A Time of Gifts Read online

  First bewilderment reigned, and then despair. After a particularly bad cropper when I was about ten, I was taken to see two psychiatrists. In a recent biography I read with excitement that the first of these and the most likeable had been consulted by Virginia Woolf; and I thought for a moment that I might have gazed at her across the waiting-room; alas, it was before I was born. The second, more severe in aspect, recommended a co-educational and very advanced school for difficult children near Bury St. Edmunds.

  Salsham Hall, at Salsham-le-Sallows, was an unclassifiable but engaging manor house with woods and a rough lake in a wide-skied and many-belfried expanse of Suffolk. It was run by a grey- haired, wild-eyed man called Major Truthful and when I spotted two beards—then very rare—among the mixed and eccentric-looking staff, and the heavy bangles and the amber and the tassels and the homespun, and met my fellow-alumni—about thirty boys and girls from four-year-olds to nearly twenty, all in brown jerkins and sandals: the musical near-genius with occasional fits, the millionaire’s nephew who chased motor-cars along country lanes with a stick, the admiral’s pretty and slightly kleptomaniac daughter, the pursuivant’s son with nightmares and an infectious inherited passion for heraldry, the backward, the somnambulists and the mythomaniacs (by which I mean those with an inventive output more pronounced than the rest, which, as no one believed us, did no harm), and, finally, the small bad hats like me who were merely very naughty—I knew I was going to like it. The nature-worshipping eurythmics in a barn and the country-dances in which the Major led both staff and children, were a shade bewildering at first, because everybody was naked. Nimbly and gravely, keeping time to a cottage piano and a recorder, we sped through the figures of Gathering Peascods, Sellinger’s Round, Picking-up Sticks and Old Mole.

  It was midsummer. There were walled gardens close at hand, and giant red and gold gooseberries, and the nets over the loaded currant bushes foiled starlings but not us; and beyond them, the trees and the water descended in dim and beckoning perspectives. I understood the implications of the landscape at once: life under the greenwood tree. To choose a Maid Marion and a band, to get the girls to weave yards of Lincoln green on the therapeutic looms and then to slice and sew them into rough hoods with crenellated collars, cut bows and string them, carry off raspberry-canes for arrows and to take to the woods, was a matter of days. No-one stopped us: ‘Fay ce que vouldras’ was the whole of their law. English schools, the moment they depart from the conventional track, are oases of strangeness and comedy, and it is tempting to linger. But vaguely guessed-at improprieties among the staff or the older children, or both—things of which we knew little in our sylvan haunts—brought about the dissolution of the place and I was soon back ‘for a second chance,’ a forest exile among the snakebelts and the bat-oil of the horrible preparatory school. But, predictably after this heady freedom, not for long.

  My mother had to cope with these upheavals. I would turn up in mid-term: once, at our cottage at Dodford, a tiny thatched village under a steep holt full of foxgloves (and, indeed, full of foxes) with a brook for its one street, where she was simultaneously writing plays and, though hard up, learning to fly a Moth biplane at an aerodrome forty miles away; once, at Primrose Hill Studios near Regent’s Park, within earshot of the lions in the Zoo at night, where she had persuaded Arthur Rackham, a neighbour in that cloister, to paint amazing scenes—navigable birdsnests in a gale-wind, hobgoblin transactions under extruding roots and mice drinking out of acorns—all over an inside door; and more than once at 213 Piccadilly, which we moved to later, where a breakneck stair climbed to a marvellous Aladdin’s cave of a flat overlooking long chains of street-lamps and the acrobatic skysigns of the Circus. I would be hangdog on the doormat, flanked by a master with a depressing tale to unfold. Though upset, my mother was gifted with too much imagination and humour to let gloom settle for long. Nevertheless, these reverses filled me for the time being with suicidal despair.

  But this particular disaster happened to coincide with one of my father’s rare leaves from directing the Geological Survey of India. He and my mother had parted by then, and since these furloughs only came round every three years, we scarcely knew each other. All at once, as though at the wave of a wand, I found myself high above Lake Maggiore and then Como, trying to keep up with his giant stride across the gentian-covered mountains. He was an out-and-out-naturalist and rightly proud of being an F.R.S.; indeed, he had discovered an Indian mineral which was named after him and a worm with eight hairs on its back; and—brittle trove!—a formation of snow-flake. (I wondered, much later on, when white specks whirled past in the Alps or the Andes or the Himalayas, whether any of them were his.) That enormously tall and thin frame, dressed in a pepper-and-salt Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, was festooned with accoutrements. Laden with his field glasses and his butterfly net, I would get my breath while he was tapping at the quartz and the hornblende on the foothills of Monte Rosa with his hammer and clicking open a pocket lens to inspect the fossils and insects of Monte della Croce. His voice at such moments was simultaneously cavernous and enthusiastic. He would carefully embed wild flowers for later classification in a moss-lined vasculum and sometimes halt for a sketch with his water-colours balanced on a rock. What a change, I thought, from those elephants and the jungles full of monkeys and tigers which I imagined, not wholly wrongly, to be his usual means of transport and habitat. At ground level I trailed behind him through half the picture galleries of northern Italy.

  * * *

  Three peaceful years followed. Gilbert and Phyllis Scott-Malden, with three sons and half a dozen boys cramming for Common Entrance under their wing, lived in a large house with a rambling garden in Surrey. (I can’t think of them, nor of Mrs. Scott-Malden’s sister Josephine Wilkinson, who had a strong and separate influence later on, without the utmost gratitude and affection.) He was an excellent classicist and a kind and patient all-round teacher, and she filled out his firm structure with a great love of literature and poetry and painting. I was still an intermittent pest, but calmer existence began and I shot ahead in the subjects I enjoyed: everything, that is, except mathematics, for which my ineptitude seemed akin to imbecility. We made up plays and acted Shakespeare scenes and lay about the grass under a holm-oak with a dish of plums and listened to Mr. Scott-Malden reading Gilbert Murray’s translation of The Frogs; he would switch to the original to explain and give point to the comic passages and the onomatopoeia. We had built a hut in an enormous walnut tree, with rope-ladders climbing half-way, then hand over hand; and I was allowed to sleep in it all my last summer term. In spite of maths, I scraped through Common Entrance in the end and looked forward to Public School life with ill-founded confidence.

  * * *

  Copious reading about the Dark and the Middle Ages had floridly coloured my views of the past and the King’s School, Canterbury, touched off emotions which were sharply opposed to those of Somerset Maugham in the same surroundings; they were closer to Walter Pater’s seventy years earlier, and probably identical, I liked to think, with those of Christopher Marlowe earlier still. I couldn’t get over the fact that the school had been founded at the very beginning of Anglo-Saxon Christianity—before the sixth century was out, that is: fragments of Thor and Woden had hardly stopped smouldering in the Kentish woods: the oldest part of the buildings was modern by these standards, dating only from a few decades after the Normans landed. There was a wonderfully cobwebbed feeling about this dizzy and intoxicating antiquity—an ambiance both haughty and obscure which turned famous seats of learning, founded eight hundred or a thousand years later, into gaudy mushrooms and seemed to invest these hoarier precincts, together with the wide green expanses beyond them, the huge elms, the Dark Entry, and the ruined arches and the cloisters—and, while I was about it, the booming and jackdaw-crowded pinnacles of the great Angevin cathedral itself, and the ghost of St. Thomas à Becket and the Black Prince’s bones—with an aura of nearly prehistoric myth.

  Although it was a
one-sided love in the end, for a time things went well. I liked nearly everybody, from the headmaster and my housemaster down, and prospered erratically at dead and living languages and at history and geography—at everything, once more, except mathematics. I found my mind wandering at games; loved boxing and was good at it; and in summer, having chosen rowing instead of cricket, lay peacefully beside the Stour, well upstream of the rhythmic creaking and the exhortation, reading Lily Christine and Gibbon and gossiping with kindred lotus-eaters under the willow-branches. Verse, imitative and bad but published in school magazines nevertheless, poured out like ectoplasm. I wrote and read with intensity, sang, debated, drew and painted; scored minor successes at acting, stage-managing and in painting and designing scenery; and made gifted and enterprising friends. One of these, a year older, was Alan Watts, a brilliant classical scholar who, most remarkably, wrote and published an authoritative book on Zen Buddhism—years before the sect became fashionable—while he was still at school. Later, he became a respected authority on Eastern and Western religions. (In his autobiography In My Own Way, which came out shortly before his premature death a few years ago, he writes at some length of my troubles at school—and especially of their abrupt end—in the warm spirit of a champion; and if he didn’t quite get the hang of it in one or two places, it was not his fault.)

  What went wrong? I think I know now. A bookish attempt to coerce life into a closer resemblance to literature was abetted—it can only be—by a hangover from early anarchy: translating ideas as fast as I could into deeds overrode every thought of punishment or danger; as I seem to have been unusually active and restless, the result was chaos. It mystified me and puzzled others. “You’re mad!” prefects and monitors would exclaim, brows knit in glaring scrum-half bewilderment, as new misdeeds came to light. Many of my transgressions involved breaking bounds as well as rules—climbing out at night and the like, only half of which were found out. Frequent gatings joined the mileage of Latin hexameters copied out as impositions, and lesser troubles filled in the gaps between more serious bust-ups: absent-mindedness, forgetfulness and confusion about where I ought to be; and constant loss: ‘forgetting my books under the arches’ was a recurrent bane. There were some savage fights; also erratic behaviour which was construed, perhaps rightly, as showing off: ‘anything for a laugh’ was the usual term for this; and, even when I succeeded, ‘trying to be funny.’ Always that withering gerund! These strictures were often on monitors’ lips. Aediles and rod-bearing lictors, they were the guardians of an inflexible code and all breaches were visited by swift and flexible sanctions which came whistling shoulder-high across panelled studies and struck with considerable force; but, however spectacular the results, they left the psyche unbruised, and, though they were disagreeable and, in this case, record-breaking in frequency, clinically and morally speaking, they didn’t seem to take. If these meetings are carried off with enough studied nonchalance, a dark and baleful fame begins to surround the victim, and it makes him, in the end, an infliction past bearing. Everything was going badly and my housemaster’s penultimate report, in my third year, had an ominous ring: ‘...some attempts at improvement’ it went ‘but more to avoid detection. He is a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness which makes one anxious about his influence on other boys.’

  Catastrophe was staved off for a few months. As I was thought to have done myself some damage skiing in the Berner Oberland just before I was sixteen, I skipped a term and a half, and, on my return, I was temporarily excused games: when everyone trooped off with oblong balls under their arms, I could spin about Kent on a bicycle and look at the Norman churches at Patrixbourne and Barfrestone and explore the remoter parts of Canterbury. This windfall of leisure and freedom soon coincided with a time when all good impressions were wiped out by a last series of misdeeds. A more prophetic eye would have seen that patience on high had at last given out and that any further trouble would be hailed as a release long overdue.

  * * *

  Intramural romances spring up and prosper in places of learning, but some exotic psychological fluke directed my glance beyond the walls and, once more, out of bounds. It was a time when one falls in love hard and often, and my aesthetic notions, entirely formed by Andrew Lang’s Coloured Fairy Books, had settled years before on the long-necked, wide-eyed pre-Raphaelite girls in Henry Ford’s illustrations, interchangeably kings’ daughters, ice-maidens, goose-girls and water spirits, and my latest wanderings had led me, at the end of a green and sweet-smelling cave set dimly with flowers and multicoloured fruit and vegetation—a greengrocer’s shop, that is, which she tended for her father—to the vision of just such a being. The effect was instantaneous. She was twenty-four, a ravishing and sonnet-begetting beauty and I can see her now and still hear that melting and deep Kent accent. This sudden incongruous worship may have been a bore but she was too good-natured to show it, and perhaps she was puzzled by the verse which came showering in. I knew that such an association in the town, however innocent, broke a number of taboos too deep-rooted and well-understood to need any explicit veto; nevertheless I headed for the shop beyond the Cattle Market the moment I could escape. But the black clothes we wore, those stiff wing-collars and the wide and speckled straw boaters with their blue and white silk ribands were as conspicuous as broad-arrows. My footsteps were discreetly dogged, my devices known and after a week, I was caught red-handed—holding Nellie’s hand, that is to say, which is about as far as this suit was ever pressed; we were sitting in the back-shop on upturned apple-baskets—and my schooldays were over.

  * * *

  Captain Grimes was right. A few months after this setback, the idea of an Army career, which had been floating mistily in the air for some time, began to take firmer shape; and the prospect of entering Sandhurst raised its distant hurdle. But what about the sack? When he was appealed to, my ex-housemaster, a strange and brilliant man, composed and despatched the necessary letter of recommendation; and, like the Captain’s, it was a corking good letter, too. (There were no bitter feelings; there had been disappointment on the side of the school authorities as well as relief; utter dejection on mine. But I felt thankful they had alighted on more avowable grounds for my eclipse than the charge of being an intolerable nuisance. The actual pretext could be made to sound dashing and romantic.)

  I had not yet sat for School Cert.—which, because of maths, I would certainly have failed—and as it was indispensable for would-be cadets, I soon found myself in London, seventeen by now, cramming for an exempting examination called the London Certificate. I spent most of the next two years in Lancaster Gate, then in Ladbroke Grove with rooms of my own overlooking tree tops, under the tolerant and friendly aegis of Denys Prideaux. I did Maths, French, English and Geography with him, and Latin, Greek, English and History, often in deck chairs in Kensington Gardens, with Lawrence Goodman. (Unconventional and a poet, he took me to every Shakespeare play that appeared.) During the first year I led a fairly sensible life, had a number of friends, was asked away to stay in the country, followed rustic pursuits, and read more books than I have ever crammed into a similar stretch of time. I passed the London Cert. respectably in most papers, and even without disgrace in the subjects I dreaded.

  But a long interregnum still stretched ahead.

  * * *

  One of the early chapters of this book touches at some retrospective length on the way things began to change; how I moved from the fairly predictable company of fellow army-candidates into older circles which were simultaneously more worldly, more bohemian and more raffish: the remainder, more or less, of the Bright Young People, but ten years and twenty thousand double whiskies after their heyday, and looking extremely well on the regime. This new and captivating world seemed brilliant and rather wicked; I enjoyed being the youngest present, especially during the dissipated nocturnal ramblings in which every evening finished: (“Where’s that rather noisy boy got to? We may as well take him too”). I had reached a stage when one changes ver
y fast: a single year contains a hundred avatars; and while these were flashing kaleidoscopically by, the idea of my unsuitability for peace-time soldiering had began to impinge. More serious still, the acceptance of two poems and the publication of one of them—admittedly, only on foxhunting—had fired me with the idea of authorship.

  In the late summer of 1933, with Mr. Prideaux’s permission, I rashly moved into a room in an old and slightly leaning house in Shepherd Market where several friends had already fixed their quarters. This little backwater of archways and small shops and Georgian and Victorian pubs had the charm, quite evaporated now, of a village marooned in the still-intact splendours of Mayfair. I had a vision of myself, as I moved in, settling down to writing with single-minded and almost Trollopian diligence. Instead, to my ultimate discomfiture but immediate delight, the house became the scene of wild and continuous parties. We paid almost nothing for our lodgings to Miss Beatrice Stewart, our kind-hearted landlady, and always late. She didn’t mind this, but pleaded with us again and again in the small hours to make less noise. The friend and model of famous painters and sculptors in the past, she was accustomed to the more decorous Bohemia of earlier generations. She had sat for Sargent and Sickert and Shannon and Steer and Tonks and Augustus John and her walls were radiant with mementoes of those years; but the loss of a leg in a motor accident had cruelly slowed her up. Much later, a friend told me that she had been the model for Adrian Jones’s bronze figure of Peace in the quadriga on Decimus Burton’s Wellington Arch. Since then, I can never pass the top of Constitution Hill without thinking of her and gazing up at the winged and wreath-bearing goddess sailing across the sky. As the pigeon flies, it was under a minute from her window sill.