The Day Gone By (37 page)

Indeed music was the great, the principal releasing agent, acting like some miraculous catalyst to bring upon us trance and ecstasy, to release from within headlong excitement and frenzies of communicative speech. We were often transported and borne away by music, as on the night when Pickard-Cambridge took us to hear the Schubert
Octet.
Arthur Klingler struggling like a wrestler with the additional handicap of having to express himself in English (‘This man Mozart … he is more great than is possible'); William Brown hardly able to contain himself in patience until the end, to tell us that one of Sophocles's choruses had exactly such a rhythm; Frank Savory - the only trained musician of us all - intently following a Schubert trio with a pocket score; Alasdair saying nothing at all until he was pressed and at last coming out, Celtic fashion, with something so pregnant yet enigmatic that everyone felt an immediate response and none could find a reply. How lucky, how supremely blest for the nonce we were, waiting for Hitler in the silver sunsets that still shine across Worcester of an evening!

I suppose that in all our elated foolishness, nothing was more intense than the cult of Chopin, out of which grew leagues-long forests of fantasy. Up to a point it was I who was responsible for this, for it was I who bought the records, one by one, and I who placed on the dresser in my room a portrait of Chopin between two green wax candles in pewter candlesticks. I even persuaded the domestic bursar to let me repaper my room in a light green, faintly shot with orange. However, you can't propagate a cult by yourself. There have to be devotees. (‘Everyone rapt in his own fantasy,' as Alasdair said.) Clifford, William, Arthur Klingler and the rest of us would immerse ourselves, night after night, in Chopin, while snow fell deep or moths flitted in from the scented garden through the uncurtained windows. Our pianists, for the most part, were Cortot, Rubinstein and De Pachman. I still have the records, but seventy-eights don't work properly on a modern machine, and in any case I have good and sufficient reason to prefer not to open the door any more upon the heartbreak of Chopin. Yet on those nights when the dragonfly hung poised over the abyss (yes, I know the man said ‘butterfly', but I think dragonfly's better), none of us would have paid attention to a voice that told us that this truth was evanescent and would one day become irrecoverable. ‘Phaeacia's been discovered: it can't be undiscovered.' It can; and candles - even spiral-fluted, green ones - can burn out. This all happened so long ago.

During my last pre-war term at Oxford - the Trinity term of 1940 - something more than delightful, a true and splendid blessing, overtook me. This occurred while France was falling and our army was escaping in near-rout from Dunkirk.

The tenth of May was - still is, I suppose - my birthday. I had arranged to give a party in The Jolly Farmers, and a lot of people were coming: not only my Worcester friends, but Baptista's crowd and the
Kingdom Come
magazine lot, and some of the university swimming club (I used to swim, after a fashion), and Hilda Brown, Stan Roberts and other town friends. The beer was to flow like the Kennet.

My scout, Bill Money, woke me as usual about a quarter to eight on a perfect May morning. ‘Good morning, sir. Many happy returns, but I don't know about the day. Them buggers have gone into Belgium and Holland.'

I took this in as best I could. ‘What d'you reckon will happen, then, Money?'

‘Anything could happen, sir. Anything at all.'

But now, just at the start - the first day of the German attack - there was not a lot more to be learned from anyone - even the wireless - than Money had told. It wasn't that we weren't concerned or that we didn't take it seriously. We were simply waiting to see what would happen. None of us, of course, imagined that France would fall. Inasmuch as we thought at all, we vaguely supposed that some situation would develop not dissimilar from that of the 1914-18 war. Anyhow, it was lovely weather, and I wasn't going to let the Jerries - or even the thought of them - interfere with my twentieth birthday. I did a morning's work on the French Revolution and after lunch went on the Cherwell with Mike and Alasdair. None of us was apprehensive, even though what was happening was never entirely absent from our minds.

My party at The Jolly Farmers was a great success. No one had ever thought of giving a party in a pub. before. I can't think why not: it was the easiest way imaginable to give a party. You simply handed the landlord a capital sum and told him to serve the company free until it was exhausted. Both bars and the Aunt Sally yard outside were well filled. It was more distinguished undergraduate company than I normally kept, partly because, student-like, people had brought other people along. I remember asking William Brown how many he thought were there. ‘If all the people,' he replied, ‘who've come to this party were laid end to end, I shouldn't be at all surprised.' However, nobody was rowdy or violent and nothing got smashed.

In the middle of it all, someone came bursting in with the news that Chamberlain had resigned and Mr Churchill had become Prime Minister. It seemed wonderful and the whole party stood and cheered. At that time we had no notion, of course; of Churchill's stature as a statesman or of what he was going to achieve. This was before the fall of France, before Dunkirk. But there had for some time past, throughout the whole country, been a general feeling that Chamberlain was not suited to be a war leader and that since Munich he had lost credibility. He had not prosecuted the war with confidence or vigour. This attack of Hitler's had at least done one thing: it had shown conclusively that we needed someone other than Mr Chamberlain. All we knew of Churchill - as yet - was that he had been consistently anti-Nazi for years, that he was pugnacious and that he really hated Hitler. Anyway, we felt that any change, with this crisis now upon us, could only be for the better. So we stood and cheered beerily, as the sun of the tenth of May 1940 set upon St Ebbe's.

One unforeseen result of this party was that I was asked to quite a few more myself. As I have explained, none of our little set had money (my party had been paid for out of birthday money) and we certainly didn't go in for socializing in fashionable, Lord Sebastian Flyte society. But one thing undergraduate society was not was snobbish, and several people who had come along to my party felt like reciprocating. Besides, I had apparently made a bit of an impression as ‘the chap who gave a party in a St Ebbe's pub.', which was regarded as stylish and original.

At more than one of these parties which I went to, I noticed one particular girl who struck me as very attractive. I had no idea who she was, and didn't ask anyone. She was not conventionally pretty, but with all the bloom of youth upon her she was most striking. She had dark hair, an unusual, sensitive face and a very graceful way of moving, light and quick. She seemed to radiate energy, laughing and responding to her companions with such readiness and warmth that I, watching, felt my heart turn over. She carried herself with so much assurance, I thought, that she was obviously an experienced socialite, a regular Oxford party-goer quite out of my star. So I leaned against the wall with my hands in my pockets, and gazed and reflected, as she burst into a peal of laughter at some crack I couldn't hear, how lucky some people were to have access to girls like that.

For the demon, this last twenty months, had given me little peace. Natalia Galitzine had been followed by various disappointments, including a girl home student who, in my arms, said ‘No, Richard, you're deceiving yourself:
you
couldn't want
me.'
It was a compliment of sorts, but it was all too disappointingly true. And when, determined nevertheless to persevere, I pressed my suit, ‘You mustn't say things like that to me, Richard.' A little while after Brenda, I became a very platonic friend of Betty Sants, the girl who was a friend of Ralph Glasser (the Gorbals boy at Oxford) and who later died, after a bicycle accident, at the end of a coma of more than a hundred days - one of the longest comas, I believe, known to medicine. Betty was a jolly good sort, but not what I was looking for. Then there was a pretty, blonde girl, named Bertha, in the gramophone record shop at Newbury, who at my invitation came over to Oxford to be taken on the river. I don't know why it didn't work, but it didn't. I could only, regretfully, agree with Alasdair: ‘I've never yet seen you with a girl and thought you looked like a couple.'

One summer evening in the prime of Hitler's weather, as his tanks forged on through France, I went to a party at Wadham, given by a young man called Hector Bruce-Binney. Hector Bruce-Binney was an undergraduate with a great deal of money, who was sedulously cultivated by John Waller for the reason that, though lacking any literary talent, he was ready to put a lot of it into
Kingdom Come.
His rooms at Wadham were expensively got up and rather overdone in an incongruous mixture of styles - his own idea. (I remember stars on the ceiling, but little else.)

I had come alone, but there were quite a few people there whom I knew. I chatted and moved about. Suddenly I saw, leaning on one end of the mantelpiece, the girl with dark hair; there was no one with her.

I strolled across and began some sort of conversation. She had the most wonderful voice, a contralto which came arrestingly from her slight, trim frame. And her manner was warm; so responsive that I needed all my self-possession to look as though this sort of thing was nothing new to me. We fell easily into talk. She asked me to get her another drink, and I could see that she was someone who enjoyed drinking. In fact, she enjoyed
herself.
Energy and animation fairly blazed out of her - a jolie-laide of nineteen or so, Jung's
kore
personified.

She told me she was the daughter of a don at Exeter (College). Her name was Jennifer Tomkinson. She was not a student.

The room was hot, crowded and full of smoke. (In those days everyone smoked.) We were chatting happily, with no least self-consciousness (the curse of the young): Jennifer's company seemed to dispel anything of that sort. As for me, I felt that all this was too good to be true. I also had the feeling that it was taking place without my volition, as though a boat were gliding downstream with the current. Something had happened. For the first time a girl - a girl I had had an eye for and now, on acquaintance, found wholly delightful - was showing me that she thought me attractive too.

After a time I suggested that perhaps it would be nice to go outside and walk in the garden. Jennifer readily agreed, and we slipped out unnoticed. The May evening was serene, Wadham garden tranquil, cool and beautifully solitary. We came to a great copper beech and spontaneously I looked it up and down with the eye of the tree-climbing child I had been only a few years before. It was a cinch.

‘Would you like to climb that tree?' I asked Jennifer.

‘I'd simply love to.'

I was still to learn that Jennifer seldom refused any reasonable proposal, as long as she liked the person it came from. Reciprocity, as the Americans say, was her middle name. We addressed ourselves to the tree, I going up first, partly so that I could pick the holds and give her some help from above, and partly because I thought it would be a bit embarrassing for her to have me looking up her skirt. As far as I was concerned it was easy climbing, bough after bough, but Jennifer, lacking about three inches of my height, couldn't always quite reach the branch above and was glad of a hand. Her enthusiasm, however, remained undented.

At its top the tree formed a sort of little arbour, a firm place to sit enclosed by sprays of leaves. I reached it, turned, gave Jennifer both my hands, drew her up beside me and kissed her warmly and with confidence. She responded ardently, and when I released her set about kissing me on her own account, looking into my eyes and laughing at my astonished joy. Yet she, too, seemed in a little amazement. Intuitively, behind my flood of desire and happiness, I sensed that this girl was not the sophisticate I had supposed, but someone more or less as inexperienced as myself.

I can't recall how long we stayed at the top of the tree - if indeed I ever knew — but when we came down we didn't go back to the party. We went out to a meal somewhere or other, drank some beer in a pub. and together strolled down towards the Parks.

‘D'you feel like a couple?' I asked Jennifer a little tipsily.

She looked perplexed. ‘But we've had a couple already.'

It seemed a splendid joke. I explained. ‘I'd like to meet this Alasdair of yours,' she said. ‘Tomorrow?'

Walking back to Worcester down Beaumont Street, I knew beyond doubt that I had attained to a different state of being. There was no catch in it: it had happened and this was what it was like — reciprocated love. Then and there I determined that, come what may, I wouldn't do anything that could possibly forfeit this radiant blessing I had stumbled upon. I could still feel her touch upon my cheeks and my wrists. Everything seemed so amazing that I vaguely thought there was something I ought to be doing about it; but no, there was nothing to do except wait until tomorrow.

I needn't have worried. Jennifer was to be my girl and no one else's for a long time to come — as we reckoned time in those days. She loved me as much as I loved her: but it was some while before I could believe it, before I became convinced. At a distance she had seemed such a smart girl, so elegant, so self-possessed, so much surrounded by polished undergraduate friends. And so she was: but there was a paradox in it. She was not experienced, not canny, not the girl my timidity had suggested. What I had thought poise was really nothing but self-forgotten, happy spontaneity. For she was a great one for forgetting herself, was Jennifer. She could enter into just about anything going as naturally as a child, and she had a Cleopatra-like quality of making anything becoming which came from herself. ‘Oh, bloody bugger!' she would say happily, tripping over the punt pole, and it seemed not a teenage mannerism but perfectly natural and acceptable. (She didn't do it too often, you see.)