The Day Gone By (27 page)

In writing of Delmé-Radcliffe I said that with him and with only one other I have remained mentally stuck. This other was my housemaster, Mr B. M. Arnold. There was no way in which Mr Arnold and I could have hit it off. He was a most rigid and insensitive man, with no natural inclination towards literature or the arts, and a martinet who enforced the strict rules with no flexibility at all. His great obsession was with ‘leave'. For any out-of-the-ordinary activity, such as attending a College society meeting or going, when bidden, to see another master during prep., you had to ask and receive leave. If you were a hair's breadth out of line - if you went early or came back a minute late - he would be on it like a knife, and any attempt to defend yourself only drove him into a terrifying rage. He was himself a distinctly limited man: he taught only lower school forms, and the general view (later corroborated to me by John Moulsdale) was that he had got his job only because Mrs Arnold was a close friend of the Headmaster's wife. ‘Rather an unfortunate appointment, really,' said Moulsdale.

Mr Arnold had been a major in the Gunners during the Great War, and this - not his rank, but the war - he invoked incessantly. We must all be like the fellows who fought in the war, we must be worthy of their example, we must never give up but always fight on, etc. I can't remember ever having a conversation with him in which he showed any real receptiveness or sensitivity. On one occasion he quite literally shouted me down and punished me with stoppage of all leave for a month (to the fury of my form master) for something I hadn't done and given the opportunity could have proved I hadn't done. The trouble was that he could be very alarming in confrontation and there was no reasoning with him. His nickname was ‘The Freezer' - to ‘freeze' meaning to quell with a fixed, hostile and intimidating stare. I can never forget that freeze: it was like waiting for a hand-grenade to go off.

The harm was negative. To go to a public school and
not
to have a wise, understanding housemaster is to be deprived of something which ought to be a blessing and a major influence for good. The greatest single factor (for good or ill) in a boarding-school education is the boys' relationship with their teachers, which ought, ideally, to remain potent; a helpful, warm memory in later life. (Hence the public status of ‘Mr Chips' as a kind of archetype.) When I saw, a few years ago, in the West End, a successful and long-running play, called
Another Country,
about a public school in the ‘thirties, I was struck by the feature that the cast contained not one master and that no sort of relationship of the boys with the masters was ever touched upon. Yet this is what public school education is all about. The staff should be
guru,
wise advisers, liked, respected people whom you feel you want to emulate. A universal situation like this is, of course, impossible of achievement in real life, but nevertheless it ought to be possible to bring about some of it, with some masters and some boys, some of the time. A housemaster whom you both fear and despise (as one grew older one could not but despise Mr Arnold - not, perhaps, for his conduct but certainly for his want of sincere interest in the arts) is a misfortune. In Arnold's time The Close (the name of our house) were reckoned a rough bunch of hobbledehoys. There's no doubt that a lot of us were - philistines - and Mr A. did nothing to remedy this. I doubt he was ever aware of or thought about it. But I will say one thing for him. At least he was conscientious and took the job seriously, according to his lights. He visited the sick, got round the dormitories and talked to people.

What I always felt and still feel about Bradfield at that time (and this is borne out by contemporary friends) was that the actual teaching - with certain honourable exceptions - was not up to much. In those days, a public school was a relatively remote, secluded microcosm. Parents were discouraged from poking their noses in. The media never turned their beams that way. It never occurred to headmasters and others to make public appearances (there was no television, anyway). In those enclosed communities, a master with good reasons for not feeling further ambition, having found himself a niche, could gently grow older and more eccentric in peace and quiet. The pressure of public examinations was nothing like what it is today. Far fewer parents and pupils thought in terms of a university, and for those who did, the universities were not difficult to get into, provided parents had the money. Quite a few of the masters at Bradfield were old shellbacks, some of them distinctly eccentric and certainly not people to push a boy on and devote themselves to getting the best out of him. This to a certain extent includes the Headmaster, for though a decent fellow, brisk, and knowledgeable about the staff and the school (he made an excellent first impression), he couldn't teach for toffee. In point of fact he
didn't
teach: he merely waffled. I don't think he prepared his lessons at all. (And he had no sense of humour.) Fortunately, however, I was later to come under the influence of two quite exceptional masters, who changed my life.

I have said enough to show that life for a junior boy (a fag) at Bradfield in those days was not only not very pleasant, but also a considerable strain - the academic work, the organized games and runs, the fagging — about as much as you could physically cope with.

Unlike Horris Hill, at Bradfield there was no allotted time for private prayer. And there was no sex education; none. Yet any kind of sexual crime was very severely punished. In a homosexual relationship - and there were plenty - the bigger boy might possibly be ‘asked to leave'. Some of these relationships were touchingly sincere and helped both participants to find a bit of happiness and pleasure amid the rigours of College life. During my third year, when I was just sixteen and beginning to make a bit of a mark in the school by my writing, I got to know a senior boy in another house:; Anthony Jacobs, the editor of the school magazine (in which some of my poems appeared). Reader, I married him; well, something like that, anyway. This was the rain-drenched summer of 1936, about the worst on record; day after day of rain, making games impossible. Anthony and I were blissfully happy. He was so considerate, so unselfish, so kind and even-tempered a lover that I can only asseverate, after all these years, that that was one of the happiest love relationships of my life. I myself was not moved to sexual activity, but I loved being desired by Anthony; I loved gratifying him; and I loved talking with him and being with him. He was himself of unconventional disposition; no mean poet, as well as being a fine musician and singer and a splendid actor. In short, he was excellent value and very good for me. His influence helped me enormously and I was proud to be his lover. That summer he played Feste in
Twelfth Night
in the Greek theatre. It was a notable production. I missed him like hell the following term, after he'd left. He went up to Cambridge and then became - with his beautiful speaking voice — a radio actor with the B.B.C.

I think the bad feature of the Bradfield régime was that it set out to hammer you into the deck, and in many cases didn't lift you up again. No doubt it is a good thing for boys to ‘have the nonsense knocked out of them' (‘Not fit to command until you've learned to obey'), but Bradfield had the effect of leaving me without any initiative whatever in objective life. It's safest to obey; it's safest to do what you're told; it's safest to take no offence, never to criticize and not to answer back. It's safest to defer to authority and take no chances. Let others take the decisions.

The only area of my life not affected in this way was the realm of the imagination, which remained untouched by the régime. In the realm of the imagination I move surely and independently, ready to take the initiative and to select and reject on no advice but my own. I know where I am and what I'm doing and have no apprehension. (‘You shut up: I'm doing this.') Well, perhaps it was all for the best. Who can tell? But I think it's a great pity that the concept of self-respect was virtually omitted from that public school system of the ‘thirties. Unless you came to be a prefect (which I never did) you couldn't really have much in the way of self-respect. Like Doolittle in
Pygmalion,
you couldn't afford it. You had to go in for lying, evasion and abject subservience. Getting round the fetters on your raw physical energy and your sexuality called for cunning and duplicity. I, of course, was no stranger to the unscrupulous. (The begonias.) But at Bradfield this developed into a policy of dodging and avoidance almost like that of Solzhenitsyn's Ivan Denisovich - except as regarded the academic work and the games, like fives and swimming, at which I wanted to excel.

I think it is worth recording one particular thing - a good and valuable thing among all the dreariness - which happened during my first term. The form I was in, known as Lower Shell B, had in its curriculum one period a week with the music master. What he did with us was entirely up to him. The music master was a quiet, reserved man called John Alden (who, as I was later to learn from Anthony Jacobs, on the whole disliked the system and most of the Senior Common Room). Alden's principal notion for the weekly hour was to have a lasting effect on me. Towards the end of term a string quartet were coming to give a concert at Bradfield, and Alden's idea was to familiarize us with the works which they would be playing. This he did partly with gramophone records and partly on the piano. He did it very well. By the day of the concert the principal subjects and the construction of the movements were clear enough, at any rate, to me. It was an excellently chosen programme: Haydn's Opus 64, No. 6, in E flat; Mozart's K458 in B major (the
Hunting Quartet);
and the Ravel Quartet. The whole business was a complete eye-opener to me: I had known nothing whatever of the construction of movements or how to listen intelligently to music. Of course, for a thirteen-year-old it was only scratching the surface. But it was a true start - a first step - an escape - into a valid fantasy world of solace and delight. Music is the most sure and splendid, the most estimable of all fantasy worlds - if indeed it is a fantasy world and not the only real one. Apart from anything else, that term's work with John Alden and the concert itself left me with an abiding love of the sheer sound of a string quartet. And there were Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Dvorak, Bartok and heaven knows who else to come. That's what I call education - adding new dimensions to life.

After two years at Bradfield things began gradually to improve. In the summer term of 1935 I took School Certificate, got seven credits (not very difficult) and next term, at fifteen and a half, got my remove to the upper school. I pressed strongly, on my own account, to be allowed to become a history specialist, and so found myself back in a class of no more than nine or ten people. My first academic year there, 1935-36, was pretty disastrous and boded little good to come. The study of history and the writing of historical essays require a particular kind of mental discipline and application, and neither John Moulsdale (who taught the English history) nor Whitworth (European) got this across to me at all. I wasted my time, really. By the end of the summer term of 1936 I didn't look like any sort of university entrant, and the Headmaster said as much on my report. (Not that my father cared.) However, in another sphere I had come under yet one more of the important and lasting influences on my life.

I have spoken of the ‘old shellbacks' who formed the hard core of the Senior Common Room. However, few of these taught at fifth- and sixth-form levels. (They wouldn't have been able to.) A lot of the higher-level teaching was done by clever young masters who were on their way through - up the career ladder to appointments at more illustrious schools. Such a one was Mr James Hunt, whose speciality was Classics, and whose form was the Classical Fifth.

The upper-school system at Bradfield was that when you began to specialize you were hived off for your special subject - historians to Moulsdale and Whitworth, modern linguists to Monsieur Le Grand and so on. However, your actual form, for all official purposes, was held to be the form in which you did English literature. This, for me, was the Classical Fifth and the master was Mr Hunt.

At this time Mr Hunt would have been, I suppose, about twenty-six or thereabouts. (He completed his career as second master at Rugby and, now retired, teaches Classics extra-murally at Cambridge.) His teaching style was free-and-easy to a degree quite unknown both to Bradfield and to me. All the same, there was no disorder in his class. Anybody was free to say anything and there was a lot of banter and laughter, but he couldn't half teach English literature. I had, of course, already made some acquaintance with Shakespeare
(The Tempest
and
Macbeth)
and had read a fair bit of poetry on my own account, but now I found myself in the hands of a born teacher of outstanding talent. Mr Hunt made you feel that nothing was more exciting or mattered more than English poetry. Chaucer, John Donne, Gray, Cowper, Keats, Shelley, John Clare; and that controversial contemporary whose name was steadily growing, T. S. Eliot; Auden, Spender, MacNeice. We had to read them aloud. We found ourselves required to write sonnets, rhyming couplets, limericks, ballads in the Border style, short lyrics. We were asked to give individual assessments of poems out loud in class. I had never received such exciting and stimulating teaching in my life: I had not imagined that teaching
could
be like this. That ‘other world' which I had frequented alone — the world of Walter de la Mare and Thomas Hardy — now opened wider every week, and was frequented by others; notably by Mr Hunt. Life was beginning to make sense in a new way.

With personal poems, Mr Hunt was always ready with friendly criticism and advice. I made, through him, the acquaintance of Hal Lidderdale, the boy (before Anthony Jacobs) who edited the school magazine. Although three years older than I, he was quite ready to let me come to his study and talked to me like an equal. I learned a lot from him. I remember being arrested with delight by his repeating from memory of ‘Take, O take those lips away'. I had never read or heard it before. Here is a short poem of mine which found its way into the school magazine about that time.