chapter two

The Wild Soldiers

I

In my early childhood, the Goose Cathedral (though its name, in those days, had yet to be invented) marked the limit – or nearly the limit – of our outings in that direction. Sometimes I would be taken to look at the lifeboat itself – an enormous blue-and-red prow protruding, like some captive leviathan, from the Gothic doors. The boatmen wore blue jerseys and chewed tobacco; I was given to understand that they were very brave. One of them fascinated me particularly because he wore small gold ear-rings, of precisely the same pattern as those worn by my nurse. He must, I suppose, be some kind of woman, though he didn’t in the least resemble one in other respects. Such a fusion of the sexes rather upset my ideas: I had encountered the same anomaly in Kenny Meadows’s illustrations to Macbeth, where the witches were shown with beards and moustaches.

But it wasn’t chiefly the lifeboat (or even its androgynous attendant) which gave to our walks along this stretch of coast their peculiar quality of excitement. I was more interested, for instance, in the yellow horned poppies, which were abundant on the waste patch beyond the boathouse; I had also, on a memorable occasion, found coltsfoot there for the first time; and beyond the lifeboat lay; vast, remote regions which I had never explored, but into which I hoped, one day, to penetrate.

On one occasion I had indeed found myself in the furthest hinterland of that unknown territory. ‘Found myself’ is the right phrase, for I had been taken by car, and this, I felt, didn’t really ‘count’. I had gone, with my family, to see the famous ‘American Gardens’ which some rich man had ‘laid out’ at, I think, Saltwood, or it may have been Sandling. I had no idea why they were called ‘American’; in fact, I still don’t know; but the name seemed appropriate to their remote situation. (I more than half suspected that the place we had come to was, indeed, America). As for the gardens themselves, they were rather dull – consisting entirely (so far as I can remember) of rhododendrons and azaleas. If these were American gardens, then I, for one, preferred the English kind.

The lifeboat-station, then, was a landmark and a limit; sometimes our morning walks would take us there, but more often we would set off in the opposite direction, towards Folkestone: either climbing the cliff-paths to the town itself, or (if we were merely going for a ‘walk’), keeping along the ‘Lower Road’ as far as the toll-gate, or perhaps a little beyond – though we seldom went much further, because that end of the road was considered rather ‘sordid’ – a mysterious quality which was reputedly shared by the Hippodrome at Dover and (as I learnt when we went to London a few years later) by Madame Tussaud’s and the King’s Road, Chelsea. On the rare occasions when we did penetrate beyond the toll-gate, I was rather attracted by this dubious territory which, in the summer, became a kind of Luna Park, with a switchback, automatic machines and a Pierrot show called the Pom-Poms: all, no doubt, very ‘sordid’, but possessing, for me, the fascination of forbidden fruit; for I was not, of course, allowed to go on the switchback or to visit the Pierrots.

II

‘Going shopping?’ inquired my Aunt Ada, brusquely, one morning, just as we were setting out from the house. (She and my Uncle Arthur must, at that time, have been home on leave from India).

I shook my head, suddenly embarrassed, and quite unable to explain that we were not, in fact, going ‘shopping’, but were bound, on quite a different errand.

Since I didn’t answer her question, my aunt repeated it. In an agony of embarrassment, I managed at last to mutter, shamefacedly, that we were not going shopping.

‘Well, where are you going, then?’ my aunt insisted.

We were going, I whispered, to Pay the Books.

My aunt made that noise which, in old-fashioned novels, is indicated by the word ‘Pshaw!’ – implying, in this case, only too eloquently, that she didn’t hold with such hair-splitting distinctions.

But for me the distinction was a perfectly definite one; and Aunt Ada’s brisk assumption distressed me – implying as it did that I and my family belonged to the same world as herself, a world where, no doubt (among other peculiarities), little boys and their nurses were in the habit of ‘going shopping’. I resented such simplifications: I was I, I belonged to my family, who lived at Number Nine, Radnor Cliffe, Sandgate, Kent, and were by no means to be confused with the families of those aunts and uncles who, periodically, descended upon us for visits, filling our house with their alien (and usually frightening) habits, and their loud, unfamiliar voices.

I don’t know why the idea of ‘going shopping’ seemed to me, in some way, humiliating; but most certainly it did. Possibly it was an embryonic form of snobbery: most of our provisions were ‘delivered’ by the tradesmen, and we seldom had to go and buy things, ourselves, in the town. Yet I cannot believe that I was aware, at that time, of such social nuances: my distress, I think, was caused merely by an exaggerated, an almost pedantic awareness of the distinctions between things. I was extremely pernickety, for instance, about names: my family would enrage me by calling the riverside plant, Typha latifolia, a Bulrush – whereas I knew that its correct name, according to the books, was the Great Reed Mace.

It was the same with ‘shopping’: we were not going to Folkestone to buy things – unless it were a spongecake which, for a treat, I was sometimes allowed to bring away from Gironimo’s, and eat on the way home. We were going to Pay the Books; I wasn’t sure, exactly, what this meant; but the outsides of these ‘books’ were perfectly familiar to me: small, strongly-bound volumes like miniature ledgers, with the shopkeeper’s name embossed in gilt on the cover. (The butcher’s book had, in addition, a rather interesting picture of a cow). But Paying the Books was not, it seemed, an event which occurred in the alien, inferior world inhabited by my aunts and uncles; or if it did, it was not distinguished as a separate activity; it came, apparently, under the same category as ‘shopping’: which only showed, I thought, how different my world was from theirs.

I was, in fact, profoundly aware by this time of the gulf which separated me from the rest of mankind. I was fatally and incurably ‘different’. I had suspected it for a long time; but recently I had begun to attend the Kindergarten at Gaudeamus, the girls’ school in Sandgate where my sister was a boarder; and here my suspicions had ripened into certainty. I had known very few other little boys up till then – my brother was a decade older than I – and such few as I had met I had almost invariably loathed. They seemed to me of a different species: they talked of subjects about which I knew nothing, they were continually doing things which, even if I was able to do them myself (and I usually wasn’t) seemed to me stupid and unnecessary. They jumped from high walls, they sprayed each other with the garden-hose, they laughed uproariously at the jokes in Puck and The Rainbow; they had, every one of them, a passion for ball-games and model railways, both of which I found hopelessly boring. On one occasion the young son of a friend of my mother’s came to stay, and we were bathed together; by some curious trompe d’oeil I formed the impression that he possessed two penises, whereas I had only one. The fact didn’t particularly surprise me; it merely confirmed what I had always known – that I was not like other little boys.

Plainly I was destined to develop, on sound Adlerian lines, as a victim of Organic Inferiority. Possibly I did – though, with all due respect to the psycho-analysts, I’m inclined to doubt it. I neither felt particularly inferior, nor, so far as I know, did I indulge in orgies of over-compensation. I was merely aware, with a sometimes painful acuteness, of being Different. This awareness of difference extended to my family: they were different from other people’s families, and I resented all assumptions to the contrary. Other little boys from other families might, in the mornings, ‘go shopping’ with their nannies; I, on the contrary, went to Pay the, Books with Ninnie.

Perhaps some early speech-difficulty had resulted in my calling her ‘Ninnie’; but Ninnie she remained, and I fiercely resented any attempt, on the grown-ups’ part, to call her by any other name. I loved her with a jealous and exclusive passion: with my mother and my brother, she completed the trinity of those whom, alone in all the world, I would admit to my affection. She returned my love: and the thought that one day she might leave us was one of the two major horrors which haunted my existence – the other being the prospect of going to boarding-school.

In my love I was to some extent a fetishist: Ninnie possessed, for example, some special embroidered aprons which she did not, on normal occasions, wear. They were laid away in the enormous domed trunk which contained the whole of her possessions, and were kept for ‘best’. But whenever I was unwell – or ‘not just the thing’ – I would beg her to put on one of the cherished aprons, which had acquired for me a kind of symbolic potency, as though their smooth, goffered folds were a visible manifestation of Ninnie’s devoted love and her magical power to console.

Once a year Ninnie went away for a holiday with her mother, who lived at Dover. For a whole fortnight I was deprived of her comfortable and reassuring presence. I dreaded these occasions; yet, I could, at times, be guilty of disloyalty in her absence. Thus, she would beg me not to eat cold boiled bacon while she was away; for as sure as fate, if I ate it, I should be afflicted with what she referred to as ‘sand in my water’. Alas! Like some apostate Jew I would yield to the persuasions of my family; and devour my daily slice of bacon; with the result, of course, that I suffered from violent indigestion till the day of Ninnie’s return. One glance at the tell-tale sediment in the pot was enough to enlighten her; I was promptly dosed with liquorice powder and put to bed: there to suffer all the agonies of remorse, coupled with the acuter discomfort caused by the liquorice. My unhappiness, however, had its consolations; for I knew that, when the liquorice had ‘acted’, Ninnie was sure to come and sit by my side, attired in the customary, the quasi-sacramental apron, and read to me The Tale of Mr Tod or a story from Little Folks.

III

On the days when we were not going into Folkestone to Pay the Books, we would go, merely, for a ‘walk’. Usually this meant the ‘Lower Road’, which led from our house, along the undercliff, to Folkestone harbour. The undercliff, a tract of semi-wild land between the Leas and the beach, was for me a kind of substitute for the ‘country’. Innumerable small paths traversed the bushy slopes; here and there, where the trees were planted more thickly, one could almost imagine oneself in a real wood. It was a manageable, a half-domesticated wilderness, where one could never wander far enough from the road to feel lonely or frightened. At night, certainly, it might have its terrors: my mother would never walk along it alone, after dark, for it was reputed (and perhaps justly) to be haunted by ‘drunken soldiers’. In the day-time, however, there was no danger from the military or from anybody else: we met few people on our walks (at any rate during the winter months) and the undercliff became peopled, for me, chiefly with the personages of my own private mythology. Some of these, indeed, were inimical: particularly the Acorn-headed Tents, which I invested with such a potent atmosphere of horror that I lay awake every night for weeks, watching for their august and terrible forms to emerge from behind the nursery wardrobe. It was useless for Ninnie to assure me that these beings ‘didn’t exist’; I knew otherwise; had I not seen them, leaning rakishly against the wall of the toll-house, along the Lower Road? Ninnie’s words, as it happened, far from consoling me, had the effect of increasing my terrors. The word ‘exist’ was new to me: and by its association, albeit a negative one, with the Tents, it acquired a terror of its own, suggesting to me, for some inexplicable reason, a kind of hair-net, such as Ninnie herself was in the habit of wearing. These sinister black webs thenceforward became associated with the Tents who, if they could speak, would probably (I felt) whisper sibilantly in my ear, as I lay in the darkness, the evil and minatory word: ‘Exist’.

The toll-gate lay at the further end of the Lower Road; the toll-keeper was a friend of ours – her name was Mrs Mawby, but from the time I could talk I called her Dadda-at-the-toll-gate. She wore a cloth cap; and this was enough to identify her, for me, with my father. Once, when Miss Trumpett came to stay with us, and had taken me for my morning walk, I had incurred her displeasure by hailing Mrs Mawby as ‘Dadda’.

‘But it’s not your Dadda,’ Miss Trumpett protested, in that rich, silky voice of hers in which, even at that age, I detected an exotic, almost indeed an erotic quality which never failed to alarm me.

‘It is,’ I insisted, obstinately.

‘But it isn’t,’ Miss Trumpett repeated.

I was taken home in disgrace. It was my first experience of adult injustice: I was honestly convinced that my father and the toll-keeper, if not precisely one and the same, were at least aspects of the same divinity. Children are obstinately polytheistic; and not all Miss Trumpett’s arguments could make me a monotheist. I drank my morning Bovril, gulping back my tears, and listening with an entire lack of comprehension to Miss Trumpett’s flute-like and blandishing tones. Presently she left me to my disgrace; and I pretended, miserably, to look at the pictures in Little Black Mingo, in which the wicked Black Noggy seemed to me to bear a startling resemblance to Miss Trumpett herself.

But whether or not Mrs Mawby was my father (and the point, to me, didn’t seem worth arguing about), it was quite certain that the Tents, which had inspired me with such horror, inhabited her house by the toll-gate. At first sight they had seemed quite ordinary tents; Mrs Mawby let them out to trippers at sixpence an hour; I must have seen them many times on the beach below our house. But leaning against Mrs Mawby’s porch – tall, shrouded figures, with small black acorn-heads – they seemed to me evil beings, capable of wreaking their will upon myself. Night after night I pictured them hobbling along the undercliff towards our house – their white shrouds flapping, their acorn-heads nodding balefully one to another, conversing in high, squeaky voices like the voices of bats; nearer and nearer they came – in at the door, up the stairs . . . I would lie trembling, trying to be brave (because I had decided to be a soldier when I grew up), but compelled, at last, to call out to Ninnie, who slept in the big bed at my side. A moment later, the room was mercifully flooded with light: I was given some milk and a Petit Beurre biscuit and, as I lay listening to Ninnie reading Mr Tod for the hundredth time, I felt a blessed relief steal over me. The familiar words soothed me like an incantation; the Acorn-heads had vanished, defeated by a superior magic; Ninnie’s voice became fainter and fainter; and at last I slept.

But the mythology of the Lower Road, apart from such notable exceptions, was not particularly alarming: for most of the creatures with whom I peopled it were, like the undercliff itself, partly domesticated.

There were, for instance, the wild soldiers (or airmen: I didn’t distinguish very accurately between the two breeds). I cherished a secret and (I felt) somewhat discreditable passion for the Army (which included, at that time, the Royal Flying Corps); I wanted, when I grew up, to be a soldier or an airman myself; but in my heart of hearts I knew this to be a mere romantic phantasy; my profound and incurable ‘difference’ precluded me, I felt, from ever being a ‘real’ soldier.

I consoled myself by inventing a race of ‘wild’ soldiers – a tractable and harmless breed, smaller than the real ones (they were not more than two feet high), who could be kept as pets. They were easily tamed, and appeared to thrive in captivity: I fed them on Plasmon Oats and Robinson’s Patent Barley. In the wild state, they nested among the bushes beneath the cliff; I recognized their nests – flattened, grassy patches among the denser undergrowth, bearing the recent imprint of their bodies. (No doubt these ‘nests’ were, in reality, the nocturnal retreats of loving couples; the official explanation, however, was that ‘tramps’ slept in them – and I was not allowed to examine them too closely, for fear of Picking Up Something).

The fauna of the undercliff included, also, a number of ‘wild’ variants of people with whom I was, or had been, in love. Among these were my brother’s friend Basil Medlicott, and Alison Vyse, with whom I had fallen desperately in love during my first term at Gaudeamus: she was two or three years older than myself, and had given a brilliant performance as Puck in the school production of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. As for the ‘real’ people we met along the Lower Road, they were comparatively few. There was a pleasant lady who always smiled at us as we passed: she possessed a white terrier which was kept so scrupulously clean that it always appeared to have been bathed that very morning. This dog, for some reason, or other, became the basis of yet another of my private myths; he lived, I decided, somewhere up in the hills near the barracks, and I even invented a little tune, a kind of Leitmotif to accompany his appearances: it consisted of a single, rather melancholy phrase, reminiscent of a bugle-call. The terrier, I think, was a kind of dog-soldier, a distant relation of the ‘wild’ soldiers on the undercliff who, though ‘human’ in other respects, did, in fact, possess short white tails, like rabbits.

Sometimes we would meet Mrs Croker, the novelist; and quite often Sir Squire Bancroft would boom a genial greeting to us as he passed. With his bush of white hair and his black-ribboned monocle he was a somewhat terrifying figure; I felt more at ease with his red-haired Scotch parlourmaid, Rae, who often used to bob out of the ‘Tradesmen’s Entrance’ of his house, as we went by, and offer me an ‘Animal’ biscuit – those fascinating confections made in the shapes of dogs, lions, rabbits and so forth. (Are they, I wonder, still obtainable?)

There was, too, at about this time or perhaps slightly earlier, a certain Mr Wells, who lived at Spade House: my brother and sister were invited to his children’s parties, and would return laden with presents. One of these presents was passed on to me – a set of small and exquisite models of the Japanese fleet. I was too young to be invited to these parties – a fact which, if I was aware of it at all, must have been a profound relief to me, for I had a horror of all social functions. My relief, however, was tempered in after years by regret, when I learnt that the Mr Wells of Spade House was none other than the author of Kipps and Mr Polly.

Later, I became less interested in the fauna – ‘real’ or imaginary – of the undercliff than in its flora. It was not the ‘country’, and botanizing at Sandgate was a poor substitute for the real thing; only in the summer, when we went to our cottage in the Elham Valley, could I feel that the flowers I found were genuinely ‘wild’ ones: at Sandgate they seemed, like the local fauna, semi-domesticated.

The most exciting floral inhabitant of the undercliff was, for me, the Cuckoo-pint, or Lords-and-Ladies. There was, at this time, a rather grand prep. school at Sandgate, reputed to cater chiefly for the sons of the aristocracy. I have forgotten its name; but we often met the boys, in their scarlet caps, being shepherded, in a crocodile, along the cliff paths. They were known, locally, as the ‘Little Lords and Dukes’; and Lords-and-ladies became, for me, arbitrarily associated with them. Not quite arbitrarily, perhaps: for the Cuckoo-pint, common as it is, has a certain quality of aristocracy, of being a ‘cut above’ its proletarian neighbours. To me, it seemed quite evidently not a ‘weed’; and the pale spathe, with the purple or yellow spadix standing erect within its shade, seemed not only distinguished, but in some way exotic and rather sinister. I certainly hadn’t learnt, at that time, the difference between a monocotyledon, and a dicotyledon; but most of the plants which impressed me by their beauty or strangeness were in fact monocotyledonous. The hyacinths, the lilies, the amaryllises – above all, the orchids – seemed to me naturally to take a higher rank in the floral hierarchy than mere dead-nettles, speedwell or cow-parsley.

One of the charms of the Cuckoo-pint was its habit of putting forth its earliest leaves in the middle of winter. In January or February – or even, in a mild season, as early as December – we would detect the first tightly-folded shoots pushing their way through the carpet of dead leaves beneath the still-leafless tamarisks or elders. Their brilliant shiny green had a flame-like, an almost praeternatural intensity: even in April and May, when their glory was diminished by the competition of other plants, the cuckoo-pint leaves still stood out bravely and assertively; but in winter, emerging solitary and naked from the brown, sodden leaf-mould, they had the breath-taking splendour of a fanfare of trumpets heard suddenly in a country silence.

From week to week we watched the glossy, sagittate leaves unfold: some immaculately green, others blotched and spotted like those of the Early Purple Orchid. Their thick, juicy texture made them seem edible and probably delicious; in fact, as I knew, they were ‘deadly poison’, and I wasn’t allowed to pick them. I was infinitely disappointed: for weeks I was consumed by a passion of concupiscence for those bright and arrowy shapes. At last, unable to bear it any longer, I decided upon a method of satisfying my lust which, if not positively deceitful, had a certain jesuitical cunning. Might I not, I asked, pick just one? I had been reading about the ingenious methods by which the plant was fertilized; I wanted to examine its internal structure – which I couldn’t do unless I was allowed to pick a specimen. I would take every precaution against its lethal properties; I would wear gloves; I would promise to keep my mouth shut all the time, lest the plant’s devilish exhalations should overcome me . . .

Such a heartfelt plea in the cause of science could hardly be refused; my wish was granted at last. Had I asked to dig up a mandrake, there couldn’t have been more fuss: wearing leather gloves, and (as though this were not enough) wrapping the leaves and spathe in a sheet of thick brown paper, I set to work with a trowel; and at last, in triumph, bore aloft the entire uprooted plant.

I duly dissected it, and afterwards kept it for a time in a pot of water; but (unlike my ‘wild’ pets) it didn’t thrive in captivity, wilting, indeed, almost at once. But I was satisfied; I never wanted to gather another. Thenceforward I was content to observe the aristocratic, sinister plant in situ; alert, from late autumn onwards, for the first sign of those shrill green flames springing beneath the dead, crackling undergrowth, among the flattened ‘nests’ of the wild soldiers.

IV

Another plant, which not only appeared above ground, but actually flowered in midwinter, grew on sheltered banks round Sandgate. This was the sweet-scented Butterbur, or Winter Heliotrope. What I really wanted to find was the ‘true’ Butterbur, which was a native British plant, whereas Winter Heliotrope was one of those species which the floras dismiss, with a high-handed xenophobia, as ‘aliens’, or ‘escapes from cultivation’. The native Butterbur, however, didn’t grow near Sandgate (though many years later I found it by a stream at Postling, only a few miles away); I had to be content with Petasites fragrans, which I felt didn’t quite ‘count’ as a wild-flower.

Its pink, woolly-looking heads smelt delicious – thrusting themselves out of the glacial winter earth with a hardiness which their delicate texture seemed to belie. Sometimes they would be in flower by Christmas, and I would gather them on our way back from Sandgate Church on Christmas morning. After the flowers came the round, dark-green leaves, very like those of coltsfoot.

Coltsfoot itself I had never found; I was mistakenly convinced that it was Very Rare. The rumour that it grew at Seabrook, beyond the lifeboat-station, haunted me for a whole winter; and one bright, windy morning in March we set out to look for it. I had been, of course, to Seabrook before – to look at the lifeboat, or, in late summer, to find the yellow horned poppy; but I had not, I think, been there so early in the year, and the occasion was in every respect a special one.

That stretch of road between Sandgate and Seabrook seemed to me then – and seems still – to evoke a sense of vastness, of enormous, airy spaces, and of being at the mercy of the elements. The sea here was not the tame, insipid sea which lapped on the Folkestone beaches; it raged and thundered upon the narrow shore, battering itself with an elemental violence against the sea-wall and, on stormy days, flooding across the road itself and into the basements of the houses beyond. The sea-wall was (and indeed still is) in a constant state of being repaired; the sea here is the enemy, a relentless monster forever threatening the land, and never quite to be propitiated.

On one side, the sea: on the other, gently-rising hills, scattered with villas, and smudged with the grey smoke of tamarisks. On the hill-top lay Shorncliffe Camp, its barracks and hutments stretching away towards Cheriton and the Downs. The bugles, in those days, haunted this stretch of coast perpetually: their sad cries drifting faintly seaward, as though answering the far, muffled booming of the foghorns, out in the misty distances beyond Dungeness . . . Desolate, wind-swept, faintly melancholy, the sea-road had for me an exciting, a rather adventurous quality: it led to foreign territory, outside our customary ambience. Seabrook merged into Hythe (already remote) and beyond Hythe began the mysterious and endless plain of Romney Marsh: the nearest approach to infinity which I was able to conceive.

The road turned inland at Seabrook; we passed in front of the lifeboat-station, and took the rough shingle track which continued along the top of the sea-wall. Here the note of desolation was intensified: there were no more houses, and the sea-wall was in a state of advanced ruin. On this blustery March day, the waves thundered with an implacable fury against the broken masses of concrete and, sucked back by the tide through a series of miniature ravines and crevasses, retreated down the boulder-strewn beach with their ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’. The flying spray, laced with small pebbles, flung itself across the path in sudden icy showers: soon our coats were drenched. Presently we left the path and clambered down into the shingly waste which lay between the sea and the Military Canal. This was a kind of Terre gastée, a desolate strip of land which had been allowed to run wild, I suppose, since the building of the canal. It was here that I had come to find the horned poppy; and here, on this sunny March morning, after only a few minutes search, I found the coltsfoot.

Goodness knows, it’s a common enough flower; but for me, at that time, it had all the glamour of rarity, and its discovery was as much of a thrill as would be, today, the finding of the Blue Sow-thistle or the Military Orchid. We walked back along the coast-road; the wind buffeted us so that we staggered to and fro across the pavement; the sun blazed down upon a sea of almost Mediterranean splendour, patched with bottle-green and peacock-blue, and flecked with a multitude of ‘white horses’.

I was possessed by a bursting, irrepressible happiness; I wanted to laugh and sing, because of the wind and the sunlight, and because I had found the coltsfoot. I did sing: but not a triumphal paean, not a rumbustious, roaring ditty such as one might have expected. No: what I sang was one of Mendelssohn’s Lieder öhne Worte – a melancholy, rather wilting little tune, very Mendelssohnian; I think it is Number 1 of the Opus. I had perhaps heard my sister play it at home, or had listened to somebody ‘practising’ it at Gaudeamus. It seemed to me perfectly to express the spirit of that particular morning: the sunlight, the wind, the shifting lights on the sea, and the yellow stars of the coltsfoot which I clutched, drooping already, in my hot, impassioned hand. The association remained, fixed indelibly in my memory; and to this day I cannot hear the tune without visualizing that same, identical complex of images which, on that March morning half a lifetime past, seemed to be so inseparably linked with it.

The problem of such musical associations is a knotty one; I have never come across any very thorough analysis of it. How much, I wonder, is musical appreciation based on such accidents? Are there certain harmonic modes or progressions which tend to evoke particular states of mind? Probably not; music, says Stravinsky, ‘expresses’ nothing. But there is more to it than the mere accidental association (such as the one I have described) between a given phrase or melody and a particular moment of time. A musical work which one has never heard before can immediately suggest certain images (there are some good examples of this in Proust); myself, I find that almost any Gregorian plainsong induces in me a vivid sense of the English countryside. Why? I never (being a Protestant) heard plainsong in my childhood; I came to it completely fresh, and its emotive power depended on no direct associations whatsoever. All I can suppose is that it suggested to me the work of certain English composers – Vaughan Williams, Ireland, Delius – who sometimes use archaic modes, and whom I had already associated with a ‘country’ atmosphere.

Whatever theories one may hold about the matter, one thing is unarguable – the sense of absolute conviction which accompanies such associations. Nothing, for instance, will shake me out of my belief that there must be a genuine psychic correspondence between that tune of Mendelssohn and the coast-road near Seabrook on a morning in early spring. My conviction is a mystical one: in precisely the same way, I take it, is the mystic convinced of his apprehension of the Numinous. The experience is so vivid to him that its validity seems to him self-evident. Unlike the mystic, however, I don’t propose to advance intellectual arguments in support of my own numinous convictions; I have read (or tried to read) too many such attempts. My arguments might, I myself believe, be quite as cogent as most of the others; but that, alas! is not; saying very much.

V

It was more often, then, in the late summer that we made the expedition to Seabrook: our chief object being, usually, to look for the yellow horned poppy. This charming flower; common enough locally, was not my own discovery; it was showy enough to have impressed other members of my family who were, generally speaking, bored by botany. My sister had gathered it at Seabrook – doubtless on some school botany-ramble; and in Anne Pratt’s little book on poisonous plants my mother had recorded (in pencil, above the coloured plate) the fact that she had found it at Aldeburgh in 1888. According to Anne Pratt, it was ‘one of the handsomest plants of our sea-shores’ – a remark which seems to me to damn the horned poppy with faint praise; I should be inclined, myself, to call it one of the most curious and beautiful plants in the British Flora. Like the Cuckoo-pint, it impressed me (though it wasn’t a monocotyledon) with its ‘aristocratic’ air: I loved the big, silky-golden flowers, so delicately contrasted with the tough, sinuous stems and the coarse-textured leaves; I was fascinated by the leaves themselves, whose glaucous bloom seemed to have imitated the very colour of the sea. I gathered whole bunches with a greedy enthusiasm; but the horned poppy is a disappointing plant to pick – the delicate flowers almost always ‘fall’ before one can get them home.

The poppy, however, was by no means the only interesting denizen of that waste-land beyond the lifeboat station. Samphire grew there, and the clammy and evil-smelling Viscid Groundsel, as well as such minor attractions as Sand-spurrey and Sea-blite. Samphire had a literary as well as a botanical interest – it was ‘in Shakespeare’. (Though common enough near Dover, it does not, I think, grow on Shakespeare Cliff itself.) The ubiquitous Pepperwort and Sea-mallow were there too, and a number of other maritime plants; the place acquired for me a curious fascination, and I could wander there, happily, for hours at a time.

Occasionally our walks would take us into the hinterland behind Seabrook; but these expeditions were few and far between, and involved, usually, a whole day’s outing, with all the paraphernalia of sandwiches and Thermos flasks. On these occasions we turned up the road called Horn Street, beyond the Fountain Hotel, into what, by courtesy, might be termed the ‘country’; it wasn’t ‘real’ country – it still counted, for me, as the ‘sea-side’ – but in Pericar Woods there were wild foxgloves and, reputedly, yellow irises. I was unlucky over the irises; they must have grown in the vicinity, for the girls of Gaudeamus brought back sheaves of them from their botany-rambles. I had admired them, in big jars of beaten copper, in the green-tiled fireplaces at the school, where they provided a natural counterpart to the art-nouveau, iris-and-water-lily scheme of decoration which prevailed. My failure to find the irises myself was galling: doubtless the girls who had gathered them in Pericar Woods had taken them entirely for granted, whereas for me they would have provided a major thrill. It was always the same – the most exciting things invariably happened to people who couldn’t fully appreciate them; I was resigned to the fact, by this time, and had adopted, in such matters, an attitude of rather cynical fatalism.

Horn Street led not only to Pericar Woods but also to the mysterious territory, where, as I was told, ‘the soldiers lived’; bugles called sadly over the hillsides, beyond the woods, and one was apt to encounter, suddenly and without warning, groups of red-faced men in khaki who would sometimes laugh at us or shout rude remarks as we passed. They terrified me – but only for so long as they were in sight; once we were safely past them, my terror gave place to excited imaginings: I liked to think of myself as one of those laughing, devil-may-care heroes inhabiting the high, windswept plateau of Shorncliffe Camp. How old did one have to be (I would ask) before one could be a soldier? At least eighteen, I was told. I was seven – I had eleven years to wait; my ambition, I felt, would hardly survive for as long as that. Besides (as I knew perfectly well), I wasn’t that sort of person: I was ‘different’.

I resigned myself to less exacting phantasies; and the red-faced, swaggering heroes of Horn Street were duly translated into smaller, more manageable versions of themselves; nesting in the undercliff, or confined in wire cages in my private ‘Zoo’ – half human, half-animal, smooth-faced fauns with putteed legs and (protruding from their khaki-covered buttocks) small white tails like the scuts of rabbits.