I SHOWED MY novel to Mary shortly after she returned from her holiday in Ireland. When I met her at Euston off the Holyhead train, she had put on half a stone in weight and was bursting out of the tailored jacket and skirt she had left London in. Her farmer relatives in the west of Ireland had fattened her up like a Christmas goose on gammon, cabbage and potatoes with an occasional chicken, serving up huge portions and watching her as she struggled to clear her plate, conscious that they would be hurt if she didn’t. She had visited three of her aunts, one of whom insisted on her niece being measured and fitted with a corset, because all respectable women, young and old, fat or thin, wore corsets, apparently for reasons of modesty, and it was simpler to submit than resist. There had been enjoyable occasions during her tour, ceilidh dances and sing-songs and excursions to the coast, but the culture shock had been challenging, especially the sanitary arrangements, or rather lack of them (on one of the farms ‘you went in the cowshed – there was nowhere else’), and she was glad to get back to England. Her figure soon resumed its normal shape.
Just before the beginning of our second academic year, she went into University College Hospital for an operation on her leg. She had torn a muscle in her thigh in some heroic athletic effort at school, and made it worse by playing hockey at college before it was properly healed, so surgery was required to repair it. The operation was rather clumsily executed, or so it seemed to us when the plaster cast was removed and revealed a long serpentine scar, cross-hatched where the stiches had been like a railway line on a map. Mary accepted this blemish, which would be clearly visible when she wore a swimming costume for many years afterwards, with what seemed to me remarkable resignation, pleased that the operation had been a success and that she could run again without pain. As it happened, I was an inpatient at the same hospital myself in the Christmas vacation for surgical treatment of a comparatively trivial problem – an ingrown big toenail. But the first attempt was unsuccessful, and became infected, and I had to go in again. This time the surgeon sliced away the side of the nail down to the root, and required me to spend a week in the ward confined to bed, giving the toe a chance to heal. I was taken in a wheelchair to the WC to move my bowels, so spared the indignity of a bedpan, but I had to use a bottle to urinate. This regime entitled me to a daily bed bath. A comely, well-built young nurse, who had an interest in literature and had taken rather a fancy to me, would draw the curtains round my bed, spread a waterproof sheet on the mattress, and sponge down the upper half of my body as we discussed classic novels she had read. She handed me the sponge and towel to attend to my private parts, tactfully averting her gaze, and then, when I turned over, rubbed surgical spirit into my buttocks to prevent bed sores. I used to look forward to these sessions (especially the finale), which were physically more intimate than anything I had experienced with Mary. I did not mention them to her.
That year we regularly attended a weekday early-morning mass at a Catholic church off Goodge Street, whose priest acted as a chaplain to the UC Catholic Society. The church of St Charles Borromeo was very convenient for a weekday mass, being a short walk from Goodge Street Tube station, which was also the closest to UC’s Foster Court entrance. It is a Victorian building in early English Gothic style, quite handsomely proportioned and (as I have discovered from the internet) now elegantly decorated, and enhanced by the addition of a spectacular sunken baptistery in the middle of the nave. But in the early 1950s it was a gloomy and chilly place, especially in winter, and in need of refurbishment.
Either the priest at St Charles Borromeo’s at that time offered, or some pious students requested, the celebration of a mass once a week for members of the Catholic Society at an appropriate hour before our first lectures of the day. Many years later I created a fictional version of this ritual and its participants as a starting point for my novel How Far Can You Go? The authorial narrator describes a dozen college students assembling for a low mass (a mass without music, singing, incense, etc.) at eight o’clock on a bleak February morning in 1952:
They do so at considerable cost in personal discomfort. Rising an hour earlier than usual, in cold bed-sitters far out in the suburbs, they travel fasting on crowded busses and trains, dry-mouthed, weak with hunger, and nauseated by cigarette smoke, to be present at this unexciting ritual in a cold, gloomy church in the grey indifferent heart of London.
Why?
It is not out of a sense of duty, for Catholics are obliged to hear mass only on Sundays and holydays of obligation . . . So why? Is it hunger and thirst after righteousness? Is it devotion to the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament? Is it habit or superstition, or the desire for comradeship? Or all these things, or none of them? Why have they come here and what do they expect to get out of it?
To begin with the simplest case: Dennis, the burly youth in the dufflecoat, its hood thrown back to expose a neck pitted with boil scars, is here because Angela, the fair beauty in the mantilla, is here. And Angela is here because she is a good Catholic girl, the pride of the Merseyside convent where she was Head Girl and the first pupil ever to win a State Studentship to University.
My own motivation was in part like Dennis’s, though in other respects he is quite unlike me. Not to join Mary at the mass would have weakened the bond between us, and possibly exposed her to the attentions of rival Catholic youths. But there was also an element of genuine religious faith in my attendance: I believed it was good for my soul to make this regular pilgrimage to hear a weekday mass in addition to the obligatory Sunday one, and that the quasi-penitential effort it entailed was a guarantee of its efficacy. And I believed that conduct like this would earn me God’s help in my earthly life as well as contributing to my salvation – indeed my hopes were far more sharply focused on the former than on the latter. Although this seems to me in retrospect a naïve and superstitious attitude, there is perhaps something to be said for self-denial, whatever the motive. A feeling of virtuousness can enhance the enjoyment of life, and there was an agreeable solidarity in sharing it with a group of like-minded young people, kneeling together in the cold, dimly lit, almost empty church, reciting the Latin responses of the dialogue mass (a recent innovation, designed to increase lay participation in the liturgy), knowing that to most of the men and women hurrying to work on the pavements and in the streets outside what we were doing would be incomprehensible. Not that we felt smugly superior to them, but we were aware of our difference, and valued it. Our breakfast after mass at the ABC cafeteria in Tottenham Court Road was a high-spirited gathering, and the food was relished all the more because of our fast.
The cast of characters introduced in the first chapter of How Far Can You Go? was meant to show a cross-section of young practising Catholics at the time, whose fortunes would be followed over the next twenty-five years; and in the interest of representativeness I invented a troubled character called Michael, who belongs to the group but feels spiritually compromised by a habit of masturbation which he cannot kick and cannot bring himself to confess, so that he is obliged to find various excuses to avoid going to communion, finally pretending to have doubts about the doctrine of transubstantiation, ‘though in fact he believes the whole bag of tricks more simply and comprehensively perhaps than anyone else present at the mass, and is more honest in examining his conscience than some’. When the novel was published in 1980 it was reviewed on BBC Radio 4 by the Oxford don Valentine Cunningham, who, when describing the cast of characters, stated that ‘Lodge himself is presumably the guilt-ridden masturbator, Michael.’ It was disconcerting to hear this assertion broadcast to the nation, but I did not issue a denial. There were other traits in Michael’s character which invited an identification with me – he is reading English at the University, writes a postgraduate thesis on Graham Greene, later becomes a college lecturer and published critic; and in any case by 1980 there was no shame attached to masturbation – au contraire, it was accepted, indeed recommended, as a natural stage in sexual development, and it would have been more embarrassing to admit to never having passed through it.
In our second year at UC Mary left her Stockwell digs and rented a small flat – a bed-sitting room, kitchenette and a shared bathroom – with her sister Eileen, who had started work as a teacher of art at a comprehensive school in London. The flat was in Highbury, near enough to the Arsenal football ground to hear the roars of the crowd on Saturday afternoons. It was not subject to the rules of university-approved lodgings and I was able to spend time with Mary there, studying or relaxing and sharing meals with her and sometimes Eileen, with whom I got on well. Our relationship continued on its affectionate and companionable path, almost like a mariage blanc, as it would for many years. We saw each other constantly during term, less frequently in vacations, kissed discreetly on meeting and parting and cuddled when we had the opportunity, but those were the limits of our intimacy. Of course I desired her, and fantasised about making love with her, seeking clues in literature to what it would be like, but in reality that would entail marriage, a possibility so distant that even getting engaged would have been premature. We both had to complete our education, and then I would have to do two years’ National Service before starting some kind of career, as yet undefined; while Mary told me she had resolved to give a significant proportion of her earnings to her parents for some years after she started work, thus making clear that marriage was not at present on her agenda. She had seen what a hard life her mother had had, and was not eager to re-enact it. Nowadays two students in the same kind of relationship, even Catholic ones, would most likely have been sexual partners by this time. Obviously the social mores of the early 1950s, and of Catholic subculture in particular, made our restraint more normal, and therefore less stressful, than it would be today, but I recognise in retrospect that there was something in my character that contributed. I was always inclined to postpone an anticipated pleasure rather than risk diluting it by too hasty an indulgence, just as I would habitually reserve the choicest titbit on my dinner plate for the final mouthful. Perhaps I inherited this trait (‘delayed gratification’, in psychological jargon) from my father who, having chosen his mate and won her assent, never wavered in his commitment but was in no hurry to consummate their union.
Taking advantage of having close relatives on the Continent, I planned a holiday for Mary and myself in our long vacation that would be more hedonistic than her Irish excursion. I wanted to impress her by showing her a good time, as Americans say, such as I had enjoyed in Germany three years before. My aunt Eileen, who had met Mary on a visit to Brockley and thought she was ‘a lovely girl’, agreed readily when I wrote asking if I could bring her to Heidelberg for a week or so, and John and Lu needed the gentlest of hints to invite us to stay with them in Brussels on our way there. They had not met Mary but I was confident that they would like her, and they did. She got on particularly well with Lu, to whom perhaps she seemed like the daughter Lu would have liked to have herself; that at any rate was the impression I received when watching her teach Mary how to cook a soufflé. That Mary spoke French well was another point in her favour, and made up for my own deficiencies in that respect. John was glad to have a pretty girl around the place and a new audience for his funny walks and amusing anecdotes. He was still chafing somewhat at having to conform to the manners of the Belgian bourgeoisie – for instance, it was the custom at large family gatherings for each individual to shake hands with all the others on his or her first appearance in the morning, which struck John as tiresome and excessively formal. One day on such an occasion he sat down at the breakfast table concealing a prosthetic hand, which he then produced and gave to his neighbour, bidding him to ‘pass it round’. Like most practical jokes it had an element of aggression in it, and not everyone present, we gathered, was amused. But Lu indulged his pranks as she tolerated his quick temper, because she loved him. Mary and I did the usual tourist things in Brussels, like the Grand Place, the Musée des Beaux-Arts, the Manneken Pis, staying with John and Lu for five days or so before they put us on the train to Heidelberg. It was a successful and enjoyable visit and a precedent for several more in the future, mostly to Knokke-le-Zoute, the upmarket end of a seaside resort east of Ostend, where they had an apartment to which they eventually retired.
The West German Wirtschaftswunder (‘economic miracle’) was by now a recognised phenomenon, but its effects were less obvious in Heidelberg than elsewhere because it had never been a commercial or industrial centre and the fabric of the city had not been damaged by the war. The German people on the street looked a little more prosperous and less sullen than when I was last there, but the Americans still provoked local resentment by their monopoly of the swimming pool and other facilities. Tourism was beginning to be encouraged in the Old Town and on the river, where pleasure boats plied up and down, but British visitors were rare. Eileen provided Mary and me with passes to all the American eating places, and scrip (the US Army’s special currency) with which to pay for our meals, but we thought we should try a German restaurant at least once. We had a limited amount of Deutschmarks and chose what looked like a cheap one at which to have lunch. I regretted the decision as soon as we sat down. The other diners stared at us in an unfriendly manner on hearing our English voices, and the waiter gave us no help in interpreting the menu. Neither Mary nor I knew any German and he didn’t appear to know, or pretended not to know, any English. In desperation I jabbed my finger at random at something unpronounceable, which proved to be a swollen haggis-like thing sitting in a puddle of gravy, which burst open when punctured with knife and fork to spill its unappetising contents over the plate. We ate very little, departed as soon as we could, and did not repeat the experiment, though we did go with Eileen and an American friend one evening to a Bierkeller in the Old Town which was more welcoming.
Eileen had found lodgings for Mary, and I was given a bed in a large house overlooking the river that Bill and Jim, two friends of Eileen’s – ‘the boys’, as she called them – shared with some other single men. We met up after breakfast and amused ourselves doing the sort of things I had done alone on my first visit – exploring the Castle, swimming in the riverside pool, drawing and painting the Old Bridge from the other side of the Neckar, and walking on the Philosopher’s Walk above it. Our only excursion of any distance was to Baden-Baden. Since my previous visit Eileen and several of her friends had taken up golf and developed a taste for gambling, and the famous spa town in the foothills of the Black Forest, which offered both diversions, had become their favourite destination for short breaks. Eileen had arranged for Mary and me to accompany them there one weekend during our stay. It was a memorable experience, which I later incorporated in Timothy’s holiday in Out of the Shelter, perhaps at the cost of some anachronism, for I doubt if Baden-Baden was quite as lively in 1951 as it was in 1954.
We were in a party of eight or ten people who set off early in the morning to drive south into the French Occupation Zone, where Baden-Baden was situated. The smart French soldiers patrolling the streets, with flashes of scarlet on their tight-fitting uniforms, looked as if they were understandably pleased with their posting. Like Heidelberg, the town had survived the war unscathed, and was an oasis of pre-war pleasures, with its famous baths, neoclassical casino, historic golf course, riverside promenades and elegant hotels where the baths had three taps, for hot, cold and spa water. As soon as we had checked into our rooms, we went off to the golf course to have lunch on the terraced restaurant overlooking the fairways and well-groomed greens. Afterwards the party split up into two groups of golfers, the competent and those like Eileen and Bill who were still learning. I offered to haul Eileen’s clubs. Mary elected to watch from the shade of the clubhouse terrace.
Golf was one of Dad’s more consistent enthusiasms, from the 1940s to the 1960s. It was an ideal sport for a musician, for he was free to play on municipal courses on weekday afternoons when they were uncrowded. Sometimes in my school holidays I accompanied him, pulling his bag of clubs along on its two-wheeled trolley and helping to look for balls that had gone into the rough, which happened quite often. Ever the autodidact, he studied golf manuals and magazines intently to improve his technique, but never managed to get his handicap lower than eleven. Occasionally he would meet a friend by arrangement, or pick up another solitary golfer to play against for a modest wager, and these games would occasion a good deal of swearing under his breath and cigarette smoking – he would usually get through a packet of ten Woodbines, a small, cheap brand, in the course of a full round. Gradually I picked up the rudiments of the game, and when he joined an unpretentious club with a nine-hole course next to a cemetery at Honor Oak Park, just a couple of miles from Brockley Cross, he encouraged me to learn, and paid for junior membership and a few lessons. I was never good enough to play with him very often, but I used to knock a ball around the Honor Oak course on my own occasionally as a break from studying, and on the strength of this experience I borrowed clubs from Eileen’s bag as she went round the Baden course, and tried some shots of my own.
I was not outclassed. Seldom, I believe, had a group of such incompetent golfers been let loose on such an exclusive course, which had been a venue for championships before the war and was the third-oldest in all of Germany. They swung and missed, sent tee shots that should have soared into the air hopping along the ground or sliced them into adjoining fairways, hacked divots out of the turf, sent fountains of sand into the air in vain attempts to play out of bunkers, and putted their balls back and forth several times across the greens before sinking them. It was a very hot afternoon and our energy flagged well before we had completed the eighteen holes. The bright blue rectangle of a swimming pool belonging to a hotel on the boundary of the course caught our eye and we gazed at it longingly. Surprisingly, it seemed to be unoccupied. Bill led us over to investigate and with the aid of some dollars persuaded the man in charge not only to let us swim but to find us some swimming costumes – old and faded, but laundered. Mary had got bored in the clubhouse and joined us by this time, so she enjoyed this unexpected treat. It was an episode which encapsulated for me the uninhibited hedonism and casual sense of entitlement that characterised the expatriate social set to which Eileen belonged. A visit to the glamorous casino that evening confirmed this impression, though Mary and I were not allowed to gamble, for reasons of age, and had to remain observers at some distance from the gaming tables. This was no great deprivation, as neither of us had any interest in gambling. Eileen was intensely interested, and could not conceal her excitement as we made our way to the casino, but she prudently set herself a limit for the evening and kept to it.
I can’t remember whether she won or lost that night, but I hope it was the former, because she must have paid for our hotel accommodation, as she paid for much of our holiday. Her friends probably picked up the tab for some of our meals and drinks on that and other occasions, and it embarrassed me later to recall how readily we had accepted their largesse, as if it was a personal extension of wartime Lend-Lease. I hope we expressed our gratitude adequately, and that they got some entertainment from our company. Of course we thanked Eileen profusely and sincerely at the end of our holiday for making it possible. Always an emotional person, who wept easily, she smiled through tears when she saw us off at Heidelberg station. And so, refreshed and stimulated by our travels, we returned home, to prepare for the final year of our degree course.