A Time of Gifts (2 page)

 

[1]
From “Twelfth Night,” in
The Collected Poems
, by kind permission of Faber & Faber, London, and Oxford University Press, New York.

D
EAR XAN
,

As I have only just finished piecing these travels together, the times dealt with are very fresh in my mind and later events seem more recent still; so it is hard to believe that 1942 in Crete, when we first met—both of us black-turbanned, booted and sashed and appropriately silver-and-ivory daggered and cloaked in white goats' hair, and deep in grime—was more than three decades ago. Many meetings and adventures followed that first encounter on the slopes of Mt. Kedros, and fortunately our kind of irregular warfare held long spells of inaction in the sheltering mountains: it was usually at eagle-height, with branches or constellations overhead, or dripping winter stalactites, that we lay among the rocks and talked of our lives before the war.

Indeed, indifference to the squalor of caves and speed at the approach of danger might have seemed the likeliest aptitudes for life in occupied Crete. But, unexpectedly in a modern war, it was the obsolete choice of Greek at school which had really deposited us on the limestone. With an insight once thought rare, the army had realized that the Ancient tongue, however imperfectly mastered, was a short-cut to the Modern: hence the sudden sprinkling of many strange figures among the mainland and island crags. Strange, because Greek had long ceased to be compulsory at the schools where it was still taught: it was merely the eager choice—unconsciously prompted, I suspect, by having listened to Kingsley's
Heroes
in childhood—of a perverse and eccentric minority: early hankerings which set a vague but agreeable stamp on all these improvised cave-dwellers.

As it chanced, neither of our school careers had run their course: yours had been cut short by a family mishap and mine by the sack and we had both set off on our own at an earlier age than most of our contemporaries. These first wanderings—impecunious, moss-repellant, frowned on by our respective elders, and utterly congenial—had pursued rather similar lines; and as we reconstructed our pre-war lives for each others' entertainment we soon agreed that the disasters which had set us on the move had not been disasters at all, but wild strokes of good luck.

This book is an attempt to complete and set in order, with as much detail as I can recapture, the earliest of those disjointedly recounted travels. The narrative, which should end at Constantinople, has turned out longer than I expected; I have split it in two, and this first volume breaks off in the middle of an important but arbitrary bridge spanning the Middle Danube. The rest will follow. From the start I wanted to dedicate it to you, which I now do with delight and some of the formality of a bull-fighter throwing his cap to a friend before a corrida. May I take advantage of the occasion by turning this letter into a kind of introduction? I want the narrative, when it begins, to jump in the deep end without too much explanatory delay. But it does need a brief outline of how these travels came about.

* * *

We must go back a bit.

In the second year of World War I, soon after I was born, my mother and sister sailed away to India (where my father was a servant of the Indian Government) and I was left behind so that one of us might survive if the ship were sunk by a submarine. I was to be taken out when the oceans were safer, and, failing this, remain in England until the war had reached its quick and victorious end. But the war was long and ships scarce; four years passed; and during the interim, on a temporary footing which perforce grew longer, I remained in the care of a very kind and very simple
family. This period of separation was the opposite of the ordeal Kipling describes in
Baa Baa Black Sheep
. I was allowed to do as I chose in everything. There was no question of disobeying orders: none were given; still less was there ever a stern word or an admonitory smack. This new family, and a background of barns, ricks and teazles, clouded with spinneys and the undulation of ridge and furrow, were the first things I can remember setting eyes on; and I spent these important years, which are said to be such formative ones, more or less as a small farmer's child run wild: they have left a memory of complete and unalloyed bliss. But when my mother and sister got back at last, I rushed several fields away and fought off their advances in gruff Northamptonshire tones; and they understood that they had a small savage on their hands and not a friendly one; the joy of reunion was tempered by harrowing dismay. But I was secretly attracted to these beautiful strangers nevertheless: they were extravagantly beyond anything in my range of conjecture. I was fascinated by the crocodile pattern of the shoes in which one of them ended and by the sailor-suit of the other, who was four years my senior: the pleated skirt, the three white stripes on the blue collar, the black silk scarf with its white lanyard and whistle and the ribanded cap with the still indecipherable gold letters that spelled out H.M.S. Victory. Between the two, a black pekinese with white feet resembling spats was floundering and leaping in the long grass and giving tongue like a lunatic.

Those marvellously lawless years, it seems, had unfitted me for the faintest shadow of constraint. With tact and charm and skill, backed by my swift treason and by London and
Peter Pan
and
Where the Rainbow Ends
and
Chu Chin Chow
, my mother succeeded in bringing about a complete shift of affection, and in taming me, more or less, for family purposes. But my early educational ventures, when the time came—at a kindergarten, then at a school of my sister's which also took small boys, and finally at a horrible preparatory school near Maidenhead named after a Celtic saint—ended in uniform catastrophe. Harmless in appearance, more presentable by now and of a refreshingly unconstricted address, I
would earn excellent opinions at first. But as soon as early influences began to tell, those short-lived virtues must have seemed a cruel Fauntleroy veneer, cynically assumed to mask the Charles Addams fiend that lurked beneath: it coloured with an even darker tinct the sum of misdeeds which soon began heaping up. When I catch a glimpse of similar children today, I am transfixed with fellow-feelings, and with dread.

First bewilderment reigned, and then despair. After a particularly bad cropper when I was about ten, I was taken to see two psychiatrists. In a recent biography I read with excitement that the first of these and the most likeable had been consulted by Virginia Woolf; and I thought for a moment that I might have gazed at her across the waiting-room; alas, it was before I was born. The second, more severe in aspect, recommended a co-educational and very advanced school for difficult children near Bury St. Edmunds.

Salsham Hall, at Salsham-le-Sallows, was an unclassifiable but engaging manor house with woods and a rough lake in a wide-skied and many-belfried expanse of Suffolk. It was run by a grey- haired, wild-eyed man called Major Truthful and when I spotted two beards—then very rare—among the mixed and eccentric-looking staff, and the heavy bangles and the amber and the tassels and the homespun, and met my fellow-alumni—about thirty boys and girls from four-year-olds to nearly twenty, all in brown jerkins and sandals: the musical near-genius with occasional fits, the millionaire's nephew who chased motor-cars along country lanes with a stick, the admiral's pretty and slightly kleptomaniac daughter, the pursuivant's son with nightmares and an infectious inherited passion for heraldry, the backward, the somnambulists and the mythomaniacs (by which I mean those with an inventive output more pronounced than the rest, which, as no one believed us, did no harm), and, finally, the small bad hats like me who were merely very naughty—I knew I was going to like it. The nature-worshipping eurythmics in a barn and the country-dances in which the Major led both staff and children, were a shade bewildering at first, because everybody was naked. Nimbly and gravely, keeping time to
a cottage piano and a recorder, we sped through the figures of Gathering Peascods, Sellinger's Round, Picking-up Sticks and Old Mole.

It was midsummer. There were walled gardens close at hand, and giant red and gold gooseberries, and the nets over the loaded currant bushes foiled starlings but not us; and beyond them, the trees and the water descended in dim and beckoning perspectives. I understood the implications of the landscape at once: life under the greenwood tree. To choose a Maid Marion and a band, to get the girls to weave yards of Lincoln green on the therapeutic looms and then to slice and sew them into rough hoods with crenellated collars, cut bows and string them, carry off raspberry-canes for arrows and to take to the woods, was a matter of days. No-one stopped us: ‘Fay ce que vouldras' was the whole of their law. English schools, the moment they depart from the conventional track, are oases of strangeness and comedy, and it is tempting to linger. But vaguely guessed-at improprieties among the staff or the older children, or both—things of which we knew little in our sylvan haunts—brought about the dissolution of the place and I was soon back ‘for a second chance,' a forest exile among the snakebelts and the bat-oil of the horrible preparatory school. But, predictably after this heady freedom, not for long.

My mother had to cope with these upheavals. I would turn up in mid-term: once, at our cottage at Dodford, a tiny thatched village under a steep holt full of foxgloves (and, indeed, full of foxes) with a brook for its one street, where she was simultaneously writing plays and, though hard up, learning to fly a Moth biplane at an aerodrome forty miles away; once, at Primrose Hill Studios near Regent's Park, within earshot of the lions in the Zoo at night, where she had persuaded Arthur Rackham, a neighbour in that cloister, to paint amazing scenes—navigable birdsnests in a gale-wind, hobgoblin transactions under extruding roots and mice drinking out of acorns—all over an inside door; and more than once at 213 Piccadilly, which we moved to later, where a breakneck stair climbed to a marvellous Aladdin's cave of a flat overlooking
long chains of street-lamps and the acrobatic skysigns of the Circus. I would be hangdog on the doormat, flanked by a master with a depressing tale to unfold. Though upset, my mother was gifted with too much imagination and humour to let gloom settle for long. Nevertheless, these reverses filled me for the time being with suicidal despair.

But this particular disaster happened to coincide with one of my father's rare leaves from directing the Geological Survey of India. He and my mother had parted by then, and since these furloughs only came round every three years, we scarcely knew each other. All at once, as though at the wave of a wand, I found myself high above Lake Maggiore and then Como, trying to keep up with his giant stride across the gentian-covered mountains. He was an out-and-out-naturalist and rightly proud of being an F.R.S.; indeed, he had discovered an Indian mineral which was named after him and a worm with eight hairs on its back; and—brittle trove!—a formation of snow-flake. (I wondered, much later on, when white specks whirled past in the Alps or the Andes or the Himalayas, whether any of them were his.) That enormously tall and thin frame, dressed in a pepper-and-salt Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, was festooned with accoutrements. Laden with his field glasses and his butterfly net, I would get my breath while he was tapping at the quartz and the hornblende on the foothills of Monte Rosa with his hammer and clicking open a pocket lens to inspect the fossils and insects of Monte della Croce. His voice at such moments was simultaneously cavernous and enthusiastic. He would carefully embed wild flowers for later classification in a moss-lined vasculum and sometimes halt for a sketch with his water-colours balanced on a rock. What a change, I thought, from those elephants and the jungles full of monkeys and tigers which I imagined, not wholly wrongly, to be his usual means of transport and habitat. At ground level I trailed behind him through half the picture galleries of northern Italy.

* * *

Three peaceful years followed. Gilbert and Phyllis Scott-Malden, with three sons and half a dozen boys cramming for Common Entrance under their wing, lived in a large house with a rambling garden in Surrey. (I can't think of them, nor of Mrs. Scott-Malden's sister Josephine Wilkinson, who had a strong and separate influence later on, without the utmost gratitude and affection.) He was an excellent classicist and a kind and patient all-round teacher, and she filled out his firm structure with a great love of literature and poetry and painting. I was still an intermittent pest, but calmer existence began and I shot ahead in the subjects I enjoyed: everything, that is, except mathematics, for which my ineptitude seemed akin to imbecility. We made up plays and acted Shakespeare scenes and lay about the grass under a holm-oak with a dish of plums and listened to Mr. Scott-Malden reading Gilbert Murray's translation of
The Frogs
; he would switch to the original to explain and give point to the comic passages and the onomatopoeia. We had built a hut in an enormous walnut tree, with rope-ladders climbing half-way, then hand over hand; and I was allowed to sleep in it all my last summer term. In spite of maths, I scraped through Common Entrance in the end and looked forward to Public School life with ill-founded confidence.

* * *

Copious reading about the Dark and the Middle Ages had floridly coloured my views of the past and the King's School, Canterbury, touched off emotions which were sharply opposed to those of Somerset Maugham in the same surroundings; they were closer to Walter Pater's seventy years earlier, and probably identical, I liked to think, with those of Christopher Marlowe earlier still. I couldn't get over the fact that the school had been founded at the very beginning of Anglo-Saxon Christianity—before the sixth century was out, that is: fragments of Thor and Woden had hardly stopped smouldering in the Kentish woods: the oldest part of the buildings was modern by these standards, dating only from a few decades
after the Normans landed. There was a wonderfully cobwebbed feeling about this dizzy and intoxicating antiquity—an ambiance both haughty and obscure which turned famous seats of learning, founded eight hundred or a thousand years later, into gaudy mushrooms and seemed to invest these hoarier precincts, together with the wide green expanses beyond them, the huge elms, the Dark Entry, and the ruined arches and the cloisters—and, while I was about it, the booming and jackdaw-crowded pinnacles of the great Angevin cathedral itself, and the ghost of St. Thomas à Becket and the Black Prince's bones—with an aura of nearly prehistoric myth.