Jill (2 page)

About jazz we had no disagreement. Jim Sutton and I had built up a small record collection at home and had brought it
to Oxford (he was at the Slade, then exiled to the Ashmolean), so that we need not be without our favourite sound. There was not much live jazz to be heard at Oxford in those days until the Oxford University Rhythm Club was set up in 1941 and provided public jam sessions, but on the advice of Frank Dixon I had found a number of scarce deletions in Acott’s and Russell’s (then separate shops) and in one or other of our rooms there was usually a gramophone going. Kingsley’s enthusiasm flared up immediately. I suppose we devoted to some hundred records that early anatomizing passion normally reserved for the more established arts. “It’s the
abject entreaty
of that second phrase.…” “What she’s actually singing is
ick-sart-mean
.…” “Russell goes right on up to the first bar of Waller. You can hear it on Nick’s pick-up.” “Isn’t it marvellous the way Bechet …” “Isn’t it marvellous the way the trumpet …” “Isn’t it marvellous the way Russell …” Russell, Charles Ellsworth “Pee Wee” (b. 1906), clarinet and saxophone player extraordinary, was,
mutatis mutandis
, our Swinburne and our Byron. We bought every record he played on that we could find, and—literally—dreamed about similar items on the American Commodore label. Someone recently conscripted into the Merchant Navy had reputedly found his way to the Commodore Music Shop in New York, where the “proprietor” had introduced him to “one of the guys who helped make these records”; yes, leaning against the counter had actually been … Long afterwards, Kingsley admitted he had once sent Russell a fan letter. I said that funnily enough I had also written to Eddie Condon. We looked at each other guardedly. “Did you get an answer?” “No—did you?” “No.”

At the end of every term somebody left. Sometimes it was a false alarm: Edward du Cann disappeared in December 1942, waving cheerfully from the back of a taxi, but he was back next term, when he promptly swallowed a pin and was rushed to hospital. But more often it was permanent. Norman was commissioned in the Artillery and ironically found himself in the kind of regiment where revolvers were fired in the mess after dinner. Kingsley was commissioned in the Signals, where
within an hour a major reprimanded him for having his hands in his pockets. Friends remained plentiful, but contemporaries were becoming scarce. I lost touch with the freshmen, among whom it was reported there was “a man called Wain”. Years afterwards John told me that our acquaintance at this time was limited to a brief bitter exchange at lunch about Albert Ammons’s
Boogie Woogie Stomp
and the poetry of George Crabbe. If so, it was a great opportunity lost.

None the less, it was almost my last term before I met Bruce Montgomery. In a way this was surprising: among the handful of undergraduates reading full Schools in the humanities friendship was generally automatic. In another it wasn’t: Bruce’s modern languages-Playhouse-classical music-Randolph Hotel ambience conflicted sharply with my own. Of course, I had seen him about, but it hardly occurred to me that he was an undergraduate, not in the same sense that I was. Wearing an air raid warden’s badge and carrying a walking-stick, he stalked aloofly to and fro in a severe triangle formed by the College lodge (for letters), the Randolph bar and his lodgings in Wellington Square. In his first year he had been partnered at tutorials with Alan Ross; having observed that their tutor’s first action was to wind up a small clock on his desk, they took advantage of his lateness one morning to wind it up for him. The tutor was an energetic man and I always understood that the result was disastrous. But now Alan had long since gone into the Navy and Bruce, like myself, was something of a survivor. This did not make me less shy of him. Like “Mr. Austen”, he had a grand piano; he had written a book called
Romanticism and the World Crisis
, painted a picture that was hanging on the wall of his sitting-room, and was a skilled pianist, organist and even composer. During the vacation that Easter he had spent ten days writing, with his J $$$-16 nib and silver pen-holder, a detective story called
The Case of the Gilded Fly
. This was published the following year under the name of Edmund Crispin, launching him on one of his several successful careers.

Beneath this formidable exterior, however, Bruce had unsuspected depths of frivolity, and we were soon spending most
of our time together swaying about with laughter on bar-stools. True, I could make little of Wyndham Lewis, at that time Bruce’s favourite writer, and my admiration for
Belshazzar’s Feast
was always qualified, but I was more than ready for John Dickson Carr, Mencken and
Pitié Pour les Femmes
. In return I played him Billie Holiday records and persuaded him to widen his circle of drinking-places. One night the Proctor entered one of these and I was caught by the bullers at a side door: Bruce, on the other hand, simply stepped into a kind of kitchen, apologized to someone he found ironing there, and waited until the coast was clear. “When will you learn,” he reproved me afterwards, “not to act on your own initiative?”

I sometimes wonder if Bruce did not constitute for me a curious creative stimulus. For the next three years we were in fairly constant contact, and I wrote continuously as never before or since. Even in that last term, with Finals a matter of weeks away, I began an unclassifiable story called
Trouble at Willow Gables
, which Bruce and Diana Gollancz would come back to read after an evening at The Lord Napier. Possibly his brisk intellectual epicureanism was just the catalyst I needed.

III

Jill
was in fact begun that autumn, when I was twenty-one, and took about a year to write. When it was published in 1946 it aroused no public comment. Kingsley, who by that time was back at Oxford, wrote to say he had enjoyed it very much, adding that its binding reminded him of
Signal Training: Telegraphy and Telephony
, or possibly
Ciceronis Orationes
. Later he reported that he had seen a copy in a shop in Coventry Street between
Naked and Unashamed
and
High-Heeled Yvonne
.

On looking through it again in 1963 I have made a number of minor deletions but have added nothing and rewritten nothing, with the exception of a word here and there, and the reinstatement of a few mild obscenities to which the original printer objected. It will, I hope, still qualify for the indulgence traditionally extended to juvenilia.

IV

Looking, after twelve years, at this introduction and the story it introduces, I am struck by the latter’s growing claims as a historical document—not only on obvious points such as John’s thinking that a pound would be sufficient pocket-money for two weeks, but as recording a vanished mode of Oxford life itself. Christopher and his friends would not now have to bother about wearing gowns, or fear molestation by the Proctors when on licensed premises, nor would Elizabeth’s visits be limited to between two and seven o’clock in the afternoon. College authorities today have been known to turn a blind eye to girls actually living in college, aware of the outcry disciplinary action would produce; some colleges, indeed, have begun to take women students, in consequence of the lack of places for them in women’s colleges. One wonders, in fact, how long the collegiate system will last: legislation of a succession of socialist or quasi-socialist governments has severely diminished college incomes from investment or property, while the rise in labour and other costs in running these academic hotels has been equally damaging. Furthermore, nobody really wants to live in them: dons and students alike prefer domesticity, houses and wives on the one hand and flats and mistresses on the other. Finally, left-wing agitation is striving to unite all Oxford students into a single political force that would be hostile to the collegiate system and the spirit it engenders. Recently a fellow of my own college said he gave it ten years.

My original purpose in writing an introduction of this kind was to make clear that my own Oxford life was rather different from that of my hero; nevertheless, over the years I can see that I have been to some extent identified with him. A later Oxford generation, according to one writer, liked my poems because they ‘found a voice for those in the painful process of transforming themselves from
petits bourgeois
or
hauts bourgeois
.’ Though this implication of enterprise is flattering, I think the time has come to disclaim it; thanks to my father’s generosity, my education was at no time a charge on public or other funds, and all in all my manner of life is much the same today as it was in 1940—
bourgeois
, certainly, but neither
haut
nor
petit
. Perhaps in consequence I may receive a few more degrees of imaginative credit for my hero’s creation.

Lastly, since the book’s original publisher is now dead, I can explain that it was probably his imprint that won
Jill
a place in that Coventry Street shop. Reginald Ashley Caton, mysterious and elusive proprietor of the Fortune Press throughout the Thirties and Forties, divided his publishing activity between poetry and what then passed for pornography, often of a homosexual tinge. My dustjacket advertised titles such as
Climbing Boy, Barbarian Boy, A Diary of the Teens by A Boy
, and so on; the previous year he had published a collection of my poems (Dylan Thomas and Roy Fuller were also on his list), and I had rather despairingly bunged the novel at him, as no one else seemed interested. He must have accepted it unread, since the printer’s objections appeared to take him by surprise; our only meeting was in a teashop near Victoria Station to discuss this, when he assured me that to find yourself in the dock on a charge of obscenity was ‘no joke’. (That cup of tea was my sole payment for both books.) All the same, as a publisher of poetry at a time when such an activity was even less remunerative than usual, he deserves a footnote in the literary history of the time. An interesting study might be written of the crusading activities of the Fortune Press in the Forties, and of the Fantasy and Marvell Presses in the Fifties, and their effect on English verse. It occurs to me that I am probably the only writer to have been published by all three. 1975                                                                         P.L.

The main location of this story in time and place—the Michaelmas Term at Oxford University in 1940—is more or less real, but the characters are imaginary.

As, despite its length, it remains in essence an unambitious short story, chapter-divisions have been dropped, leaving it merely as a narrative with breathing-spaces.

J
ohn Kemp sat in the corner of an empty compartment in a train travelling over the last stretch of line before Oxford. It was nearly four o’clock on a Thursday in the middle of October, and the air had begun to thicken as it always does before a dusk in autumn. The sky had become stiff with opaque clouds. When they were clear of the gasometers, the wagons and blackened bridges of Banbury, he looked out over the fields, noticing the clumps of trees that sped by, whose dying leaves each had an individual colour, from palest ochre to nearly purple, so that each tree stood out distinctly as in spring. The hedges were still green, but the leaves of the convolvuli threaded through them had turned sickly yellow, and from a distance looked like late flowers. Little arms of rivers twisted through the meadows, lined with willows that littered the surface with leaves. The waters were spanned by empty footbridges.

It looked cold and deserted. The windows of the carriages were bluish with the swirls of the cleaner’s leather still showing on the glass, and he confined his eyes to the compartment. It was a third-class carriage, and the crimson seats smelt of dust and engines and tobacco, but the air was warm. Pictures of Dartmouth Castle and Portmadoc looked at him from the opposite wall. He was an undersized boy, eighteen years old, with a pale face and soft pale hair brushed childishly from left to right. Lying back against the seat, he stretched his legs out and pushed his hands to the bottom of the pockets of his cheap blue overcoat. The lapels of it curled outwards and creases dragged from the buttons. His face was thin, and perhaps strained; the expression round his mouth was ready to become taut, and a small frown lingered on his forehead. His whole appearance lacked luxuriance. Only his silky hair, as soft as seeding thistle, gave him an air of beauty.

He had been travelling all day and was hungry because he
had had no proper lunch. When he started out that morning from his home in Lancashire, he had had two packets of sandwiches in his pockets, made the night before by his mother. The egg sandwiches were wrapped in white paper and the ham in brown; they were each tied firmly, but not tightly, with string. But at a quarter to one he was sitting in a full compartment, with no prospect of changing for fifty minutes, and as he was shy of eating in front of strangers he looked anxiously at the other passengers to see if they were going to produce food themselves. They did not look as if they were. One man pushed out to take lunch in the dining-car, but the others—two elderly ladies, a beautiful girl and an old clergyman who was reading and annotating a book—all sat on placidly. John had not travelled much before and for all he knew it was considered bad manners to eat in a public carriage. He tried to read. But at one o’clock he had grown desperate and had slunk along to the lavatory, where he locked himself in and bolted a few of his sandwiches before a furious rattling at the door made him cram the rest out of the ventilator, noisily flush the unused water-closet and go back to his seat. His return might have been a prearranged signal: the shorter and fatter of the two old ladies said: “Well!” in a pleased way, and produced a leather shopping-bag, from which she took napkins, packets of sandwiches, small fruit pies, a thermos flask, and they both began to eat a small picnic. Meanwhile the beautiful girl took out some coarse-looking rolls and cheese in silver paper, and even the old clergyman was crumbling biscuits into his mouth, with a handkerchief stuffed into his collar. John hardly dared to breathe. He could sense the old ladies exchanging glances, and sat miserably turning the pages of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, waiting for what he knew must come—the charitable offer of food. And sure enough, in five minutes he felt a nudge, and saw the shorter and fatter of the two leaning across, holding out a packet in a napkin. She had a rosy face and her false teeth were bared in a smile.