The Day Gone By Page 19

  The third thing was just plain stupid, but it shows how unreflecting small boys can be. It happened before I had gone over to Horris Wood and while I was a member of Dormitory Four, the biggest dormitory at Horris Hill itself. One morning I committed some misdemeanour while Harrison, the captain of the dormitory, was still along in the cold bath room. The dormitory second, a boy called Meredith, decided to deal with me himself, and made me stand still, with my hands behind my back, while he boxed my ears. When Harrison came back he was told what had happened and said that he himself would now box my ears again, which he proceeded to do.

  It is the truth, believe it or not, that it did not occur to me to connect this with what followed. A day or two later I began to have earache in my right ear. I was no stranger to earache, of course: once more there was a garden in my ear. I went up to Sister Wood, who felt that my father ought to have a look at it. He in turn decided that he would like an examination by a London specialist, which surprised and rather startled me, for in our family the general policy was to make light of indispositions and take them in your stride. He had a friend of student days at Bart’s, a Mr E. D. D. Davis, who had become an ear, nose and throat specialist in Harley Street. So to Mr Davis - a little, dark, alert man like an Aberdeen terrier - I was taken, dressed in my best suit and pleased to have a day off in the middle of term. I can’t remember much about it, except that he was very nice to me; but what followed was that I was taken home and kept a week in bed. All I knew was that I had seen on some piece of paper or other that I had ‘otitis’ (which means inflammation of the ear). When I returned to Horris Hill, I got teased quite a bit for malingering, and Mr McIntyre, having picked up the ‘otitis’, nicknamed me ‘old osteophitis’ (but it didn’t stick).

  It was not until years afterwards, as I was talking one day to my mother, that she told me that Mr Davis had said that I must have received a very severe blow to the head; and that Mr Stow, tackled by my father, had maintained that that was quite impossible. I think that it may have been at this time that the cooling of their relationship began: for a cooling there certainly was, and in his later life I often heard my father speak disparagingly of Mr Stow. Certainly, if Mr Stow had a fault it was that he would never hear a word against Horris Hill. For instance, the food (I now realize) was unimaginative and not good, but the slightest criticism - even a mere leaving on the plate - invariably brought Mr Stow down on the offender like a wolf on the fold.

  The Horris Hill curriculum of those days would, I am sure, strike a lot of people now as, simply, incredible. Its purpose was to get as many boys as possible into Winchester. Other schools were not ruled out and boys who were obviously not up to the Winchester entrance were not sent away, but merely hived off to finish their time in a special form (no Greek) taken by Mr Liddell. Nevertheless, entrance to Winchester was what Horris Hill was all about. Before breakfast, fortified by cocoa and biscuits, we did forty minutes’ early school, which was usually devoted to hearing or correcting last night’s prep. The first period after breakfast lasted an hour and a quarter, and was devoted to Latin or, in the upper three forms, to Greek. This meant Kennedy’s Latin Grammar, Caesar, Ovid and Xenophon. After this there was an hour’s French, then an hour’s break (nets in summer, puntabout in winter) and then another three-quarters of an hour’s Classics. Into this lot English literature, divinity and poetry could be inserted at the whim and discretion of the form master - and that went for the setting of the evening’s prep., too. After lunch, four days a week, there would be an hour’s maths., followed by an hour’s history or geography - two of each every week. These were taken rather easy, since everyone knew that what really mattered was the Classics. I can still remember my gender rhymes to this day (and very sustaining they are, too).

  ‘A, ab, absque, coram, de,

  Palam, clam, cum, ex and e,

  Sine, tenus, pro and prae.

  Add super, subter, sub and in,

  When state, not motion, ’tis they mean.’

  ‘Abstract nouns in “io” call

  Feminina, one and all …’

  One of the things that I enjoy in Benjamin Britten’s The Turn of the Screw is the play made by the little boy, Miles, with the gender rhymes and the Benedicite:

  ‘Aninis, axis, caulis, collis,

  Clunis, crinis, fascis, follis, bless ye the Lord.’

  All this, really, was the old Victorian classical education. Science, biology and any sort of technology were of no account in the education of young gentlemen. The general idea was that if you had a mind which could translate ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ into Latin elegiacs, then you had a mind which could tackle anything appropriate for a gentleman.

  For ‘gentlemen’ was what mattered and no error. I have never, before or since, lived in such a class-conscious and snobbish atmosphere. Among the parents of these boys the snobbery was somewhat masked; the edge taken off a bit, as it were, by euphemism (‘Well, perhaps that’s not quite the sort of thing we …’), reserve, moderation and restraint. Among the boys it was open, articulate and undisguised, virtually the principal value in life. The Horris Hill word for anyone not considered a gentleman was a ‘rustic’. This automatically included all workmen, shopmen, servants and so on; servant-girls were ‘skivs’, and no other word was in use. But beyond this distinction lay the finer business of penetrating disguise, pretence, imposture. Might someone purporting to be a gentleman really be a rustic? I came in for a certain scrutiny here, for my father was the school doctor - a sort of servant - and though I retained friends, I did not entirely escape calumny. Thank goodness! For that saved me from becoming drawn into - or at any rate from subscribing to - this scale of values. Recognize it I could not avoid doing — in the same way that one can recognize stinging nettles. Yet to this day I cannot help silently applying the criteria. Endorse them I never did. ‘Your mater does the cooking, doesn’t she, Adams?’ asked a thirteen-year-old who was with me in the top form at Horris Hill. When I replied that that was so, he turned away with a snigger.

  There were really two criteria. Speech, obviously: this had to conform to the southern upper middle-class norm, although a slight admixture of Scotch or Irish was acceptable in boys who might come from those parts. But clothes were almost as important. These had to be ‘right’. For example, to wear a school cap in the holidays was really bad form, and I well recall the embarrassment and distaste made plain to me on this account when I once ran into two Horris Hill boys at Newbury races. To be convicted of acting like a rustic was virtually a moral condemnation. Indeed, it was stronger than several sorts of real moral condemnation. A single act, showing that someone had been a bully or a sneak, would be roundly condemned but fairly soon forgotten; yet to be a rustic would have been an ineradicable stigma. I say ‘would have been’ because I can’t remember anyone at Horris Hill who actually was a rustic. (I expect Mr Stow saw to that.) This outlook didn’t, however, rule out becoming friendly with the boot-boy, the drill corporal or the school carpenter. They were ‘jolly decent rustics’: i.e., they recognized the social distinction.

  The other main ingredient of our society that I remember is, I reckon, universal among little boys at all social levels, never has changed and never will. In adult society, people commonly avoid contradiction, contention and argument, and refrain from correcting others. Boys aged nine to thirteen are unremittingly contumacious, contradictory and condemnatory, for ever squabbling, bandying words, picking bones and setting each other to rights. There had been very little of this at Miss Luker’s. At Horris Hill it was incessant. I got to know the gentler, milder boys - Tim Reynolds, George Glossop, Tony Pawson - who didn’t go in for dropping on everyone for any little thing, and made friends of them. But since you had to live in school society as a whole, nothing could keep you entirely out of the way of the sharp-tongued and the captious. On this account alone, prep. school life is something one can feel happy to have outgrown. I have noticed that when one does occasionally run into old Horris Hill b
oys out of that generation - about 1927 to 1934 - they are not usually particularly forthcoming with happy memories.

  My greatest comfort and pleasure during this time continued to lie with books. There was a reasonable amount of leisure in which you could read, especially on Sundays, which, in accordance with the system, were days of ‘rest’, i.e., inactivity. But over and above this, I devised a crafty scheme for reading during evening prep. One of the books with which we were issued was a very good verse anthology. I can’t remember what it was called, but I wish I still had it. You could add this to the Latin grammar, maths, book and so on which you were taking from your locker to your desk for prep. Unless the invigilating master happened to be your own form master (and the odds were against it), he wouldn’t know but what you had some verse to read or learn as part of your prep. With a bit of effort you could get the hour’s prep. done in three-quarters of an hour, which left fifteen minutes for reading the verse book. This was really supportive, a true escape.

  ‘O, young Lochinvar is come out of the West.

  In all the wide border his steed was the best …’

  ‘Whenever the moon and stars are set,

  Whenever the wind is high …’

  ‘Hamelin town’s in Brunswick,

  By famous Hanover city.

  The river Weser, deep and wide …’

  ‘William Dewey, Tranter Reuben, Farmer Ledlow late at plough …’

  Oddly, I became fond of the few Hardy poems in the book - ‘This is the weather the cuckoo likes’, ‘When I set out for Lyonnesse’, ‘Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock’. I knew nothing, of course, of the autobiographical and personal background to ‘When I set out for Lyonnesse’, but I grasped clearly enough that the writer had had some marvellous, transcendental experience; and that was sufficient. Hardy’s standing as a fine poet needs no boost from me, but I think it lights up, as it were, a further corner of his genius that he made this direct appeal to a ten-year-old who didn’t even know who he was or anything about him.

  My greatest discovery at this time - the one which added a new dimension to awareness - was Walter de la Mare. I found in the school library a hardback copy (paperbacks hadn’t been invented) of The Three Mulla-Mulgars, with the two coloured illustrations by E. A. Monsell. This was, in the event, to turn out to be one of the most important influences on my whole life, though of course I could have had no inkling of that at the time. I became entirely rapt, lost in the book. It seemed more real to me than my surroundings. There were no other books: this was the only real book. I was Nod in the snow, puny but nevertheless possessed of some strange, numinous power. Beyond the boring outward world this other, valid world of the imagination really existed; a remote, dangerous place, with its own animals, trees and plants, where all the inhabitants were animals (except Andy Battle, of course, and he, too, was remote; a shipwrecked sailor.

  ‘Me that have sailed leagues across

  Foam haunted by the albatross …’).

  I put a friend, whom I judged to be likely, on to the book, and for weeks we conversed in references, proper names and quotations. We came within half a plank of worshipping Tishnar, but that would have been dangerous (and too revealing: we had no wish to hear her traduced).

  Since those days I have read the book many, many times. Often I have set out to read it aloud to various people. My mother loved it, but I could never get my feeling for the book across either to my father or to my sister. Indeed, they teased me. This surprised and somewhat upset me. It was the first time that I had had the experience which I reckon that as we grow up we all undergo in one way or another. We find that even our intimates, and those we love very much, do not always understand or empathize with things which we ourselves feel deeply: either they don’t feel them at all or else they see them differently. In the deepest recesses of the imagination we must expect to find ourselves often alone, separated even from our closest friends. (I was once in love with someone who hated Jane Austen.)

  That wasn’t, however, by any means all there was to Walter de la Mare during this time. One of the masters, Denis Fussell — may his name be blest for ever — had acquired the newly published Poems for Children (1930), comprising ‘Songs of Childhood’, ‘Peacock Pie’ and about forty other poems; and somehow the book came my way. By gum, some ‘poems for children’ those are! They flung open the door upon a numinous, night-blue world of incessant danger, wild beauty, loss, fear and death; no pretence or dressing-up (like M. R. James), but deeply felt and sincere, and all cast in words of storm, rainbow and wave. They struck into my heart the full realization of humanity’s ultimate ignorance and insecurity in this world; and this has never left me, having since been endorsed again and again by just about everyone from Beethoven to William Golding.

  ‘Who said, “Peacock Pie”?

  The old King to the sparrow:

  Who said, “Crops are ripe”?

  Rust to the harrow:

  Who said, “Where sleeps she now?

  Where rests she now her head,

  Bathed in eve’s loveliness”? —

  That’s what I said.

  Who said, “Ay, mum’s the word”;

  Sexton to willow:

  Who said, “Green dusk for dreams,

  Moss for a pillow”?

  Who said, “All Time’s delight

  Hath she for narrow bed;

  Life’s troubled bubble broken”?

  That’s what I said.’

  Chapter VIII

  My father’s character was in certain respects oddly paradoxical. As I have told, with his time he was more than generous to his children. I spent long, happy hours in his company, being read to, walking in the country or simply accompanying him on his morning rounds. We never seemed to have too much of each other. In minor ways he, like my mother, spoiled me. Once, for example, I remember how I had been rather ‘going on’ for a day or two about how much I wanted a certain boxed game (I was very fond of indoor games) in which one ‘caught’ cardboard fish with small magnets on the end of miniature rods and lines. That afternoon I raised the matter again.

  ‘All right,’ said my father. ‘Let’s go down to the town now, and buy it.’

  I was delighted, and was about to precede him out of the garden door that we normally used, when he said ‘Let’s go this way’ and unexpectedly went down the hall towards the front door.

  The game, wrapped in brown paper, was already stuck in the letter-box. We spent the evening playing it.

  Yet this open-handed generosity did not extend to our education or our careers. My sister has since told me that when she got her entrance to Girton, my father wasn’t at all keen for her to go up. He said he couldn’t afford it, and it was only the formidable Miss Luker (‘Nonsense, Dr Adams!’) who coerced him otherwise. He used to say that he could never see the advantage of going to a university, since you were no better qualified when you came down. (He himself, of course, had gone from school to Bart’s.) ‘Much better get on and get a job.’

  The funny thing was that if you asked him ‘What job?’ he had no particular ideas: he seemed to have no ambitions for the children he loved so much. I believe he would have been quite content for my brother and myself to take jobs, say, in a bank in Newbury (though, to do him justice, he paid for my brother to become a solicitor).

  The real trouble was that he was not making a great deal of money; that much even a child could perceive, for during the early ‘thirties our- establishment began to dwindle, and went on doing so. Once, when I was little, we had had a gardener (Thorn), a cook and two housemaids. I can’t remember the details, but gradually we came down to Thorn and one maid. (‘Your mater does the cooking, doesn’t she, Adams?’) Yes, she did, and she did it loyally and well.

  I had vaguely supposed that I would go from Horris Hill to Winchester, but as my last term approached it was clear that my father had other ideas. He reckoned he could get something reasonable in the way of a public school for less money, but he also want
ed it to be not too far away from home. He meant to keep an eye on it. Casting around, he hit on the very place to suit him: Bradfield. He went over there, taking me with him, to meet and talk to the Headmaster. He liked the Headmaster and more than liked the look of the school; their business was soon done. I was put down for the Michaelmas term of 1933.

  Bradfield lies on the Pang, about a dozen miles north-east of Newbury, in the heart of the Berkshire countryside and not far from Pangbourne. Like a pretty girl, the school has for a start a great asset in its favour. Both it and its surroundings are very beautiful. The school buildings are anything but compact, extending in a rambling way, from the south bank of the Pang up the hill known as Hogger, and covering more than a quarter of a square mile altogether. Open country lies all around, and out beyond the Pang, about a mile away, lies the extensive woodland known as Greathouse Woods. There can hardly be a more attractive school site in the whole country. The first-eleven cricket ground, known as Pit from the high banks which surround it on three sides, is outstandingly beautiful.