing, a dripping nose, uncontrollable sneezing fits. She likes people to be seemly and decorative and makes me feel doubtful whether I am either.

  When she had gone up to her room I paced about the drawing-room among the small tables and bric-a-brac, and when I was peering at some miniatures hanging on a velvet screen behind the sofa I managed to knock over the screen, and the miniatures came clattering down all over the floor. I pinned them up again, I hope in the right order, as I am sure Aunt Zaidée would notice if they were not. Then I went into the pantry and sat drinking tea and joking with the maids. One of them, Sarah, was always my favourite. She is so gentle, just the sort of woman I should like to be married to.

  13 October 1926.

  I left Cheltenham this morning to go to stay with the Lauries. When I said goodbye to Aunt Zaidée she gave me a cheque for £50, so I take back anything critical I thought about her. She is a Grand Old Girl. The Lauries are great friends of Mother’s and are extremely kind to me. Colonel Laurie is full of life and enthusiasm, like a young man. He took me on a tremendous walk today across the Epsom Downs and walked so fast that I could hardly keep up with him. He is very religious and evangelical – a fine man. He does not approve of drinking or smoking, so I go and sit in the conservatory when I want to smoke. I have been talking quite a lot to Mrs. Laurie. She is so understanding – I feel I can say anything to her – a really Christian woman, but she never forces her faith on you. She is lovely to look at too: beautiful brow and eyes.

  14 October 1926.

  The Lauries motored me to Oxford today. I was really shivering with excitement and hardly knew what I was saying when we were talking in the car. It was raining and we took some time to find my digs, which are in the Abingdon Road. It was a wrench saying goodbye to the Lauries. They are the last link with home. My digs consist of a bedroom and half a sitting-room, the latter to be shared with an American Rhodes Scholar. The sitting-room looks out on now flooded playing-fields. There is an aspidistra in the window and a small fireplace with one log smouldering in it. The landlady is very toothy and genteel. Her husband, who is a plumber, lurks in the back hall. When I was unpacked, the Rhodes Scholar came in. His name is Post. He has a round, pink face and is quite old – a graduate student from the Western States. He looks good-natured but was very firm with the landlady about putting more coal on the fire.

  I do not have to report in to college till tomorrow morning, so tonight I walked along the Abingdon Road and over the Folly Bridge into Oxford and turned left opposite Christ Church to where I had been told Pembroke College was – my college – and went into the porter’s lodge. It was crowded with undergraduates talking and laughing together in groups and I felt very out of it not knowing anyone. I asked the porter where I could have dinner and he said Hall was not open till tomorrow “but some of the gentlemen go to the George Restaurant,” so I followed his directions and came in to a little bar packed with undergraduates who seemed more smart and glossy than the ones at the porter’s lodge at Pembroke. They were making a lot of noise chaffing each other and standing each other drinks and telling stories of what had happened to them in the vacation. I ordered a cocktail and sat down in a corner watching the animated scene. Then I had another cocktail and I thought, “Here I am, friendless in a city of friends,” so I had a third cocktail and said to myself, “Some day I will come back to this bar surrounded by friends of my own,” but I couldn’t face going up to the restaurant and having dinner alone so I walked back to my digs and on the way looked through the porch of Christ Church at the noble, spacious quad, the lighted windows gleaming through the damp mist, and I felt a pang of pleasant excitement and anticipation heightened by the cocktails taken on an empty stomach. When I got to my digs Post was in the sitting-room drinking a glass of beer. He said, “You and I will have to come to an arrangement with these people about having sufficient coals and firewood. This place is cold enough to freeze your balls off.” I must say he is right; it is damned cold.

  15 October 1926.

  This morning I reported to Drake, the senior tutor. I was ushered into a sort of sitting-room, where all the other freshmen were sitting about looking self-conscious and pretending to read magazines. Drake looks ageless as an icon and just about as welcoming. (I believe he is one of the last surviving dons who came in under the old rule that dons could not marry.) He was grimly polite to me but when he looked at my credentials he seemed very doubtful whether King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, existed at all. Then he told me that I was to take no History in my first year but to do Pass Mods instead. I was too awed at the moment to protest but I have every intention of doing History as I always planned. Our next interview was with the Dean. I had expected a pot-bellied, old grey-beard, but he can’t be forty. He has an aureole of golden curls, a most seraphic smile, and a positively caressing manner. He had actually heard of Nova Scotia and thought he had a cousin there, either there or in British Columbia.

  I dined in Hall and sat next to a red-haired man called Ducker with a prominent jaw. I made the mistake of remarking on the effect of the evening light coming through the coloured windows on the panelling and portraits. He lowered his head in a disapproving silence. After dinner when we were walking across the quad he told me that it was not good form to make such comments. The beauties of Oxford are supposed to be taken for granted. Still, he doesn’t seem such a bad sort. We were joined by another freshman called Miles, a dark-eyed, untidy youth whose ambition is to beco
me a Shakespearean actor. We three sauntered about the streets in the rain, trying to look as if we had been up at Oxford for at least two years.

  16 October 1926.

  I went to my first lecture today from the Dean on Voltaire as an historian. It was a most irritating performance. He pointed out the inaccuracies in Voltaire’s historical writing and described it as “superficial,” as if he was correcting an undergraduate’s essay. I imagine that Voltaire could demolish the Dean with a flick of the wrist. In the evening Ducker and I adjourned after dinner to Miles’ digs. He has photographs of actors stuck up everywhere. He knows all about Kean and Henry Irving and all the great Shakespearean actors, and he recited passages from Shakespeare with his dark eyes flashing. He has lent me Hassan by Flecker, a marvellous poem full of restless beauty. Later in the evening we went round to Hertford College to call on a friend of theirs called Johnson. He is a flaxen-haired, pipe-smoking man who has bought a lot of objects like bowls containing matches, etc., made of pebbly brown china with the Hertford arms emblazoned on them. The curtains were drawn and we sat round the fire drinking cocoa, at first talking seriously and then exchanging limericks. I walked home feeling that I had had a real Oxford evening.

  20 October 1926.

  I had tea with a group of Canadian undergraduates. It would be very easy to fall into the habit of going about with my fellow Canadians. There are quite a lot of them around and some very nice ones. Almost all are older than I am as they got degrees at colleges in Canada before coming here. Of course, it is nice to swap experiences of Oxford and to talk about things at home, but I did not come to Oxford for this.

  Also, I have called on two or three boys who were at preparatory school with me in England, including John Martin, who was quite a friend of mine. He has become very conventional and seemed only moderately pleased to see me, saying that he expected that we might run into each other again sometime.