The Day Gone By (29 page)

Outside the French windows (also timber-framed) lay the long, walled garden, parallel to Market Street. White beehives there were, and dahlias, golden rod and antirrhinums, the bees droning and drowsing among them. You couldn't hear any traffic. I would be let in by the housekeeper (‘Doctor's in his room, sir') go along the passage and open the parlour door. Dr Hickman would be reading - some small-print, Victorian book - holding it up high to the light and peering through his smoked lens. He would look up. ‘Oh, it's you, young Richard. All right, you know where they are: get 'em out.' And I would go to the cupboard.

He played very much for fun. If I pondered too long, he would say, ‘Come on, man, you're not playing for pound notes!' He had, indeed, the reputation of having been an impatient man in his day. I grew to be more than fond of him. We had some great games in that Victorian parlour; and I heard some interesting reminiscences, too, for he had been born as long ago as 1849.

In 1938, during my last year at Bradfield, I learned that he was ill and abed. A week or two later came one of my father's characteristically brief communications. ‘Old Hickmaninov has been gathered to his fathers, and I am sure he is glad of it.' He had left me his beautiful twenty-inch square board and his chessmen. I still have them. A label on the back of the board says ‘Hickman'. It shall remain there.

Reader, after his death that beautiful, eighteenth-century house was bought by a ‘redeveloper', razed to the ground and the garden obliterated by concrete. A petrol station stood on the land for some years, but now the whole neighbourhood has been once more redeveloped and the site of Dr Hickman's house and garden form part of the broadened highway of Market Street. There were no ‘listed buildings' in 1938.

It was at about this time that my father gave me a bit of our garden in which to grow my own roses. I chose them carefully and he and I drove all the way from Newbury to Waterer and Crisp, beyond Reading, to buy them. Traffic lights had just been introduced in Reading. My father, over thirty years a motorist, had never seen traffic lights and he ignored them, simply looking right and left as he had always been wont. It was a hair-raising run, but I never said a word.

As a new dimension the roses were a great success. I sprayed, manured and learned how to prune. I well remember the first bunch I brought in to my mother, and how delighted she was. I can recall the names of several, but not all of them: Mrs G. A. Van Rossem, Madame Jules Bouche, Portadown Fragrance, Shot Silk, Etoile de Holland, Ivanhoe. I had a Paul's Scarlet Climber, too. Some of these names seem to have dropped out of catalogues nowadays, but others, like Shot Silk and Etoile de Holland, are still going strong. Life in Mr Arnold's house at Bradfield had now become something from which I derived nothing at all and to which I felt I owed nothing. True, I fenced, played fives and swam for the house, but as I enjoyed these sports and they were organized to some extent on a house-competitive basis, I couldn't really do otherwise. I knew my housemaster would never make me a prefect, and I determined to try all I could to make him look a bigger fool for not doing so than he could make me look by depriving me. And so began the academic year of 1936-37, with no Anthony Jacobs and myself a distinctly dim, unproficient member of the History Sixth.

In their small classroom below the miniature rifle range (and not far from Mr Hunt's digs by the Pang), the History specialists found themselves facing a dark-haired, olive-skinned, slightly stout young man, rather good-looking, with a pointed nose and large brown eyes. He spoke pausingly, choosing his words or his next phrase with care, yet always incisively and directly. This was Richard Hiscocks, newly appointed to take over both English and European history at sixth-form level. He was also form master of the Classical Sixth, since he was to teach English literature at that level, too.

From the outset it was clear that Hiscocks was taking the job - and his pupils - very seriously indeed. He had obviously prepared each lesson carefully beforehand, and his style of teaching was deliberate and lecture-like. There were none of the sallies, badinage, quips and laughter which formed part of Mr Hunt's classes. Indeed, as we were to find out, if Mr Hiscocks had a fault it was that his sense of humour was a bit limited. Sometimes you could almost see him weighing up a joke he'd been told before deciding whether to laugh or not. To any red herring introduced by a member of the class he would respond courteously for a sentence or two before closing further irrelevance with his famous phrase ‘Still we - er - can't discuss that now.' The Classical Sixth had a song, which went to the tune of ‘You Can't Do That There 'Ere':

‘Oh, we can't discuss that now.

Oh, we can't discuss that now.

Anywhere else we'll discuss that there,

But we can't discuss that now.'

Here was a change indeed from the Headmaster's dilettante, half-informed waffling! You could hardly take notes fast enough as Mr Hiscocks, in his gown and characteristic pose, leaning on the newel-post at the foot of the little flight of stairs which led down into the classroom, talked about Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus, or Archbishop Laud and the Covenanters. What with several other people needing them, you had a hell of a job to get hold of all the books he told you to read for your weekly essays. It was easier to buy some of them, like Tanner's
Constitutional Conflicts,
since there was usually only one copy of anything in the school library.

The big surprise came when Hiscocks said that he wished to see each of us tête-à-tête, at his own digs, for an hour every week, to return and talk about our essays and discuss our future work and progress. These, in effect, were tutes, as at Oxford or Cambridge. (Oh,
wouldn't
Mr Arnold be pleased, I thought: an hour out of prep. once a week!) His subjects for essays were enigmatic and challenging. ‘Is it right that Cromwell's statue should stand outside the House of Commons?' ‘“To the King's [Charles II's] coming in without conditions can be attributed all the evils of the reign. (Clarendon)” Discuss.' ‘When examiners ask these questions,' explained Hiscocks, ‘they're
getting
at something in particular. They want to see whether you grasp the vital point and can say - er - what they - er - want you to say.' Many were the private colloquies and puzzlings over what he wanted us to say: but after a bit we began to get the hang of it.

At the end of the first week he rated me so severely for the poor quality of my essay that he almost had me in tears. ‘I don't think that represents an adequate standard of work for a sixth-form boy.' ‘Oh, sir!' ‘No, I
don't.
' And he proceeded to do something which none of his predecessors had got around to before. He began actually teaching me how to read for, prepare and write a historical essay. I dolefully poured out my heart to Mr Hunt, but he told me it was high time, and would do me nothing but good.

Gradually - very gradually - my essays improved. So did my enthusiasm. I began to realize that my lukewarm application and attention during the previous year had been due largely to the tepid quality of the teaching, and to not having been taught in the first place how to set about history as a specialized subject. Hiscocks was like a refiner's fire. (One or two people actually dropped out.) He lived for the History Sixth. There was no subject in the world so rewarding and noble as history. But its proper study - and entrance to Oxford or Cambridge - required a whole, all-round man, and to this many-faceted matter Hiscocks addressed himself with no less ardour.

When it came to English literature, our travels in the realms of gold were so unforeseeable as to blow your mind. We read
Edward II, Tamburlaine the Great, The Winter's Tale, The White Devil
and
The Duchess of Malfi,
Shakespeare's sonnets,
The Shoemaker's Holiday, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Philaster, Samson Agonistes
and - yes, we did -
The Ascent of F6.
(I read the part of Ransome's mother.) In this sphere Hiscocks was less dogmatic than in teaching history. You were expected to have ideas and to voice them. He himself was very receptive of ideas from the form, and would often admit that he hadn't thought of that, and allow it to be pursued for a while.

He was keen on lecturettes. Members of the History Sixth would be allotted subjects to which to devote special study and on which to give short addresses to the class. I remember speaking - or doing my best to speak - on ‘James I and the Spanish rapprochement', ‘Shaftesbury and the Oxford Parliament', and ‘Aspects of eighteenth-century music'.

For it must not be supposed that Hiscocks, in his sense of responsibility to his pupils, stopped short at history and English literature. That wouldn't provide fodder enough for university scholarship general papers. He had a gramophone with an enormous horn (the latest thing in those days) and on Sunday evenings anyone in the Sixth was invited to go to his rooms, listen and talk. From the National Gallery he ordered hundreds of postcard reproductions on a sale-or-return basis, and these were passed round and discussed in class. You were free to order those you liked, and encouraged to build up a collection. (This was how I first became acquainted with Gauguin, with Kandinsky and with Matisse.) I still have some of them. ‘A painter's - um - true job,' said Hiscocks, ‘is to make people see ordinary things in their true reality and as they have never seen them before. Now take the - er - seventeenth-century Dutch painters: Pieter de Hooch and - er - bricks, for instance …' Many years later, I was to travel in the Tahitian islands and find out that Hiscocks had spoken even more sooth than he knew. Gauguin painted exactly what is there to be seen.

Architecture we studied, and Hiscocks organized expeditions to Winchester and Oxford. I volunteered for a lecturette on Norman, and in the course of preparation found myself standing in a kind of daze in the north transept of Winchester Cathedral, and later actually moved to tears in the tiny, forlorn church of Avington beside the Kennet near Hungerford. As no book could, the austerity of Norman architecture told of a bleak, bare, northern world where the wind was cold, stones weighed heavy and vaults were round-arched and square in plan, because there was no other way in which vaults could be constructed.

It was at about this time that a series of articles by J.M. Keynes appeared in
The Times,
embodying his innovatory ideas on national economics and a policy for avoiding booms and slumps. Hiscocks cut these out and made me read and digest them thoroughly. ‘It always makes a favourable impression, Adams, if you can answer a question on — er — economics.'

Every week Hiscocks had a period devoted to current affairs. Each member of the class was allotted a subject - the Far East, Germany, Domestic Affairs and so on - and was required to comb the respectable daily newspapers for items and make his week's report to the class. I wasn't very good at this (my subject was the Near East) and tended to be slangy and facetious in my reports. Hiscocks corrected this tendency, and I learned the value of speaking precisely, with dignity and an air of authority, when addressing an audience (or a panel of examiners).

You'd wonder how on earth we got through all this, but we did; to be continually stimulated and excited, and to feel your capacity and abilities growing in directions you had never imagined - such experiences are commonly agreed to confer pleasure. Hiscocks may sometimes have been a little pedantic and humourless (another of his pet phrases, which everyone could imitate, was, ‘What's the - er — significance of that, Smith?' — or whoever you were). But as in the case of General Montgomery, like Hiscocks or not (and I did, very much), he was the right man for the job. I was naïf in those days and had no ideas whatever about my own future. I was entirely content to work for Hunt and Hiscocks, to swim and play fives for the school, to write poetry and to find myself at last out of the house-room and sharing a study with two boys I liked. It was as demanding and vivid a present as ever I have known.

I must now digress a little, in order to fulfil my earlier commitment to say more about the Greek theatre and its effect upon Bradfieldians.

Practically all British schoolchildren today have some acquaintance with Shakespeare. They read and act him at school. They study one or more of his plays for examinations. In recent years the admirable practice has grown up of producing the set play for the year in London and elsewhere, and the students are taken to see it. If you were to go enquiring among adults in a public bar on a Saturday night you'd probably have quite a job to find anyone who didn't know
something
about Shakespeare. (Who Shylock was, for instance.) Shakespeare is part of the general scene as he is not in America.

This means that everyone, as a matter of course, thinks of drama in terms either of the proscenium arch or the Elizabethan open stage, or both: and drama itself they think of as something essentially secular, intended to move swiftly, to exploit suspense and to be as realistic as the confines of the stage and theatre will allow. (Shakespeare spends a lot of
Henry V
in lamenting that he can't be more realistic, and the same point comes up a good deal in
The Knight of the Burning Pestle.)

Ancient Greek drama springs from entirely different sources, is based on entirely different concepts of drama, moves slowly, excludes action on stage, is religious and not secular, verges on the ritualistic and is deliberately subject to various strict conventions. The audience all know the story, or it is assumed that they do. The topography of the stage is different from that of modern theatre, the relationship of protagonists, chorus and audience is a formal desideratum and the playwright's objects are different. I won't enlarge on this any more - it would take pages, anyway - but an excellent novel to which I recommend the reader is Mary Renault's
The Mask of Apollo.
This will give anyone a reasonably firm grip on the social background, the conventions and the nature of ancient Greek drama in its day.