He must have known that he had some kind of a Red for a son, but he seemed to manage to talk to me as if I still had elementary Saxon common sense, and I was very affected when I discovered that, by stealth, to his small circle of friends, he was giving Christmas gift subscriptions to my pinko magazine, the New Statesman. “Rather interesting piece by my son in that last issue… don’t know if you noticed it.” Did this make up for my failures as a sportsman? I doubt it, but then I had to ask myself if I had chosen the field of journalism to compensate for other shortcomings on the field of valor. On this point, too, he administered more of a shock to me than he can have intended. After I had returned from a visit to Lebanon in the mid-1970s, and a trip to the war zone in the south of that country that I had later written up for the magazine, I was sitting at my desk one afternoon when the telephone rang and it was the Commander. This occurrence was rare enough in itself to make me worry that something might be amiss. But he was calling to say that he had admired my article and, while I was still searching for the words in which to respond, he in effect doubled the stakes by saying that he thought it had been “rather brave” of me to go there. And then, as I grappled with that rather vertiginous development, he said goodbye and replaced the receiver. A man of few words, as I believe I have said.
At the time, I couldn’t make any definite connection between my own visits to the places where he’d been stationed, from the South Atlantic to the Eastern Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean, and the Commander’s earlier presence there. I myself could not picture how these one-time colonies must have looked when viewed through a massive ship’s gunsight, or from the deck of a superbly engineered war-machine. In truth, when in Cyprus or in Palestine or southern Africa or elsewhere, I generally felt myself so much in sympathy with those who had resisted British rule that I thought it better for the Commander and myself to avoid the subject. If you had asked me then about the likelihood of the Union Jack flying again over Basra or the Khyber Pass, I would have both mocked and scorned the idea. Yet when the Argentine fascist junta invaded the Falkland Islands in the early days of 1982, just after I had immigrated to New York, I felt a sudden stab of partisanship for the Royal Navy as it sailed out to reverse the outcome. I even wrote to the Commander in fairly gung-ho terms, hoping for a hint of common ground. His response surprised and even slightly depressed me. “I don’t know if it frightens the enemy,” he wrote about Britain’s last war-footing fleet as it found its inexorable way to the South Atlantic, “but it certainly frightens me.” This slightly hackneyed borrowing, from what the Duke of Wellington had said of his “infamous army” of drunken and homicidal riffraff on the eve of Waterloo, left me feeling flat. (“Waterlooville” was the name of a suburb of Portsmouth, and there was a celebrated pub called “The Heroes of Waterlooville” whose inn sign showed the redcoats smashing Bonaparte’s “Old Guard,” so he had to know that I would find his historical allusion slightly trite.)
On reflection, though, I am able to see what I did learn from my father. I had once thought that he’d helped me understand the Tory mentality, all the better to combat and repudiate it. And in that respect he was greatly if accidentally instructive. But over the longer stretch, I have come to realize that he taught me—without ever intending to—what it is to feel disappointed and betrayed by your “own” side. He had a certain idea of England, insular to a degree, and conservative for sure but not always, or not necessarily, reactionary. In this England, patient merit would take precedence over the insolence of office, and people who earned their money would be accorded more respect than people who merely had it or “made” it. The antiquity and tranquility of the landscape and the coastline would likewise have earned their share of deference: those who wanted to uproot or to “develop” an area would have to make a case for change rather than be permitted the glib and clever assumption that change was a good thing in itself.
And yet the postwar Conservative Party had become the agent of hectic and greedy modernistic metamorphosis: tearing up the old railway lines and cutting great new swaths of motorway through hill and forest and dale; licensing the commercial principle in everything from television to elections; contemptuous of tradition; handing the skylines and harbors of our grand and blitzed old seaports to builders and speculators who swiftly made them unrecognizable to the veterans who had made those place names honored and famous. And this was just in the time of Harold Macmillan. If the Commander had lived to see the full impact of Thatcherism, he would have felt that there was almost nothing left worth fighting for, or rather having fought for.
I have so few vivid memories of him that one may do duty for many: we had gone as a family into Portsmouth for the opening night of The Longest Day. This epic film about the D-Day landings would, I knew from experience, be almost certain to annoy or disappoint the Commander in at least one of two ways. The movie would either understate the role of Britain in the historic storming of the beaches of occupied Europe (reversing an ancient verdict by having us invade Normandy) or it would underplay the part of the Royal Navy in this hinge event. In the event, it was grudgingly agreed in the car on the way home that fairness had at least been attempted. There were a few laughs at the expense of “the Yanks and their gadgets,” and a few reminiscences of the Dieppe raid that had raised the curtain on Normandy: a hellish fiasco in which the Commander had helped land the doomed Canadian forces on bullet-swept beaches, with Lord Mountbatten (an especially vain member of the British Royal Family) as part of his ship’s company. But this effort at good cheer was all aimed at erasing what had occurred before the cinema’s curtains had parted. My father had come back from the box office with the news that only the most absurdly expensive or the most abjectly cheap seats were now available. He looked quite put out at this: Didn’t the throng for this film understand that he’d practically been there? Yvonne attempted mollification. “Who’s snapped up the tickets then? ‘The affluent society,’ I suppose?” “You have that right,” said the Commander with bitterness. He’d done so much for the empire and it had done so little for him in return. If I had had my way, he would have been respectfully escorted to a front-row seat, or perhaps a box.
But I also admired him for his lack of guile and his dislike for anything that was surreptitious or underhand. While in the Royal Navy, he had indignantly refused any advances from the Freemasons, even though this mafia of the mediocre might, had he but joined them, have swung the difference between being promoted and otherwise. One loyalty was enough for him. His candor and modesty once almost caused me to weep. He told of a senior officer who had asked him if he’d come and help out at a cocktail party on the base. It was explained to him in confidence by his superior that the event was meant to soak up all the bores who hadn’t been invited to anything yet. “Thank you, sir,” he had replied. “But I believe I have already received my invitation.” Yvonne’s face, when he told this story in company, was a frozen study that I never forgot.
The Commander lost his last proper job in a similarly naïve way, feeling himself obliged to tell the boys’ school in Oxford—the place which had furnished his last and only economic security—that he had reached the statutory retirement age. “Honestly, Eric,” the somewhat shambolic headmaster later informed me he had told him, “you didn’t have to do that. Nobody was going to make anything of it. Nobody had ever even thought of asking. But now that you have bloody well told us, the Board of Governors has no legal option but to give you a gold watch or something and let you go.” And so he went, quietly and uncomplainingly as ever.[4] In his last years, in enforced semi-retirement, he did some very small-time bookkeeping work for a medical man of sorts, in the out-of-the-way Oxfordshire village of Sutton Courtenay, where George Orwell is buried and where, when I once visited, the vicar led me to the spot and then said: “Oh, sorry: wrong grave. This one says ‘Eric Blair.’ ”
Eric Ernest Hitchens’s own grave is on Portsdown Hill, overlooking what Arthur Conan Doyle used to call “The Narrow Sea.” This histori
c stretch of water was decidedly and historically “ours.” (“I do not say,” Lord St. Vincent is supposed to have told Parliament in the Napoleonic epoch, “that our enemies cannot come. I only say that they cannot come by sea.”) Here is the chapel where General Eisenhower said a prayer for fine weather and victory the night before the D-Day landings in Normandy: a stained-glass window commemorates the modest warrior who later became president of the United States. Commander Hitchens had once assured me, after a visit to my long-bedridden grandfather, that he would not make a protracted business of dying, and he was as good as his word. He died in 1987, aged 78. Having never spent a day in bed in his life, he went very speedily from diagnosis of an inoperable cancer in his esophagus to a hammer-blow heart attack that gave his hostess, his sister Ena, barely time to rush to his side. (My Aunt Ena had also landed on the beaches of Normandy as a nurse in the second wave—another excellent day’s work—and got all the way to Germany before they told her to stop.)
The Commander’s funeral took place on a day of bitter and extreme cold. I dismounted from the train at what had once been my home-bound station for the school holidays. By a macabre coincidence, as I walked through the freezing station yard I saw workmen painting out the faint storefront sign “Susannah Munday” on what had once been my mother’s sad attempt at a dress shop. I was able to see my father in his last repose before the screwing-on of the lid, and later to do for him what he had once done for me, and carry him on my shoulders. We laid the coffin in the chancel of the D-Day chapel: my brother had made all the liturgical and musical arrangements with a clear eye to tradition and dignity. I rather pity those Anglo-American families to whom the “Navy Hymn” is not a part of the emotional furniture: its words and music are impossibly stirring even to one who finds the opening words “Eternal Father” doubly problematic. The tune is actually called “Melita,” after the old name of the island of Malta where St. Paul was shipwrecked, and was written for someone who was about to take ship across the Atlantic for the United States. My own text was from that same Paul of Tarsus, and from his Epistle to the Philippians, which I selected for its non-religious yet high moral character:
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
Try looking that up in a “modern” version of the New Testament (Philippians 4:8) and see what a ration of bland doggerel you get. I shall never understand how the keepers and trustees of the King James Version threw away such a treasure. But that very thought, if you like, is partly taken from my father’s legacy of suspicion of change and of resistance to the rude shock of the new.
The Commander had no surviving friends to speak of and in the misty churchyard there were only a few gaunt Hampshire faces with that Hitchens look: the look of the tough south English peasant that one can sometimes also see in Georgia and the Carolinas. These distant kinsmen gave a hasty clasp of the hand and faded back into the chalky landscape. It was all stark enough to have pleased my father at his most downbeat. An absence of fuss could be noted. I suddenly remembered the most contemptuous word I had ever heard the old man utter. Discovering me lying in the bath with a cigarette, a book, and a perilously perched glass (I must have been attempting some adolescent version of the aesthetic), he almost barked: “What is this? Luxury?” That this was another word for sin, drawn from the repertory of antique Calvinism, I immediately understood.
That my mother would have approved—though perhaps languidly preferring a chaise longue to a bath—I also knew. So, here you have my two much-opposed and sharply discrepant ancestral stems: two stray branches that only war and chance could ever have caused to become entwined. I ought not to overstate the contradictions: one of the two apparently stern and flinty and martial and continent and pessimistic; the other exotic and beseeching and hopeful and tentative, yet the first one very much less sturdy than it should by rights have been. Even though it has left me with a strong sense of “fight-or-flight” on family occasions, and a real dread of clan occasions such as birthdays and Christmas and other moments of mandatory gaiety, I am grateful enough for the blessed anxiety and unease that it has bequeathed to me.
Fragments from an Education
Orwell, Connolly, Waugh, Betjeman, to name only a few, have pungently described the disenchantments of schooldays… I do not wish to appear less competent than my contemporaries in making creep the flesh of the epicure of sado-masochistic school reminiscence.
—Anthony Powell: Infants of the Spring
…that stoic redskin interlude which our schools intrude between the fast-flowing tears of the child and the man.
—Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
I NOW CLAIM STANFORD, California, as a part of my own turf but I was extremely apprehensive and feeling very junior when I first glimpsed the campus in 1987. The impression of first-day-at-school in its grand quads was only enhanced by the effort of my old friend Edward Said, with whom I was visiting the campus for a conference, to encourage me to feel more at home. “Come on,” he said, “we’ll go and take a cocktail from Ian Watt.” I was made additionally nervous by the thought of introduction to this dry, wry, and donnish figure, the world’s expert on Joseph Conrad and the author of The Rise of the Novel. On greeting, he caused me to feel even more uneasy by drawing attention to the unusual number of Japanese students who could be seen from his windows. “I know it’s silly to say so, but it still makes me feel odd sometimes.”
Nobody could have been less chauvinistic than Ian Watt but then, he was one of the few survivors of The Bridge On The River Kwai, The Burma Railroad, Changi Jail in Singapore, and other Hirohito horrors that I still capitalize in my mind. He admitted later that, detecting other people’s reserve after returning home from these wartime nightmares, he had developed a manner of discussing them apotropaically, as it were, so as to defuse them a bit. And he told me the following tale, which I set down with the hope that it captures his memorably laconic tone of voice:
Well, we were in a cell that was probably built for six but was holding about sixteen of us. There wasn’t much food and we hadn’t been given any water for quite a while. The heat was absolutely ferocious. Dysentery had begun to take its toll, which was distinctly disagreeable at such close quarters…
Added to this unpleasantness, we could hear one of our number being rather badly beaten by the Japanese guards, with rifle-butts it seemed, in their guardroom down the corridor. At this rather trying moment one of my young subalterns, who’d managed to fall asleep, started screaming and flailing and yelling. He was shouting: “No, no—please don’t… Not any more, not again, Oh God please.” Hideous noises like that. I had to take a snap decision to prevent panic, so I ordered the sergeant to slap him and wake him up. When he came to, he apologized for being a bore but brokenly confessed that he’d dreamed he was back at Tonbridge.
My laughter at this, for all its brilliant timing and understatement, was very slightly awkward. Watt went on to recall an interview with that other old Asia hand E.M. Forster, in which he’d been asked, as an “old boy” of Tonbridge School, whether he would ever agree to write an article for the school magazine. “Only,” said the author of A Passage to India, “if it could be against compulsory games.” The very phrase “compulsory games” had automatic resonance for me, bringing back not merely the memory of freezing soccer and rugby pitches, and of the gloating sadists who infested the changing-rooms that were the aftermath of these pointless contests, but also W.H. Auden’s suggestive line in one of his greatest poems [“1 September 1939”]:
And helpless governors wake / To resume their compulsory game…
It was indeed Auden—who had been a master at such a school as well as having been a pupil at one—who had said that the experience had given him an instinctive understanding of what it would be like to live under fa
scism. (He had also said, when told by the headmaster that only “the cream” attended the school: “yes I know what you mean—thick and rich.”)
But this is where I must very slightly disappoint you. The three great subjects of Beating, Bullying, and Buggery (the junior or cadet equivalent of Winston Churchill’s naval tryptych of “Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash”) are familiar enough to me in their way, and I have often been closely questioned—usually by girls—about their influence on my formation. I was subjected to a certain amount and to a certain extent to the first two of the Big Bs but not (my italics) to the third. I should perhaps add that I was never big or strong or desperate enough to inflict any of the above procedures on anyone else. In fact, in the annals of British boarding-school trauma, I scarcely count even as walking wounded. This is because, at the very last moment, I was saved from having to go to Tonbridge.
Have you ever walked away from a car smash without a scathe, or had that other experience so well evoked by Winston Churchill: the sheer perfect relief of being shot at by someone who has missed you? I have in fact had both these experiences, but neither approximates to my sense of deliverance from the Tonbridgean. It was once again a matter of my mother versus my father. Neither of them knowing anything about the upper reaches of the education system, it had been decided when I was born to “put my name down” for the only school with which we had contact, run by someone who had once been on the same warship as the Commander. This seemed an efficient rather than a random way of doing things. However, and just before I was due to take the entrance exam at the age of thirteen, my mother bethought herself that it might be worth taking a look at the place where I was due to be conscripted for the next five formative years.
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