Criminal Conversation (20 page)

When we did our homework we had to write at the top of the page, very neatly, name and christian name, date, the Jesuit motto A.M.D.G., and this ‘maxim' which we were trained to copy into our rough-books the moment it appeared. I fought, even then, an instinctive war against all maxims, and did this with the greatest distaste. My writing was uncontrolled and sprawling, and I always lost marks for imperfect transcription of those ornate flourishes signalling a capital letter's dreaded approach.

Horror – one winter evening I found that I had forgotten the maxim, and without it my homework would receive an inexorable zero. It was that kind of educational system: work counted for
nothing if the seven-year-old were not thoroughly impregnated with some literary nun's corrections of Bernadette Soubirous' solid good sense.

My mother was adamant. Back I had to go, under wet dripping ghastly trees, through the black echoing ‘playground' past reeking dark sheds (lavatories, in the dark the gas chambers of Auschwitz) into a building that was still open, because at the other end the big boys were still getting instruction hammered into their dirty ears. I crept into an empty classroom, lit by an economical fifteen-watt bulb in the passage, and found that maxim, smug and imbecile on its blackboard, and ran like a fury home, in hysterical tears long before I reached ‘The Beeches'.

Next morning I got a zero after all. I had looked in Class Two.

It must have been a year later, and in Class Two, that I was so terrified at not knowing my tables that one day I never went to school at all. I left the house, naturally, at the given time, my satchel on my back. But I spent the whole day lying concealed in the belt of rhododendrons by the front gate, trembling as the baker's boy banged along the path whistling, a foot from my head, but unsuspected and undiscovered, the whole blessed day. I was immensely proud of this achievement, and my confidence lent me a fluent mendacity when I said at school I had had to go to the dentist. I repeated the trick twice, that year. I did not suffer from those hours lying in damp leafmould. Indeed no prison would appear to me brutal, no guard severe, even now.

From the age of seven, children who misbehaved were not punished with a tweak to the ear or even a back-hander in class, but were sent formally with a chit to the Prefect of Discipline, an aged tyrant who walked endlessly around the playground with his breviary. In the top class of the preparatory department, aged eleven and bold with beginnings of muscle and pubic hair, we maintained that inside the pages of the breviary he really had cowboy stories, folded small.

When a child reached this chalky old gentleman with one of the chits (there was no means of evasion, since after execution a second chit was given, to be handed to the master originator of the court-martial) he would slip the cowboy stories into a side pocket of the
soutane, read the chit severely, and motion the criminal towards his office, a bleak little room embellished with an extraordinary ornate rolltop desk. This walking to the office was the worst part of the punishment. For children as for adults the leisureliness of justice carries the real sting.

Out of a back pocket, for those soutanes were ingeniously designed for the carriage of concealed weapons (and in the sleeves were stuffed large dirty clerical handkerchiefs) he then produced a Jesuit invention, most painstakingly manufactured and well finished, officially called a ferula. It was a shiny thing of black stitched leather, something like the sole of a narrow shoe in shape, rather elegant, flexible and springy as a Negro athlete. One then held out one's hand for Twice Two or Twice Four, according to the gravity of the offence. Some recommended holding the hand limp and hollow, others keeping stiff and brave; the methods were equally painful. Maximum in theory was Twice Nine, but there were dread tales of even dreader beatings. I was beaten frequently, being dreamy, inattentive, fidgety, often disrespectful, and occasionally really wicked, as witness the time when I discovered that by swallowing quantities of air I could presently send the whole class into hysterics by loud emissions of wind. I got Twice Six for Disrespect, Creating Disturbance, Obscenity, and the grave crime known I believe to the army as Dumb Insolence. I was also beaten frequently for lying.

We measure time in decades: one is infant till ten, child till twenty, youth till thirty. After that one is just man for thirty years, until one's sixtieth birthday and, I suspect, the beginnings of wisdom and decrepitude hand in hand. At ten years old I got from my father my first fountain pen, rather superior, black with a rolled-gold clip. Rolled gold sounds good but means, I believe, some cheap plating process. To a child, it is very fine.

I had surmounted the initial stage of a Jesuit school - Preparatory, Elements, and Figures. I was in Rudiments, and before me lay Grammar, and the superior school, the names of whose classes I have forgotten, save two which were beautiful: Poetry, and

Philosophy. In Grammar I met the one sympathetic action I was to encounter from the teaching staff throughout my whole school days, indeed the one action approaching intelligence.

I had the highest marks in the class, consistently, save for one boy, a Jewish boy called Gold. I have no idea why he was sent to a Catholic school, though he had bright blond hair and a muscular Aryan exterior that would have pleased Heinrich Himmler. Certainly he made no effort to deny or conceal his Jewishness. He was good at gymnastics, for which I envied him bitterly; to me gymnastics – those dread bars, those ropes, those harsh coconut mats, that smell of feet and carbolic – were hell. I could box, though, much to my surprise, and Gold and I – the children called him Fish, of course – fought furiously. Once he knocked half my left ear loose, and I still feel the tiny welt. He was, you will understand, my friend.

His parents were rich, and he turned up one day with a French dictionary, so new, shiny and delectable that I was eaten up by the desire for it. I stole it, thinking that its newness made it untraceable. Alas the master, investigating, found Gold's name, written after the fashion of children very small, in pencil, at the extreme inside bottom corner of the back cover. I will always remember that master. He said nothing in public at all. He made me go quietly to Fish, admit my theft, and give back the dictionary. And he gave me another, as new, as shiny, he had himself gone out to buy in the midday break.

I have said that this man was the one teacher with intelligence. That seems harsh, but I encountered in the superior classes nothing but a dull pedantry. There was nothing whatever to give a child the slightest pleasure in anything, outside the curriculum or in it. For a Jesuit school it must have been a very bad one. I recall little of those years, save ludicrous episodes like the embarrassed cleric and Victor Hugo. I remained good at languages and bad at algebra. I got prizes at the end of the year (of the genre Southey's
Life of Nelson
) and reprimands for not being able to trace the exact outline of Charlemagne's empire upon the map of Europe. I made frequent
penitential excursions to the office of the Prefect of Discipline, and others to the Prefect of Studies, where the torment, though not corporal, was just as disagreeable and lasted much longer. I would be told here that my parents paid reduced fees, and Made Sacrifices, and that Consequently…

We were doing
Booz endormi,
an example favoured by pedants for illustrating Hugo's less-ranting manner, and had got to the line where Ruth is asleep with her breasts bare.

“Seins,” said the pedant, mumbling, “means – uh…”

“Breasts,” said Gold, who had a sophisticated home life.

“Bosoms,” suggested some other urchin.

“Tits,” sotto voce at the back; some overgrown child with a huge dirty wink at various fifteen-year-olds corrupt in an innocent and fumbling way.

“Chest,” said the pedant firmly, searching in his sleeve for a handkerchief. “Chest,” defiantly. Fish kicked me under the desk, I sniggered, and was immediately sent to the Prefect for judgement.

I recall nothing of my lyceum years but trashy French verse. ‘Oh combien de marins, combien de capitaines' and the poetry for housemaids by Alfred de Musset. Was there no French prose? I suppose that there were approved authors, like Chateaubriand. Of English literature I recall the dreary set pieces by Lamb and Hazlitt with titles like ‘A Cold Morning' (somebody warming a razor in his bosom, surely an extraordinary notion) or ‘On Going a Journey'. English poetry seems in retrospect to have been suppressed along with the French prose, but it was that kind of school. Those worthy and excellent clerics – one is reminded of Stendhal's tutor, the Abbé de Raillane.

It must mean something that Ruth's bosoms stuck so fast to this capricious memory. I was certainly the kind of child described by Raillane-tutors as ‘prurient'. I was precocious, nervous, easily touched by the sensual. My mother, going through a Life Beautiful phase just after the Kaiser's War, had many elaborate books. It is the illustrations by Rackham and Dulac, rather than the splendid
Don Quichotte
by Doré, that I recall. Hawthorne's
Wonder Book,
or the
Ring of the Nibelungen,
with endless flexible naked little girls: all these illustrators must have had a bit of a Lewis Carroll complex. I recall one of these books vividly, called
The Earthly Paradise
- or some such name. It was bad verse which I never read, but each page was accompanied by a large arty photograph in the pearly halftones of the period. All were of naked pre-pubescent girls on a beach, playing little games with sand and reeds and shells, the mysterious shadows between these children's slim elegant thighs photographed with loving attention. Did these pictorial Annabelles and Lolitas give me a taste for rounded women in their late thirties? No, Henry; no explanations.

My memories of my father are vague. He was a big, robust man, who had made a lot of money as a mining engineer in Indonesia. There he had injured his health, maybe as a consequence of rheumatic fever. Certainly he had also a recurrent tropical malady that laid him up at intervals in a black depression. I think he may have been furious at his muscular body letting him down.

I was born in Indonesia, but within three years we were all brought back to Holland. My sisters, much older than myself, would talk about the wonderful life, but no colourful or uninhibited memory, no word of Malay disturbs my placid Dutch childhood. My father had wealth placed in mines of various kinds, and we lived, as I have said, in a large hideous villa suitable to a well-off rentier. I recall glass cases of geological specimens and others with daggers and shields, bellicose handwork of Dyaks or some such, less dull but with which I was not allowed to play. I recall the garden, damp and gloomy with overgrown laurel and rhododendron, and a house also damp and gloomy with stained glass that lent mahogany and pampas grass a churchy feeling surely depressing to others as well as me, but nobody did anything about it.

My father's shares lost value steadily during the depression. My mother, who dramatised most things, was fond of saying that we were as poor as rats, and that we should be on the street in our shirts at any moment. I cannot recall our suffering the slightest hardship. We never got to bread-and-marge-and-cocoa, like most. But the house was sold, certainly at a huge loss, and we moved to a small poky house in a new, rather ‘working-class' district. I think my father suffered. He used to go out into the country, such as it was: splendid farming ground but flat and featureless. The polder, and on one side the sand dunes, were no substitute to him for the forest, the jungle.

I think that he was a nice person, because he made botanical drawings, a few of which I still possess. He would take a little sketch pad, and draw field flowers. At home he did these over, exactly, minutely, in Indian ink and water-colour, and wrote all the names he could discover underneath in his printed engineer's script. They are quite clumsy and naïve but there is devotion in them.

My mother was a nice person too. You will notice the strange distance between me and my parents. Affection I had, and affection I returned, but there was always a gap of which I was aware.

She was a very pretty, gushing, talkative woman, from a family of important colonial administrators; an uncle had been a Governor General. She had greatly lost caste in her family by becoming
converted to Catholicism; she swam in emotional fervour with all a convert's uncritical joy. She had plenty of intelligence and much charm, marred by a certain tiresome silliness. She crowded the houses with bondieuserie – pious pictures and holy-water stoups covered in sugar angels. She had a very showy missal, and a terrible rosary of wood from the Mount of Olives, blessed, it was said, by a Pope, of which she was very vain. She poisoned my life with sentimental child saints – well-born of course, like Aloysius Gonzaga or Guy de Fontgallant – and invited curates to the house for glasses of sherry.

Once we were poor she maintained herself with innocent snobberies. She could not of course cook or do housekeeping, and that was not her fault, surrounded as her whole life had been with a flock of servants, but unwittingly she made me suffer. Hardship, I have said, there was none, but suffering there was. I was sent to the most expensive school. My sisters had been to expensive convents, but had finished, being much older, before the depression really made itself felt. They were now independent, with their own friends, and cared little. I was small and fragile, much mothered and babied, and had no such defences. I was sent to school in the cheapest clothes. My companions played tennis, but we were too ‘poor' to afford a tennis racket. They had expensive bicycles; I had none.

They went for holidays, which we could not afford. Their clothes were elegant and their shoes of supple leather. I was sent to school in boots, and my mother was proud of the economies thus accomplished. Some of these things bit very deep. I have never forgiven that tennis racket. Or the shapeless cotton swimming-shorts, that when wet hung on my shanks like paper, outlining my extremely self-conscious penis, causing sniggers from children with solid wool shorts that had badges of swimming-clubs stitched on them. Occasionally the kind mother of a rich comrade – Mrs Gold – would invite me for a free afternoon or even a day at weekends. My mother made me accept these invitations, quite rightly but inconsistently, and I see myself still climbing into the Golds' big luscious Talbot auto, wearing boots, clutching my cotton shorts,
agonising. Fish himself was much too nice a boy to comment, and Mrs Gold, and the chuckling, cigar-smoking Papa Gold, who dealt in furs, showered me with kindnesses. But other children remarked with their natural cruelty upon my mother's petty snobberies and pettier economies.