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

by Ritchie, Charles

  As I was walking home with Morris he produced out of his pocket a piece of paper on which was a drawing of a key. The different parts of the key were labelled in his writing “Perfect Purity,” “Perfect Faith,” “Perfect Humility.” He said he had a similar drawing of a key which he always carried with him and would like to give this one to me. He said he looked at his when assailed by temptation. I thought this puerile but somehow touching. He suggested that we should have a “quiet time” together once a week, but I draw the line at that.

  4 November 1926.

  As I was leaving the Oxford Union today, where I had been writing a letter to Mother on their free writing-paper, a small creature like a moth came fluttering down the steps beside me and burst into breathless conversation: “Oh, the sepulchral gloom of Oxford on Sunday afternoon. How does one survive it? One feels like going into the garden to eat worms. Don’t you agree? I see you do. Come and have a cup of tea with me if you can bear my utterly squalid digs. The hideousness of them has to be seen to be believed.” His name is Leslie Mahon. He lives in Wellington Square and his sitting-room is full of his landlady’s antimacassars and Landseer steel engravings, to which he has incongruously added a large purple velvet pouf and some orange cushions and has pasted up reproductions of Bakst ballet costumes. When we got in he produced not tea but crème de menthe in tiny green glasses and curled himself up on the pouf. “To think you come from Canada,” he said. “I have a grandmother there in Montreal. I stayed with her last winter. It is not a seat of culture and it is too penetratingly cold but she is so generous to one, such a dear understanding old person.” Mahon wants to be a playwright and read me one of his plays. It was not very good and reminds me very much of Noel Coward’s Hay Fever. Then he put Ravel’s Bolero on the gramophone and we had some more crème de menthe and went on talking and the afternoon slid by quite entertainingly. It was dark when I emerged into Wellington Square.

  6 November 1926.

  In the afternoon I went to Jeremy’s to play rouge-et-noir. His rooms are a glorious mess – mysterious bits of car engines, cigarette boxes, scattered playing cards, gramophone records, even packages of French safes are all left lying about in total confusion. It was a black rainy afternoon outside, so we drew the curtains, turned on the electric lights, and settled down to playing for five hours. Patterson and Anstruther-Gray and Matza were there. I lost again, this time £11 10s.

  Afterwards we adjourned to the George Restaurant and Jeremy stood us to a sumptuous meal with unlimited burgundy. The restaurant was packed with undergraduates calling out to each other and wandering from table to table. It was a splendid scene of revelry, with the burgundy swimming about in one’s brain and the George’s punka swaying to and fro overhead wafting clouds of cigarette smoke. Mahon appeared, making quite an entrance as he was carrying a large Japanese painted fan and accompanied to my surprise by Roger Barclay, who is not at all the aesthete type but a sort of typical public-school boy, very handsome, which must explain it. Leslie Mahon kept waving to me with his fan in a coquettish way, which rather embarrassed me and led to a lot of jokes at my expense at our table. Towards the end of dinner Patterson suddenly began reciting the death-scene speech of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, which he seems to know by heart, and flushed with burgundy he got to his feet and in a loud voice called out, “Christ’s blood streams in the firmament.” Jeremy said, “Go easy, old man,” but Patterson just repeated it louder still until all the people round us stopped talking to listen. Finally we got him to sit down. He is an unexpected man, as a moment before he had seemed quite sober and had been talking about carburetors for his new car. When we got into the street we were all rather drunk. We saw a moving bus on its way to Headington and all jumped on and sat in the open seats at the top singing till the bus conductor asked us to stop as he said it annoyed the other passengers. That bloody fool Anstruther-Gray got into an argument with him, saying, “My good man, why don’t you piss off.” The bus conductor said, “How would you like a punch on the nose?” At that Anstruther-Gray yanked one of the wooden placards marked “To Headington” off and threw it into the street. Jeremy said, “Let’s get off this bus pronto,” so we clambered down and jumped off as it was going at a fast pace up Headington Hill. We had a long, cold walk back and Anstruther-Gray again distinguished himself, this time by being sick in the street. As we walked along together I said to Jeremy that I was fed up with Anstruther-Gray, but all he said was, “Poor bugger, he can’t hold his drink.” Jeremy is very good-natured, or nothing seems to matter to him.

  7 November 1926.

  A cold, blustery day. I woke up feeling unusually aggressive, so much so that I plucked up enough courage to go to see the Dean about getting rooms in college, and I was glad afterwards that I had done so as he said there was an unoccupied set of rooms over the porter’s lodge that I might have on a temporary basis for a few months, but that after that he himself was going to move in there and use them for an office, and it was uncertain whether any other rooms could be found for me in college, so I might have to go back into digs. I jumped at this proposition, anything to get away for the time being from the aspidistra plants and the landlady with her genteel chat. Besides, these rooms used to belong to Dr. Johnson and still house his teapot.

  In the evening to a roulette party at Matza’s. Once again I lost. My bad luck is something phenomenal. I tried to imitate an Austrian gambler I have read about who remained impassive as the luck went against him by digging his nails into the palms of his hands until they bled. Jeremy said that my luck was bound to change and then he said he would stake me from now on and that when I won he would take fifty per cent of the winnings. This was very generous of him and I ought not to have accepted it, but I want to go on playing and I have no more ready cash at all until the next instalment of my allowance comes in. I am not a natural gambler and I started playing here because my friends do and I didn’t want to be left out, but now it is beginning to take hold on me harder than on any of the others.

  Later in the evening two prostitutes came in to join the party, just standing around and drinking gin. It was risky of Matza to have them in his rooms as of course no girls are allowed in digs at night, much less prostitutes, and one of them, Betty, is well known to the proctors. She is quite attractive in a coarse way. Somebody mentioned the name of Margot Poltimer, who is a kind of legend around Oxford for glamour, and Betty said, “The airs she gives herself, my lady Poltimer. She is nothing but a bloody tart and she spoils the market for the rest of us.”

  After the rest had gone home I stayed on with Matza for a final drink. He seems older in sophistication than the other undergraduates but he is rather lost at Oxford. People take advantage of his lavish hospitality and he is beginning to notice. I think he would be happier with others as rich as himself. He told me tonight that he had one ambition and that was to marry a beautiful, well-educated English girl – a blonde who understood the art of conversation. He says the nice girls he knows in Cairo are so strictly brought up that they know nothing, but he says that because he is an Egyptian no nice English girl will have anything to do with him; that they are polite enough at first meeting but that if he tries to go any further they freeze up. For example, he said he had a theatre party the other night in London and asked two English girls. They went on afterwards to a supper dance but both the girls made excuses and would not dance with him. He said that they don’t want to be seen dancing with someone they consider coloured, so he said there is nothing left but prostitutes – “They don’t care about colour except for the colour of my money.” It is a rotten situation and I feel very sorry for him. Besides, he is so handsome and has such an air of distinction that I should think any girl would prefer him to most of the hobbledehoy youths around this place.

  8 November 1926.

  I have not seen anything of Morris for several days but he appeared at my digs today when I was out and Post was in. I think he must have made some kind of religious pass at Post because afterwards Po
st said to me, “Is that funny little guy all right in the head?” Morris had left a note for me saying that he’d made an appointment for me this afternoon to meet Bishop Taylor Smith, who he was sure could be of help to me. What nerve! Without consulting me beforehand, but I felt I had to go. The Bishop is a monstrously massive old man with a huge, somnolent head, and, surprisingly enough, quite a sense of humour, but when he weighed into religious subjects he talked to me as if I was a child or a private soldier. (He used to be Chaplain-General to the Forces.) He said he was first turned to Christ by the thought of the “riffraff” he would meet in hell, and then he wheezed out, “I am sure it would make you as a gentleman shudder to think of mixing with them.” When I got out in the street I began laughing aloud to myself. I thought, “That has done it. I am through with the whole shebang – Morris and his key to Perfect Purity, and quiet times, and house parties, and sharing the burden of my sins.”

  I have not written this diary for days. During those days I have done no work. Each afternoon and every evening we have been playing rouge-et-noir and roulette and I have lost almost steadily. We usually gather in Jeremy’s rooms, sometimes at Matza’s. The curtains are drawn, the lights turned on, the air is thick with cigarette smoke, half-finished glasses of whisky on the tables, a lot of loud talk. We always seem to play to music; someone puts on the gramophone, all those tunes, “Bye-bye Blackbird” with its melancholy note, “Blackbird … bye-bye,” or a very old-fashioned tune, left over in Jeremy’s rooms by a previous occupant, called “Roses of Picardy” or “Tea for Two, Two for Tea” jingling away. The needle gets stuck in the groove and grinds to a halt and someone gets up to wind the gramophone. The roulette wheel spins or the dice take a rattling fall on the bare boards of the table. The cards are dealt … vingt-et-un is my passion.… “I’ll take a flip” … “I’ll buy a card” … and another, and one more … that’s buggered it … one over twenty-one. Roulette is a silly game – poker is not for me – but vingt-et-un is my passion.

  This gambling is a real torment to me. It is such a waste of time and of my opportunities here at Oxford. It is the opposite of all I looked forward to. I used to think of the endless stimulus of Oxford and the interesting friends and the beauty of the place. Now I don’t notice my surroundings at all, make no new friends, read nothing. My whole time is spent in this idiotic pursuit, and worst of all I have lost and continue to lose so much money – that is, much for me. To a rich man it would not seem much, but when I think of the sacrifices Mother has made to give me my allowance and the way I am wasting it, I am truly ashamed of myself. I should never have accepted the arrangement with Jeremy that he stake me for my losses. The result is that he has lost a great deal of money. He is so good-natured and generous that he never makes me feel uncomfortable about it, but it is a humiliating situation. What surprises me about myself is that I don’t give a damn so long as I can keep on playing.

  I had another letter from Mother today about the state of our finances. She says again that she will have to put The Bower on the market. She cannot afford to keep it up. Sell The Bower! It is such an awful prospect.

  16 November 1926.

  I went to McCallum today for my tutorial. After I had finished reading my essay he said, “You are a Scottish-Canadian, aren’t you? Not a race, I think, to waste time and throw away opportunities in the way you are doing at present.” I was somewhat taken aback but said that I intended to work much harder in the future. He said, “See to it,” in rather a grim voice. In fact I intend to start afresh. Heaven knows how many “new lives” I have started in my day but this one is positively going to be different. To start with, I am not going to touch a card for the rest of this term, not even bridge at small stakes. Secondly, I am going to resume going to lectures, although I must say I do not get much out of them. Most of them are delivered by dons who have written books on the subject they are lecturing on so that the lectures are just regurgitated books, delivered usually in a very bored manner to a very bored audience. It is just as simple to read the book and skip the lecture. Thirdly, I have decided to read the Gesta Francorum twice a week with Ducker. In fact I can see him at this moment leaning his bicycle up in the porch and soon his elephantine step will be on the stairs. He is as heavy in mind as he is in body and terribly slow to work with. I have got fond of the Gesta and the school-boy Latin of the Crusaders’ times and the figures in the history like kings and knaves in a pack of cards. Miles, the other man whom I met when I first came up here, seems to be offended with me. He has very nearly cut me several times in the quad. I don’t think he approves of the company I keep.

  From now on my days are going to be ordered on a system: so many hours’ work, moderation in drinking, economy in spending, making friends who can stimulate my mind or help my career and discarding those who do not, watching my tongue, and not showing off.

  I had a letter today from Elizabeth, Aunt Zaidée’s maid, saying that Aunt Zaidée is seriously ill.

  17 November 1926.

  I have taken up boxing at the suggestion of Paton of Hertford, a very nice man I was at preparatory school with. I think it will keep me healthy and out of trouble, although it is a very unlikely pursuit for me. I went to his rooms today for the first lesson. I was pretty feeble, but I intend to stick to it and box three times a week, regularly. Paton thought I should see some real boxing, so we went this evening to the Oxford-versus-Navy match at the town hall instead of my going to Somerville to hear Harold Munro discuss poetry, which I had intended. I was quite amused at first but got bored after two or three bouts.

  18 November 1926.

  I saw in the newspaper today that my old school (or one of them) in Ontario has been burned down. I have no tender memories of that red-brick prison where I lost my faith “in God and Man.” All the same I dropped in to see Mockridge, who is up here, and to bring him the news (which of course he had heard already). He is a very nice fellow, but I was surprised and annoyed to hear that he has invented a new reverse gear for motor-boats which he expects to bring him in £400 a year. What annoys me is that he is so well off already and doesn’t need the money.

  19 November 1926.

  Patterson had a breakfast party in his room today – Sarkies, Jeremy, one or two others, and myself – we drank port with scrambled eggs and bacon. In the afternoon, feeling as sodden as the weather, I went for a walk to the Three Hinkseys with King, a New College man whom I am cultivating as I think it is time that I had a few scholarly friends and he is said to have “a first-class mind.” He certainly has a lofty brow with receding chestnut hair, but he is damned dull company, and wore woollen half-mittens on his hands. He said he regarded sensuality and introspection as both being a waste of time. In the evening Mockridge took me to supper with Lady Osler, who is his aunt or cousin or something. She is the widow of the great Canadian doctor and lives in a huge Victorian Gothic house. She seems very kind but quicktempered. I liked her. Her brother, Mr. Revere from Boston, was staying with her. He is a jolly old sod. Went home and read some of Squires’ poems – very fine – and also Henry James’ The Awkward Age.

  20 November 1926.

  I have at last met the famous Margot Poltimer, about whom there has been so much talk. Some people say that she is a gold-digger, others that she is “an enthusiastic amateur,” and anyone who has slept with her feels that it is a great cause for boasting. Jeremy has known her since he was here at a crammer’s, being tutored to come up to Oxford. Nobody seems to know exactly what has become of her husband, Brian Poltimer. One story is that when he was at Christ Church he married her for a bet after a Bullingdon Club dinner and when he woke up and found what he had done he vanished into thin air. According to another story he is lurking about somewhere, suffering from DTs. As for Margot herself, Jeremy says that she is the daughter of an Oxford landlady, convent-educated.

  I was sitting in the George bar having a cocktail today when I saw this tall, leggy girl or young woman with a bleached Scandinavian look (the fashion
able look of this year) coming in, pulling a miniature poodle after her on a lead. In about two minutes three or four men in the bar had gathered around her and I could hear her chattering away in rather an affected, actressy voice. Then that girl Vi came in to join her. She is Anstruther-Gray’s girl, rather a dreary creature I think, but after a few minutes she came up to me where I was sitting and said, “You must be Cedric’s friend. He has spoken of you so often that I feel I know you.” I had never thought of Anstruther-Gray as Cedric. “Wouldn’t you like to meet Margot? She is so attractive, isn’t she?” So she took me up and introduced me and Margot said, “I crave a cocktail, my sweet, a pink lady,” so I ordered her one. The minute I heard her artificial way of talking I realized that she reminded me of someone. It is Geraldine, whom I knew at home; the same touch of the amateur actress, and I feel completely at my ease with her and strongly attracted. By now the bar was beginning to fill up and we were quite surrounded by a boisterous crew: some undergraduates and a man in a black and white checked suit with a carnation in his buttonhole who looked like a bookie, but Margot just went on talking to me as if we had known each other all our lives. She talks in a most affected way, moaning, “Vi and I had such a divine walk in the country today,” and “I must have just one more teechy-weechy little cocktail.” But underneath all this I feel that we understood each other, and asked her to lunch with me next week, which she immediately accepted, and then teetered out of the bar on her high-heeled shoes, dragging the poodle after her. Afterwards I dropped in to see Jeremy to ask him about her and he said, “Oh, she is a grand girl, Margot, but a bit careless about who she sleeps with.” I asked about her husband and whether it was true he was dying of DTS and he said, “Old Brian Poltimer, not a bit of it. I was at school with him. Not a bad chap but infernally dull. He couldn’t keep up with Margot at all, so he has buggered off to London and got some kind of a job. I believe he makes her some kind of allowance, not a very big one I should say.”