A Time of Gifts (3 page)

Although it was a one-sided love in the end, for a time things went well. I liked nearly everybody, from the headmaster and my housemaster down, and prospered erratically at dead and living languages and at history and geography—at everything, once more, except mathematics. I found my mind wandering at games; loved boxing and was good at it; and in summer, having chosen rowing instead of cricket, lay peacefully beside the Stour, well upstream of the rhythmic creaking and the exhortation, reading
Lily Christine
and Gibbon and gossiping with kindred lotus-eaters under the willow-branches. Verse, imitative and bad but published in school magazines nevertheless, poured out like ectoplasm. I wrote and read with intensity, sang, debated, drew and painted; scored minor successes at acting, stage-managing and in painting and designing scenery; and made gifted and enterprising friends. One of these, a year older, was Alan Watts, a brilliant classical scholar who, most remarkably, wrote and published an authoritative book on Zen Buddhism—years before the sect became fashionable—while he was still at school. Later, he became a respected authority on Eastern and Western religions. (In his autobiography
In My Own Way
, which came out shortly before his premature death a few years ago, he writes at some length of my troubles at school—and especially of their abrupt end—in the warm spirit of a champion; and if he didn't quite get the hang of it in one or two places, it was not his fault.)

What went wrong? I think I know now. A bookish attempt to
coerce life into a closer resemblance to literature was abetted—it can only be—by a hangover from early anarchy: translating ideas as fast as I could into deeds overrode every thought of punishment or danger; as I seem to have been unusually active and restless, the result was chaos. It mystified me and puzzled others. “You're mad!” prefects and monitors would exclaim, brows knit in glaring scrum-half bewilderment, as new misdeeds came to light. Many of my transgressions involved breaking bounds as well as rules—climbing out at night and the like, only half of which were found out. Frequent gatings joined the mileage of Latin hexameters copied out as impositions, and lesser troubles filled in the gaps between more serious bust-ups: absent-mindedness, forgetfulness and confusion about where I ought to be; and constant loss: ‘forgetting my books under the arches' was a recurrent bane. There were some savage fights; also erratic behaviour which was construed, perhaps rightly, as showing off: ‘anything for a laugh' was the usual term for this; and, even when I succeeded, ‘trying to be funny.' Always that withering gerund! These strictures were often on monitors' lips. Aediles and rod-bearing lictors, they were the guardians of an inflexible code and all breaches were visited by swift and flexible sanctions which came whistling shoulder-high across panelled studies and struck with considerable force; but, however spectacular the results, they left the psyche unbruised, and, though they were disagreeable and, in this case, record-breaking in frequency, clinically and morally speaking, they didn't seem to take. If these meetings are carried off with enough studied nonchalance, a dark and baleful fame begins to surround the victim, and it makes him, in the end, an infliction past bearing. Everything was going badly and my housemaster's penultimate report, in my third year, had an ominous ring: ‘...some attempts at improvement' it went ‘but more to avoid detection. He is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness which makes one anxious about his influence on other boys.'

Catastrophe was staved off for a few months. As I was thought to have done myself some damage skiing in the Berner Oberland
just before I was sixteen, I skipped a term and a half, and, on my return, I was temporarily excused games: when everyone trooped off with oblong balls under their arms, I could spin about Kent on a bicycle and look at the Norman churches at Patrixbourne and Barfrestone and explore the remoter parts of Canterbury. This windfall of leisure and freedom soon coincided with a time when all good impressions were wiped out by a last series of misdeeds. A more prophetic eye would have seen that patience on high had at last given out and that any further trouble would be hailed as a release long overdue.

* * *

Intramural romances spring up and prosper in places of learning, but some exotic psychological fluke directed my glance beyond the walls and, once more, out of bounds. It was a time when one falls in love hard and often, and my aesthetic notions, entirely formed by Andrew Lang's Coloured Fairy Books, had settled years before on the long-necked, wide-eyed pre-Raphaelite girls in Henry Ford's illustrations, interchangeably kings' daughters, ice-maidens, goose-girls and water spirits, and my latest wanderings had led me, at the end of a green and sweet-smelling cave set dimly with flowers and multicoloured fruit and vegetation—a greengrocer's shop, that is, which she tended for her father—to the vision of just such a being. The effect was instantaneous. She was twenty-four, a ravishing and sonnet-begetting beauty and I can see her now and still hear that melting and deep Kent accent. This sudden incongruous worship may have been a bore but she was too good-natured to show it, and perhaps she was puzzled by the verse which came showering in. I knew that such an association in the town, however innocent, broke a number of taboos too deep-rooted and well-understood to need any explicit veto; nevertheless I headed for the shop beyond the Cattle Market the moment I could escape. But the black clothes we wore, those stiff wing-collars and the wide and speckled straw boaters with their blue and white silk ribands
were as conspicuous as broad-arrows. My footsteps were discreetly dogged, my devices known and after a week, I was caught red-handed—holding Nellie's hand, that is to say, which is about as far as this suit was ever pressed; we were sitting in the back-shop on upturned apple-baskets—and my schooldays were over.

* * *

Captain Grimes was right. A few months after this setback, the idea of an Army career, which had been floating mistily in the air for some time, began to take firmer shape; and the prospect of entering Sandhurst raised its distant hurdle. But what about the sack? When he was appealed to, my ex-housemaster, a strange and brilliant man, composed and despatched the necessary letter of recommendation; and, like the Captain's, it was a corking good letter, too. (There were no bitter feelings; there had been disappointment on the side of the school authorities as well as relief; utter dejection on mine. But I felt thankful they had alighted on more avowable grounds for my eclipse than the charge of being an intolerable nuisance. The actual pretext could be made to sound dashing and romantic.)

I had not yet sat for School Cert.—which, because of maths, I would certainly have failed—and as it was indispensable for would-be cadets, I soon found myself in London, seventeen by now, cramming for an exempting examination called the London Certificate. I spent most of the next two years in Lancaster Gate, then in Ladbroke Grove with rooms of my own overlooking tree tops, under the tolerant and friendly aegis of Denys Prideaux. I did Maths, French, English and Geography with him, and Latin, Greek, English and History, often in deck chairs in Kensington Gardens, with Lawrence Goodman. (Unconventional and a poet, he took me to every Shakespeare play that appeared.) During the first year I led a fairly sensible life, had a number of friends, was asked away to stay in the country, followed rustic pursuits, and read more books than I have ever crammed into a similar stretch
of time. I passed the London Cert. respectably in most papers, and even without disgrace in the subjects I dreaded.

But a long interregnum still stretched ahead.

* * *

One of the early chapters of this book touches at some retrospective length on the way things began to change; how I moved from the fairly predictable company of fellow army-candidates into older circles which were simultaneously more worldly, more bohemian and more raffish: the remainder, more or less, of the Bright Young People, but ten years and twenty thousand double whiskies after their heyday, and looking extremely well on the regime. This new and captivating world seemed brilliant and rather wicked; I enjoyed being the youngest present, especially during the dissipated nocturnal ramblings in which every evening finished: (“Where's that rather noisy boy got to? We may as well take him too”). I had reached a stage when one changes very fast: a single year contains a hundred avatars; and while these were flashing kaleidoscopically by, the idea of my unsuitability for peace-time soldiering had began to impinge. More serious still, the acceptance of two poems and the publication of one of them—admittedly, only on foxhunting—had fired me with the idea of authorship.

In the late summer of 1933, with Mr. Prideaux's permission, I rashly moved into a room in an old and slightly leaning house in Shepherd Market where several friends had already fixed their quarters. This little backwater of archways and small shops and Georgian and Victorian pubs had the charm, quite evaporated now, of a village marooned in the still-intact splendours of Mayfair. I had a vision of myself, as I moved in, settling down to writing with single-minded and almost Trollopian diligence. Instead, to my ultimate discomfiture but immediate delight, the house became the scene of wild and continuous parties. We paid almost nothing for our lodgings to Miss Beatrice Stewart, our
kind-hearted landlady, and always late. She didn't mind this, but pleaded with us again and again in the small hours to make less noise. The friend and model of famous painters and sculptors in the past, she was accustomed to the more decorous Bohemia of earlier generations. She had sat for Sargent and Sickert and Shannon and Steer and Tonks and Augustus John and her walls were radiant with mementoes of those years; but the loss of a leg in a motor accident had cruelly slowed her up. Much later, a friend told me that she had been the model for Adrian Jones's bronze figure of Peace in the quadriga on Decimus Burton's Wellington Arch. Since then, I can never pass the top of Constitution Hill without thinking of her and gazing up at the winged and wreath-bearing goddess sailing across the sky. As the pigeon flies, it was under a minute from her window sill.

* * *

My scheme was not working well. That improvident flight from the rooms and meals and all that went with them at my tutor's had reduced my funds to a pound a week and the way things were shaping, it looked as though opulence from writing might be delayed for a time. I managed somehow, but gloom and perplexity descended with the start of winter. Fitful streaks of promise and scrapes and upheavals had marked my progress so far; they still continued; but now I seemed to be floating towards disintegration in a tangle of submerged and ill-marked reefs. The outlook grew steadily darker and more overcast. About lamplighting time at the end of a wet November day, I was peering morosely at the dog-eared pages on my writing table and then through the panes at the streaming reflections of Shepherd Market, thinking, as
Night and Day
succeeded
Stormy Weather
on the gramophone in the room below, that
Lazybones
couldn't be far behind; when, almost with the abruptness of Herbert's lines at the beginning of these pages, inspiration came. A plan unfolded with the speed and the completeness of a Japanese paper flower in a tumbler.

To change scenery; abandon London and England and set out across Europe like a tramp—or, as I characteristically phrased it to myself, like a pilgrim or a palmer, an errant scholar, a broken knight or the hero of
The Cloister and the Hearth
! All of a sudden, this was not merely the obvious, but the only thing to do. I would travel on foot, sleep in hayricks in summer, shelter in barns when it was raining or snowing and only consort with peasants and tramps. If I lived on bread and cheese and apples, jogging along on fifty pounds a year like Lord Durham with a few noughts knocked off, there would even be some cash left over for paper and pencils and an occasional mug of beer. A new life! Freedom! Something to write about!

Even before I looked at a map, two great rivers had already plotted the itinerary in my mind's eye: the Rhine uncoiled across it, the Alps rose up and then the wolf-harbouring Carpathian watersheds and the cordilleras of the Balkans; and there, at the end of the windings of the Danube, the Black Sea was beginning to spread its mysterious and lopsided shape; and my chief destination was never in a moment's doubt. The levitating skyline of Constantinople pricked its sheaves of thin cylinders and its hemispheres out of the sea-mist; beyond it Mount Athos hovered; and the Greek archipelago was already scattering a paper-chase of islands across the Aegean. (These certainties sprang from reading the books of Robert Byron; dragon-green Byzantium loomed serpent-haunted and gong-tormented; I had even met the author for a moment in a blurred and saxophone-haunted night club as dark as Tartarus.)

I wondered during the first few days whether to enlist a companion; but I knew that the enterprise had to be solitary and the break complete. I wanted to think, write, stay or move on at my own speed and unencumbered, to gaze at things with a changed eye and listen to new tongues that were untainted by a single familiar word. With any luck the humble circumstances of the journey would offer no scope for English or French. Flights of unknown syllables would soon be rushing into purged and attentive ears.

The idea met obstruction at first: why not wait till spring? (London by now was shuddering under veils of December rain.) But when they understood that all was decided, most of the objectors became allies. Warming to the scheme after initial demur, Mr. Prideaux undertook to write to India putting my démarche in a favourable light; I determined to announce the
fait accompli
by letter when I was safely on the way, perhaps from Cologne... Then we planned the despatch of those weekly pounds—each time, if possible, after they had risen to a monthly total of four—by registered letter to suitably spaced-out
postes restantes
. (Munich would be the first; then I would write and suggest a second.) I next borrowed fifteen pounds off the father of a school friend, partly to buy equipment and partly to have something in hand when I set out. I telephoned to my sister Vanessa, back from India again a few years before, and married and settled in Gloucestershire. My mother was filled with apprehension to begin with; we pored over the atlas, and, bit by bit as we pored, the comic possibilities began to unfold in absurd imaginary scenes until we were falling about with laughter; and by the time I caught the train to London next morning, she was infected with my excitement.