chapter three

The Goose Tree

I

Precisely at what period Eric Anquetil ‘discovered’ the Goose Cathedral, I cannot remember; but it must, I fancy, have been one summer in the early thirties, when he had come to spend his holidays at Folkestone. Thenceforward, the boathouse which, in my childhood, had seemed a perfectly normal feature of the landscape, became the breeding ground for a series of fantastic legends: an elaborate superstructure of nonsense not unsuited to the gimcrack, hey-nonny Gothic of the ‘chapel’ itself.

The boathouse, as it happened, had fallen upon evil times: soon after the First War it had apparently become, as they say, ‘redundant’, and had been converted into a private residence. Curtains hung now in the mullioned windows; the shingle patch was enclosed by an iron fence, within which three or four geese waddled up and down with a dégagé air, grubbing among the squalid remains of what had once, presumably been an attempt at a garden – a few stunted wall-flowers and Brompton stocks were all that now remained of it. The place must have changed hands several times since its ‘conversion’; it seemed chronically dirty and unkempt, and exhaled a curious atmosphere of desolation – as though its inmates had fled before some threat of war or pestilence.

We never, I think, caught a glimpse of the ‘chapel’s’ real inhabitants; but if they didn’t (visibly, at least) exist, we were quite prepared to invent them, and during that summer, sunbathing on the beach below, we elaborated a whole mythology centred about the ‘Goose Cathedral’. It was inhabited, we decided, by a mad archdeacon named Vindables, who had been unfrocked in consequence of his untimely conversion to Mithraism (he had attempted, with a notable absence of tact, to sacrifice a bull on the high altar at Canterbury). He was also a good amateur alchemist, and had (like Cardinal Pirelli) a marked tendency to transvestism; he had married, in later life, a Rumanian from Bessarabia who, besides being a noted witch, and the leader of the local coven, conducted as a sideline a highly successful bordello catering exclusively for the needy and deserving clergy . . . As for the geese themselves they were undoubtedly, said Eric, Barnacle-geese, hatched from the fruit of the legendary Goose-tree (he had written, a few years before, a learned little paper on this topic for the Oxford Outlook). Doubtless Mrs Vindables employed them for her own dubious purposes; probably they were her familiars.

Mythology quite apart, the Goose Cathedral became for us a minor aesthetic culte: it was an admirable example of le style Betjeman, and a perfect monument to the age which produced it. As such, we considered, it ought to be preserved by some antiquarian society, or bought for the National Trust. A boathouse disguised as a Gothic Chapel – it was a reductio ad absurdum of all that was commonly implied by the word ‘Victorian’; it became for us a symbol, in fact the very archetype, of all that we condemned so fiercely, in those days, as ‘bogus’.

The word was fashionable at that period – the late twenties and early thirties. It was a useful word; and perhaps the Goose Cathedral was a useful symbol. So much could be included in the context – not only the obvious ‘bogosities’ like Tudor petrol-pumps and Scots-baronial cocktail bars, but all those other, more insidious counterfeits: a pretentious prose-style, for instance, a fake-cubist picture or (even) the refined accents of suburbia. Bogosity, indeed, was ubiquitous; it wasn’t only a question of art or architecture; it was linked up (we considered) with snobbery: a symptom, merely, of the same pernicious and deep-rooted disease. We were all snobs of one kind or another – social, intellectual, sexual, athletic or what have you. The virus of bogosity, like the influenza-bug, infected all of us sooner or later; it was, we decided, a peculiarly English disease: no other country, for instance, could have produced anything quite so fantastically perverse as the Goose Cathedral.

At this time – I was still in the early twenties – I was much preoccupied by the problem of my own bogosity. The disease appeared to be incurable: ever since my childhood I seemed to have been afflicted with a chronic bovarysme, a perpetual mania for escaping from ‘reality’. In my last year at school I had envisaged myself as a sort of modified Huxley character – an oh-so-dis-illusioned Gumbril or Francis Chelifer; at Oxford, I had been the poète maudit of the nineties, modelling my personality (very inaccurately) upon that of Verlaine. Since then, however, my personae had tended to become polymorphous and confused – I was never quite sure which, at any given moment, was uppermost. I would have liked to evolve a brand-new one; I contemplated desperate remedies – I would become a communist, or join the Army (n’importe où, hors du monde!); but these particular Trans-formations of the Libido threatened to be rather too exacting. Besides, I wasn’t quite sure how one set about becoming a communist: I knew nobody, alas! who could direct me to that ‘small club behind the Geisha Café’ where, it seemed, most of my contemporaries were congregating.

I decided, instead, to become a Business-man; and was con-veniently offered a job in my father’s business at Folkestone. Not Emma Bovary herself could have been more unfitted for her chosen role than I was for mine. I realized it; but I continued to wear a checked cap, drink a great deal of beer, and cherish an incipient moustache – perfectly aware, all the time, that beneath this unconvincing disguise lurked the old, ineffectual poète maudit of my Oxford days. I lived in hopes, however, of a ‘change of heart’; if only one observed the forms of piety for long enough (so my Catholic friends assured me) one finally acquired Faith. Something analogous, I felt, might happen to myself in my father’s office: I would in time (so I devoutly hoped) develop the authentic, the indispensable characteristics of the business-man. (Why I should have supposed a business-man to be nearer to ‘reality’ than anybody else, I cannot attempt, after so long a lapse of time, to explain.)

Poker-faced, with the stiffest of Stiff Upper Lips, I tried my best to cultivate the virtues of Efficiency, Initiative and Commonsense. Alas! I was never a very good actor; and the stiffness of my upper lip was seriously impaired by my total inability to grow a really convincing moustache. Like Theodore Gumbril’s (and in spite of vaseline), it remained incorrigibly mild and melancholy.

And I must borrow every changing shape

To find expression . . . dance, dance

Like a dancing bear,

Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape . . .

I tried hard (in spite of my moustache) ‘to keep my countenance’, to ‘remain self-possessed’; but alas! my efforts were doomed to failure. I would hear too often that

worn-out common song,

With the smell of hyacinths across the garden

Recalling things that other people have desired . . .

I developed, in fact, a cult of nostalgia – that easiest of all escapes from a hostile environment. Not that this, for me, was anything new: I had always, I suppose, been in love with the past – even in my childhood. But now my nostalgia became deliberate and self-conscious: I had not read my Proust for nothing, and I excused what I sometimes felt to be a weakness by telling myself that les seuls vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus. One day I was going to write a Proustian masterpiece of my own; I owed it to myself, therefore, to keep (so to speak) my sense of the past in working-order. And if the lost paradise of the past was the only true one, I felt, also, that nowhere but in the past could I escape from my chronic bovarysme, and encounter once again my ‘real’ self – so, at least, I liked to think; in fact, I was rather sceptical about this ‘real’ self lurking beneath the successive layers of my assumed personae. Did it, in fact, exist? Had it ever existed? Sometimes I suspected that it hadn’t. In any case, my contemporary ‘personality’ was, I was convinced, irretrievably bogus: a mere façade of wishful phantasies, a kind of Goose Cathedral of overblown whimsy and pretension.

In one respect, my cult of nostalgia assumed an outward and even a ‘practical’ form: for almost the first time since I had left school, I rediscovered the pleasures of botany. True, I went about it in a half-hearted – even a rather shame-faced – manner; for since I ‘grew up’ I had come to regard botany (like fireworks and tame grass-snakes) as an occupation unworthy of my mature years, and particularly unsuited to one who was dedicated to a romantic and Baudelairean career of self-destruction. I compromised, however, with my career, to the extent of going for a series of long walks at week-ends: I preferred to think of them as romantic expeditions à la recherche du temps perdu, which indeed they incidentally were; none the less, I had retained a lively interest in botany for its own sake (whether I approved of it or not) and it was noticeable that my walks took me, with an increasing frequency, to places where I was likely to find interesting plants.

Thus, in the early spring of this year, I had walked out to Seabrook, to that waste patch beyond the boathouse where I had once, so memorably, found the coltsfoot. The March morning was still haunted, for me, by that slow, sentimental melody of Mendelssohn; but the coltsfoot itself, unaccountably, had vanished. Common on every bank round Folkestone, and the bane of local gardeners (why had I never found it elsewhere but at Seabrook?) it had gone from the one place to which it could still, for me, lend a certain enchantment. I searched in vain: other former denizens were still there – I saw the leaves of the horned poppy – but no coltsfoot. Some silting of the shingle, perhaps, had occurred, or the soil had become too salty; but the plant’s absence seemed to me, somehow, to have a more esoteric significance . . . So much, I thought, for the recherche du temps perdu – it didn’t do to try and salt the tails of one’s private myths.

I walked, also, over the Hills – those chalky knolls behind Folkestone, once so rich in orchids, where I had wandered on so many summer afternoons with Ninnie. There were still orchids – but not so many as formerly, for educational ‘reform’ had progressed considerably since those days, and now every summer brought its hordes of botanizing schoolchildren to despoil these hills of the Bee Orchid, the Dwarf and the Late Spider.

But I wasn’t, particularly, in search of rarities; unaccustomed, of late years, to botanizing, I could feel a thrill of delight in encountering even the commonest, the most ordinary of plants; and today, in memory, that summer at Folkestone is enshrined for me in a flower which in former days I would have passed over as an uninteresting weed: the common purple vetch, Vicia sativa.

I had walked, on an afternoon in May, across the fields behind Cheriton and Shorncliffe, towards the hills; in the rough patches at the edges of the fields, the vetch was just coming into flower, its winged petals gleaming suddenly among the ox-eye daisies like small, crimson flames. Walking up to the hills I hummed to myself Reynaldo Hahn’s setting of Verlaine’s poem:

Le ciel est pardessus le toit

Si bleu, si calme . . .

and the melancholy little song became, like the vetch, indelibly imprinted upon my memory.

Qu’as-tu fait, ô toi que voilà,

Pleurant sans cesse?

Dis, qu’as-tu fait, toi que voilà,

De ta jeunesse?

The words, I felt, were all too relevant to my situation: what indeed had I done with my youth? Listening, in the evenings, to Ninon Vallin’s charming performance of the song, on the gramophone, I was bowed down by the weight of a vast, indefinable sadness, a tragic sense of the lacrimae rerum which (to be honest) I found highly enjoyable If only I wasn’t a business-man, if only I were free every day (as I had been today, since it was Sunday) to walk the hills and play the gramophone, I should have been, I felt, almost happy. But alas! I was committed to my bovarysme – I had chosen to become what I was, and there was no getting out of it. Self-condemned to ‘office-hours’ and to the cosy, bourgeois ambience of Folkestone, I cursed myself for a fool; and pulling forward the typewriter which I had borrowed from the ‘office’ (on the pretext that I wanted to learn to type for ‘business’ reasons), I settled down to type out my latest batch of poems.

These were, without exception, exceedingly bad – essays in the ‘New Country’ manner, without a spark of individuality. But I was going through a phase when I would seize upon the mannerisms of any modish writer to ‘body forth my own vacuity’. I wanted to write a Proustian roman fleuve – but I was far too tired, when I came home in the evenings, to feel like doing anything except have a drink. The most I could do was to attempt an occasional poem: full, in nearly every case, of the fashionable images – pylons and kestrels and ruined farms – and of curt monosyllables like ‘death’ and ‘stripped’ and ‘chum’. I didn’t really find the cult of homo-communism very sympathetic; but having borrowed its accents, I found myself borrowing, also, a modified and extremely corrupt version of its ideology. I became, in fact, something of an inverted snob – not only in my poems, but also, to some extent, in my social life as well; it was an affection which, amid the burgess respectability of Folkestone, was liable to be misinterpreted.

It was, of course, just another symptom of the disease from which I was suffering – a hyperbovarysme with complications. On Sunday evenings, when a day’s freedom had restored some of my normal power of self-analysis, I was able to diagnose my complaint only too easily. The prognosis seemed extremely gloomy; I could see no prospect of a permanent cure. But I knew, at any rate, that I wasn’t and never would be a ‘business-man’; nor, for that matter, was I likely to be a poet-maudit or otherwise – judging from my recent efforts. I was (in the fashionable phrase) ‘overcompensating’, with a vengeance. But overcompensating for what? Aware of abysses yawning at my feet, I drank beer with moustached hearties in Prince’s Bar or the Esplanade, and wished that I had the courage to flee, like Rimbaud, to Abyssinia. The fact that none of the people with whom I consorted had ever heard of Rimbaud gave me immense satisfaction. I felt, in some obscure way, that in such company I was nearer to what I still, with a singular naïveté, called ‘Reality’.

II

On certain other occasions I approached (so I liked to think) even nearer to that chimeric and delusive entity. Often I would take a bus over to Dover, on a Saturday night, and drink beer in the squalid, cheerful little pubs in Snargate Street. I liked the workmen and soldiers whom I met there; and I liked the town itself – the tough, vicious, sea-port atmosphere overlaid by a seedy, early-Victorian elegance. I had never been to Dublin, but in Dover I thought I could detect a quality which evoked for me the mise-en-scène of Joyce’s Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist; nor was I, in fact, so very far wrong.

But even this weekly dose of ‘reality’ didn’t really satisfy me; I would return to my rooms as disgruntled and melancholy as ever; there to sit morosely over some book which I felt I ‘ought’ to read – usually it emanated from the Left Book Club – or to play, over and over again, my favourite gramophone records.

The sole compensation, I found, for being a business-man, was that I had (for the first time since I left Oxford) a Room of My Own. True, I wasn’t doing any writing – which, I felt, was the proper function of a Room-of-one’s-own. But at least I could play the gramophone and contemplate my future masterpieces without being disturbed.

The Room was at the top of a tall, gaunt apartment-house called ‘Glencoe’, in one of those big, rather déclassé squares in the ‘West-end’ of Folkestone. My brother inhabited two rooms on the ground floor, where we took our meals together; but apart from this we kept religiously to our own quarters. Besides the gramo-phone, I had collected together my few other possessions – books, and one or two reproductions (Cézanne and Sisley); and the mere fact that I was thus able, even to a limited extent, to create my own ‘background’, gave me an illusory sense of freedom. The landlady, Miss Bugle, was tolerant and unobtrusive – a negative, dim-featured woman whose conversation was mainly restricted, like that of Mr F’s aunt, to occasional utterances of a sibylline obscurity, such as (when it was a question of some bit of local gossip) ‘There’s some in this town could tell a different tale,’ or (àpropos of nothing in particular) ‘kind words butter no parsnips’ . . . She could maintain an almost unnatural calm in the face of misfortune: once, for instance, when an accident with the geyser had all but blown her sky-high, her only comment was: ‘Oh well, it’ll all be the same in a hundred years, I suppose.’ The rise of Hitler (it was 1933) seemed to her less alarming than the rise in prices: ‘Tuppence-’alfpenny-on-the-meat-and-everything’s-awful,’ she would announce, in dazed and hopeless tones. Life, one could imagine her thinking, was an unavoidable misfortune; she would rather have been dead, but there it was; and what she was going to give us for dinner that night the Lord only knew, unless it was a little bit of done-up . . . Yet, surprisingly, she was quite a good cook; and the ‘bit of done-up’ would prove, as often as not, to be excellent.

There were few other lodgers in the house; I could play my gramophone without fear of disturbing anybody, and of this I took full advantage: putting on record after record, well into the small hours, drugging myself with music to dull the sharp edges of my unhappiness and my sense of frustration. (‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins.’) I bought more records than I could afford: mostly modern works, and mostly chamber-music. I fell in love with Poulenc’s Trio for Oboe, Bassoon and Piano, finding its crisp yet nostalgic gaiety a good corrective for my own costive moodiness. There was, too, Ravel’s Piano Concerto, that curious, febrile work which seems to embody all the sensations of hyperpyrexia – the quickened pulse, the hot skin, the nervous twitching of the limbs. And there was Ireland’s ’Cello sonata which, for me, became inextricably associated with winter evenings by the sea: the sunset flaming yellow in the west, the last rainy light gleaming in the puddles on the cliff-paths, and the sullen thudding of the waves on the beach below.

I found the same quality in other works by this composer – in some of the piano works, for instance: Month’s Mind, Soliloquy, Ballade; a bracing, ‘open-airish’ feeling combined with a rather austere note of nostalgia, an awareness of ‘old, unhappy, far-off things’. Probably I was mistaken: but Ireland’s music became one of my cultes, I associated it with my own love of certain country-scenes which I felt to be haunted by Druidic memories and the ‘forgotten rites’ of a pre-Christian civilization.

III

My flirtations with the Left Book Club were brief and unrewarding – as indeed they deserved to be, for my intentions were far from honourable. What I wanted was the passing thrill of ‘conversion’; I had no real intention of tying myself down to anything more permanent. Before long, the last, paper-bound pamphlet had been returned to the library, and, by way of giving myself a holiday, I took to re-reading all the books which I really liked. Proust, the early Huxley, To the Lighthouse, Howard’s End – how refreshing they seemed after all those wodges of facts and statistics! I had cured myself, at any rate, of one of my bovarysmes – I should certainly never become a communist.

Happy in my new-won freedom, I abandoned myself to even worse excesses: I began to burrow, with delight, through old piles of school-magazines, copies of The Isis, manuscripts of abortive novels which I had begun at school. What talent I must have possessed in those days! But alas! the stream had dried up; my ‘writing’ had been no more, perhaps, than a disease of adolescence; it was high time I faced the facts, and settled down to be a Responsible Member of Society.

I turned out, among other relics, an old copy of the Oxford Outlook, containing Eric’s article on Barnacle Geese. It was extremely erudite, and full of quotations (with page references) from obscure authorities . . . That same night I had a curious dream: I was on the beach at Seabrook, near the ‘Goose Cathedral’; night was falling, but the Gothic façade was perfectly recognizable against the darkening sky. From the centre of the roof, where the bell-tower should have been, rose a vast tree, from whose branches hung clusters of inky-black shells, shaped like mussels, but very much larger. Perched upon the tree’s boughs, or fluttering around it, were a number of plump white geese; some of them had descended from the tree, and were waddling rapidly along the beach where I stood, or had taken to the sea, and were floating among the foam-crests in the shallows. I knew, obscurely, that I had to catch one of these birds: somebody had just been explaining at great length the best method of doing so. My father stood on the edge of the sea-wall, urging me on: outlined against a stormy, threatening sky, he kept shouting at me: ‘Wake up, Brooke! Run for it!’ as though I were fielding in a cricket-match. But I was paralysed, I couldn’t move: the birds waddled by me, close to my feet, yet I stood motionless, possessed by an increasing terror and a desperate, annihilating misery. Suddenly the whole company of geese took wing, like a drove of rooks, and the sky was darkened by their enormous wings. They swooped upon me, I felt the wind of their onrush, I saw their yellow beaks and their small, evil, black eyes . . .

I woke up to find that I had, literally, been weeping in my sleep: my face was wet with tears, and for several minutes the sense of that desolate, heart-rending unhappiness persisted. Like so many bad dreams, this one left a slight hangover the next morning: a faint, unpleasant taste in the mouth, a curious feeling of uncleanness. It haunted me, in fact, for some days, and attached itself to my waking thoughts: the geese, it seemed to me, had been a kind of manifold projection of myself, they were my innumerable personae, one at least of which I must capture and cling to, or I should be lost.

The idea, I thought, would make rather a good poem; I sat down with paper and pencil; but perhaps, I decided, I should write a better poem if I went out and had a drink first. (‘Malt does more than Milton can’, etc. – I was an adept, in those days, at discovering literary justifications for my behaviour). It was a Saturday night; I walked down to the Clarendon in Tontine Street. There I picked up with some acquaintances; it was not till some hours later that I sat down again to begin the poem. By the time I had finished it, it was nearly two o’clock. I went to bed; the poem, I thought, was a good one, and I felt a profound satisfaction at having completed it.

Next morning I took up the scrawled pages with a certain eagerness. Alas! Malt might justify God’s ways to man, but it didn’t, I felt, so easily justify the ways of Auden, Spender and Day Lewis. The poem, in fact, was no better than any of the others I had written lately: it was very bare, very stark, and full of phallic symbols. It had almost nothing to do with my dream; the geese, it was true, did make a brief appearance; but from the context they might just as well have been kestrels; It really wouldn’t do, I thought. I tore up the poem; it was a fine Sunday morning in May, and I decided to take a bus up the Elham Valley to the park where, in my childhood, I had found the Monkey Orchid.

I searched the park for a couple of hours; but there was no sign of the Orchid. I hadn’t really expected to find it; it had not been seen in the district for at least ten years. The sky was clouding over; a chilly wind blew across Barham Downs, bringing with it a spatter of rain; I hurried up to the main road and caught the next bus into the town.