Growing Up In a War (31 page)

When I told this story, many years later, to Colin Davis, he capped it with a better one of his own. It was again set in the Latin class of the headmaster, who was dobbing his finger round the room asking each boy in turn what he wanted to be in later life. When he reached the young Davis, Colin said: ‘A musician, sir.’

The headmaster laughed with fat joviality: ‘Do you know, Davis, for a moment there I thought you said you wanted to be a musician.’

‘I did, sir.’

‘What, you mean you
seriously
want to be a musician? You want to earn your living at music?’

‘Yes, sir.’

The headmaster laughed again, derisively this time, and said: ‘Will you let me hold the hat for you?’

Colin said to me: ‘Ever since, there’s been a tiny voice at the back of my head saying: “I’m going to show that bastard.”’

CHAPTER TWENTY

ONE DIFFICULTY ABOUT
encapsulating day-to-day life in any big, complex institution is the many-sidedness of it: there are so many different things going on at one time and being taken for granted simultaneously. As well as those I have mentioned there were many others. For instance, I was a member of the Officers’ Training Corps, known as the Corps. Once a week we dressed up in First World War uniforms – puttees and peaked caps – and carried out military training. It came as a great surprise to me to discover that I was a good shot – it did not seem to fit in with the rest of my character.

The school possessed a sizeable armoury of military weapons. This was kept under tight security, but there were one or two thefts from it while I was there. One of these occasioned a scene of unforgettable drama. The headmaster summoned the entire school to a special meeting in Big School and told us, in tones of majestic gravity, that a gang of older boys had carried out a theft of explosives and detonators from the armoury. We naturally thought this was tremendous news, and were agog for more. Who were these boys, and what were they planning to do with the explosives? Blow up the school? With what may have been an inborn sense of theatre, the headmaster brought his narrative to a climax, and then thundered: ‘Douglas, stand forth!’ The hero-villain of the school at that time was a sinisterly handsome boy whom we called Black Douglas because of his hair. He now
emerged
from his seat as if on cue, and stood alone in the centre aisle. The headmaster denounced him in front of everybody as the ringleader of this criminal escapade, dwelling on the terrible consequences it could have had if the explosives had fallen into the hands of young children. Douglas stood calm and self-possessed, neither defiant nor intimidated, just looking the headmaster coolly in the eye while every other eye was on him. I happened to be in front of him and quite near, so I got a full-frontal view. What impressed me was that he looked so like his normal self, neither cocky nor abashed. How can he do it, I wondered: how can he be so at home inside his own skin in circumstances like these? The headmaster brought his denunciation to another climax, made another dramatic pause, and then, with Jehovah-like magnificence, proclaimed: ‘Douglas, you are expelled!’ Gasp. The intake of breath was audible from hundreds of throats. I thought it was impossible now for Douglas to know what to do. I expected him to slink back to his seat. But with the simple self-possession that had distinguished him throughout, he turned and walked up the long aisle between the rest of us and out of the building. He had been expelled so he was going. His demeanour said quietly: ‘There is a world elsewhere.’

There was another boy in my house who had more the character of a small-time criminal. Being a monitor he was allowed to beat boys, and he delighted in punishing. He made himself a rubber truncheon, filled with lead, and used to whack it into his palm in a kind of foreplay of threatening. Not long after leaving the school he held up the post office in one of the local villages at gunpoint. Although he was wearing a mask at the time he was identified and caught. It turned out that he had stolen the gun from the Christ’s Hospital armoury, which was why he had carried out the crime so close to the school.

We were all trained in using the military small arms of the day – I was particularly good with a Sten gun. Militarism was not only
in
the air, it was encouraged – we were, after all, in the middle of a war in which the older boys were going to have to fight, and the younger ones too if it went on long enough. So the more we prepared for it now, the better. On what were called Field Days we used to take a whole day off class and carry out far-ranging military manoeuvres across the Sussex countryside. These were cunningly plotted to challenge the map-reading skills in which we had been trained. The skill they actually developed was that of finding out-of-the-way pubs that would let us in because of our army uniforms, and where we could remain unlocated for a couple of hours, saying afterwards that we had got lost. This was certainly a realistic training for warfare. And it was on these days that we came to know the extended countryside round Christ’s Hospital. Not until we were sixteen were we allowed to have bicycles, or even go out of bounds unaccompanied.

Until that age, apart from Field Days, most of us went beyond the ring fence only when we had visitors from outside, usually from home. Boys who were good enough at any game to play it for the school would visit other schools – our standard fixture list was Brighton, Charterhouse, Cranleigh, Dulwich, Epsom, Lancing, St Paul’s, Tonbridge, Whitgift and St John’s, Leatherhead – but I never had that experience. I was no good at games, and lucky if I played for the house. Even then, I was lucky at, say, cricket if I was brought in as fourth bowler; and my highest innings ever was 34. My performances were bold but insecure – I might hit runs off half a dozen balls and then be clean bowled. And that was the way I was in most sports. On a good day I might appear to be a reasonable player for a couple of minutes, but the luck always ran out very quickly. The most I can say is that I was not as hopeless at any other games as I was at rugger. There were some at which I was not far below average, even able to fill in unnoticeably. It contributed to my education that I got the inside feel of so many games by playing them for several years: rugger, cricket, fives,
squash,
hockey, soccer. But my lack of prowess confined me to the school.

It was only when I had visitors that I even went as far as Horsham, two and a half miles away. Horsham was the shopping centre for the staff, an essential part of their ordinary lives, but for us boys it was remote: it was out of bounds. Our uniforms were too conspicuous for us to go there unobserved, and we did not have the money for shopping anyway. We went when we were taken; and what we knew chiefly were the eating places and the cinemas.

My father visited me every term. Usually I met him at the station, and we would go for a gentle stroll round the school, then take a train into Horsham. If we were having lunch there we would go to the King’s Head, which we preferred to the Black Horse. These were Horsham’s only two hotels, and in the England of that day there were rarely restaurants in small towns, so one ate in hotels. More usually we just had tea, and for that our favourite place was Wakefield’s. This had a clock sticking sideways out of its front on the first floor, and we always asked for a table beside the window next to it so that we would not forget the time, as we had once done somewhere else. There was a day when we ordered the set tea at Wakefield’s and it turned out to include an especially delicious apricot melba. At the end of it my father said with a note of surprise and inspiration: ‘Shall we have it again?’ We had it again. Heaven, I thought, could only be like this.

Other members of the family came occasionally to visit me. At that time women wore hats, and they felt under a compulsion to wear something different from the norm if the occasion was seen by them as being special, say a wedding – or, unfortunately, a visit to a boys’ school. Then they felt it necessary to make a splash by dressing up. Even if normally they looked very nice, they still felt they had to look different, so they spoilt their appearance for special occasions. No amount of remonstration with them availed;
they
would explain that this was something they had to do. Boys dreaded being visited by their female relations: they hated seeing their mothers or sisters making themselves look ridiculous in front of everyone. Mine were no different, and after early experiences of their visits I told them they could come again only if they wore the hats they normally wore. They disregarded this, so I felt compelled to say I would receive them only if they wore no hats at all. This stopped them coming. Although it had not been part of my intention I found I welcomed it, because it meant I had my father to myself.

By this stage he and I were talking about everything under the sun, but most of all the chief of our shared enthusiasms, which were music and politics. As a socialist I was so much of an idealist that my attitude to socialism came near to being religious: I saw it as the only form of society that was morally right, and therefore I thought one must crusade for it regardless of circumstances. My father, who was a humane pragmatist, shocked me by saying that if all private employers were good employers there would be no need for socialism. He made other sorts of remark that were outside the range of my understanding. He once observed that the imposing, elaborate set of brick buildings that constituted Christ’s Hospital station were a typical example of the nineteenth century’s overcapitalisation of the railways, and I simply had no idea what that meant. But most of the time we talked on equal terms – which I was not able to do with my schoolmates when it came to those particular passions.

Apart from such one-day visits, the only escape most of us had from the colossal weight of organisation that governed our lives was when we were ill. However, after I ceased to live with my mother I was scarcely ever ill. I had a short spell in the infirmary with mumps, and a longer one with a chest infection, but that was all. The doctor did not know what the chest infection was, or how to cure it. This was before the general use of antibiotics. If
you
got any kind of infection you waited for it to run its course, and either you got better or you lost the infected part, which might be all of you. My illness was bad enough to keep me in bed for three or four weeks, during which time I lost an alarming amount of weight. The school doctor was on the point of having me transferred to the hospital in Horsham when I started to get better. I remained skeletally thin, and when I went home for the school holidays I was given a medical prescription for more than my ration of milk and eggs. However, my mother appropriated these for family use, declaring with a gritty laugh that I obviously did not need them now that I was getting better.

The weeks in which I was bedridden became a memorable experience. There had always been a contemplative side to my nature, and I was now able to lie in bed all day and just think. I did a lot of this, and somehow it was clarifying, and made me feel better generally. Something was happening to me that had to do with my age, connected I think with puberty. I was reaching what people used to call the age of reason, and beginning to relate to life more in terms of concepts and less in terms of emotional reaction. Concepts were new things to me, or at least many of them were, and they filled my head. They lit up so much that I found them wonderful and fascinating. Above all, they liberated me from the here and now, the hereness and nowness of feeling. I began to find myself living in a wide-open landscape of the mind, in which thoughts moved forward, backward and sideways almost simultaneously: if such-and-such was happening now then so-and-so must have occurred at some point in the past without my noticing it, and if that was already the case then I ought to expect such-and-so to happen in the future. I had thought like this before in some individual situations, but not all the time about everything, and it made the world in which I found myself a clearer and more meaningful place. But there was a downside to it. Concepts, so useful and illuminating, got in the way of my spontaneous
reactions.
All my life up to now I had been immediately up against everything I experienced, unthinkingly identified with it, as if I
was
it, and nothing else existed. The sensory immediacy of it filled me. There was a naked presence and engulfingness about living that for most of the time I enjoyed, though sometimes I found it overbearing. It was this that was now coming to an end. Sensory experience now found itself at one remove. Between me and it came thoughts, ideas and concepts of every kind, forming chains of connection. Along with them there arrived a new kind of self-consciousness, so that I was aware not only of the experience I was having but also of myself as having it. Sometimes I felt that this devalued the experience itself. There was no longer that unthinking, self-forgetful spontaneity of before. It was a felt loss. I was ceasing to be the natural animal that small boys are, and becoming a creature living in the light of the mind. It was not a process I would un-wish, but I was far from thinking that it was all gain.

In the school infirmary there was a radio speaker in each ward, and among the few things on it that were thought suitable for us was classical music, so I listened to a concert every day. Among the most thrilling moments was hearing, for the first time in my life, that wide-open-spaces horn motif that leaps up out of the orchestra near the beginning of Dvorak’s ‘New World’ Symphony. It seemed to take the top of my head with it, and my brain was suddenly out there in the open spaces with the wind blowing round it. To this day that moment can give me the same exhilaration, while also bringing back the memory of myself lying in a hospital bed feeling it for the first time. Another revelatory work was Borodin’s Second String Quartet. As an orchestra chauvinist I thought I did not like string quartets: I found their sound too gaunt, too undernourished. But here was sensuously beautiful sound as a vehicle for superbly lyrical music. It opened the gates of chamber music for me.