A Sort of Life (2 page)

The first thing I remember is sitting in a pram at the top of a hill with a dead dog lying at my feet. It was close by the fields which were later to become, thanks to the beneficence of my rich Uncle Edward – known for mysterious reasons as Eppy – the playing-fields of Berkhamsted School, for even the geography of the little town was influenced by the two big families of Greenes (seventeen Greenes resident in one small place would seem even today an unduly high proportion of the population, and at holiday times the Greenes could nearly reach a quarter of a century). The dog, as I know now, was a pug owned by my elder sister. It had been run over – by a horse-carriage? – and killed and the nurse thought it convenient to bring the cadaver home this way. The memory may well be a true one, as my mother once told me how surprised she had been months later by some reference which I made to the ‘poor dog’; they were almost the first words I had spoken.

In all these early years I an uncertain what is genuinely remembered. For example I think I can remember a toy motor-car, which now surely – a 1908 vintage toy – might be worthy of a sale at Sotheby’s, but since it appears in a photograph of myself and my brother Raymond, this may not be a true memory. My age then was about four, and I wore a pinafore and had fair curls falling around the neck. My elder brother with a proper masculine haircut, an adult of seven, stares fearlessly towards the box-camera, like a future mountaineer of Kamet and Everest, while I still have the ambiguity of undetermined sex.

As children we used to go down to the drawing-room for about an hour after tea, from 5.30 to 6.30, to play with our mother, and I remember the fear I felt that my mother would read us a story about some children who were sent into a forest by a wicked uncle to be murdered, but the murderer repented and left them to die of exposure and afterwards the birds covered their bodies with leaves. I dreaded the story because I was afraid of weeping. I would infinitely have preferred quick murder to the long drawn-out pathos of their end. My tear-ducts in childhood, and indeed for many years later, worked far too easily, and even today I sometimes slink shame-faced from a cinema at some happy ending that moves me by its incredibility. (Life isn’t like that. Of such courage and such fidelity we dream only, but in my distress I wish them true.)

As I approach school-age the memories thicken. One vivid memory (I was probably about five) was of passing with my nurse the old alms-houses which leant against each other near the Grand Junction canal. There was a crowd outside one of the little houses and a man broke away and ran into the house. I was told that he was going to cut his throat, nobody followed him, everybody, including my nurse and I, stood outside waiting, but I never learnt whether he succeeded.
The Berkhamsted Gazette
would have informed me, but I couldn’t yet read.
¹

Of all my first six years I have only such random memories as
these and I cannot be sure of the time-sequence. They are significant for me because they remain, the stray symbols of a dream after the story has sunk back into the unconscious, and they cry for rescue like the survivors of a shipwreck.

There was a particular kind of wheaten biscuit with a very pale pure unsweetened flavour – I am reminded now of the Host – which only my mother had the right to eat. They were kept in a special biscuit-tin in her bedroom and sometimes as a favour I was given one to eat dipped in milk. I associate my mother with a remoteness, which I did not at all resent, and with a smell of eau-de-cologne. If I could have tasted her I am sure she would have tasted of wheaten biscuits. She paid occasional state visits to the nursery in the School House, a large confused room which looked out on the flint church and the old cemetery, with toy cupboards and bookshelves and a big wooden rocking-horse with wicked eyes and one large comfortable wicker-chair for the nurse beside the steel fireguard, and my mother gained in my eyes great dignity from her superintendence of the linen-cupboard, where a frightening witch lurked, but of that later. The wheaten biscuit remains for me a symbol of her cool puritan beauty – she seemed to eliminate all confusion, to recognize the good from the bad and choose the good, though where her family was concerned in later years she noticed only the good. If one of us had committed murder she would, I am sure, have blamed the victim. When she was in an untroubled coma before death and I was watching by her bed, her long white plantagenet face reminded me of a crusader on a tomb. It seemed the right peaceful end for the tall calm beautiful girl standing in a punt in a long skirt with a tiny belted waist and wearing a straw boater whom I had seen in the family album.

An unpleasant memory of those years is of a tin jerry full of blood: I was feeling horribly sick, for I had just had my adenoids out and my tonsils cut. The operation had been done at home. For thirty years after that the sight of blood worried and sickened me, so that sometimes I fainted at the mere description of an accident. In the blitz, before I encountered the first wounded, I was afraid of what my reaction might be until I found that fear and the necessity of action conquered the nausea.

Our home until I reached the age of six was a house called St John’s, one of the boarding-houses of Berkhamsted School. My father was housemaster there. When he became the headmaster in 1910 we removed to the School House, but I went back to St John’s as a boarder at thirteen and most of my memories of the house (and very unhappy ones they are) date back to that time. Before that first climacteric I remember of St John’s only the extra piece of garden we had across the road, where on special days in summer we would go and play with the exciting sense of travelling abroad. There was a summer-house there (no such thing existed on the every-day side), and the garden was built up high above the road so that I couldn’t see over the bushes to my home which might have been a hundred miles away. It was my first experience of foreign travel. Later I used to think of the two gardens as resembling England and France with the Channel between, although I had never been to France – England for every day and France for holidays.

At the far end of Berkhamsted at the Hall, the great house of the town, lived the family of Greene cousins. The mother was German and the whole family had an intimidatingly exotic air, for many of them had been born in Brazil near Santos, on a
fazenda
which was also the name of the coffee we drank. There were six children, the same number as in our family, and in ages they were inserted between us, our family starting first, as though my uncle, who was the younger brother, had suffered from a competitive spirit and wanted to catch my father up. My own particular friend was Tooter, though it was with his younger sister Barbara that I was years later to make the rather foolhardy journey through Liberia which I have described in
Journey Without Maps
.

My uncle’s children were the rich Greenes and we were regarded as the intellectual Greenes. We would visit them on Christmas Eve for the Christmas tree, my elder siblings staying for dinner. I used to be embarrassed by the carols in German round the tree because I was afraid I might be expected to sing too. The whole affair in our eyes seemed rather Teutonic, for to us the eve of Christmas had no significance at all. Christmas only began the next morning with the crunchy feel of a heavy stocking lying
across the toes and a slight feeling of nausea, due to excitement, which bore the family name of ‘Narcissus tummy-ache’. I don’t remember any Christmas tree in our house, and mistletoe was an embarrassing joke played by our elders. Kissing had no appeal, and I kept well away from the mistletoe if anyone else were around.

On Christmas Eve, at the Hall, the children all had their presents laid on separate tables which were identified by names on cards. I remember being bitterly disappointed once when an adult present, a leather writing-case, on my table, turned out to be there in error: it was intended for my uncle, who bore the same name and who was the Permanent Secretary of the Admiralty and a Knight of the Bath – a title which I found impressive and not funny at all.

Very remote my uncle Graham seemed, and the more important for his dryness and his taciturnity and the glasses which dangled over his waistcoat on a broad black ribbon. Even today I find it difficult to think of him as a little boy riding to school in Cambridge on a donkey. His speech was all ‘ehs’ and ‘ahs’. Perhaps he felt ill at ease with anyone but a civil servant. He died unmarried in 1950 at his home in Harston at the age of ninety-three, looked after by his two old sisters, Helen and Polly, both in their eighties. At the age of eighty-nine he fell under a tube train owing to failing eyesight on his way to attend a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence which was to discuss the import of reindeer into the north of Scotland. He lay, quiet and self-possessed, beside the live rail while the train moved back and it was found that he had only bruised a rib. With difficulty he was persuaded to return to Harston. There, when he was ninety-one, he fell out of a tree (he was pruning the branches) and for a while he had to take to his bed, but a more humdrum accident proved the fatal one, a year later, when he tripped over a chair on the lawn. He survived quite a while even then, though bed-ridden, having
The Times
leaders read to him every morning, and the first sign of his approaching end was when my old aunts while undressing him removed a toe with his socks. He was a remarkable man, if we had only known it. Having been drummed out of the Admiralty after Jutland by Lloyd George and the Northcliffe
Press, he joined his friend Winston Churchill at the Ministry of Munitions. Only recently in a volume of the
Dictionary of National Biography
did I learn of his connection with the world of James Bond – he was one of the founders of Naval Intelligence. Carson told how ‘I met Churchill in the prime minister’s room and congratulated him on his knowledge of men. “What do you mean?” said Lloyd George. “Well,” I said, “Winston has the wisdom to choose for a much bigger job the man you dismissed from the Admiralty”.’

My uncle lived in a big house at Harston in Cambridgeshire, and as children we would go there for the summer holidays, though later my elders went away to the Lake District to climb and I was left with my mother and the baby Hugh. (Finally my sister Molly fell off a mountain and got married to the man who photographed her fall – perhaps she admired his presence of mind.)

Harston House was – at least in part – a lovely William-and-Mary house, and it had a large old-fashioned garden very suited to hide-and-seek, with an orchard, a stream and a big pond containing an island, and there was a fountain on the front lawn. We would fix a cup to the handle of a walking stick, and the water so obtained tasted very cold and very pure. The fountain was about two feet deep and a yard across. Once my elder brother Raymond fell in at the age of three, and when asked how he had got out he replied with bravura, ‘I struck out for the shore.’ The smell of apples seemed to fall everywhere over the garden and the smell of box hedges, and there was a buzz of bees in the hot summer weather. I remember the funeral of a dead bird which was coffined in a Price’s night-light box. My elders, Herbert and Molly and Raymond, buried him in what was called the Shady Walk. I was only a minor mourner, being the youngest, too young and unimportant to be priest or grave-digger or chorister.

My uncle was never there when we were. He stayed safely away from any family turbulence in his bachelor flat off Hanover Square. I had a very possessive feeling for the great rambling garden, and I was furious one year when my mother invited another small boy called Harker, the son of the school doctor, to
share my summer there. I treated him as a pariah, I wouldn’t play with him, I would hardly speak to him. I never showed him how to get water from the fountain, and I knew hiding places that he would never find, so that he was left ambling aimlessly without a companion, bored sometimes to tears. The experience of that terrible long August was never repeated and thereafter I was allowed to stay alone.

It was at Harston I quite suddenly found that I could read – the book was
Dixon Brett, Detective
. I didn’t want anyone to know of my. discovery, so I read only in secret, in a remote attic, but my mother must have spotted what I was at all the same, for she gave me Ballantyne’s
Coral Island
for the train journey home – always an interminable journey with the long wait between trains at Bletchley. I still wouldn’t admit my new talent, and I stared at the only illustration all the way to the junction. No wonder it so impressed itself on my memory that I can see with my mind’s eye today the group of children posed on the rocks. I think I feared that reading represented the entrance to the Preparatory School (I went through the grim portal a few weeks before my eighth birthday), or perhaps I disliked the sense of patronage which I always detected when I was praised for something others did quite naturally. Only a few years ago at an Edinburgh ceremonial my memory was confirmed by Doctor Dover Wilson, the Shakespearian scholar, who told me that my parents often spoke to him of the difficulty they found in teaching me to read. I detested that absurd book with the engravings which now seem so charming,
Reading Without Tears
. How could I be interested in a cat who sat on a mat? I couldn’t identify with a cat. Dixon Brett was quite another matter, and he had a boy assistant, who might easily I thought, have been myself.

I particularly resented my father’s interest. How could a grown man, I argued, feel any concern for what happened on a child’s walk? To be praised was agony – I would crawl immediately under the nearest table. Until I had grown up I think my only real moments of affection for my father were when he made frog-noises with his palms, or played Fly Away, Jack, Fly Away, Jill, with a piece of sticking-plaster on his finger, or made me blow open the lid of his watch. Only when I had children of my own
did I realize how his interest in my doings had been genuine, and only then I discovered a buried love and sorrow for him, which emerges today from time to time in dreams.