MY LIFE AS an undergraduate was more like that of a student in a Continental European city, where it is still common practice to study at your local university and live with your family, than that of most post-war British students, for whom living away from home for part of the year, on the historic Oxbridge pattern, has been an essential part of their tertiary education. When the system began to expand rapidly in the 1960s and ’70s, new universities were constructed on the American campus model with integral student accommodation, and civic redbrick universities provided their swelling intakes with what were called ‘halls of residence’ – a somewhat archaic phrase which covertly invoked the Oxbridge heritage. I lived at home, and commuted daily to college by train and Tube along with office workers and shop assistants. I have sometimes wondered if missing the experience of a residential university was a deprivation, but there are enough accounts by people who were made miserable by it to make me think that at seventeen and a half I might have been one of them. At home I was looked after by my mother, who cooked my meals and did my laundry and performed other mundane tasks for me more solicitously than any Oxbridge ‘bedder’ or ‘scout’. I had a nice room to myself, with an electric fire, and in very cold weather a coal fire, to keep me warm, and a desk at the window to work at. I had nothing to do but pursue my studies and extracurricular interests.
For Mary, going to university was more of an adventure and a challenge, though her daily journey was very similar to mine. She obtained university-approved ‘digs’ in Stockwell, a drab older suburb in south London between the boroughs of Lambeth and Brixton, served by the Northern Line of the Tube. She shared a bedsitter with another first-year student in the English Department, a tall, buxom girl with a rather affected posh manner and accent, and an obsessive interest in ‘boys’, with whom Mary found she had little in common, so she was grateful that my companionship and frequent invitations to Millmark Grove reduced the time she had to spend with her room-mate. Their landlady observed the rules prescribed by the University Lodgings Office scrupulously, and I was never allowed to cross her threshold until the very end of our first year. I splashed out on tickets for the college summer ball, held on the South Bank Festival site, and when I called at the house for Mary I was permitted to step inside and wait in the hall for her till she descended the staircase, looking stunning in the full-length blue taffeta dress she had made herself. Even so, after escorting her home at the end of the evening I had to kiss her goodnight on the porch, as usual. This was a repetition of my routine with Peggy, except that I had a much longer journey afterwards, and often I had to run to Stockwell station to catch a Tube that would connect with the last train to Brockley or New Cross. Occasionally, if it was very late, I would travel to Knightsbridge and wait in the vestibule of the Studio Club for a lift home with Dad.
That summer ball was one of the few occasions when our lives resembled those led by students at Oxford and Cambridge. Another was the annual Rag Week, when we rode down to the Strand on the backs of lorries in fancy dress and taunted our rivals at King’s College with the chant ‘All King’s Students Are Illegitimate’, repeated four times, and concluding ‘Buggering About the Strand’, Mary singing with gusto a word which had never previously passed her lips, or perhaps even impinged on her ears, and the literal meaning of which was known to neither of us. A more useful taste of traditional university education which we enjoyed occasionally was a condensed version of the undergraduate Reading Party, held at Cumberland Lodge, a fine seventeenth-century house in Windsor Great Park donated to the nation by King George VI as a conference centre. Initially it was specifically designed for use by institutions like UCL which did not have a residential communal life. Twice a year a group of up to thirty students from different years in the English Department and perhaps half a dozen staff would go down to Windsor by coach for a weekend of reading and discussions around a theme. We paid a subsidised rate for the privilege – and a privilege it was to chat and eat with our teachers in such surroundings. The food I remember was fairly dire, but the table settings were elegant and the furnishings and décor quite luxurious, with deep upholstered armchairs and sofas in the vast drawing room. The grounds, and the park itself, invited conversational strolls in good weather. I have warm memories of those weekends at Cumberland Lodge, which were a bonding as much as an educational experience. It moved intellectually upmarket in later years, and I think ceased to host undergraduate groups.
Mary and I were soon recognised as a couple by others in our year and none of the boys tried to displace me, but I was always watchful of potential rivals for the attention of this obviously attractive girl. I was somewhat apprehensive when a postgraduate in the Law Department called Marcus Lefebure made contact with Mary. His sister had been at the Enfield convent school with her, and they were slightly acquainted through that connection. He was a few years older than us, of French extraction, handsome in a refined, ascetic way, cultured, articulate and Catholic. It seemed to me that he and Mary got on well with each other, and that if he made a pitch for her affections he would be a formidable rival. He asked her out to a meal once, and I was relieved when he went off to do postgraduate research in Cambridge, but in fact I had no reason to be jealous. He invited us to visit him in Trinity College, and took us to lunch at a little Indian restaurant where I had a curry for the first time in my life and found it delicious. He told us that he had decided to try his vocation as a priest in the Dominican order, and in due course he was ordained. Marcus was chaplain to the Catholic students of Edinburgh University for many years, until he had a serious psychological breakdown and left the order and the priesthood, but not the Church, to become a lay counsellor. We kept in touch with him until his death at the age of seventy-eight from a particularly distressing, slowly crippling disease which he bore with saintly fortitude. It is a story which, like many others of a similar kind, I find difficult to reconcile with the idea of a loving personal God.
On a lighter note, I recall that Mary had another admirer at the University whose attempt to impress her ended unfortunately for him, though I did not discover the full farcical facts of the matter at the time. John Paddy Carstairs, then in his early forties, was a prolific British director of popular films, including comedies starring Norman Wisdom and a series based on the ‘Saint’ novels of Leslie Charteris. The films were of little artistic merit, but he nourished an interest in English literature and desired to improve his knowledge of it. He accordingly signed on as an ‘auditor’ in the UC English Department, meaning that he paid a fee to attend lectures of his choice, but received no tuition. He was a friendly, boyish-looking fellow who evidently enjoyed mixing with young people, and he took a fancy to Mary, whose looks inspired him to call her ‘Peaches and Cream’, subsequently shortened to ‘Peaches’. Eventually he invited her to have lunch with him and she accepted. Suspicious as I was, I couldn’t think of any good reason to dissuade her that wouldn’t seem silly and possibly insulting. She just thought he was being friendly, and probably that was the case; if he hoped to lay the foundations for a seduction he was certainly disappointed. Off she went to the date in her best dress and a new pair of high-heeled shoes. When I next saw her and asked her what the lunch had been like she said it had been very nice, but was vague and evasive about details, and it was only many years afterwards that she revealed to me what a disaster it had been. The high-heeled shoes were a mistake to begin with, for John Paddy Carstairs was extremely short in stature, and she towered over him as he escorted her into the smart restaurant he had chosen. She was quite unfamiliar with the protocol and routines of such a place, made imprudent choices from the menu, and had a prolonged coughing fit when something stuck in her throat, which alarmed the whole dining room. She told Carstairs that she did not drink wine (in fact she had never drunk anything alcoholic) but he ordered a bottle anyway, vainly hoping to persuade her to try it, and was obliged to consume all of it himself or see it wasted. Perhaps it acted as a welcome anaesthetic. He did not ask her out again.
It is very difficult to recall accurately how one felt and behaved sixty years after the event, so any written trace of such experience is illuminating, and sometimes surprising. When we were separated during vacations Mary and I exchanged letters, and a few handwritten pages from the middle of one I wrote to her in our first year, probably in the Easter vacation, have survived to give me some idea of how I courted her (that now distinctly archaic verb seems appropriate):
I have read your letter through several times & I find it delightfully typical. However I linger on the rare affectionate passages & skip through the rest, which has something of the conversation of a shy young girl at her first ‘tête à tête’ with her sweetheart. I am sure you have something more to say underneath, and if you could only break down your barrier of shyness it would make me so happy. Remember that you did so once when you first told me you loved me, – a gesture so miraculous on your part that I shall never cease to marvel at it, and a moment so thrilling that I shall never forget it. Let me refresh your memory & do a little homework for Mr Palmer as well . . .
That epistolary style now strikes me as highly artificial, like something lifted from a period novel, affecting a maturity I certainly didn’t possess, and the letter gets even more literary as it goes on. Kenneth Palmer was the lecturer who taught the Essay Writing class we both attended, and I recalled the ‘thrilling moment’ in the form of a creative writing exercise. It begins with an atmospheric evocation of rain falling on a London street at night, reflections of streetlamps, the gurgle of water in the gutters, etc., and a young couple sheltering under an umbrella.
The boy has his arm round her waist, and her cheeks are wet as dewy peaches are wet as she nestles against him, and they stand in a silence vibrating with unsaid thoughts. But his mind fidgets and he has to say something:
‘Penny for your thoughts.’ Then, remembering a former conversation as she does not reply, ‘Oh, I forgot: you don’t like saying what you’re thinking.’
She answers, rather hastily, ‘O yes I do – sometimes.’
A long, long pause, while he ponders & the never-ceasing accompaniment of the rain goes on. Then, delivered in calm, level tones, but coming in their supreme import like a new & dazzling meteor hurled into the heavens from another cosmos – seven simple words: ‘I was thinking that I love you.’
And still the rain fell. But the world had changed.
Cue violins and the close-up of a prolonged kiss. This must have described a real event, rhetorically heightened in the hope of drawing from Mary some equivalently ardent declaration which she had so far evidently withheld, because she was more reticent or perhaps just less certain about her feelings. But what interests me most about this fragment is that I was trying out different literary styles in a love letter, in the effort to define my own feelings. The letter continues in its original primly formal manner – ‘It is with reminiscing on such incidents that I console myself during your absence’ – but then suddenly takes a less ingratiating, even aggressive turn:
Incidentally I should love to read out the above extract in an Essay class and watch your reactions. I think perhaps if I was a little more brutal in that way I might make you more callous towards your own emotions. But then I’m not sure I should like you any different from what you are.
And I’m not sure now what I meant by ‘callous’, but this passage seems a more authentic expression of feeling than the overblown rapture of the rain-drenched tryst.
At the beginning of our first long summer vacation Mary and her elder sister arranged to work for a month as cooks on a student farm camp near Wisbech in Cambridgeshire. Eileen had a boyfriend, a student at Oxford, whom she had met at a camp the year before, and he would be joining her. I didn’t like the idea of Mary spending several weeks out of my sight in such a community, so I decided to accompany her for the first two of them, little as I relished the prospect of agricultural labour, and reluctant as I was to put aside the novel I had started writing. The camp was situated in the flat featureless Fens, next to a farmhouse where Eileen and Mary slept and worked in the kitchen. The student labourers, male and female, lived in tents. I shared one with a genial Norwegian who was older and certainly more experienced than I. One afternoon during working hours I went to our tent to look for something and found him lying on his camp bed under a blanket with one of the girl students. He grinned up at me without embarrassment as I mumbled an apology and hurriedly withdrew. He told me later that he came on these farm camps chiefly to have sex with girls, and urged me to let him know if I wanted to have the tent to myself and Mary one day. I did not bother to explain the chaste nature of our relationship, but I was glad that by coming on the camp I had warned off such potential predators from being a nuisance to her. There was a group of bearded Persian students who could not disguise their lust for the bare-headed English girls in their revealing shorts and skimpy tops, and exchanged no doubt obscene remarks with each other on the subject in their own language, laughing and rolling their eyes, but Eileen and Mary managed to control their behaviour by treating them like naughty children.
The work itself consisted mainly of picking strawberries, planted in long rows that seemed to stretch to infinity, in a stooping or squatting posture, putting them in a large punnet and taking it, when filled, to be weighed and credited to your individual account. Before long, muscles I never knew I possessed were aching painfully and my delicate townee’s fingers were chafed and sore. At the end of each day I was exhausted. The rate of pay was low and I was not adept at the task, so I did not earn a great deal. But I saw Mary every day and spent some time with her in the evening when she and Eileen had finished clearing up the kitchen after dinner, and I returned home a fitter and healthier-looking young man. I settled down to finish my novel, while Mary, after returning from Wisbech, went off to visit her many relatives in Ireland for the first time.
The novel was entitled The Devil, the World and the Flesh, and had as its epigraph Question 348 in the Penny Catechism: ‘Which are the enemies we must fight against all the days of our life? The enemies which we must fight against all the days of our life are the devil, the world, and the flesh.’ I don’t know if anyone has remarked that this triad is ordered differently in traditional theology as ‘the world, the flesh, and the devil’, ‘mundus, caro, et diabolus’, or explained why the Catechism put the devil first. I suspect it was to emphasise the connection between sin and damnation, for the answer to the next question, ‘What do you mean by the devil?’ is: ‘By the devil I mean Satan and all his wicked angels, who are ever seeking to draw us into sin, so that we may be damned with them.’ It wouldn’t have been a bad title for somebody’s novel, but was ludicrously portentous for mine. I preserved the typescript and read it, or rather skimmed through it, when writing this book, frequently cringing with embarrassment at the naïvety of my eighteen-year-old self.
The hero is Paul Fletcher, sixteen years old at the beginning of the story, a pupil in the fifth form of a Catholic grammar school with an entirely lay staff. (I must have invented this institution to avoid identification with St Joseph’s.) He is an orphan, brought up by an aunt and uncle, a practising Catholic but alienated from the conventional piety of his parish community, something of a loner at school, bookish, self-obsessed, nourishing literary ambitions, desiring sexual experience but restrained by his religious beliefs – in other words a self-portrait modelled on the adolescent Stephen Dedalus. Early on in the narrative he goes to a party very like the one at which I met Peggy and meets a girl of voluptuous good looks who introduces him to necking. She is Ruth Seed, the daughter of Paul’s history teacher, and has a sister called Teresa who has just returned home after unsuccessfully trying her vocation as a nun. The family belongs to the same Catholic parish as Paul. He begins a relationship with Ruth which leads to their having sex. The story takes a soap-operatic turn when Ruth finds she is pregnant, and this becomes known in the parish and at the school, provoking great scandal, the stigmatisation of Ruth and harassment of Paul. A comic subplot about the organised humiliation of the martinet headmaster of Paul’s school delays the denouement, which I can hardly bring myself to summarise even at this distance in time from its composition. Shortly before Christmas, Ruth is rushed to hospital seriously ill. When Paul visits her she confesses that she has a history of sexual delinquency, and set out to seduce him. She tells him not to blame himself if she dies and, it is revealed after her demise, refuses the abortion that might have saved her life, in accordance with Catholic teaching. The medical and gynaecological details are left vague, since I did not know what they might plausibly be.
The flaws in the novel become more and more evident as it goes on and the novelist gets more and more out of his depth in the subject matter. But it must have been written at considerable speed, mostly in that long vacation, and to have finished it at all, a novel of about 60,000 words, was a kind of achievement. Stylistically it was often lively and imaginative, teeming with metaphors and similes. ‘The moon suddenly appeared from behind a cloud, like a silver disc slipped through a button-hole in the sky’ is one I could still find a use for. I showed the novel to Malachy Carroll, with whom I remained in touch and occasionally visited at his home in Greenwich. I don’t remember now what he said, but he thought it was promising enough – presumably on grounds of style rather than substance – to send it to someone he knew at Michael Joseph, then an independent publishing house, for an opinion. I received a letter on their headed notepaper to say that they would like to meet me and suggesting an appointment. Highly excited, I presented myself at the Michael Joseph premises and met two men who I presume were editors. Any dream I might have nourished of having my novel published as it stood were quickly but kindly dispelled. But they kept the MS, and one of them, a Mr P.H. Hebdon, wrote to me when returning it to say that it had ‘an extremely difficult theme which you will be able to tackle very much better when you have had a little more experience’, and that they would be interested in seeing any further work.
I knew I would have no time to write another novel until I had finished my degree course, but I was encouraged by their interest. It would also, I hoped, impress Mary, and make her take a more favourable view of The Devil, the World and the Flesh. She had been the first person to read it, and had not liked it at all. She had read very little contemporary literary fiction – I doubt if she had read even Greene and Waugh by that time – and she was somewhat shocked by the novel’s preoccupation with sexual desire, complicated by Catholic morality and guilt, as experienced by a character in whom she could of course recognise aspects of me. She was certainly anxious to erase any traces of herself in the novel. Ruth calls Paul ‘fish’ in affectionate mockery on occasion. ‘You can’t write that,’ Mary said firmly. ‘It’s something I say’ – as indeed it was, when she wanted to tease me.
She would not have been reassured by Paul’s mental response to a seductive whistle he hears from the shadows of a bomb site early in the story:
He quivered with a breathless surge of emotion and excitement. After all, the experience. And he wanted to be a writer, didn’t he? Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh – how did they get their experience, and they were Catholics, weren’t they? A mortal sin. But was it? Some fragment: ‘A young man and a young woman in a green arbour on a May morning – if God would not forgive it, I would.’ Besides, there was always confession . . .
Indeed there was always confession, which was the means by which those eminent Catholic novelists managed to reconcile the practice of their religion with illicit sexual activity. Greene, who became a Catholic while courting the devoutly Catholic Vivien Dayrell-Browning, was resorting to prostitutes within a year of marrying her. Much later he tried to persuade the great love of his life, Catherine Walston, who was married and had become a Catholic as a consequence of reading his books, to live with him with this enticement:
Whenever we settled for any length of time, we would have two rooms available, so that at any time without ceasing to live together & love each other you could go to communion (we would break down again & again, but that’s neither here nor there).
The parenthesis betrays a rather superficial understanding of the ‘firm purpose of amendment’ which is required of a penitent to make the sacrament of Penance valid, but Greene was a man who liked to live on what Browning called ‘the dangerous edge of things’, and seemed to derive a kind of spiritual exaltation from transgression. ‘I’m a much better Catholic in mortal sin! Or at least I’m more aware of it,’ he wrote to Catherine on another occasion.1 This was a paradoxical stance that a boy from the Catholic suburban ghetto could not emulate. I was saddled with an unresolvable conflict between a biological urge to have sex and a mental conviction that to do so outside marriage (a prospect so distant as to be not worth thinking about) would endanger my immortal soul. The urge is of course a normal condition of youth, but in my case it was reinforced by a belief that sexual experience was necessary to become a writer of fiction. My sense of being in a double bind was comically expressed in an undated and unpublished story called ‘The Wages of Sin’, which I had completely forgotten until I came across it in a file of typescripts belonging to the 1950s. It begins:
The envelope fell on to the mat with a dull thud, but I didn’t hurry to pick it up, being a young writer, still a student and struggling to get work published, and thus used to such a sound. However it wasn’t one of my rejected manuscripts, but a large official envelope that wore its embossed crests and other decorations as self-importantly as a general with three rows of medals. The letter inside was from the Apostolic Delegate, and it was short and to the point. ‘Dear Joe,’ it ran (my name’s Joe). ‘I am pleased to tell you that the Pope has granted your request for an unlimited right to commit sin for one day in order to get material for your new book. Yours truly, etc.’
The story, which describes the serial frustration of Joe’s efforts to make the most of this dispensation, is too tame to live up to its promising beginning, but there was a lesson in it which it took me a long time to recognise: that the best way to treat Catholic hang-ups about sex was through comedy.
1 Letters quoted by Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, Volume Two: 1939–1955 (1994), pp. 227 and 324.