The Day Gone By (8 page)

I don't remember ever feeling nervous or in deep water at the Behrends' parties. If I recall rightly, Julie Behrend was a little older than I and Georgie about the same age. There always seemed to me to be a great crowd of children — far more than the modest parties for twelve or fourteen which were the form for Jean, Ann, me and our friends. Although, naturally, there were a lot of strangers, the children were not formal or stiff with each other, because of the common bond of excitement and expectation about the fireworks. There would be a few games before tea, the preliminaries being spun out by the adults long enough to ensure that it had grown properly dark. Then we would all crowd into the big bay windows - there were at least three, if not four - and get comfortably settled. We were looking out onto the terrace - a gravel path as broad as twelve feet, with a low stone wall about three or four feet high on its opposite side. Here stout poles had been driven into the ground, rockets set up and all other preparations completed.

The reason why we were kept behind glass and not invited out into the garden — as at many firework parties I have been to since — was that the fireworks themselves were so large, noisy and, in some cases, unpredictable. (I have played Mr Behrend's part myself since then, and if I find myself with a circle of six cardboard cylinders conjoined by light strips of wood and instructions to affix to a stout pole or fence, light the blue touch paper and stand clear, I want to feel sure that there aren't any five-year-olds loose in the vicinity.) Mr Behrend's fireworks were spectacular and he presented them really well, with one thing following another in ascending order (or orders) of effect. The vocal response of his audience was what might be expected. I remember one or two children becoming so much excited that they had to be calmed by being embraced by adults or sitting on their knees. I suppose the whole thing probably didn't take more than half an hour, but it wound the children up to fever-pitch with its sudden outbursts of coloured fire, gushing spouts of sparks interspersed with the ‘Pouf!' of red or green or purple globules of light, and the hissing uprush of rockets which seemed to disappear into the sky for seconds before exploding into screaming tadpoles or pendent, incandescent parasols hanging motionless, going out only as they at last began to fall.

At the end Mr Behrend, a shadowy figure in the dark, would take off his hat and bow to us - a convenient signal, I suppose, to the grown-ups, who now had on their hands about fifty children wrought to the highest pitch of excitement. I can remember feeling exhausted, although I'd done nothing but watch.

What has been said so far of my father, that silent, reticent, undemonstrative man, who was fifty when I was born and whose life bore a heavy burden of bereavement (of which I knew nothing) may have left a reader wondering how on earth he and I came to be so close. The first characteristic of our relationship - and of this I was unconsciously aware before I could formulate thoughts at all — was that my father spoke to me and treated me to a large extent as though I were grown up and an equal. He didn't go in for stories of the past or for memories, but he would answer questions truthfully and impassively, even to the point where a lot of people nowadays, I suppose, might hesitate or take refuge in euphemism. For example, I remember once asking him by what means the Philistines ‘put out' Samson's eyes. ‘I expect they burnt them out with red-hot irons,' replied my father, in the straightforward and emotionless tone in which he answered all questions, whether from the servants, my mother or us children. I cried out in horror and began to weep; but my father let this run its course, until after a little a natural opportunity arose to change the subject. I knew that my father could always be relied upon to tell me the truth.

A second characteristic was that he genuinely enjoyed my company and would seek it out, with the suggestion that we might go for a walk (usually with a specific object - always a sensible idea with a child), play cards, or that he might read to me. Sometimes he would ask me to come with him to look at some particular shrub or group of flowers in the garden which had just come into bloom. In this way I learned by degrees the names of all the trees and flowers we grew, and would speak of them unselfconsciously. Eschscholzia, convallaria and coreopsis presented no difficulty to me, because it had never occurred to me that they might. I learned, too, the names of all the roses - not only the ones along the verandah posts - and, as I grew older, was sometimes able to steal a march on my father by coming and asking him whether he knew that the ipomoea on the kitchen garden pergola had put out its first bloom, or that the collinsia was coming out?

My father would not allow you, without mockery of some kind or another, to talk about a ‘bird'. If you did, he would put on the falsetto voice of a silly woman, and say ‘Oh, Dr Adams, do look at that
funny
bird!' You had to refer to the bird by name. So the Marguerite bird became a song-thrush, and soon I could identify the wren I couldn't see in the bushes by its characteristic, long, sustained trill.

Although he was so familiar with the inland birds of the south country, my father had never gone out of his way to seek out birds of other terrains. I have often wondered why. For example, on his own admission he knew little or nothing of sea-birds - one of the most rewarding of all branches of ornithology - though he knew a certain amount about birds of bog and moorland from younger days in Somerset, when he used to go shooting; and he had sometimes been to Scotland as a shooting and fishing guest. The snipe and the wheatear he certainly knew, but I wonder whether he would have recognized a greenshank: not, I am virtually certain, a red-throated diver. I suppose he simply observed the birds that came in his way. Well, it was no matter. Through him I learned to admire and respect birds and to want to know more about them. Years after his death I was to find the Isle of Man a maritime bird Utopia, watching the fulmars gliding up to the cliff-face and turning away without a single beat of the wing, the guillemots racing out across the sea, and the kittiwakes, marble-white heads and shoulders, feeding their young on the ledges. I wish my father could have sailed with me through the Antarctic, to see the Wilson's petrels, the skuas, sheathbills, king penguins and the great albatrosses. Well, it all started in the garden at Oakdene. ‘Look at that splendid chap!' he would say, as the spotted flycatcher darted from its nest to its hunting-post on the tennis netting. And in time I became able, now and then, to anticipate him, pointing out a blackcap or a bullfinch.

My father, although he did not play bridge (or cribbage), enjoyed a light-hearted game of cards and I believe now, in retrospect, that he considered cards a good way of sharpening children's wits. (He taught me draughts, halma and chess, too.) Cards began when I was still quite small, by playing two-handed, five-card German whist with my mother. From this I at least learned what a trick was, what a trump was and about following suit. Soon afterwards my father introduced me to bézique. Two-handed bézique is a dull enough game for adults, but I can still remember its excitement and fascination for me as a child. In the first place, it was all new. I was entering upon a novel form of experience and learning and practising a hitherto unexperienced kind of skill. The game seemed so romantic and colourful, with its strange oddities. Why should the tens be worth more than everything but the aces? Why should you get forty for the queen of spades and the jack of diamonds? What did ‘bézique' mean, anyway? I can still recall the excitement of realizing that I held four kings or four aces, and the splendid moment when you won a trick, laid them down on the table and clocked up the score on your marker.

But there was a degree of strain in bézique, too. An adult naturally sees so simple a game as a mere way of passing the time, and also knows how much luck there is in it. A child takes it seriously, for to him it is something not yet rooted in experience. It involves decisions. Bézique was for me the first business in which I had to make decisions — decisions which would affect the outcome of the game. ‘I'm holding two kings and three queens. They can't all stay. Shall I discard the queens, four of which score only sixty, and trust to getting four kings (eighty)? Or on the other hand, would it be better to play safe and go for the queens?' And you could be disastrously wrong, as I learned in good time. You could spend the whole hand saving for a sequence, only to find that your opponent had been craftily holding both the queens of trumps all the time. Then there was the agony of having acquired something really good — a sequence or even double bézique — when there were only two or three tricks left to play, none of which you could win. I used to get tense and very much involved with the game, occasionally to the point of tears. I think my father sometimes pulled his punches to avoid upsetting me. In his position, I would have done the same. To a seven-year-old, to hold double bézique and be prevented from declaring it is a mortifying experience. But you had to learn to lose with a good grace. (I was yet to see the Australians, in the test series of 1932-33, going virtually berserk over Larwood and Voce.)

Later on came picquet. Since becoming grown-up it has surprised me that, in a country where bridge is widely played and people take it almost for granted that they will be able to make up at least some sort of a table, very few people, by comparison, play picquet. It is by far the best card game for two — elegant and skilful — and during my life I must have had hours of enjoyment from it. I remember reading somewhere that Richelieu used to play picquet, and it amuses me to think of the game being devised at the sophisticated French court of the seventeenth century at more or less the same time as Sir John Suckling (so Aubrey says) was inventing cribbage. Sir Toby Belch (in old age) might have played the latter. Somehow I can't see him playing picquet (although Prince Rupert might very well have played it, I dare say).

Picquet was pretty fast bowling for an eight-year-old. I remember how I began it with no more experience behind me than that of bézique, with the idea that it consisted of virtually no more than collecting honours in the hand. Two things which took me a long time to learn were the importance of planning and playing to win the majority of (or at least to split) the tricks, and the necessity, for the younger hand, of ‘guarding' or ‘covering' kings or queens, to stop your opponent running through the suit. My father had given my sister a beautiful picquet set - a gilt-lettered red box with two packs and two pads of score sheets — and she was often ready to play. As she was more than nine years older, unless I got very good cards she could wipe the floor with me. My sister held the view that I was spoiled and over-indulged — which was true — and that it would be good for me to take a few sound hidings. I think it was. Most people who have taken up learning a skill, a game or an accomplishment, know the infuriating frustration of watching someone else perform something which you want to be able to do and cannot. For a long time I simply could not get the hang of prudent discarding and of keeping ‘stops'. Tears and temper were not uncommon, for I took the business seriously and wanted to master it.

One day I had an idea — an idea not altogether unconnected, perhaps, with Mr Punch. Without consciously formulating the notion in so many words, I realized that picquet was a self-contained business, having no links with anything outside itself. (Unlike, say, dancing, which had all sorts of tedious tie-ups with things like hostesses, partners and conversation.) If I could really master picquet, it would become indestructibly mine, like an object in my pocket. I set myself to do it and since the game is not bottomless, like chess or bridge, in due course, and after a good deal of rather taxing application, I succeeded. That is to say, I could play anyone - any grown-up — without needing indulgence and without doing anything silly. I had it on board, right down to the pleasure to be derived from making something of a rotten hand. (Many years later I was to teach the game, on board ship at literally the other end of the world, to Mike McDowell, the young cruise director of the
Lindblad Explorer.
Mike became adept at making the best of a bad hand, and many a time would save his score with four tens or a quint to the jack.)

I have come to see that there are two perfectly valid ways of feeling about games in general. My wife doesn't really care for - or about - games. If she consents to play, it is to pass time and she doesn't particularly want to win: an admirable approach. ‘Games,' she says, ‘are a waste of time. They are parenthetical. They are nothing to do with life, with which it's far more fun to be getting on.' (What she gets on with are English ceramics. She is an F.S.A. and an acknowledged expert.) My own view is that any idea of succeeding at Life is futile (as I think George Orwell remarked). But you
can
hope to become proficient at and sometimes succeed at a game, and this gives a lot of satisfaction. My personal view is that no game should be played professionally, though I've no objection to it being
taught
professionally.

In the course of succeeding years I was to take on board one self-contained thing after another, from wild flowers to Brahms to Parliamentary Questions, but I still remained unable to deal with Mr Punch, in whatever guise he came.

But to return to my father. It was the places he took me to which had the strongest formative influence upon me and gave me, in childhood, the most delight. If we went out through the gate at the bottom of the paddock, across the lane (Monkey Lane) and into the big ploughed field, it was a matter of a few hundred yards to a copse of silver birch, oak, ash and hazel bushes. This was damp most of the year, with a rivulet running through it. We called it the Bluebell Wood: in April the bluebells flowered so thickly that the ground was blue as a field is green. To me the density of colour was not, however, their most poignant quality. The blue was composed of myriads of individual blooms, tall, narrow and moving slightly in the breeze. This gave the receding distance of blue a penetrable quality, so that you looked from the flowers at your feet into a near distance where they blended into a less broken, multifoliate blue: and from these into a further distance of a single, hazy blue — single as a cloud is single, a soft mass full of recesses, shadows and dim, dissolving rifts and cavities. To look into that receding infinity of bluebells was to become more lost to all else, more teased out of thought, than when looking up into a clear blue sky and trying to imagine what lay beyond. There couldn't possibly be so many bluebells; yet there they were. Examine a single one: it was perfect. Each one in that infinity was similarly perfect. To grasp this inspired awe as well as delight. Throughout the wood lay the faint but clear scent of the flowers, and somewhere on the edge, in a birch tree, a blackbird would let fall its pausing, unhurried phrases.