A Sort of Life (7 page)

You could get to the school also by going past the dark room and linen-cupboard on the nursery landing, through a glass door, to the dormitories. As I had the freedom of these regions only out of term, they are always empty in my memory – stony, ugly, deserted.

I went to school just before I was eight, as my birthday came in October, after term had started. My form master in the bottom form was called Frost. Later the school was reorganized and he was put in charge of the preparatory school which occupied a house in which my aunt Maud had once lived – it was there that I first read
Dracula
with great fear one long summer afternoon. The memory is salt with the taste of blood, for I had picked my lip while reading and it wouldn’t stop bleeding – I thought I was going to bleed to death, one of Count Dracula’s victims.

Frost had the reputation of getting on well with very small
boys, but I was a little afraid of him. He used to sweep his black gown around him in a melodramatic gesture, before he indulged his jovial ogrish habit of screwing a fist in one’s cheek till it hurt.

Of my first day at school I can remember nothing except that I had to read a passage from
Captain Cook’s Voyages
, the set English book that term. I found the formal eighteenth-century prose very dull, and I still do. History was my favourite subject, and when I was about twelve a rather foolish master whom we all despised stated in my annual report, otherwise given up to laconic statements – ‘Satisfactory’, ‘Tries hard’, ‘weak’ and suchlike – that I ‘had the makings of an historian’. I was pleased, but considered rightly that it was an attempt to pander favour with my father.

At this period I was not unhappy at school except that, when I was twelve and I was moved into the top junior form, I remained at the bottom of the class for a whole term and lost my confidence. Of the masters I remember a monstrously fat one called Moir with black hair which was thinly streaked across the top of a bald head. Poor man, he must have suffered from some glandular disease which rendered him unfit for military service. He married during the war to everyone’s astonishment a pretty young woman who was a temporary mistress; it seemed the mating of Beauty and the Beast. A popular master in charge of one of the junior houses was called Simpson. He was never properly shaved, the five o’clock shadow was there at morning prayers, and he had four chins, although he was not otherwise a fat man. He rubbed his hands together in a gloating manner when in form he caught one who belonged to his house in a punishable offence. He would refer jocularly to beatings and he very obviously enjoyed them. In a strange way this made him popular. It seemed to me even then that his boys were collaborators in a pleasure.

I can remember nothing about games, except that once I teased my cousin Tooter, who ran home from the playing-fields, crying. I felt a great shame at this, I knew already in my heart that I belonged on the side of the victims, not of the torturers, and this was a betrayal of all those sunlit afternoons on the roof of the Hall. These were the old playing-fields near the railway station, beyond Berkhamsted Castle, and when war came they were taken
over by what was called Kitchener’s Army and to this day they are known as Kitchener’s Fields. (My rich uncle came to the rescue of the school and lent the governors enough money to buy far better fields at the top of the hill where my sister’s pug was killed.)

The only class I actively hated was held in the gym. I was very bad at gymnastics and all life long my instinct has been to abandon anything for which I have no talent; tennis, golf, dancing, sailing, all have been abandoned, and perhaps it is only desperation which keeps me writing, like someone who clings to an unhappy marriage for fear of solitude. I particularly disliked trying to vault or to climb a rope. I suffered in those days, like a character of mine, Jones, in
The Comedians
, from flat feet, and I had to wear supports inside my shoes and have massage from a gym mistress. The massage tickled a little and my soles sometimes ached, but on the whole I found the treatment agreeable, perhaps because it was given by a woman. This must have been between the age of ten and twelve, for it was the war of 1914 which brought a number of mistresses to the school in place of the masters who had joined the army.

The memory of August 1914 is associated with my uncle’s house at Harston. The lawn in front of the house had a high wall. One could see over it only by climbing the chunky roots of old trees covered in ivy and swarming with spiders. Troops were continually passing through in these first days and they rested on the village green; once I was sent out with a basket of apples to refresh them. Herbert bicycled in from Cambridge one day with the evening paper announcing the fall of Namur. My brothers and I were delighted at the speed with which it had fallen because the prolonged defence of Liège had threatened a speedy termination of the war. As long as the war continued, we might one day be involved, and the world of Henty seemed to come a little nearer. Perhaps there would be an invasion, as in William Le Queux’s famous documentary novel, and Berkhamsted Common, I believed, would be ideal for the exploits of one young
franc-tireur
. Indeed there were dramatic incidents even in Berkhamsted. A German master was denounced to my father as a spy because he had been seen under the railway bridge without a hat, a
dachshund was stoned in the High Street, and once my uncle Eppy was summoned at night to the police station and asked to lend his motor-car to help block the Great North Road down which a German armoured car was said to be advancing towards London. A colonel of the Inns of Court
O.T.C.
was also at the station. ‘Five hundred rifles,’ he lamented, ‘and not a round of live ammunition.’ My uncle was sceptical, but he lent his car.

But the war ended too soon for us, and only Herbert became lightly involved, when he was promoted lance-corporal in the
H. A. C
. He never reached France and one day he returned home without his single stripe. It was only a long time afterwards that I learned the reason – a sympathetic one. He was in charge of a spy who was awaiting execution in the Tower (he added the spy’s autograph to his collection), and on the occasion of an air-raid he let the prisoner out of his cell to share the fun. Otherwise we were touched closely only twice – by the death of St George and by the disappearance of our new nurse’s fiancé – ‘missing, believed killed’. She was a kind dumpy young woman called Olive Dodge with an agreeable face like a penny bun with two currants for eyes (the most you could expect in war-time), and we were sad for her, knowing as our parents told us that there was little or no hope. Yet she never lost her hope and one day the miracle happened – he was discovered in a London hospital with shell-shock. He didn’t recognize her, he was plunged in deep melancholia, but she never despaired, and one day she was able proudly to introduce him to the denizens of the nursery, a very tall dark man with a small moustache who spoke hardly at all. They married and lived happily ever after, or so I hope, in Acton.

At some point that year I abandoned the effort of trying to vault or climb a rope or scramble on the parallel bars, and I pretended, whenever that class came round, that I was ill. I would walk up on to the Common and stay there, hidden among the gorse bushes with their yellow flowers until school was over. Once lying flat in the bracken by the side of the road I saw the gardener Charge go by with the family donkey-cart. My parents, when I told them years later, denied that this was possible, because they said he could have had no
business up there far away from the laundry and the town, but how could I have imagined
Miranda? Perhaps he was out for his own personal pleasure on a sunny June day. I enjoyed the feeling of being safely hidden among the bushes while he went by, even if I were not yet hunted. The long secret trek through the heather by Alan Breck and David Balfour always for me took place on Berkhamsted Common; it almost seemed a personal adventure, perhaps because my mother was kin to the Balfours of Pilrig, and indeed first cousin to Stevenson himself.

I don’t know how long these sporadic escapes went on. They turned at some point (I would guess when I was eleven) into a better organized and a more prolonged truancy. By this time I was having breakfast in the dining-room with my elders, and not in the nursery with five-year-old Hugh and the baby Elisabeth. At the end of breakfast I would gather up my school-books as though going across to prayers.

I should explain that the school day began with prayers of a rather lay variety – masters on a platform, boys below – in what was called Deans’ Hall which was named after Dean Incent, the sixteenth-century founder of Berkhamsted School, but also – the position of the apostrophe was important – after Doctor Fry, my father’s sinister sadistic predecessor and kinsman by marriage, who had become the Dean of Lincoln.

This Manichaean figure in black gaiters with a long white St Peter’s beard sometimes came to stay. After breakfast on these occasions it was my mother’s duty to clear the hall outside the dining-room of maids and children, so that the Dean could go to the lavatory unobserved and emerge again unseen by anyone. As a headmaster he had been known as a flogger, and he thus made a life-long enemy of one old Berkhamstedian, later my Oxford tutor, Kenneth Bell, who one day had his cap snatched off by a school bully and was then beaten by Fry who saw him in the street without it. Fry as Dean of Lincoln became a popular lecturer in the United States where he went at regular intervals to procure money for restoring Lincoln Cathedral. On his last voyage, as he returned first-class in a Cunarder, fate overtook him and showed him up as the absurd figure he had always been. He had suffered a stroke before embarking which damaged his
powers of speech and his neighbours at table overheard him asking his son Charley, the Vicar of Maidenhead, for certain shocking objects when all he had in mind was a soft-boiled egg. Charley, who for years vainly paid court to my beautiful aunt Nono, was a far more likeable figure. He was so fat that he looked like a black tennis-ball, and to amuse us he would put two chairs together and bounce over them – not jump. ‘Bounce for us, Cousin Charley, bounce for us,’ we would cry, while my aunt watched with cynical disdain. She couldn’t respect a man who bounced.

Instead of going to Deans’ Hall I would wait in the garden until I knew the school was safely assembled, for fear that I might meet other boys or masters, and then I would walk up the High Street. My purpose was to steal something to read from the local W. H. Smith’s store. I can only remember two occasions, but I think there must have been others: once I stole a copy of
The Railway Magazine
and once, as I have mentioned,
The Abbess of Vlaye
by Stanley Weyman, a sixpenny paperback with double columns. My reading matter thus obtained, I would return home. This must have been an even trickier matter than the theft as I had to go by the windows of the dining-room where the maid would be clearing breakfast, but I suppose at the height I had reached then it was quite easy to stoop below their level. That danger safely past I would go cautiously out to the croquet lawn, past the buddleia and the butterflies, and swing the summerhouse round so that it faced a flower-bed and the sanatorium wall; there I sat comfortably in a deck-chair and read my stolen book until the school broke up for lunch. I followed the same routine, without the foray to the High Street, in the afternoon, and recklessly I carried my truancy on until the last day of term. I was in the form of a Mr Davis and my father, who was making a rapid tour of the classrooms on the last day, was asked by Davis how my illness was progressing. It must have been quite a shock for my father who knew of no illness in his family. He came back home and out to the shelter where I was discovered … or rather I think he sent my mother. (Perhaps the search was proceeding in many directions at once.) I was told to go to bed, and when I was in my nightshirt my father came up and caned me.

This is the only beating I can remember, but at school I would invent apocryphal stories of having been cruelly flogged – it gave
me the status which a headmaster’s son lacked. I was in the middle of some story of brutal cruelty during a break between classes in the quad when a ‘scrumming’ took place. This was a strange kind of lemming drive which at intervals afflicted the lower school. A rumour would start that an extra half-holiday was going to be given (which happened fairly frequently during the war, whenever an old boy had been decorated with a
D.S.O
. or an
M.C
. A
V.C.
ranked as a whole holiday, but this only happened twice.) The rumours, however often they proved to be wrong, caused the whole junior school to press up against the terrace during a break and stay crammed there until my father would appear and send us packing. Occasionally the rumour proved true and so confirmed the idea that we had actually caused the half-holiday by our scrumming.

Magic and incantation play a great part in childhood. There was a tuckshop by the fives-court which was only open, because of war-shortages, to boys of the senior school. As a junior I would stand outside reciting an accepted formula, ‘Treat I’, to any older boy as he came out, and occasionally one would detach a morsel of bun and hand it over. The favourite purchase was a penny currant bun with a bar of chocolate inside, though it was seldom that any chocolate was included in the exiguous treat. I suppose we were always a little hungry in the war years. There were no potatoes and little sugar and we grew deadly tired of substitutes – rice and honey-sugar. My sister Elisabeth, who was around two at the time, would have hardly eaten anything at all during our nursery meals if I had not named each spoonful after a war-leader, though what their names could possibly have conveyed to her I cannot imagine. ‘This is General Joffre,’ I would say, popping in a dreary spoonful of suet, ‘and this is General French … Hindenburg … Allenby.’

The clouds of unknowing were still luminous with happiness. There was no loneliness to be experienced, however occupied the parents might be, in a family of six children, a nanny, a nursemaid, a gardener, a fat and cheerful cook, a beloved head-housemaid, a platoon of assistant maids, a whole battalion of aunts and uncles, all of them called Greene, which seemed to bring them closer, and invariably at Christmas that old bachelor
friend who in those days formed part of any large family gathering, a little mocked in secret by the parents, a little resented in secret by the children. The six birthdays, the Christmas play, the Easter and the summer seaside, all arrived like planets in their due season, unaffected by war. Only in the clouds ahead I could see that there was no luminosity at all. Yet anything, I felt, anything, even a romantic death, might happen to save me before my thirteenth year struck.