Growing Up In a War (28 page)

Corks and I spent a lot of our time simply talking about music. His interests were wide, but his love of Elgar knew no bounds. Elgar, he asserted, was as great a composer as Beethoven. When I said the polite equivalent of ‘Aw, come off it,’ his reply was that we should judge a composer by his greatest work, and Beethoven never wrote anything better than
The Dream of Gerontius
. Elgar, said Corks, composed only a handful of things on that level, and Beethoven many, but the level was just as high. This view, coming on top of my father’s love of Elgar (and particularly
The Dream of Gerontius
), made me familiar with the idea of Elgar as a great composer. I never took the patronising attitude towards his music that was common at that time; in fact from my teens onwards he became a special love of mine.

Corks played piano pieces to me by widely differing composers, pointing out things about them that I would not have noticed for myself. I have remembered some of his performances: the last movement of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata, for instance; and
Chopin’s
‘Revolutionary’ Study; in both cases it was the first time I heard them. He gave a hilarious rendition of the overture to Wagner’s
Tannhäuser
in which, while his left hand intoned the Pilgrim’s Chorus with po-faced solemnity, his right suddenly darted out and seized a hearth brush lying within reach and started crazily whacking the upper part of the keyboard in simulation of the violin accompaniment. Because of my passion for Wagner he invited me one evening to his study to listen to a broadcast by Kirsten Flagstad. He lent me the first of the innumerable biographies of Wagner that I have read – and also, naturally, a biography of Elgar.

Another music master, Philip Dore, arrived at my house as the junior housemaster, and I saw him constantly. During the holidays he earned large sums of money by playing one of the seafront organs at Blackpool, from which he also broadcast on BBC radio – his signature tune was ‘Oh I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside!’ – and this gave him kudos with the boys. He was a good musician, and was the first to record the complete organ sonatas of Mendelssohn. Short, very fat, very jolly, he was just the right sort of person to have around boys. At that time there was a popular song whose words went (they had to be sung in an old-style black American accent; and I quote them from memory):

Mr Five-by-five

He’s as tall as he’s wide

He don’t measure no more

From his head to the floor

Than he do from side to side

and this led to Dore being nicknamed Mr Five-by-five. This was then shortened to Five – and then, because of our propensity to say things in German, Fünf. (One of our jokes was: ‘What comes between fear and sex?’ and the answer was ‘Fünf.’)

In Big School there was a beautiful early-nineteenth-century organ that had been brought to Sussex from the school in London, and whenever Five wanted to get into practice for one of his Blackpool appearances he would take a group of us up to its loft and give us a recital of popular songs. He always began with his signature tune, which he would launch into with terrific brio, instant swing that made my skin jump into goose pimples; and while playing it he would turn his face back over his shoulder and beam at us with his great big bespectacled features, just as he was going to do with his audience in Blackpool: he was rehearsing his beaming as well as his playing. I was so transported by these sessions that I was seduced into playing that organ myself when no one else was around. It was a mad thing to do, because it was strictly against the rules for any boy to touch the organ without permission, and sooner or later I was bound to be heard. I got away with it for a surprisingly long time. Unluckily for me, the person who heard me was the one who cared most about the organ, the head of the music department, Dr Lang. He summoned me to his study and gave me six of the best – the only time I was given the full six in all my years at Christ’s Hospital – and it hurt more than I would have believed possible. He was one of the two or three masters who were notorious for perceptibly getting an erection when they beat a boy, and he laid it on with a kind of mad ferociousness.

My addiction to music led me to take up the bass trombone, though it happened partly by accident. I wanted to learn the clarinet, so I went along to the bandmaster, Mr Stagge, and asked if I could do so. He said the clarinet was the most popular instrument in the band, and he had people queuing up to learn it, so his answer had to be no. On the other hand, he was going to be short of a bass trombone in a year’s time, and would I be interested in learning that? One of my father’s closest friends, Chopper, was a trombonist in a Salvation Army band, and I had often
watched
him play: I think this may have been one of the factors in my saying yes. I made a start, and learnt the rudiments of the instrument. But whereas Chopper was a tenor trombonist, and had splendid tunes to play, the bass trombone scarcely ever did anything but provide bass notes for the harmony. It was not even
oompah, oompah
, but only half that. This caused me to lose interest. I gave the instrument up before getting as far as playing in the band.

The authorities at Christ’s Hospital were not unanimously keen on music. Quite a lot of the masters resented it for taking boys away from games, or from their prep; and the headmaster himself once famously complained that there was ‘too much music going on’. Fortunately there was enough of it to have a momentum of its own that enabled it to survive this opposition. Corks had discovered that a particular note on a particular stop of the chapel organ set up sympathetic vibrations in the wooden panel against which the headmaster, Mr Flecker, leant his head during the services, so whenever Flecker made difficulties for the music staff Corks extemporised
fortissimo
voluntaries centring on this note.

It was at Christ’s Hospital that I first heard – and saw – Gilbert and Sullivan.
Trial By Jury
was staged at the end of my first year. From some source – I think it must have been my father – I had acquired a snooty attitude towards Gilbert and Sullivan, but I thought
Trial By Jury
was great fun. Its attitude of derision towards authorities and accepted hypocrisies was to my taste, and the match between words and music seemed right. The role of the Plaintiff was sung pleadingly by the attractive young wife of the most notoriously sadistic of the masters, thus insinuating sexual implications from an intriguing quarter. A boy, Bob Pitman, sang the Usher, and made himself the star of the show. For some time afterwards the rest of us went around singing ‘From bias free of every kind this trial must be tried’; and the first three or six of those words became our standard comment on any kind of stitch-up. The
following
year
HMS Pinafore
was done. It was brimming with tunes, and both words and music contributed permanently to the school’s stock of standard references. Again Pitman performed, this time the role of Sir Joseph Porter. I was astonished that a boy could be so good. With his stage presence, good baritone and satanic looks, which included black eyebrows meeting in the middle, he came close to stealing the show. I think he could have had a future as that kind of singer, but he was destined to become a star of a different sort, the star columnist on
Express
newspapers.

Stage productions of any kind came on at the end of term, when discipline was lax and the audience about to go home. But the whole term would be filled with preparations, so even boys not involved in a production would be constantly aware of it. Actors with roles to learn would be asking their friends to hold the book for them and prompt them, or would walk about declaiming their lines. Particularly good lines or jokes would go around and become quotations. If the production was a musical one the songs would become well known. Disasters at rehearsal were always plentiful, and stories about these would go the rounds too. Every house put on a play or plays in the winter term. The first such programme in my time included that unforgettable fable
The Monkey’s Paw
, by W. W. Jacobs (who was then still living). A level up from house plays were school plays. The first of these was Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
. The role of Maria was played by a boy called Ivan Yates, who from then on made a speciality of playing female comedy roles, in which he was uncommonly sophisticated without being camp. He gave us Lady Teazle a year later, and Lady Bracknell two years after that. He was to become a friend of mine at Oxford, and remain so for the rest of his life, though at school I never met him.

Whereas the school plays were chosen from the classics, the most popular kind of house play would be a recent success in the
commercial
theatre. A famous production by another house was
Arsenic and Old Lace
, in which the two old ladies were Ivan Yates and Bernard Levin. Those in my own house included Noël Coward’s
Hay Fever
and Terence Rattigan’s
French Without Tears
. I appeared in a couple of one-acters; but to this day the only full-length play I have ever acted in was R.C. Sherriff’s
Journey’s End
, a tragedy set in the trenches of the First World War. With us, casting was always type-casting: every role would be given to the boy who seemed closest to it. So I played Trotter, the cockney officer who had risen from the ranks. He is a sympathetic character, and the one with most of the funny lines, so I got most of the laughs. It was, I found, satisfying to play. But the experience taught me that I was no better at acting than any of the other boys, in spite of my special love for the theatre and the fact that I was soaking it in during the school holidays.

I reached puberty at what was then, I believe, the normal age for a boy, thirteen. What apprised me of the fact was that I had an explicit sexual dream that climaxed in orgasm, and I woke up having the orgasm, never having had one before. Still half-asleep, I had no idea what was going on – except that, whatever it was, it was alarmingly violent. As I came to in the darkness of the dormitory my whole consciousness was being electrified as if it had been plugged in to the mains, and a massive charge pumped through it, convulsing my brain. My first thought was that I was having an epileptic fit, or going mad. But then the convulsions died away and I became aware of something entirely different, a warm sticky mess in the bed. I felt for it with my hands, and found that my pyjamas and sheets were soaked with some thick, smooth liquid. I sniffed at it on my hands, and it smelt like mushrooms. It was some seconds before I realised that it had come from my penis. And then, of course, when I was properly awake, I put two and two together, and the realisation swept over me: ‘My God, so this is …’

Central to the whole experience was that it was outside my framework of understanding. The container of the only reality I knew had split, and something of a radically different order had come flooding in from outside, from some totally other elsewhere. There was already something else that I experienced in this way, and that was music. Just as people in love often think that no one else in history can possibly have felt the way they feel, so I did not believe that anyone else could have the same experiences as I had when I listened to music. It was not possible. Music came to me not
as if
from a different world but actually from a different world, from some order of being and reality unconnected with anything in the space I occupied. And from now on it was the same with orgasm, only more so, because orgasm was intense and climactic, more emotionally violent. The power behind it was at a higher voltage.

Fundamental to the difference in experience between men and women is that from puberty onwards boys have orgasms frequently whether they want to or not. Their bodies are unceasingly producing sperm that has to be got rid of, and if they do not induce orgasms in themselves, Nature does it for them in so-called wet dreams. So orgasms are inescapable. Boys grow up in the grip of this situation, and for most of them there is something overwhelming about it. They cannot ignore their own sexuality; and their sex drives and desires are as strong now as at any time in their lives. Yet the situation is new to them, and they have no experience in dealing with it. In fact, the truth is they are still children. And because of their age it is impossible for them to find the sexual outlets they feel a ravenous need for, and dream about. At the age of fourteen or fifteen I made some absurd attempts to have sex with one of the housemaids, a sixteen-year-old girl, but it all petered out into nothing. We were both terrified, first of all of the sex itself, and also because we knew we would be sacked on the spot if we were caught. We were more ignorant
of
how to do what we wanted to do than either of us realised, and both of us were pitifully lacking in self-confidence. Our fumblings and gropings were almost paralysed by ignorance and inhibition, with the result that nothing of consequence took place, except for a lot of red-faced and inarticulate embarrassment. It is so painful a memory that even now I shy away from thinking about it. But behind all that, as the cause of it, was a drive of tremendous power, something which on my side came close to desperation. I was obsessed by sex, and tempestuously in need of it. I thought about it more than anything else during the years between puberty and my first relationship, which occurred when I was seventeen and still at school – but that is a story we shall come to later.

Meanwhile the only outlets we boys had for our animal sex drives were with one another. But the inner as well as the social inhibitions against this were very powerful, and exposure was usually met with immediate expulsion, so by no means everybody took part in that sort of activity, though many did. It went on patchily and in semi-secret – the activity itself was always hush-hush, and yet it was the subject of endless rumours and excited whisperings. It was on everybody’s mind. I never heard of anything happening that went beyond mutual masturbation. In later life I was surprised to be told by people who had been to Eton that buggery had been commonplace there. I never heard of it at Christ’s Hospital, nor do I think it occurred: I was as active sexually as any of the other boys, and so voraciously interested in sex that I tapped in to all the grapevines, and it would have been almost impossible for something like that to be going on without reaching my ears. What we did do was fairly mild, and always
faute de mieux
, or so it seemed to me. When I was involved I used to fantasise about the boy being a girl, and afterwards I would always feel guilty and ashamed, and swear to myself that I would never do it again.