A Sort of Life (13 page)

Perhaps if I could have saved enough money I would have gone to France that summer and not to Sheringham. Paris at the time lured me more than Athens or Rome. In Paris
Ulysses
had just been published: at the Sphynx, they said, the customers were served by naked waitresses: the Folies Bergère and the Concert Mayol were not regarded as the family entertainments they have since become. But the end of my first year saw me heavily in debt: so many barrels of beer, so many books, shelf upon shelf of them, which had nothing to do with work. At Blackwell’s bookshop credit seemed to a newcomer endless (though they liked a little bit sometimes on account), but drinks were ordered through the college buttery and appeared on battels, as college bills were called (there was no credit given there), and as I spent my first two terms in lodgings in Beechcroft Road, far up in north Oxford,
there had often been taxis at midnight – which left a deficit for the term ahead. So gloomily, I thought, ‘It must be Sheringham this summer’, for there I could live at my family’s expense.

The younger children, Elisabeth and Hugh, had grown too old for a nurse, and so my kissing-instructress had not been replaced, but instead a governess had been appointed, a young woman of about twenty-nine or thirty – ten years or more older than myself. During the first days at Sheringham she made little impression – my day-dreams were still of my cousin and of the waitress at the George. My brother and sister were happy, I noticed, with her, and she joined cheerfully in our games of cricket on the sands. The first time I looked at her with any interest was at the same instant the
coup de foudre
. She was lying on the beach and her skirt had worked up high and showed a long length of naked thigh. Suddenly at that moment I fell in love, body and mind. There was no romantic haze around this love, no make-believe: I couldn’t share it like calf-love with a waitress at the George.

It is strange how vivid the memory has remained, so that I can see the stretch of beach, my mother reading, the angle from which I examined her body, and yet I cannot even remember the first time I kissed her or the hesitations and timidities which surely must have preceded the kiss. For her it was a flirtation which at first, before she scented danger, must have helped the passage of the boring hours, alone in the big nursery at Berkhamsted with two children as companions. For me it was an obsessive passion: I lived only for the moments with her. She began soon to be a little scared of what was happening; every evening of the winter vacation I would go upstairs to the nursery where she sat alone and the slow fire consumed the coals behind an iron guard. My parents must have heard my footsteps night by night as they crossed the floor, just as when I sat below I could hear her movements on the ceiling while I pretended to read. Sometimes during the day she would enlist my sister’s aid to hide from me. I took dancing lessons in order to please her, and on Saturday nights we would go together to what were called ‘hops’ at the King’s Arms. To keep up appearances I would have to dance occasionally with some boring wife of a master at the school and surrender her
to other arms. Sometimes in the dark schoolroom out of term, on the excuse of teaching my brother and sister to waltz and foxtrot, we had dances of our own when half-kisses could be exchanged without the children seeing.

But the fear set in. She told me how she was engaged to be married to a man working for Cables & Wireless in the Azores. She had not seen him for over a year, and he had become like a stranger to her. Soon he would be returning, and she would have to leave Berkhamsted to marry him. Once when she talked to me of her marriage, she wept a little. I was too inexperienced to press her for more than kisses; marriage for me seemed then to be years out of reach and there was the great difference in our ages. All I could do was urge her to break her promise and I had nothing to offer in exchange. We wrote to each other every week when I returned to Oxford, and her handwriting became so fixed in my memory that when, more than thirty years after we had ceased to write, I received a letter asking me to get her seats for my first play
The Living Room
, I recognized her hand on the envelope and my heart beat faster until I remembered that I was a man of over fifty and she, by now, well into her cruel sixties.

I can see now that my courtship from the distance of Oxford went to comic and selfish lengths. For example I organized a reading of poems by ‘Oxford Poets’ with what was then the British Broadcasting Company at Savoy Hill. Among others Harold Acton took part, Joseph Gordon Macleod, T. O. Beach-croft and A. L. Rowse, who was the only one to receive a ‘fan’ letter – it came from an old invalid lady who had found his verses, she wrote, ‘consoling’. I read an extract from an attempt on the Newdigate Prize. The subject that year was ‘Lord Byron’, but my sentimental blank verse lines had nothing to do with Byron – they were directed at Berkhamsted where the governess sat listening, as she had been warned to do. Poor young woman, it never occurred to me what embarrassment she must have suffered, seated before the radio set with my father and mother. Other verses too I poured out to her like letters and sold them to the
Weekly Westminster
, still edited by Kenneth Richmond’s friend, Miss Naomi Royde-Smith, or gave them gratis to the
Oxford Outlook
(of which I was conveniently the
editor), or sent them to the
Oxford Chronicle
, which paid me five shillings a poem, or the
Decachord
, which paid nothing. There would have been no doubt at home of the subject of my verses. Even the sound of her footsteps on the nursery floor were recorded in plain lines, and my jealousy of the man she was to marry. In one sonnet written in that winter of 1924 I looked forward without relish to my solitary future – ‘Eating a Lyons chop in 1930’ the sonnet pessimistically began. How could I have imagined that by 1930 I would have been already happily married for two years? But the reality of a passion should not be questioned because of its brevity. A storm in the shallow Mediterranean may be over in a few hours, but while it lasts it is savage enough to drown men, and this storm was savage. Passion had temporarily eased the burden of boredom: hope was a panacea, even when it was only expectation of the ‘hop’ at the King’s Arms on the next Saturday night, but there were times – even a governess has holidays and days of freedom – when I realized that my old enemy was merely biding his moment. A manic-depressive, like my grandfather – that would be the verdict on me today, and analysis had not cured my condition.

I can remember very clearly the afternoon I found the revolver in the brown deal corner-cupboard in a bedroom which I shared with my elder brother. It was the early autumn of 1923. The revolver was a small ladylike object with six chambers like a tiny egg-stand, and there was a cardboard box full of bullets. I never mentioned the discovery to my brother because I had realized the moment I saw the revolver the use I intended to make of it. (I don’t to this day know why he possessed it; certainly he had no licence, and he was only three years older than myself. A large family is as departmental as a Ministry.)

My brother was away – probably climbing in the Lake District – and until he returned the revolver was to all intents my own. I knew what to do with it because I had been reading a book (I think Ossendowski was the author) which described how the White Russian officers, condemned to inaction in southern Russia at the tail-end of the counter-revolutionary war, used to invent
hazards with which to escape boredom. One man would slip a charge into a revolver and turn the chambers at random, and his companion would put the revolver to his head and pull the trigger. The chance, of course, was five to one in favour of life.

One forgets emotions easily. If I were dealing with an imaginary character, I might feel it necessary for verisimilitude to make him hesitate, put the revolver back into the cupboard, return to it again after an interval, reluctantly and fearfully, when the burden of boredom and despair became too great. But in fact there was no hesitation at all: I slipped the revolver into my pocket, and the next I can remember is crossing Berkhamsted Common towards the Ashridge beeches. Perhaps before I had opened the corner-cupboard, boredom had reached an intolerable depth. The boredom was as deep as the love and more enduring – indeed it descends on me too often today. For years, after my analysis, I could take no aesthetic interest in any visual thing: staring at a sight that others assured me was beautiful I felt nothing. I was fixed, like a negative in a chemical bath. Rilke wrote, ‘Psycho-analysis is too fundamental a help for me, it helps you once and for all, it clears you up, and to find myself finally cleared up one day might be even more helpless than this chaos.’

Now with the revolver in my pocket I thought I had stumbled on the perfect cure. I was going to escape in one way or another, and perhaps because escape was inseparably connected with the Common in my mind, it was there that I went.

Beyond the Common lay a wide grass ride known for some reason as Cold Harbour to which I would occasionally take a horse, and beyond again stretched Ashridge Park, the smooth olive skin of beech trees and last year’s quagmire of leaves, dark like old pennies. Deliberately I chose my ground, I believe without real fear – perhaps because so many semi-suicidal acts which my elders would have regarded as neurotic, but which I still consider to have been under the circumstances highly reasonable, lay in the background of this more dangerous venture. They removed the sense of strangeness as I slipped a bullet into a chamber and, holding the revolver behind my back, spun the chambers round.

Had I romantic thoughts about my love? I must have had, but I think, at the most, they simply eased the medicine down. Unhappy love, I suppose, has sometimes driven boys to suicide, but this was not suicide, whatever a coroner’s jury might have said: it was a gamble with five chances to one against an inquest. The discovery that it was possible to enjoy again the visible world by risking its total loss was one I was bound to make sooner or later.

I put the muzzle of the revolver into my right ear and pulled the trigger. There was a minute click, and looking down at the chamber I could see that the charge had moved into the firing position. I was out by one. I remember an extraordinary sense of jubilation, as if carnival lights had been switched on in a dark drab street. My heart knocked in its cage, and life contained an infinite number of possibilities. It was like a young man’s first successful experience of sex – as if among the Ashridge beeches I had passed the test of manhood. I went home and put the revolver back in the corner-cupboard.

This experience I repeated a number of times. At fairly long intervals I found myself craving for the adrenalin drug, and I took the revolver with me when I returned to Oxford. There I would walk out from Headington towards Elsfield down what is now a wide arterial road, smooth and shiny like the walls of a public lavatory. Then it was a sodden unfrequented country lane. The revolver would be whipped behind my back, the chamber twisted, the muzzle quickly and surreptitiously inserted in my ear beneath the black winter trees, the trigger pulled.

Slowly the effect of the drug wore off – I lost the sense of jubilation, I began to receive from the experience only the crude kick of excitement. It was the difference between love and lust. And as the quality of the experience deteriorated, so my sense of responsibility grew and worried me. I wrote a bad piece of free verse (free because it was easier in that way to express my meaning clearly without literary equivocation) describing how, in order to give myself a fictitious sense of danger, I would ‘press the trigger of a revolver I already know to be empty’. This verse I would leave permanently on my desk, so that if I lost the gamble, it would provide incontrovertible evidence of an accident,
and my parents, I thought, would be less troubled by a fatal play-acting than by a suicide – or the rather bizarre truth. (Only after I had given up the game did I write other verses which told the true facts.)

It was back in Berkhamsted during the Christmas of 1923 that I paid a permanent farewell to the drug. As I inserted my fifth dose, which corresponded in my mind to the odds against death, it occurred to me that I wasn’t even excited: I was beginning to pull the trigger as casually as I might take an aspirin tablet. I decided to give the revolver – since it was six-chambered – a sixth and last chance. I twirled the chambers round and put the muzzle to my ear for a second time, then heard the familiar empty click as the chambers shifted. I was through with the drug, and walking back over the Common, down the new road by the ruined castle, past the private entrance to the gritty old railway station reserved for the use of Lord Brownlow, my mind was already busy on other plans. One campaign was over, but the war against boredom had got to go on. I put the revolver back in the corner-cupboard, and going downstairs I lied gently and convincingly to my parents that a friend had invited me to join him in Paris.

For I had to get away somehow from evenings where the ceiling of the room where I sat sounded under the well-known footsteps and all I had for physical expectations were the Saturday night ‘hops’ or a few minutes pressed together in the dark schoolroom. My rival was soon to return from the Azores and the governess would be married and gone before the long summer vac came round again. The whole episode of my love had lasted less than six months, but even today it seems to have endured as long as youth itself. As for the revolver I was never tempted to take it up again, but it left an influence on my night-life; in dreams even to this day I often raise a revolver to defend myself against some enemy and find it useless because, when I fire, the bullets are discharged without the force to penetrate. A kind of Russian roulette remained too a factor in my later life, so that without previous experience of Africa I went on an absurd and reckless trek through Liberia; it was the fear of boredom which took me to Tabasco during the religious persecution, to a
léproserie
in the Congo, to
the Kikuyu reserve during the Mau-Mau insurrection, to the emergency in Malaya and to the French war in Vietnam. There, in those last three regions of clandestine war, the fear of ambush served me just as effectively as the revolver from the corner-cupboard in the life-long war against boredom.