Basil Street Blues (23 page)

He called me ‘Hagga’, an odd name that caught on in the house to the extent of Purple Parr sometimes using it when he had drunk too much in the evenings. ‘Dear Hagga,’ Griffy writes to me, attempting after an interval of forty-five years to explain the derivation of this name. ‘At the time you always looked, and indeed probably still do, though for other reasons, quite haggard. Also at that time I was reading the works of H. Rider Haggard (
She
etc.). Hence the name Hagga.’

Griffy came to believe that the catastrophic fall in our house ‘from majesty to disrepair’, combined with the unsupportive, discouraging nature of Parr himself, affected us all. Can there really, I asked myself, have been long-term consequences? Were we in any way exceptional, Carlton, Holroyd, MacLeod, Philipps, Valentine? One of us became an alcoholic, killed two people in a car crash, and died himself; one of us went to prison; one of us, perhaps the most fortunate, was removed prematurely from the house; one of us was informed in his last school report that he would never achieve anything worthwhile; one of us was striving to become invisible. I reckoned we were an average intake.

Having come from ‘broken homes’ and finding ourselves now in a broken-down house probably did have some effect on Griffy and myself. ‘I opted for a quiet life and studied
Wisden
,’ Griffy wrote to me. He hardly does himself justice. He was the very spirit of
Wisden
, that bible of cricket, and the greatest scholar of the game I have met or could imagine. His command of bowling analyses, stretching over continents and back years, was breathtaking. Batting, too, in this respect, was no difficulty to him. I would have backed him in any quiz, and he was never dull. When he quoted statistics, they danced and sang for him. He spoke with a quiet passion and authority that touched even oarsmen and tennis players.

But no one bothered to encourage him as, over a short period, they tried to help me. Though Griffy knew everything about cricket, no cricketers knew about Griffy. Our Captain of Games in 1949 was Peregrine Pollen, a tall chap who looked like the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, and who later became a top man at Sotheby’s. He wanted me to recover my cricketing status by turning into an experimental spin bowler. Under his tuition at the nets I invented a new recipe for the googly which seemed less risky for the umpire. My bowling was acknowledged to be unusual, but no legend adhered to it as it had to my uncle’s bat. While I sweated at those nets with this mournful, kindly Don Quixote, Griffy, it now shames me to remember, volunteered to come along and field the balls that were clouted over my head. Fielding was all he ever did.

I made Griffy the hero of my essay ‘Not Cricket’. The top game at Eton was played with frightful earnestness, but all the other games were circuses of misrule. I felt happy neither with the solemnity of the one nor the lawlessness of the others. Having no river-ambitions (I could barely float), I descended into what was contemptuously called a ‘slack-bob’. But Griffy never gave up. He would be dispatched to obscure pitches on the edge of the school territory, yet his keenness and devotion to the game were never extinguished by the drudgery of his experiences. In the evenings I would come across him oiling his bat and turning over his arm against the day when he would be invited to bat or bowl. That day never really came. One of the consequences of his parents being divorced, I understood, was that he didn’t own a pair of cricket boots. But this didn’t matter in the games he played. Nothing mattered. ‘They were less cricket matches than exhibitions of anarchy,’ I wrote in ‘Not Cricket’.

No one bothered if you turned up or didn’t. Philipps always turned up early. Sometimes he had to wait almost an hour before enough people ambled along to make up a couple of scratch teams…

Philipps took his role as spectator to the centre of the field. He knew more than anyone there and he remained there, year after year, waiting to use his knowledge. I would see him in the summer afternoons setting off to the fields like clockwork… Possibly because of his divorced parents, he never got a new bat or pads or anything else during his five years at Eton. In a sense they weren’t needed. Everything looked new: but smaller. By his last year all this miniature paraphernalia with which he stood waiting to try his luck looked Lilliputian.

While Griffy Philipps lay at anchor in the mainstream of Etonian sport, I was carried off into an odd tributary. Avoiding the conventionalities of team games, I would make my solitary way down a long avenue of fives courts with their stone ‘pepper-pots’ to a cluster of huts grouped in a shallow valley, like a primitive African village. These were our squash courts. Squash, unlike rackets and fives, was not a fashionable game in the late nineteen-forties. It gets no mention in a well-known book on the school called
Eton Medley
that was published in 1948, not even in ‘Sport’, the longest chapter in the volume. But this obscurity appealed to me. After a winter storm no one could feel quite confident that these hutches would still be standing. Usually they were for the most part, and I devised ingenious games of water-squash among the copious puddles.

Dominating this village were two superior courts. When their lights were turned on (a complicated business involving numerous keys and switches) they glowed like magic places. To see the illustrious senior players, you climbed up a wooden staircase and stood on a platform in the freezing weather viewing them through a wire mesh from above – like opera-goers standing in the gods. I venerated the Keeper of Squash, Ian de Sales la Terrière, whose exotic name seemed to add lustre to his elegant play.

Ian de Sales la Terrière, who later played for England, was influenced by the great Egyptian player, Open champion of the world, M.A. Karim. In fact, we all were. Karim wore long, cream-white flannels and he gave this sweaty, thundering, claustrophobic game a quiet and classic beauty. While others laboured, gasped, pounded around the court, Karim stretched and stroked the ball this way and that. He had what all legendary figures must have: he had mystery. His style masked his intentions so cunningly that, however hard you studied him, you could never tell whether it was a lob or a drive, a deft reverse-angle or a tender drop-shot that was coming. We were like children watching a magnificent conjuror.

I modelled my style of play on Karim, though not being very strong, I was obliged to hold the racket very high up its handle, and was much criticised for this eccentricity by the master in charge of squash, Dr Lefevre. Nevertheless, despite my handicap, I thrived. Players with the smartest of Etonian names, Colin Ingleby-Mackenzie, Richard Williams-Ellis, eventually fell before my blade. Though I made a speciality of losing very brilliantly, I went on to win the public schools under-fifteen cup, and then in 1951 the British Open Junior Championship for under-sixteen-year-olds.

This was not of course a triumph on the playing fields of Eton where the Duke of Wellington was reputed to have said the Battle of Waterloo had been won (and where, according to George Orwell, the opening battles of all subsequent wars were lost), but it was something my father could enjoy. He liked telling me of a famous Egyptian player of his day called the Amr Bey, Open champion in the nineteen-thirties. His deadly lob, so altitudinous, so accurate, was unreturnable, my father boasted. He was of course speaking up for his generation, but it sounded as if he were playing the shot himself, and I was sceptical. Karim, I told him, was in a different sphere. He made even the finals of the world championship, I explained, look like exhibition matches. I used to go and watch him play at the celebrated Bruce Court at the Lansdowne Club off Berkeley Square, where all the major championships were held in those days. His victories rose above national pride. I felt delighted that squash possessed such a miraculous player and would come away from his matches exhilarated as from a ballet at Covent Garden or a concert in the new Festival Hall.

In 1951 a rumour began buzzing round the squash world of a remarkable new player from Pakistan named Hashim Khan. I was in the gallery of the Bruce Court when Hashim met Karim in the final of the Open that year. In his dazzling flannels, Karim glided and stroked the ball everywhere, and Hashim ran hectically after it. Often he ran in the wrong direction. But it didn’t matter since he seemed able to change direction in mid-air. It was obvious to me that no one could go on running like that and not collapse. I felt sorry for Hashim. What happened however was that Karim collapsed – not physically, but morally. What was the purpose of out-thinking, out-manoeuvring your opponent if he still won the point? The game was reduced to a simple test of speed and stamina. Hashim won the match 9–5, 9–0, 9–0.

The impossible had happened. I could hardly credit it. But perhaps it was a freak of history. Next year the two of them met again in the final to decide the future of squash rackets. I saw the first game proceed very much as in the previous year. But in the second game Karim made the supreme effort and they reached seven all. I had never known anyone run as Hashim ran. He dived and swerved and hurled himself around this way and that, always smiling cheerfully, and sometimes when he was completely outplayed breaking into laughter. Karim played with agonising beauty. The wonder of his stroke-play was beyond anything I could conceive. There was such wit and grace, eloquence, ingenuity in those strokes. I cannot explain the happiness they gave me. They made squash an aesthetic pleasure where thought and movement were one. There were gasps from the gallery at the mesmeric combination of these rallies, first the delicate potency of Karim’s play, then the impossible retrievals of Hashim. I can see again Karim’s dazzling figure moving so easily about the court, embodying something vital to me. But he lost 9–5, 9–7, 9–0, gave a small bow as he left the Bruce Court, and never returned.

It was the end of squash for me. The game was changing and so was I. As I became less competitive and more of a joker, I switched to the unserious (though rather dangerous) game of doubles and actually helped to win the Public School Doubles and then, partnered by a future amateur champion, Nigel Broomfield, the Palmer Cup, a doubles competition for under-twenty-one-year-olds. This may not wholly have satisfied my father, but for eighteen months, as Keeper of Squash at Eton, I was able to join the margin of that Vanity Fair up and down the High Street wearing a dark blue cap with crossed rackets stitched in gold at the front, which mystified the ‘lower boys’. Yet the glamour of this position, which appeared so bright when Ian de Sales la Terrière occupied it while I was still a junior boy myself, seemed curiously to dissolve like a mirage once I reached it. I had however scored a satisfying technical victory over Dr Lefevre. The new Open champion, Hashim Khan, held his racket as far up the handle as I did. I had wandered briefly into fashion.

No sooner had I achieved this particle of glory than, it seemed to me, my father turned his mind to graver matters. I think it must have been shortly after he appealed to my Hungarian-born stepfather for half my school fees that his character appeared to change. ‘We need to have a serious talk, Michael,’ he said to me gravely one day at Norhurst. I braced myself, as we entered the gloomy morning-room with its lurking telephone, for what I assumed would be another attempt to explain the facts of life to me. But on this occasion it was the economic facts of life my father wanted to explain. The family fortune, such as it was, had gone down the drain, he told me, and I could expect an inheritance of serious debts. It was essential therefore that I wasn’t a damn fool. I mustn’t fritter away my chances. I must use my education to prepare myself for a modern business life. Being out of work himself, he had been thumbing through advertisements for jobs in the newspapers and seen how huge the demand was for plasma-physicists, chemical engineers, radiologists and other scientific people. He wished to God his own father had spoken to him as he was now speaking to me. I would thank him later – not that he wanted thanks, not that he had ever received thanks for anything. No. Never mind that: it was probably too late for him. But it was not too late for me to become a plasma-physicist or whatever. I must specialise in the sciences if I knew what was good for me.

This was a bleak prospect. My instinct recoiled from all my father was saying, but I had no arguments to marshal against what appeared to be his formidable common sense. To my mind school was something you got through as agreeably as possible. My father, in his concern for me, made adult life sound so appallingly grim that I averted my mind from it. I had little sense of school being a factory which trained you for some profession, or of exams being used for money-making – and nor, I believe, had many of the masters. Of course I knew that I would have to begin a career sometime, but that belonged to another chapter in my life, and who could tell how that would eventually be drafted? My father despaired at the impracticality of my attitude, and I lamented over the impracticality of his anxious planning. But though I trusted to my instinct to direct me in due course, I agreed to my father’s schemes because I could offer no plausible alternatives. Besides, I knew that once I had agreed I would hear fewer cautionary tales from the business world.

So I returned to Eton and, from the age of fifteen or sixteen, specialised in arithmetic, biology, botany, chemistry, geometry and physics – with a little astronomy thrown in at night. Over the next two years, my days became filled with a maze of logarithmic tables, geometric angles, and a blackboard covered with algebraic signs and letters that needed to be solved. I can remember vividly the dead frog, saturated in evil-smelling formaldehyde and crucified on a wooden block, at which I picked with my scalpel each week, identifying bits and pieces of its body. From among the bunsen burners with their firm blue and orange flames, and between the array of retorts, flasks and pipettes with their coloured powders, liquids, gases, I can see the exasperated face of our Czechoslovak teacher appear, like a pantomime demon, as he tried to beat back our happy ignorance with eruptions of barely intelligible English. Occasionally, too, a few of us would climb to the top of a remote school building after dark to gaze blankly at some blob of light in the sky and solemnly utter its Latinate name. I believed that I had some interest in astronomy, but it lay in the lure of the unknown, the mysteries of time, the question of our origins and the problem of our destination, rather than this recital of named stars. In short, I was a poor science pupil. But then my teachers were poor.