The Day Gone By Page 5

  The other thing was the fountain. Although, as I have said, our own garden was big and delightful, it had no water. Uncle Jessop had a lily pond with a fountain. The fountain could be controlled by a foot-high, upright iron tap in the gravel, and to me this was a source of great pleasure and excitement. You could turn the jet into a circular fan of water, its thin streams, like rain, falling all around to transform the surface of the pool into winking, plopping coruscation. You could then bring it up higher, into the faint semblance, perhaps, of a standing figure, an ondine made all of ascending water. And then, finally - if they’d let you, for you weren’t allowed long; it was too much indulgence of a little boy with mechanism that was not considered a toy — you could turn it into a single, immensely tall spout, which shot up into the air as high as the first-floor windows and fell back onto the surface with a most satisfying smack and splash. I always felt a little guilty about going all the way with the fountain, because you had to plead for it to get a grudging ‘Well, all right, but only for a minute, mind.’ I was not to know that fountains are among the oldest and favourite toys of mankind, and that kings and emperors have played with and delighted in them. (My brother, good pianist as he was, was not quite up to Ravel’s Jeux d’eau. I was about nineteen when I first heard that; it evoked an immediate response of recognition.)

  Another neighbour, with whom I was to become well acquainted as the years went by, was Captain Cornwallis. (That is not his true name.) He attracted me - as he attracted many - by his generosity, high spirits and enjoyment of life. Captain Cornwallis (I learned all this much later, of course) had originated God knows where, and before the First World War had been a strolling, needy adventurer - a sort of figure from the pages of ‘Sapper’ - with nothing much for ammunition except a pleasing geniality and a great ability for things like golf and bridge, which he played for money. Wounded in the war, he found himself in hospital, being tended by an ugly little V.A.D. nurse called Sally. From gossip he learned that Sally came from a wealthy family and had a lot of money. As soon as he was convalescent he set about courting her, and was successful.

  Sally Cornwallis was very small — tiny — with no physical attractions (to say the least) and so little intellect that even a child could perceive the lack. It was hard to tell whether she liked you or not, because her manner and brief speech, unsmiling and flat, were the same to everyone - except servants, to whom she was a tyrant and a bully. (When first married, the Cornwallises had spent some time in India.) Nevertheless, she and the Captain were happy enough on her money (though the Captain went in for brief absences now and then, which earned contemptuous inferences from my father - probably justified, I now think; though I personally can’t say I blame him or see that they did any harm).

  The Cornwallises arrived on Wash Common during my early childhood. The Captain bought a farm, its fields comprising the stony, unproductive upland of the plateau above the Enborne. It was about half a mile from our home. He employed two men, but the place was not a true farm; not a going, commercial concern. When not playing bridge or golf, though, he could shoot rabbits on the land. They had two sons; the elder, Duncan, was about my age and a cripple, his speech badly defective and his legs in irons. He could barely walk and used to get about the place on a tricycle. The younger, Arthur, was a year or two younger than myself, and as the years went by became my close associate, for I grew up fairly proficient at swimming and at hitting various kinds of ball, and the Captain thought it good for Arthur to have a slightly older friend who could extend him a little. During our ‘teens our friendship became more limited, since Arthur grew up a straightforward, practical, outdoor fellow, while I became a swot who went the length of liking poetry and classical music. We remained friends, however, right up till after Hitler’s war, when Arthur (‘Can’t farm here: it’s nothing but damn’ pioneering on gravel’) emigrated to Canada, where he has done well.

  The great attraction and benefit to me of the Captain was his easy-going generosity. What was his was yours, in effect. He built a swimming-pool and a squash court, and these our family were free to use whenever we liked. The summer holidays of the ‘thirties, when I was in my ‘teens, to a considerable degree revolved round the Cornwallises - sauntering up there in the hot mornings, along the verge of the big cornfield, to swim; tennis in the afternoon and perhaps a bridge lesson from the Captain in the evening. The Captain was most articulate and liked to talk gaily and freely, and this always seemed strange to me - almost unnatural - for my own father, of whom I was so fond, spoke little and smiled hardly at all. I have never forgotten that when my sister Katharine was about twenty-two, she and a friend called Dorothea Rowand decided to enter for an amateur tennis tournament at Hunstanton in north Norfolk and have a bit of fun at the seaside into the bargain. Captain Cornwallis, unasked, lent them his own Bugatti - a superb car - to drive up there and back and to use as their own for the holiday.

  My father detested the Captain for a jumped-up cad and a bounder, though he never tried to stop us going up there and mostly kept his feelings to himself. Now and then, however, he would come out with brief and contemptuous references to patent lies that the Captain had told, or ill-bred boasts which he had made at the South Berks Club in Newbury, or with a scornful mention of his ‘farm’, which was no farm at all. I liked the Captain and I liked my father, and sometimes I would try to mediate. ‘But, Daddy, even if he is a bounder, you must agree he’s very generous.’ ‘Yes,’ replied my father, ‘with other people’s money.’

  Another time, when I was older - perhaps sixteen - and presumably to be relied upon not to repeat things, he and I were talking about the Captain when I asked some question or other about how he had come to be where he was.

  ‘Why, he married that woman for her money, of course,’ answered my father. ‘You couldn’t marry her for anything else, could you?’

  I realize now that to my father, who had endured disapprobation and family hostility to marry my mother without a penny, for love, this would seem the ultimate in caddishness. And yet I myself am not so sure. Mrs C. lived as happily as she could well have hoped to. She liked and respected her husband, who was always genial and friendly to her. She had two sons and, under his dispensation, more fun than, with her looks and disposition, she could possibly have had otherwise. Whatever infidelities he went in for he kept well away from his own doorstep, and I never heard the least trace of a cross word between them. Yes, he was a sharp scamp (he could always spot in a moment how any card trick was done), but one of Falstaffian charm. I wonder, might my father’s resentment have had in it an ingredient of jealousy? He himself had always been a shy, correct and upright man. ‘Lo, these many years have I served thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandments. Yet thou never gavest me a kid . . .

  We never had quite enough money for our establishment. Throughout the eighteen years of my childhood the servants gradually grew fewer and fewer, until at last there was none. My father suffered much financial anxiety, I know. But I think I perceive, now, another factor also. He himself, as he always used to say, was a poor mixer; except for my elder sister’s and brother’s tennis parties in the summer, we didn’t entertain much, and we never went away for holidays. My father, celibate for forty years, had for all I know lived a rather restricted life, working at home with my grandfather. His reward was his sense of his own correctness. But then he had torn up the rule-book and married my mother. Mightn’t an uncharitable person possibly have compared her to Captain Cornwallis? (Though she played her social part admirably and had adapted very well: I doubt whether anyone round Newbury thought her socially below my father.) The Captain, coming from nowhere, could handle people and had got what he was after by means of cheek and an outgoing temperament. My father’s style, on the other hand, was based on reticence and propriety. How aware was he that this was because, when put to it, he had little real force of character? There is nothing in Christian doctrine which forbids marrying for money. It was, rather, the Captain’s
style which my father disliked. Yet my childhood would have been far less enjoyable without the Captain.

  Another neighbour, whom my father did like, was ‘Uncle’ Urling. Uncle Urling was also a stockbroker. I remember him as a portly, ruddy-faced, genial man, who enjoyed spending money. He had two daughters, Mary and Sheila. Mary was my own age and a friend and playmate - my best friend, I think, next to Jean Leggatt and Ann Lester. (Ann was the daughter of the manager of the Newbury Waterworks.) I would dispute any idea that I preferred the company of girls to that of boys. It was just the way things fell out. Mary played the piano well and my mother wanted me to do the same; but somehow I never could take to it. (More of this anon.) The Urlings had a hard tennis court, the very latest thing, with a loose, green-granulated surface, not an asphalt red one. (The early hard courts were quite smooth and had a surface like maroon asphalt.) Mary was a kind-hearted, slightly nervous little girl, who never said a cross word and made me feel protective. (‘Am I doing it right, Richard?’) She had a wind-up gramophone, and by its means I became acquainted with ‘Coal Black Mammy’, ‘It Ain’t Gonna Rain No More, No More’, ‘All By Yourself in the Moonlight’ and other hits of the ‘twenties.

  When I was about ten a tremendous thing happened. Uncle Urling was hammered on the Stock Exchange. I didn’t in the least know what this meant, and I was carefully not told, but it was plain enough that the Urlings were in trouble. My father was sympathetic and did all he could to help. Uncle Urling arranged with him that we should, by private arrangement, ‘borrow’ his (Mary’s) beautiful grand piano - a Steinway - to save it from being sequestered (or whatever it’s called). So our good old upright - the pianola - was put away and the Steinway, which seemed to fill half the drawing-room, was installed. My brother, of course, was delighted, and used to play even more. I felt almost in awe of the instrument, which was mostly kept closed and covered with a thick, heavy, brown cloth embroidered in gold braid with elephants and lions. It stayed with us for about five years, I think, before Uncle Urling was in a position to take it back. When, ten years later, I read Emma for the first time, I was able to respond exactly as Jane Austen would have wished to the moment when Jane Fairfax receives the mysterious piano.

  It was a bit of a limitation in one way, though. From my earliest days (well, say four or five) I had loved playing the pianola. When I first began to play it I was so small and light that someone had to hold my chair firm; otherwise my feet, pressing the pedals, slid me bodily backwards. The rolls were what you would expect: Cavalleria Rusticana, Chopin’s Valse Brillante, The Russian Church Parade, Pagliacci, ‘Where My Caravan Has Rested’, ‘Lilac Time’ and many more. I realize now how lucky I was to have this sort of introduction to instrumental music.

  I responded to music all right; almost over-sensitively, as a matter of fact. My brother, too, had a wind-up gramophone, and I recall that one day, when I was about six, he played me the Unfinished Symphony. The quality of the reproduction, of course, would today be beneath contempt, but it was more than enough for me. The opening theme, in the ‘cellos and basses, at once seemed to me to convey menace and dread. It frightened me. Something terrible was going to happen. I think now that this was perfectly valid. It does. The second movement was no better. The pizzicato opening seemed grim and dire. I felt (although, of course, it hadn’t yet been written) like Simon, in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, confronted by the pig’s head on a stick. It assured him that life was a bad business. But Schubert seemed not to be trying to frighten me as a bully would. ‘I know this is frightening,’ he seemed to be saying. ‘I can’t help it. It frightens me, too.’ I have gone on finding a lot of Schubert frightening from that day to this - the Octet, the A minor Quartet, the big piano sonatas: so frightening that I prefer not to try to think it out further. Let’s drop it.

  Surely a good teacher could have made a player out of a child as sensitive as this? I’ll always maintain that it was as a result of hidebound, insensitive teaching and regime that I never could make a go of learning to play the piano. I think this is worth mentioning here, not in order to excuse me, but because it may possibly help other parents. My first teacher, at my kindergarten, was a decent but distinctly limited woman, who also turned an honest penny by driving her car for hire. Her teaching was boring and uninspired and as far as I remember she never played any music for my enjoyment or praised me for anything I did. I was with her for about two years or thereabouts. Then I went on to prep. school (boarding school), and here I came under the tuition of a lady who was, even at that date (1929), an anachronism. Miss Jarvis (not her name) was the archetypal Victorian governess: a maiden lady in later middle age, grave and admonitory in manner, she taught French and Arithmetic to the smaller boys and the piano to all those who were ‘put down’ for it. She seldom smiled and never made a joke. The two essentials for a teacher are warmth and humour, but Miss Jarvis possessed neither. Her best quality was her sense of duty. Upon her death (which occurred when I was about twelve and still at the school), the headmaster made a moving speech about the long and honourable service she had given, including, during the First World War, extra duty, for which she had refused to take a penny. She was certainly a worthy and, I suppose, rather a sad lady; she made you work, but one thing she could not communicate (I doubt now whether she really possessed it herself) was the joy or magic of music. I see her clearly in memory, her slightly aquiline features fixed severely upon a pupil as she reproved him for his own good, looking out from under the broad-brimmed, dark-blue straw hat which she always wore indoors. She wore it quite straight, of course, and it was fastened by a big hat-pin which was so low that you would have sworn that it must go through her head and not just through her white hair. I have a memory of her at the school concert. Three boys were to play a trio on one piano. They sat down to play, and Miss Jarvis stood behind them throughout, tapping their shoulders and whispering (you could see her lips moving) ‘One two three four, One two three four.’

  During all the six years that I learned the piano, no one ever told me anything about the great composers, no one played any great piece of music and explained it or invited me to love it as they did, no one ever represented the piano to me as a wonderful, glorious accomplishment which would one day be mine; no one ever took me to a recital. At my prep. school, practices and lessons with Miss Jarvis were all conducted in what was, for other boys, play time. The pianos were situated in the different classrooms, and it wasn’t always easy for a junior boy to make his way into a relatively senior classroom, where there might be ten or twelve bigger boys none too pleased that he was come to play the piano badly. Nor was it any fun coming in on a fine summer half-holiday afternoon, when others were out of doors, to sit in a queue and wait, perhaps for nearly an hour, while Miss Jarvis took each in turn. No wonder that when I was eleven I persuaded my mother, with tears, to let me give up the piano. It was nothing but drudgery without reward even held out in prospect.

  Years later, I saw to it that none of this took place with my elder daughter. Everything was done to encourage her, help her to love music, build up her morale and convince her that she was doing better all the time. She finished school a Grade 8 pianist.

  Although I liked ‘having a friend to tea’ (usually Jean, Ann or Mary) and playing in the garden for the afternoon, big children’s parties were another matter. There was no lack of fairly wealthy (and some really wealthy) families round Newbury. Several of these regularly gave children’s parties, and naturally the family doctor’s children were invited. As I was so much younger than my sister and brother, I used to get asked to different parties, for smaller children - alone. Of course, my father didn’t like the invitations to be refused. If it was Ann’s or Mary’s party this wasn’t so bad, but some of the big parties at wealthy houses, among a crowd of rich children who were mostly strangers, were unnerving - quite as bad as a parachute jump was to prove later. I was socially timid, used to solitary play, and nervously uneasy among the rather reserved and se
lf-possessed boys and girls, well equipped to fulfil the roles expected of upper middle-class children in those days. For the most part I got on badly.

  One of these parties was for me the occasion of a genuine Freudian trauma, the origin of a behaviour pattern of cracking under stress which has remained with me all my life: I know it well and can spot it whenever it turns up. This was a big party, given by the parents of a boy I hardly knew (he later kept wicket for Eton), and it was fancy-dress. I went as a Red Indian, though you could hardly have guessed it. The costume, such as it was, was old and shabby and had been lying in some cupboard since before I was born. It did fit, but what it amounted to was a crumpled jacket and trousers of thin, brown cloth, edged with strips of red and blue canvas. You couldn’t wear it with any swank, which is surely the whole point of fancy dress. I could just about get by in it — and perhaps not even quite that. We hadn’t the money for smart fancy dress.

  I knew hardly anybody at the party. Most of the children were a little older than I. There were some splendid costumes. I remember a fairy, with wings and starry wand, to take your breath away. There was also another Red Indian, finely attired, with a tomahawk and a head-dress of coloured feathers half-way down his back. He didn’t speak to me.