What, meanwhile, of my home and my family? Since October 1938, when I went up to Worcester, things had changed much, and for ever. After recovery from his illness and retirement from medical practice, my father had in effect abdicated from his position as head of the family. He now left decisions to others, and acquiesced in them. From an emotional point of view this meant little enough either to my sister or my brother. Katharine, teaching, was now twenty-eight and had not been living at home — except now and then - for some time. John, who was twenty-six, still lived at Oakdene but, as I have explained, had never had a warm relationship with my father. Emotionally, he stood to lose little or nothing from my father’s diminution. I think that, although he never said so, he thought that my father had failed in his family duty and responsibilities - as indeed he had - and that for this reason he felt contempt and resentment, but little sympathy. He could feel little sympathy because he had never kept my father’s company for enjoyment or from any sense of affinity. My father’s merits left him cold, while his failings irritated him. He thought, too, that he had let my mother down; for John, undemonstrative though he was, had always been devoted to my mother. He felt resentment because responsibility for the family’s economics, which were in a bad state - indeed, well-nigh desperate - had now devolved upon him, so that he had had to take on a rotten job, someone else’s balls-up. Always pessimistic by nature - a great smeller of rats and discoverer of flies in ointment - he now had only too good cause for shaking his head and wondering what would become of us. I owe him much gratitude, in this worrying situation, for always doing everything he could to help me and never showing anything but full support - no envy - for my going up to Oxford. Although I was too young, too self-centred and irresponsible to realize it at the time, he had a pretty rough ride, inexperienced as he was, with his new family responsibilities; and he did well. I thank him much.
For me, of course, this was a time of adolescent expansion, although for the rest of the family it was a time of harsh retrenchment. My father - he must have had a bad fright – now drank nothing stronger than beer, and not a lot of that. During these final years of the ‘thirties he gradually began to assume the ways of an old man. He didn’t know what to do with himself: he often said he wished it was time to go to bed, but when he went to bed he would say he wished it was time to get up. He thought ill of the state of the world - and God knows it was fully as bad as it could be - and largely gave over initiative and any sort of personal purpose or direction. Whither, indeed, could he go? He had no work and no money. While I was still at Bradfield he had derived vicarious enjoyment from my success, but Oxford he could not relate to, though he came over there to see me when I asked him. The last thing I wanted was for him to drop out of my world, and in the vacations we still enjoyed a good deal of our old relationship. It was different, though, for I was no longer a child and he could no longer be my guide and mentor, for at bottom - though he never said so - his heart was not in what I was doing. I know now, too, that he must have regarded the impending inevitable war as a terrible threat to his children and also the end of his world; as was no more than the truth. He was not a stout-hearted man by temperament and the fire had been knocked out of him. Yet I could still keep warm at the ashes.
Some time round about midsummer of 1939, when he was sixty-nine, my father was advised that he must have all his teeth extracted, or else incur further grave illness. He submitted. I well remember his return home on a beautiful June afternoon, when Arthur Klingler, my Bavarian friend (who was staying for a week or two of the long vac), and I were practising trout casts on the lawn. I called out and asked him how he was. He replied ‘Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.’ Yet in those days I had little real feeling and was short on empathy: I felt sorry, but I didn’t really set myself to imagine what it must be like to have all your teeth out, or what it would do to your state of mind. God forgive me.
My brother and sister had now decided that there was no alternative to selling Oakdene and installing my parents in a smaller, more economical house. After looking at a few, it seemed to them that the best course would be to move into Thorn the gardener’s cottage, which was already ours. (The Thorns, of course, would perforce be leaving us anyway.) It would need a bit done to it, but not much. So during the summer of 1939 Oakdene, my beloved and life-long home, was put on the market. Like most people who have ever sold a house, my brother has spent the rest of his life regretting that we didn’t get more for it. He had a true sense of responsibility, yet he was by temperament someone for whom nothing ever went quite right.
Oakdene was sold, a few weeks after the outbreak of the war, to a middle-aged couple called Balfour, who could not have been nicer to deal with or to have as neighbours. Mr Balfour, not to mince words, was a gentleman, of the same family as Arthur Balfour, the Edwardian Prime Minister. He was cultured, friendly, extremely loquacious and a pleasant man to deal with. Mrs Balfour was also pleasant enough, but had her own ideas about what she wanted to do with the property. Now, I personally began to feel one disadvantage of moving to the Thorns’ adjacent cottage: you had to stand by - without a word, of course - and watch what she did. And what she did, principally, was to fell the trees. Oakdene’s three acres contained plenty of trees, and several of these had individuality and had in effect been landmarks in our lives. We knew every tree in the garden, of course. I could draw a map, now. I have never been able to understand Mrs Balfour’s motive in felling the trees, for having felled them she did nothing more to the sites. She felled the three silver birches along the crest of Bull Banks, and she also felled the Spanish chestnut - which made even my brother wince and express regret. Then she dug up the circular rose garden outside the dining-room windows: but she didn’t convert it to something else. She just dug it up and left a mess. It all seemed very odd; but we never quarrelled with the Balfours.
I personally left Oakdene - for the last time - for Oxford in October 1939, and returned to the cottage at the end of term in December. I found living there not unpleasant, even though we were a tightish fit. My brother had enlisted, earlier in 1939, as a gunner in a territorial artillery regiment, the Berkshire Yeomanry, which mobilized upon the outbreak of war. During that winter he was stationed on Newbury race course, where he had a pretty rotten time (it was a very hard winter).
The cottage was comfortable and snug enough: I accepted the situation contentedly. The only thing I couldn’t quite get used to (though I never said so, of course) was the rather explosive gas geyser for hot water in the cold little bathroom (a lean-to), which took about half an hour to trickle you a bath.
It was in this cottage that my father spent the last six and a half years of his life. I’m afraid he cannot have been happy, although he never showed as much in his dealings with me. I myself, at nineteen, was young and foolish and full of my own doings. It honestly never once occurred to me that we had come down in the world.
It may seem astonishing - even incredible - to a reader that it should not have exercised my mind that the family fortunes had failed and that my father, quite contrary to anything that ‘Dr Jarge’ could have foreseen or imagined when he left Martock for Newbury with his bride in 1910, was ending his life in failure and straitened circumstances, with the local reputation of a dried-out alcoholic. I didn’t feel regretful, or in the least ashamed of my family. The reasons, I now think, were three. First, the war had an obliterating effect upon private and personal troubles. Everyone’s feelings at that time were primarily concerned with the war. I remember an amusing song of those days, popularized by the comedian Jack Warner, called ‘Didn’t you know? There’s a war on’, in which the imaginary verse-by-verse protagonists, each of whom would normally have been more than justified in complaining or even in extreme anger, were always met with the bland rejoinder ‘Didn’t you know? There’s a war on’ (e.g., the returning husband finding his wife in bed with another man, etc.).
Secondly, my parents themselves never said anything to me to suggest that they had any regrets or were at all sorry for themselves.
The third reason was my own temperament, which rendered me more or less immune to considerations like ‘What are people thinking?’ or ‘Have I got as much money, or social standing, as that fellow over there?’ My life was really centred upon four things: my love for my father; my friends at Oxford — friendships more enjoyable, productive and rewarding than I could ever have imagined; my work on the history syllabus, which I found enormously enjoyable and gratifying; and fourthly my imaginative life, which was in certain respects more real to me than reality.
I had always had a lot of fantasy in my life - as far back as I could remember. Once it had been the kingdom of Bull Banks, its halls and state rooms secluded among the laurels; a land-locked realm, deriving its attributes largely from King Arthur and peopled with knights, whose enemies were foxes. Later, at Horris Hill and under the influence of films and of writers like Sapper and Dornford Yates, Bull Banks had become a gay, fashionable city-state of sport and pleasure, its celebrities, my companions, forever playing cricket or football matches or dancing in champagne-flowing night clubs (like those of Ralph Lynn and Winifred Shotter; Bertie Wooster; Marlene Dietrich). At Horris Hill I had found that this Bull Banks carried so much conviction and included so much detail that other boys revealed their own fantasy countries (and one or two, I suspect, hastened to invent them). A few years ago, walking along the Embankment by Charing Cross, I ran into a friend from those days, and as we chatted, recalled those kingdoms - his and mine. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘but you had the ends much better tied up than I did.’ Certainly a great deal of my time and mental energy went into the fantasies which in my infancy compensated for solitude and at boarding-school for boring features like Mr Morris and Mr Arnold.
Not the least of the wonderful things about Oxford was that it happily accepted and took on board even your fantasy potential - whoever would have thought it? - developed and transformed it, blending it with magic oils, with sounds and sweet airs that gave delight and hurt not. Christopher Isherwood found exactly this at Cambridge, and wrote about it in his autobiographical Lions and Shadows. Alasdair, like Isherwood’s friend Chalmers (‘Already the crowds begin -’), would find phrases suggesting themselves as we listened to music. I recall how we derived, as surely as ever did Swann from the ‘petite phrase’ of Vinteuil, a peculiar and personal meaning from the Leonora No. 3. (Alasdair used to sing, I think, he soon, will really be quite free.’)
Indeed music was the great, the principal releasing agent, acting like some miraculous catalyst to bring upon us trance and ecstasy, to release from within headlong excitement and frenzies of communicative speech. We were often transported and borne away by music, as on the night when Pickard-Cambridge took us to hear the Schubert Octet. Arthur Klingler struggling like a wrestler with the additional handicap of having to express himself in English (‘This man Mozart … he is more great than is possible’); William Brown hardly able to contain himself in patience until the end, to tell us that one of Sophocles’s choruses had exactly such a rhythm; Frank Savory - the only trained musician of us all - intently following a Schubert trio with a pocket score; Alasdair saying nothing at all until he was pressed and at last coming out, Celtic fashion, with something so pregnant yet enigmatic that everyone felt an immediate response and none could find a reply. How lucky, how supremely blest for the nonce we were, waiting for Hitler in the silver sunsets that still shine across Worcester of an evening!
I suppose that in all our elated foolishness, nothing was more intense than the cult of Chopin, out of which grew leagues-long forests of fantasy. Up to a point it was I who was responsible for this, for it was I who bought the records, one by one, and I who placed on the dresser in my room a portrait of Chopin between two green wax candles in pewter candlesticks. I even persuaded the domestic bursar to let me repaper my room in a light green, faintly shot with orange. However, you can’t propagate a cult by yourself. There have to be devotees. (‘Everyone rapt in his own fantasy,’ as Alasdair said.) Clifford, William, Arthur Klingler and the rest of us would immerse ourselves, night after night, in Chopin, while snow fell deep or moths flitted in from the scented garden through the uncurtained windows. Our pianists, for the most part, were Cortot, Rubinstein and De Pachman. I still have the records, but seventy-eights don’t work properly on a modern machine, and in any case I have good and sufficient reason to prefer not to open the door any more upon the heartbreak of Chopin. Yet on those nights when the dragonfly hung poised over the abyss (yes, I know the man said ‘butterfly’, but I think dragonfly’s better), none of us would have paid attention to a voice that told us that this truth was evanescent and would one day become irrecoverable. ‘Phaeacia’s been discovered: it can’t be undiscovered.’ It can; and candles - even spiral-fluted, green ones - can burn out. This all happened so long ago.
During my last pre-war term at Oxford - the Trinity term of 1940 - something more than delightful, a true and splendid blessing, overtook me. This occurred while France was falling and our army was escaping in near-rout from Dunkirk.
The tenth of May was - still is, I suppose - my birthday. I had arranged to give a party in The Jolly Farmers, and a lot of people were coming: not only my Worcester friends, but Baptista’s crowd and the Kingdom Come magazine lot, and some of the university swimming club (I used to swim, after a fashion), and Hilda Brown, Stan Roberts and other town friends. The beer was to flow like the Kennet.
My scout, Bill Money, woke me as usual about a quarter to eight on a perfect May morning. ‘Good morning, sir. Many happy returns, but I don’t know about the day. Them buggers have gone into Belgium and Holland.’
I took this in as best I could. ‘What d’you reckon will happen, then, Money?’
‘Anything could happen, sir. Anything at all.’
But now, just at the start - the first day of the German attack - there was not a lot more to be learned from anyone - even the wireless - than Money had told. It wasn’t that we weren’t concerned or that we didn’t take it seriously. We were simply waiting to see what would happen. None of us, of course, imagined that France would fall. Inasmuch as we thought at all, we vaguely supposed that some situation would develop not dissimilar from that of the 1914-18 war. Anyhow, it was lovely weather, and I wasn’t going to let the Jerries - or even the thought of them - interfere with my twentieth birthday. I did a morning’s work on the French Revolution and after lunch went on the Cherwell with Mike and Alasdair. None of us was apprehensive, even though what was happening was never entirely absent from our minds.
My party at The Jolly Farmers was a great success. No one had ever thought of giving a party in a pub. before. I can’t think why not: it was the easiest way imaginable to give a party. You simply handed the landlord a capital sum and told him to serve the company free until it was exhausted. Both bars and the Aunt Sally yard outside were well filled. It was more distinguished undergraduate company than I normally kept, partly because, student-like, people had brought other people along. I remember asking William Brown how many he thought were there. ‘If all the people,’ he replied, ‘who’ve come to this party were laid end to end, I shouldn’t be at all surprised.’ However, nobody was rowdy or violent and nothing got smashed.
In the middle of it all, someone came bursting in with the news that Chamberlain had resigned and Mr Churchill had become Prime Minister. It seemed wonderful and the whole party stood and cheered. At that time we had no notion, of course; of Churchill’s stature as a statesman or of what he was going to achieve. This was before the fall of France, before Dunkirk. But there had for some time past, throughout the whole country, been a general feeling that Chamberlain was not suited to be a war leader and that since Munich he had lost credibility. He had not prosecuted the war with confidence or vigour. This attack of Hitler’s had at least done one thing: it had shown conclusively that we needed someone other than Mr Chamberlain. All we knew of Churchill - as yet - was that he had been consistently anti-Nazi for years, that he was pugnacious and that he really hated Hitler. Anyway, we felt that any change, with this crisis now upon us, could only be for the better. So we stood and cheered beerily, as the sun of the tenth of May 1940 set upon St Ebbe’s.
One unforeseen result of this party was that I was asked to quite a few more myself. As I have explained, none of our little set had money (my party had been paid for out of birthday money) and we certainly didn’t go in for socializing in fashionable, Lord Sebastian Flyte society. But one thing undergraduate society was not was snobbish, and several people who had come along to my party felt like reciprocating. Besides, I had apparently made a bit of an impression as ‘the chap who gave a party in a St Ebbe’s pub.’, which was regarded as stylish and original.
At more than one of these parties which I went to, I noticed one particular girl who struck me as very attractive. I had no idea who she was, and didn’t ask anyone. She was not conventionally pretty, but with all the bloom of youth upon her she was most striking. She had dark hair, an unusual, sensitive face and a very graceful way of moving, light and quick. She seemed to radiate energy, laughing and responding to her companions with such readiness and warmth that I, watching, felt my heart turn over. She carried herself with so much assurance, I thought, that she was obviously an experienced socialite, a regular Oxford party-goer quite out of my star. So I leaned against the wall with my hands in my pockets, and gazed and reflected, as she burst into a peal of laughter at some crack I couldn’t hear, how lucky some people were to have access to girls like that.
For the demon, this last twenty months, had given me little peace. Natalia Galitzine had been followed by various disappointments, including a girl home student who, in my arms, said ‘No, Richard, you’re deceiving yourself: you couldn’t want me.’ It was a compliment of sorts, but it was all too disappointingly true. And when, determined nevertheless to persevere, I pressed my suit, ‘You mustn’t say things like that to me, Richard.’ A little while after Brenda, I became a very platonic friend of Betty Sants, the girl who was a friend of Ralph Glasser (the Gorbals boy at Oxford) and who later died, after a bicycle accident, at the end of a coma of more than a hundred days - one of the longest comas, I believe, known to medicine. Betty was a jolly good sort, but not what I was looking for. Then there was a pretty, blonde girl, named Bertha, in the gramophone record shop at Newbury, who at my invitation came over to Oxford to be taken on the river. I don’t know why it didn’t work, but it didn’t. I could only, regretfully, agree with Alasdair: ‘I’ve never yet seen you with a girl and thought you looked like a couple.’
One summer evening in the prime of Hitler’s weather, as his tanks forged on through France, I went to a party at Wadham, given by a young man called Hector Bruce-Binney. Hector Bruce-Binney was an undergraduate with a great deal of money, who was sedulously cultivated by John Waller for the reason that, though lacking any literary talent, he was ready to put a lot of it into Kingdom Come. His rooms at Wadham were expensively got up and rather overdone in an incongruous mixture of styles - his own idea. (I remember stars on the ceiling, but little else.)
I had come alone, but there were quite a few people there whom I knew. I chatted and moved about. Suddenly I saw, leaning on one end of the mantelpiece, the girl with dark hair; there was no one with her.
I strolled across and began some sort of conversation. She had the most wonderful voice, a contralto which came arrestingly from her slight, trim frame. And her manner was warm; so responsive that I needed all my self-possession to look as though this sort of thing was nothing new to me. We fell easily into talk. She asked me to get her another drink, and I could see that she was someone who enjoyed drinking. In fact, she enjoyed herself. Energy and animation fairly blazed out of her - a jolie-laide of nineteen or so, Jung’s kore personified.
She told me she was the daughter of a don at Exeter (College). Her name was Jennifer Tomkinson. She was not a student.
The room was hot, crowded and full of smoke. (In those days everyone smoked.) We were chatting happily, with no least self-consciousness (the curse of the young): Jennifer’s company seemed to dispel anything of that sort. As for me, I felt that all this was too good to be true. I also had the feeling that it was taking place without my volition, as though a boat were gliding downstream with the current. Something had happened. For the first time a girl - a girl I had had an eye for and now, on acquaintance, found wholly delightful - was showing me that she thought me attractive too.
After a time I suggested that perhaps it would be nice to go outside and walk in the garden. Jennifer readily agreed, and we slipped out unnoticed. The May evening was serene, Wadham garden tranquil, cool and beautifully solitary. We came to a great copper beech and spontaneously I looked it up and down with the eye of the tree-climbing child I had been only a few years before. It was a cinch.
‘Would you like to climb that tree?’ I asked Jennifer.
‘I’d simply love to.’
I was still to learn that Jennifer seldom refused any reasonable proposal, as long as she liked the person it came from. Reciprocity, as the Americans say, was her middle name. We addressed ourselves to the tree, I going up first, partly so that I could pick the holds and give her some help from above, and partly because I thought it would be a bit embarrassing for her to have me looking up her skirt. As far as I was concerned it was easy climbing, bough after bough, but Jennifer, lacking about three inches of my height, couldn’t always quite reach the branch above and was glad of a hand. Her enthusiasm, however, remained undented.
At its top the tree formed a sort of little arbour, a firm place to sit enclosed by sprays of leaves. I reached it, turned, gave Jennifer both my hands, drew her up beside me and kissed her warmly and with confidence. She responded ardently, and when I released her set about kissing me on her own account, looking into my eyes and laughing at my astonished joy. Yet she, too, seemed in a little amazement. Intuitively, behind my flood of desire and happiness, I sensed that this girl was not the sophisticate I had supposed, but someone more or less as inexperienced as myself.
I can’t recall how long we stayed at the top of the tree - if indeed I ever knew — but when we came down we didn’t go back to the party. We went out to a meal somewhere or other, drank some beer in a pub. and together strolled down towards the Parks.
‘D’you feel like a couple?’ I asked Jennifer a little tipsily.
She looked perplexed. ‘But we’ve had a couple already.’
It seemed a splendid joke. I explained. ‘I’d like to meet this Alasdair of yours,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow?’
Walking back to Worcester down Beaumont Street, I knew beyond doubt that I had attained to a different state of being. There was no catch in it: it had happened and this was what it was like — reciprocated love. Then and there I determined that, come what may, I wouldn’t do anything that could possibly forfeit this radiant blessing I had stumbled upon. I could still feel her touch upon my cheeks and my wrists. Everything seemed so amazing that I vaguely thought there was something I ought to be doing about it; but no, there was nothing to do except wait until tomorrow.
I needn’t have worried. Jennifer was to be my girl and no one else’s for a long time to come — as we reckoned time in those days. She loved me as much as I loved her: but it was some while before I could believe it, before I became convinced. At a distance she had seemed such a smart girl, so elegant, so self-possessed, so much surrounded by polished undergraduate friends. And so she was: but there was a paradox in it. She was not experienced, not canny, not the girl my timidity had suggested. What I had thought poise was really nothing but self-forgotten, happy spontaneity. For she was a great one for forgetting herself, was Jennifer. She could enter into just about anything going as naturally as a child, and she had a Cleopatra-like quality of making anything becoming which came from herself. ‘Oh, bloody bugger!’ she would say happily, tripping over the punt pole, and it seemed not a teenage mannerism but perfectly natural and acceptable. (She didn’t do it too often, you see.)
My friends took to her immediately, and she to them. Mike Seale in particular, a handsome boy somewhat resembling the young James Stewart, was very much taken not only with her vivacity but in particular with her beautiful voice, and would question her again and again simply for the pleasure of hearing her speak. She was entirely at her ease with Alasdair, William and the others, for she was a girl who was used to being admired and, like Yum-Yum’s moon, there was not a trace upon her face of diffidence or shyness. The great thing about Jennifer was that she never put on any sort of act. She had come by magic and magic she remained.
All through those bright summer weeks, while the Germans smashed their way towards Paris, the two of us were about as happy together as it is possible to be. I remember a garden party one evening out at Garsington, where some acquaintance said to me ‘Richard, what’s happened to you? You’ve changed in some way.’ I dallied with my golden chain and, smiling, put the question by. Hilda Brown, the Walton Street landlady at The Jolly Farmers, also took a great liking to Jennifer, who made her laugh. One day the two of us hitch-hiked to Newbury - hitch-hiking was easy with Jennifer - but my father didn’t warm to her. I don’t know; with hindsight, could he have been jealous? I know now that parents often are. But for once I didn’t care what my father thought. This was perhaps the happiest quality of my relationship with Jennifer; my own unwavering certainty. There were no second thoughts, no unwelcome discoveries. I knew what I wanted and this was it. She clearly felt the same.
What did she do for me? For in love there must be mutual conferral and a feeling that the other has qualities not your own. Quite simply, Jennifer was a totally different kind of person from me. She did not go in for passing exams. (or want to do so). She had no particular ambitions. She was certainly not a stupid girl - anything but - yet she was not academic, not particularly well-informed and did not try to be. I was a striver, but Jennifer, for all her bright energy and eager reciprocity, was lazy and self-content. Nor was she given to deliberation. There was an immediacy about her - about her reactions and her whole style - which suited her very well. Indeed, she enjoyed a youthful lightness of heart verging on the irresponsible. Yet God knows that one thing those times needed was lightness of heart, and the ability to put by the terrible things that were happening; for our time to take part in them had not yet come. It would be a fair criticism for any serious-minded person to say that we were nothing but playmates - Peter and Wendy — and that the relationship was childish. So it was, to the extent that we had no notion of marriage and that physical love - apart from kisses and caresses — didn’t enter into the picture. Desire did, certainly, but in the manner of those days, fifty years ago, Jennifer was apprehensive of so serious a step.
It must be remembered that, while today a young couple who are continually together and obviously fond of each other are not only condoned for making love but virtually expected to do so and even thought rather odd if they don’t (hostesses put them in the same bedroom, etc.), in those days all social pressure was very heavily the other way - heavily enough to give any girl second thoughts. Girls were brought up to think it cheap and contemptible. To be known to sleep with a lover most certainly didn’t do any unmarried girl, however independent, any good (see, e.g., Dorothy L. Sayers’s Strong Poison). An eighteen-year-old virgin, living at home with her mother, was more than fully entitled to have qualms and to feel that it was a risk simply not worth taking. Risk? Of what? Of possible pregnancy, but, apart from that, of the most almighty row imaginable if the truth were to come out. I had, of course, met Jennifer’s mother - a delightful person with a warm sense of humour and fun - and I knew that she felt in no doubt that we would stop short of physical love. That was why she allowed Jennifer so much freedom and why she was always so nice to me,
If Jennifer herself was in two minds - as she was - I was quite ready to accept the situation. This surprised me. I had thought I was ruthlessly, single-mindedly carnal, and it was rather pleasing to discover that I valued Jennifer’s inclinations more than my own selfish will. Besides, I could see that if she was only going to be full of regret and guilt afterwards, it would be ruinous to all our pleasure together to set out to overcome her reluctance. She was very good for me as things were: for she was the very Antipodes of Hiscocks (who would not, I sensed, have liked her much). There was a wholeness, a feminine roundness (as opposed to a male sharpness), a completeness, about Jennifer. She didn’t compete or toil in the spirit: she simply existed. There was an admirable humility about her, for despite being if anything too conscious of her limitations, she was the best-tempered girl in the world. In fact, now that I come to think of it, though I once or twice saw her reproachful, I never once saw her angry. It wasn’t her style. I hadn’t heard about Jung in those days, but if I had, I might have mused on one of his cracks: ‘Man seeks perfection, but perfection is incomplete. Woman seeks completion, but completion is imperfect.’
Our happy summer went on, while the world ran ruinward. The Germans, advancing at the rate of thirty miles a day, reached the channel at Abbeville. Older people - including Bill Money - shook their heads and said that this was worse than anything they could remember. The exact succession of the days and disasters escapes me now, but of course I remember Dunkirk. Quite a few of our evacuated soldiers were brought back to Oxford. They were to be seen around, and you could tell them by their air of battered exhaustion, even though they had been fed and rested. Among them came a Worcester friend of mine, J. D. Evans, a man a year senior to me, who had joined up at the outbreak of war the previous year. J. D. told me that the Germans had to be seen to be believed. He said he had personally seen what looked like a solid wall of tanks appear over the crest of a slope. ‘And we’d got no effective weapons to oppose them.’ He also said that being dive-bombed by Stukas was most demoralizing. Again, we were not equipped to hit back. It sounded bad. I was, of course, ignorant in these matters and still a mere child - young for my age, I think - yet I shared the feelings and faith of everyone throughout the country. Somehow or other, it would all come right in the end. Later, George Orwell derisively summarized the British attitude: ‘Anyway, England is always right and England always wins, so why worry?’ I won’t say we weren’t worried, but I never met anyone who thought we should sue for peace. Apparently Hitler thought we were going to: the very idea shows his limited comprehension. My mother used to say ‘You mark my words, dear. That Hitler - he’ll come to a bad end.’ It’s easy enough, now, to say ‘Yes, of course,’ but it didn’t seem like that at the time, I can assure you.
The term ended. The University authorities had arranged what they called ‘special examinations’, on the results of which they awarded ‘war-time degrees’; although, as I’ve said, we all doubted how much use they would be later. However, this was no time to be thinking of such things. The storm was up and all was on the hazard. At least I got a distinction in the special examination, for which the College gave me a prize - a handsome copy of the letters of Keats, stamped in gold with the College crest.
Memories are vague. I remember, having come home, driving to Newbury station, about mid-day, to meet a train, though I don’t remember which of the family was on it. I was standing on the platform when I heard behind me two soldiers talking. One said something to which the other replied ‘What, ’ave the French packed it in, then?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Bloody ‘ell, that’s a go, ain’t it?’ My feelings were exactly those expressed by Louis MacNeice in his poem on the debacle: ‘Something twangs and breaks at the end of the street.’ France’s capitulation was a dying fall; it made a small, contemptible, paltry sound. Nevertheless, it left us all with the feeling that now we were in real trouble.
My calling-up papers arrived in the post. The thirteenth of July was my date to report to Aldershot. At the outbreak of war I, like the majority of undergraduates, had been interviewed at Oxford and asked to state my preferences. I had had one firm idea, based on what I knew of the First World War: anything rather than the infantry. If they were giving me a choice I would darned well exercise it.
My first option had been for the Navy. However, the Commissions Board (or whatever they called themselves) at Oxford wouldn’t grant this. They said that I was ‘a potential cadet’ and that the Navy was already over-subscribed with such. My next choice was the Fleet Air Arm, but this also was denied for the same reason. I could feel the infantry lapping about my ankles. In desperation I asked what about the Royal Army Service Corps? (Here I must give my sister due credit: it had been her shrewd suggestion.) Yes, into that I could be mobilized as a potential cadet, at the end of the summer term of 1940. I would receive instructions ‘through the usual channels’ in due course.
As the day drew nearer, my personal world seemed to disintegrate piece by piece, in a mundane and undramatic way, until I was left, in effect, stripped and bare. Our little Worcester set dispersed to the four corners of the British Isles, well knowing that within a matter of weeks we would be setting out again for barracks, aircraft stations and shore training establishments: for Catterick, Portsmouth, Down Ampney, Tidworth and the like. Any possible return to Oxford certainly did not lie in the foreseeable future. Books were taken to Blackwell’s or Thornton’s and sold for whatever they would fetch. Sheets, pillow-cases, towels, dinner services, glasses, pictures - all the things that normally stayed put during the vac. - had to be packed up to go home.
Alasdair’s tea service was Northallerton china; nice, capacious cups and saucers decorated in bold red and deep blue. I’d drunk tea from them many a time. ‘I can’t see any point in carting those all the way back to Newcastle,’ said Alasdair. ‘Take them to Newbury with you; they can stay there till we all get back.’
A last pint in the College buttery, farewells and tips to our scouts, another last pint in The Jolly Farmers and Oxford was left behind indefinitely; except for Jennifer, for there were still three weeks or so to run and she and I were determined to meet a few more times before I disappeared into the khaki belly of the whale.
Arrived back at home, I felt foolish doing nothing all day, even though it was my last chance for a long time. Everyone was doing something. So I went and joined myself unto a citizen of that country, and he sent me into his fields to feed swine. In point of fact, I went to work on Captain Cornwallis’s farm for two or three weeks (and that was the first money I ever earned). Swine were certainly involved, for on my first day one of the regular labourers, a fellow named Tucker, gave me a sacking apron and told me to hold a piglet upside-down by the back legs, gripping its head between my knees while he castrated it with his pocket knife. I set my teeth and fettled myself, but when I actually had the piglet in position, its back against my stomach, squealing blue murder, and Tucker opened the blade of his pocket knife with his front teeth, I said I couldn’t go through with it. (I doubt I could now.) Tucker closed his knife without a word and we started doing something else, but a little later he remarked ‘You’re not the first one to turn that job in, Richard.’
Most of the time, though, it was haymaking. I never learned to use a scythe, which I would have liked, partly because the hay was cut by revolving blades and horsepower, and partly because no one had the time to teach me. I raked the hay into field-long windrows by means of a horse-drawn, automatic rake. The tines bumped behind you, picking up the cut hay and pulling it along. As you came up to the end of each windrow you had to judge the right moment to pull a lever which lifted the tines and released the hay to lie in the row. Bennett, another of the men, let me carry on for a couple of hours and then suggested politely that perhaps I’d like to hand over to him. During the lunch break he asked ‘D’you know what the old mare said to me, Richard?’ I had no idea. ‘She asked if you could go back on the rake s’afternoon.’ There was a general laugh. I learned, that day, that a horse soon weighs up whoever is behind it (or on it, for that matter) and if it’s allowed to, will take advantage of the inexperienced to idle. On my second spell I took care that the mare became brisker.
It was at this time that the L.D.V. (Local Defence Volunteers) were formed, which later became the Home Guard. Every able-bodied man who, for one cause or another, wasn’t in the armed forces joined up, and there was no reason why I shouldn’t. (No one ever thought of women volunteering, although the A.R.P. was full of them.) We certainly were a scratch lot - no uniforms, of course, and no military weapons. All we could really do was keep a night-long watch at points all round the local countryside, in case Hitler’s parachute troops turned up. They were confidently expected (‘Reckon ‘e’s bound t’ave a go somewheres or other’) and anyone who had a shotgun was determined to make good use of it. It was a great time for rumours and for ‘My brother knows a man in Whitehall who was saying -’. Everyone believed for certain sure that in Holland the Germans had dropped parachutists disguised as nuns; so they probably would here. I imagine real nuns must have had quite a difficult time getting about on their lawful occasions.
I was given the odd and rather superfluous job of riding round our sentry posts on a bicycle in the middle of the night, so that I could be challenged and subsequently confirm that everyone had been where he ought to be. (I had no wireless, of course: no one had.)
It was only a week or two after midsummer and the nights were short. I remember, towards the end of one such night, wheeling my bicycle while I walked with two or three others along a country lane, on our way back to Wash Common and dismissal after the night’s duty. It was still dark - or darkish.
‘Won’t be long now, then, ’Arry,’ said one of my companions to another. ‘There’s th’old lark startin’ up, ’ear ’un?’
It was indeed a skylark on the wing. I had not known before that they sense the dawn and make their first song-flight in the darkness shortly before light comes into the sky. This knowledge was my most valuable - indeed my only - gain from my short service in the L.D.V.
Now there was hardly a piece of my civilian life left. I’d said good-bye to Jennifer; and to the few people in and around Wash Common who might possibly notice I was no longer about, including Jim Spencer, publican of The Bell. Packing’s not much of a problem to someone on his way to join up. Extra socks, ditto underclothes, handkerchiefs, pyjamas and a toothbrush and toothpaste were about the size of it. In those days, in theory at least, a man was supposed to be able to join the Army with nothing but what he stood up in and be completely ‘all found’ by the quartermaster. Issue kit included a safety razor but, oddly, neither pyjamas nor a toothbrush. So a soldier was officially acceptable sleeping in his shirt and pants and never cleaning his teeth. Is he still, I wonder?
The thirteenth of July came. All in the hot, sunny afternoon my mother and father came down Wash Hill to see me off from Newbury station. I was to go by train to Reading and change for Aldershot. The train, when it arrived, was a little diesel more like a large motor-coach. I got in, waved good-bye and, as we departed, sat down. I made up a triolet, though not a very good one.
“With that he lit a cigarette
And sang to keep his spirits up.
He thought “It will get tougher yet.”
(With that he lit a cigarette.)
He said “The footlights flicker up,
The house-lights dim, the stage is set.”
With that he lit a cigarette
And sang to keep his spirits up.’
Although, as my sister was for ever telling me, I was too much addicted to self-dramatization, even I could hardly have over-dramatized, within myself, that summer afternoon departure from Newbury on the diesel train. It was carrying me away not only from my childhood and adolescence, never to return, but from an entire society and way of life, from everything I had experienced and come to know as familiar. The world would never be the same again.