Going Up (18 page)

Renford told me that the examiners had been amused by my essay on the relationship between religion and ethics. I had dared to say that the two things seemed as closely bonded as Brahms and Simon. The Brahms I had in mind was, of course, Caryl, who collaborated with S. J. ‘Skid’ Simon in writing
Don’t Mr Disraeli
and
Bullet in the Ballet
. I was surprised to discover that Richard Braithwaite, the chairman of the examiners, had even heard of such frivolous compositions. I liked to think of philosophy as a very solemn business.

In the early summer, Hilary Phillips telephoned my mother. She was married and living in Hendon and had recently had a baby, with some difficulty. She would like to see me sometime, if I had nothing better to do. I called and arranged to go to tea. I took the Underground to Hendon Central and walked past a long parade of suburban shops and up to the side street of similar 1930s houses in which Hilary and Gerald lived. She was alone in the house. She had had a hard time with convalescence but she was still a
very pretty woman. I told her that I was happily in love with someone else. She said, ‘Then why have you come to see me?’

‘Because you asked me to tea.’

She said, ‘I’d better make some then, hadn’t I?’

When she came back with the appropriate tray and, after a due delay, poured out the contents of the teapot, my cup was filled with hot water. Hilary laughed and threw her hands in the air and then lay back full length on the wide sofa. ‘I only forgot to put the tea in. What do you make of that?’ She lay there looking up at me. Frank Harris would have seized his opportunity to, as he said with enviable frequency, ‘improve the occasion’. I lacked the desire or the recklessness. I took the teapot into the kitchen and she came and put some tea in it. I suppose I had gone to see her to prove how happy I was without her; and she without me, perhaps.

I walked back past all those hedged and gated houses, distinguished from each other only by their gardens or their paintwork, and along the Hendon Way past the row of shops, a hairdresser, a laundry, a United Dairy and the paper shop with a two-sided billboard pitched on the pavement. By the time I was waiting for the train to take me back to civilisation, I was somewhat pregnant with my second novel,
The Earsldon Way
, although I had not yet written my first.

S
INCE SHE WAS still working for Victor Gollancz, Beetle could take only a month’s holiday, during August. Nicolai Rubinstein, a great authority on medieval Tuscany, recommended the ancient walled city of Lucca. I knew of it only because Julius Caesar, Pompey and Marcus Licinius Crassus had met there, in 60 BC, to compose the three-headed tyranny later known as the First Triumvirate. We travelled third class by train from Paris to Pisa and by bus to Lucca. There we found a
pensione
where we could have two meals a day for the equivalent of eight shillings each. The only available room was on the top floor of an annexe run by two old ladies. They were unlikely to disturb us on account of the number of steps it would require them to climb. There was a big bed and a desk overlooking the mossed and lichened roofs of the old city.

I had promised Leslie that I would come back to Cambridge with a revised script in which his songs could be heeled in time for us to begin rehearsals. I put more jokes and routines in the text, which Leslie had agreed that I should direct, while he concentrated on staging the musical numbers. I also wrote some sketches for the first Footlights Smoker of the new academic year. One was a two-handed send-up of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, in which they preened themselves on their command of
the English literary scene and on the eagerness with which publishers pursued them (‘We were nearly subjected to rape / By the man from Jonathan Cape / ‘Victor Gollancz?’ / ‘No thanks!’ etcetera.) Tony Becher later supplied me with the perfect capper: ‘I’m the Greene to end all Greenes / And I’m the Waugh to end all Waughs!’

Beetle and I took the bus to Viareggio and swam or lay on the busy beach. A man toting a wide basket trudged in the soft sand, calling out, ‘
Bombolini, gelati, aranciata
…’ Basted with sun oil, our bodies were badged with evidence of the mosquitoes that plagued our nights in shrill shoals. The white walls of our high room became covered with the bloody dottle of crushed insects. The generous food at the
pensione
compensated for our scratchy sleep. The cook was a squat, smiling woman who, when you thought you had seen it all, came out with a dish of
cipolline
glazed in the oven. A resident set of Italian army officers occupied a central round table. Their colonel was a stamp collector who asked us to send him any used covers we might have. There was, it seemed, a kind of innocence even in military men.

We often spent a hot hour playing our soft version of cricket in a malodorous culvert under the thick city walls. Now and again, we bought the tissue-paper airmail edition of the
Daily Telegraph
. I saw one day that Peter May had scored an unsurprising century in his first Test match against the Australians. I watched him score centuries at Charterhouse in the course of almost all home matches on Big Ground. I met him only when I was drawn to play against him in the school tennis singles. He arrived on court punctually and explained that he had never played before. He would be glad if I would run through the rules. We knocked up for a short while and then he said we might as well play. He won 6–0, 6–0, without taking his first XI hasher off. He was so good at all sports that, while aged by his own precociousness, he displayed no vanity. The ex-Leicester and England bowler George Geary coached Peter until he was fifteen years old, after which he said that he had nothing left to teach him.

In 1961, ill health accentuated by his lack of success against Richie Benaud’s Australians, forced May’s retirement from the England captaincy. My literary agent, George Greenfield, suggested that I ghost a book of his memoirs. He arranged a lunch at which I tried to discover what kind of secrets Peter might have in his locker. He had none whatever. He had had his problems, but he remembered no quarrels and had no dirt to dish. In an effort to show knowledge, I asked him how, when facing (and destroying) the legendary West Indian slow bowler Sonny Ramadhin, he could distinguish between a googly and an orthodox off-break. ‘I couldn’t,’ he said. ‘No one can.’

‘So how did you…?’

Peter said, ‘The only thing to do is to hit the ball before it has time to turn one way or the other.’

The memory of Charterhouse recalled the weekly ‘art lectures’ given, with black and white slides on the epidiascope, by A. L. ‘The Uncle’ Irvine, a recently retired, already legendary sixth-form master. The Uncle had inspired both Hugh Trevor-Roper and Peter Green to excel in Greek and Latin. Trevor-Roper acknowledged the quality of Irvine’s scholarship but considered that he had been coercive in imposing his views on ancient literature and life. Trevor-Roper absconded to history. Peter Green has displayed no difficulty in challenging or discarding
idées reçues
, whether from The Uncle or from anyone else. If Peter ever made a prosaic mistake, it was in diplomacy: at Cambridge, he gave abrasive notice of his heterodoxy before he had secured himself an academic pulpit. Simon Raven claimed that Peter’s first and great mistake was to have refused to apply for a commission in the RAF. This allowed his iconoclastic scholarship to be attributed to a bolshie character rather than to the freshness of his ideas.

Simon was given a research fellowship at King’s, of which he was deprived after he breached the ethos of the college by a heterosexual adventure leading to the pregnancy of the nice Susan, who was later my patron at the
Sunday Times
. Peter, the outstanding scholar of his year, was suffered to teach undergraduates but never to become a member of the Trinity establishment. He found a rewarding world elsewhere, especially during the years he lived, wrote and taught in Greece. Unlike Trevor-Roper, Peter had dared to dissent from The Uncle’s opinions even as a schoolboy. When he won the Craven scholarship at Cambridge, The Uncle said, ‘I understood that you are to be congratulated. In which case, congratulations.’

The Uncle had been a keen traveller in pre-war Italy. He summed up at the end of one sequence of art lectures by saying, ‘Of all the plaishes I have ever vishited the one I should mosht like to shee again is Shan Gimignano.’ Beetle and I went to the Lucca bus terminal to inquire whether there was a bus to such a place. Her Italian was better than mine but she left me to do the talking. There was a daily departure to the place I had named every morning at ten. We bought rolls and ham and cheese and a bottle of water and boarded the antique bus along with a few old peasants and their baskets. The driver headed inland, through Bagni di Lucca, past the ‘Ponte del Diavolo’, a pedestrian bridge steeply canted towards its off-centre crest and paved with cobbles untenable for cloven feet, and into the hills. We climbed through many bends in the narrow road until we stopped and the conductor called out ‘
San Gemignano
’. No one else got off.

We were at the foot of a hillside olive grove at the entrance to a small village of not more than a dozen and a half houses. I willed myself to echo The Uncle’s rapture. Strings of corn husks hung, dark yellow, alongside wattled red peppers, from the tiled eaves; chickens ran and clucked as a cock strutted in to make his choice; grapes depended from wire trellises. It was a small Tuscan village. We walked down the rough street without seeing anyone at all. The low-built church had an unyielding door. We gazed at the olive trees and I wondered what The Uncle had treasured so keenly. Perhaps, more romantic than I had supposed, he had imagined the bucolic Virgil and Sabine Horace in the huddled cottages and the stone-walled
allotments (Arnold Toynbee had recently claimed to have had a box seat at the Battle of Marathon). There was no café, no
trattoria
, no
brava gente
. The bus was not due to return until three o’clock in the afternoon. We sat in a field under an olive tree and ate our picnic.

I am not sure when it occurred to me that my mispronunciation – ‘
San Gemignano
’ for ‘
San Gimignano
’ – had carried us to the wrong place, but we discovered my error and, a few days later, took a smoother bus to the city renowned for its
campanilismo
. We could now see what The Uncle had admired, the competing towers conspicuous among them, and try to share his admiration. The baked beige streets seemed airless and without magic. Only Barna da Siena’s murals had a spice of enlivening irony. As I remarked solemnly in my notebook, his sequence of panels in the Collegiata seemed like an obituary of the dying Middle Ages. The characters of Jesus’s time were revised in the eye-narrowing light of suspicion and self-interest.

In the panel depicting the crucifixion, the figure on the cross, being humanely speared by a mounted squaddie, attracted little reverence from the attendant crowd of frescoed extras. While, in a corner, grieving women huddled around Christ’s mother, Barna’s central image at the foot of the cross (destroyed by Allied gunfire) was of Roman soldiers throwing knucklebones for the Saviour’s raiment. Their scavenging presaged the vulturous advent of men such as the pitiless English
condottiere
Sir John Hawkwood, who came to pick up the pieces of what was left after the plague had done its worst. Barna included the only clear image of a grown-man’s penis that I have seen in ecclesiastical surroundings. The drunken Noah was displayed, without a loop of tactful drapery, while his manifest manhood is mocked – or envied? – by his sons.
Campanilismo
of a kind? Or was the artist suggesting that, when floods come, the likeliest survivors are those who know no shame?

We sat on a beige stone wall and shared a small pot of chocolate-freckled ice cream and determined to find a way of not being separated when I
went back up to Cambridge. For our fourth year, Tony Becher and I were free to live in ‘unlicensed digs’, without being irked by the rules of prompt homecoming at night and chastity thereafter. Tony found a furnished terrace house to rent in Montagu Road, well out of town along the Chesterton Road. There were four bedrooms, the largest of which, on the first floor, Beetle and I could share.

Once back in England, she spotted an advertisement for a job at the University Appointments Board. This employment exchange for graduates was housed in a four-square Georgian building off Chaucer Road, at the far end from the city to Montagu Road. Beetle was interviewed (and obliged to take an intelligence test) by J. G. W. Davies, whose fame derived from his having bowled Don Bradman, at the height of his powers, for a duck when the touring Australians played Cambridge University at Fenner’s. He did wonder why Miss Glatt should seek a job for which she was manifestly over-qualified, but she did not indulge his curiosity. She left V. G. with more regret on his part than on hers.

When my mother heard of Beetle’s plan to live in Cambridge, she was displeased, although no mention had been made of our sharing the same digs. By this time, Irene had surely guessed that we were lovers. Even her daily help, Mrs Garrod, asked me what it was like making love with that beautiful dark-haired girl. Irene called Beetle’s mother to inform her of her daughter’s imminent delinquency. Ray was neither shocked nor intimidated. She had winced when first informed of Beetle’s decision but she knew better than to hope to change it. Ray told Irene that Beetle was a grown woman; she had no wish, or ability, to interfere with her life.

We filled the other rooms in 28 Montagu Road without difficulty. One was rented by a Siamese student whose surname was Punyanita. ‘Poony’ spoke pidgin English with a fluent paucity of vocabulary. Her response to any jest (and there were many) that she failed to understand was ‘You clazy!’ Her father was said to own all the prisons in Thailand as well as a zoo. ‘Poony’
was soon attached to Paddy Dickson, an always smiling medical student who also played piano for the Footlights. Paddy had an equally cheery double, a Johnian called Robert Busvine, who hung on the fringes of the Gaiety. So alike were they that I was never sure which one I was talking to until the course of the conversation veered towards some identifying marker. David Gore-Lloyd, who was also reading Moral Sciences, although he never came to supervisions with me and Tony, rented the top room in Montagu Road.

David made no marked contributions to our philosophical causeries, but he did once suggest that a machine for sorting bad eggs from good could be said to be ‘biased’ against the bad ones. This seemed to imply that a machine could have mental attitudes. The prospect of sophisticated computers programmed to disqualify certain people, or types of people, from benefits or even from medical attention, makes the notion of a biased machine less comic now than it seemed in the 1950s. David formed a romantic attachment to Poony’s sister ‘Pussy’, who lived in the dormitory for foreign students run by ‘Pop’ Prior at an address that Poony called ‘Nigh Ada Lo’ (otherwise 9 Adam’s Road). One day, David discovered that he had a lump in one of his testicles. His mother insisted that he go to London to be seen by a specialist.

Since our house was so distant from the centre of Cambridge, I spent a good deal of time in Leslie Bricusse’s new rooms in a Caius annexe on the other side of Trinity Street. He approved of the work I had done on the ‘book’ and set himself to getting costumes, sets and cast for a December production. Although he showed no interest in the ADC, he was eager that their new president, Gordon Gould, play the part of our (in fact Canadian) heroine’s American millionaire father. I had written a scene to open the second half in which Jinx, as I called our heroine, in memory of Mary Jane Lehman, whom I had loved briefly, but keenly, in New York, was at breakfast, at a very long polished table, with her badly hungover papa. It called for clever playing, in very slow motion, as the two of them slid various elements in the breakfast diet, with exhausted effort, from one end of the
table to the other. I have no idea why we thought that this would be funny, but Leslie endorsed it, so long as we could get Gordon to take the part. No one in literary or theatrical Cambridge thought well of Leslie or of his artless ambitions. Not without a prolonged show of important doubt, Gordon Gould did, however, eventually agree to be of our company.

I rehearsed the actors with a facsimile of the confidence with which I had drilled my Lockite platoon. My jokes amused the cast enough to convince them that they would get laughs from the audience. Armed with the licence of authorship, I did not hesitate to coach Gordon Gould. If he came to scoff, he remained to play. Brian Marber was recruited to play a Dago racing driver based on Juan Fangio; Joe Bain (who had stayed in Cambridge to do a ‘Diploma of Education’) was Sir Roland Butter, the father of the tenor Dai Jenkins, a handsome Welshman who was engaged, in reality, to a very pretty, if short-stemmed, English rose called Norma. Tony Becher had not been slow to coin the phrase ‘See Norma and Dai’.