“The kings of the earth stand up, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord.”
(THE 2ND PSALM)
The revolt against God was plainly in the very air of early 1960s England, before most of us were even aware of it. I think I now know why. God was associated in our minds with the tottering, enfeebled secular authorities of our country, to whom we had bound ourselves at misty, freezing memorial ceremonies each November.
The authorities were not what they claimed to be. The cool competence and the stoicism were a fraud. The catastrophe of the Suez episode in 1956, when our governing class had tried to behave like imperial rulers in Egypt and had fallen flat upon their faces, had shrunk them and weakened their power to command. The government had sought to abuse (as later governments would also abuse) the semi-sacred incantations of 1940: Egypt’s leader, Gamel Abdel Nasser, was a “dictator.” Acceding to his demands for control over the Suez Canal was “appeasement.” As we have found so often since, these modern villains are not Hitlers, and their ill-armed backward nations are not the Third Reich. Nor are our modern leaders noble or heroic. Secretly colluding with France and Israel to fake a pretext for war, as the British government did in 1956, was hardly Churchillian. Although the full details of this chicanery took years to emerge, the smell was bad, and we were vaguely aware that they had lied rather crudely to us. We were also conscious that they had done so while trying to employ the cult of Churchill with which we were imbued. (More about that in a later chapter.)
This failure and dishonesty sapped and rotted everything and everyone, from the local vicar and the village policeman to the grander figures in the nation. None of them ever had quite the confidence they had possessed before. Some, through strength of character, could still exert authority of their own. Others, who had relied on the institutional force of obedience to the good state, had lost it. Older teachers, who could not be trifled with, were still terrifying persons whose anger could make all the blood in your body drain into your feet with a word of rebuke. But that was because they still carried in themselves the style and manners of a more confident time. Younger ones were just ordinary humans. They had to charm us—or fail.
The change imposed by the Suez catastrophe visibly diminished my own father, because one effect of the defeat was the rapid scrapping of much of the Royal Navy in which he served and the enforced retirement of thousands of officers and men. I can just remember the later parts of the crisis itself, through a haze of five-year-old incomprehension. There was no fuel for our family car, because the blockships sunk in the Suez Canal had held up the oil tankers. As a result, my father had to struggle across Dartmoor in the autumnal winds on a decrepit bicycle, at that time definitely not thought of as fitting transport for an officer and gentleman.
This was a nasty foretaste of much greater indignities to follow. Not long afterward, my father found himself unexpectedly forced to retire from the abruptly shrunken fleet in which he had spent his entire adult life. He had to lay aside his splendid uniform and go off to work in an ordinary office in a civilian suit, far from the sea and the wind that he loved. It was easy to tell he did not much like the change, and nor did I. In those pre-terrorist times, officers in the British armed services still wore their uniforms in public places rather than hiding their occupation, as they do now. And they were proper uniforms—not camouflage overalls, but assemblies of brass and braid more-or-less Victorian in their splendor.
I can recreate in my mind the terrible explosion of jealousy and regret I felt when a schoolfellow’s father, who had survived the post-Suez cull, arrived on a visit to our school one winter evening, in the grandeur of a naval commander’s rig, greatcoat, gold braid, and epaulettes. He swept into the high eighteenth-century hall looking enormously tall and confident, as he was meant to do. The boy in question had until that moment seemed to me to be insignificant and dull, a bespectacled, silent nobody. But that night I would happily have been him instead of me.
Our school was in those days very emphatically naval. Every one of the chilly dormitory chambers in which we wept silently for our far-off homes, before surrendering to sleep on our hard, iron-framed beds, was named after a great warrior on the seas. I can remember the sequence to this day: Blake, Hawke, Benbow, Rodney, Grenville, Frobisher, Howe, Hardy, Sturdee (the sick bay), and finally—for the senior boys—the greatest of all, Drake and Nelson, saviors of their country from the foreign menace. It strikes me now as interesting that Blake—Oliver Cromwell’s “General at Sea”—was excused for his anti-monarchist revolutionary sympathies, in a thoroughly royalist and conservative school, by virtue of having been a fine seadog. Two of my teachers were known by their naval and military rank, one a naval commander, one a captain of marines. We all assumed that the ingeniously sarcastic man in charge of our physical education had been a sergeant-major in the army. Even the headmaster’s own apartment, with its interesting personal library (the socialist thrillers of Eric Ambler jostling with Fyodor Dostoevsky) and its fearsome Edwardian bathtub, all brass levers and mysterious valves, bore a wooden plaque commemorating Admiral Lord Samuel Hood.
We were expected to follow in this tradition, if we could, though I was to find out around that time that my eyesight did not meet the exacting standards of Her Majesty’s Navy. My school, it was clear, would never name a dormitory after me, and I would not, after all, be perishing nobly at my post in cold northern seas in some future war. My old Wonder Book of the Navy, with its stiff pages and ancient illustrations of grinning bluejackets coaling dreadnoughts and ramming shells into the breeches of enormous guns, had specially inspired me with the story of sixteen-year-old Jackie Cornwell, Boy (First Class) aboard HMS Chester at the Battle of Jutland. Mortally wounded, he had dutifully stayed by his gun. His captain, Robert Lawson, wrote to Jackie’s mother:
He remained steady at his most exposed post at the gun, waiting for orders. His gun would not bear on the enemy; all but two of the ten crew were killed or wounded, and he was the only one who was in such an exposed position. But he felt he might be needed, and, indeed, he might have been; so he stayed there, standing and waiting, under heavy fire, with just his own brave heart and God’s help to support him.
How I had envied him.
But now it was obvious that Jackie Cornwell (who was originally tipped into a nameless mass grave and only later canonized as an official War Hero) would not be needed in the future. In fact, I began to suspect that in my England he might even be jeered at for staying at his post when he should have been jostling for urgent treatment in the sick bay and perhaps saving his life.
I had begun to wonder, with increasing urgency, what I might do instead of joining the navy. During brief spells spent outside the confines of school, where I could see how rackety and exhausted my country was becoming, it was also growing plain to me (though I would never have expressed it so clearly at the time) that I had been brought up for a world that no longer existed. I think I realized this, finally and irrevocably, on the dark, cold January day when they propped a small back-and-white TV on a high shelf in the school dining hall, and we watched on a fuzzy screen the funeral of Sir Winston Churchill—which was also the funeral of the British Empire—ending with his coffin being borne into the deep countryside for burial, on a train hauled by the steam engine bearing his name. It had been taken out of retirement for the occasion. After it was all over, the funeral train was brusquely towed back to the depot by a workaday diesel.
There was to be no more picturesqueness of that sort. A cheap and second-rate modernity was to replace the decrepit magnificence we had grown used to. The timetable for the funeral train’s run still exists, noting that it “passed” various signal boxes and junctions at certain set times (though not mentioning the thousands of people who somehow knew that they ought to line the track in the January chill). Read aloud, so that “passed” sounds the same as “past,” the timetable is a sort of elegy on rails, as the body-bag of Imperial England is zipped up ready for final disposal.
This loss of confidence, combined with the knowledge that I could not, would not follow in the expected tradition, must have gone deep. It combined with the effects on me—and everyone I knew—of the Profumo Affair, Britain’s great political sex scandal. This was the moment when the ruling class that had failed morally and martially at Suez failed in another equally morally important way, as they perched lubriciously around a country-house swimming pool. How odd it all seemed to me as I tried to decode the unhelpfully incomplete accounts of the affair in the newspapers. I was more sexually innocent than it would nowadays be possible to be and had no idea what had got into all these characters. We used to practice target-shooting in a dusty loft—the smell of gun-oil and lead still brings it readily back to me—and I would imagine myself on the African Veldt or the Western front, a hidden sniper training his sights on the hated foe. What—apart perhaps from driving a steam locomotive—could be more fun? Yet here was John Profumo, the Secretary of State for War (a title now abolished in case it upsets people), a man with access to all the wonderful toys of war, from submarines to tanks, accused of spending his time with…girls who also dallied with Russian spies. It was incomprehensible when he had so many guns to play with. What could be wrong with the man?
I was barely aware of what was going on—twelve-year-old schoolboys of my class were not then expected to understand what government ministers might have been doing with call girls, even if the headlines could not be kept from us completely. As for osteopaths, Soho drinking clubs, and West Indian gangsters—the other characters and locations in this seedy melodrama—who knew what to make of them? Certainly not I. I had no idea what a call girl was (or an osteopath) and, as I recall, very little curiosity about what they did. The mere idea of a Soho drinking club gave me a headache, as it still does. We were more interested in the fact that the girls had also been associating with Russian diplomats, presumably spies.
This was also the time of the first James Bond films, of SMERSH (the KGB’s special murder squad), and of knives concealed in the shoes of Soviet assassins. Spies were easy to understand, though surely it should be our spies sharing women with Russian defense ministers rather than the other way around? We always won, didn’t we? A Russian naval attaché must, by definition, be an emanation of evil. What was a Minister of the Crown doing in such company? Why were the Russians even allowed to maintain such a person in London? By contrast, I rather liked the look of Mandy Rice-Davies, one of the call girls, and I have long treasured her eloquent and timeless dismissal of a politician’s denial of his role in the scandal “He would, wouldn’t he?” Many, many years later I actually met the naval attaché involved: poor vodka-wrecked Captain Yevgeny Ivanov, a babbling human husk, his memory gone, his navy a rusting memory like ours, sinking into his final darkness in a Moscow apartment. So much for the glamour of spies.
While we small boys in our knee-length shorts did not really understand what people such as Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies were for, we knew that their presence in our national life was a bad sign. We knew it had gone rotten, that what we had been taught to revere had lost its nerve and lost its virtue. How right we were. At that time there was only one boy at my school with divorced parents, a fact we whispered about with mingled smugness and horror. Now it is commonplace to find divorced boarding-school parents. To give some idea of the change that has overtaken us, I should also record my reaction to hearing on a news bulletin that some pop star and his girlfriend were to have a baby out of wedlock. I found this unimaginable, impossible. Weddings came first, babies afterward. This was the natural order. I was convinced the baby would be physically abnormal, and my mother had to talk me gently, if elliptically, out of my distress.
Oddly enough, around the same time as the Profumo Affair, a miniature moral scandal exploded at my school. A popular (as it turned out, too popular) master suddenly disappeared. He had been in the habit of entertaining some of the better-looking twelve- and thirteen-year-olds in his room, playing jazz records, and introducing them, perhaps a little early, to the joys of wine. That, alas, was not all he introduced them to. Somebody talked, as someone always does. Justice—or at least retribution—descended swiftly and silently in the night. One morning he was not there, and his classes were taken by others, without explanation. His name was not mentioned. The local newspaper was not in its wonted place on the table in the hall. Several of the older boys made it their business to get hold of a contraband copy, so we were introduced to the mysterious phrase “indecent assault” for the first time. It would not be mysterious for long.
The change that followed was not slow or gradual, but catastrophic, like an avalanche. Small children now know and use swearwords as punctuation. (Mostly they know no other punctuation.) Sexual acts are openly discussed on mainstream broadcasts and explained in British school classrooms with the aid of bananas and hockey-sticks, and boys not much older than I was then are (unsurprisingly) fathering children. The astonishing swiftness of the change, like the crumbling of an Egyptian mummy to dust as fresh air rushes into the long-sealed tomb chamber, has been one of the features of my life. It suggests that our old morality was sustained only by custom and inertia, not by any deep attachment or understanding, and so had no ability to withstand the sneering assault of the modern age.
What happened to me next was, as I shall contend, entirely normal and usual for a boy of my sort in any age or country. But in this context of decay and collapse, it was far more dangerous and far more prevalent.