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

by Ritchie, Charles

  Tomorrow the long-planned motor-race to London takes place. Jeremy, Anstruther-Gray, and Jim Patterson. I am going as Jim’s passenger in the Amilcar.

  24 January 1927.

  The day of the race. We all met at the George bar for drinks before the race. Margot and Vi joined us. Margot was accompanied by a short man with a rather wooden face and a dark-brown moustache who remained almost completely silent while the rest of us were celebrating. I asked Jeremy who he was and he said, “Oh, don’t you know Brian Poltimer, Margot’s husband, he is here on a visit from London.” It must have been his voice that answered the telephone the other day when I rang her up as he said that she was resting and couldn’t come to the telephone. She was in fine fettle today, greeted me with a hug and kiss, then tried on Jeremy’s crash helmet, which looked very dashing on her. Vi copied her by putting on Anstruther-Gray’s helmet, which completely submerged her pin-sized head.

  The start of the race was at Magdalen Bridge and off we sped with our Amilcar in the lead sweeping through Dorchester, coming round street corners at 40 m.p.h. Jim was just saying what the disconsolate faces of the others would be like when they came limping after us to the rendezvous at the Ritz in London when I heard an ominously familiar sound from the engine. Jim said, “Christ, it can’t be the bloody big-end again,” but it was, and the car slowly conked out and we had to be hauled into a garage in Benson and take the bus back to Oxford in a pretty sour mood. In the evening there seemed nothing left to do but to get drunk, so we had dinner at the George and drank a lot of Asti Spumante and afterwards went to the Pembroke Smoker and drank innumerable whiskies with a nameless Rugger Hearty, a silent, good-looking hulk from Manchester.

  25 January 1927.

  I woke up and took my appalling hangover for a walk with me through Christ Church Meadows. It must have been that revolting Asti Spumante. I tottered across the Quad to see Jim, to hear from him that Jeremy’s car overturned on the way back from London last night. Jeremy is in the Radcliffe Infirmary and will be on his back for three months with compound fractures of the groin. He was propped up on the pillows, very talkative and I think feverish. He was much agitated about money. He says he owes to half the shops in Oxford, that his mother has already stumped up £100 to pay his creditors, but that he had lost it all gambling. He asked me whether I would go to all his friends and ask them to lend £10 each and also would arrange to sell the things in his rooms and his car.

  27 January 1927.

  I had a most harassing day trying to settle Jeremy’s affairs. It should be easy enough to raise £10 each from Jeremy’s friends, especially since he has always been so hospitable and generous, but the trouble is that most of them are broke themselves, and Matza, who could easily settle the whole thing, is away in Cairo. Morton, who is supposed to be a friend of Jeremy’s, infuriated me today by saying that his father had told him that before lending any money he must make it a rule to have a signed IOU – there is a petty-tradesman mentality for you! As for selling the contents of Jeremy’s rooms – there are all sorts of expensive gadgets, such as a pair of drums for a Jazz Band, brand new gramophone, and gleaming new motor-bike, etc., but I doubt if any of these have been paid for, so I hesitate to sell them. Jeremy is too ill to understand the difficulties and is quite impatient. I shall be glad to get away from Oxford for a few days as, to my surprise, Basil Templeton, whom I do not know at all well, has asked me to go to stay with his people in Yorkshire for the local hunt ball and I leave tomorrow.

  Basil is at Christ Church. I met him at a party at the end of last term and we struck up a pretty alcoholic friendship.

  28 January 1927.

  Today I went and bought myself a first-class ticket, although it is an awful waste of money. I was glad I had, because the only other person in the first-class carriage was an extremely attractive girl. We soon began chatting and it turned out that she too was going to Mitcham for the weekend. Her name is Felicity Travers. She had been to stay at Mitcham before. When I asked her what it would be like, she said in a blasé drawl, “Oh, the usual form, you know. The ball will go on forever with a lot of drunks in pink coats galloping about the floor, stepping on one’s feet.” I asked her about Basil’s family. She said, “There’s a widowed mama, not a bad old thing but said by some to be a secret drinker, and Lionel, the younger brother, and of course Basil himself – very much the lord of the manor. Thinks he’s God’s gift to women, and of course the niece, Muriel. You’re asked for her, I imagine. She has been out for simply years but hasn’t nabbed a husband, though not for lack of trying. She even went out with the Fishing Fleet to Malta last year and nearly caught someone, but he got off the hook at the last moment.” I did not know what the Fishing Fleet meant but she explained that the girls who had missed out in London are sent off to the Mediterranean to see if they can catch a sailor pining for England, Home, and Beauty. Felicity and I seemed to be getting on swimmingly and she said, “I rely on your support if the weekend proves too utterly drear. We can always go for a country ramble together and compare notes.”

  Muriel, the niece, met us at the station. She is a big girl, not fat but large, with large, handsome features and outsize dark eyes, not bad looking but a bit overpowering. We piled into the family Rolls and drove up to this house which is colonnaded like a Greek temple and is the colour of pale butter. Basil and his brother, Lionel, met us in the hall. He was very welcoming. Then we were shown up to our rooms. Mine looks onto the stables, which are like a barrack square. When we came down to dinner Mrs. Templeton, Basil’s mother, greeted me most effusively, saying, “How is dear Canada? I haven’t been there since I stayed at Government House in Ottawa. It seems centuries ago.” It is quite a hard question to answer, “How is dear Canada?” so I let it slide.

  She must have been a real beauty once. In fact you can see from the portrait of her in the hall what she looked like. She is painted coming in from a walk with two setters running beside her and the wind in her hair. She has a vague manner but she certainly doesn’t seem like a secret drinker.

  29 January 1927.

  The day seemed rather long. Basil took me round the stables, where he has six hunters. He asked me if I hunted and I said, “Good God, no.” This made him laugh and he put his arm round my shoulders. I see what Felicity means. He does think he is the lord of all he surveys and so he is, with a property of thousands of acres, an adoring mother, and servants who scurry about at his commands. His brother, Lionel, is a charming, rather shadowy creature with prune-coloured eyes and a curling dark lock falling over his forehead. He knows all about the china and furniture in the house, which Basil takes no interest in except for the interest of possession. What surprises me is that Felicity, after saying that she thought Basil so insufferably conceited, never takes her eyes off him, praises everything he says, and laughs at his very unfunny jokes. Today I was paired off with Muriel and we went for a long walk together across some very damp meadows, scrambling through hedges and over stiles, which she did with great agility. When I put out my hand to help her, quite unnecessarily, over a stile she gave me quite a squeeze. She asked me a lot about Canada and said she supposed that our estates there must be much bigger than theirs in England as the country was so much larger.

  After that we all went up to dress for the ball. It is the first time that I have ever worn tails. When I went to tie my white tie I found that it was too short to make a bow. I tried again and again till I was in despair and sat down on the chair saying to myself, “All right, I can’t go to the bloody ball at all and I’ll send down a message to say I have been taken ill.” Then it occurred to me that I could borrow a tie from someone, so I rang the bell and the butler appeared in person. He looked at my tie and said he could tie it for me, so he stood behind me tying the tie, both of us facing the mirror so that his arms were round my neck. He was chatting away about Mr. Lionel when to my amazement I saw in the glass that his hands had moved down from tying the tie and the next thing I knew they were under my hard s
hirt, stroking my body and feeling it. When I said, “Stop that at once,” he took his hands away and looked quite discomfited, and he said, “I am sorry, sir. It was a misunderstanding. Mr. Lionel’s friends always enjoyed it when I did that sort of thing for them,” just as if he had handed me a delicious dish at dinner and I had refused it. Then he withdrew with dignity and a hurt expression.

  There was a dinner party here and four others came. They seemed up to the standard of the occasion. Mrs. Templeton presided, wearing a diamond tiara as if she had been born with one on her head. After dinner we all bundled into cars and drove for miles till we reached an endless avenue and saw at the end of it Carborough Castle, where the dance was to be held. I was told that it is a copy of the renaissance Château de Chambord. It is enormous and many-turreted. Mrs. Templeton says it is “in appalling taste,” but I thought lighted up against the night sky it looked like a castle in a fairy tale illustrated by Edmond Dulac.

  Inside, we passed through one saloon after another hung with pompous portraits and furnished with splendid Louis xv commodes and consoles, till we reached the ballroom. There the dancing was well underway. I danced most of the time with Muriel, who is a good dancer but with an irritating habit of trying to lead. Felicity looked marvellous in a white dress covered with silver sequins. I had one dance with her. She danced most of the time with Basil. I must say they made a fine pair: he, very handsome; she, very seductive. After a time I began to feel tired and self-conscious standing by the door in my black tails when almost every other man in the room was in hunting pink. I told myself that it was a spectacle to watch the whirling couples under the chandeliers but I wished myself invisible. As the night went on the party got rowdier and all were stamping about the ballroom, bursting balloons and hallooing. I joined in, helped by five glasses of champagne, and got so hot that my hard collar went soft. A lot of the men had brought extra collars and went to change them when the first collar began to wilt.

  When we got home from the ball we didn’t feel at all sleepy. Muriel and I paired off, leaving Basil and Felicity together in the library. Soon we were kissing and mugging about in the drawing-room but when we came to I was horrified to see that my cigarette, which I had left burning in an ashtray, had fallen off and burnt a long scar in a magnificent Dutch marquetry desk. I said to Muriel that I would have to explain it to Mrs. Templeton, but she said, “I’ll just move the lamp on top of the burn and no-one will be any the wiser.” By this time it was 6 a.m. and I was quite tired and feeling guilty about concealing the cigarette burn.

  30 January 1927.

  This morning when I got up I decided to tell Mrs. Templeton about the burn. She was very decent about it, although she did say that the desk was “rather a treasure.” At breakfast Basil was in a very bad temper and bossy, and surprised me by shouting across the table to Muriel, “For Christ’s sake, don’t talk such balls,” but she did not seem at all upset. She and I went for a walk in the rain and agreed to meet again in London. I caught the 11 a.m. train. Felicity decided to stay on for a few more days. In the train I read an account of the ball in a social column. It sounded marvellous. Although I would not have missed it, I don’t know that I actually enjoyed it very much.

  31 January 1927.

  Sir Robert Borden, our former Canadian Prime Minister, is coming to Oxford shortly to make some kind of speech and will be staying at All Souls. I intend to call on him – he and my father were law partners, and great friends.

  When I was still at school he wrote to me about the Department of External Affairs in Ottawa, suggesting that it might be a career for me as he knew from my mother that I was interested in international affairs and he thought the Department would expand into a Canadian diplomatic service. I have this possibility in the back of my mind. It is true that in the last year or two I have lost interest in international affairs, but as a boy I used to follow them in the newspaper and make copious notes on them. Of course, I would have to get a good degree to get into the Department and also to pass their exams. I think I could do it. I have been working quite hard during the vacation and since this term began. But I do not write about work in this diary.

  1 February 1927.

  This afternoon I went to the Infirmary to see Jeremy. He looks less ghastly than he did just after the accident. He says that while in hospital he has made up his mind to go down from Oxford when he recovers and to look for a job, “perhaps something in the city.” Although I shall miss him very much, I think he is right. He is quite unsuited to this place. He then began talking about Margot. He says he thinks that the only man she really cared about is Frankie Turner and that her husband realizes this and that is why he took her away to London for the Christmas vacation. He did not mind her sleeping around but does not want to lose her. While we were in the midst of this conversation, who should appear but Margot herself, armed with a bunch of flowers for Jeremy. She looked – for her – rather plain and chattered away in a very forced way so that Jeremy began to look exhausted. She and I left together and walked back into Oxford. When I said how much I missed seeing and being with her this term she first did not answer. This irritated me and I said, “There is no use in my talking to you when you are in this mood.” She said, “It is not a mood, it is a fact – a fact that you could guess if you had any idea of anyone but yourself – the fact that I am pregnant.” I was stunned and must have looked my question, which was, “Who?” Before I could speak she said, “Now ask me ‘Who?’ It might have been a lot of people, mightn’t it? But you need not look so scared, my pet – the ghastly thing is that it is my own bloody husband and he doesn’t want me to have an abortion. He wants me to have the baby and he has taken a cottage in the country and we are to go and live there at any rate until the baby is born.” “Oh,” she wailed, “it will be such utter hell.” I tried to console her. I could see she was on the verge of tears. When we got to the Iffley bus stop I said I would come with her on the bus, but she said no and jumped on the bus and we waved to each other as it took off. Shall I ever see Margot again?

  2 February 1927.

  Today I had a letter from Mother containing some wonderful news. Aunt Zaidée left more money than anyone expected. Not a fortune by any means, but it makes just the difference so that there is no need to think of selling The Bower, at any rate in the immediate future.

  She also left me £200. I cannot help thinking what would have happened if I had had that money last term when Margot suggested that we should go to Paris together in the vacation. It might have changed everything. She would not have gone to London to join her husband and would not be expecting this baby. But would it really in the long run have changed anything? I have never really been in love with Margot as I was with Katherine. Yet Margot has made me very happy. I owe her a lot. Also, I am very fond of her, yet if I never do see her again, I’ll survive!

  Mother in her letter writes of next summer vacation and how lovely it will be for us to be together again at The Bower with Roley home for his school holidays. I am beginning to get quite excited at the idea of being back, which seems funny when I think how often I wanted to get away from Halifax. I feel I am a different person from the one who sailed for England last year but I don’t suppose that anyone at home will even notice the difference.

  EPILOGUE

  Long after my Oxford days, when the house had passed into other hands, I returned to The Bower. In The Siren Years the scene is described as follows:

  29 October 1940.

  I was thinking today of the last time I was in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and went for a walk to my old home, The Bower.

  That day I was trying to look outward from an introspective bout of indigestion by reconstructing the road as it used to be. Only it was more a question of destruction than construction. First of all that row of white clapboard bungalows would have to be swept away and replaced by scrub and pine trees. Then over the stone wall of Gorsebrook – green fields must stretch to woods beyond where now hulked St. Mary’s newly built C
atholic College, in a monumental freestone, priests pacing its cement-filled paths. Where that stone wall ran my eye could detect the gap built in of new stones where had been a gate on which Peter and I had leaned on a summer afternoon, undirected sex driving us clumsy and breathless. In the Gorsebrook fields I had walked in my new beige Oxford bags reciting Rupert Brooke and trying to keep my pace steady when the small boys from the village catching sight of me through the gap called names after me.

  The wall ended at the turn into The Bower drive. Here I was thrown back on memory with no stick or stone to help me – gone the gateposts, gone the lodge, gone the woods on either side of the drive and the tall trees that cast a green gloom until you came out on the slope which curved between rough lawns towards the house. I turned into the cul-de-sac of new houses which with their gardens had obliterated the former drive and woods. My walk was becoming an archaeological expedition, but instead of being buried under this new layer of living the old had vanished without a trace; swept off into space and time existing only in my memory.

  There seemed to be an excessive number of dogs about. From each porch or garden gate of the new houses a barking dog bounded out sniffing my ankles. Children on bicycles circled the end of the cul-de-sac where The Bower house stood – for it still stood though crowded into a corner by the new houses so that it hardly had room to breathe. Shorn of its approaches it was at an awkward angle to the street. Altogether the house looked sheepish and out of place among its brisk new neighbours – too large – but without giving any impression of grandeur. They had painted it a musty pale yellow and torn down the vine from the front wall. All that was left of the lawns was a wedge of grass on which still stood the big oak tree. The house would, as they say, have been “better dead.” Its physical presence there stopped the power of my imagination like a leaden block. I could not go into the house in my memory while that solid door stood facing me. Yet in that room above the porch on the left I was born. I had shivered and sweated out my adolescence. From that window I had watched for Katherine coming up the curve of the drive from under the summer green of the trees into the sunlight in her pink cotton dress swinging her straw hat in her hand.