For the sake of it

“Why do I write, if I can’t write any better? But what would become of me if I didn’t write what I can, however inferior it may be to what I am? In my ambitions, I am a plebeian, because I try to achieve; like someone in a dark room, I’m afraid to be silent. I’m like those who prize the medal more than the struggle to get it, and savour glory with a fur-lined cape.” (Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, 152)

Pessoa writes so much better than I. Until my thoughts are focused by a certain mysterious elation, I cannot write, in the sense of expressing anything publishable. But when I enter this mystery, and let it translate itself into words, something transcends the plebeian inferiority.

I took a trip to Iver, a village in the extreme south-east corner of Buckinghamshire, drawn by some sense of affinity. Iver, Bucks: I never went there before but once lived a few miles away, if ‘lived’ is the right word, for it was little more than a postal address while I was at boarding school and university. For most of my life I’ve not really lived anywhere: not exactly a rolling stone, more an uprooted plant. So I went to Iver in search of something. It would be hard to say what, but I found it after five yards of following the public footpaths that led off the High Street. In a moment, it was as if something inside tuned to a frequency, and pretty much stayed locked on to it from there on. I became alert to things, both around and within, as if the mere sensual inputs held a significance, something apprehended yet not quite understood.

“From birth to death, man is the slave of the same external dimension that rules animals. Throughout his life he doesn’t live, he vegetatively thrives, with greater intensity and complexity than an animal. He’s guided by norms without knowing that they guide him or even that they exist, and all his ideas, feelings and acts are unconscious—not because there’s no consciousness in them but because there aren’t two consciousnesses.

“Flashes of awareness that we live an illusion—that, and no more, is what distinguishes the greatest of men.” (ibid,150)

Further on, the footpath was fenced on either side, cutting a meadow in two. There were horses on either side: curious, friendly. A mare stood guard over two resting foals, born in different seasons, so still, as they lay prone, that I thought they might be dead. But they were just relaxed. Later, the younger one became shy, and hid behind the mother.

Still further, I saw a giant hogweed in the hedgerow, about nine foot tall. I had a vague idea that handsome as they were, these weeds are undesirable in some way. I checked the Web later, and confirmed that they are very toxic. There were signs that someone had been cutting them down, but hadn’t finished the job. The sap can cause blistery burns whose scars last for years, I learned; or blindness and even death. I’m glad I didn’t get too close. I entered ‘giant hogweed Iver’ into Google and discovered that another walker had photographed the same ones a few days previously (Beeches Way, 18th June, on a site called Pete’s Walks). We are ruled by our enthusiasms. Whatever gives us a buzz, we endlessly seek to repeat it. One day I might run into Pete.

At one point, the paths forked, so I stopped to check the map. I noticed a pair of mature trees whose trunks were so close together that they touched at the base, with their barks fused together. Higher up, the same thing had happened to some major branches. Not uncommon, you may say: but one was an oak and one a horse-chestnut, both displaying their immature fruit. Did their saps combine? Had they grafted themselves together, to produce a hybrid? No, I think it is just a phenomenon of bark. It adapts. It can grow over barbed wire if necessary. Parasites like orchids and mistletoe can penetrate through bark, without any exchange of DNA. Two lovers, however close, don’t merge and become one flesh. Donne notwithstanding, every man or woman is an island.

“If I often interrupt a thought with a scenic description that in some way fits in to the real or imagined scheme of my impressions, it’s because the scenery is a door through which I flee from my awareness of my creative impotence.” (ibid,152)

Here, Fernando, take over this keyboard. Take this site for your own. You are the writer! I’m just a reader. I could happily leave the stage to you, and stay silent in my wayfaring, for I’m not sure if I have anything to say. I just “vegetatively thrive”. And part of this is to be instinctive like a bird, to stand on the highest branch and sing whatever joyful song comes out.

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The Colne Valley Trail, the Beeches Way and Route 61 of the National Cycle Network have transformed derelict farmland into a park or nature reserve, close to the M25, London’s outer ring-road motorway. Here you may see oak and chestnut in close embrace, and foals frolicking next to their mare.

Dreaming spires

Oxford is everything that my own town is not, and it’s only 30 miles away. I decided Park and Ride was the best way to enter in triumph, using my new electronic bus pass, on a superb day in June, discovering that the students are in exams and the streets are a motley of tourists. Oxford is impressive, but that’s the whole point of it. Much of it was built when a king, or other potentate, proclaimed his glory through the endowment of poor students and their teachers, so they might be wedded to Learning; a pursuit requiring literacy, a skill mainly restricted to those in Holy Orders. Pomp, glory, religion, Latin, Greek, Church of England, celibacy—I think these were the desired norm, until the nineteenth century was fairly advanced.

Today, it’s clean, well-organised and beautiful, in its own manner. There are many places to dispose of your surplus pocket-money on books, maps, pictures, pretty cakes, fountain-pens, classy antiques. I find myself imagining how it would be, living here, to become a professor of international renown; at twenty-one, a young blood, brilliant double-first and Blue; at my age a Prof. Emeritus, my once-original ideas now considered shallow, echoing hollow in the quads. To stay vigorous and relevant, one would need to escape the enervating Ivory Tower. Then I think of Richard Dawkins. He lives in the city, in Summertown, I’m told.

Sidewalks are clogged with groups clustered round guides who point out the sights, relate their history. I’m glad I can just float along pursuing my non-agenda, soaking up the vibe—or not, as I please; reserving the right to be impressed, or not. I feel the sharp edge of glittering intellects, as a constant fencing-match of privilege and fashion, backed up by centuries of the same: it’s in the very air I breathe, stimulating me to improve my game, as a worthy opponent does for a tennis-player. This is where la crème de la crème gathers. Here, like filings to a magnet, come Rhodes Scholars from corners of the globe. I pass an impressive building with a Latin inscription which I translate roughly as “After despoiling Africa, Cecil Rhodes was noble enough to endow this building and scholarships to perpetuity.”

Speaking of despoliation, see the attached sign. BILL POSTING AND OTHER DESPOILATION OF THIS BUILDING IS FORBIDDEN BY ORDER OF THE DEAN NEW COLLEGE OXFORD PERPETRATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. There is no such word as despoilation. Oxford’s very own English Dictionary confirms this. How many cities have their own dictionary? You’d think those which do would take trouble to use them, before nailing up public signs. Despoliation means robbery or plundering, which bill-posting is not. Robbery is contrary to common law, as every child knows, so cannot be in need of a sign. To put up a misworded and misspelt sign under the authority of the Dean of New College Oxford is despoliation, for it plunders any reputation the College may possess for scholarship. Its fustian grandiloquence is laughable: what’s wrong with ‘Bill Posters Will Be Prosecuted’, apart from provoking the inevitable graffito, ‘Bill Posters Is Innocent’?

I’m outside Basil Blackwell’s famous bookshop, sitting on a bench to write this, when a thought pops up: for me, the safe place to be is on the edge of nothing. I don’t mean nothingness, with all its philosophical flummery, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and so forth, but just plain simple nothing. Simple life, simple death. I imagine myself clinging to a safety-rail at the edge of an abyss. What more do I need? Not that I see any vertiginous chasm in my own life; only everyday examples of hopelessness, such as you meet on every street, at any rate in my home town. Why is it that in tourist traps, or should I say world-class cities like Oxford, the shambling examples of hopelessness are so much more lurid and gaudy? I’m not even talking about beggars, just people like you and me going about our business, but with some tell-tale sign, some stigma, that says they have nothing going for them, and they know it?

One of my favourite novels, unknown in any list of great books, ignored by the critics, passed over even by the small clique of its author’s aficionados, is Wood and Stone, by John Cowper Powys, first published in 1915. In his Preface, he refers to “that world-old struggle between the ‘well-constituted’ and the ‘ill-constituted’, which the writings of Nietzsche have recently called so startlingly to our attention.”. He goes on to say, “In a universe whose secret is not self-assertion, but self-abandonment, might not the ‘well-constituted’ be regarded as the vanquished, and the ‘ill-constituted’ as the victors?” Well, he may be right, and his novel demonstrates how it can work. But for me, and I don’t know why, despite greatly admiring the insights of Nietzsche, I’ve yet always had, like Powys, an instinctive and unreasoned compassion for the ill-constituted, those pathetic creatures who remain vanquished, except in the imagination of a romantic few. At least let them be victors in their own imaginations! That is all that matters.

So this is how I immunise myself, unconsciously, against the pomp and glory of Oxford, this paradise for the well-constituted. And then I remind myself that it’s founded on money, the kind of ill-gotten wealth which in all ages has needed top-class money-laundering, the kind you can only get by endowing a college. Speaking of which, I photographed an inscription on a building, which appears to be dated MCMLX (1960). I assume it records someone’s philanthropy in abbreviated Latin: someone shy enough to reveal his name only in coded form.

Do you think I am bitter against Oxford? I have no reason for such feelings. My first visit to the town was in November 1959. My headmaster had sent me to be compete for a scholarship at Worcester College. Nobody from my school had been to university in living memory, but he had tried to prepare me, by discussing current affairs and making sure I read The Times. The big story was the Colonel Nasser’s leadership in Egypt. The British were not keen on what he was doing, that was the main thing I recall. As for the academic side, English Lit and so on, the headmaster thought he could safely leave that to me.

I arrived at a rainy Oxford, after dark. I had a bad cold and should have stayed in bed. I know it was 1959 because I went to see ‘Journey to the Centre of the Earth’, starring Pat Boone, at the Odeon cinema—it’s still there, just as I remembered it. Next morning, I was in no state to sit the papers, do the essays, and the same evening I flunked my interview with two dons in the twilight of some book-lined study. I easily fell for a trap, when they asked me about how I would interpret lines by the poet John Donne. But I don’t hold that against Oxford. I would have failed even without the cold.

I go to look in Blackwell’s window. On prominent display is a book of memoirs by Christopher Hitchens: Hitch-22. I go in, browse its pages, discover that the author is mortally ill from esophageal cancer. (As soon as I get home I check Wikipedia to make sure he’s still alive.) Apart from my instinctive urge to harbour no negative thought of the dead and dying, I find myself disliking his self-depiction. His militant atheism, as screamed from the title of his book god Is Not Great, seems at odds with the behaviour of an English gentleman who enjoyed the hospitality of Balliol College in his student days—in several ways. Being an obstinately obsessive egotist is one of them. Later, I forgive him the obstinate egotism: he’s on a mission, his days are numbered, let him plumb his own depths and speak his truth, whilst he has time! I download a sample of his book on my Kindle reader, but delete it before I’ve had time to read it, such is my antipathy to this apparent monster, I shall not engage him in debate, alive or dead.

But that happens later. Still in Oxford, pacing the streets, I look back on my life and how it unfolded, after I failed to secure the glittering prize of a scholarship to Oxford, which I’m certain I didn’t deserve. I note that I’ve somehow cultivated a policy of randomness in my life: a strategy which like certain types of spread-betting may take a lifetime to hit the jackpot. Randomness is the wrong word. At the time it appeared like choicelessness, which is perhaps the thing which has linked me to all the ‘ill-constituted’ persons who walk this earth—those who are physically able to walk. There is a voluptuous pleasure in choicelessness, if you can learn the trick. It is precisely this, dear Hitchens, now facing choicelessness yourself, which drives the ill-constituted and hopeless into religion. Who are we to push them off their life-raft?

I downloaded the sample of Hitchens’ memoir again, and read it this time. The first chapter is about his mother, whom he calls by her name, Yvonne. Now his sincerity starts to break through my mindless prejudice. I start to see who he is, make a distinction between him and Richard Dawkins, against whom I still uphold a prejudice. Hitchens, you arrogant swaggerer, Devil’s Advocate (yes, official, as once appointed by the Vatican), opponent of so many principles of behaviour I hold dear! You are a contrarian, that’s your role, a seeker of conflict, a partisan: this is how you want to contribute to the world’s betterment, not unlike your equally misunderstood predecessor, Nietzsche. I don’t say you are his equal, but this is not a competitive sport, even though I suspect you of being one of the world’s more competitive intellectuals. When I think about it, try naming anyone who claims to be an intellectual who is not driven by a competitive urge as compulsive as any racing driver!

Hitchens, you may yet do honour to Oxford, even as you have tried to subvert the selfsame religious foundations of your alma mater. At any rate, you are as showy as those who have endowed those dreaming spires, those ageless colleges and so forth. I think I may, after all, buy your book. You have, despite everything, endeared yourself to me. God bless you!

PS: A propos writing one’s autobiography—the thought occurs to me that most of the facts that I would want to include could not be verified by anyone else living. I decided therefore, if I ever get round to the final memoir, and don’t leave it too late to be of sound mind, that I shall compete with Hitchens for the brevity of Preface, Prologue or Foreword—let him choose his own weapon! Here’s what I shall say:

How do I know that any of this is true? I shall just have to take my own word for it. As for you, dear Reader, I’ll be delighted if you consider it fiction.

By Magdalen Bridge, punts for hire next to the Botanical Gardens.

I wondered what the Town Crier was about to announce, but it seems he was standing in the road ready give helpful directions to any tourist who asked him.

Village Idiot Ale! Yes please!

The sun’s blessing

I step out the house for the daily ritual of meeting K from work. My route involves shortcuts through alleys. A perfect ritual has no practical purpose, no sense of obligation. It’s done for joy alone. Its sacredness within the rhythm of daily life increases on every repetition. Its tendency to sameness draws attention to the variations: the passing of seasons and stages of life, the remembrance of previous enactments, the passage of time which will lead one day to death. A ritual is precious only because you make it so.

Time is one of the variables. Our rendezvous is usually half-past four, winter and summer. Today it’s three hours later, because she stayed on campus to attend a course. The mile-long walk to her office appears literally in a new light, for the sun is dipping in the west, bathing the scene in its glow. There’s a fresh light wind, but it feels creamy. What does? The air, the sunlight on Victorian brickwork, the entire world as I perceive it in this moment; or something within me? And why use this adjective? It was given to me. Left to myself, perish the thought, I might have said “beneficent”, which implies a Giver handing out blessings. My Muse has no truck with belief systems, and intervenes to make sure we don’t go there.

The creaminess of the evening is in no way diminished by two stained mattresses, unceremoniously dumped in this street of derelict factories, along with a scattering of sodden cardboard and plastic bags of refuse. I come here because it’s part of my shortcut. I could take another street but in life one takes the rough with the smooth. Legally the street is privately owned, but the landlord doesn’t care, biding his time till the price is right. The council has responsibility for pedestrian access, as it’s part of the county-wide network of footpaths. Every month or two they send a truck to clear the rubbish. I reconcile myself to the squalor, taking comfort in the observation that everyone who picks their way through this garbage looks reasonably sane and well-presented. There are hells compared with which this street is Heaven.

Going through my head is a tune from Origin of Symmetry, an album by Muse (the English rock group). It’s my favourite of the genre, whatever the genre is called. Perhaps it’s a “concept album”, which I understand to be like a symphony but with more movements, none of them labelled “minuet” or “scherzo”, all referred to as songs or tracks. Or is it “heavy metal”? There are dirty grating noises as from rusty iron, or circular saws with big teeth, or the scraping and clashing of stainless steel in different shapes, forged in a factory of corrugated iron with no safety-guards on the machinery. And the mood that connects the whole? To me, despite what composer/vocalist Matthew Bellamy may express in his lyrics, I’d say it’s about how to endure the world you’ve been dumped in, how you may grow to love it, cushioned by the wild excess of creative genius. It is autobiographical at a profound level that you and I may relate to, and see that vanity—pride—is our greatest form of defiance, and our strength against the priests of every stripe. This is also Nietzsche’s message. And the way to defy?—To accept without shame what one is, and to be it: one’s own vanity, desire, joy. And make something of it all, doesn’t matter what.

It takes a while to accustom yourself to Matthew’s falsetto. It rises, up and up like a lark, then higher still, beyond all expectation, in a self-transcendence that gives it power and authority. The bursts of exuberant noise from guitars and synthesizers makes you think of a teenager holed up in his room, defiant against parents for all that they symbolize of the entire world and what’s wrong with it. In this self-imposed captivity, the teenager spontaneously generates his own version of the Stockholm Syndrome, loving that which he hates, till the boundaries of his polemic are fatally compromised, and the protest turns to panegyric, the sweet classical quiet movements cut from the same cloth as the rusty-iron noisy ones. (I’ve long had the idea to write what we used to call “sleeve notes” for this album, going into much greater detail, but this is the longest I can do in spontaneous flow, from memory. I’ve said nothing about its musicality, the unity of its themes, because I don’t know how.) On another Muse album there’s actually a song titled “Stockholm Syndrome”, though no one on the Web is able to explain how this relates to the song’s lyrics.

At the dead end of this derelict street a narrow alley escapes in triumph from the degradation of rain-soaked mattresses. It’s brightened up by a mural in the graffiti idiom, sponsored by BMW cars and local businesses, giving coded exhortations against drugs. I showed some photos of it in a previous post, as background to some stripey caterpillars (see alongside).

I suddenly remember the radio programme I part-heard the other day, a documentary called Unbuilding Detroit". Perhaps I won’t ever listen to it properly but I made an echoey copy on my pocket recorder, and borrowed the illustration (see top) from the BBC website. They were talking about alleyways and graffiti, and how to humanise ruins and make people feel good and not scared. Suddenly I started to feel warm towards America. It felt close and not alien, as if another part of England, just down the road from here. This is the highest praise I know how to bestow. I won’t even analyse the feeling, I’ll leave that to you, if you so wish, but it was one of those significant moments, call it a turning-point, or what you will. I have grieved over my negativity towards America in recent years, probably dating from 9/11/2001, when in my view a wake-up call was responded to wrongly. Before that I had sometimes thought it a good idea if the US colonised us, the UK! I must have been crazy, and alienated against Europe. All the same, America endears itself to me whenever I see it in its underclothes, so to speak. Just like here, it can be overgrown with weeds, criss-crossed with disreputable alleyways, unamerican immigrants, graffiti and a general sense of vulnerability. I care little for the American Dream, that imagined El Dorado of immigrants: but in a parallel universe, back in the day, I could have been one of those waiting approval on Ellis Island.

After emerging from the alleys into the suburban road which leads to our rendezvous at the hospital, I overhear a conversation between two men, neither of them young, dressed in some kind of work-clothes, not office garb. The older one says he is going to train up the other one and goes on to depict a vision of how he sees things developing, the skills to be attained, the duties, the opportunities. The other one is quiet. So he goes on to speak of the difficulties, the privileges, the unfolding of circumstances as yet unknown. It made me feel nostalgic for a career, to be engaged in something like that, whatever the trade, instead of this terminal status of “retired”. Yet I didn’t feel nostalgic for my own career, now long past, which had usually involved wearing a jacket and tie. It even rose to the smart-suited pretension of management consultant. But my true comfort zone embraced analyst/programmer, rising to project team leader. My life-experience has been rather narrow.

Earlier today I was talking with a team leader from the Water Board, who came to diagnose and fix a supply leak, the latest in a long saga of confusion which has taken months or years. These Victorian cottages all run off a communal supply, so in principle neighbours have to share the cost of leaks. I felt an easy kinship with this man, in the brotherhood of problem-solving, professionals versus users, those-in-the-know versus the ignorant. For the challenge and the salary, I had veered into the office-based world of computing. Would I have been happier in a manual open-air trade—builder, roofer . . . ?

Now I remember my own biological father, the one I never knew, but met when I was fifty, a roofing contractor in Western Australia. All the time I was being educated in England to take a role in the officer class or colonial service, he, contributor to my genes, pursued his no-nonsense trade directly under the sky. Something in me responds; at a physical level rejects the airy-fairiness of progressive middle-class values. I struggle for words but this must do.

I would not have understood this enough to find any words for it, had I not paid a visit to a certain supermarket. It’s the one nearest, it has wide aisles, there’s nothing purely rational to object to: but I normally avoid the place on principle. I feel that it embodies the utopian hell that wealthy socialists & readers of The Guardian newspaper would create everywhere if allowed to do so. You’re struck by the advisory voices everywhere, placards and audio. They tell you to stand and hold the handrail, be ready to move your trolley off when you get to the end of the walkway. (Its wheels are locked electronically till that point.) There’s a sign for “Adult cereals” and another for “Children’s cereals”. The sum of the oats and muesli is more than fifty varieties: some designed to save the earth, some to save your health, some with various flavours to sweeten the pill of eating healthy, some to reassure you against food-scares, some to reinforce food-scares. Whether it pleases you to worry about the global economy, ecology, obesity, wholeness of food, inequality, every possible food fad or the nagging of your spoilt children, you’ll find products to suit, precisely categorised. Here is the place to mix and match consumerism, materialism, gourmanderie, frugality and ostentatious virtue, all in one-stop shopping. Why does going there make my flesh creep? Whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness. (Matt. 23:27.) For the global problems which they so virtuously worry about are precisely the ones created by their own consumerism.

Next day: This sense of creaminess—I felt it again, in the backyard, this beautiful piece of earth, miniature of infinity, 22ft x 11ft not counting the concreted path. I was sitting on the bench, eyeing my work in progress. It had to be made simple: oblong of grass here, oblong plant border there against the fence. Nothing else. I’ve cut down the cherry tree (the one I’ve written about here several times). It was in process of fruiting. Some of the cherries were turning from green to red. I apologised to the tree and blithely completed the felling. The air was a blend of birdsong, street noises off, all against the background of primeval silence, the eternal hush, the creamy blessing of the sun.

In the thistle field, at dawn

I lie in bed watching dawn’s rosy fingers light up the house opposite, creeping lower as the hour advances. This street is narrow, its houses joined together (‘terraced’) in a continuous chain on both sides. You’d think there’d be scant room for the low-slanting rays to penetrate. But our house is near the street’s eastern end where there’s nothing but a derelict school yard beneath a big sky, as in my middle picture below.

This bedroom is the cosiest refuge you could imagine. My beloved sleeps peacefully alongside. As insistently as a rooster, or a bugle playing Reveille, the sun rouses me to full wakefulness. Like a soldier in barracks, I’m ready to leap up and out, but I stay in bed, motionless. Only my imagination goes wandering, down a corridor of decades to a jukebox of old scenes, a database of memory snapshots. I don’t need to press any button. It operates automatically. When something here and now triggers it, the jukebox retrieves images of the first time I encountered that thing, like magic. I don’t know if that happens for you too.

So I’m taken back to a dawn long ago, when I found freedom in the midst of bondage. I’ll try and tell you about it, but it won’t make much sense until I tell you more of the story.

I was sent to boarding school at the age of six—six and a half to be more precise. I remained there, at Merrion House Preparatory School, Sedlescombe, Sussex, from September 1948 to March 1954. My parents, I mean my mother and stepfather, were newlyweds. They lived a mere seven miles from the school, but it must have been convenient for them that I should be out of the way. In my grandparents’ view, I needed to learn the speech and manners of a young gentleman. My half-sister must have been born around the time my grandfather delivered me to Merrion House for the first time. I have hardly any memories of ‘home life’ from that time. I suppose school was my real home, Matron the nearest thing to a mother.

The monotony of school routines makes it hard to arrange my snapshots chronologically. But it’s important to try, so that I can date each memory and know how old I was. Nobody is alive who can help me in this. (My sister was too young.)

I know that from January to March 1949 I missed my second term, being in hospital on a penicillin drip to avoid amputation of my leg. So it must have been in my first term that the headmaster first tried to rescue me from original sin. I was the youngest child in school then, still a little wild from having spent my earliest years in Australia in a ladies’ lodging house, my mother often absent. Then we came to England, my mother a war widow looking for a wealthy dashing replacement husband—her main concern being a father for me, as she carefully explained. This was why I was sent to Holland at the age of five, to lodge with her sister-in-law, whilst she went to Switzerland on a man-hunt—where, I imagine, she could have met some fugitive ex-Nazi, holed-up and incognito. This didn’t happen, of course.

So one night in the dormitory after lights out, instead of story-telling relays beginning “It was on a dark and stormy night” and going on to encounters with highwaymen or ghosts, the conversation diverted to matters new to me. In principle I knew about sex since the age of four, when a five-year-old girl, whose mother had just told her, had told me, and we had tried to do it there and then. It proved impossible standing up, and then my grandfather caught us before we could try an alternative position. That was only memorable as an embarrassment. I can’t remember anything of our dormitory discussion, only my utterance of four incriminating words, in which I offered to do something, though slightly repelled by it. I must have spoken from curiosity and bravado. No sooner had the words left my lips but the headmaster, who had been listening outside the door, burst in, red-faced, trembling with anger, to give me a sound thrashing. This at any rate earned the other boys’ respect. Sympathetically they explained to me as a new boy that thrashings were inevitable once in a while.

Six strokes of the cane on bare buttocks was no big deal, after the pain wore off. What hurt most was the disapproval and suspicion that never went away afterwards. I had no idea about sexuality, let alone homosexuality. I just had an instinctive attraction to whatever was forbidden, like Adam and Eve. The headmaster was on my case, and must have worked on the principle that Original Sin could be cured by punishment. His religion was more Old Testament than New.

As time went on, I moved on from being the youngest boy, until I eventually became a Senior. I have no record of it but can deduce from memory snapshots when that transition occurred. For example, I recall a boy running up the little boxed-in servants’ staircase on 6th February 1952, to tell everyone that King George VI had just died. It was the staircase used by juniors. So I must still have been one. In June ’53 we were taken to the Gaiety Cinema in Hastings to see the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and—exciting double bill!—the first ascent of Mt Everest, by Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing. By then I was certainly a Senior, with all corresponding privileges, the most exciting ones being to use the Pond. It was a muddy affair, surrounded by chestnut trees which dropped their conkers and leaves to decay in the pond till it smelt sulphurous. But it was stocked with varies types of fish, and in the summer we would make our own rods from bamboo, and buy line, weights and hooks from the school tuckshop. The floats we had to make ourselves, from corks and matches. We used white bread for bait, kneaded into a paste.

The other thing we did in the pond was make rafts, using small oildrums as floats lashed under a platform of old planks. There were always two rafts and the thing was to fight with them. One crew tried to board the other’s raft and push all the boys into the water. For me, the fishing and rafting were the ultimate fun you could have at school; because I was no good at football and cricket; and disliked the entire concept of organised team games.

But I think I became a senior first in the summer of ’52, for it was then that disaster struck. I had formed a one-to-one friendship with a boy of my age, whose skin was strangely dark, though not brown or ‘olive’. He was disapproved of like me, and I wondered if it was connected with colour. He used to talk about Burma and ayahs, but it was much later that I learned that his father had been a British officer, killed in World War II (like mine, I thought, not discovering till forty years later who my father actually was). His mother was Burmese and I deduce his birth was considered a scandal. So at the end of the war his relatives arranged to take him away from his mother so that he could be brought to England and learn to be an English gentleman. We seemed to have a number of things in common. Now, he was living with a widowed aunt in Sedlescombe village, having been rescued from a succession of ayahs (nannies). I believe (guessing in retrospect) that one of them had played with him “inappropriately”, as we say these days, for he was precocious in certain ways. One day we were both reported to the Headmaster for an offence recorded as “filthy language”. The description was accurate insofar as it clarified that no deeds were involved. I was ready for another thrashing but this time the punishment was more fiendish: no pond privileges for the rest of term. In addition my half-caste friend and I were not allowed alone together.

I’m quite sure that dreadful summer was ’52, because the following June was joyous. The dawning of the second Elizabethan age was merely the backdrop. I was particularly happy because my mother was happy. She had fled from my stepfather (leaving my half-sister with him) and was in love again. When the divorce came through, I’d have a new nice stepfather and we’d go to live in the Isle of Wight. Aged eleven, I suddenly had the prospect of a home and a future.

I still got school punishments from time to time, but nothing serious enough for thrashing or major loss of privileges. My principal sin was being cheeky to the prefects (the most senior boys) who supervised our evening ‘prep’. Each infringement was noted in a big book and had to be expiated on a Saturday afternoon. However, in June ’53 we had a full programme of cricket matches against other schools. I was too useless to be in the team. My once-infected leg was accepted as an excuse, even though it was quite well now. Being bookish and scholarly wasn’t enough, in that system of values. Unless certified as a cripple, you had to excel at sport too. So I was made the school’s Official Scorer. Keeping a scoresheet is a complicated business. You have to record every ball of every over and its effect on both teams, so that statistics like batting averages can be preserved for posterity. I was no good at this either, but the two opposing scorers sat together and at a pinch I could copy from the other boy.

Since my afternoon was to be thus occupied, one Saturday I was woken at dawn to take my punishment. I was to pull up all the thistles and nettles from a potato-field. I felt myself akin to a Negro slave, cotton-picking for a cruel master. The thought gave me strength for secret resistance. And it wasn’t so hard. I discovered the literal meaning of the adage ‘grasp the nettle’: it can’t sting you then. Or perhaps I had been provided with gloves.

What I do remember was the long shadows cast by the potato-plants in the early sun; the jewelled glint of the dewdrops caught in the spines of thistles; and my determination, as I wiped the sweat off my face with a dirty hand, to finish the weeding before I came to breakfast. But I was called in after an hour. I volunteered to complete the job on other mornings, but it seems the task was only available as punishment. To show signs of enjoying it was a disqualification.

These are the records which the dawn sun played for me on memory’s jukebox. I The more I think about him, the more I remember of Monty Brummell-Hicks. Maybe I’ll write a whole post about him.

Afterthought:
Coming back to this piece after publishing it earlier today, I realize that its significance for me is not how I was affected by several years of punishment and close scrutiny. On the contrary, it reveals to me that I was the same then as now: impulsive, disobedient, ungregarious; and other things I shall not list. What I discovered for the very first time in the thistlefield, that makes it stand out in my memory, that made me volunteer to go back each morning till the weeding was finished, was not a propensity to masochism or slavishness, but a love of Nature that still inspires me 58 years later.

And when I say ‘Nature’, I can’t describe what aspect I’m referring to. A potato field choking with thistles isn’t what you’d imagine as something to fall in love with. So I don’t really know what I mean. The mystery remains intact.