Going Up (2 page)

When I was fifteen, and my mother was quarantined with mumps, I had no recourse, between attending to her, but to sit alone and read. I happened on
Of Human Bondage
in my parents’ shelves (two long rows, low under the bay window). Somerset Maugham’s orphaned hero, Philip Carey, was bullied at school because he had a club foot. His guardian was a Church of England vicar, as the author’s had been. Accused of a want of Christian charity, he retorted (perhaps more self-mockingly than his ward recognised) that parsons were ‘paid to preach, not to practise’. Maugham’s decorous eroticism was piquant enough to inflame adolescent desires. His young hero was dismayed, and all but dismasted, by Miss Wilkinson’s pragmatic stays and undergarments. The Literary Guild’s illustration of her, in booted
demi-déshabillé
, furnished my dreams and stiffened my ambitions.

Unlike the patrician elaborations of Osbert Sitwell’s autobiography
Left
Hand! Right Hand!
, which I tried to admire, in the Reprint Society edition, Maugham’s unadorned ironies seemed by no means inimitable. Why not recapitulate juvenile sorrows with the vengeful accuracy that had made him a bestseller? He too had been translated as a small boy from one culture to another in which he both was and was not at home. Born in France, never quite at ease in England, he made a virtue of duplicity. Since Maugham was, as
he later said himself, ‘three-quarters queer’, his doubleness was greater than it occurred to me to guess in the 1940s. Many years later, Jocelyn Rickards, the stage-designer wife of the film director Clive Donner and sometime mistress of, among others, Graham Greene and Freddie Ayer, told me that, in Australia at the same period, ‘everyone’ knew that Maugham was queer. Wagga Wagga, NSW, was evidently closer to informed circles than Putney, SW15.

Maugham’s notebooks and prefaces acknowledged a debt to French models, especially to the short stories of Guy de Maupassant. I added the Penguin
Boule de Suif
to the three white shelves of my bedroom library. With the Anglocentricity primed by Churchill’s ‘finest hour’, it did not occur to me that it would be better to read French, or any other writers – unless Latin or Greek – in their original language. Except for a fortnight in the early summer of 1939, when we went for a holiday in Knokke-le-Zoute (its attraction for my parents was its casino), I had never been to the Continent. During the war, Europe was defined as a place teeming with ‘starving millions’, any one of whom would have been grateful for my prep school menu of parsley potatoes and boiled cod, roly-poly pudding, watered treacle and the thick outside leaves of lettuce. The lure of ‘the Continent’ grew bright as I read Maugham’s account of Philip Carey’s anguished life as a young painter. To be poor and bohemian in Paris seemed very heaven.

Soon after reading
Of Human Bondage
, I won the third prize in the Charterhouse school painting competition. My true prize was the pursed displeasure on my housemaster’s face. Harry ‘HAM’ March had excluded my landscape from the Lockites’ official entry. I had been hung in the equivalent of the
Salle des Refusés
. At least as far back as the sixth century BC, when the Parian poet Archilochus shafted the family of the beautiful Neobule, who had dumped him, art and revenge have overlapped. The bearded judge, Claude Rogers of the Camden Town School, detected vestiges of ‘significant form’ in my suburban oil-on-canvas-paper. Dreams of Paris and its liberties came a shade closer.

In my teens, eager to get out of 12 Balliol House, I went regularly on the 14 bus to the second-hand shelves in the Charing Cross Road. From the diagonal rack beside the entrance to Joseph’s cavernous bookshop, I picked up the works of Byron and Tennyson, in green boards, for sixpence each, and the Nonesuch edition of Hazlitt’s essays for a shilling. I also acquired a prize copy of the often lauded Jeremy Taylor’s 1651
Holy Living
, with the front board detached, for thruppence. I bought it to see why Somerset Maugham had scoffed at it.

Having paid dawdling dues to English literature, I went up the street to Foyle’s. There I passed not too quickly from history and fiction to the medical section, where it was possible to scan a few pages of Dr Van der Velde’s
Perfect Marriage
before one’s presence stuck out. The text informed me that, in the right position (‘see fig. opposite’), the female genitals could be raised or lowered for more penetrating pleasure. A couple’s clinching rapture was to arrive at simultaneous orgasm. It appeared to take a bit of doing, but practice made for perfection, after which what Jeremy Taylor called ‘mutual endearment’ would contrive a permanent bond.

The anatomical diagrams in
Perfect Marriage
were as salacious as the London Underground map, but they served to make me glad to be wearing my blue mackintosh as I walked past shady, half-curtained premises that sold Damarrhoids and trusses, to Leicester Square Tube station. During the long ride to Putney Bridge station, detumescence was assisted by
Idylls of the King
, though they too carried an erotic charge. What did not?

I quit Charterhouse without regret or gratitude. I had gone there, in the autumn of 1945, as a last resort. Earlier that year, midway between VE Day and the Japanese surrender, I sat the Winchester scholarship exam with a prep school friend, Richard Bird. A couple of months younger than me, Richard had spent most of the war years in America. After all the papers had been evaluated, I was fourth in the number of gross marks, Richard eleventh. Our prep school headmaster, ‘Skete’ Workman, promised that, even
after the examiners had allowed ‘weight for age’, I was odds on to receive one of the twelve scholarships on offer. I set about learning Wykehamist slang. There was, I discovered, one way into the school grounds known as ‘Non Licet Gate’, because it was not lawful for boys to pass through it. I could hardly wait not to use it.

After the examiners’ final conclave, I was seen to have descended from fourth to thirteenth in the published roll. Relegated to
proxime accessit
(a free translation, in the modern style, would be ‘close but no cigar’), there was to be no place for me at Winchester. Richard had risen to sixth. He was in; I was out. My abiding suspicion is that the headmaster, Spencer Stottesbury Leeson, a canon of the Church of England and later Bishop of Peterborough, put his heavy, although not yet episcopal, hand on the scales, thus adding disqualifying weight to my age. During my interview with him and his formidable colleagues, Leeson had asked how I felt about going to chapel. I gave an honest trimmer’s response: going to chapel had never bothered me at Copthorne School and would not bother me at Winchester. The sideways twitch of his mouth might have become a smile but it snagged into a wince.

Old Wykehamists have denied that my elimination could have had anything to do with anti-Semitism. Nothing excites charges of paranoia more quickly than the evidence of an accurate memory. Who will now believe that in the summer of 1945, after the recent discovery of the German concentration camps, a great English school was inflected by a policy which echoed, however discreetly, that of the defeated Nazis? In fact, in 1945, Winchester’s rival, Eton College, announced its intention to operate a
numerus clausus
. My father’s old school, St Paul’s, with its long tradition of admitting any number of Jews, followed suit.
Non licet sed perpaucis Judaeis
(none but a very few Jews allowed) was the new slogan on their gates. Protests led by the Old Etonian A. J. Ayer, a leading Oxford philosopher (and ex-Guards officer), and by Isaiah Berlin, an Old Pauline of equal academic and social
distinction, impelled both schools publicly to rescind the proposed measures. It would be nice to suppose that they ceased to operate them. Life in old England was dominated by those who composed not only its small print but also, if pressed, its invisible writing.

By the time Skete Workman learned of my rejection by Winchester, Charterhouse was the only major school whose scholarship examinations had not yet taken place. Despite blurring tears, I did my educated stuff and was given a £100-a-year scholarship. Two years later, it was increased by another £40 when I gained a ‘senior scholarship’ at the same time as taking the despised ‘School Cert’. Arrogance and submission were the clever boy’s systole and diastole. Part of the English education was to learn, by indirection, of the link between brains and money; a first-class degree gave a man access to enviable emoluments, but one must never talk about them and certainly not wave one’s hands around while doing so. By the age of eighteen, I had been laced into the ways and manners of the middle of the English middle class towards the end of the last season of its high opinion of itself. The British and their king-emperor had been sent victorious by a manifestly Anglophile Almighty. Even if He seemed to specialise in close-run things, few doubted that He was still in His heaven.

Austerity and rationing were the outward and visible signs of patriotic taxes that had to be paid for post-war Britain to stay on top. Life under Clement Attlee’s trustworthy, pipe-smoking, thin-voiced chairmanship was a grey vale of warnings and prohibitions. From her desk in the Home Office, the stern daughter of the voice of God warned us to ‘Keep Death Off the Roads’ and proclaimed ‘Clean Living the Only Real Safeguard’ against the unspeakable ills conveyed by the fell initials V. D. There were few activities about which we should not feel guilty. Good citizens were warned that ‘Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases’; we should ‘Trap Them in Our Handkercheases’. The traveller might still find himself sitting under a sign asking ‘Is Your Journey Really Necessary?’ Civilians of the 1940s were consigned to patriotic immobility.

According to John Raymond, a
New Statesman
pundit, post-war England was ‘on the anvil’. The drama of the Berlin air-lift had proved that our 1948 and George Orwell’s 1984 were distinguished only by a quirk of the pen. Russia had replaced Germany as the heavy hammer that threatened to come down on everything that the civilised world held dear. The war was over, but hostilities might begin again at any time. Why else did Carthusians blanco belts and burnish brasses before parading in the Junior Training Corps? In the second lustrum of the 1940s, I spent every Tuesday afternoon ‘doing Corps’. I was neither keen nor slack; I conformed. I was conscious, at the same time, that conformity entailed an element of irreconcilable difference. Was that why I bit my nails?

In my third year at Charterhouse, the JTC’s commanding officer, Major Morris, alias ‘Magger Mo’, announced a ‘promotions exam’. With the competitive docility that a good education fostered, I dealt with the questions set before me as well as I could: I rehearsed the infantryman’s mantra, ‘Down, Crawl, Observe, Sights, Fire!’; I defined an ‘O-group’ and its duties; my sketch map was complete with ‘church with steeple’ and ‘bushy-topped tree’, and I inserted an unambiguous arrow to indicate the proper line of march; I was even practical enough to dismantle and reassemble a Bren gun (real soldiers were said to do it blindfold) before jumping up and standing to attention. If a condition for promotion had been that I should itemise the details of the Sullan constitution, I should have done it with equal zeal. There were no hurdles like English hurdles. What counted was to clear them cleanly, never mind whether they led to anywhere one really wanted to go.

As a result of gaining good marks, I leapfrogged from private to ‘
acting-corporal
’. The Napoleon of Godalming Hill was launched on his unlikely ascent. Shortly afterwards, command of the Lockite house platoon was wished on me by the incoming head monitor, Jeremy Atkinson, the other senior scholar in the house (if only a natural scientist). Jeremy, whose
naval officer father had been killed in action off Singapore in 1941, had more urgent administrative things to do than to ‘play soldiers’. He later became head of the school and was awarded the Holford Scholarship to Christ Church the year before I was disqualified from presenting myself as a candidate.

Leadership, I discovered, was akin to acting: imposture was easier, and more enjoyable, to sustain than sincerity. With calculated riskiness, I invited an unenthusiastic platoon to relish the comedy of excelling at something that neither they nor I wanted to do. My Tuesday afternoon squaddies responded with eager complicity: pretending to be keen turned conformity into performance. In my last Quarter, seconded by Sergeant James Cellan-Jones, I marched ‘Lockites’ into a tie with ‘Robinites’ for first place in the school drill competition. Which of the adjudicating officers could guess that our snappy uniformity carried a stamp of irony?

Promoted to under officer, I joined the only other Carthusian of the same rank, David Vansittart, a curly-haired, blond, blue-eyed Robinite. We two alone were entitled to wear officer’s uniform, carry a leather-encased swagger stick and sport a Sam Browne belt. We also had the exalted right to parade in brown rather than black boots, a privilege I lacked the means to exercise. I could, however, look forward with some confidence to selection as an officer when the time came to do National Service. My khaki future was postponed by a government ordinance that allowed scholars first to go to university. It must have been intended to increase the military intake of young men with serviceable degrees in subjects such as engineering, medicine and current foreign languages.

Although competence in Latin and Greek was likely to be of small utility on the battlefield, one band of classicists was known to have played a notably gallant part in the war. A visiting lecturer had told us how knowledge of ancient Greek had qualified Stanley ‘Billy’ Moss, Patrick ‘Paddy’ Leigh Fermor, C. M. ‘Monty’ Woodhouse and Xan Fielding to lead guerrilla
operations in Crete and on the Greek mainland. Seen from a distance, the adventures of those latter-day philhellenes furnished one of the few romantic episodes of the Second World War.

While at Charterhouse, Stanley Moss had been the fag-master of my friend Peter Green, probably the greatest, certainly the most versatile, of modern classical scholars. In 1950, Moss published the bestseller
Ill Met by Moonlight
. A film version, in which Leigh Fermor was played by Dirk Bogarde, embellished its real-life hero’s Byronic renown. Moss himself, a Jew who was Leigh Fermor’s 2 i/c in the great adventure of kidnapping the German general Heinrich Kreipe, derived little kudos or satisfaction from his success. ‘Paddy’, on the other hand, acquired iconic standing in Greece, and an elevated literary reputation in England, for the rest of his long life. He had been at the same school, King’s Canterbury, as Somerset Maugham. Common Old Boyishness may explain how come, as a guest at the Villa Mauresque, Leigh Fermor offended his host by daring to tell a funny story about someone with a very b–bad s–stammer.