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

by Ritchie, Charles

  I worked all day until five o’clock without stopping for lunch and then Matza and Jeremy dropped in and I went with them to the billiard saloon. By this time it was raining hard. I stood around watching them play for a little, then I collapsed on a sofa in front of an enormous coal fire and dozed off to the sounds of the clicking billiard balls and the rain on the window panes and the coals shifting in the fire.

  3 December 1926.

  Today Jeremy motored me over to the du Plat Taylors’ for lunch. They have left Newfoundland and now live only an hour or so from here in a village in Buckinghamshire. Their house is a pretty Georgian ex-rectory. They have invited me there several times, but this time they said that Eric Smith would be there, which was a great added inducement. They gave me a warm welcome, but the house was bloody cold, even for an English house in the country, so I see they have not lost their liking for discomfort which they enjoyed so much in Newfoundland.

  Mrs. du Plat Taylor has not changed a bit – as majestic as ever. The Colonel looks much older and rather shaky. He still has that appalling set of false teeth. Cynthia works at the neighbouring kennels. She always wanted to do that. She seemed glad to see me again, in her undemonstrative fashion. Eric Smith was as delightful as ever and very friendly to me, but he has got thicker somehow. Not fatter, but thicker and almost middle-aged-looking. He had driven over from a neighbouring country house with a dark-eyed rather silent woman. I thought he seemed pretty keen about her. I only had a chance to talk to him alone for a few moments when we took a turn in the garden together, and he went on just as he used to do about his plans and projects for the future. It is always the future with him. There was only one awkward moment when I tactlessly asked him how he was getting on with Iris, the “unwieldy woman” whom he had confided to me at Black Duck he intended to marry. He looked quite surprised and not at all pleased and said, “How did you know about her? Anyway, it is all washed up ages ago.” He had obviously forgotten ever telling me about her. When I left he said I must look him up the next time I was in town, but I am not sure that he meant it.

  It was rather strange seeing the du Plat Taylors and Eric in a different setting, and somehow disappointing. They did not seem as exceptional as they seemed to me in Newfoundland. More like other people. Perhaps it is because I am older. Jeremy was on his best behaviour at lunch and quite charmed the du Plat Taylors. He was really rather bored by the whole thing.

  4 December 1926.

  Thinking about the other night’s visit to the Nag’s Head. A sort of mist of homosexuality does hang over Oxford like the mist of the Thames Valley and it would be hard to imagine the place without it. It is not so much actual buggery, though doubtless there is some of that too, it is more a matter of teasing attractions and rebuffs and friendships mixed with attraction and tinged with sentiment. But isn’t all friendship mixed with attraction and tinged with sentiment? Mine certainly is.

  In the morning I went to Professor Baker’s lecture on Economics. He is one of the better lecturers and to my surprise I find the subject interesting. Most of the economic and monetary theory is over my head and I never had much head for theory of any kind, but the practical side of it – the levels of wages, the social conditions, and the role of the unions – is quite engrossing. Also, social history is beginning to interest me. The economic side of the Crusades and the Expropriation of the Monasteries and the Land Enclosures in the eighteenth century. I was very ignorant of all these. Most of the history I have read has dealt with treaties, wars, dynasties, alliances, and personalities, and so was very one-sided.

  While I was working Anstruther-Gray came in. He says Oxford is a waste of time and has decided to join the police in West Africa. This is good news, but God help the natives with this bullying braggart in charge of them. He is the kind of Englishman who “gives the Empire a bad name” as Mother would say. However, he began to talk about his own upbringing at home. How his father used to beat him up unmercifully to “make a man of him,” and how terrified he was of him. This explains a lot about Anstruther-Gray, but not enough to make him tolerable.

  In the evening I had tea with the Master and Mrs. Homes-Dudden. They ask each member of the college to tea once a year. It is like a royal audience. The Master is magnificent – the handsomest man in Oxford and very genial in the grand manner. Mrs. Homes-Dudden is a thin, tall, yellow-faced woman with a sharp tongue and a critical eye. She is said to be kinder than she seems, which would not be difficult.

  We had tea in their big high-ceilinged drawing-room. Acres of nondescript carpet, some fine china, and a blazing hot fire. The Master showed me a pretty little table that the Queen gave him as a souvenir of his preaching at Sandringham. I should not be surprised if he ended up as an archbishop.

  5 December 1926.

  I woke up to a surprise this morning. It had snowed overnight. I have never seen Oxford under snow before. The Quads look like white linen handkerchiefs. I must say I am delighted to be at Pembroke College. It was good luck for me coming here. The place has an atmosphere of its own. I suppose all the colleges have, but Pembroke has something friendly and informal about it and I wouldn’t be at any other college. It is, I am afraid, at rather a low ebb in its fortunes, not at all in the lead academically or in athletics. The undergraduates are a curious mixture. A small group of Scholars, several from the Channel Islands, which have some special connection with Pembroke; a smattering of rather gilded foreigners; some Paris Americans; a brace or two of Rhodes Scholars; some raffish men from the grander public schools who failed to get into other colleges; and a substratum of ordinary chaps from ordinary schools – all presided over by the Master, who billows through the Quads in his ample gown like Jupiter descending from the clouds.

  In the evening went with Jim Patterson to the Super Cinema – Adolphe Menjou in Surrender – a slight but charming film. Jim says there is a rumour of having talking films at the Super to replace the silent ones. I intend to start a protest group. Talking films would absolutely ruin the movies.

  Jim came back to my rooms and we sat up for hours. He is determined on an adventurous life and thinks none other is worth having, and I daresay he will have one. He has the nerve for it. I find him not as attractive as Jeremy, but a good friend.

  Aunt Zaidée’s case of Peninsular War Madeira has arrived from Cheltenham and I am planning to have a dinner party in my rooms to celebrate the event.

  6 December 1926.

  Tonight was to have been the night of my dinner with Margot but she telephoned this morning with some long tale of Vi’s mother being ill and Vi didn’t like to leave her alone, but she had promised to have dinner tonight with Cedric Anstruther-Gray, so Margot had said she would go and spend the evening with Vi’s mother and she had the nerve to say that she knew I would not mind! It is maddening, all the more so because my evening with Margot is to be sacrificed to the insufferable Anstruther-Gray. She says she will have dinner with me tomorrow.

  I tried to settle down to writing my essay on the topic “The eighteenth century marked the low watermark of international morality,” and I think my bad temper and frustration at being put off by Margot actually helped me to demolish this absurd proposition and to build up the case for the twentieth century being “the low watermark.” However, as there is no such thing as “international morality” it doesn’t really matter which century you pick on.

  In the afternoon I ran into Jeremy and Jim in the High. We all went back to Jeremy’s rooms, where we were joined by a noisy but nice Harrovian. We practised shooting a revolver at an egg cup. Jim hit it every single time – I not once.

  Came home and read Barbellion’s Diary of a Disappointed Man and could not face going into Hall, so went to sleep in front of the fire and when I woke up at two a.m. the fire had gone out and the room was as cold as an icebox.

  7 December 1926.

  I had lunch today with precious Branksome of Eton and Magdalen, who looks like a suave, rather supercilious shop-walker with his hair parted i
n the middle. There were quite long pauses in the conversation during which he occasionally lowered a remark into the silences, such as “modern poetry has outgrown the investing of local patriotism with aesthetic significance.” What was my astonishment when, as we were walking out of the porter’s lodge of Magdalen, he asked me if I knew “a really remarkable young woman called Margot Poltimer.” It seemed such an extraordinary coincidence that I wondered if he had the power of reading other people’s thoughts. Also, I cannot imagine what he and she could have in common, but he said, airily, “she is a charming creature, don’t you think? As a matter of fact I am having tea with her today.”

  When I got to Margot’s this evening to take her out to dinner, the first thing I asked her was whether she knew Branksome, and she said, “Oh yes, he dropped in unexpectedly today. Too, too tiresome.” I did not pursue the subject, but now I am convinced that she must see him fairly often and has mentioned my name to him, so that he only asked me to lunch to score off me by showing me that he had been there first. Anyway, it is none of my business who she sees or how often.

  I wanted to take her to dinner at the George but she said, “Oh, that is so expensive, don’t waste your money. I hate waste. Let’s go somewhere cheaper.” (So much for the legend that she is a gold-digger.) So we went to the Candied Friend, where we had a most insipid dinner of fillet of plaice, finishing off with apple surprise, which is just apple sauce, in a room hung with “The Cries of London,” waited on by waitresses in mob-caps. The tables were so close together that we could not really talk to each other, but she did look so lovely in that dreary restaurant I was proud to be seen with her. She wore a black dress which made her fairness seem quite startling.

  When we got back to the Iffley Road she was very sweet, even affectionate, which she has never been before.

  8 December 1926.

  In the morning read Aristotle’s Politics. I like this – “to be always seeking after the useful does not become free and exalted souls.” In the afternoon I went to an exhibition of modern paintings at Ryman’s. One of the pictures by a new artist called Christopher Wood I liked very much, then to the Super with Jeremy to see Harold Lloyd in For Heaven’s Sake. He is the funniest comedian of all. Far funnier to me than Charlie Chaplin. In the evening I dined with Jackson and Clere Parsons and some of their friends. The conversation was out of my range. A rapid crossfire exchange about modern literature, music, and painting. When I find myself in a group of really cultured people I am uncomfortably aware of my own ignorance. When I am with the little set of Jeremy, Anstruther-Gray, etc., I can delude myself that I am almost a civilized man, and so I am in comparison to them. The worst of it is that I have gone backwards since I came to Oxford. I seem to have reverted to the mentality of an irresponsible schoolboy without intellectual curiosity. Also the poetry, criticism, etc., which I read at home is looked on here as hopelessly out of date. For instance, Lawrence Binyon, Maurice Baring, Lascelles Abercrombie, and Blunden. As for Rupert Brooke, they say he is “for schoolgirls,” and the literary critics I followed like Edmund Gosse and Saintsbury are not taken seriously.

  9 December 1926.

  I met Leslie Mahon at the Super for coffee this morning. The place was packed as usual so that you can hardly thread your way through the extra tables and chairs they bring in to pick up the extra custom. It really is a peculiar institution. Why do we all crowd in to that place, blue with smoke, noisy with chatter, to sit on hard chairs at tiny, rickety tables and drink cups of tepid coffee and nibble damp chocolate biscuits? Leslie and I were put in a corner, which I was quite glad of, as I still feel conspicuous being seen with him. If only he would not wear a silk handkerchief clasped by a bracelet to his wrist and wave at his acquaintances with it.

  He was in a very nervous mood today, and when the waiter spilt some coffee over his shoulder he said, “This is too much. We must escape from this stinking badgers’ den.” When we got out and were walking down the street he said, “I must tell you the most awful thing has happened. Last night I had drink taken and thought I would just pop in for a minute to see Roger. He was alone, sitting by the fire and looking so divine with the firelight on his golden hair, so perfect and so ruddy. He asked me to sit beside him on the sofa and we talked as we have never talked before. It was the most perfect time we have ever had together. Then I spoilt it all. I suddenly heard myself saying, ‘I love you.’ He just got up from the sofa and stood in front of the fire, his poor face was pink with embarrassment, then he said in a sort of strangled way, ‘I am sorry.’ That was all he said, but it was death to me. I shall never be able to look him in the face again. I didn’t close my eyes all last night, and then a shattering idea occurred to me in the small hours of the morning. My dear, what do you think it was? I thought that if I had made a real pass at him it might have been all right. It was those fatal words ‘I love you,’ and the agony is that I do.”

  Poor Leslie. I felt so sorry for him.

  10 December 1926.

  What a drama! This is what happened, so far as I can remember it. Last night was my dinner party to celebrate the Peninsular War Madeira. I wanted it to be regardless of expense so I ordered lobsters and venison. The electric lights were put out and the scout borrowed some college silver candelabra so that the candlelight glimmered appropriately against the panelling of the room, a perfect setting.

  I had asked Jeremy, Jim Patterson, Anstruther-Gray, Matza, and Sarkies. I have never been a host like this before. All came in dinner jackets. At first we stood about feeling rather self-conscious, but relaxed with the drinks; then, at the close of dinner, came the great moment of pouring the ancient wine. Jeremy got up and made a speech, saying how sporting I had been to share this wine, which was the same that the great Wellington had drunk, and commiserating with me on my bad luck at cards this term, which was bloody nice of him. Then I thought I saw a queer look on the faces of the others as they drank the Madeira, and I took a sip myself. It was like clotted vinegar, and there was the whole case of it. Jeremy pretended that it was not too bad and said we were just not used to wine of that age, but it was no good. No-one could force it down, and there was no other wine left. Nothing but a couple of bottles of gin. I think it was the gin that did it.

  The scout had cleared the table away and we were setting up a table for roulette when someone produced a pistol and started taking shots at the lamp in the street. One or two others went to the window and joined him in the shooting. There was a lot of laughing and shouting. I was standing at the window watching when I saw two passers-by going under the lamp-post, a man and a girl, and to my horror as a shot was fired I saw the girl stumble and collapse on the pavement. I shall never forget that moment. The man called up at us, “Get a doctor. She has been hit.” So Jeremy and I ran across the Quad to telephone for a doctor.

  As we were trying to get through on the telephone, who should emerge in the Lodge but the Dean. He said, in a very cutting voice, that he was at a loss to understand the unseemly noise at this hour coming from my rooms and he fancied he had heard shots fired, so of course we had to explain what had happened, pointing out that it had been only a Rag. He said, “I doubt if it will be so regarded,” and swept up to my rooms, giving one look around at the guests, who were pretty white and shaken, and said, “Gentlemen, go to your rooms at once and do not leave them until you receive further instructions. This is a most disgraceful affair. You should all be ashamed, both for yourselves and the discredit you have brought on the college. What the condition of the unfortunate victim of your behaviour is we do not know, but for your sakes I hope it is not serious.” Jeremy then said that he had seen the woman get up from the pavement and go limping along the street leaning on the arm of the man, so that the injury could not be too bad. “That is as may be,” said the Dean.

  About an hour later the doctor whom we had telephoned called through to the porter’s lodge to say that the injured woman had had two pellets extracted from the fleshy part of her leg and that she is �
�resting comfortably at her home.” So far so good.

  11 December 1926.

  We all met at the Super this morning (except Matza, who had shut himself up in his rooms and said he would see no-one) and talked over the shooting and its consequences. Of course, news of it has spread and we find ourselves rather celebrities. Some of our acquaintances enjoy prophesying the most dire consequences for us, that we shall end up in Wormwood Scrubbs, disowned by our families, or have to emigrate to the colonies. Someone said “to Canada.” So I said, “That would suit me as I come from there anyway, and moreover, Canada does not happen to be a colony.” They said, “What’s the difference? It’s part of the Empire, isn’t it?” That is all they know about Canada.

  It is funny the way this shooting affair shows up people’s characters. Jeremy is cool and easy, making a joke of the whole thing. Anstruther-Gray boasts for one moment that he fired the fatal shot, and the next moment tries to put the blame on me for giving the party in the first place. Sarkies, as a third-year man, is the most likely to be held responsible and to be sent down from Oxford, but he does not seem to give a damn. The most peculiar behaviour is that of Matza. When he did not turn up at the Super I went round to his rooms. He was in a terrible state of funk. He had had the door bolted and his man-servant stationed on the stairs to warn him if the police were coming, so that he could make good his escape by the back passage. He seems to imagine that he will be consigned to an oubliette, also he is determined never to see any members of the “little set” again, as he finds them “in very bad taste,” which is rather much coming from an Egyptian! He said that if it came to a court case his picture might be in the Cairo newspapers and what would his uncles and aunts say. I was rather nettled by this and said my picture might be in the Nova Scotian papers and what would my aunts say, but he did not seem to think that that would be at all the same thing.