Time to Be in Earnest (5 page)

Tom and Mary Norman arrive tomorrow—they say shortly after five—to stay until Saturday. Tom is one of my oldest friends and one of the few who knew Connor. They met during the war when both went to Cambridge for some preliminary entrance examination before taking their B.A. courses. They were due to have a practical examination the next day and Tom suggested that they should go down to the laboratories to see if the incubators were working. If they were, at a time when
energy had to be carefully conserved, it would be possible to draw up a list of probable questions. The incubators
were
working and Tom gave Connor a list of subjects for last-minute revision. Connor told himself, “This man is a genius and I will stay close to him all my life,” which, with a few difficult years’ intermission during the worst of Connor’s illness and when they were serving in different theatres of war, he effectively did.

I can’t remember my first meeting with Connor, but I know that it was when I was working at the Festival Theatre in Cambridge. I was assistant box office manager, assistant stage manager, and indeed assistant to anyone who needed a willing if inexperienced factotum. I had finally said goodbye to my first disastrous job in the tax office at Ely and, in taking the job at the theatre, probably had some idea that I would like to be a playwright and that this would be good experience. It was certainly experience of a kind. Connor and Tom came together to one of the performances and we met. I had no intention of asking my parents for permission to marry—parental consent was then necessary if bride or groom were under twenty-one—but we married on 8th August 1941, five days after I came of age.

I shan’t write about my marriage in this incomplete diary except to say that I have never found, or indeed looked for, anyone else with whom I have wanted to spend the rest of my life. I think of Connor with love and with grief for all he has missed: the grandchildren in whom he would have taken such joy, my success, which would have made the burden of mental illness easier to bear—as money always does—the journeys, the laughter, the small triumphs and the day-to-day living we haven’t shared. Tom Norman is one of only two friends now living who experienced with us those Cambridge days and, later, our move to London, the small one-bedroom flat we rented in Manchester Square which was later destroyed in the bombing, Connor’s life as a medical student. I don’t see him often enough. It is one of the penalties of fame and its concomitant over-busyness, and a matter for shame as well as regret, that our lives become ill-directed and we spend so little time with the people we love and most wish to be with.

Tom and Mary dropped me at Darsham station this morning to catch the train before themselves driving back to Winterborne Houghton in Dorset. The visit was a happy one for the three of us.

Mary was anxious to see Somerleyton, so we drove there on Thursday. It is an extravagantly splendid example of early Victorian country-house architecture, built round a Tudor-Jacobean shell but retaining few of the original features of the old house. The particulars of sale prepared in 1861, when Sir Morton Peto was forced to sell the estate, described the Hall as “a specimen of the architecture of the Elizabethan period, transformed by the purist taste into a rich and noble example of Anglo-Italian, a rich, harmonious style pervades the whole building.” It is very much a family home, which I liked.

We had lunch there in a small agreeable café, with a view of the gardens, and then went on to see the Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Blundeston, notable for its round thin tower constructed in about 988. Two women from the village appeared while we were there. They took pleasure in telling us about the church. I said how glad we were that it wasn’t shut, and one of them replied that the police had advised that it should be and that one of their previous vicars had, indeed, closed it for a time but the congregation had insisted that it remain open. She said: “Why should we let vandals close our church when Hitler couldn’t do it?”

I love visiting country churches although, not being a motorist, the opportunity to do so is limited. Usually now there is someone from the village keeping watch and ready and willing to talk about the church and its history. The pride and the love shown are appealing. The custodians are seldom young and I wonder how long this close personal interest will continue.

On Friday we drove south to Thorpeness, that extraordinary black and white mock-Tudor holiday village created between the wars, a bastion of middle-class respectability and conformity incongruously facing the bleak wind-scoured beach and the untameable North Sea. For me it is peopled with the ghosts of 1930s nursemaids and small children in their floppy-brimmed hats. A good place to set a detective story? Certainly
it provides an intriguing contrast between claustrophobic security and the contaminating disruption of violent crime, but the architecture is too uniform to stimulate the creative imagination. Then from Thorpeness to Aldeburgh, where we ate a picnic lunch at one of the wooden tables with benches outside the Moot Hall. It was warm and sunny, as it was for the whole of the visit.

One of the delights of being with Tom and Mary is their knowledge of natural history. There isn’t a bird, butterfly, flower or tree which they can’t name. They spend much time travelling, often in some discomfort, in remote areas of Asia, searching for and photographing rare orchids. One, which Tom was the first to discover and describe, is named after him. At Covehithe we saw a butterfly that Tom said was called the Holly Blue and which he recognized as female because of the darker hue round its wings. It lives for just three days, and I wondered whether ours were the only human eyes that had actually seen it during that brief span. As Tom and Mary moved through the gate leading to the abbey ruin, the butterfly fluttered to a leaf close to me and rested motionless. It was one of those rare moments in which a fugitive beauty, briefly contemplated, untouchable, is experienced with a peculiar intensity, the sense of being a privileged spectator of a life which, however brief, is part of a mysterious whole.

I’m back again in London. Last night was swelteringly hot and I awoke this morning to find myself lying in a pool of sweat. The house is again being underpinned and the mess outside is appalling. The two young men on the job, who seem to work cheerfully in this awful heat, have dug deep holes at the front, side and back. Despite my offer of unlimited tea, surely necessary in this heat, they won’t come into the house—I imagine because the firm have a policy that they never do—but bring their own drinks with them. The house today looks particularly depressing and dilapidated. The cracks seem to have widened during the last few days as if the house has resigned itself to decrepitude. I shall have to wait several months after the underpinning is finished before any repairs
and redecoration can be carried out. I long to see it restored to what it once was.

I had lunch with Frances Fyfield at the Belvedere in Holland Park. It is always good to see Frances, whom I admire as a crime writer and value as a friend. Arriving early, I spent some time quietly walking round what must be one of London’s loveliest parks. I have been fortunate all my life to live only in beautiful and historic places, first Oxford, then Ludlow, then Cambridge, and finally London. I can’t remember when my parents moved from Oxford to Ludlow, but it was certainly before I went to school. I don’t think young children respond to natural beauty; people are more important than flowers and trees; but to live in Ludlow from the age of four to eleven meant that my eyes saw little of the world outside home which was without beauty, and this constant exposure to the delights of one of England’s loveliest towns must surely have left its legacy.

Looking back on my early schooldays, they seem closer to the Victorian age than they do to the life of a primary school child today, and indeed they were closer, in time as well as in attitudes to teaching. I was taken to my first school, which I must have attended from the age of five, not by my mother, but by a boy little older than myself who lived nearby. My memory is of being lugged along at a furious pace by this reluctant but not unkind attendant. The schoolroom was large and square with a huge coal fire burning in winter, the fire surrounded by a high fire-guard. It was a room which came alive in memory when I read an account of the schoolroom at Lowood in
Jane Eyre
, although I am sure the two establishments had absolutely nothing else in common. There were no inside lavatories and I can distinctly recall the day in which I was sitting on one of the wooden seats in the outside shed when part of the plaster ceiling fell on my head. I was temporarily stunned by surprise—although certainly not hurt, since no one at home was ever told of the misadventure—but I sat there, my head covered in plaster, until one of the children, alerted by the noise, summoned a teacher. I can remember her gazing at me with an expression half-shocked, half-amused.

We seldom went straight home after school. My small minder had a fertile and slightly morbid imagination (but who am I to complain?) and would lug me down to the river in the hope of seeing drowned bodies of which he seemed in daily expectation. We were disappointed, but I do remember being taken to see a man who had broken his arm. He was sitting
in the back garden on a kitchen chair, nursing his arm and moaning, and we children gazed at him through the chink in the wooden fence in fascinated anticipation, although he was a very poor substitute for a drowned corpse.

The two medical problems of the school were nits and ringworm, the second the more serious. Those afflicted would have their heads shaved and subsequently wore small cotton caps, a badge of shame, in which they looked like diminutive clowns. One compensation, however, was that girls with straight hair—regarded as an affliction in those days—frequently grew it with curls after the shaving.

My second school, which I remember much more clearly, was the British School, a red-brick building on Old Street, fronted by an asphalt playground and iron railings. The school was named British not from patriotism or any necessity to distinguish it from alien establishments, of which in Ludlow there were none, but because it was one of the schools founded by the British Society, a voluntary and charitable organization established in 1840 to provide elementary education for the children of the poor. The children of the early nineteenth century would still have felt perfectly at home in it. And the name was not inappropriate. A map, permanently displayed in the largest double classroom, with its splurges of red—Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand—its small islands like splashes of blood in all the oceans of the world, enabled our teacher to point out that this was, in truth as well as legend, an empire on which the sun never set. Empire Day was a notable event celebrated with a march round the playground and a salute to the flag. The teaching was not jingoistic but we were imbued with a belief that the empire was beneficent and the rulers well-intentioned, a view which may have been simplistic but was probably no more damaging than the present belief of some young people I meet that everything that has gone wrong with the world in the past century is the fault of Britain.

My generation’s early years were dominated by the 1914–18 war, a catastrophe which none of us were old enough to remember but which had scarred the lives of our parents’ generation and cast over our own a shadow of uncomprehended vicarious sadness, a universal grieving which reached its apogee on Armistice Day when, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the country would virtually come to a stop as we stood for the silence.

I learned to read very young, certainly well before I started school, and I can remember the day when it happened. My mother would buy
a comic each week,
Tiger Tim
or
The Rainbow
, and would find time to read it to me. From the moment the comic was handed over, the waiting to hear it read was intolerable. And then, one morning, to my astonished delight, the curved and angular shapes under the pictures suddenly came together and made sense. From now on I would need no help. I could read. I must have been helped by the pictures and it was probably a matter of relating words to image. But it is one of my earliest memories of great happiness.