The Haunting of Toby Jugg (16 page)

It strikes me only now, as a point of interest, that by the time I was fifteen I was already able to talk quite intelligently with all my Trustees—except that old human calculating machine, Roberts—on their hobbies and favourite recreations. Obviously Helmuth must have found out what those were and deliberately coached me in them—although that never occurred to me at the time—but it is no wonder that they were all so well satisfied with him as a tutor for me; and no doubt it was his use of me, over a period of years, to convey to them something of his own wide knowledge and varied interests that made it easy for Iswick and Uncle Paul to persuade the others that he would be a good man to replace Sir Stanley Wellard on the Board.

But I owe just as much to Julia as to Helmuth, since he did not become the dominant influence in my life until I was thirteen.

My sojourn at Kew lasted only a little over three months, and with it ended that happy, exciting period of exploring a new world of restaurants, cinemas and shops instead of doing lessons. The Trustees agreed that Uncle Paul must be furnished with the means to bring me up in the sort of surroundings that I should have enjoyed had not my father died. After he became a widower, he had returned to live in Kensington Palace Gardens, and at Queensclere, with my grandfather; so it was in these two big houses that I had spent my childhood and would, presumably, have continued to live had my father survived the accident. In consequence, soon after Christmas, the contents of the little suburban villa were packed up and we transferred ourselves to
Millionaires’ Row. Then, a fortnight or so later, I was sent as a day-boy to the nearby prep-school in Orme Square.

So far as I can judge, the teaching there was excellent but limited, of course, to a normal curriculum; and, as Julia remained my guiding star, I am sure that I picked up more useful miscellaneous knowledge in my evenings, outings, week-ends and holidays with her than I did in my hours spent at lessons. But I attended the school in Orme Square only for a year. In the autumn of 1930 Julia told me about Weylands.

At the time she could not have known very much about the place herself, but some friends of hers had two boys there. After giving me a rough idea of the system, she said that it did seem to offer special opportunities for anyone who really liked learning things, as she was sure I did; so, if she sent me there, would I promise to work reasonably hard and not let her down with the Trustees by lazing about the whole time.

Like any other boy of nine-and-a-half I was most averse to the idea of leaving home; but I knew there was no escaping a move in the near future to a prep-school in the country, to get me used to being a boarder before I was sent to a public school. It seemed that my guardian angel had found a way of saving me from the worst, as she assured me that at this new-fangled place there were no prefects, no bullying and no enforced games. So I duly promised not to let her down, and off to Weylands I went in January 1931.

Looking back from my present standpoint I do not think one can possibly defend Weylands as an institution. It is a terrible thing to bring children up as atheists—just how terrible no one can fully appreciate until, like myself, they find themselves pursued by some creature of the Devil.

Then the tacit encouragement of the young to indulge in immorality must be a bad thing. Their freedom to experiment in sex without reproach may save a few of them from later developing secret complexes and abnormalities, but I believe that for every one it saves it robs a hundred—who, if subject to the usual prohibitions, would turn out quite normal—of their illusions.

It certainly did me; and that goes, too, for every other senior pupil, male or female, that I knew at all well there. We had all
eaten too greedily of the tree of knowledge, and although appetite remained there was no longer any mystery surrounding the fruit. Both sexes had discovered too early that the other, like itself, had feet of clay; so when we went out into the world nothing was left to us but a cold, cynical seeking after partners in pleasure. Never could any of us hope to be carried away with the sort of mad, self-sacrificing, glorious intoxication of which we had read in books. All too late we were conscious that for us, in connection with a member of the opposite sex, three great words must for ever remain meaningless—glamour, romance, love.

Again, the whole conception of teaching people that they should develop their own ego, irrespective of every other consideration, is all wrong. It makes them hard, selfish, greedy, aggressive and incapable of co-operation in a time of crisis. When I went into the R.A.F. I knew nothing of the team-spirit, except that at Weylands it had been sneeringly defined as ‘a conception typical of the human-herd mentality, as it excuses the timorous from emerging from the mass and accepting personal responsibility’. What utter tripe!

In view of the opinions I aired during my early days in uniform I must have appeared to my companions the most bumptious, self-centred young cad; and I marvel now that they were so good-natured as to do no more than laugh at me. But I was always a pretty quick learner and it did not take me long to find out the worthlessness of the Weylands definition of the ‘team-spirit’. In a Fighter Squadron your life and the lives of your friends depended on it. If we had started to play for our own hands instead of for our side, when opposed to a superior enemy formation, the lot of us would have been hurtling down in flames within a matter of minutes.

Had there been no war, I would probably still believe that the Weylands creed embodied the highest achievement in logical human thinking; but I know now that much, if not all, of it is false. Nevertheless, I believe that I acquired far more academic knowledge there than I would have at any school where it was forced upon me, to be learned parrot fashion as an alternative to receiving punishment; and I can look back on my schooldays as happy ones—which is more than a lot of chaps can say.

All that I owe to Julia; and I certainly do not hold her responsible for anything I may have missed through the bad elements of the Weylands system, for I am convinced that of those she cannot have known enough to appreciate their possible results.

Helmuth was not at Weylands when I first went there. He did not arrive until the summer of 1933, and during his first year I had little to do with him. It was my backwardness in languages that brought about our special association. Naturally, for my future it was considered important that I should be able to speak French, German and Spanish fluently: but I was much more interested in chemistry, engineering, history and geography, so gave hardly any time to the uncongenial business of trying to master foreign tongues.

My Spanish was not too bad, as it resembles Italian, and Julia had taught me from the age of eight to speak her own soft brand of that; but she was worried by my lack of progress in the other two, and decided that the best way to get me on was to have someone who would talk them to me in the holidays. In consequence it was arranged that Helmuth should spend the August of 1934 with us at Queensclere.

Looking back, I can see now that he took great pains to make himself agreeable to us all. He was about thirty-seven then, and his strong personality was already fully developed. There was no trace in his manner of the retiring diffidence often displayed by private tutors; but the ideas he threw out were always well calculated to appeal to Uncle Paul and Julia.

My uncle’s main interest has always been horses. Helmuth, as I have learnt since, dislikes all animals and considers horses stupid brutes; but he threw himself into helping Uncle Paul arrange the local horse show at Queensclere that summer, as though they were his ruling passion.

With Julia he had a more congenial row to hoe, as he really likes and understands period furniture and she was then busy planning a new
décor
for some of the rooms at Kensington Palace Gardens. He not only helped her find many of the pieces but got them for her much cheaper than she could have done herself; and that was a big feather in his cap with Uncle Paul as well as Julia, since the Trustees gave them a good allowance to
keep the two houses up, but were always a bit sticky about weighing out additional sums for such things as antique furniture.

So far as I was concerned Helmuth played his cards most skilfully. He announced at once that we would have no set lessons and would not bother with books—at least, not grammars and dreary set-pieces of translation—but he would like me to read one or two that I should find amusing, with the aid of a dictionary.

One, I remember, was Dr. Madrus’s unexpurgated translation of the
Arabian Nights
in French, and another an edition of Casanova’s
Memoirs
in German. Both gave vivid pictures of life in an age totally different from our own, as well as being spiced with a wealth of bawdy stories, so they held my interest and induced me to acquire extensive vocabularies in a very short time. For the rest, Helmuth always talked to me when we were alone in French or German, repeating in English any bits I didn’t get, so without any great effort on my part I was soon able to gabble my thoughts in both languages.

It is hardly surprising that he was asked to stay on through September, and to come to us again for the Christmas holidays. By the time we were due to go back to Weylands at the end of January I could speak colloquial French and German with considerable fluency, so Helmuth thought of another way in which he could make himself useful. He said he thought that, now I was rising fourteen, it would be a good thing for me to go over some of the factories I was one day to control; so it was arranged that part of his Easter holidays should be spent taking me on a tour round the most important ones.

On our return from it, Julia broke the news to me that she and Uncle Paul were anxious to make a long tour through the United States that summer, so they had asked Helmuth to look after me. Naturally I was disappointed at first that I should not be spending my holidays with them; but the pill was gilded by the news that they had taken a little house on Mull that had excellent shooting, for Helmuth and myself; and the present of a brace of Purdys, which enabled me to have visions of doing terrific execution among the grouse.

That outlines the first five years that I spent with Helmuth ‘as my guide, philosopher and friend’; and the others differed from it
only in detail. With each year this viper, that the unsuspecting Julia had nurtured in her bosom, became more deeply entrenched in her regard and in my uncle’s confidence, so that latterly they did nothing without consulting him; while I tamely accepted his authority, partly from habit and partly because he was clever enough to refrain from attempting to make me do anything he knew that I would really have hated. Nevertheless, our wills did clash eventually.

By the spring of 1939 Helmuth had established himself so firmly as the arbiter of my fate that no one even thought of contesting his opinion when he announced that, instead of my going up to Cambridge, as my father had done, at the beginning of 1940, he felt that I would derive much more benefit from being taken by a suitable mentor on a two-year tour of Europe, which would include a stay of a few weeks in the Ruhr, the Saar, Hamburg, Turin and each of the other great industrial centres.

The last point was especially calculated to appeal to the Trustees, and when it emerged that Helmuth was willing to resign his mastership at Weylands to act as my cicerone, they not only jumped at the idea but urged that the tour should be extended to two-and-a-half years, so that the last six months of my minority might be spent visiting the industrial zones of the United States. It was even urged that we should make an earlier start, and, as my eighteenth birthday was in June, set out on our travels soon after the ending of the summer term. However, the authorities at Weylands were unwilling to release Helmuth before the end of the year, and many Weyland pupils stayed up till they were nearly nineteen, so it was agreed that we should put in a final autumn term there.

But things did not turn out according to plan. We were still up on Mull in the first week of September when the war broke out. I told Helmuth that Sunday night that in the morning I proposed to take the first train south from Oban, and, on reaching London, volunteer for the R.A.F.

There was the hell of a row. Apparently it had never occurred to him that I might react to the news like that. But he soon got his bearings and, once he had recovered his temper, he began to produce all sorts of well-reasoned arguments in favour of my holding my hand for a bit.

His first line was that it would be silly to rush into the ranks when, just as in the last war, every well-educated youngster would, in due course, be needed as a junior officer. Then he said that this time the Government was better prepared, and did not need volunteers, as they had already arranged to call up such men as they required by classes. Finally he urged that so much had gone into fitting me to hold great responsibilities that my life was not my own to throw away; the least I could do was to submit the matter to my Trustees and hear what they had to say, before jeopardising all the hopes that they had placed in me.

Thinking things over a few weeks later I came to the conclusion that none of these arguments had weighed with me in the least. I was a strong, healthy young man of eighteen and a bit, with a very fair knowledge of aircraft design and engineering. I knew perfectly well what I ought to do, and what I wanted to do. Yet I did not do it.

Helmuth’s will proved stronger than mine. The battle between us went on for over a week. Again and again I tried to screw my courage up to the point of defying him and walking out. Several times I was on the verge of slipping out at night and making off in the motor-boat to the mainland. Yet I could never quite bring myself to do either.

I feel certain now that it was neither his reasoning nor my ingrained respect for his authority which was the paramount factor in keeping me there against my will. It was the silent, compelling power that at times lies behind the steady regard of his tawny eyes. He used a form of hypnotism to bind me like a spell.