Everything I Have Always Forgotten (14 page)

Someone had read to me from an illustrated children's book about a hare. I remember a feminine voice reading that the hare was a ‘scamp'. I forget why. But somehow the word ‘scamp' took on a sexual connotation in my mind. There was something erotic in the stance of the hare on its hind legs, with its slim waist and powerful furry thighs that obsessed me. I was terrified that Father would find the book, deem it ‘sentimental', and banish it forever. So I hid it carefully and only took it out to lust over the illustrations when I was safely alone… it might as well have been a copy of
Playboy
or
Hustler
.

Another obsession was my underwear. I suppose that all boys of my age at that time were condemned to wear thick woollen underpants that were extraordinarily scratchy. As a teenager, I had to join the school Officers' Training Corps for which we carried World War I .303 Lee Enfield rifles (stamped with their dates of manufacture: 1917 or 1918). Mine had corrected sights and was amazingly accurate for such a hated and abused old piece of steel and wood. But it was the uniforms that I really hated: the material was so scratchy it felt as if it had been made of Brillo pads cut in half. Also, when wet, it stank, not just of wet dog, but of wet and miserable Army Issue. Fatigues were of heavy cotton and vastly preferable for their texture, even if the tasks we performed in them were worse than all the rest. So I preferred to dig trenches in the pouring rain, but in my fatigues, than to stand to attention on the parade ground on a summer's day, in my scratchy uniform.

Now, had there been long silk underwear at the time, I would surely have been less miserable in the OTC. Well, at this tender age, I discovered a pair of underpants, full of holes, that may well have belonged to a female relative (I know my sisters had to wear navy blue knickers that were not much more sensuous than my own, so they were not theirs). Since Mother had already shown me the rudiments of sewing, I clumsily repaired the holes and wore them to the exclusion of my ‘official issue' underwear. Made of brushed cotton or perhaps a silk/cotton blend their softness was a sexual caress. When no one else was taking any interest in my solitude and rain precluded the great outdoors, I would go to bed in my underpants and look at the hare book and squirm with mysterious pleasure. Even the word ‘pants' (underpants in English) or ‘shorts' (as in American underpants) held a sexual connotation for me. For me shorts were shorts and trousers were trousers or even ‘bags'. Pants were underpants.

I also discovered, in the paint and tool shed, an enormously thick copy of
Vogue
magazine from the forties. While
Vogue
was careful at the time not to run advertisements for corsets and foundations, considering them far too vulgar, there were so many references to femininity in the pictures… while at the same time
Harper's Bazaar
, besides publishing good short stories and articles by Hemingway, Faulkner and even Father, did not have such scruples and since the edition with Father's article in it was in the house, it eventually became my version of
Playboy
or
Penthouse
, thanks to its advertisements for foundations,
guèpieres
and lingerie.

* * *

I was still seven years old when Mother took me to the station and put me on a train to London. It was an eight-hour journey and involved changing trains twice, once in Welshpool and once again in Shrewsbury. Things were different in those days and she asked the guard of the train to look out for me and make sure I made the first change of trains.

After that, he probably asked another passenger to hand me on in Welshpool to the next guard, through to Shrewsbury where the process would be repeated when I was handed on to the London train. I have no recollection of how much grownups helped or ignored me. As far as I was concerned, I just carried on. In retrospect, I am sure that many a kind adult assisted me. Mother and I had already travelled by train to London a few times, but it was less stressful traveling alone than with Mother: she always had so many packages that, like a flock of sheep, she had to keep counting them, to make sure she hadn't left one behind. I just had one very large suitcase, which I am quite sure was too large for me to handle, so someone must have been helping me along the way… so no doubt I just followed my suitcase. Mind you, her parting words to me were: “Now, do not speak to strangers…”. Just how does a seven-year-old child travel from North Wales to London by train, changing trains twice and taking a taxi in London, manage without talking to helpful strangers and accepting their assistance? Even at twice the age, travelling by three ferries and four trains from the Dodecanese Islands in Greece, home, I was ‘kidnapped' by some older teenage French girls and had a night's sleep in a real bed in Paris!

Once in London, I took one of the quaint old nineteen forties London taxis that could turn in little more than their own length. I gave the driver the address of Nan, a friend of Mother's – she was divorced from the Liberal Member of Parliament, Wilfred Roberts (he was already out of the picture by then) and she lived in a large elegant house in a splendid walled garden across the road from Hampstead Heath. Nan tried to persuade Mother to buy paintings by Mondrian (which were selling for a pittance at the time) but she replied that, though she liked his early flowers and trees, she could not accept his later geometric work… just what thrilled Nan so much. When I arrived, I paid my fare and (following instructions) offered the driver a tip. But he waved it aside with: “No, no, sonny, you'll be wanting that soon enough for a cup of hot tea”.

That first year I went to a day school called Byron House in Highgate with Judy, daughter of another family friend. I lodged at their house, up the street from Nan's house on Keats Grove and right opposite the Romantic poet's own house. The houses on that street were elegant Queen Anne, all set back in their own gardens – though none as large as Nan's. Father's literary agent (David Higham) had a lovely house between the two friends.

Mother had seen Judy and her mother, Jess, camping in a field near our house in Wales. The weather was dreadful and for days the dreary rain would not let up, so she invited them over to dry out their clothes in the kitchen and play with us indoors. They soon became good friends and continued to be so, long after I stayed with them.

Jess was a staunch Socialist – a neat trick for someone who owned such a lovely house and lived off the proceeds of stock in Cadbury's chocolate. The Cadburys were Quakers and lived unostentatiously, giving lavishly to many charities. But Jess did not believe in God or Church and discouraged any vague interest I might have shown. However, Father's godfather (he looked like G.B. Shaw, with his spare frame and great white beard) lived at the top of Keats Grove and sometimes took me to the pretty church at that end of the street. It was something one did. He lived happily with his younger (second) wife, taking her breakfast in bed every day in their bedroom upstairs. I picture him walking up the stairs with a tea-tray loaded with breakfast accoutrements. Methodical, precise and gallant. In conversation with Mother one day, he said: “I believe it was a mistake to live over 90.”

“But why Charles? You seem so happy!”

“Well, my dear, one begins to feel… how should I put it? Perhaps a little ‘middle-aged'? Trouble lacing ones shoes and such…”. He was 96 and died peacefully later that year.

Besides the godfather, there was also a summer neighbour from North Wales (a German Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany before the war). He too lived at the top of the street. That made five different friends of my Parents all within one hundred yards of each other, in the elegant neighbourhood of North London: Hampstead.

The walk to and from school seemed interminable. There were few distractions along the way, so I would think of Father's tales of walking to school. There was the time he met a baby bird on the ground on his way to kindergarten: he chatted with it for a while and then carried on to school, only to find that the other children were already leaving as he arrived! Such is time to a very young child. Then there was the time that he fell in love with an older girl and could not bear to walk into the classroom with her eyes upon him, so he made his entrance with a series of summersaults. Her reaction was to scold him with: “Get up off the floor, don't you see you're getting your clothes dirty?” The spell was broken and he was out of love in a trice.

When the first snow fell, a friend of Judy's invited us to go home across Hampstead Heath and try out her new skis with her. My introduction to the sport was as patchy as the melting snow, but I do remember a few thrilling slides and less thrilling falls. By the time we reached home, Jess had called the police and reported us missing, but fortunately for me, Judy was a year or two older than I, so she was the scapegoat and took the brunt of the blame.

Another time, we were walking on the Heath together when a man came up to me with a persuasive invitation to see something very special that he was sure I had never seen before. He was right. But what is so special about watching someone else jerk off? Ever since, I've always felt it is something to be enjoyed oneself – not exactly a spectator sport. I think I can still remember the man's dirty old raincoat, frayed scarf and nicotine-tainted breath, but those memories are vague and may well have come from later indoctrination – they seem too typical. Perhaps he was a well-dressed, good-looking young man, but that was not the memory I have of him. Judy discovered us behind the bushes and said it was time to go home for tea… now I am sorry I did not thank her for that intervention. Fifty years later, when she joined me for lunch at my photo studios in New York, I could have done just that. I could have thanked her. I regret the omission. She might well have forgotten the incident, or had some other slant upon it, but I didn't even mention it. Another missed opportunity, that might have revealed that she saw nothing of my experience, or there again, she might have felt she was saving me from embarrassment and perversion. After all, I had been precociously enjoying myself ever since ‘Benty' was towed away, though we all know that sex comes with few, if any, users' manuals.

At all events, London was a far cry from my solitary existence in Wales, in the rain, without electricity or playmates… I had stimulation from the current world, instead of being isolated at home in North Wales.

XIV

MISTY MOUNTAIN

T
he next year, I went to a weekly boarding school in the opposite direction, walking back to Judy's home for weekends. It was housed in red brick Victorian buildings amongst quiet streets of substantial, elegant townhouses. The assembly hall (or was it the chapel?) and classrooms were on the lower floors and dormitories for the ten per cent of weekly boarders were up in the attics, right under the beams and trusses of the roof.

I remember the intense bewilderment of that first day at school with no one to point me in any particular direction. Everyone seemed to know what they were doing and where they were supposed to be, except for me. Eventually I went into an empty classroom and sat down. Some time later, a class came crashing and shouting in and sat down, ignoring me. When the master arrived to subdue the rabble, he spotted me at the back and asked me what I thought I was doing. Truthfully I said I did not know. I had no ‘thought', I had no ‘plan', I was simply trying to be out of the way. Now I know to temper the truth – it can so easily be misconstrued.

With threats of a beating, I was taken to the correct classroom, already labelled as a devious, lazy smart aleck. Very soon I was known as Misty Mountain and drifted cluelessly through my classes, school prayers and football (soccer), rugby, boxing and cricket. In my bewilderment, I took refuge in my misty mountain disguise. Foggy detachment stayed with me and most of the classes floated over my head like the motes in sunbeams that fascinated me so much more than did lessons. Boxing was purgatory. We boxed in stockinged feet on a parquet floor, to teach us balance – every other boy was faster than I was so I served as a punching bag, trying desperately not to lose my slippery footing on the polished floor. Boxing was to make men of us. Doing it in socks on a slippery floor was supposed to give us balance and poise. Instead it gave me a life-long aversion to fisticuffs.

We sang that jingoistic anthem ‘Rule Britannia' as well as the National Anthem: ‘God Save the King' (soon to become: ‘the Queen') at every excuse possible – I was too young to see the absurdity in lauding a country that was broke from fighting the War, miserable from rationing and shortages, standing in queues, struggling to ‘make do'. Britain was certainly not ‘broken', given its straightened circumstances, it was still remarkably cheerful and brave, but as for ‘ruling the waves', the concept was ridiculous. Old habits die hard and in those days, everyone stood to attention for the National Anthem before every film or concert started. The stiff upper-lip and ‘carry on regardless' attitude held people together. After all, the whole of Europe was flat broke after the war, at least Britain had ‘won' the war, but what was left of the British Empire? The very fact that Britain stubbornly tried to go on ‘ruling the waves' with its naval fleets and RAF squadrons and soldiers stationed in foreign countries, was exacerbating its gloomy economic situation. The brave bluster (and sometimes incredible stupidity and narrow-mindedness) of the Charge of Light Brigade, in which almost an entire cavalry brigade was decimated by Russian troops near Sebastopol, thanks to rigid training, squabbling officers and muddled miscommunication, carried on. How I remember the news arriving at school that Colonel Nasser was nationalizing the Suez Canal, creating an international crisis. A very fat old master cried out (his face apoplectic with enthusiasm): “Hoorah! Let's send in the battleships… that'll teach those Wogs a lesson!”

To quote the Communist Djilas (oh how my school masters would turn in their graves!): “The manipulation of fervour is the germ of bondage.” So the ‘servant class' (or what remained of it after the war) still seemed proud of the expensive habits of their bosses. They did not seem to aspire to anything much better. Thanks to unions and several left wing governments, the playing field has been levelled a great deal since then and everyone can at least aspire, even if higher goals are not really attainable. These were the dying gasps of the British Empire.