The Watertower
Now joy’s cartographer I trace
My acres of gay and wellbeing’s land
O my summer be Proust and Sisley and
With me in the dead season, pastoral days
clere parsons
I
From the village, the watertower was invisible: hidden from our sight by the high chalky plateau of Barham Downs. But on many of our walks (since most of these took us on to higher ground, above the valley) we would, sooner or later, at one point or another, catch a glimpse of the tower: its peaked white summit gleaming above the trees which surrounded it. Perhaps we had wandered further than usual through Gorsley Wood, and, unsure of the way (for the wood was large and the paths innumerable and confusing), had at last come to the wood’s fringe; we would gaze out anxiously through the thinning trees to see exactly where we were; and there, on the north-eastern horizon, like a beacon to guide us, we would recognize the tower, and know that we were, after all, within twenty-minutes’ walk of the village.
It was a landmark, and also a limit: bounding, in that north-easterly direction, the familiar zone covered by our afternoon walks. We never went far beyond the tower: the wood at the back of it, which we called (rather inaccurately) ‘Waterworks Wood’, was good for primroses and bluebells, and once or twice a year, in the spring, we would make the expedition. It was one of our longest walks: to get there and, back in an afternoon was considered something of a feat, and the whole outing had a faint tinge of adventure.
It was not, in fact, a very heroic undertaking: ‘Waterworks Wood’ was hardly two miles from the village; but the way was all uphill, and for my own nurse and Alec’s, pushing mailcarts laden with all the materials for a picnic, it must have seemed quite far enough.
Alec Bell lived at the big, Queen Anne manor-house in the park which fringed the village. My family knew Colonel and Mrs Bell, and our respective nannies had struck up a corresponding friendship. Nurse Collier was a plump, brown-faced, commonsensical woman with a pleasant little chuckle and a fund of proverbial wisdom; she was a typical nanny, and had been employed one felt, only by the best families. Sometimes we would go to tea at the big house, or at the dower-house where, at one period, the family preferred to live. I was impressed by the grandeur of Alec’s surroundings: he had a day-nursery and a night-nursery, and Nurse Collier had a nursemaid ‘under’ her. There was a very large and (for those days) a very modern gramophone; a great many different kinds of cake for tea; and innumerable toys – far more than I had imagined it possible for one child to possess.
I didn’t envy Alec the grandeur, and didn’t, I think, covet many of his possessions: an exception was a book on natural history with very fine engravings of animals. I had a passion for bats and snakes, both of which were extensively illustrated; and at Alec’s tea-parties, I was with difficulty dragged away from my fascinated contemplation of the Great Fruit-eating Bat or the Puff-adder. The Puff-adder I particularly loved; that thick body half-embedded in the sand, that blunt triangular head slightly raised, ready to strike – like de Lautréamont before his octopus, I was thrilled by a sense of romantic evil.
But these tea-parties happened comparatively rarely; far more often we went for picnics – laden, like a party of explorers, with our numerous baskets of provisions: sandwiches, enamel cups, Thermos flasks. Sometimes, especially when the weather was hot, we went no further than one of the two parks which bounded the village: encamping under the bee-haunted lime-trees whose lower branches were nibbled by pasturing cattle, to a dead level, like the formal trees in a Noah’s ark. But when the weather seemed settled, and not too warm, we would go further afield: to Ben Hill, which we called Teazel Wood, or to Gorsley; sometimes penetrating to the mysterious territory beyond the woods towards Pett Bottom, which was known locally as California.
In the Gorsley direction, the limit of our journeying was Langham Park: an isolated farm which, like the watertower, marked, for me, one of the verges of the known world. Mr Adams, the farmer, had a milk-round, and would drive into the village of a morning: an emissary from another land, the remote, mysterious border-country beyond Gorsley Wood.
Ben Hill, or Teazel Wood, a kind of côté de Méséglise, was a ‘short’ walk; instead of climbing the long hill to the station, we left the village by a narrow, tree-muffled lane, skirting the beech-plantation where, a few years later, I discovered the Fly Orchid and the White Helleborine. We traversed the corner of one of the parks and crossed an iron railway bridge, beyond which the line curved away mysteriously between chalk embankments towards Elham and Lyminge. Across the line, Apps’s farm lay in its hollow, grey and damp-looking and slightly sinister: dogs barked fiercely in the farm-yard, and nobody ever seemed to be about. Once we saw a fox dart through one of the farm-gates; we never went too near the farm, because of the dogs. Beyond the bridge – our heels clanked hollowly as we crossed it; we were rather frighteningly aware of walking over an abyss – a grassy path continued between high, untrimmed hedges towards the woods. Teazel Wood was hardly more than a copse; a narrow strip running steeply uphill. It was famous for its bluebells; beyond it lay the deeper woodlands, seldom visited: once we found a dead badger there, lying across the footpath.
Teazel Wood, though small, was just large enough to possess the authentic atmosphere of a ‘wood’. Though narrow, it straggled on for a considerable distance: one never felt very far from the fields on either side, but one never, on the other hand, knew quite how far the wood extended over the hillside. The upper part became dense, the paths narrowed; we had our tea in a clearing, and then turned back and went home the same way. Once we did penetrate to the furthest boundary: coming at last to a hurdle, overlooking an unfamiliar field, which sloped away gently into a valley . . . Our eyes travelled adventurously over the valley, searching for something familiar: and there, sure enough, overtopping the dark crest of pine-trees, beyond Barham Downs, was the white peak of the watertower.
The valley was our own valley, after all; we were seeing it, merely, from an unusual aspect. Even the unknown field proved to be the upper part of Mr Apps’s pasture-land, which fringed the railway. The grown-ups insisted that it was so, and I was forced to believe them: but to me it still seemed a ‘different’ field, with a secret of its own.
There was no mystery about the way to the water-tower. On the days when we undertook the great expedition, we started off up the lane, beneath an arching avenue of beeches, towards the main Dover road. The lane was known, after about 1914, as Boring Lane: not because it was particularly tedious, but because of the extraordinary phenomenon which, at about this time appeared at the top of it, where the lane joined the main road. The Boring had risen suddenly, portentous and sinister, in the corner of the field known as Forty Acres: a chimney which belched a volcanic plume of smoke, a group of sheds, and an exciting contraption of wheels and pulleys. Occasionally one caught a glimpse of strange, black-faced men entering or leaving it. They didn’t belong to the village, and were generally held to be dubious characters.
It was the pioneer-period of Kent coal: in a few more years, it was commonly predicted, East Kent would become Black Country. It never did; the few collieries which were developed remained localized, remote and (unless one lived near them) unsuspected. Our own Boring was shortly-disused: bryony and Traveller’s Joy festooned the rusting headgear, the chimney smoked no longer. After a year or two, the sheds and chimney were removed, and the ground levelled.
The Boring disappeared: but the name remained. Further afield, however – in the remote lands beyond the watertower – other ‘Borings’ remained permanently: Snowdon, Tilmanstone, Betteshanger. We were not concerned with them – they didn’t belong to ‘our’ country; only occasionally, from the higher places of Barham Downs, would one glimpse a far-off chimney, its plume of smoke hanging like a pennant, dimly discernible in the mysterious distance.
Passing the Boring, we crossed the road and walked on up a chalky lane which wound away over Barham Downs. Here there was always a wind: it rustled faintly but insistently across the uneven downland, and sang its high, remote song in the telegraph wires. The wires stretched away into unimaginable distances, between their black posts which seemed to flower, at their summits, into corymbs of small white buds . . . Sometimes on summer days, the wind’s song was the faintest of humming: a low, perpetual bourdon, like the held chords in the introductory passage of Brigg Fair; a haunting undertone beneath the treble motifs of lark’s song and plover’s cry. On gusty days in April, or when the first gales of Autumn began, one detected a less placid, a wilder note – a bardic rhapsody of successive, violent statements, abrupt as the lashes of a whip: the opening of the third movement of Ireland’s Sonata for ’cello and piano.
The downs themselves, after the tree-muffled, post-prandial atmosphere of the village, had a quality of wildness: the wide, uneven plateau of chalk stretching away towards Dover, punctuated by the diminishing telegraph-poles. Larks sang perpetually in the high emptiness of the sky, and peewits circled, plaintively crying, above the further ploughland. The downs were partly cultivated, partly aboriginal chalk, clothed with the tufted tawgrass and, in August, with the delicate, waxen-pink Squinancy-wort (which had inspired a rather coy little poem by Edward Carpenter, whose bearded but crypto-Uranian talent my father much admired). At this time, the uncultivated tracts had just been laid out as a golf-course; little red pennants fluttered gaily in the perpetual wind, and the earthworks and tumuli which, on these Druidic heights, had once perhaps witnessed a bloodier kind of ceremony, now provided bunkers for the Saturday amusement of Canterbury business-men.
Sometimes, as we crossed the downs, an angry voice would shout ‘Fore!’, and I would duck my head, having an ingrained horror of round objects which flew violently through the air . . . I was prejudiced, indeed – and at an even earlier age than this – against balls in any form. In infancy, when kind aunts presented me with them – woolly or painted or rubber ones, it made no difference – I would be overcome by an intense and painful embarrassment. For myself to be observed in possession of a ball was, I felt convinced, a circumstance so unnatural that it could only be a matter of laughter among the-grown-ups. Shamefacedly, I would immediately conceal the ball in the most convenient place: in my pram or in my bed, or, if I happened not to be in either, behind my back.
This highly un-British prejudice was to last my lifetime: at school, my horror of football was only excelled by my passionate loathing for cricket. Balls, for me, had a horribly fluid, unstable quality: they never kept still, they had no firm base on which to rest, they rolled and slithered perpetually, they were unseizable and remote as the idea of God. (Years later, I found highly sympathetic one of Kapp’s drawings in a little book called Minims: the drawing was called ‘God’, and showed – just a circle.) At cricket I was so hopelessly bad that, to my relief, I was usually, when fielding, placed at long-stop or some such remote and comparatively irresponsible position. Here I could watch from a safe distance the other players (who seemed to be enjoying themselves, in their own mysterious way), or preferably do a little furtive botanizing in the long grass at the edge of the pitch. Cricket and football were, for me, as meaningless and unreal as the world of Beowulf: an endless, boring saga in which people’s motives remained, so far as I was concerned, impenetrably obscure.
Nu is se raed gelang
Eft oet the anum. Eard git ne const,
Frecne stowe, thaer thu findan miht
Felasinnigne secq: sec gif thu dyrre!4
‘Over!’ the master-in-charge would call, just as I had spotted a Green-winged Orchid in the grass fringe: or ‘Go for it! Chase it! Wake up, Brooke!’ and the hard, red orb would fly past me, speeding away into the long grasses. ‘You must be more keen!’ they said. ‘Brace up! Put your back into it!’
I did my best, but without any conviction; flinging the ball back (underhand, like a muff) to the wicket-keeper.
As yet you know not the haunt where you may cope
With the paramount evil . . .
Wake up, run for it, felasinnigne secq: the heroic saga-world was not for me, and I knew it; why was I born with a different face?
Over the crest of the downs, we suddenly came in sight of our objective: the tower greeted us, remote still, but at least visible. We could see, too, the last part of our way – a white, chalky track winding up to the very edge of the wood.
The road dipped down to Coldharbour Farm, then rose again. To the left, another road swung away towards Bekesbourne and the remote country beyond. In this country of hills, there was never what could properly be called a ‘view’: one reached the summit of one hill, only to be confronted by another. Somewhere, one felt, one would come one day upon the focal centre of this land: see it stretched out around one, the familiar hills and valleys falling into position, making a completed pattern. But this never happened: the gentle hills rose in their long undulations and sank again, the dark crest of woodland masked the further valley; one was perpetually enclosed, there was always something ‘just beyond’ which one could never reach.
The watertower, as it happened, was built on the highest point in the countryside; and as we approached it, on fine days, we would begin to look for what was, in this landscape, the nearest approach to a ‘view’. Over to the north-east, beyond Bekesbourne, beyond Wingham and Chislet, the country swept away, gently and unemphatically, in a long slope towards the sea. It was said that on a very clear day you could actually see Pegwell Bay. Perhaps you could: but one could never be sure. A faint gleam on the horizon might have been sea, or merely a sunlit bank of cloud; a streak of more solid whiteness might have been cliffs, but could equally well have been some chalky outcrop further inland. Pegwell Bay remained remote and mysterious, never really revealing itself: a mirage trembling on the verge of reality.
But by now we were approaching the tower itself: the mail-carts creaked and lumbered up the chalky track, and we could see the brick arches, which supported the water-tank, above the dark pine trees. The track ran for a few hundred yards along the wood’s fringe, then plunged into it, ending a quarter of a mile further on at the house of Mrs James; we never approached near enough, in those days, to see the house: I took its existence on trust, and invested it – lying as it did, isolated beyond the frontier-station of the tower – with a rather sinister quality. (Years later, I penetrated to the very gate of the house, and my suspicion seemed confirmed: for it proved to be a small, grey-stone early Victorian building, fronted by a grove of dark shiny evergreens, and surrounded by woodland: reminding me of the steel engraving which formed the frontispiece to my copy of Wuthering Heights.)
By the time we reached the wood’s fringe, the tower had disappeared. It had, in fact, an extraordinary capacity for thus suddenly disappearing and reappearing; from miles away, on the other side of the valley, it could be seen, at one moment, shining out clearly above the woodland; and a few seconds later, it would have entirely vanished, masked suddenly by an intervening tree, or by some higher reach of Barham Downs.
As we approached it, skirting the outermost fringe of the wood, I could feel creeping over me the rather sinister feeling which its proximity always evoked. Partly it was the wood itself: seldom visited, incompletely explored, it was not as other woods. It existed on the frontier of the known world; moreover, it was to some extent enemy territory, for it didn’t belong to Colonel Bell. In Colonel Bell’s woods, on the other side of the valley, we could brave the keepers with impunity; but here the keeper was our natural enemy. He was a big, red-faced man, and would appear suddenly, as though from nowhere, at the end of a ride, or at the corner of one of the narrow, winding paths; armed with a gun, and followed by a large setter who growled at us threateningly . . . Often we picnicked and primrosed in the wood for hours without meeting the keeper: but the threat was always there, and instinctively we kept close together and spoke in low voices.
Once beneath the trees, the tower was upon us almost before we realized it. It stood in a little clearing on the edge of the path, surrounded by a spiky iron fence, and exhaled a peculiar atmosphere, as one approached it, of inviolability. There was a little gate, always kept locked, in the fence: people could and presumably sometimes did enter that holy ground; but not just ordinary people – only those specially-privileged persons whom Nurse Collier referred to as ‘officials’. No official, however, was ever visible on our visits to the tower; perhaps they only came at night.
So potent was this atmosphere of exclusion, that we were not allowed, Alec and I, even to touch the surrounding fence; perhaps our nannies had a vague fear that it might be charged with electricity. We could only stand on the path and gaze across the forbidden territory – weed-grown and untidy – to where the fabulous bulk of the tower reared itself skyward.
It was an extraordinary structure: not ‘functional’ at all, as one might have expected, but built with the solidity, the pretentious respectability, of a stockbroker’s villa in Surrey. (Even the group of pine-trees which surrounded it gave an added touch of suburbanity; the rest of the wood was mainly oak and hazel.) Four columns of brick-work, converging at their summits, formed four corresponding arches: the tower had the look of an arcade or a viaduct folded in upon itself to form a quadrilateral. The brickwork was solid and expensive-looking, and one expected to see at its base, instead of the jungle of nettles and willow-herb, neat beds of lobelias and calceolarias. But above the four conjoined arches, the suburban impression ended abruptly; for, instead of a red roof and gables, the tower bore upon its summit the vast, rectangular tank, painted white, and bearing the inscription:
margate corporation district waterworks
1903
Margate was miles away in the Isle of Thanet; what were its waterworks doing here? The mystery seemed, as we gazed up at that portentous tank, entirely insoluble. The tower loomed over us: vast, sinister and inexplicable, guarding its secret.
For it had a secret; and the secret was perpetually, it seemed, on the tip of my tongue – something I once knew but couldn’t remember, like a forgotten tune or the name of a book. The tower was fringed with a special atmosphere unlike anything else; one would never reach its secret by comparison with other things, for it was unique. It was not, taken as a whole, like anything: the brick towers were like a house, but the white rectangular summit was like nothing so much as a vast, an elephantine lavatory tank; one expected almost to see a chain hanging from it with a porcelain handle on the end, so that one could ‘pull the plug’. This impression was intensified by the peculiar noises which sometimes emanated from the interior: muffled clankings and gurglings such as one often heard in the wc at home.
The tower was disturbing, as I now see, largely by reason of its incongruity: Lautréamont’s sewing-machine-on-a-dissecting-table was not more calculated to épater le bourgeois than this enormous lavatory-tank resting on top of a folded-up viaduct. I was not exactly frightened of the tower: indeed, I was rather fond of it. But my affection was tempered by a certain awe, a sense of some unknown potency residing within that august form. I felt about it, in fact, very much as I felt about my own father, whom on the whole I liked, but whose several attributes could be individually frightening: at about this time, for instance, he wore a rather bushy blond moustache, for which I had lately conceived a profound and irrational terror.
Once the tower was reached, we turned down one of the paths, on the other side of the track, to a clearing where the primroses were particularly abundant. Birds must have sung there: but in memory ‘Waterworks Wood’ seems to have been wrapped in a tomb-like silence – probably for no better reason than because we spoke in whispers, for fear of the keeper.
Here among the primroses, the tower was once more out of sight. Wandering on through the wood, however, we would suddenly glimpse it again: its august and minatory outline appearing momentarily in the vista of a ride . . . One late afternoon in April I had my first private encounter with the tower; I had wandered away from the others, through the hazel-thickets, in search of purple orchises. They grew scattered among the bluebells at intervals of a few yards: the biggest and best were always just a little further on. The late sunlight slanted through the thickets, creating an oddly illusory atmosphere: things appeared to be what they were not – a flint-boulder looked like a couched animal, an enamelled milk-can, dropped by some workman, took on the contours of a human skull. The bluebells themselves, in this hallucinatory radiance, had a purplish tinge, so that I ran hither and thither fruitlessly, thinking they were orchids.
The grown-ups were calling already from the clearing: it was getting late. But I must just get that tall, resplendent orchid a few yards further on . . . Another orchid and another lured me forward. Suddenly the bushes thinned, and I reached a path – but not a path I knew. I emerged and looked round me, and with a start of astonishment saw, at the end of the path, only twenty yards away, and presenting to me (owing to the new angle from which I was viewing it), an aspect of itself which I had never seen before – the brick arcades and the white peaked summit of the watertower.
Because I had never seen it from just that position, and because I was alone with it, the tower seemed, more than ever, to be offering me some extraordinary and desirable secret . . . If only I could grasp it! I stood and stared at the white tank for several minutes; encircling the base of it, above the brick-work, was a little gallery, with an iron fence round it – used, no doubt, by the ‘officials’ on their secret visits to the tower. A zig-zag iron ladder led down from this gallery, to the ground. Perhaps if I waited long enough I should see one of those mysterious visitors cross the little clearing within the fence, and climb the ladder . . . But I couldn’t wait: the voices calling from beyond the thicket were becoming impatient and rather angry . . . I turned away, and hurried back through the close-growing hazels. The sunlight was fading, the bluebells were blurred into a vague, uniform greyness; the milk-can was just a milk-can, the stone an ordinary stone.
II
At this time – early in the first War – one of my great excitements was to watch for airships. Aeroplanes were already a fairly common sight: but an airship was a rarity. I possessed one of the first posters showing the various types of British and enemy aircraft; and the airships, in particular, I invested with a kind of totemistic quality: they were like sacred tribal animals, strange leviathans possessing, like the watertower, a mysterious and indefinably potency of their own.
Like animals, indeed, they were reputed to have regular habits: the best time to watch for them was apparently in the late evening, at which hour, it was said, they could often be seen ‘on their way home’. So sometimes, for a treat, I was allowed to go up to Barham Downs after my usual bed-time: having, of course, had an ‘extra’ rest in the afternoon.
For hours, it seemed, we watched with strained eyes the north-easterly horizon, whence the airships were expected to appear. By too-long staring at the bright, empty sky, I induced in myself a kind of hallucinatory state: I began to see, not only airships, but a whole menagerie of aerial monsters . . . Sometimes we walked up the narrow road over the crest of the downs: and my heart would give a jump as I saw a gleam of white appearing over the distant trees. At last! But it was no airship, only the tank of the water-tower gleaming in the last rays of the sun.
One spring evening, returning from one of our expeditions to ‘Waterworks Wood’, I began to yawn, and to feel abnormally, unpleasantly tired. Alec skipped from one side of the road to another, as alert and lively as usual: he squealed with excitement as a weasel ran across the road; a little further on he found a dead frog, crushed flat like a pressed flower by a passing cart-wheel. Normally I should have been extremely interested; but this evening the frog seemed merely a dead frog, nothing more; even the weasel could not arouse my flagging interest.
The grown-ups began to notice my preoccupied air, my dragging steps.
‘He’s tired,’ they said, and, sotto voce, added the humiliating words: ‘He’s not very strong.’
Tears stung my eyes, my mind swooned into an ecstasy of self-pity. The westering sunlight falling across the downland seemed, all of a sudden unbearably sad. I hated Alec for being so obviously not tired; nobody said of him that he ‘wasn’t strong’. Perhaps I should soon die, like Judy in Seven Little Australians – she had died, I remembered, at sunset: it seemed to me a profoundly appropriate time of day to die.
I was put into the mailcart and pushed the rest of the way home; but I began to feel worse instead of better; and I realized, at last, that I was beginning to feel genuinely and unmistakably ill.
The word, once admitted to consciousness, tolled like a tocsin through my mind. I was terrified of illness; for me it meant one thing only – vomiting. This had only happened to me once or twice since babyhood; but the sensation of retching was, for me, the ultimate horror. And now, coming down ‘Boring’ Lane, I began to recognise the familiar sensations: the ‘full’ feeling in the stomach, the sense that my throat was about to turn inside out. I laboured under the curious delusion that I had once vomited up the bulb of a large electric-torch: I had been ‘taken poorly’, as they said, during the night, and either the torch had really slipped into the bowl, or had been placed suggestively near it. Now, once again, I was haunted by the horrible image of a torch thrusting its way up my gullet . . .
I suffered in silent misery; above my head, the grown-ups kept up a cheerful, a positively sprightly conversation. The last sunlight faded in a glory of red and gold behind the beeches – just as it had in Seven Little Australians. I tried vainly to believe that I was only, as they said, ‘a little over-tired’; I refused to admit, with absolute finality, that I was really Ill.
But reality triumphed at last. I managed to hold out till we reached home, and were safely in the bedroom. Then I made no further attempt to deceive either myself or anybody else.
It was nothing very serious – a tummy upset which the doctor diagnosed as a ‘touch of colitis’. But I vomited frequently for two or three days; and the doctor’s diagnosis haunted me alarmingly: I fancied the word was ‘killitis’, and had no doubt that I should die. Owing to the ‘k’ and the ‘itis’, the dread word evoked also the image of a triangular purple kite, such as I had once possessed, straining at its string.
I was ‘ill’ only for a few days, but in retrospect it always seemed weeks. I was given albumen water to drink, after my bouts of vomiting; and the insipid stuff became inseparably associated with the delicious relief which followed each attack, acquiring thereby a flavour which seemed to me positively ambrosial.
At last I was better; I was taken to the window to look at a rainbow: I had never seen a rainbow before, and felt that it had appeared at this moment solely to compensate me for being ill. A gramophone in the next-door cottage played the Toreador’s Song from Carmen: and to this day, I cannot hear the tune without recalling the burst of sunlight after rain, the rainbow itself, and the insipid taste of albumen water.
I was better: but one never recovers entirely from any illness, slight or serious. An attack of ’flu, a mere cold in the head even, takes something from one inexorably, something which is never paid back. One may succeed in forgetting one’s illness entirely: but the loss of sensibility, the enforced withdrawl from life, is none the less a little death. A fraction of oneself – infinitesimal, but measurable – has gone for good. It is Death by instalments – the instalments may be minute, but, slowly and mercilessly, they add up towards the final reckoning.
Illness in childhood – like most childish misfortunes – is more acutely experienced than ever in after life; the instalments paid out are greater. The developing capacity to reason, if it doesn’t diminish one’s liabilities, at least enables one to dodge a payment – or two; or perhaps only to imagine that one has dodged it – which amounts to the same thing.
I, personally, was rather lucky in the matter of childish illnesses: colds, bilious attacks, mild bouts of ’flu – they didn’t take a very heavy toll. But I feared illness more than I feared anything else, and I still do. Exterior dangers – being bombed or run-over – at least give one a sporting chance: even the supernatural can be evaded by the simple process of disbelieving in it. But illness – the insidious assault from within, the revolt of body against mind – against illness one has no chance. One may begin by refusing to believe in it; but unless one is a Christian Scientist, one can’t keep it up for long.
I wasn’t often ‘ill’ as a child; but on the other hand, I suffered from that mysterious and indefinable defect of being ‘not very strong’. This involved, after my minor attacks of ’flu and so on, long periods of convalescence and being ‘taken care of’. These I found delightful: I wasn’t ‘ill’ but I enjoyed all the privileges of illness.
It was during one of these periods that I started reading Shakespeare.
My mother had been to a sale in Folkestone, and had ‘picked up’, as part of a ‘lot’ which doubtless contained other and more desirable objects, a three-volume edition of Shakespeare and a microscope. These were given to me; and proved to be the most exciting presents I had ever received.
The microscope was a small, low-powered affair: but quite good enough to magnify a fly’s wing or a grain of pollen to miraculous proportions. I spent many absorbed hours with it: but it was the Shakespeare that was to become for me, in due course, the more rewarding of my mother’s two purchases.
I opened the volume of tragedies first, and was enthralled by the very first page.
How many autobiographers have thus described their first introduction to the pleasures of literature! The sensitive child wandering among dust-grimed folios in the library; the volume of Keats (or even Milton, incredible though this must seem), ‘selected at random’; and then the instantaneous recognition of a life’s mission: the ‘magic’ of the language ‘grips’ him, he determines in that crucial moment to be a poet . . . (Often enough he does, indeed, become one; and may even qualify, in time, for the more dazzling honour of writing middles for the weeklies, or scholarly articles on eighteenth-century poetasters for the Cornhill.)
My own experience was rather different; I did indeed open the volume of tragedies and was quite genuinely enthralled: not by the text, however, but by the illustrations.
These consisted of ‘engravings on wood, from designs by Kenny Meadows’. The text was edited, ‘with a memoir’, by Barry Cornwall, and was interspersed with ‘annotations and introductory remarks on the plays, by many distinguished writers’ who preferred, however, to remain anonymous. The fat, royal octavo volumes were bound in chocolate-brown cloth with thin leather backs, and were published by Robert Tyas, 8 Paternoster Row, in 1843.
I opened the book at Macbeth; and at the opening of Act I was held entranced by the three-quarter-page engraving which start-lingly preluded the play . . . A vast scaly serpent lay coiled, apparently, upon a cloud; within its coils, as though in a nest, sat the three witches, raising their ‘choppy fingers’ skyward; their hatchet-faces, with protruding teeth and cavalry-moustaches, peering from nun-like hoods. Perched insecurely on the serpent’s flank, sat Paddock and Grimalkin, the latter clutching at the slithery surface with claws prehensile and elongated as the talons of an eagle. Above this unconventional family-group impended a dark and thunderous cloud behind which, evidently, some vast and nameless monster was concealed: enormous bat’s wings protruded from the swirls of vapour, and two muscular hands, grasping daggers, menaced the cloaked heads of the witches below. The face of the monster was concealed: but upon the dark centre of the cloud was inscribed, in black-letter script, the word Macbeth.
Lying in bed, lapped in the delicious passivity of convalescence, I was in a state to appreciate with an almost too-acute susceptibility the art of Mr Kenny Meadows. I realized that, without knowing his work, I had long been one of his predestined admirers . . . Snakes, bats, witches, corpses dripping with blood – here was all the horrific imagery of the ‘Romantic Agony’ in its later stages; the demonology of a Hieronymus Bosch transposed into terms of Gustave Moreau, with side-glances at Mrs Radcliffe and Monk Lewis . . . I realized that it was the vestigial hint of this quality which had so endeared to me the engravings of bats and puff-adders in Alec Bell’s natural history book. Fascinated, I turned the pages: horned and semi-human incubi clutched, with eagle talons, at the stomachs of their slumbering victims; serpents with the heads of women writhed in fantastic copulations; blood dripped from jewelled daggers; an asp with a human death’s-head wriggled from a glass phial held in a skinny hand . . . Thunder and lightning, in this dark and murderous world, seemed incessant; and in every engraving, even the most innocent, some evil symbol – a skull or a serpent – lurked in the background; incubi lay concealed in the boudoir, nude muscular ravishers crept unseen upon unsuspecting virgins; on the first page of Romeo and Juliet, a tiny human skeleton, bearing an arrow, clambered like some noxious insect from the corrupt heart of a rose . . .
I wonder if the surrealists ever discovered Kenny Meadows; if not, I can certainly recommend him to the survivors of the cult. Not even Max Ernst, in his Victorian collages, has succeeded more admirably in producing an effect of horrific incongruity.
My pleasure in the engravings was mingled with surprise: I had only read ‘Lamb’s Tales’, and was inclined to think of Shakespeare as a rather milk-and-water, almost a goody-goody writer – like Pilgrim Street or Jessica’s First Prayer. Plainly he was something quite different; far from being goody-goody, he seemed to me, by this time, to belong rather to the class of literature which I was ‘not allowed to read’. I detected, I think, even then, the signs and symptoms of something which children seem often able to recognize without in the least understanding: a preoccupation with physical sexuality, plus (in this case) a strong element of sadism.
Kenny Meadows, in fact, was a crypto-pornographer; he kept adroitly on the side of ‘niceness’, but the insistence on buttocks and breasts, the juxtaposition of hirsute, half-human monsters and early-Victorian damsels, perpetually betrayed him. Had I acquired his engravings in any other form, I should almost certainly not have been allowed to enjoy them; but fortunately they formed part of ‘Shakespeare’, and were, therefore, apparently considered blameless.
Sated temporarily with Gothic horrors, I began, hopefully, to read the text. Macbeth started promisingly with witches; at the very moment, moreover, that I began the first lines, a genuine clap of thunder burst, with an almost too-obliging appropriateness, overhead . . . Much of the play I skipped, naturally enough; but I did go through it to the end, and, helped out by the frequent oases of the engravings, which decorated (for Kenny Meadows was nothing if not prolific) almost every page, I persuaded myself that I was enjoying it. Parts, of course, I did genuinely enjoy: any child would be thrilled by the witch-scenes and the murders. The Scottish names, the feeling of a world remote and ‘prehistoric’, thrilled me too; and the desolate, thunderous horror of such outbursts as ‘Glamis hath murdered sleep!’ and ‘Macbeth shall sleep no more!’ haunted my mind with an obsessive potency long after I had finished the play. The very name ‘Macbeth’ came to have a romantic and almost an onomatopoeic quality: the sharp, crackling ‘Mac’ followed by the muffled reverberation of ‘beth’ seemed appropriately to suggest the noise of some remote and menacing storm.
My next choice was Lear, and I found it heavier going. But Kenny Meadows helped me through: Lear, white-gowned and bearded, like a Druid at an eisteddfod, shaking his fist at the thunder; Goneril and Regan shown symbolically as bat-winged harpies with serpents’ tails; Lear again, ‘crowned with rank fumiter’ . . . It was not quite so exciting as Macbeth; but the blinding of Gloucester, Edgar’s ravings as Tom O’Bedlam, and the ‘gentleman with a bloody knife’ seemed to me almost up to the standard of Kenny Meadows; besides, I was interested, as a botanist, in the bits about flowers.
‘Fumiter’ was recognizable as fumitory; ‘harlocks’ I assumed to be charlock; samphire I recognized with a thrill of delight: I had found it myself, only the year before, on the foreshore at Seabrook. ‘Dost thou know Dover?’ asks Lear. I did; and felt the thrill of the suburban theatre-goer who finds that Miss Dodie Smith’s new play is actually about a family at Ruislip – ‘just like us, my dear.’
It was windy March weather when I read Lear, and I was still convalescent after ’flu: the play came to be associated, ever afterwards, with the first daffodils, the chestnut-buds bursting along the Undercliff, the first, warm, melancholy spring days. But it was the Dover passages which, for me, gave the play its character. Dover acquired for me, on our subsequent visits there, a special literary quality; it was ‘in’ Shakespeare, and seemed to me to have thereby gained an added reality: I began to notice it, consciously, for the first time, like a native of Dorset who has just started to read Hardy.
We lived at Sandgate; our visits to Dover were infrequent; when they occurred, they had (even before I read Lear) a special kind of excitingness. The only other town of comparable size which I knew well was Folkestone; Dover, only eight miles away, seemed to me to belong to a different world. I was prepared by hearsay for this ‘difference’: Dover was considered ‘dirty’, ‘sordid’ – one didn’t go there unless one had to. Other, more sinister rumours attached to it, too: ‘things’ had happened there which were spoken of in whispers – ‘nasty’ things. This element of ‘nastiness’, I gathered, emanated chiefly from the Dover Hippodrome, a small music-hall which I invested with goodness knows what horrific glamour. I didn’t know what a music-hall was, but I suspected it to be connected in some way with girls – the kind of girls whom my family referred to as ‘fast’, whatever that might mean. (One or two of my sister’s acquaintances were thus stigmatized by my mother: I observed them carefully for signs of this reprehensible motility; but they seemed to me very much like other girls, though somewhat nicer than most.)
The very word ‘Hippodrome’ had, for me, a faintly immoral flavour: I connected it with hips, which apparently were not quite nice. My brother had bought a gramophone record of a song called ‘Florrie the Flapper’, which had a passing reference to this wicked if indispensable part of the body; he was not allowed, after the first time, to play it in my presence . . . Then one day I heard the maids whispering about a girl who had recently been found dead under the cliffs; she had been employed, it seemed, at the Dover Hippodrome . . . So much I heard: the rest of the story was related in whispers, punctuated by exclamations of shocked disapproval. Visualizing some horrific disembowelling à la Kenny Meadows, I begged for details: but I was only told that they ‘weren’t fit for a child’s ears’. Not unnaturally, this increased my curiosity a hundredfold; and by judicious eavesdropping I did at last overhear, uttered in an appalled whisper, the horrifying words: rotten with disease.
I wasn’t much the wiser; but the images evoked by the phrase did tend to confirm the Gothic vision of Dover which I had evolved for myself by reading King Lear. Any woman we passed in Dover who could be identified, in my estimation, as ‘fast’, seemed thereafter to be a combination of Regan or Goneril and the girl-from-the-hippodrome. (I could hardly have been aware, at the time, that the name of Lear’s eldest daughter did, in fact, by a faint verbal echo, justify in part my rather tenuous association.) Similarly, any old man with a white beard, whining outside a pub, was Lear himself.
Even without these romantic associations, however, I should have detected the ‘difference’ between Dover and Folkestone. Folke-stone (apart from the old town round the fishmarket, where we seldom went), was impeccably ‘nice’: the buildings were newer, the streets cleaner, and the people one saw shopping or walking along the Leas were, most of them, recognizably the same sort of people as my own family. In Dover, it was all quite different: the houses were old and rather ramshackle, the streets were grubby, and nearly all the people were of the class which I was accustomed to hear spoken of as ‘common’. They had loud, alien voices, and strange gestures; the women’s clothes seemed shabby, many of the men wore cloth caps and mufflers.
This strangeness frightened me rather, but I found it, none the less, exciting. I was thrilled, too, by the trams which clanked and rumbled down the narrow streets, their long antennae striking forth blue sparks from the overhead wires. And from beneath East Cliff, one peered up at an astonishing series of ‘houses’ built into the solid chalk: some of them had brick walls and even windows, just like real houses; some were mere tunnels and hatchways leading into the interior of this mysterious, subterranean ‘town’. How far, I wondered, did this underground world extend? Perhaps, I conjectured, it went on as far as our own village, ten miles inland; perhaps the ‘Boring’ itself, in Forty Acres field, was an extra outlet for the inhabitants . . .
I was to learn, before long, that these troglodytic ‘houses’ were the relics of fortifications, built during the Napoleonic wars; they had nothing to do, after all, with the inland collieries at Bettes-hanger and Snowdown, or, for that matter, with our own temporary ‘Boring’. But I was haunted for years, and still am at times, by the sense of a great subterranean town extending from Dover, inland under Lydden and Coldred and Sibertswold, towards Barham Downs and the remoter country beyond the watertower.
III
In spring and summer, coming back from our walks in the late afternoon, I used to be tortured by the fear that there might be ‘people to tea’. If there were, I was liable to be seized upon and made to say ‘how-do-you-do’. I possessed even less social aplomb than most ‘difficult’ children: the prospect of being faced with a crowd of unknown grown-ups (or even children for that matter), terrified me out of my wits. I still suffer, at times, from the same fear: and one of my nightmares is that, by some extraordinary concatenation of circumstances, I may one day have to be received at Buckingham Palace. An unlikely contingency, to say the least, it is the adult equivalent, for me, of my mother’s tea-parties.
As often as I could – if I detected, in the garden, the fluttering of ladies’ dresses, or white flannel trousers (for the cottage lawn was just big enough for badminton, though not for tennis) – I ran away and hid myself: as often as not in the Igglesdens’ garden. The Igglesdens had an immense orchard of nut-trees: it was practically a wood, though so familiar, its bounds so well-defined, that it lacked the element of fear and mystery which, in a ‘real’ wood, would have prevented me wandering for long there alone. The Igglesdens’ wood, moreover, had a fascinating flora: half-wild, half-cultivated. In early spring, the ground was covered with great drifts of snowdrops: later came daffodils, and later still, in May, carpets of ramsons, the starry-flowered wild garlic. Other more coy denizens were the Turk’s-cap Lily and the blue Mountain Anemone, both considered ‘doubtful natives’ in the floras, and almost certainly not truly wild in the Igglesdens’ orchard. But I preferred to think them indigenous. Truly native, however, was an orchid – Epipactis latifolia – of which a single plant turned up one summer: I had only found it once before, and was immensely excited.
One April evening when there were ‘people to tea’ I had escaped from the visitors, and was wandering by myself through the high, sun-pierced thickets of hazel. It was a Sunday, and the church-bells were ringing for evensong; three placid notes leisurely and interminably repeated: tum-tum-ty, tum-tum-ty, tum-tum . . . The bells were in need of repair, and the third note was so faint that one could hardly hear it at this distance: shrill, uncertain, slightly cracked, it had, none the less, a curiously prolonged echo, which was ‘held’, like a dotted minim, above the subsequent repetitions of the other two beats, producing an effect of some vague, remote descant, faintly discordant, as though the traditional ‘tune’ of the bells had been re-set by some modern composer.
The westering sun poured its sheaves of gold through the hazels; the notes of the bell seemed a kind of thickened, concentrated essence of the light, exuding in drops of a darker, richer tone from the very core of the evening. A cuckoo began to call, too, its iterated note cutting across the song of the bell with an effect of increased ‘modernity’, as though the composer had redrafted his score, ‘thickening’ the orchestration, and adding an atonal element in the manner of Schönberg or Webern . . .
I wandered to the limits of the garden, to where it was bounded by the bottom of ‘Boring’ Lane. The orchard was separated from the road by a narrow stream and an oak fence; the stream was a tributary of the Nailbourne or ‘woe-water’ which flowed through the village in spring: rising irregularly every few years, and supposed, by its appearance, to herald disaster. It seemed, in those days, to rise more often than not: they were the years of the first War, so perhaps the legend seemed more than usually plausible . . . On this particular evening the stream was flowing turbulently between its banks; and on the banks themselves and above them, on the higher ground, stretching away under the trees as far as I could see, their cups still wide-open to receive the later sunlight, was a golden carpet of celandines.
In the quiet, sunlit orchard, their sudden splendour took me unawares: I had seen them often enough before, but never in such prodigal quantities, never at this precise moment when the last sunlight fell full upon their innumerable stars, burnishing their gold to an infinitely richer brilliance. The cuckoo called across the held note of the bell: the sunlight glanced on the brown, chuckling stream: the golden, sonorous evening seemed timeless, eternal. I felt suddenly inclined to cry: it was too much, the moment was making some vast, intolerable demand upon me which I knew I couldn’t satisfy. To escape its importunity, I began to gather a bunch of celandines: pretending that this was just an ‘ordinary’ evening, and that I was doing something quite casually which I might equally well do at any other time . . .
As I picked the flowers, the light began to fade: the sun was dipping behind the great chestnuts beside the church. The celandines were rapidly closing their petals; when I had picked a bunch, they looked curiously drab and inglorious. I returned to the house, leaving my flowers in the porch: I would collect them when I went home.
An hour later I went to look for them: they had gone. Mr Igglesden had thought they were ‘rubbish’, and thrown them in the dust-bin. I burst into passionate tears, an outburst so unreasonable, so out of proportion to its cause, that Mrs Igglesden concluded that I must be ill. It wasn’t as if the celandines were ‘rare’: there were plenty more of them. I could go and pick some more now, if I liked . . . Nobody ‘understood’; I could hardly have specified, even to myself, the reason for my tears. But I continued to cry with a desolate unhappiness until, at last, exhausted and almost unable to speak, I was escorted home.
On the days when I couldn’t escape, and was made to go and say how-do-you-do to the visitors, I would be led, like a victim to the sacrifice, towards the tea-table spread under the plum-trees, where enormous aunts or cousins loomed in a semicircle, like figures of some terrifying myth. They all seemed immensely old, and reminded me vaguely of the picture of the Graiae in the ‘Told to the Children’ edition of Kingsley’s Heroes. ‘Lend me thy tooth, Sister, that I may bite him . . .’ My Aunt Ada or Aunt Gertie did not, in fact, show any signs of wanting to devour me; though Aunt May Hewlett, on one occasion, did give some colour to my phantasies by seizing hold of me and (painlessly) pretending to take a mouthful out of the back of my neck . . . I protested, with some vigour; offended, Aunt May said that her little boys simply loved having their necks bitten. (At a later date, when I met her offspring, I not unnaturally expected them to be rather peculiar; little boys who liked being bitten must, I felt, be in some way extraordinary; but – rather to my disappointment – they proved to be perfectly normal.
Sometimes Cousin Howe would be present too, and his wife, Cousin Lucy. Howe Hewlett was a portentous figure: an evangelical parson with an immense white beard and huge hands with horny, spatulate fingers. Everything about him was enormous: even when he gave my parents a present, he chose a vast, an out-landishly outsize edition of Webster’s dictionary, almost a yard wide . . . I think he disliked me; Cousin Lucy certainly disapproved of my upbringing, and said so in no uncertain terms. Once she gave me a picture-book which, naturally, at bed-time, I took upstairs with me. For reasons which I have never fathomed, this action was in some way ‘naughty’; what tenet in Cousin Lucy’s extraordinary system of ethics specifically forbade the taking of books upstairs, I cannot imagine. But I was sternly rebuked, and the book remained, in future, below stairs.
Often Miss Trumpett had come to tea: resplendent in crimson or scarlet, like some extraordinary macaw. She terrified me, but I was also half in love with her. She was at least familiar: other visitors, strangers, held for me the terror of the unknown. Mrs Sabatini, Mrs Noblett, Mrs de Lacy Bacon . . . their very names were alarming. Mrs de Lacy Bacon – a vision of rashers swathed in lace; Mrs Noblett – she seemed to be covered with curious protuberances. ‘So this is the baby?’ they would say, when I was introduced. My brother and sister were a decade older than myself: it was an eternal humiliation to me.
‘Visitors’ were divided, by me, into two classes: friends and relations of my mother and father, and friends of my brother and sister. My parents’ visitors all seemed to me incredibly ancient: they were remote as gods, and as unapproachable. The friends of my brother and sister, being younger – though still immeasurably older than myself – occupied a kind of no-man’s-land between Godhead and mortality: they were less than divine, but more than mortal. Unlike my parents’ friends, these demi-gods could consort, to a limited extent, with mere mortals like myself. It was, indeed, a rather unsatisfactory kind of intercourse: the half-godly ones had the whip-hand every time, and could dispense or withdraw favours as they chose. But they did possess certain human characteristics: one of which (an important one for me) was that they could be fallen in love with.
And fall in love with them I did: distantly, secretly (I would have died rather than reveal my passion), but none the less whole-heartedly.
Hertha de Lacy Bacon (whose mother was one of the Olympians) endeared herself to me for life by doing for me a beautiful drawing of a Bee Orchid. I treasured the drawing – the gift of a half-goddess – for years. It was seldom, though, that such tangible contacts were established . . . Usually, I was no more than an enthralled observer of the rites and ceremonies with which these heroes and heroines of myth occupied their time: badminton, bathing (when we were at Sandgate), golf (on Barham Downs: I was careful to keep at a safe distance), listening to the gramophone; and, of course, talking.
Their talk was interminable and, because I couldn’t understand half of it, fascinating. The conversation of my sister’s friends, in particular, had an esoteric and magical quality which thrilled me. Often they would speak in low voices, sometimes in whispers: there were quick, complicit glances, bursts of incomprehensible laughter . . . What was their talk about? What were the jokes that amused them? I tried my best to overhear; but when I did succeed in doing so, I was seldom much the wiser. Sometimes, overhearing some remark which had provoked screams of laughter, I would hypnotize myself into believing that I, too, thought it extraordinarily funny. I would repeat it to myself in private, not understanding it in the least, but thinking how exquisitely witty it must be. Once, unable to keep such a gem of wit to myself, I repeated it to my mother: she gave me an odd look, didn’t laugh at all, and told me not to be rude. After this, I noticed that my sister’s friends became all at once much more difficult to over-hear . . .
Elspeth, Violet, Hertha, Dolly – they sprawled their big, athletic bodies on deckchairs in the sunlight, talking; the more daring of them smoked cigarettes – which was still considered a little ‘fast’ by the Olympians (Cousin Howe and Mrs Sabatini), sitting aloof beneath the plum-trees’ shade . . . I was thrilled and exasperated by the sense of a world beyond my ken: the innumerable jokes and allusions belonging to a shared past, a community of age, experience and upbringing. They had nearly all been at the same school: Miss Pinecoffin’s rather ‘advanced’ and very strenuous establishment at Sandgate, Gaudeamus, where I myself was soon to go to the Kindergarten. Hockey and high ideals and high-jinks in the dormitory – it all sounded fascinating, like the stories in Little Folks; but it remained for me, as did the totemistic world of ball-games, an insoluble and provoking mystery.
This sense of a communal past which I hadn’t shared became, in later years, inseparably associated with the secretive, clannish world of my sister’s school-friends; and after a time, the association became concentrated in and almost confined to Dolly Matheson. I don’t know that she was any more typical than the others: a jolly girl, given to frequent bursts of laughter, she does not, in retrospect, seem specially memorable. But to this day, if I find myself in some society to which I am a stranger, where the conversation turns on a common past which I have not shared, my sense of being alien, my irritation at private jokes which mean nothing to me, find vent in the silent, laconic exclamation: ‘Dolly Matheson!’ And I see, for an instant, with perfect clarity, the chubby face, the athletic body, and the complicit smile at some mystery which I shall never be able to solve . . .
My brother’s friends shared equally a common fund of memories: but they were less secretive, less given to giggling in corners over jokes which were, perhaps, a little ‘fast’ . . . Could men be ‘fast’ as well as women? I wasn’t sure; it seemed to be chiefly a feminine quality, but perhaps all men were fast by nature, anyway, and accepted as such. They seemed, at any rate (I thought), to take life more easily, they didn’t seem to mind whether people disapproved of them or not.
My brother’s friends were mostly at Sandhurst, or about to be; some of them were already in the Army. Sometimes they appeared in uniform, sometimes in tennis-flannels: they all seemed very large, with loud voices and big moustaches, and they smelt of tobacco and Anzora. They talked interminably about games: I was rather bored, but quite contented so long as they only talked. When they were actually playing, I kept well out of the way, for fear of balls.
Heroic inhabitants of a world to which I knew I should never rightfully belong (the world of Ballantyne and Lost Island), they squatted on the grass playing a portable gramophone and smoking pipes or what they called, rather deprecatingly, ‘gaspers’. I was faintly shocked because they wore their tennis-shirts open at the neck: extremely prudish myself, I would never have thought of doing such a thing; though once or twice I unbuttoned my own shirt, in private, before the glass, to see what it looked like.
They talked a lot, too, about ‘shows’. I realized they meant theatres, and as I had at that time a devouring passion for the stage, I felt a certain sympathy . . . But I had only been to Peter Pan and a performance of Twelfth Night; the ‘shows’ attended by my brother’s friends (and my sister’s too, for that matter) were quite different. They had names like Bubbly, Tonight’s the Night, Razzle-Dazzle; they appeared to consist largely of music, and my brother bought gramophone records of them. These were mostly two-sided, labelled ‘Selection I’ and ‘Selection II’ respectively, so that I conceived of a musical comedy or revue as being arbitrarily divided into two parts, each with its own special atmosphere.
I was not allowed to go to these ‘shows’; nobody, indeed, ever suggested such a thing. I knew very little about them, except from the fragments of talk which I managed to overhear: one had some ‘ripping girls’ in it, another had a Scottish scene, others had marvellous tunes or (in one or two cases) very ‘low’ jokes. Like the Dover Hippodrome, these ‘shows’ had a faint flavour of wickedness: especially the kind called revues. I studied attentively the posters of the Pleasure Gardens Theatre, Folkestone, hoping to wrest from them some inkling of what a revue really was. All I could gather, once again, was that it was something to do with girls – and particularly girls who wore very few clothes.
I possessed a model theatre, in which I used to give performances to my family on Sunday evenings. After studying the posters with more care than usual, and storing up a few quotations I had managed to overhear, I decided to ‘produce’ a revue called Razzle-Dazzle. All went well till I introduced upon the stage a woman with a pram and a baby and, like player and prompter combined, delivered the appropriate lines. I cannot remember the joke; I have a feeling that it alluded to babies; in any case, my production was banned there and then, and subsequent ones, I was told, must be confined to Peter Pan or A Midsummer-night’s Dream.
Naturally I developed a passion for revue: it lasted well into my adult life. Directly (at the age of sixteen or so) the opportunity occurred to go to a real one, I went. Goodness knows what glamorous immoralities I expected; I was bitterly disappointed, anyway. But I wouldn’t admit it; perhaps this wasn’t the right kind of revue . . . I tried again – and again; for years I couldn’t bring myself to lose hope. But at last I gave it up. Evidently, I thought, revues weren’t what they had been in my childhood: a fond illusion which I still vaguely cherish.
Rupert Cockayne, Basil Medlicott, Jack Fearnside-Speed, Neville Penlington – heroic friends of my brother, sprawling on the lawn and listening to records of Tonight’s the Night: how many of them are still living, after two wars? I loved them and hated them – hated them because I felt inferior, because I was ‘not very strong’ and couldn’t play games; loved them remotely and respectfully, knowing them to be demi-gods. I imagined, too easily, that I was being laughed at; my brother’s friends were really very kind, and hardly laughed at me at all, but I still had a nasty feeling that they might be doing so behind my back.
Basil Medlicott, big and stalwart, with an enormous black moustache, was already in the Army. He laughed less than the others; he was quieter altogether. My hero-worship, for a time, became concentrated upon him: I particularly admired, for some esoteric reason, his white flannel trousers. I can remember nothing about them, now, which made them different from any other white flannel trousers; yet they must have possessed some mystical virtue which distinguished them from the ordinary article. I admired them so much that (as is the way with lovers), I had to talk about them, sooner or later: and confessed my infatuation to my nurse, who told me not to be silly.
My libido, as it happened, was soon diverted into other channels . . . When we returned to Sandgate, the girls of Gaudeamus gave a performance of A Midsummer-night’s Dream, to which, for a treat, I was taken. I fell hopelessly in love with the girl who took the part of Puck. Her name was Alison Vyse; her blonde hair was bobbed – a novelty in those days – and she played Puck with verve and distinction. My passion was a singularly hopeless one, for she was a year or two older than I, and, by the time I began to attend the Kindergarten, was of an age to be quite unapproachable. However, she formed the centre of my amorous phantasies for a long time; I invented, in due course, a ‘wild’ Alison Vyse, which (had she but known it), was a compliment of the first order. I preferred wild flowers and wild animals to tame ones; therefore, if I liked anybody, it seemed natural that, in my wishful phantasies, I should evolve an undomesticated variant. The Undercliff was already peopled, for me, with ‘wild’ airmen, who nested in the bracken, and were partly covered with hair, like fauns. There was at one time a wild Basil Medlicott; and now Alison joined the indigenous fauna: hopping about on rabbit’s paws, her blonde bob flapping seductively among the tamarisks and conifers under the cliff. For a time I even kept her in a cage and fed her on Plasmon oats, which I had seen advertised in Little Folks: it seemed to me to be the sort of food she would probably like. (Later, she came to stay for a time with my family – an experience which, alas! was to prove disillusioning.)
At Sandgate, badminton was replaced by bathing; our garden descended in terraces to a semi-private beach, and my brother and sister and their friends bathed frequently and with gusto. I would watch them from afar off, as they ran down the steps with shrill screams and laughter – ‘Wouldn’t Myra love it!’ ‘Do you remember that time at Seabrook?’ – always those echoes of some unknown, exciting past which I hadn’t shared . . . The girls wore voluminous costumes, covering their arms and almost all of their legs; the men’s attire was scarcely less prudish – curious garments like combinations, patterned with gay stripes.
I was encouraged – even, on occasion, compelled – to bathe; but the water terrified me. I would as soon have plunged into a fire as into those hostile, icy breakers . . . I was frightened; but my prejudice against bathing was occasioned quite as much by pudeur as by fear. I had a rooted objection to undressing in public; that other people could do so struck me as shocking, though I secretly admired my brother’s friends for being so shameless, so nonchalantly ‘fast’ . . . I watched the bathers from the terrace above the beach: shouting, laughing, splashing each other in the shallows. I envied them: but only as a mortal may envy demi-gods – not with any real hope of ever having a share in their fabulous existences.
My own existence was divided sharply into two contrasting modes, distinct as the cleavage in music between major and minor; two worlds which seemed so different that, when the transition occurred from one to the other, I could fancy that a corresponding change occurred in myself.
These two distinct modes of thinking and feeling were symbolized by our life at Sandgate (our ‘real’ home) and our sojourns in the ‘country’, at the cottage in the Elham Valley. Between these two ways of life the opposition was complete and irreconcilable. Even geographically the barrier was clearly marked; the ‘country’ lay, remotely beyond the line of chalk-hills at the back of Folkestone. We penetrated, on our walks, to the extreme verge – climbing Caesar’s Camp or Sugarloaf to hunt for the Bee Orchid or the Spider; but we never crossed the frontier. When the time did come, at last, in spring or early summer, to go to the ‘country’, we took the little local train from Shorncliffe Station; or sometimes we would go, more excitingly, by car: actually penetrating the mysterious barrier of the hills, driving through Swingfield and Denton and along the high plateau of Barham Downs, until at last we would see, gleaming above the far woodlands, the white, familiar peak of the watertower.
Yet it was possible, on special occasions, without going by train or crossing the frontier of the hills, to take a sort of magical short cut into that Land of Lost Content. At Seabrook, between Sandgate and Hythe, a turning called Horn Street led off the main coast-road, under a railway-bridge. The branch-line was disused; the bridge was plastered with ancient, rusty tin placards, advertising Virol and Veno’s ‘Lightning’ Cough-cure. Once under this bridge, one could imagine oneself, already, in the ‘country’; fields and hedges bordered the road; sheep cropped the pasture; a stream gurgled with a country-noise beyond the hedge. And if one walked on for half a mile, and turned up a lane to the left, one actually came to real woods.
Pericar Woods they were called, rather oddly. Primroses and bluebells grew in them, undoubtedly – also wild foxgloves, which were rather rare in the district, and supplied, usually, the official reason for our expedition; yet I could never feel that Pericar Woods were quite genuine. Without the train or the car, without the sense of crossing the frontiers of Caesar’s Camp or Sugarloaf, I couldn’t convince myself that I was in the ‘real’ country.
None the less, Pericar Woods were a good substitute for the genuine article. They lay on a steep hillside: at the top of the hill was Shorncliffe Camp, and in the still, June afternoons, as we gathered our foxgloves, we could hear the far-off crying of bugles. Sometimes we would meet soldiers, about whom I felt rather as I did about the inhabitants of the ‘Boring’: they were an alien, rather inimical race, given (if the grown-ups were to be believed), to almost perpetual ‘drinking’, and to other things which were only hinted at in whispers. I decided that I would be a soldier when I grew up; I would have died rather than mention the fact – my publicly-admitted ambition was to be a bus-conductor – but I cherished the idea in secret. I don’t think I really quite believed in it myself: but I derived a peculiar thrill from imagining myself dressed in the rough khaki uniform (with a leather belt), and living in the remote and rather sinister territory beyond Pericar Woods.
IV
I was a hero-worshipper in spite of myself: I didn’t want to be, but I was drawn into one passionate admiration after another, whether I liked it or not. This totally one-sided love-life of mine was an inviolably private affair: it remained even, at times, almost concealed from myself – I didn’t approve of it, and would sometimes refuse to admit its existence. This ambivalence bred in me a not-so-unusual impulse to ‘take-it-out-of’ the people I loved; to injure, humiliate, or in some other way ‘do the dirty’ on them. Only, of course, in phantasy: in real life, I remained as polite and self-effacing as ever. But Basil Medlicott, and after him Alison Vyse, were ‘punished’ by being kept in a cage.
I had few friends of my own age: I was painfully shy, and my dislike of ball-games didn’t help to induce a spirit of mateyness. I tended, instead, to form ‘friendships’ with adults and preferably on paper: I developed a taste for ‘pen-friends’.
My earliest pen-friend was, or should have been, Pimpo, the clown, of Sanger’s Circus, to whom I wrote an enthusiastic fan-letter at the age of four. Unfortunately, the letter was returned by the Post Office as ‘insufficiently addressed’.
I was luckier, however, with Mr Hesse.
Mr Hesse was a taxidermist in Dover; I had been, for some time now, collecting a ‘Museum’ of butterflies, fossils, stuffed animals and so on. When I found some dead stoat or barn-owl, I was allowed to send it to Mr Hesse, who stuffed it, and mounted it on a little platform with realistic appendages – twigs or grass – appropriate to its habitat. I had never seen Mr Hesse; I was not to meet him for years. But a curious and voluminous correspondence sprang up between us: he wrote me long letters, in his crabbed handwriting, about anything and everything – animals and plants, his own family, aeroplanes, the war, fretwork, gardening. I replied at even greater length: I told him about everything I did, and illustrated my letters with little vignettes in the style of Kenny Meadows – pierced hearts, daggers dripping with blood, serpents with bats’ wings. The correspondence lasted for several years, uninterruptedly. Then, one summer, when we were at the cottage, Mr Hesse was at long last invited over to tea. He came: an elderly, tubby little man with a bald head and steel-rimmed spectacles. I was not exactly disappointed: I had never imagined Mr Hesse to be of the race of heroes. But somehow, after that, my letters to him became less frequent, and finally stopped altogether. The impact of his physical presence had destroyed some delicate adjustment: I would have preferred our relationship to remain purely epistolary. To this day there are certain people whom I prefer to write to rather than meet; it is a weakness, I suppose, of the ‘literary’ temperament.
No doubt I invested Mr Hesse with a certain added glamour owing to the fact that he lived at Dover. The town remained for me a thrilling, slightly sinister place, and our infrequent visits there continued to be fraught with a special kind of excitement.
I was shown the Grand Shaft – that mysterious spiral staircase built through the sheer cliff, leading up to the Barracks: it seemed to be (we never ascended it) yet another entrance to that vast subterranean town which I imagined stretching inland towards the ‘Boring’ and the watertower.
Then there was a mysterious creature called ‘the dredger’ which lived in the harbour; all day it grunted and snorted and roared somewhere out in the dazzle of sunlight: monstrous and invisible, it seemed to me a kind of tutelary spirit, a totem-beast guarding the town.
There was, too, the ‘twelve o’ clock gun’, which exploded, up at the Castle, punctually at midday, its thunderous roar echoing with a terrifying, a more-than-Shakespearian reverberation along the beetling cliffs . . .
The gun, the dredger, the ‘town’ inside the cliffs: Dover was full of romance, a fit background for heroes such as my brothers friends, many of whom were stationed there . . . The gun and the dredger remained for me mysteries which I scarcely dared – or even wanted – to try and penetrate; but I had read some article about mining and the invention of the Davy Lamp, and I began to have some inkling of the real meaning of the ‘borings’ in the surrounding country.
Walking up to ‘Waterworks Wood’, I would be haunted by the feeling that, hundreds of feet below, lived a dark, alien race, their naked bodies crouched in narrow, pitch-black corridors where the ‘Davy Lamps’ gleamed like glow-worms, and canaries hung in cages to give warning of the deadly firedamp . . . They seemed to me, this underground tribe, to represent all that was dark, dangerous and inadmissible; and I was possessed by a fear that, on one of our longer walks, they would emerge in force, black-faced and naked from their caverns, and carry us off with our primroses, like so many Proserpinas at Enna, into the infernal regions below Snowdown and Womenswold . . .
One afternoon we set out for ‘Waterworks Wood’; we were going primrosing, and it must have been, I think, Easter-time, for Nurse Collier was heard to murmur that she only hoped the woods wouldn’t be full of ‘bank-holiday people’. This outcast race was known to infest, at certain seasons, Mrs James’s woods, and even – despite the increased vigilance of the keepers – Colonel Bell’s. I had seen them myself once or twice: they were usually very fat, they roared with inexplicable laughter when they saw us, and wherever they went left a litter of paper-bags, as though they were engaged in a perpetual paper-chase.
We walked up the hill, and skirted the first part of the wood. As we neared the watertower, we could hear voices – a most unusual occurrence. Rather cautiously, we continued on our way; and at last reached the fenced enclosure . . .
The sight that met our eyes was fantastic and, to me, shocking in the extreme. The august, inviolate mass of the watertower was alive with human figures: they clambered up the zig-zag iron ladder, they clung like monkeys to the railing round the tank; some had mounted to the gallery itself. The enclosure itself was full of them. They wore black clothes, most of them, and cloth-caps; their shirts were open at the neck, and their faces all seemed exactly the same: smooth, round, bright-red, with enormous mouths full of very white teeth. They laughed and chattered in some extraordinary dialect of which we could understand not a single word; some of them pointed at us, and roared with laughter.
With one accord, we turned away and hurried back by the way we had come: out into the blessed sunlight again, away from the enveloping trees, down towards Coldharbour.
‘Just what I was afraid,’ I heard Nurse Collier muttering. ‘Those miners . . . it wouldn’t do to stay, not with them about. They’d been drinking, too – you could see.’
So they had been miners: the watertower, no doubt, was one of their outlets from the Plutonic kingdom below the woods . . . I looked back, furtively, once or twice, to make sure that the black, red-faced figures were not following us. But all I saw was the white cap of the tower, floating serenely as ever above the dark crests of the pines.
4 Once again our hope
Rests with you to upbear:
As yet you know not the haunt where you may cope
With the paramount evil: seek if you dare!
Gavin Bone’s translation.
(Blackwell, 1945.)