Date: 2017-10-30T13:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Classics; Queer Literary Fiction
Description: The Dog at Clambercrown takes its name from a mysterious pub - seductive and frightening, never visited, only heard of – that fascinates Brooke’s child narrator in this beautiful and utterly original work of autobiographical fiction. Both a journey through Europe and a return to the forbidden kingdoms of a Kentish childhood, the novel interweaves past and present as Brooke, responding to the magical potency of “Abroad”, summons the obsessions and terrors of his youth, and conjures an almost pagan vision of the English countryside – even as he sits down to tea with the Sicilian mafia. First pub
Publisher: Boxtree

Title

Jocelyn Brooke

THE DOG AT CLAMBERCROWN

Contents

Contents

PART I

PART II

PART III

PART IV

PART V

PART VI

PART VII

PART VIII

Dedication

To

EDWARD SACKVILLE-WEST

With admiration and affection

Author’s Note

Author’s Note

I wish to express my gratitude to several kind friends who have assisted me, directly or indirectly, in the writing of this book: in particular, to Richard Gorer, for his invaluable advice and criticism; to Julian Trevelyan, who first showed me the guide to the Palermo catacombs; to “Ariadne” for her unstinted hospitality; and finally to Edward Sackville-West, who with inexhaustible patience corrected my grammar and punctuation, and to whom The Dog at Clambercrown is most gratefully dedicated.

The “Dog” itself is not a figment of my imagination: it was once a real public-house, and the building, now a small-holding, still stands today. No reference, however, is intended in these pages either to its past or present occupiers. Much of this book, on the other hand, is quite shamelessly autobiographical, and I have been indiscreet enough to introduce a number of characters under their real names; to these—and also to those whom I have portrayed pseudonymously—I offer my humble apologies, and hope that I shall be forgiven.

Acknowledgments are due to Punch, The London Magazine and the British Broadcasting Corporation, in whose pages and through whose microphones certain short passages were first made public; also to the following, by whose courtesy I have been enabled to reproduce copyright material: Messrs Michael Joseph (Stay Me with Flagons, by Maurice Healy); Mr Leonard Woolf and the Hogarth Press (A Writer’s Diary, by Virginia Woolf); Messrs Chatto and Windus (Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley); Mrs Frieda Lawrence and Messrs William Heinemann (Poems, by D. H. Lawrence).

J.B.

Epigraph

Confound not the distinctions of thy Life which Nature hath divided: that is, Youth, Adolescence, Manhood and old Age, nor in these divided Periods, wherein thou art in a manner Four, conceive thyself but One. Let every division be happy in its proper Virtues, nor one Vice run through all. Let each distinction have its salutary transition, and critically deliver thee from the imperfections of the former, so ordering the whole, that Prudence and Virtue may have the largest Section.

Sir Thomas Browne: Christian Morals

PART I

The Road to Enna (I)

London to Taormina

Chapter opening

London was fog-bound, and the air-station, when I arrived there, was already overcrowded. We sat beneath the neon lights, drinking pink-looking coffee from utility cups, and listening to the genteel voice of the female announcer which, at frequent intervals, emerged from the loud-speakers above our heads.

‘Attention, please. Attention, please. The British European Airways Flight Number 401 for Rome and Cairo is delayed for forty minutes owing to unfavourable weather conditions . . . The Swissair Flight Number 315 for Geneva is delayed for thirty minutes . . . Passengers are asked to stand by for further announcements.’

I was travelling by Swissair: there seemed little hope that we should get off that day—quite possibly not for several days. The fog seeped in from Kensington High Street, blurring the lights and catching at the throat like an irritant gas; hunched in their chromium chairs, the crowded passengers stared gloomily before them: the neon tubes made their faces look like death-masks. An infant in arms squealed incessantly; nearby, in a corner, three nuns told their beads with the calm, disengaged air of women knitting in a train. A chronic victim of what Palinurus calls l’angoisse des gares, I envied the fatalism of my fellow-travellers: they had, I thought, the mindless, infinitely patient air of political prisoners, herded in some frontier-station and waiting, without hope of reprieve, for the cattle-truck to Auschwitz or Buchenwald.

Bound for Sicily, I found it increasingly difficult to realize the fact: only the mechanics of the journey seemed ‘real’—I might as well have been travelling to Birmingham or Manchester. Disconsolately, I found myself staring at the tourist posters which adorned the walls: Swiss Alps, Italian lakes, bronzed bathers in the Bahamas—fairy-tale visions of ‘abroad’, each carefully designed to echo the individual travel-wish. Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté . . .

Anywhere, anywhere out of the world—the ancient fallacy (I thought) remains as deeply rooted as ever in the human consciousness. More of us travel today, probably (in spite of currency restrictions), than ever before; yet we retain our illusions—the myth of Abroad has lost none of its magical potency, we still believe that by crossing one or two national boundaries we can escape from the tight, intolerable nexus of the individual self. ‘Travel broadens the mind’—but does it? For some, perhaps; but for others—and I suspect they are in a majority—the reverse is probably true. Removed from one’s normal, quotidian surroundings, the area of consciousness tends to shrink, to draw inward upon itself, like a limpet forcibly prised from its rock. Yet the myth imposes itself—fostered by the films, by travel-books, by the seductive leaflets of the travel-agencies; fuir, là-bas fuir—and, protected by our tough carapaces of habit and prejudice, we duly flee: to sit huddled, miserably, upon the café terrace in some accredited beauty-spot, shivering in the Föhn or the mistral, feverishly counting our currency, and reading the day-before-yesterday’s Daily Express—unhappy limpets exiled from the rock-pool.

‘Attention, please. Attention, please . . .’ The rasping, refined voice emerged again: the Swissair flight was delayed for a further twenty minutes.

Not a hope, I thought: one might as well go home and wait, in comfort, for the fog to lift. I ordered more coffee, bought a packet of cigarettes; it was now half-past nine, and I had arrived at the air-station at eight. Air-stations and air-ports are, I suppose, more productive of anguish than other kinds of station; for air-travel is streamlined, disciplined—one has the sense, all the time, of being under orders. At a railway station one at least retains one’s freedom of choice; one can, if one feels like it, just walk out of the station, without the least risk of being questioned. But in an air-station one is virtually a prisoner: the warders (and the wardresses) are impeccably polite, the prison is run, one feels, on the humanest, most enlightened lines; but it remains, none the less, a prison.

I am the world’s worst traveller, and the prospect of a long journey—or even, for that matter, a comparatively short one—can fill me for weeks beforehand with an intolerable anxiety. Currency forms, travellers’ cheques, time-tables—one becomes involved, progressively, in a kind of Kafkaesque nightmare, a process which, though doubtless possessing some dark, internal logic of its own, seems totally unrelated to any material contingency; one is, as it were, on trial for some forgotten, mysterious crime at whose nature one can only guess.

A few months ago the idea of a trip to Sicily had seemed to me infinitely desirable; yet now that I was actually started upon the journey I found myself wishing, perversely, that I was safely at home again. For two pins I would have cancelled my passage, taken a taxi to Victoria, and caught the next train to Canterbury. But the process had been set in motion and could hardly, at this stage, be reversed: I had drawn my currency, booked my seat in the aeroplane, handed in my suitcase at the air-station; the Kafka nightmare had begun, and one cannot awake from a nightmare by a mere act of will.

Sicily . . . For me, in my present mood, it seemed the remotest, most mythical of Never-never Lands: scarcely more real than the travel-posters of St Moritz or the Bahamas. Had I been bound for Xanadu or for Ballantyne’s Coral Island, I could hardly have felt less convinced of the journey’s authenticity. Sicily, as a true entity, an objective fact—an island in the Mediterranean, lying roughly at the junction of Latitude 38N and Longitude 14E—eluded my imagination. The word evoked, merely, an incongruous hotch-potch of associations, assembled over a lifetime—a debased coinage, rubbed and tarnished by too much handling. True, I had been stationed at Syracuse in 1943; but even my memories of that war-time sojourn had become obscured and falsified by literary accretions: I had described certain episodes of that period in a volume of autobiography, and I knew that, like every other autobiographer from Rousseau onwards, I had selected my material arbitrarily and, consciously or unconsciously, idealized it.

‘Attention, please. Attention, please. Will passengers for the Swissair Flight Number 315 please have their coach-tickets in readiness and report at the coach-departure platform . . .’

Incredulously, I looked at my ticket: yes, it was for Flight Number 315. I jumped to my feet and hurried to the door at which the bus was standing. From the waiting crowd a little group detached itself and moved in the same direction: among them, I noticed, were the three nuns and the squealing child. In the street, the fog seemed as dense as ever; I climbed into the bus with a growing sense of the futility of the whole proceeding. The aeroplane was certain to be grounded; and the prospect of another interminable wait at the air-port was hardly to be endured. Soon the bus started: rolling with the slow, dignified motion of an expensive hearse down Kensington High Street, past Barker’s and Derry and Toms’, towards the remote, fog-bound reaches of Earl’s Court and the Addison Road.

At the air-port the fog seemed hardly less dense than in Kensington. Once again the sense of nightmare descended: the spacious waiting-room suggested the casualty department of a military hospital, the crowded rows of passengers had the air of out-patients awaiting a call from the Orderly Medical Officer. The air-hostesses, bright and efficient in their trim uniforms, might have been nursing sisters—but hardly (and here the analogy broke down) sisters in a military hospital; they suggested, rather, the staff of some smart and slightly sinister nursing-home. Waiting in the passport queue, I felt as though I were about to be admitted to hospital for an operation which might, only too probably, prove fatal.

Having shown our passports, we sat down, prepared for a day-long wait. I found myself sitting next to a pleasant, young-middle-aged man: only too appropriately, he was carrying a copy of Kafka’s The Castle.

‘Looks as if we’ve had it for today,’ he remarked, looking out of the windows at the fog-bound air-field.

As though to confirm his prophecy, the crackling voice of an announcer burst from a nearby loud-speaker.

‘Attention, please . . . The Swissair Flight Number 315 is delayed indefinitely owing to unfavourable weather conditions.’

My neighbour and I exchanged a smile.

‘So that’s that,’ I said, and walked over to the telegraph office, where I sent a telegram home: ‘Flight indefinitely delayed.’

Ten minutes later another announcement crackled out of the loudspeaker above our heads: passengers for Flight Number 315 were to prepare to embark immediately. ‘K’ (as I had privately christened him) gave a jump, so did I, and we looked at each other incredulously. A mistake, no doubt . . . But no: glancing across the room I saw the three nuns, imperturbable as ever, fumbling for their embarkation cards.

The fog seemed no less impenetrable than before. With a growing sense of unreality we followed the moving crowd towards the air-field entrance; the three nuns were there before us. The aeroplane reared itself dimly in the gloom: we mounted the gangway, took our seats; five minutes later we were roaring down the run-way; another minute and we were, miraculously, above the fog, in the brilliant sunshine of a March morning. As we climbed, the belt of fog fell away: London lay like a plate of brown soup below. Presently the brown thinned out into a patchy whiteness: here and there the Surrey hills appeared, black crests of pine and beech islanded in a level, waveless sea. Oxted, Limps-field, East Grinstead—I thought of the stockbrokers’ wives and the retired Anglo-Indians drooping in a hundred Tudor snuggeries over their morning coffee. Soon the fog became thinner still, and a whitish, snaky line was revealed, beyond which stretched what appeared to be a level plain flecked with snow.

‘The channel,’ said ‘K’, next to whom I had managed to get a seat. ‘We must be just about over Eastbourne.’

A few minutes later luncheon-trays appeared: soup, roast chicken and salad, a carafe of Swiss red wine. Some thousands of feet below, I thought, in the grey, wind-swept streets, the pubs would be opening: big black pints of mild slopping on the mahogany counters; and beyond the steamy windows the drifting fog and the bleak March wind catching at the throat . . . My spirits suddenly lifted; the wine tingled on my palate, a sudden foretaste of ‘abroad’. Looking down, I saw the vague, irregular outline of the French coast. Through the windows the sun fell hot on my cheek; I finished my quarter-litre of wine and asked for some more.

A physical coward in most other respects, I have, curiously enough, no fear of flying. This is the more odd, as I suffer from a well-defined phobia about heights: I cannot stand on top of the Monument or even in the gallery of St Peter’s at Rome without panicking. The explanation, I suppose, is that flying produces—inexplicably—no sense of height: the earth, seen from an aeroplane, seems no more alarming than the view which one enjoys from the windows of an Alpine hotel.

When I was seven years old—it was during the First World War—I decided that, when I grew up, I would be an airman; not, alas, from patriotism or any such creditable motive, but merely because I had conceived one of my fetichistic passions for the uniform of the Royal Flying Corps (khaki tunics, puttees and forage caps). Sometimes, for a special treat, I would be taken up to Capel-le-Ferne, on the cliff-tops above Folkestone, where there was a large airship hangar. Alas, I never saw the airship—perhaps it wasn’t really there at all; but the R.F.C. were very much in evidence. My secret (and quite indiscriminate) passion for them was partially sublimated—for public consumption, at any rate—into a cult for the airships and aeroplanes themselves; I remember that my father obtained for me, at that time, one of those early posters with illustrations of British and enemy aircraft, and I became something of an expert at distinguishing an Avro from a Taube, and the British Parsival (unsuitably named, surely) from the German ‘Zepp’. My cult, however, was short-lived; when the blue R.A.F. uniform was introduced, I suddenly lost interest in aviation, and transferred my allegiance to the Army; nor, indeed, on a purely practical level, had my young ambition much chance of being realized, for I was then and remain to this day a perfect moron about gadgets and machinery. I cannot even mend an electric fuse, let alone drive a car, and was plainly destined to spend the Second World War as a private in the R.A.M.C.

Yet perhaps my early predilection for the R.F.C. had something to do with my subsequent love of flying. Even now, at the age of forty-five, I haven’t the faintest idea why an aeroplane stays in the air; it is enough to know that—accidents apart—it does, and flying, for me, remains one of the major pleasures of life.

France slid away beneath us: we were flying low enough to make out the pink, square dolls-houses and the rows of poplars. The fog had cleared on the hither side of Paris; thereafter, the spring hastened to meet us: sudden strips and squares of green, patches of woodland misted with young foliage.

‘K’ and I talked about Joyce; I forget how the topic came up, but I remember that my companion had met the Master several times before the war at Zürich, which Joyce used to visit once a year for the sole purpose of tasting once again his favourite Fendant, which was apparently unobtainable in Paris. What, I asked rather ingenuously, was Joyce really like? ‘K’ surprised me by insisting on his humour and good-fellowship; he was excellent company and, it seemed, ‘kept everyone in fits’.

‘Of course, his work was a complete leg-pull,’ ‘K’ continued. ‘He was perfectly frank about it—though he did enjoy being famous. He used to have a good laugh, sometimes, at all the solemn things that were written about him—and no wonder.’

Switzerland took me by surprise: from the air, and approached from the north-west, it appears suitably neat and self-contained—a spiky white wedding-cake planked down upon the flat, brown-and-green table-cloth of the French countryside. Today, in the clear spring sunlight, each peak was sharply outlined against the cloudless blue: ‘K’, very knowledgeably, pointed out the better-known ones.

Below, the Saône wound snakily across the landscape, a streak of silver painted with a beguiling realism on a contour-map. Switzerland advanced to meet us: a child’s idea of ‘Switzerland’, a concentrated, abstract image of itself. I decided, before we landed, to write a letter upon the paper so thoughtfully provided by the air-line. But I had reckoned without the vagaries of fountain pens at a high altitude; for some reason, of which I am wholly ignorant, they leak—copiously and abominably. I managed to cover about half a sheet; the result was discouraging, and liable, I thought, to alarm the recipient, who might well suppose it to be blotted with my tears. I abandoned the attempt, and began, instead, to study the card which, handed round at intervals, gives details of the route. We were at 9,000 feet over Grenoble, travelling at 208 m.p.h. Our commander was called Monsieur Stutz; his co-pilot was a Monsieur Schüpback . . . Soon the yellow light flashed on: No Smoking, Fasten Safety-belts. The ground tilted, the Savoy Alps rocketed disconcertingly into the sky; a group of toy châlets in a bright green field slid away at a disquieting angle, as though a table-cloth were being twitched from a table. A hedge flew up to meet us, there was a mild bump, and a minute or two later we were taxi-ing up to the air-port entrance.

I think it was Jung who said that, when one travels by air, one is subject to a psychic time-lag; one’s psyche hasn’t had time to catch up with one’s body. Waiting in the passport queue, I had an odd feeling that my ‘self’ was still hovering, disembodied, somewhere over East Grinstead; despite the warm spring sunshine, despite the snow-peaks glittering against the cloudless sky, one had no impression of having travelled; the two-hour flight seemed the equivalent of a bus-ride from Piccadilly to South Kensington. Yet here one indubitably was, in the clear central-European light, with the chatter of French in one’s ears and, in one’s nostrils, that ubiquitous ‘foreign’ smell of coffee and freshly-baked rolls. I thought of the stockbrokers’ wives sitting over their Nescafé in the chintzy cafés, and felt—as the infrequent traveller must always feel—a naively snobbish satisfaction at the mere fact of being abroad.

The bus dropped us at the Cornavin station, where I caught a train to Vevey (I was to stay a couple of days there, visiting friends, before going on to Rome). From the train the countryside looked spring-like, but drifts of dirty, clotted snow lingered under the hedges. Across the lake the mountains of Savoy rose bleak against the still-clear sky, their brown, wooded slopes stippled and streaked with white. Peasants in blue overalls waved from the fields as we passed; a neat little steamer chugged across the calm, cobalt reaches of the lake. Along the lake-side, patches of brilliant green (the ‘emerald’ green of a child’s paint-box) alternated with brown vineyards; the twisted, dead-seeming stumps of the vines were like the half-identified forms in a surrealist picture.

It is fashionable, I suppose, to sniff at Switzerland—I have sometimes, I’m afraid, sniffed at it myself; but to rediscover it thus, incidentally as it were, and fresh from fog-bound London, is a delightful experience. I am no friend to mountains—they bore me, and the Wordsworthian mystique of the Alps leaves me cold. But the Swiss pastoral landscape—the Vaud and the Valais, and such odd, unexpected pockets as the Lötschental—has the naive, nursery charm of those old-fashioned illustrations to fairy-tales, printed in three colours, with formalized Noah’s Ark trees and fields uncompromisingly green. Switzerland, in fact, is Pre-Raphaelite—there is none of your impressionist nonsense, here, about green fields being blue or purple, every object is depicted in its ‘natural’ colours, like a picture by Millais or Holman Hunt; which no doubt goes far to explain why the Swiss have produced so few first-rate painters.

In my youth the Lake of Geneva represented for me the prototype of ‘abroad’—for the very good reason that my first holiday out of England was spent, at the age of fifteen, at Montreux. Today, for all its charms, Switzerland seems to me only semi-abroad: a foreign country decked out, as it were, for home-consumption, like some folksy pavilion at an international exhibition. Yet, in spite of the tourists and the gift-shops, the cuckoo-clocks and the English tea-rooms, Lac Léman retains for me something of the magic with which I invested it in my boyhood. I could, I think, live happily in Montreux, haunted by the grey, charming and rather disconsolate ghost of my father; I can imagine myself, in old age, promenading beneath the willows and acacias on the digue, and drinking my morning coffee at Zürcher or Reubi’s; or botanizing, gently and unenterprisingly, in the meadows of Glion and Les Avants.

On that first visit, in 1924, I used to be taken on Sunday mornings to the Christian Science service at 57 Bon Port. (Today, the premises are occupied by a shop; though I noticed that a Société de la Science Chrétienne does survive on the opposite side of the road.) Even in those days I had begun, alas, to lapse into apostasy—though the final break was not to come till a year or two later. Perhaps the services at 57 Bon Port were hardly calculated to strengthen my waning allegiance to the cult; they were bilingual, and the readers took it in turn to deliver the weekly ‘lesson’ in French and English. Their English accents were not always impeccable: one lady, I remember, addressed the congregation, disconcertingly, as a ‘generation of veepers’. My consequent attack of fou rire did much, I cannot help feeling, to increase my growing tendency towards agnosticism.

Switzerland, as we know it, is a by-product of the romantic movement: two hundred years ago, mountains were discovered to be beautiful and not, as previous generations had innocently supposed, merely infertile and obstructive; hence St Moritz and winter sports, hence the Montreux Palace, the gift-shops and the Kursaal. Switzerland, in fact, is the only country in the world to have built up a national industry out of a literary cult. What, one wonders, would it have been like today, if Rousseau and the Romantics had never existed?

It is pleasant to speculate about the future of our current aestheticisms: will Mr Betjeman, for example, be as much revered in Surrey, two hundred years hence, as Byron is in Switzerland today? And what of the ‘proletarian’ poets of the thirties—will trippers, in 2150, flock in their atomic charabancs to the slums (carefully preserved, of course, like the Château de Chillon) of Jarrow or the Gorbals?

The Swiss reverence for Byron is not, perhaps, so very surprising: he was, after all, a pioneer of tourism, and Swiss hotel-keepers regard him as a kind of patron-saint of their profession. What is far odder is the fact that Byron, among the educated Swiss, is still—as he is in France—considered second only to Shakespeare in the hierarchy of English poets. Byron, Poe, Wilde—all second-rate writers, they are far more widely read in Europe than Milton, Keats or (even) Dickens. It is the same with the moderns—in Italy, every bookstall groans beneath the collected works of Signor Carlo Morgan; and Cronin is seriously discussed among French intellectuals who, in all probability, have never so much as heard of E. M. Forster. For that matter, our own tastes in French literature often seem quite as misguided to Frenchmen as their impenitent addiction to Poe and Byron does to us; I have been told, for example, that we greatly overrate Verlaine and, to a lesser extent, Proust. Someone should write a little monograph (under the auspices of UNESCO) about this curious aspect of international relations.

The cleanliness and tidiness of Switzerland make one wonder whether the Swiss suffer from some kind of mass compulsion-neurosis, of the kind which, in individuals, manifests itself in constant washing of the hands or a repetitive anxiety about latch-keys, etc. Such compulsions are associated, I believe, with a repressed tendency to onanism; and I was once told, by a psychiatrist, of a patient of his, an addict of le vice solitaire, who, as a consequence of some early fixation, was able to achieve orgasm only on the top of a mountain—and a high mountain at that. An awkward propensity, one might suppose, for an English businessman, the patient in question, however, contrived to organize his eccentric love-life entirely to his own satisfaction. Once a year he took a fortnight’s holiday in the Alps, enthusiastically climbing a different peak each day. Per ardua ad astra . . . One would like to know how he felt at the end of these strenuous and singularly uncosy honeymoons; and one is tempted to wonder, too, whether his case was unique, or whether some of those keen climbers one has known—schoolmasters, dons, scout-leaders—may have been actuated by similar motives.

*

Whatever one may think about the psychological provenance of Swiss cleanliness, it has certainly endeared the country to the English tourist. One suspects, indeed, that for the last hundred years or so English travellers have been attracted to Switzerland (rather than to France or Italy) quite as much by its sanitation as by its scenery. Switzerland, in fact, is for many people a kind of idealized version of England itself: it is what we should have liked our country to be if we hadn’t invented industrialism and grabbed an Empire. Switzerland, moreover, is endowed with all those virtues other than cleanliness—honesty, civility, a ‘sound’ sexual morality, etc.—upon which we pride ourselves but which we don’t in fact possess, and perhaps, alas, never did possess. The war and the post-war years have made most of us rude and dishonest, if we weren’t before; our restaurants and railway-trains are without exception the dirtiest in Europe; nor, in the moral sphere, have we much to boast about: a glance at the News of the World should be a sufficient corrective to any complacency on that score . . . No wonder we enjoy Switzerland: our pleasure is the pleasure of Caliban at seeing, not his own face, but an idealized version of it, in the glass.

Bound for Rome, on the next stage of my journey, I had an hour to wait at Geneva air-port; I spent it in the bar, drinking coffee and cognac, and meditating upon the curious habits of the tourist. How is one to account for the fact that when we travel abroad we tend automatically to develop a whole series of odd and, in most cases, quite uncharacteristic compulsions? The passion for sending picture-postcards, for instance: I am far from being immune to it myself, and invariably, when I am away from home, write dozens of them—usually to people with whom I seldom or never correspond, and to whom I have nothing whatever to say. ‘Lovely weather, wish you were here’—what possible pleasure can such jejune epistles give to their recipients? Probably none: but for the sender, the act of writing them—preferably at a café table with a drink at one’s elbow—is one of the perennial delights of being abroad. It is, I suppose, a form of snobbery: the mere fact of being abroad at all confers a special status, one’s personality is, one feels, in some mysterious way enlarged and improved, and must, therefore, be of more interest to one’s friends than if one were at home.

I am, I admit, an inveterate sender of postcards; but I do not, I am glad to say, share that associated (and far more inconvenient) aberration of the average tripper—the mania for buying presents and souvenirs. Perhaps I am just selfish; but I have, also, a perfect horror of carrying more luggage than is absolutely necessary, and, whatever the length or duration of my journey, will contrive to stuff the whole of my possessions into a single suitcase. My friends and relations, in consequence, are apt to come off badly in the way of presents: not for them those delightful ‘bits’ of peasant pottery, those Florentine baskets and illicit nylons which fill the suitcases of more considerate travellers. The most they are likely to get out of me is a couple of Alinari prints and the butt-end of a garlic sausage.

The bar at Geneva air-port is the souvenir-hunter’s paradise: one can buy almost anything there, from postcards to cuckoo-clocks. At my table sat a young man whom I had taken, at first, to be a Jap; in fact, he proved to be a Filipino, on his way back from some cultural trip to Germany. For some time I had watched his eyes straying, compulsively, towards a nearby stall; at last he could contain himself no longer, and, rising suddenly to his feet, trotted with an air half-eager, half-furtive, across the bar. I saw him point to an enormous cuckoo-clock, not less than two feet square; the clock was wrapped up for him, he produced his notecase and, with the utmost equanimity, handed a thick wad of notes across the counter. Then, carrying his enormous parcel, he trotted back to the table, beaming all over his chubby brown face.

‘All my life I have wanted a Swiss cuckoo-clock,’ he informed me. ‘Now that I have it, I am satisfied, you see.’

He grinned at me with a child-like complacency, patting his precious parcel as though he were indeed a child and had just been presented with a very large and expensive teddy-bear. I wondered how much the dock had cost him: he could hardly, I thought, have got it for less than four or five hundred Swiss francs.

I found myself thinking of Harry Lime’s disobliging remarks about Switzerland in The Third Man: ‘Five hundred years of democracy, and what have they produced? Cuckoo-clocks.’ Yet to the little Filipino, Swiss culture plainly left nothing to be desired; and he wouldn’t, I felt sure, have exchanged his cuckoo-dock for a Sienese altar-piece, a Rembrandt etching or a drawing by Picasso.

Flying oyer the Alps is apt to produce a slight qualm in even the most air-minded of travellers. Peaks and crags as far as one can see: if anything does go wrong, one hasn’t a dog’s chance. Ten thousand feet or so above Chambéry, I thought of that eccentric patient of my psychiatrist friend, and wondered whether he enjoyed flying; it seemed probable (I thought) that the prospect of so many potential love-nests viewed simultaneously and, so to speak, sub specie aeternitatis, might be rather off-putting.

I decided, for my part—and not for the first time—that mountains bored me, and settled down to reread Cocteau’s Portrait-Souvenirs, which I had, as it happened, bought in Switzerland twenty years before. It doesn’t reread very well: Cocteau seldom does—he is too modish by half; Portrait-Souvenirs, moreover, is frankly journalism—a series of articles written for a Paris evening paper. If one is to read Cocteau at all, it should always, one feels, be his latest book. This is not to condemn his œuvres complètes as mere journalism (even if they were all journalism, they could hardly be described as ‘mere’); it is simply that his art is that of the conjuror, and the best tricks become stale by repetition. Even so, how immensely more readable—and indeed rereadable—he is than most writers! Portrait-Souvenirs has on the fly-leaf a quotation from Cocteau himself: ‘Je suis un mensonge qui dit toujours la vérité.’ The words might stand as epigraph for his Collected Works: there is a faint echo of Wilde, but it is translated into the idiom of Montparnasse in the twenties. (Contemporary critics are apt to forget, I think, how much the twenties owed to the nineties: there was a very perceptible hangover from the Mauve Epoch—noticeable, for instance, in the early Huxley and, still more so, in Firbank; not to mention, of course, Mr J. Alfred Prufrock.)

Flicking over the pages I came on Cocteau’s story of the genesis of Les Enfants Terribles. Jacques Chardonne had said to him: ‘Vous avez la crampe du chef-d’œuvre. Le papier blanc vous paralyse. Commencez done par n’importe quoi. Ecrivez: Un soir d’hiver . . . et continuez.’

It is probably sound advice—and perhaps one need not be suffering from the crampe du chef-d’œuvre to benefit from it. The prescription has been known to work even for plain, ordinary writer’s cramp: if one has reached the stage of being ‘paralysed’ by the sight of a blank sheet of paper, there’s a good deal to be said for sitting down firmly and making some sort of mark upon it. ‘Un soir d’hiver’—the mark is made, one is committed fatally, yet again, to the task of building up some kind of word-structure upon the vide papier que la blancheur défend.

As a writer, I suffer from the amateur’s failing of taking perpetual short cuts; chronically lazy, I find it nearly impossible to write within a conventional framework, and am apt to employ the loosest form available, or the form in which, at the moment, I seem able to work most easily. Yet I have always wanted to be a novelist, and have long cherished a secret ambition to write a novel which begins: ‘On a dark and stormy November evening, some fifty years ago, a bent figure might have been seen . . .’ etc. Novels which really do begin like that I find irresistible—at least for the first few pages; usually, alas, the initial spell wears off all too quickly—as, for instance (at least so far as I am concerned), with most of Hardy. Which is perhaps a good enough reason for not embarking upon such a work myself.

The air-port at Nice must be one of the least attractive in the world. The approach from the air is disquieting: one appears to be dropping plumb into the sea. The air-field itself consists of a narrow strip of foreshore which—but for a few depressed-looking palm trees in the distance—suggests the coast of Essex rather than the Côte d’Azur. We had three-quarters of an hour to wait, and were shepherded firmly into a small and stuffy waiting-room. Once again, as at London air-port, I had the sense of being a refugee on the run; at Geneva there had been no such feeling—but the French are (with some justification, no doubt) a profoundly suspicious race, and I wasn’t in the least surprised at being thus virtually imprisoned. Gallic xenophobia was at least, on this occasion, tempered by conviviality, and the waiting-room contained a bar.

Drinking a bock, I studied my fellow-travellers, and amused myself by trying to place them. It is a perennially fascinating game, though I am extremely bad at it, and my guesses are almost always wide of the mark. One man in particular roused my curiosity—tall, rather good-looking, with a moustache; obviously English, I thought—possibly an Army officer, but more probably a businessman. Later, paying for our drinks at the bar, we got into conversation: his English was impeccable—yet his accent had a curiously flat, depersonalized quality which gave little clue to his social back-ground. One guessed at a secondary school and, perhaps, a red-brick university; I decided that he was some kind of engineer—a key-man, a technocrat, with a nice little place on the Green Line bus-route: television in the lounge, two kiddies and a Corgi, Picture Post and the novels of Frances Parkinson Keyes . . .

Presently I mustered the courage to ask him which part of England he came from.

‘Oh, I’m not English,’ he laughed. ‘I’m Swiss, as a matter of fact. I live in Zürich, but I’ve been to London quite a bit on business. I’m in the watch-trade, you see.’

So much, I thought, for my ability to sum up my fellow-men; Nature, I reflected once again, had plainly never intended me to be a novelist—or even, for that matter, a journalist.

Somewhere over Corsica we were issued with a complex and—to me—wholly unintelligible currency-form, which had to be filled in before we landed at Rome. Fortunately the nice Swiss businessman came to my aid; at the best of times I am a bad filler-up of forms, and at twelve thousand feet I found that I was even stupider than usual. Yet it occurred to me that I could—if the mood had descended (and given a fountain-pen which didn’t leak)—have written rather a good poem. It may well be that one’s mental characteristics—both positive and negative—become more pronounced at a high altitude; that one becomes, in a word, ‘more oneself’. It seems to me an interesting hypothesis, which would repay further investigation; it would be pleasant, for instance, if the crampe du chef-d’œuvre were found to be curable—as whooping-cough is said to be—by a trip in an aeroplane. Perhaps the British Council, at my suggestion, will arrange for (say) Mr Spender, Mr Evelyn Waugh and Miss Compton-Burnett to be permanently airborne for a few weeks: the results might well be interesting, both from a purely literary point of view and as an experiment in applied psychology.

It was dusk as we flew down the coast; dark when we circled over Rome itself. The city tilted up dramatically as we veered down towards the air-port: ablaze with lights, it looked like an ‘abstract’ set-piece in some very avant-garde firework display. Dropped by the bus at the Stazione Centrale, I went to a hotel to which I had been recommended. No rooms. I tried another—and another; all were full. I ought, of course, to have telegraphed for a room; but in some respects I am an incurable optimist; I never—or seldom—book in advance, and one of my recurrent nightmares is of peregrinating interminably the streets of some foreign town, late at night, burdened with a dozen suitcases, and never finding a bed.

Finally I had to take a double room—all they had left—at a smart, pretentious place near the station. It would cost me all of 4,000 lire; in the circumstances, I should have to have a cheap dinner. I wandered down the Corso looking for a suitable restaurant; most of them looked too expensive. At last I picked on an anonymous and nondescript trattoria, in the window of which was displayed a handsome pink fish and a pile of globe-artichokes. I ordered soup, an omelette and a couple of artichokes—so deliciously tender that one could eat not only the whole of each leaf and the fond, but an inch or two of the stalk as well. The Chianti was excellent: I took a deep draught of it; at that moment it was as though the psyche had caught up, once again, on that Jungian time-lag. Sitting at the rough wooden table, with its red-checked cloth, drinking my wine, munching the last of my artichokes, I realized, for the first time, that I was back in the country which I loved best in the world.

Later—much later—I returned to the posh, unfriendly hotel. The night-porter greeted me with an air of rather dubious affability.

‘Americano?’ he asked hopefully.

I said that I was English, and saw his face fall immediately: plainly I wasn’t worth much in the way of a tip. His expression, as he conducted me to the lift, was polite but supercilious.

Brilliant sunshine, but a cold nipping wind at the street-corners; a few cafés with tables on the pavement—but only a few, for Italians, on the whole, are not much given to eating and drinking out of doors, except in the summer. I sat down in one near the Spanish steps, and drank coffee; it was soon warm enough to shed my overcoat. An English couple sat at the next table, shivering in thin clothes, and feverishly counting what remained of their currency. Their faces were pinched and anxious: tonight’s dinner, the hotel bill, tips, sandwiches in the train—would the last traveller’s cheque cover it all? At another nearby table sat a party of Americans, drinking champagne; they reckoned to be through with Rome in a couple of days, and planned to take in Florence and Milan on their way up to Switzerland. Presently they called for their bill; I noticed that they left the waiter a thousand-lire tip.

I had decided that, since I had only one day in Rome, I would make no attempt at sight-seeing; I was catching the rapido to Taormina early the next morning—a twelve-hour journey; it would be wiser and nicer, I thought, to have a lazy day and an early night. I am, moreover, a bad sight-seer: I get impatient and easily tired, my appetite for works of art is extremely limited, and churches, however beautiful, are apt to induce in me a mood of acute nervous irritability. Slothful and unenterprising, I find it all too easy to lounge away my holidays on café terraces; yet the influenza Romana was to prove, on this occasion, more potent than I had bargained for—more potent and more insidious. Or perhaps some remnant of adolescent conscience—a hangover from Bedales; lectures by Sturge-Moore, serious talks with Julian Trevelyan, walking over the downs above Steep—made itself felt. The sun had become warmer; it would be nice, I decided, to have a stroll. I paid for my coffee; and found myself, a few minutes later, picking my way between the boulders and the fallen columns of the Forum.

I suspect that being a botanist (though only an amateur one) provides, for me, a kind of psychological alibi—an escape from vocational responsibility. Such sidelines, if one happens to be a writer, are apt to become altogether too absorbing: one thinks of Housman with his footnotes to Manilius, Yeats and politics, Dickens and his penny-readings; or, in our own day (among many others), Roy Campbell, who would rather be a torero or a sergeant-major—in which he has all my sympathy—than write verse; not to mention all the willing or unwilling victims of the B.B.C. and the British Council.

I have never, I think, come across any description of the flora of the Forum; and I am sorry to say that it was the flora, rather than the antiquities, which on this day of early spring claimed the greater part of my attention. Sitting in the sun, I amused myself by trying to identify as many plants as I could. There was Arum italicum, for instance—a handsome Lords-and-ladies with bigger, more sagittate leaves; in England it is a rarity, confined to a few localities near the south coast, and I am never quite sure whether I have really found it, or whether I am just wishfully—thinking. Here, there didn’t seem much doubt about it. Two dull ‘English’ plants, Annual Mercury and Alexanders, were abundant, and a white corydalis which I couldn’t identify; the big, feathery kind of fennel was also much in evidence, and a nettle which I presumed, rather arbitrarily, to be the Roman Nettle—said to be extinct, nowadays, in Britain, whither it was imported originally, according to botanical tradition, by the Roman legionaries.

I walked up to the Palatine Hill, then down towards the Colosseum; outside the enclosure a fallen column caught my eye: on it was scratched an inscription. I went closer and examined it: W Bartali, I read. The name was not, after all, I thought, so incongruous; professional bicyclists may have replaced gladiators in the public esteem, but the principle remains the same. The temptation to scribble graffiti must be at least as old as the Œdipus complex—and perhaps, indeed, older; one likes to think that the hunters of Lascaux were in every sense—and not merely chronologically—pre-Freudian.

At the entrance to the Colosseum a cross is set in the wall, on the left-hand side as you go in; by kissing it, one qualifies for a nice little term of indulgence—a year and twelve days. Why? If the magic were available only (say) to Scandinavians or South Americans, one could understand it; but the Romans themselves are equally eligible, it seems, for the privilege. In the stone-work surrounding the cross were scratched the names of Antonio, Tonino, Umberto, and a date—3/3/53: exactly a week ago. Were these pioneers, or had the names of their predecessors been carefully expunged? And why a year and twelve days, rather than a year? One can only say that it seems a remarkably easy matter, if one happens to live in Rome, to reduce one’s term of purgatory almost indefinitely. An agnostic, but incurably superstitious, I duly kissed the cross.

The rapido left at eight o’clock; I had bought a loaf of bread, a generous cut of salame and a two-litre flask of Chianti at the nameless trattoria in the Corso, and was prepared, optimistically, to enjoy the journey. Needless to say I did nothing of the kind; for the Italian peninsula is a great deal longer than one thinks, and Rome is not nearly so far south as it looks on the map. Nor, alas, am I one of those happy travellers who positively ‘enjoy every minute of it’, and for whom the most appalling discomforts are ‘all part of the fun’. Not that I despise such adventurous souls: on the contrary, I admire them immensely. Bustling across Europe, burdened with nothing but a toothbrush and a copy of the New Statesman, what fun they must have! Not for the world would they travel anything but third-class; it is not a mere question of expense—most of them could afford to travel second; but no—third-class is more ‘fun’. One meets such interesting types; one shares sandwiches and wine, one ‘gets into conversation’; all of which more than compensates, no doubt, for sitting bolt upright for thirty-six hours or more on a hard wooden seat.

For them, but not for me; for I am one of those who, as the saying goes, were born a couple of double whiskies (or a litre of wine) below par; I have reached an age, moreover, when I like my comforts, and though I am quite prepared to scrape acquaintance with Interesting Types (if they seem sufficiently rewarding), I prefer to do so elsewhere than in railway carriages, from which—should the types prove less interesting than one had supposed—there is no possibility of escape.

On this occasion I was travelling second-class, and for the first part of the journey my compartment had only one other occupant—a middle-class Italian woman of singularly repellent aspect with an enormous quantity of luggage. I counted no less than nineteen suitcases, bags and bundles, not counting several parcels of food, an umbrella and two bottles of very nasty-looking mineral water. Fortunately she seemed disinclined for conversation; on the contrary, when I offered, at one point, to assist her with her baggage, she darted at me a look of such concentrated malevolence that my chivalrous impulse was effectually nipped in the bud. For two pins, I thought, she would have begun to scream, or pulled the communication-cord; thenceforward I kept to my corner, and care-fully avoided her glance.

South of Rome, the orange and lemon orchards increase, and on this day of early March the peach-trees were already in full bloom—smudges of sentimental, ice-cream pink amongst the classic, steel-grey olives. Towards midday we reached Naples: an oddly uninspiring town, seen from the railway. Vesuvius, smokeless and (since the last eruption, which changed its shape) at first glance unfamiliar, loomed beyond the outer suburbs; I remembered Lammie Camp, where I had hung about for three depressing weeks in 1945, waiting to be demobbed; and a fainter, more remote memory stirred, simultaneously, in my mind—the vision of a distant, twin-humped hill, seen vaguely through a romantic sunset haze, and forming the background to a landscape in some picture with which I was familiar, yet which, for the moment, I found it impossible to ‘place’; the picture remained, a blurred image, at the back of my mind, and the half-apprehended memory continued, irritatingly, to recur throughout the day . . .

To my infinite relief my fellow-traveller descended (I did not offer, this time, to assist her), and was replaced by two harmless-looking Italian males. I ate my salame, drank half a pint of wine, and began to feel considerably more cheerful.

The coastline south of Naples is, I suppose, by common consent the most romantic landscape in the world. The sea becomes magically more blue, the sunlight takes on a sudden, theatrical intensity; the Homeric world begins here: travelling south, one travels backward through the centuries, from Rome to Magna Graecia. On the craggy hillsides the big tree-spurge made blobs of brilliant, incandescent green; the banks by the side of the line were starred with small pink anemones. The train roared through tunnel after tunnel: it was as though one were being shown the landscape in a series of brief but incredibly vivid ‘dissolving views’—a magic lantern, as it were, in 3D and full Technicolor. For an hour or two I watched eagerly for each new ‘slide’: half-fearful, perhaps—as I used to be in childhood—that the operator would put it in ‘wrong-side-up’. After a time, however, the entertainment began to pall: there are limits to one’s capacity for looking at scenery—even the scenery of southern Italy; beauty, after all (as Mr Maugham has irreverently declared), is apt to become a bit of a bore.

I began to read an Italian newspaper; and becoming attuned, as it were, to the language, I found myself listening to my two companions in the carriage. I guessed them to be small businessmen or shopkeepers; they were discussing the recent death of Stalin: who would succeed him—Beria, Malenkov? I was drawn at last, reluctantly, into the conversation: what was my view of the situation? I shrugged my shoulders; but I wasn’t to be let off so lightly: my questioner returned almost immediately to the attack. It was evident that, as a foreigner, I was expected to know more of the international situation—and even of the inner workings of the Kremlin—than a mere Neapolitan shopkeeper. It is a common enough fallacy, and by no means confined to Italy; indeed, I should say that it is particularly rife among the English. We may despise foreigners, but we do tend to suppose that they are more ‘in the know’ than ourselves, especially in matters of art or politics; what we are apt to forget is that the process can operate in reverse. In southern Italy, especially—more backward and ‘provincial’ than almost anywhere in Europe—a travelling Englishman or American is apt to be invested with a reputation for political acumen which, in most cases, he will find it exceedingly hard to live up to.

I refused to commit myself about Stalin’s successor; preferring to maintain a silence from which—so I hoped—it might be inferred that I knew more than I thought politic to say . . . Meanwhile the sun was sinking: in the intervals between tunnels I watched the sea turn from blue to burnished gold. In the sunset light the green clumps of spurge, the little plots of young corn, took on a pyrotechnical brilliance. Now and then a small village bordered the line: a cluster of tumbledown shacks, peeling and decrepit. Here and there, on the fading pink or blue walls, one noticed the old Fascist slogans still in evidence: Credere, Obbedire, Combattere; Meglio un giorno da leone, etc. Elsewhere in Italy they have long been painted over; but here in the south nobody bothers—il fascismo can never have meant much to these people, anyway; the slogans remain—meaningless vestigia of the past, trivial and pointless, already, as the graffiti at Pompeii.

Dusk fell, and a lurid orange sunset blazed in the west. Suddenly, during one of the ‘flashlight’ intervals, my two companions pointed across the darkening sea: outlined against the sunset were several small darkish humps. The Aeolian Isles, they said: and there was Stromboli, a cone of darkness rising from the sea—the text-book archetype of a volcano. Beyond lay a larger, fainter mass: ‘Ecco la Sicilia’, they said. We were in sight, at last, of our destination—that cloud-cuckoo-land in which, waiting despondently at the Kensington air-station a few days before, I had found it almost impossible to believe: a legend built up from my war-time memories, and from other memories older still, deriving from the private myths of childhood. Tunnel succeeded tunnel; but the intervals now—since the landscape was seen in all-but darkness—were less dramatic. Lights winked; a faint crepuscular radiance lay still across the straits. A quivering line of brightness in the distance was perhaps Messina. My thoughts wandered—with a vagueness only possible to one who has not enjoyed the benefits of a classical education—to Homer: the Siren isles, Scylla and Charybdis, the Wandering Rocks. I drank some more wine; the lights across the straits were brighter now, and the train was slowing down; we must be approaching the train-ferry at Villa San Giovanni. The train crawled through a small station; I was curious enough to look at the name of it—and saw, by the dim light of a station-lamp, that it was Scilla.

I looked across the straits at the winking lights and the looming outline of the island; and, as the train bore me onward towards that fabled land, my mind travelled backward in time, bound upon another and longer journey whose destination remained, for the time being, ambiguous and indeterminate: a place not marked on the map, a land as elusive and unstable as the island of Laputa . . . Suddenly—and with seeming incongruity—the forgotten picture which had stirred in my memory as we passed through Naples clicked into focus: a formal landscape, in which walked a tall, elegant lady with two little dogs—none other than Aunt Martha Cock. Behind her, in the sunset haze, loomed the twin-humped hill; and beyond the hill lay those far territories which, in childhood, had seemed so perilous and so unapproachable: a country of the mind in the midst of whose wooded and impenetrable hinterland lay the mysterious region known as Clambercrown.

The train shunted on to the ferry, and we began to move across the straits towards the lights of Messina; yet my mind wandered, remote in time, through other and very different landscapes—those lands in which the features of the countryside are perceived, as Sir Thomas Browne says, ‘by Parallaxis, or at some distance from their true and proper beings’; a country in which a perpetual revision of the frontiers is in progress, and where the validity of one’s passport is liable to be questioned at any stage of the journey by the frontier-guards.

PART II

The Picture of Aunt Cock

Chapter opening

One may as well begin with Aunt Cock—for the path along which, in her portrait, she so elegantly saunters is one of many paths which, like the narrow, tree-muffled lanes winding up the hillsides from Lynsore and Pett Bottom, from Bladbean and the Elham Valley, converge at last, in this country of the mind, upon the remote, mysterious territory of Clambercrown.

Miss Martha Cock was, I suppose, my great-great-aunt, or possibly great-great-great, for in her portrait, painted in 1826, she is shown as already middle-aged, and, if one allows for the element of flattery—almost inevitable in a commissioned portrait by a second-rate painter at that (or indeed any other) period—she may well have been a good deal older. She was aunt, or possibly great-aunt, to my great-grandfather, Joseph Hewlett, a close friend of Thomas Hood, and himself the author of Peter Priggins and a number of other ‘humorous’ novels which have long since been deservedly forgotten, except by amateurs of minor nineteenth-century fiction. Martha Cock was presumably Hewlett’s maternal aunt; but I have never been able to establish the exact relationship. Her novelist-nephew was born in 1800, and would therefore have been twenty-six at the time her portrait was painted; he had married two years previously, and, according to his marriage lines, Aunt Martha had been a witness at the ceremony, which took place at St Giles’s Church, Oxford.

According to family tradition, Aunt Cock was something of a terror. She is said to have been wealthy, and also to have kept a firm grip upon the family purse-strings; certainly poor Joseph Hewlett never benefited from her in her lifetime or, one imagines, under her will, for he was, despite his modest success as a novelist, chronically penurious—a fact hardly to be wondered at, since he was not only a clergyman (and a singularly unsuccessful one) but polyphiloprogenitive and exceedingly convivial. He was up at Worcester, and one may suppose that Aunt Cock, who lived at Number 13 Beaumont Street, kept an alert and censorious eye upon his undergraduate activities. Later, he became headmaster of the grammar-school at Abingdon, where no doubt he continued to live in wholesome dread of his Aunt Martha’s prim and spinsterly surveillance.

Joseph Hewlett’s eldest daughter, Charlotte, married my grand-father, John Brooke, and died comparatively young; her sister, my great-aunt Patty, lived to an advanced age, and died unmarried and in poverty, though fortified by the comforts of the Anglo-Catholic church. It is, of course, well known that Roman Catholics are Dirty—or so, at any rate, I (like most protestant children in those days) was brought up to believe; it follows, therefore, that Anglo-Catholics are likely to be dirty too, and indeed (being so often, in intention if not in fact, more catholic than the Pope) probably dirtier. Such, at any rate, seems to have been the case with my great-aunt Patty; my mother and father visited her on her death-bed, and my mother has often described to me the extreme squalor of the old lady’s surroundings. This, so I am assured, had nothing to do with her own poverty, for she had spent her declining years in the house of friends who, from all accounts, were comparatively well-off, and able to maintain their protégée in comfort. These kindly protectors were, however, High Church—so high, indeed, that (as my father was wont to remark) they were in danger of toppling over backwards; it was hardly surprising, therefore (indeed, it was to be expected), that they should pay insufficient attention to the rules of hygiene.

Aunt Patty, gratified by my parents’ visit (they must have been, I suppose, almost her last surviving relations), offered each of them ‘something to remember her by’—anything they liked to choose from among the innumerable and mostly quite valueless ‘treasures’ which filled her squalid, dust-grimed bedroom. My father chose a set of Grandfather Hewlett’s novels, my mother the portrait of Aunt Cock. Perhaps from genuine curiosity, but more probably from a nervous desire to please the old lady by showing an interest (which she probably didn’t feel) in this ‘memento’ of somebody whom, after all, she had hardly known, my mother ventured to ask her the names of the two little dogs which appeared in the foreground of the picture.

Almost in articulo mortis, Aunt Patty was just able to reply, in a barely audible murmur: ‘Bijou and Prince.’

The picture, which now hangs in my bedroom, is a big one: three feet by two and a half, not including the massive gilt frame. In the bottom right-hand corner it is signed ‘J.T.’, with the date—1826. It is, no doubt, if looked at with the proper detachment—of which I am seldom capable—a very bad picture: a hack job by some dim provincial portrait-painter (Aunt Cock, if legend is not unjust to her, was far too mean to employ anybody better). It shows a tall, elegantly-dressed lady strolling in a formal landscape—the stock landscape, vaguely classical and deriving from Claude Lorrain, of the commercial artist of the period: the equivalent of those canvas ‘backgrounds’ which, a generation or two later, would form part of the stock-in-trade of the professional photographer. The perspective is somewhat at fault, and Aunt Cock is shown, in proportion to her surroundings, as considerably larger than life—one would suppose her to be at least seven feet tall. Her figure dominates the picture, strolling nonchalantly across an open space between very artificial-looking trees; her expression is aloof and disdainful, but her penetrating eyes are fixed, none the less, in a critical and somewhat distrustful gaze upon the observer. The unfortunate painter may well have quailed beneath such a glance: Aunt Cock, one can’t help feeling, was wondering whether she was going to get her money’s-worth.

Probably the artist flattered her; but, even so, her face seems to confirm the family tradition: the nose is sharply aquiline, the lips are primly set in a thin, forbidding line, the pointed chin juts forward with an air of implacable (though perfectly lady-like) obstinacy. She looks, in fact, a terror—strait-laced, avaricious and thoroughly bad-tempered. Nor do her clothes and accoutrements, soft and feminine enough in themselves, do much to counteract the general impression of hardness and severity: the eyes stare forth from beneath a fringe of tight, forbidding little ringlets surmounted by a lace head-dress whose sharp, projecting points suggest the pricked ears of some animal (when I was a child I did indeed suspect that Aunt Cock was really a kind of cat, dressed-up as a human being, like the redoubtable Tabitha Twitchit in Tom Kitten). The dress itself, of some soft, ivory-white stuff, is high-waisted in the fashion of a somewhat earlier day, falling in severe folds almost to the ground; from beneath it projects a tiny pointed foot, like a mouse peeping coyly from its hole. The right hand is clasped to the breast, supporting a billowing pink silk scarf; the left hand holds a long-handled, folded parasol, with a crook at the top. In the foreground two small liver-and-white spaniels—Bijou and Prince—trot sedately by the side of their mistress: Prince’s face is turned up towards her, as though urging her to hurry her pace; Bijou stares suspiciously forward at the spectator, with an expression oddly similar to that of Aunt Cock herself. The picture has the opaque, muddy patina of an ‘old master’—an effect which (though the canvas has never been cleaned) one guesses to have been part of the painter’s intention.

In my childhood, though I had a certain fondness for Aunt Cock, I felt that in real life, with her cross-grained, rather prissy expression, she might well have been an unwelcome and even, perhaps, a dangerous addition to our household. At one time, indeed, I rather suspected that she might be a Suffragette—a mysterious and alarming sub-species of the female breed who, it appeared, were addicted to the most outrageous and deplorable forms of wickedness. I regarded them, I suppose, as a sort of cross between witches and the more frightening kind of aunt; their very name carried sinister overtones, suggesting as it did, to me, ‘suffocation’ and (by the final syllable, ‘gette’) the gas-jet at the bottom of the basement stairs, at which I had once tried, unsuccessfully, to fill a toy balloon. I had conceived, at an early age, a peculiar horror of gas—that invisible, intangible and evil-smelling substance which, when ignited in those old-fashioned gas-stoves with their round, fungus-like lumps of asbestos, was liable to explode with a terrifying report, and which, if anybody ‘left the gas on’ by mistake, was capable of ‘suffocating’ us all as we slept.

No wonder, then, that the suffragettes had acquired for me—quite apart from the disrepute in which their activities were held by the grown-ups—unpleasant and even lethal associations. I had gathered that the local branch or coven of this destructive sisterhood lived somewhere in the neighbourhood of Coolinge Lane, that long, half-countrified road which led to Shorncliffe Station across a high windswept plateau on the western outskirts of Folkestone. I had formed this impression, I suppose, because I had once been taken up to Coolinge Lane and shown the latest ravages of these degraded and anti-social aunt-witches: the windows of a large modern house (perhaps inhabited by some anti-suffragist politician) had been shattered on the previous night, and had been temporarily patched up, by the owner, with brown paper and treacle. Why treacle? I was puzzled at the time, and still am; perhaps treacle was supposed to possess—like vervain or rowan-berries—the property of keeping witches (or suffragettes) at bay. Coolinge Lane, at any rate—a place which, with its open fields and its glimpses of distant woodland, had rather endeared itself to me as a kind of local substitute for the ‘country’—became henceforward haunted by these terrifying viragoes who broke windows, flung themselves under racehorses and chained themselves to the railings of Buckingham Palace. I was not, I think, much concerned with the motives for these strange and improbable outrages; I was content, I suppose, to regard them as acts of mere motiveless malignity or suicidal mania; though I had, it is true, heard a vague report that suffragettes were in perpetual pursuit of something called The Vote—an entity which I conceived as a white, V-shaped and elusive object, rather like the kites which I had sometimes seen other children flying on the beach.

It seemed not improbable, at any rate, that Aunt Cock might, among other things, be a kind of suffragette—a suffocating and lethal presence with a nasty smell who, incarnated in female form, would probably be capable of breaking windows in Coolinge Lane, or even, perhaps, of tying herself to the railings of Lord Radnor’s house (our nearest local equivalent, as I supposed, to Buckingham Palace) along the Lower Road. Fortunately, however, Aunt Cock appeared to be eternally immobilized, with her dogs, within the safe bounds of a square yard or two of canvas, and unlikely, on the whole, to carry her pursuit of The Vote to any such indecorous and alarming lengths.

In my early childhood the portrait used to hang in the hall of our house at Sandgate; when the front-door was opened, on windy days, the massive frame would sway and flap perilously in the draught. On the opposite wall hung the tiger skin presented to my mother by her old friend Frank Borret (who had himself shot the tiger in India); the beast’s head rested on a large oak chest, its jaws realistically agape, glaring ferociously across the hall at the composed and disdainful countenance of Aunt Cock. The two of them—Beauty and the Beast—seemed to me united in some profound, mysterious relationship which could never be consummated; foster-children of silence and slow time, they were destined, for all eternity, to gaze at each other across the draughty hall from their respective prisons—the tiger safely crucified, head downwards, upon the wall, the lady for ever immured within her calm, two-dimensional landscape of trees and distant hill:

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss.

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Aunt Cock and the tiger, indeed, possessed for me a kind of symbolic significance, representing, as they did, the opposed forces of civilization and savagery. If the tiger stood for the terrors and dangers of the unknown, Aunt Cock for her part belonged wholly, I felt, to the familiar, circumscribed world of my own home. For one thing, she was an Aunt, and, being such, I naturally identified her with my living aunts—infrequent visitors whom I held, like Aunt Cock herself, in considerable awe, and who were not, perhaps, much more ‘real’ to me than the lady in the picture. For a child, the worlds of Art and Nature are apt to overlap, and I hardly distinguished between Aunt Cock and the numerous ladies (including aunts) who visited the house. Nor, indeed, to the eyes of a child, did Aunt Cock’s clothes—‘old-fashioned’ though they were—seem markedly different from the long, sweeping skirts and large hats worn by these late-Edwardian lady-visitors. As for Bijou and Prince, they were almost identical with the woolly, brown-and-white toy dog (with a squeak in its tummy) which my grandmother had given me for my birthday, and which I took to bed with me every night. Ha-bow-wow (for thus, oddly, had I christened my toy) was quite plainly the brother—or at least a close relation—of the two little spaniels who trotted in the foreground of Aunt Cock’s picture.

I accepted Aunt Cock, therefore (together with her pets), as being more or less a member of the family, I even felt a certain prejudice in her favour—for Aunt Cock, despite her rather minatory air, had the virtue (too rare among grown-ups) of leaving me severely alone: she couldn’t kiss me (a habit which I detested), or send me to bed early; nor was I expected to say how-d’you-do to her or to hand her cakes at tea-time.

But it wasn’t so much Aunt Cock herself as the landscape in which she moved that chiefly fascinated me. I was then—and I suppose, generally speaking, I am still—more interested in places than in people; and Aunt Cock, after all, was a lady very much like other ladies (though more harmless than most), and as such could evoke only the mildest enthusiasm in the heart of a born misogynist such as myself. Her background, on the other hand, I found of perennial interest: the stock landscape of an inferior portrait-painter, it had for me the enthralling quality of some dream-vision by Dali or Max Ernst. Those overarching trees, that distant hill bathed in a golden sunset haze—they were familiar yet mysteriously unfamiliar, features in a landscape which I knew, but which, like the landscape of a dream, had undergone some subtle, indefinable transformation.

From the start I was firmly convinced that the background of the picture was meant to be the ‘Little Paths’—by which name my family were wont to refer to that semi-wild, semi-domesticated tract of the undercliff, intersected by gravel walks and provided, here and there, with rustic seats and arbours, which bordered the ‘Lower Road’ leading from Sandgate to Folkestone Harbour. The Little Paths were one of the places I knew best—our morning walks took us, more often than not, along the Lower Road as far as the toll-gate or beyond—and it was natural enough, I suppose, that the undercliff, with its carefully tended shrubs and its general air of bogus rusticity, should seem to me identical, or nearly so, with the formal, park-like landscape in the picture. I was convinced, at any rate—despite certain discrepancies—that Aunt Cock ‘lived’ in the Little Paths, and nothing I was told to the contrary could persuade me otherwise.

Aunt Cock, I was assured, had in fact lived at Oxford; but my faith in my own theory remained unshaken, for there was nothing, surely, to prevent Aunt Cock—unknown, perhaps, to my parents—from visiting Sandgate; very probably, I thought, she had come to stay with one or other of our neighbours—Lady Byron or Sir Squire Bancroft—along the cliff. Besides, I was by no means sure—since I had never been there myself—that Oxford really existed; I knew that my father had once lived in a part of Oxford called Trinity, and that he had, moreover, performed some mysterious evolution known as ‘rowing in the eight’; my sister, too, in more recent years, had been to Oxford-for-an-exam; but such facts as these carried little conviction—they seemed to me no more ‘real’, in the purely objective and sublunary sense, than the sort of things one heard in church. ‘Trinity’ remained for me a vague and inchoate conception—something to do with God and the Holy Ghost; and, though I more than half suspected that God and my father were one and the same, I had been assured on the best authority (my nurse) that ‘ghosts’ didn’t exist. Moreover, I was privately convinced that ‘Trinity’, if indeed it had any objective reality, was not at Oxford at all but at Folkestone, and that it was nothing more or less than a plain ordinary church—a modern Gothic building in the Sandgate Road, which I had often passed on shopping expeditions to the town. (It had acquired a slightly sinister reputation for me since I had heard—or rather misheard—the grown-ups referring, with bated breath, to the fact that the Vicar used incest: a piece of recondite information which, when I repeated it to my elder brother, evoked an outburst of ribald—and to me quite incomprehensible—laughter.)

Trinity, then—and therefore Oxford itself—was really (so I assured myself) merely a part of Folkestone; what more natural, then, that Aunt Cock should inhabit the Little Paths? But there were, as I have said, certain discrepancies between the landscape in the picture and that of the undercliff. For one thing, I had never seen hollyhocks growing in the Little Paths, and in the picture there were two plants which were, as I supposed, meant to be hollyhocks, though the painter had, as a matter of fact, got the leaves wrong. Perhaps, I thought, the holly-hocks had since been dug up; or perhaps they were really meant to be the Tree Mallow (Lavatera arborea—precocious little beast that I was, I even knew its Latin name), which did grow wild along the undercliff. I was rather puzzled, too, by the plants which grew in the extreme foreground: as a botanist I found them even harder to identify than the ‘hollyhocks’. More than anything else, they seemed to resemble the cinerarias which I had seen in the windows of Clark’s Nurseries in the Cheriton Road, and which sometimes, on festive occasions, decorated our own drawing-room; but cinerarias certainly didn’t grow in the Little Paths, and I could only conclude that they had been planted out there, as a special gesture on the part of the municipality, to celebrate Aunt Cock’s visit (just as my mother would buy a cineraria or a cyclamen when one of my real aunts was coming to stay).

A far more serious discrepancy, however, was the fact that in the distant background of the picture appeared a hill, its outlines vague and indeterminate in the Turneresque sunset haze, but easily recognizable, by me, as Caesar’s Camp, the chalky hillock projecting from the low downs to the north of Folkestone. Of the hill’s identity I was in no doubt; Caesar’s Camp was the most considerable hill in the neighbourhood, and if Aunt Cock lived (as I was convinced she did) in the Little Paths, it stood to reason that the hill in the picture could be none other than Caesar’s Camp itself. The trouble was that one couldn’t, in reality, see Caesar’s Camp from the Little Paths, for the paths lay two or three hundred feet below the cliffs, which formed an uninterrupted barrier, extending from Sandgate to Folkestone Harbour, between the undercliff and the level plateau of West Folkestone. I was puzzled but not unduly worried by the inconsistency; for children, generally speaking (and I was no exception to the rule), take a primitive view of pictorial landscape and will accept, for instance, as perfectly ‘natural’, those early Italian paintings in which the artist shows several events happening simultaneously and, as it were, on the same level, but without apparent relationship to each other, and often with a fine disregard for the laws of perspective. (Thus, a saint is seen decapitating a dragon, while a priest, nearby, confesses a penitent, apparently quite oblivious of the stirring conflict in progress a few yards away; a peasant, meanwhile, tills a neighbouring vineyard, another priest is calmly absorbed in his breviary, and, from just over the hill, with its black crest of cypresses, God the Father peers down, benignly, upon the varied and incongruous scene below.)

In a more rational and sophisticated mood I would sometimes wonder if there were not, after all, some gap in the towering bulwark of the cliffs, some vista so far undiscovered by myself through which the painter had been able to discern the distant prospect of Caesar’s Camp. But I knew very well that no such gap did, in fact, exist, and I was perfectly content, for the most part—despite the occasional promptings of my rational faculty—to accept the artist’s composite, ‘portmanteau’ vision of my native landscape as perfectly authentic and ‘true to life’.

The hill in the picture was not really, for that matter, very like Caesar’s Camp, but the resemblance was quite close enough—since Caesar’s Camp and the adjoining downs were the only hills I knew—to convince me of its identity. Looking at the pictured hill today, with its two unequal humps, I am reminded rather of Vesuvius; and indeed the painter may well have been accustomed to flatter his clients by placing them against a ‘Neapolitan’ background, thus creating the illusion that they were much-travelled (and therefore wealthy) and that the picture was a ‘genuine hand-painted’ one by a foreign artist. In childhood, however, I immediately recognized in those twin humps an attempt (if not a very successful one) to represent the barrows and earthworks at the top of Caesar’s Camp—that Promised Land towards which I looked with so much longing, but which, for one reason or another, I had not, as yet, been allowed to explore.

The hills behind the town, romantic enough in themselves, engaged my imagination for another reason: for their steep, chalky flanks formed an effectual—and, so it used to seem, an almost impassable—barrier between the familiar, semi-urban world which I inhabited and the vast unknown region which my family were accustomed to refer to, with a comprehensive vagueness, as ‘The Country’. Unknown, that is to say, but for the small and strictly delimited area which surrounded the cottage, at the further end of the Elham Valley, where we spent the summer holidays, and which, though indubitably in the country, formed a kind of civilized outpost amid the unexplored and probably dangerous territories of the hinterland.

Apart from this small, familiar province, The Country remained for me a wild, mysterious kingdom, scarcely to be distinguished from the deserts and jungles in the adventure stories of Little Folks, and almost as unattainable. Sometimes, by eavesdropping on the grown-ups’ conversation, I would acquire scraps of information about this terra incognita beyond the hills: travellers’ tales from the interior, tall stories which, filtering through by hearsay to the coastal region, I was inclined to take with a grain of salt. There was, for instance, a place called Wheelbarrow Town which, improbable enough in itself, was rendered more rather than less mysterious by the fact of being (as I was credibly informed) ‘not far from Stelling Minnis’—a name which had already acquired for me a potent and rather sinister magic. Hardly less sinister, and even more difficult to credit, was the existence of something called an ‘Aerodrome’ at Paddlesworth, which, so I was told, lay ‘just beyond Caesar’s Camp’. At that time I only half-believed in aeroplanes; true, I had once seen one—or so I was assured—but since I had been only two years old at the time I was forced to accept the fact on hearsay; only the vaguest impression of my miraculous vision remained with me—a confused memory of leaning out of the window at our country cottage and seeing a small, rectangular shape, bright blue in colour, high up in the sky; probably what I really remembered was a ‘box’ kite, flown by my brother, for when I tried to describe, retrospectively, my ‘aeroplane’, I was promptly pooh-poohed and told that such things as blue aeroplanes didn’t exist. A little later, when aeroplanes became more common, the aerodrome proved to be a quite credible—and extremely exciting—actuality. I visualized it as being something like the Hippodrome at Dover—a small theatre, of evil repute, past which I had more than once been hurried, with averted face, by my nurse, on our periodic visits to the neighbouring town. From this extra-ordinary—and perhaps, by association, slightly wicked—edifice, ‘just behind Caesar’s Camp’, the aeroplanes would emerge, at infrequent intervals, over the top of the downs: thrilling, almost supernatural visitants, throbbing high in the cloudless blue of a summer’s afternoon, above the gay, fluttering crowds on the Folkestone Leas.

Paddlesworth, Stowting, Acrise, Postling—the odd, outlandish names of these inland villages acquired for me each its own special and private magic. At Postling Wents, for instance (what on earth, I wondered, were ‘wents’? I still don’t know), I was told that one could find the butterbur, that exciting plant with its huge leaves like those of some vastly magnified coltsfoot. My informant was an impoverished and rather dirty old gentleman upon whom my mother had taken pity, and who used sometimes to come to tea; he rather fancied himself as a botanist, and had also told me (quite correctly, as it happened) that the Spider Orchid was to be found on Sugarloaf Hill; but I flatly disbelieved his story of the butterbur. It was a plant I particularly wanted to find, but I had been unlucky and, by a kind of inverted wishful-thinking, I had convinced myself that it didn’t grow in our neighbourhood. Nor did it seem likely, alas, that I should ever go to Postling; and in fact I didn’t, oddly enough, go there till many years later, when I was already grown-up, and had almost forgotten old Mr Anderson and his traveller’s tales. To my surprise, the very first thing that caught my eye, when I did at last make the long-deferred pilgrimage, was the butterbur, growing in a ditch within sight of the roadside: a standing rebuke to my childhood scepticism, and a fitting memorial to a kind-hearted old gentleman (he took rather a fancy to me, and presented me with an enormous old-fashioned watch) who must have been dead these many years.

The village of Acrise (pronounced Ay-kriss) evoked more disquieting phantoms. I had once been taken to a farm there, for the summer holidays, but this fact, like my first aeroplane, had to be taken on trust. I didn’t really remember Acrise, though a vague memory persisted—and persists to this day—of a horse called Ginger whom, for a treat, I was sometimes allowed to feed with lumps of sugar. I don’t think I can—or could even at the age of which I write—really remember Ginger; but he passed early into my private mythology, and I managed, I think, to convince myself that my memory of him was authentic and at first hand. For the rest, that forgotten visit to Acrise took on for me, if only by hearsay, an emotional tone which was wholly unpleasant. In my infancy I had suffered badly from night-fears, and at Acrise these were redoubled, chiefly—as I have been told—owing to the unfamiliar farm noises: the lowing of cows, the crowing of cocks, or the shrill neighing of the horse Ginger who, though by day a harmless and even friendly presence in the adjoining meadow, became transfigured, by night, into a malevolent and terrifying monster. On such occasions I would be afflicted by a species of convulsion or nervous paralysis: my whole body would become rigid, my limbs immoveable, and I would lie thus, transfixed with terror, for an hour at a time. The attacks continued throughout that summer, and ceased only when we left Acrise and returned to Sandgate, where the nocturnal silence was disturbed by nothing more alarming than the familiar booming of a foghorn, half-muffled by the continuous and hypnotic murmur of the waves on the beach below the house.

Acrise was in fact—and still is—a lonely and isolated spot, lying well off the main road between Swingfield and Elham. It was not till more than twenty years later that I did at last have occasion to revisit it: I had gone there with my brother to call on some acquaintances of his, Mr and Mrs de la Motte, an eccentric and misanthropic couple whose sole occupation, it appeared, was the consumption of enormous quantities of whisky (they were reputed to drink, between them, at least three bottles a day). This strange pair inhabited a small converted farmhouse surrounded by trees—perhaps the very one in which we had spent that ill-omened summer holiday twenty-odd years before. The day of our visit was, I remember, warm and cloudy, with intermittent thundery showers; the lonely, tree-shrouded village seemed to exhale a curiously stale, lifeless atmosphere—a sense of some unseen and intangible evil lurking, like a bad smell, among the neglected gardens and the dripping trees. My brother’s friends received us with a vague, off-hand cordiality, as though hardly aware of our identity: blinking at us, in the dim, sunless afternoon, like the denizens of some submarine cavern dazzled by a sudden emergence into daylight. Mrs de la Motte, a fat, rather slatternly woman with a viscid, swollen face of the texture and colour of a turnip, was reputed to have a talent for palmistry: rather unwillingly, standing in the drenched garden (for we were not, oddly enough, invited into the house), I proffered her my hand. She stared at it for some time, and at last, with evident reluctance, informed me that I had recently been ill, that I was fond of books and flowers, and unhappy in my present job. She added several more details about my past, but made no attempt to predict the future; I am certain—for what the fact is worth—that she could have known nothing, in the ordinary, normal sense, about my past life; probably she had been unaware, until that afternoon, of my existence; yet everything which she told me about myself was, without exception, factually accurate.

*

To this day I cannot pass the turning which leads from the main Folkestone-Canterbury road down to Acrise without a faint, recurrent sense of disquiet. Perhaps my unease is associated, merely, with that dismal and rather unnerving visit to Mrs de la Motte; I suspect, however, that it springs from a deeper source, and that the sudden qualm which I feel as I pass near that gloomy tree-muffled farmhouse is in fact an echo of those ancient terrors which haunted that long-forgotten summer of my infancy.

Our morning walks through the Little Paths seldom extended beyond the toll-gate—a barrier separating us effectually from the squalid and rather disreputable territory of Folkestone Harbour. The toll-keeper’s wife, however, was a friend of ours, and we would often stop to chat to her outside the little sham-Gothic toll-house. On the house-wall hung a noticeboard with a list of the toll-charges: a shilling for a ‘private motor’, sixpence for a horse-drawn waggon, threepence for a carriage, and so on down to bicycles, barrows, horses, asses and mules—all of which could be transported across the frontier for the modest charge of one penny. I never so far as I can remember, saw anybody leading an ass or a mule through that magic barrier; but the thought that they might do so added a pleasantly romantic—even a Biblical—touch to the toll-house, appropriate enough to the faintly ecclesiastical architecture of the building itself.

The toll-gate, the cliffs, and beyond the cliffs the hills—I must, I suppose, as a child, have been more than usually frontier-conscious; and that feeling of being habitually cut off, by a series of impassable barriers, from the world at large has, I think, remained with me to this day. It was an odd, remote little province in which we lived—this world of the Lower Road, tucked away beneath the cliff, and so carefully protected, by the toll-gate, against the incursions of ‘private motors’, mules, asses and trippers. But if the harbour quarter seemed alien to me, so too did the pompous, Edwardian town which impended upon us from the cliffs above. I myself belonged, I felt, to neither: though I would be seized at times by a romantic desire to explore the raffish, forbidden territory beyond the toll-gate, with its fun-fairs and winkle stalls and milling crowds of trippers; and on hot summer afternoons, when the sound of the military band on the cliff-top was wafted down through the pine-scented air to the Lower Road—selections from The Gondoliers, or one of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches—I would evoke for myself the splendours of that gay, mondaine society which thronged the level, grassy reaches of the Leas. I don’t think I ever went so far as to imagine myself an integral part of that exciting and alien world; true, I would be taken, occasionally, to listen to the band, and we often walked along the Leas on our way to the shops in the Sandgate Road; but I felt myself a stranger in such worldly surroundings, and was glad enough to return, down the steep cliff-walks with their ‘rustic’ bowers of euonymus and tamarisk, to the familiar world of the undercliff and the Little Paths.

I feared and distrusted the Leas, perhaps, because I was apt to associate it with those smart visiting ladies who were liable, when they came to tea, to pounce upon me without warning and kiss me. By association, too, I conceived at one time a slight prejudice against Aunt Cock herself, who, though she very sensibly seemed to prefer the Little Paths, might well be imagined sauntering, like any other lady, with her dogs and her parasol, along those asphalt paths and flower-decked lawns upon the cliff-top.

I preferred—on the rare occasions when I was allowed to visit it—the harbour quarter and the Old Town beyond the toll-gate. Here was a skating-rink and a switchback (alas, I was never allowed to patronize either of them), and that mysterious edifice known as The Pier—a kind of house which one approached by a bridge across the sea, and which I conceived to be inhabited by Lord Radnor, to whom, so I had heard, the undercliff belonged. A guichet led on to the pier, at which a forbidding-looking lady dispensed tickets (when I heard people talking about peeresses, I supposed that they meant ladies who sold tickets for piers, and I assumed, naturally enough, that this particular lady must be Lady Radnor herself); outside was a row of slot-machines which, like the switchback, were forbidden to me; none the less, I would examine them with the utmost interest, and was particularly fascinated by one of them upon which, beneath the picture of a swarthy, gipsyish lady, was inscribed the legend:

To tell you your fortune I do not pretend,

But I’ll give you some fun if a penny you’ll spend.

I had been given to understand that fortune-tellers were wicked, so I was not much surprised (though a little depressed) by the gipsy’s priggish disclaimer; Folkestone, after all, was far too respectable a town, at that period (it was long before the advent of Mrs de la Motte), to countenance any such dabblings in the Black Arts; though I knew, by hearsay, that real gipsies were sometimes to be met with in those wild, lawless provinces ‘beyond the hills’.

I longed, more than ever, to explore that mysterious hinterland, and looked forward, throughout the winter months, with a growing impatience to the day when we should depart for that distant but familiar outpost of civilization in the Elham Valley. Folkestone, on the whole—despite the reputed ‘wickedness’ of the pier and the fish-market—seemed to me lacking in romance: an impression which, for that matter, persisted into my boyhood and adolescence, when, having begun to read ‘grown-up’ novels, I realized that, from a purely literary point of view, my home-town could hardly be said to exist at all. None of the characters in the novels I read ever lived there: if people in novels went to Folkestone at all, it was merely in order to get somewhere else—somewhere ‘abroad’—and even then they more often sailed from Dover. I began, in fact, to feel mildly ashamed of living in so undistinguished a milieu, and often found myself wishing that I had been born in Cornwall or Devon (much favoured by novelists in those days) or, better still, that I inhabited some crumbling and romantic manor-house in Ireland or the west of Scotland. Wells, it was true, had written about Folkestone (in Kipps), though with evident contempt and dislike (in the early years of the century he had been a neighbour of ours at Sandgate); but Wells, I felt, hardly counted; and only many years later, when I read Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart and Edward Sackville-West’s Simpson, did I feel that Folkestone, at last, could be pin-pointed, so to speak, on the literary map.

Acrise, Paddlesworth, Postling—these, if impenetrably sequestered beyond the barriers of Caesar’s Camp and Sugarloaf, were at least known to me by repute; they had even been visited by my parents or their friends (and, in the case of Acrise, by myself). But beyond Acrise, beyond Postling with its butterbur and its mysterious ‘wents’, lay other and even less accessible territories—the sinister regions about Stelling Minnis and Wheelbarrow Town, the bad-lands of Stodmarsh and Pluck’s Gutter, and many another village or hamlet with strange, remote-sounding names: Bladbean, High Chimney, Old Wives’ Lees . . . I hardly conceived it possible that I should ever visit these places: for me they remained names, merely—romantic symbols of the inaccessible, less ‘real’ to me, perhaps, than Ungava or Tahiti or the Great Karoo, of which (if I didn’t wholly believe in them) I had at least read vivid and extremely plausible descriptions in Ballantyne or Rider Haggard.

One name, however, more than all the rest, had captured my imagination, and indeed had become—by reason of the special magic which attached to it—the central nucleus, the very epitome of that vague yet powerful enchantment with which I had invested the unknown country beyond the hills. The name, itself so pregnant with strange echoes, seemed to have absorbed into its mysterious syllables, and to exhale in a more potent and concentrated form, the mystery of all those other place-names which for so long had haunted my mind. The ‘Dog-and-Clambercrown’—for this was the form in which the name, by some misapprehension on my part (or perhaps on the part of my parents), first presented itself to me—the ‘Dog-and-Clambercrown’ was, it appeared, a lonely and isolated inn, lying somewhere, as I had heard, ‘at the back of beyond’, over towards Bladbean and Stelling Minnis. None of my family, in fact, could tell me exactly where it was, and for them almost as much as for myself the Dog stood as a symbol of remoteness and isolation. The East Kent hounds sometimes met there, and it was thus, very probably, that I first heard of it, for there was a long-standing joke in my family about a hard-riding, hard-swearing M.F.H. who was accustomed to refer to the ‘Dog-and-Clambercrown’ as the ‘Cat and Custard-pot’.

It was not till many years afterwards that I discovered that the true name of the inn was, tout court, the Dog—the Dog at Clambercrown: thus designated, no doubt, to distinguish it from other Dog Inns, of which there were several in the neighbourhood. At this period, however, and for a long time to come, it remained for me the ‘Dog-and-Clambercrown’, and I am inclined to suspect that my family, as well as myself, accepted the misnomer as correct, probably owing to the M.F.H.’s joke (which, for my part, I didn’t think very funny). The Dog, so I gathered, being ‘miles from anywhere’, was apt to be rather unpopular with the local hunt, and it was for this reason, no doubt, that it had become for my family (though they didn’t hunt themselves) a by-word for inaccessibility.

The Dog-and-Clambercrown . . . The mysterious name continued to echo, with innumerable strange overtones, in my imagination. I was puzzled—but not unduly—by the word ‘Clambercrown’; in many respects a rather incurious child, I preferred, when faced by such riddles, to explain them to myself in my own terms rather than pester the grown-ups for a ‘true’ explanation which, in any case, would probably prove inadequate and disappointing. In the case of the ‘Clambercrown’ I was able to solve the mystery entirely to my own satisfaction—not, indeed, by any rational process but simply by allowing the sonorous and evocative syllables to work their will in my imagination. A ‘clambercrown’, then, I conceived to be a golden crown wreathed about with dark, clambering foliage, surmounting the head of a large black dog. But the word, though not as yet dissociated (and not to be for many years to come) from the name of the inn, none the less extended itself to the distant, unimaginable territory in which the inn was situated, tinging the hills and woodlands of that unknown countryside with its own mysterious and rather baleful colouring; so that when, much later in life, I came to realize that ‘Clambercrown’ referred, after all, not to an object but to the name of a place, the transposition seemed to me of little importance, for the place itself had by then become so heavily impregnated with the magic of the inn’s supposed name that the two had become, in my imagination, almost indistinguishable one from another.

It wasn’t, I suppose, till I was grown-up that I did at last learn the true name of the inn—I suspect, indeed, that it was no more than a decade or so ago that I was finally persuaded, in the teeth of my previous conviction, that the ‘Dog-and-Clambercrown’ of my childhood was none other than the Dog Inn, situated in an ill-defined tract of countryside commonly referred to as Clambercrown (or sometimes as the Clambercrown). Yet I remained, throughout my boyhood—and well into my adult life—oddly incurious about the mysterious ‘Clambercrown’ so inexplicably coupled (as I supposed) with the Dog in the inn’s title. I continued to accept it—as I had accepted it in the first instance—on trust; I didn’t know—and I don’t think I particularly wanted to know—what the word really signified; for me it remained a coronal of dark leaves—identified vaguely, perhaps, with the foliage of ivy and woody nightshade—encircling a dog’s head. Other pubs, after all, had names hardly less odd, and almost as inexplicable—the Goat and Compasses (‘God encompasseth us,’ said the pedants), the Mytton and Mermaid, the Beetle and Wedge . . . By comparison, the Dog and Clambercrown didn’t seem particularly outlandish; and when conversation turned upon the topic of unusual pub-names I would trot out the Dog and Clambercrown with considerable pride, feeling pretty sure that nobody (unless he happened to live in the district) would have heard of it; nor, indeed, should I have been much surprised if some learned etymologist had interpreted it as a corruption of (say) ‘God’s Hand and Crown’, or of some other—and equally far-fetched—Saxon or Old English original.

The Dog and Clambercrown was—so much I had gathered—a public-house; and public-houses, I had been led to suppose, were rather wicked places, which, like the Dover Hippodrome, my nurse was wont to hurry past with pursed lips and averted face. The Dog and Clambercrown therefore acquired for me, by association—like the aerodrome at Paddlesworth—a vague, rather frightening yet perversely seductive aura of evil.

The only public-house with which I was familiar (though I had never, of course, been inside it) was the one in the village where we spent the summer holidays—a small, Victorian building in dingy red brick, with a slate roof, frequented by a handful of local farm-labourers. Sometimes, passing its open door on summer evenings, I would catch a glimpse of red-faced, corduroyed men crowding round the bar, and would sniff, apprehensively, the rank, foxy reek of beer and sweat and shag tobacco which was wafted across the village street. Public-houses, I had learnt from hearsay—and the fact seemed obvious enough, if one was to judge by the only one with which I was familiar—were places to which ‘gentlemen’ didn’t go; they were, in fact, the preserve of that inferior tribe which included the servants, the gardener, the farm boys and the village blacksmith—people with whom one was never allowed to make friends, because one belonged, oneself, to a different and in some way superior race. On the whole, I accepted this rather ill-defined distinction without questioning its validity, for I seldom felt any active desire to penetrate the barrier which separated me from that alien breed. Sometimes, indeed, I would envy them—for I realized that their lives were incomparably freer and more adventurous than my own, yet my envy was tinged with fear and distrust: the cow-men, the errand-boys, the village sweep—such people were not exactly to be counted as enemies, they were friendly enough, or, at any rate, didn’t appear openly hostile; but one felt that their friendliness was somehow suspect, that they were looking at one with a secret contempt, and perhaps laughing at one behind one’s back. One could never, in any case, meet them on equal terms: they wore different clothes, ate different food, and even smelt different; they didn’t have baths every day, and they went—since they were not ‘gentlemen’—to public-houses: not only to the one in our village, but to the Black Robin at Kingston or the Red Lion at Bridge; and perhaps some of them (who knew?) had even penetrated to that ultramontane archetype of all public-houses—the Dog and Clambercrown.

I didn’t, as I have said, feel much resentment at the inhibitions imposed by my own gentility; yet there were occasions when my attitude towards that outcast and forbidden community (widely referred to, in those days, as ‘the poor’) would be complicated by an emotion of whose nature I was wholly ignorant, but of which, already, I had learned to feel obscurely ashamed. Certain ‘poor’ people—Mr Bilham the baker’s boy, for instance, or our own gardener—were able to evoke in me a curious feeling of excitement which, if it puzzled me at the time, I can recognize now as being precociously erotic. My ‘love’, on such occasions, was apt to take on a distinctly fetichistic tinge: in the case of Mr Bilham, it was centered chiefly upon his whip-cord breeches and gaiters; the gardener, on the other hand, appealed to me largely by reason of his corduroy trousers and his ragged workman’s shirt which, whatever the weather, he wore unbuttoned nearly to the waist. To wear such trousers and such a shirt myself became for me one of my most cherished (and most secret) ambitions; the possibility filled me with a shameful, inadmissible elation which I certainly couldn’t have explained, but which I associated, obscurely, with other and more easily explicable ambitions, such as my desire to go up in an aeroplane (from the Paddlesworth aerodrome) or, when I should be grown-up, to become a soldier and live in the high, bugle-haunted plains of Shorncliffe Camp.

The gardener, then, for a long time, headed that secret list of people whom, in a peculiar and specialized way, I loved. My elder brother, a lifeboat-man at Sandgate, Pimpo the clown—these, already, were included in that ill-assorted company of the elect: the ‘love’ which I felt for them, half-realized, and tinged with a sense of shame and disgust, was, I felt, something profoundly alien from myself, something which didn’t ‘fit in’ with the rest of my life, and which must at all costs be concealed from the grown-ups and even, so far as possible, from myself. These love-objects, though varying considerably from one to another (and by no means always drawn from the ranks of the ‘poor’), had at least this in common, that they represented for me the very antithesis of my own normal personality, being connected, obscurely though quite recognizably, with ideas of violence, hardship and danger. I loved them, yet I also, guiltily, hated them? I was suffering, I suppose, from the age-old conflict between sacred and profane love: the sacred element being embodied in the person of my nurse, to whom, I felt, the profane attraction which drew me towards Mr Bilham or the handsome young gardener would have seemed a gross and un-forgivable infidelity.

Jim, the gardener, was a man of about thirty, tall and very muscular, with a dark, ruddy face. On summer afternoons, when he was working, I would linger in the cottage garden, watching him as he steered the lawn-mower up and down the grass which, as the work proceeded, began to take on a fascinating pattern of parallel dark and light green stripes. Plainly Jim took his work seriously, and, though friendly enough, was inclined to be some what aloof and unapproachable. If the day was warm, he would take off his coat and work in his shirt, which, unbuttoned as usual, flapped open across his broad chest. His neck would be burnt to a dark reddish-brown by sun and wind, but the skin lower down was white and smooth as milk. He sweated as he worked, and the sweat showed in damp patches through his shirt, where it clung to his body. If I approached near enough, I could detect the smell which exhaled from him—an earthy, animal smell, like that which was wafted, in the evenings, from the door of the public-house. For the most part, however, I was content to watch him from a distance: gazing, with a kind of hypnotized intensity, at the lithe movements of his thighs and at the long V of white, naked flesh between the flaps of his open shirt. This shameless exhibition of his body, though I found it extremely embarrassing, seemed to me to imply a wild, adventurous, devil-may-care spirit on the gardener’s part which provoked and exacerbated the inadmissible passion which I already felt for him. I hated him for evoking such incongruous and disquieting emotions in my breast; yet I knew that, if he had suddenly turned to me and said: ‘The ship sails for Peru tomorrow morning: be ready to leave with me at midnight’, I should have obeyed him without an instant’s hesitation.

Content though I was, for the most part, to admire Jim from afar, my love-hate relationship was forced, one summer afternoon, to an unexpected and distressing climax. The gardener had been trimming the edge of a border with a spade; suddenly I saw him pause and stare down at something in the flower-bed. With a half-reluctant curiosity, I walked over to where he was standing, and, following his glance, saw a slow-worm wriggling along the edge of the border. Already Jim had raised his spade, and was about to bring it down savagely upon the slow-worm, when I darted forward and seized his wrist.

‘Don’t kill it,’ I exclaimed, in shrill, nervous tones.

‘What, not kill a snake? Them’s poisonous,’ Jim retorted, attempting to thrust me aside.

‘It’s not a snake, it’s a slow-worm,’ I protested, in an agonized attempt to restrain him. The slow-worm still wriggled, innocently and rather unenterprisingly, along the rut at the lawn’s edge.

‘Pesky little b——s,’ the gardener remarked, contemptuously.

‘They’ll sting you if you touch ’em.’

‘But they don’t sting,’ I insisted, desperately, knowing that I was in the right, since I had read all about snakes and slow-worms in one of my natural history books. ‘And they’re not snakes, either,’ I repeated. ‘They’re a kind of lizard, only they haven’t got legs.’

‘What, them things lizards? That’s a snake, that is—anyone can see that.’

Holding me off firmly with one hand, he lifted the spade with the other, and with two neat blows cut the reptile into three pieces. Immediately I was overtaken by a passion of uncontrollable anger such as I had never experienced before: anger at the man’s stupidity, his ignorance, his gross assumption of grown-up superiority.

‘It’s not a snake, it’s not a snake,’ I screamed: but Jim’s big hand still held me firmly while, with the other, he renewed his attack, jabbing viciously at what remained of the slow-worm, till it was reduced to a mess of bloody fragments. Only when he was quite sure that the job was completed did he release his grasp. Breaking free at last, I ran into the cottage and up the stairs to my bedroom, where, throwing myself upon the bed, I burst into a passionate fit of weeping. Wave after wave of unhappiness flooded through my mind: the death of the slow-worm was bad enough—I had been wanting, for some time, to catch one to keep as a pet—but the basic causes of my misery were beyond my powers of analysis: a feeling of my own utter defencelessness against grown-up ignorance, of hatred for the gardener and all that he stood for, and, at the same time, a sense of the wild, unattainable beauty of the people whom I secretly ‘loved’, and who seemed for ever fated to become my worst enemies.

I think that, after this painful episode, I did my best to keep out of the gardener’s way; I don’t, at any rate, remember encountering him again at close quarters. Occasionally, however, I would see him in the village street, and once, returning later than usual from some outing, I caught a glimpse of him through the door of the public-house: his stalwart figure silhouetted romantically against the soft, diffused glow of the oil-lamp behind the bar, still dressed in those exciting corduroys, his shirt still gaping open to his waist. I had ceased, by then, to love him; yet he remained for me—and still remains in memory—the very archetype of that mysterious community to which he belonged: the outcast fraternity of people who were ‘poor’, who went to public-houses, and who therefore might be assumed, by association and (in this case) by the laws of probability, to have visited, at one time or another, the Dog and Clambercrown.

I suppose that, in the social hierarchy as it existed at that time, my family might have been described as middle-middle class. We were descended, for the most part, from clergymen, minor professional men, yeoman farmers and wine-merchants (both my grandfathers were in the wine trade). My father, beginning life as a solicitor, had abandoned the law for his father’s wine business at Folkestone: though no snob, he took a firm and on the whole realistic view of social distinctions: you were either a gentleman or you were not—the point was an important one, but not all-important, and (like sex) was never discussed in public; but the fact (like certain other unmentionable facts) was inescapable.

Gentlemen, it appeared, were—among other social disadvantages—debarred from going to public-houses (many years after the period of which I am writing, I remember my father remarking that people—by which I suppose he meant ‘gentlemen’—who went to pubs did so because they preferred the company of their social inferiors, myself a predestined déclassé, a gentleman manqué, I am afraid that I often incurred his displeasure). I certainly cannot imagine my father having a drink in a public-house, and I should guess that he was never inveigled into doing so; yet his prejudice against pubs didn’t preclude him from having a fine taste in wine—a fact which his friend Maurice Healy has pleasantly recorded in his book, Stay Me with Flagons. ‘One of the most charming men I ever met, even in the wine-trade,’ he says. ‘He had all the outfit of a wine-merchant; in the first place, you could discern the gentleman at a mile. He had a delicate sense of sauntering, a most engaging quality in itself, and almost an essential part of the makeup of a wine-merchant. To him, wine was the subject of one of the Arts; what his commercial assessment was, I cannot tell, but “His soul was of the Saints, And Wine to him a joy”, if I may so transpose my Lionel Johnson, whom he so much resembled. To see his nose delicately twitching over a glass that was the subject of a test was an education in itself. I was not surprised to learn that he and Frank MacKinnon used to spend their holidays together, walking and talking; for both had the love and reverence for beauty and tradition, although I am afraid the wine-merchant never persuaded the Lord Justice beyond Brown Sherry. He died unexpectedly a few years ago, and Paradise was enriched.

To which Ian Campbell adds the gloss: ‘I re-echo Maurice’s eulogy of Henry Brooke, the saunterer, who was at Dulwich with me and was popular with masters and fellow-students, a saunterer but a good footballer.’

I must confess that, until I read Maurice Healy’s book, I was unaware that my father had ever distinguished himself at football; nor had I ever discerned his affinity with Lionel Johnson. Though a wine-merchant (or perhaps because of it) he was excessively temperate—almost, indeed, a teetotaler; I never saw him drink more than a glass of claret and perhaps—but only on uncommonly convivial occasions—a glass of port, at a sitting.

Clambercrown—the word had by now acquired a whole complex of far-reaching, ill-defined but, to me, perfectly logical and coherent associations. The word itself—the muted, closed dissyllable of ‘clamber’ opening into the sonorous diapason of ‘crown’—possessed a verbal magic which for me had the potent quality of an incantation. Many years later I was to recognize this same magic of place-names in such lines as:

Today the Roman and his trouble

Are ashes under Uricon.

in which (for my judgment of poetry remains, alas, incorrigibly subjective) the final cadence would be vastly improved, to my mind, by the substitution of ‘Clambercrown’ for ‘Uricon’. And in other poems, too, the mere evocation of distance and inaccessibility would send me back to that ancient symbol of remote forest-bound isolation—for instance, George Darley’s lines (quoted by Aldous Huxley, incidentally, as an example of purely ‘magical’ poetry):

The mountainous green wilds among,

Here ends she her unechoing song:

With amber tears and odorous sighs

Mourned by the desert when she dies.

‘Mountainous green wilds among’—it was thus, precisely (though I hadn’t, of course, in those days, read Darley’s poem), that I imagined the situation of the Dog and Clambercrown. Yet the ‘song’ of Clambercrown—the potent, incantatory music of the name itself—was far from being ‘unechoing’; on the contrary, its echoes were manifold and complicated: the syllable ‘clam’, for instance, suggested in itself something restrained and secret—‘clamped down’, ‘tight as a clam’—and at the same time ‘clammy’, a quality which recalled for me the viscid, fœtid leaves of the henbane, that sinister plant which, I conceived, might well be expected to grow in the neighbourhood of the Dog. The ‘crown’, on the other hand, broadening out from that pursed, poisonous monosyllable, evoked an open space among dense, impenetrable woods, haunted by the mutter of thunder and (since hounds met there) by the faint, dying note of a hunter’s horn, a cor au fond du bois. Onomatopoeia quite apart, the thunder suggested itself, probably, by reason of the fact that, when we were staying at our summer cottage, the violent, terrifying storms to which, in that river valley, we seemed particularly subject were wont to blow up, sudden and unheralded, from the south-west—in which direction, so I had been told (but far away, beyond the farthest woods, and well outside the orbit of our most ambitious excursions), lay the Dog and Clambercrown itself.

Inaccessible from Sandgate, where we spent most of the year, the Dog seemed no less remote from that distant yet familiar outpost in the Elham Valley. It would remain, I supposed, for ever unvisited: a country of the mind existing, perhaps, only in my imagination; a myth which, for all I knew to the contrary, had like other myths (Mother Ceres and Proserpina, for instance, about whom I had read in Tanglewood Tales) long ceased to have any objective validity, and which survived only in the debased oral tradition (the ‘Cat and Custardpot’) preserved by my family. Yet for myself, at any rate, the myth remained valid: the vague, inchoate conception of a remote countryside, cut off by impenetrable woodlands; the site of a public-house frequented by such heroic figures as Jim the gardener, with his corduroy trousers and brawny, naked chest; a country shaded and echoing, haunted perpetually by thunder and the crying of horns.

From such imaginary excursions into those far-off countries of the mind I would return, willingly enough, to the cosy quotidian world of our home at Sandgate where, in the draughty hall, Aunt Cock tranquilly strolled, as ever, through the familiar landscape of the Little Paths. The picture, owing to the particular position in which it was hung, seemed to suggest that Aunt Cock, in her sedate, leisurely sauntering, was perpetually in transit between two totally disparate and mutually exclusive worlds: the world of the Little Paths, the cliffs and the town on their summit, and that other, wholly distinct universe of the garden, the beach and the frightening, illimitable sea. If the diningroom door were open, my passage through the hall would, as it were, add a new dimension to the canvas, for it would seem to me that I myself was moving, in the same direction as Aunt Cock—though at a considerably more rapid pace—towards some objective which (so far as the picture was concerned) remained for ever out of sight, on the right-hand side of the frame.

Once arrived in the dining-room—having left Aunt Cock to linger, as was her wont, in the Little Paths—I would be dazzled by the flood of sunlight which fell opulently upon the big dining-table (covered, in the day-time, by a pale-orange Liberty cloth) and upon the fire-place, with its beaten-copper fender and green tiles, over which hung two Bartolozzi engravings of pictures by Angelica Kaufmann: one depicting Cordelia, all naïveté and girlish innocence, the other Eurydice, looking considerably less girlish and, apparently, liable to be bitten at any moment, if she wasn’t careful, by a small snake (not unlike the slow-worm so incontinently slaughtered by Jim the Gardener) which reared itself, menacingly, in the opposite corner of the picture.

These prints had impinged upon my imagination with hardly less vividness than the portrait of Aunt Cock; I had, indeed, conceived the notion that Cordelia and Eurydice were, like Aunt Cock herself, some sort of relation, possibly aunts (though they seemed younger than most aunts) or, more probably, cousins, like Gertrude and Nancy Pullen who, on infrequent occasions, came to stay. When, however, I asked my mother about them, I was told that they were ‘myths’—an unsatisfactory word, vague, cobwebby and unseizable, suggesting (insofar as it suggested anything at all) the destructive though usually invisible ‘moth’ against which my mother waged perpetual war in the clothes cupboards, and the methylated spirit whose pungent smell haunted the pantry in the basement, where it was used—together with a pale pink, rather messy substance called Goddard’s Plate Powder—for cleaning the silver.

I had gathered, none the less, that a ‘myth’ was a kind of story, not quite a fairy-tale but, on the other hand, not really ‘true’. This rather nebulous distinction between myths and fairy-stories was based, it seemed, on the fact that myths were chiefly Greek or Roman, and therefore, in some unexplained way, at once more serious and more respectable than Cinderella or Jack the Giant-killer, which were intended only for children. A myth, in fact, appeared to be a kind of grown-up fairy-tale, rather like Bible stories, but with the advantage of not being holy nor of inculcating any particular ‘moral’.

Cordelia and Eurydice, then, were to be placed—despite their deceptive air of being ‘relations’—in the same category as Philemon and Baucis, or Ceres and Proserpina, about whom I had read in Tanglewood Tales. (The inclusion of Cordelia, by a slip on my mother’s part, in ‘Ancient Mythology’ was an anachronism which I didn’t detect till some years later, when I had begun to read Shakespeare.) Tanglewood Tales had already, in fact, become a part of my own private—as opposed to Ancient Greek—mythology: more especially the story of Proserpina, which, when it was first read to me, made a profound and indelible impression upon my mind.

The volume was one of a series—‘Told to the Children’—published in the early nineteen-hundreds by T. C. & E. C. Black. The little books used to be kept in a bookshelf in the dining-room, near the window (which was hung with Liberty curtains of the same colour and texture as the table-cloth), and I associate Tanglewood Tales and the other volumes in the series inseparably with the special atmosphere of the dining-room itself: the indeterminate, dusty, slightly ‘moth-eaten’ smell of the curtains, and the faint odours of seaweed and wallflowers drifting up, through the open french windows, from the garden and the beach below. The ‘Told to the Children’ series included a wide and somewhat incongruous assortment of abridged and expurgated classics and lives of the great: there were ‘Stories from Wagner’, for instance, and lives of Christ and Napoleon, besides tales from Shakespeare, Chaucer, etc., etc. Apart from Tanglewood Tales, the only one which greatly impressed me was, I think, the Life of Napoleon, and that chiefly on account of the pictures, one of which, I remember, depicted a particularly ferocious battle-scene, which became associated for me with that alarming yet fascinating world of violence and danger in which, as I liked to suppose, such romantic figures as Jim the Gardener passed their adventurous and somewhat disreputable lives. But more than all the rest, it was Tanglewood Tales which engaged my imagination. The title itself was evocative, suggesting the dense thickets of briar and thorn which surrounded the palace of the Sleeping Beauty (and which, perhaps, I associated also with those ‘mountainous green wilds’ about Clambercrown); and the ‘tales’, when they were read to me, seemed wholly different from (and superior to) any of the children’s stories which had so far come my way.

The story of Proserpina was told, I remember, in a very much bowdlerized, milk-and-watery style—necessarily, I suppose, for in a version intended for middle-class Edwardian children, Proserpina could hardly, after all, be raped, or even (unless their union were blessed by the rites of the Anglican Church) subsequently became Pluto’s queen. No: in my version of the story Proserpina was just a little girl who was stolen away from her mother by a selfish, inconsiderate, but on the whole kind-hearted old gentleman who lived in a gloomy underground cavern, not unlike that mysterious subterranean region, known as ‘The Tube’, which I looked forward to visiting on that distant, unimaginable day when I should be taken to London.

Despite the debased and travestied version through which I first became familiar with it, the story of Demeter and Persephone has remained my favourite myth. From that first reading I derived an impression of vague, illimitable tragedy—a sense of the ruined spring, the long winter quest for the lost child, an awareness of a terrible underworld (somewhat resembling the Tube, perhaps, or even more alarmingly, the new coal-mines which had recently been sunk not far from our country cottage), into which, with an appalling suddenness, one might be spirited away. The story of Proserpina was, moreover (since I had not yet begun to go to school), my first introduction to the agonies of homesickness; I identified myself, naturally enough, with Proserpina, and could imagine only too well the misery of being imprisoned in that dark, sunless cavern, by a boring and pernickety old man (rather like Sir Squire Bancroft, along the cliff, or old Mr Anderson, who had told me about the butterbur at Postling), while Mother Ceres—in the outward semblance of ‘Ninnie’ (my nurse), weeping and wringing her hands, and liable at any moment to be attacked by ‘nervous prostration’, from which she (Ninnie, not Demeter) had suffered in her youth—ranged despairingly the familiar landscape of the undercliff and the Little Paths, barren and flowerless now, and doomed to remain so until Proserpina should be finally released by her captor, and emerge again, with the first wallflowers and the lords-and-ladies, from her dismal sojourn in the depths of Snowdown colliery.

It is, after all, one of the most potent and enduring of myths, and it is hardly surprising that it should seize upon a child’s imagination (even in the mimsy, falsified version of ‘Told to the Children’) as it did upon mine. I was told that the story was supposed to have ‘happened’ (in so far as myths could be said to happen at all) in a place called Sicily, but I was not really much impressed by this piece of information. I was not old enough to have started geography, and I hadn’t the faintest idea where Sicily was; true, I imagined it to be a long way away—perhaps even farther than Wheelbarrow Town or Stelling Minnis. Yet the name itself, incongruously enough, had for me a rather cosy, homely sound, since I associated it with Cicely, the name of the little girl in Stumps—a book which, though Ninnie objected to it on the score of its ‘silliness’, I found perennially fascinating. Who now remembers Stumps? Nobody, I suppose, under forty-five; yet it remains—or ought to remain—a children’s classic, quite apart from being an enchanting period piece. Its morality is still uncompromisingly Victorian (it was first published, I think, in the eighties), yet the heroine, Cicely, otherwise known as ‘Stumps’, is at any rate a thoroughly naughty, indeed a perfectly exasperating little girl, and the pious passages, though they do of course occur, are not too mawkish or obtrusive. Stumps’s family seemed to me the type and epitome of what a family should be: very like my own, in fact, but (so to speak) a good deal more so. For one thing, they were obviously richer—they kept a carriage, with a coachman and grooms—but what really made me envy them was the fact that they lived permanently in the country, near a place called Coppleston, whereas I, for the greater part of the year, was condemned to live at the seaside which, since it was my home, I considered (unlike most children) to be very dull and unromantic. Coppleston I imagined to be somewhere near—and perhaps even identical with—our own village in the Elham Valley; though the Stumps family didn’t, it seemed, live in the village itself; perhaps, I thought, they inhabited one of the smaller country houses nearby—Ileden, or Barham Court, or Bursted Manor. The family name was Grant; and such was the impression made on me by the book that, many years later, when I had begun—at the age of fifteen or so—to write a novel myself, it seemed natural and indeed almost inevitable that I should use the name Grant for my chief character.

But if the world of Stumps seemed a kind of improved and extended version of my own home, I was forced to admit that the incident upon which the book hinged could never, by any possible stretch of imagination, have occurred in our family circle. This was the sudden adoption, by Mr Grant (at the instigation of Bertie, aged eight, who had found him abandoned and starving in the neighbouring countryside), of a circus-boy called Peter. The irruption of Peter—ragged, dirty and still dressed in his circus sequins—into the closed, conventional world of the Grant family struck me in those days (and strikes me even more forcibly today) as being wildly improbable. True, Peter was nominally employed as a house-boy, but he appears to have lived on terms of near-equality with the children—a circumstance which seems to argue that Mr Grant was a great deal more democratic than the rest of the story would lead one to suppose (perhaps he was a Christian Socialist, or even—appalling thought!—a crypto-Fabian). Peter (whom Stumps cannot bear, because her brother Bertie ‘lubs dat nasty dirty circus-boy better dan he lubs ‘Tumps’) comes, alas, to a sticky (and quite undeserved) end: he is all but fatally injured in saving the ungrateful Stumps from death in a landslide; and the book ends with Stumps’s belated reconciliation with her saviour, now an incurable invalid. (The author’s attitude here seems oddly to imply that Peter, being ‘common’, had to be punished; or perhaps his disastrous accident is intended as a judgment upon poor Mr Grant for his injudicious leanings towards Socialism.)

Peter himself fascinated me, largely because he was rough and dirty and associated, therefore, with the forbidden, exciting community of ‘the poor’. My parents, like Stephen Spender’s, ‘kept me from children who were rough’, and generally speaking I was thankful enough that they did so, for I feared, like Spender, ‘the salt coarse pointing of those boys’, who ‘climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams’, and whose ‘thighs showed through rags’ (as indeed did those of Peter, in the picture of him in Stumps). Yet I longed to be friends with one of that forbidden tribe, and I would imagine a boy, something like Peter, whom I could keep as a kind of pet—a tame, house-trained Peter, who would do as I told him, and wouldn’t ‘copy my lisp behind me on the road’. Yet I knew that my family, unlike the Grants (and despite my father’s openly expressed Fabian sympathies), were not in the least likely to adopt a circus-boy, even if I, like Bertie, were to find one wandering, deserted and hungry, along the Lower Road. I had once, as it happened, been taken to a circus at Canterbury; but circuses seemed to be of infrequent occurrence, and their proprietors probably took good care that their boys didn’t get picked up by decadent members of the bourgeoisie such as myself. There seemed, at any rate, not the slightest chance of my acquiring a ‘pet’ circus-boy, and my yearning for Peter soon became relegated to that limbo of romantic desires which I knew that I should never be able to satisfy.

But if Sicily, the home of Proserpina, was thus cosily and incongruously associated with Stumps (‘Get back. Miss Cicely, get back!’), it remained, none the less, one of those places which lay, remote and unapproachable, somewhere ‘beyond the hills’—or, remoter still perhaps (for I had vaguely heard that Sicily was an island), beyond the sea itself, like the South of France, where my wicked Uncle Hewlett (he had been divorced) lived in wealthy and iniquitous exile. But such enormous, legendary distances meant no more to me than the distance between the Earth and Sirius, measured in light-years, means to an unmathematically-minded adult. Anywhere far enough away to remain, by me, unvisited could be presumed for the sake of argument to form part of that ill-defined, uncharted kingdom behind Caesar’s Camp, of which the Dog and Clambercrown, like some inaccessible or forbidden city—Lhasa or Eldorado, or the terrible mountain dwelling of Ayesha in Rider Haggard’s She—represented the metropolis: the centre of a vast and boundless Empire which included, by association, among its outlying provinces, such improbable and outlandish places as the Fiji Islands, Bengal (where Frank Borret had shot the tiger), the South of France and Sicily itself.

Lacking, as I do, the benefits of a classical education, my later ideas about the Demeter-Persephone myth have owed little to the primary and accredited sources; originating with ‘Told to the Children’, they have filtered down, through a succession of literary references—Milton and Matthew Arnold, D. H. Lawrence and The Golden Bough—and my conception of the myth remains, to this day, largely a childish one. At school, reading in Paradise Lost of that
fair field

Of Enna, where Proserpina gathering flowers,

Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis

Was gathered, which, cost Ceres all that pain

To seek her through the world,

I would experience a sudden, Proustian flash-back to the dining-room at Sandgate—the spring sunlight falling across the Liberty table-cloth and the copper fender, the scent of wallflowers borne on the sea breeze through the open windows, and I would remember the little book, with its glossy, faintly art nouveau pictures of ‘Proserpina gathering flowers’ in a landscape which, in childhood, had seemed to me to resemble, more than anything else, the high countryside beyond Barham Downs, above the Elham Valley. Or there was Matthew Arnold:

She knew the Dorian water’s gush divine,

She knew each lily white which Enna yields,

Each rose with blushing face . . .

A very different Proserpina this—having little in common either with Milton or with Tanglewood Tales: a Proserpina who, despite the fact that ‘her foot the Cumner cowslips never stirred’, remains un-mistakably Pre-Raphaelite, and Oxonian.

Proserpina, incidentally, would seem to have been something of a botanist, and being (even at the ‘Told to the Children’ stage) a fanatical botanist myself, I was bound to be prejudiced in her favour. I was distressed, however, by the picture in Tanglewood Tales, which showed her gathering an exceedingly improbable bunch of flowers, none of which, I was convinced, really existed, even in Sicily. In later years, too, I was inclined to suspect Matthew Arnold (usually pretty accurate in his references to flowers) of lapsing into mere ‘poet’s botany’; from what little I knew of the Mediterranean flora, I could guess that those lilies and roses of his were the most conventional of images, comparable with Tennyson’s amaranth and moly, and probably not indigenous in Sicily at all. (Nor, for that matter, did it seem very likely that Matthew Arnold, a busy man from all accounts, with a tendency to spend his holidays in Switzerland, had ever been to Enna himself.)

the war was to take me, at long last, to Sicily—but not, alas, to Enna. From Syracuse, where I was stationed, the ‘home’ of Proserpina remained—like Postling and Bladbean in my childhood—a far-off cloud-cuckoo-land ‘beyond the hills’; leave was unobtainable (it was just after the Sicily landings), and even if I had been able to get a pass, the chances of reaching Enna would have been exceedingly remote. One day, I promised myself, I would return to Sicily and make the journey into that wild mountainous hinterland . . . But I hardly believed in my own promises; moreover, I had learnt by experience that such sentimental journeys are apt to end, almost invariably, in disillusion. I was content, on the whole, that Enna should remain romantically remote and unexplored, somewhere beyond the august, snow-clad heights of Mount Etna; just as in childhood I had resigned myself to the thought that I should never visit the mysterious, tree-muffled kingdom of Clambercrown, that breeding-ground of other and more personal myths—for ever cut off from me by the high bulwark of Caesar’s Camp, before which, in her portrait, Aunt Cock serenely promenaded amid the safe, familiar landscape of the Little Paths.

PART III

The Road to Enna (2)

Tea with the Mafia

Chapter opening

Friends who had been there (I had missed it, myself, during my war-time sojourn in Sicily) were inclined to be rather snooty about Taormina. ‘Quite amusing, but so touristy,’ they said; and of course it’s perfectly true—Taormina, hardly less than Capri, is a millionaire’s playground; it is fantastically expensive; a beauty-spot of the most obvious kind, full of rich Americans and of Germans (inexplicably) hardly less rich. Il turismo is its only industry, and i turisti are catered for with a wholeheartedness which only the Italians and the Swiss, perhaps, can achieve.

Yet the fact remains that Taormina is one of the most beautiful places in the world. I incline, myself, to be of a splenetic humour, and as a traveller I am anything but starry-eyed; I expect, as a matter of habit, to be disillusioned, and I have seldom visited an accredited beauty-spot which didn’t prove a disappointment. But Taormina is all—or very nearly all—that one expects it to be: its climate is as near perfect as any in Europe, outside a travel-agent’s brochure; the view over the bay towards Etna has a classic majesty unrivalled anywhere except (perhaps) in Greece; and the town itself, a fantastic mélange of squalor and magnificence, has a dotty Firbankian charm which is irresistible.

Yet my own arrival, after the journey from Rome, could hardly have been less auspicious, and was, indeed, calculated to prejudice me for a life-time against ‘this magnificent site, resplendent and universally admired gem of the Ionic coast’, as a local guide-book somewhat hysterically describes it. When the rapido at last drew in at the station I was in no mood to appreciate any site, however magnificent or resplendent. It was dark in any case, I had been travelling for twelve hours, and I was extremely hungry; nor, indeed, despite all the assurances of ticket-inspectors, does the train from Rome—or indeed any train—take one to Taormina, which is on a hill, but to Giardini, on the coast, from which one takes a station bus or an expensive carrozza up to the town. Feckless as usual, I had planned my arrival badly: I had arranged to stay, as a p.g., with a friend-of-a-friend in her villa, but I had been vague about dates, and wasn’t sure whether she could have me. I was forced, therefore, to spend the night in the only hotel in the place with a vacant room; it proved to be uncomfortable, inhospitable and extremely expensive. The dinner was nearly uneatable—an escalope of some nameless and unidentifiable meat, red wine which tasted like Coca-Cola laced with methylated spirit. After dinner I sat in the bar and drank coffee and cognac; a party of Americans, boringly drunk on rye whisky, were discussing the shortcomings of Sicilian sanitation in a corner . . . I finished another chapter of Portrait-Souvenirs and went to bed.

Next morning I set out early to look for Ariadne’s villa; I was determined that, whatever happened, I wouldn’t spend another night at the hotel. (My room, a bad dinner and an exiguous breakfast had cost me the equivalent of five pounds.)

The morning was dazzlingly brilliant—the sun as warm as an English May; only a slight, not unpleasant nip in the air reminded one that it was, after all, early March. Sicily, I thought, was at least living up to its reputation; but I was still travel-weary, I had a slight hangover, and Taormina, at first sight, didn’t impress me very favourably. As I strolled across the little square at the back of the hotel, details imposed themselves, one by one: a street of squalid, rather forbidding houses; a café, its doors closed as firmly as those of an English pub out of hours; a woman staring suspiciously from a window . . . In the bright windless light the town exhaled a curious air of deadness: it was as though the inhabitants had fled to the hills before some threat of invasion or pestilence.

I noticed a fifteen-year-old boy sitting on a broken-down wall and asked him the way to the Villa Aurora. He pointed up the hill: ‘E sopra—sulla collina,’ he remarked, without much interest, and turned to stare at a large American car which, emerging from a narrow street into the square, was nosing its way, with a restrained impatience, through a straying herd of goats. A carabiniere also surveyed the scene, dispassionately, from a doorway. Two ragged children, appearing from nowhere, shouted disobliging remarks at the goatherd; the goats bleated; the car hooted; the situation had a timeless, eternal quality—there seemed no particular reason why it should ever be resolved. At last, after much shouting and gesticulation, the goats were dispersed and the car drove on; the children vanished; the carabiniere marched away, with an air of imperturbable gravity, down a side-street. The incident was, in its way, an epitome of the Sicilian way of life—and of life in Taormina in particular.

I walked on up the hill, and at last reached Ariadne’s villa. Taormina may or may not be the most beautiful place in the world: what is certain is that the Villa Aurora is the most delightful house in Taormina. Set on the hillside, high above the town, it was built in the early nineteen-hundreds by Ariadne’s uncle, a painter: a plain, unpretentious but roomy house with a broad verandah and a garden ascending in terracies, at the back, nearly as far as the Madonna della Rocca—a chapel on a crag, surmounted by a statue of the Virgin which is flood-lit in the season and on feast-days. The view from the terrace is stupendous: the town, with its jumble of red roofs, lies beneath, and below the town the sea and the narrow peninsula of Naxos; beyond stretches the plain of Catania, and beyond that again, towering above the vast wide-flung landscape, rises the enormous mass of Mount Etna.

Ariadne welcomed me with enthusiasm and relief, fearing that I had met with some accident: she had expected me, after all, on the previous night, and had even—being herself unable to meet my train—left a message for me with the station-master at Giardini. This, like most messages in Sicily, had miscarried: it was only, said Ariadne—with the fatalism of those who have lived for many years in the island—to be expected.

Before lunch we made a tour of the garden: the elderly peasant, Ciccio, who tended it had been employed by Ariadne’s uncle, and was devoted not only to the garden but to Ariadne herself. The terraces, cut out of the craggy hillside, were planted with roses, stocks and petunias: once again I had the sense of a psychic time-lag—thinking of the snow-drifts beneath the Swiss hedgerows, the bleak March wind sweeping the kiosks and the shuttered boarding-houses on the sea-front at Eastbourne . . . The winter had been wonderful, said Ariadne: they had breakfasted on the terrace on New Year’s Day, and had continued to do so, almost daily, ever since.

‘But, oh, I do wish it would rain,’ she exclaimed, with what seemed to me, in the circumstances, a misguided enthusiasm. ‘Ciccio’s nearly in despair—the tank up at the top of the garden’s nearly empty, and unless it rains soon there won’t be a flower left in the garden in a month’s time.’

After a delicious luncheon I dozed, comfortably, in a corner of the terrace; in such an ambience there seemed little reason why one should ever bother to do anything else. With some satisfaction I reflected that there seemed small hope of Ariadne’s prayers for rain being answered: the sky remained immaculately blue, Etna revealed herself—rather unusually for this time of year—with a shameless candour: a vast, naked cone of whiteness against the cloudless sky. From her peak rose a tiny puff of smoke no larger than a man’s hand. Below the terrace, shaded by orange-trees, the garden beds were ablaze with cinerarias: starry tufts of blue and crimson which elsewhere would have suggested suburban drawing-rooms or the lounges of grand hotels, but which here, in this brilliant Sicilian afternoon, had the naive, formal beauty of illuminations in a mediaeval missal. Between the flagstones of the terrace freesias thrust their fragile spikes with a determination which in England one is apt to associate chiefly with plantains and dandelions; and over the walls hung tangled tresses and festoons of roses—the roses of an English June, precocious jeunes filles en fleur who, it was evident, had never read their Matthew Arnold. Here, the ‘high midsummer pomps’ were already well under way, with their ‘open, jasmine-muffled lattices’, with snapdragons and ‘Sweet William with his homely cottage smell’.

Again I had the sense of having skipped three months, of having been jolted, disquietingly, into some fourth dimension, where not only were the seasons interchangeable but in which, also, the gulf between past and present was miraculously bridged, and the scenes of childhood became fused, as in a dream, with my actual surroundings. Thus the terraced garden of Ariadne’s villa seemed, as it were, a fantasticated, dream-like version of our garden at Sandgate, the calm expanse of sea took on a colder, more northern gleam, and the far-seen strip of land projecting beyond Catania became the distant prospect of Dungeness and the country beyond Hythe and Dymchurch. As for the cinerarias, surely they were those which had been ‘laid out’, so incongruously, in the Little Paths, for the reception of Aunt Cock. And there, too, as one would expect—remote and impassable upon the sky-line—was the barrier of the hills, dominated by that greater hill which, though the painter had exaggerated its contours (giving it a ‘foreign’, Mediterranean air, in order to flatter his client), could none the less be identified as the steep, barrow-topped bulwark of Caesar’s Camp, beyond which lay those vast, uncharted territories which included not only the badlands of Stelling Minnis and the Clambercrown but those other more distant, more mysterious regions: the Great Karoo, the cowboy-haunted prairies and those barren fields of Enna where Mother Ceres wandered in perpetual search of the lost child, imprisoned within the gloomy and sulphurous depths of the ‘Underground’.

The landscapes of our childhood tend often enough to become ‘type-forms’ which, consciously or otherwise, we superimpose upon the scenes of later life. Thus, a town by the sea, a terraced garden ‘in a coign of the cliff’ and a range of hills behind it form a topographical association which I identify invariably and almost automatically with my childhood home. In the present instance, my equation of the clear-cut, classic landscape of Taormina with the grey hills and fog-bound distances of Sandgate was not only wildly incongruous but also (as indeed it probably deserved to be) extremely ill-omened.

On the morning after my arrival I woke to the sound of rain—a heavy, relentless downpour which, as I guessed from my previous experience of Mediterranean springs, would probably continue all day. I went to the window; and the scene which confronted me seemed the outward and visible realization of my nostalgic vision of the previous afternoon. The distance was blotted out by a veil of mist and rain, save for the black, rocky promontory of Naxos—hardly to be distinguished from those treacherous, slippery areas of rock which, at low-tide, project from a Kentish beach. Taormina itself, drenched to a uniform greyness, might have been an English seaside town; even Ariadne’s garden—ablaze yesterday with roses and cinerarias—had the pathetic air of some carefully laid-out municipal pleasure-garden, wrecked beyond hope of repair by the gales and cloudbursts of an English June.

Clearly Ariadne’s prayers had been answered—and with a prodigality which, one would suppose, might seem a little excessive even to Ciccio the gardener. The rain, as I had guessed it would, continued without a break throughout the day; I resigned myself with a fairly good grace, knowing myself to be one of Nature’s rain-bringers, capable of blighting the crops or, as the case might be, of ensuring a bumper harvest whereever I happen to be (in a more primitive society, I should doubtless be assured of a tidy little income as a witch-doctor). I consoled myself by Ariadne’s assurances that ‘it couldn’t last’—or not, at any rate, for more than a day or two—and, more materially, by Ariadne’s library, which included nearly everything of importance published in England between (roughly) 1905 and 1925, besides a varied and fascinating assortment of guide-books. Within a few minutes I had spotted half a dozen works which one ‘ought to have read’ but which, for one reason or another, I had missed: early novels by Wyndham Lewis, Lawrence, Norman Douglas, as well as some limited editions and such oddities as Irene Iddesleigh, The Green Hat and Odette d’Antrevernes. I decided that, in the circumstances, I didn’t mind if it rained for a week.

Alas for Ariadne’s optimism: the rain went on and on—for two days, three, four—and still no sign of a break. Clearly, I thought, my presence was to blame; but, since I had unwittingly attracted the climate of East Kent to this north-eastern corner of Sicily, I should have to grin and bear it. It rained and it rained; and I read and I read—varying my somewhat desultory researches into early twentieth-century fiction by brief and drenching sorties into the town: to the Caffè Nuovo, reputed (and probably justly) to make the best dry Martinis in the world; or to a wine-shop off the Corso where, more economically, I would drink the potent wine of Castelmola in the company of a handsome young brigand called Salvatore. Once, when the downpour was slightly less heavy than usual, I walked up the rocky goat-path to Castelmola itself: a dull village, enlivened only by a very tatty tourists’ café, furnished with those curious chairs made of the dried, pithy stems of fennel. The café-proprietor said the weather was most unusual—unheard-of, indeed, for the middle of March; a remark to which (since my presence is guaranteed to break meteorological records wherever I go) there seemed no adequate reply. I drank a glass of rather nasty wine, and made my way back, down the hill, to Taormina; back to the confort anglais of the Villa Aurora—delicious meals, roaring fires and the works (nearly complete) of Aldous Huxley and Norman Douglas.

I have an insatiable passion for guide-books: I love them inclusively and uncritically—Baedeker or Betjeman, Murray or Michelin, they are all grist to my mill. Most addicts, however, have their favourites, and my own speciality is the kind of local guide which one comes across in foreign beauty-spots—the kind, I mean, which is written in English (or something not unlike it) for the benefit of the Anglo-Saxon tourist.

The little guide to Taormina, by Francesco Bucalo, from which I have already quoted on an earlier page, is a good example of the genre, and I warmly recommend it to fellow-addicts. It is, I may say, a good guide, very informative and generally accurate; but it is in his more lyrical flights that Signor Bucalo shows his true mettle. Thus, after an erudite sketch of the town’s history, he pauses to contemplate the spectacle of modern Taormina:

‘Countless splendid hotels,’ he writes, ‘providing every modern comfort, deck the delicious Parnassus of Tauro. On the faces of those who have the good fortune to alight here breaks forth the joy accompanying the realization of a long-nurtured desire’—a statement which, as I read it (crouching over a blazing fire and listening to the rain beating against the windows), seemed to me distinctly questionable, if admirably expressed. Having ‘alighted’ in this delicious Parnassus, the tourist is not likely to find time hanging heavy on his hands—there is something in Taormina for everybody: for the student who ‘scrutinizes the vestiges’ of the past, seeking to recapture the hibden (sic) vitality of antiquity’, or for the mere ‘plump idler’ who, as Signor Bucalo sympathetically records, ‘basks in the flowery meadows of the fertile countryside’. (Congenitally idle, though far from plump, I found myself envying this pleasing figment of Signor Bucalo’s imagination; I hadn’t seen many flowery meadows on my walk to Castelmola, and if I had I shouldn’t have been much tempted to bask in them.)

‘In such a delightful atmosphere’ (the author perorates) ‘the noble and illustrious city of Pomponius Mela and Solinus, mindful of its triumphs, goes forward eager to recapture the pinnacles of the past’—an Einsteinian attitude of mind which, if a little confusing, at least does credit to the progressive outlook of the Taorminesi. (Nor, one infers, is Signor Bucalo ignorant of the masterpieces of modern English fiction: any literary critic worth his salt will immediately recognize, in the above-quoted passage, the influence of Mrs Amanda McKittrick Ros.)

An English forerunner of Signor Bucalo, Douglas Sladen, is less enthusiastic about this ‘gem of the Ionic coast’. In his guide to Sicily, published in 1905, he is distinctly sniffy about the attractions of Taormina. It is, he remarks, ‘full of vulgar bars, styled American, but not kept by Americans—it only means whisky, largely made in France’. Financial transactions, too, must have been awkward for the Edwardian visitor to Taormina: there was ‘no bank, only a money-changer, very timid and exorbitant’. Worse still, Taormina ‘suffers from artists badly—they swarm, and have made models dear and independent. The town is, of course, full of artists’ bits.’

It is indeed—in every possible sense of the term; though I am told that these ‘bits’—the male kind, at any rate—are less numerous today than in that pre-Fascist and more uninhibited era. One can still, none the less (in the back-rooms of local photographers’ shops), come upon ‘artistic’ studies of them, posed in faunish attitudes on the rocks of Mazzaro, and leaving little (if anything) to the imagination.

Mr Sladen’s opinion, not only of Taormina but of Sicily in general, strikes one as a little lukewarm. While admitting it to be the ‘best winter resort’, he hastily qualifies this statement by adding that it ‘cannot equal Cannes in English houseparty life’, and that, in the general matter of ‘entertaining and entertainers, it is behindhand’. Still, if one was so foolhardy as to abandon dear, homely old Cannes for the wilds of Sicily, Mr Sladen is full of sound practical advice, especially about clothes: ‘Men’, he says, ‘will find that their flannels, if one suit is dark, and their dress-clothes will carry them through, with plenty of overcoats . . . For hats, you need only a cloth cap and a panama straw or a Montecarlo felt.’

As a member of what, in those days, would have been referred to as the ‘hatless brigade’ (how they must have shocked Mr Sladen), I found myself regretting, as I paddled down to the town in the rain, that I hadn’t provided myself with, at the very least, a ‘Montecarlo felt’ . . . The fashions in headgear, by the way, throw a fascinating sidelight upon social developments during the last half-century: when precisely, for instance, did it cease to be an unforgivable solecism for a man—or at any rate a gentleman—to appear in public without a hat? As late as 1910 Leonard Bast, in Howards End, is as horrified to discover that he is walking bareheaded down Regent Street as we should be to find ourselves trouserless in the same situation. My father, to the end of his life, refused to stir from the house—even into the garden—without a hat: partly from fear of catching cold, but mostly, I feel sure, out of respect for the conventions of his youth. The change may have had something to do with motor-cars and motor-bicycles; or can it be, merely, that we are tougher and more commonsensical than our fathers?

It rained and it rained; it continued to rain, in fact—despite all Ariadne’s prophecies to the contrary—for ten whole days. Ciccio’s water-tank was not only full but overflowing; and Ariadne had begun to pray, not for rain, but for its cessation.

I had planned to set off, after a day or two at Taormina, for Syracuse; but it was absurd to contemplate such a journey in present conditions, and I preferred to stay on in comfort at the Villa Aurora. I continued to read—and to drink dry Martinis with Ariadne at the Caffè Nuovo, or red wine with Salvatore in the wine-shop off the Corso. By temperament akin to des Esseintes, I found it infinitely more agreeable to reread South Wind and Vestal Fire than to expose myself to the rigours of a Sicilian March; and as Huysmans’ hero, captivated by the idea of a romantic, fog-bound England, contented himself with Little Dorrit and a meal of haddock, rosbif and rhubarb tart in the rue d’Amsterdam, so now did I enjoy the charms of the Mediterranean spring before a blazing fire in Ariadne’s salotto, in the company of Norman Douglas and Compton Mackenzie, in whose pages the weather is always perfect and the society as stimulating as the climate.

I enjoyed myself, too, in the company of another writer—none other than the venerable and prolific ‘Anon’, who, among other notable works, was responsible for the little guide to the Capuchin catacombs at Palermo. Later, I was to visit the catacombs themselves, but, like des Esseintes again, I might just as well have contented myself with the guide, for the cemetery, though possessing a certain macabre charm, was to prove distinctly less stimulating than ‘Anon’s’ brilliant description of it.

The guide, a mere opuscule of ten pages, is entitled ‘The Great Sepulture of the Cappuccini’, and is well worth the hundred lire one pays for it. ‘From an artistic point of view, the convent is an uninteresting building’, the author confesses in his opening passage; soon, however, his rather tepid enthusiasm is kindled: ‘Its speciality is the curious cemetery in its subterraneans. A weird spectacle indeed is here: about eight (8,000) thousand mummified corpses, some placed in niches in the walls of the galleries, some standing up, the whole producing a very strange effect . . . Very interesting, a scene of inexpressible ghastliness.’

Details follow: ‘Skeletons, still covered with their skins dressed; some wear evening dress and gloves . . . The expression of some of these mummies change their expression from a tragic one into a comic one; and this is because the skin on its way to destruction keeps on moving, very slowly, of course, giving to those faces from time to time yarious expressions.’

The Great Reaper, it would seem, is far from indifferent (in this particular milieu, at any rate) to social distinctions: ‘If the family paid more, they put the body in a box protected by a glass, so that all the body can be visible . . . If they paid cheap price they put it in a niche.’ (‘Some of them’, our author adds, with a distinctly snobbish relish, ‘are lying underneath of Wealthy family.’) Others were even less fortunate: ‘Most interesting to see is the body of a little child, named Ernesta Maria di Paola, which was only eight years old when it die (1855) mummified.’ (One concludes that the monks were apt, on occasion, to be a little premature in their ministrations.)

The March of Progress, however, could not (even in Palermo) be resisted, and ‘In 1881 the Government put a stop to the mummification of dead bodies, because it was unhealthy, otherwise the monks would have mummified all Palermo.’ . . . The city (or most of it) was fortunately spared—a notable triumph of State over Church; but the Church, very rightly, has not omitted to draw an appropriate moral, and the slim little pamphlet includes a ‘Sonnet’ (also by ‘Anon’) which is well worth quoting, not only for the loftiness of its sentiment but also for the sheer beauty of its diction (which, as the amateur of modern verse will hardly fail to observe, owes much to the late Fr. G. M. Hopkins):

Now that you are intirely aware
of what human misery, consists
have you, my brother any doubt, there
to affirm that greatness is vane
and that by the fatal fate, as it were
oppressed you saw beauty, mondane,
vivacity, pageantry splendour luxury
which are nothing but worldly insane?

Heaven calls you now to give your account

Why then staggering where is your impudence?

Dont you care to settle for the amount
of sins for which excuse is not sufficient?

Have you not yet observed what is a sound
mind of a perfect man who uses to depend

Only upon, a good method of life all around?

One afternoon when the rain was less heavy than usual I walked up the rough track leading past Fontana Vecchia towards Monte Ziretto. The view across the bay, to southwards, seemed more than ever English: a leaden-grey expanse of wind-tossed sea, its breakers thundering upon the rocky spit of Naxos. Above, the mountain peaks—Monte Venere, Monte Ziretto and the forbidding citadel of Castelmola—were mobled in heavy swags of cloud; the rain fell gently but without stopping.

I was looking, in a desultory way, for flowers; so far, on my few brief excursions, the Sicilian flora had proved less exciting than the accounts of it: masses of yellow oxalis, the ubiquitous asphodel, a few pink anemones—but not much else. This afternoon I was luckier: on the bank at the side of the path I suddenly came upon Hermodactylus, the Snake Iris—a charming flower, green and velvety brown, which I remembered finding in the Abruzzi during the war. Though recognizably of the Iris family, it has an oddly orchidaceous air, with much of the colouring of the English Spider Orchid. The Orchidaceae themselves, however, appeared to be absent; yet I remembered reading, in Lawrence’s letters, of the orchids which grew above his villa at Fontana Vecchia . . . Presently I came upon the villa itself; a tablet is let into the wall facing the pathway, with this inscription:

D. H. Lawrence

English Author

(11.9.1885—2.3.1930)

Lived here

1920 – 1923

The dates, as it happens, are wrong: Lawrence only spent thirteen months at Taormina—from March 1920 to April 1921. Nor did he like the place overmuch; but then Lawrence never liked anywhere much, after the first month or two. At Taormina he seems to have been on the worst of terms both with the Sicilians and with the foreign colony; only the animals and flowers really pleased him. I remembered the poems he had written here—Sicilian Cyclamens, Purple Anemones, Snake; also that he had finished The Lost Girl in this house—one of the least turgid and (nowadays) most approachable of his novels. As I looked at the villa, dank and rather forbidding beneath the grey veil of rain, Lawrence seemed to me a curiously ghostly, unreal figure; it was difficult to imagine him (supposing he had lived for another twenty years or so) inhabiting the world of today, with its squalid competitiveness, its travel-restrictions and its increasing hostility towards ‘all things counter, original, spare, strange’. Unhappy enough in his own lifetime, he would, I thought, have been unhappier still in our world of television, horror-comics, Mrs Dale’s Diary and the hydrogen bomb.

I walked on up the hill, coming at last to more open country: a heathy tract flanked, on the seaward side, by a steep, almost precipitous declivity. Suddenly I paused, my eye caught by a tall pink flower-spike growing on the edge of the abyss. I went forward, and other spikes revealed themselves: they were orchids, which I recognized as being Orchis italica—a species confined, I think, to Southern Italy and North Africa. It happened to be the one plant which, in my Sicilian botanizing, I had hoped to enounter; and here it was, abundant though (for the most part) almost inaccessible upon the slopes of Monte Ziretto. Perhaps Lawrence himself (I thought) had found it here; it was certainly a more than sufficient reward for an arduous and drenching tramp into the hills.

At the risk of boring the non-botanical reader I must here make a confession. I had first found Orchis italica in the Abruzzi, during the war, and had identified it as Orchis simia, the Monkey Orchid—or at least as a sub-species intermediate between the Monkey and the closely-allied Orchis militaris. At that time, as it happened, I had not seen the Monkey—nearly extinct in England—for twenty years or more, so there was, perhaps, some excuse for my mis-identification; moreover, simia and italica are superficially much alike, and would certainly have been ‘lumped’ as a single species by Bentham and Hooker. Subsequently I described my discovery of what I believed to be Orchis simia in a book called The Military Orchid; and not till some years later did I learn (from Camus’s book on European orchids) of the existence of the equivocal Orchis italica, which is, in fact, a perfectly good species, belonging to the sub-generic group Militares, though quite distinct from the Monkey Orchid. Apart from its robuster habit and broader lip, italica differs from simia in the fact that the flowers at the bottom of the spike expand (as in most other orchids) before those at the top; whereas simia has the odd habit of opening from top to bottom.

A year or two after the war I was taken by my friend Francis Rose to see the true Monkey Orchid in Oxfordshire; and I realized that the Abruzzi plant was far more distinct from it than I had remembered. Orchis italica, in fact, is a good deal nearer to the Military Orchid than I had supposed when I first found it; in Sicily and farther south it seems to replace the type-species, which is not, I think, found in Italy south of the Abruzzi.

I picked a spike or two, and walked on up the hillside path. Presently I came upon a wayside shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes. An inscription assured the wayfarer that La Madonna di Lourdes libera ogni corpo humano delle disgrazie e delle male tentazione. A vase was hung before the shrine, containing stocks, marigolds, sprigs of asphodel and a few spikes of Orchis italica. Underneath, another notice adjured the passer-by to deposit un obolo volontario in the box provided.

Liberated as I was from the evil temptation to pretend that Orchis italica was either the Monkey Orchid or the Military, I contributed my voluntary obol; and began to walk back, through the driving rain, towards the town.

Lawrence, Lorenzo—that bearded, skimpy little genius (‘but . . .’) with his bright-eyed charm, his love of flowers, his ungovernable temper; the miner’s son who made good, the latter-day Carlyle married to great big bouncing Frieda von Richthofen—what are we to make of him after twenty-five years?

More than any other writer of the century he had, I suppose, at one time or another, nearly all of us by the hair; in my own case I discovered him late—after I had left school—but I surrendered, none the less completely, to those great splurging books of his in which an ill-defined, diffuse ‘philosophy of sex’ seemed to offer an alternative to the religion of our parents, which we had so firmly and so superciliously rejected. We accepted him, I suppose—at least I did—not primarily as a great writer but as a prophet; and in those days, prophets being unfashionable, one didn’t surrender to them without a certain reluctance, an uneasy feeling that one might be backing the wrong horse. Prophets were so liable to make fools of themselves—and perhaps of oneself as well (look at Nietzsche, look at Tolstoy); one was tempted to giggle at the wrong moment (‘One cannot’, as E. M. Forster said, ‘help laughing at a prophet—his bald head is so absurd’); and Lawrence, however seriously one took him, was always letting one down in this way. Yet we fell for him none the less; he was ‘in the air’, if he hadn’t existed it would have been necessary to invent him (and Voltaire’s epigram, it may be added, has also been applied to the late unlamented Adolf Hitler, another ‘prophet’ of genius).

Yet I find, nowadays, that though most of my contemporaries continue to pay him lip-service they will confess, if one gets them into a corner, that they are quite unable to plough through Lawrence’s novels. Why? The answer must be whispered (lest Dr Leavis should be hiding under the table), and the answer is, alas, that Lawrence’s novels are, for the most part, badly constructed and, above all, badly written. Aldous Huxley, in his admirable preface to the Letters, insists that Lawrence was pre-eminently an artist; but this, surely—in the exact sense of the word—was the one thing he was not. A genius, a prophet, yes—but an artist, no. He was too prodigal, too careless and in too much of a hurry; his books came flooding out of him with the uncontrolled force of an orgasm (it is significant that Lawrence would never ‘revise’ a novel—if he wasn’t satisfied with it, he rewrote it entirely). He was best, perhaps, in his descriptions of Nature—flowers, animals, scenery—and in his lyrical glorifications of the human body, whether male or female. Yet his finest passages are apt to descend, with a disconcerting abruptness, into bathos; he cannot keep it up, the impulse fails; consequently his best writing is to be found in the short stories and some of the poems.

As it happened, Ariadne’s library included copies of Aaron’s Rod and The Rainbow; I tried, after my trip to Fontana Vecchia, to reread both—but unsuccessfully. Aaron’s Rod (much praised in its time) struck me, quite simply, as an abysmally bad novel: there are pages and pages of dialogue which lead nowhere, Lawrence is simply ‘strumming’—playing his tunes, like a N.A.A.F.I. pianist, with two fingers; padding out the book, trying to be clever, showing-off before his newly-acquired upper-class friends, whom he both admires and despises (he is catty, in an ineffectual way, about Norman Douglas, Reggie Turner etc.). How on earth was one ever taken in?

I tried The Rainbow: the first chapter seemed magnificent; after all, I decided, Lawrence had everything—a genius for evoking landscape, a sense of character, a marvellous apprehension of human relationships. Yet after a further chapter or two I was firmly bogged down: the prose becomes more and more turgid, more and more repetitive; there is the feeling of an engine perpetually running, wastefully, and getting nowhere; a kind of verbal masturbation, a brooding on sexuality which, by repetition, dulls one’s susceptibilities, so that one entirely forgets the terms of reference. Yet there are magnificent passages in The Rainbow—as there are in Women in Love, its sequel. If only, one feels, he could have kept it up! But he couldn’t: Gudrun, for instance, dancing before a herd of cows (in Women in Love)—it simply doesn’t come off; and that embarrassing scene in which Gerald and Birkin wrestle, naked, upon the drawing-room floor—one knows, only too well, what Lawrence was getting at, but one suspects that he didn’t, altogether, know himself; or, worse still, that he didn’t have the courage to admit it.

Lawrence’s ‘secret’—if one can call it that—was, I suppose, that he was profoundly homosexual; but his lonely, puritanic, lower middle-class upbringing prevented him from coming to terms with his own homosexuality. Just how far he did, in later years, come to terms with it, we shall not know, I suppose, for some time—if we ever do know; but his crypto-‘queerness’ seems to me to be the key to his complex and unhappy personality. Today we have come to accept homosexuality as a universal, almost a ‘normal’ phenomenon; no young contemporary novelist could get away with that wrestling match in Women in Love—if he described such a scene at all, he would be frankly writing about a homosexual relationship. This disingenuous, self-deceiving element in Lawrence is, I think, one of the chief qualities in his writing which makes him unacceptable to a younger generation.

What is, perhaps, more saddening is that he failed not only as a writer but as a prophet: the cult of the Dark Gods, the ‘holiness’ of sexuality (there is more than a touch of mawkish, chapel-bred piety in Lawrence’s quasi-religious attitude to sex), the perils of sex-in-the-head (as opposed to sex-in-the-loins)—it is all very sound, very desirable, no doubt, but the point which seems to have escaped Lawrence is that such a philosophy is either evolved instinctively or not at all: it cannot be inculcated by preaching. Many of Lawrence’s sermons on sex have the embarrassing quality of those sermons on Purity to which one was treated at school: the matter is different, but the manner is the same; and Lawrence, like most schoolmasters, was a thoroughgoing Puritan. The weakness of his sermonizing is, alas, that it defeats its own ends; and the direct result of it has been that we suffer, nowadays, more from sex-in-the-head than ever we did before.

Whatever Lawrence’s champions may say, Lady Chatterley is in all essentials a pornographic novel; no normal young man, surely, could read it without becoming sexually excited—artificially, in cold blood, and at several removes from reality, which was the one form of sexuality, above all others, that Lawrence professed to deplore; yet he must, in his heart, have realized the effect that the book would have. Once again (as in the ‘homosexual’ passages in Women in Love and elsewhere) one is made aware of his profound naïveté—or, if one is less charitable, of his unconscious hypocrisy (it is noteworthy, by the way, that the descriptions of the sexual act in Lady Chatterley are nearly all written from the woman’s point of view). The book is, moreover, shoddily written, and greatly inferior to Sons and Lovers or even to Women in Love (a friend of mine once described it, unkindly, as ‘Warwick Deeping with the dirt left in’); it is also a remarkably dull book—I was never able, myself, to get through it, even at an age when its ‘obscenity’ might have had more appeal for me than it has today.

Sons and Lovers, The White Peacock, a few of the short stories and a handful of memorable poems—it is these, out of Lawrence’s enormous output, which seem most likely to survive. He was a writer of genius who, to a great extent, wasted or misused his gifts; consumption, the war, persecution by authority—these helped, undoubtedly, towards his downfall; but there was also, I think, an innate flaw in his personality which made it inevitable that he should develop, more or less, along the lines that he did. Yet for all his bad writing and his wrong-headedness, he was a genius and a great man, and he has become a part of our consciousness; an influence which, like that of Freud, may be for good or ill, but which is—and will remain—permanent and inescapable.

The weather changed at last: I woke one morning to a blaze of sunshine, and looking out of the window saw that the Sicilian landscape had emerged once more, miraculously, from the nordic glooms which had enveloped it for the last ten days. The sea was as blue as a tourist-poster; the pink roofs of the town gleamed with a new-born vividness, like Noah’s Ark houses straight out of a toy-shop; even Ariadne’s garden blazed with a renewed, more voluptuous flamboyance; and beyond the town, beyond the vineyards and olive-orchards and the far blue hills, rose the great peak of Mount Etna, naked and shameless once more against the blue, cloudless sky.

I had planned to depart, directly the rain stopped, for Syracuse; yet I delayed, for one reason or another, for several days. Taormina, so suddenly and miraculously revealed once again in its true colours, was irresistible; I was in no hurry, after all; and I was tempted, like Signor Bucalo’s ‘plump idler’, to bask for a day or two ‘in the flowery meadows of the fertile countryside’.

I visited the Greek Theatre (surely the view from here, looking towards Etna, is one of the two or three most beautiful in Europe); I walked, yet again, up the hill to Castelmola; and, with Ariadne, scaled the heights of Monte Venere, where an aunt of my old friend Julian Trevelyan had caused an extraordinary tomb to be constructed for herself, high among those barren treeless hills. For the rest I was content, impenitently, to bask—not indeed in the ‘flowery meadows’, but naked upon the flat roof of the Villa Aurora; feeling, as the sun burnt into my flesh, the ‘cold griefs’ (the phrase is Culpepper’s) of an English winter gradually disperse in the soft Sicilian airs.

My departure was delayed still further, as it happened, for another and more cogent reason—namely, an acute bilious attack due, indirectly, to the nefarious activities of the Mafia. An Englishwoman whom I knew, lately arrived in Sicily (I will call her Anthea), had become acquainted, through a Sicilian friend, with the local chief of this most sinister and powerful of secret societies. According to Anthea, the capo di Mafia was a charmer, and she, in her turn, had so much impressed him, that he had formally taken her under his ‘protection’.

‘You simply must meet him,’ she said. ‘I’ve arranged everything with Roberto—we’re going the day after tomorrow. Roberto’s mamma has asked us to lunch—they live out at——, it’s miles from anywhere, and Pasquale’ (this was the name of the capo di Mafia) ‘lives right up in the mountains, about ten miles farther on. We can drive over there after lunch—he’ll be expecting us about three o’clock.’

My ideas about the Mafia were vague in the extreme, being mostly derived, I suppose, from fiction. For me it remained a more or less legendary conception: a secret society, more powerful and more ruthless than most, which had originated in Sicily, but which could exert its powers, when necessary, throughout the world, and more particularly in America, where most of the big gangsters—such as Al Capone—have been of Sicilian origin. Stimulated, however, by the prospect of meeting an accredited member of this sinister brotherhood, I became curious to find out something about its workings.

I didn’t, needless to say, find out much, for such matters are not discussed in the presence of tourists; but I heard enough to convince me that the Mafia is still a powerful force in Sicily. Like a number of other things (the ‘artists’ bits’ at Taormina, for instance), the Mafia was supposed to have been suppressed by Mussolini; but his efforts, in this case, seem to have been notably unsuccessful, and, even during my short stay in the island, I heard a good many reports and rumours of its present activities. There was the story of Giuliano the bandit, for instance—it was said that at one period of his brief and colourful career he had sought the protection of the Mafia, and been refused; it was even rumoured, in some quarters, that the Mafia had been ultimately responsible for his death. Then there was the case of the mayor of such-and-such a town—why had he been found shot dead in a ditch between Syracuse and Catania? The Mafia, perhaps—chi lo sa? Nobody quite liked to hazard an opinion—or not, at any rate, in public . . . There were plenty of similar tales, but any attempt to elicit more detailed explanations was apt to be met with a shrug: Sicilians, understandably enough, prefer not to talk too much about the Mafia, even among themselves; and most of them, no doubt, have very good reasons for keeping silent.

My own encounter with the Mafia proved to be distinctly alarming and uncomfortable, if not positively dangerous. We set off, on the appointed day, in Roberto’s car—Anthea, myself and a delightful middle-aged Swedish woman, called Ingeborg, who was wintering at Taormina.

‘Perhaps,’ remarked Ingeborg cheerfully, as we drove off, ‘we shall all be murr-derred. But if this Mafia-man is so attrr-active as dear Anthea is telling us, then I think perhaps I do not mind so moch, do you not agree?’

We drove for many miles through lonely rock-bound valleys; the day was sunny, but with a wintry chill in the air, and I wished I had brought an overcoat. As we drove farther inland, away from the fertile coastal belt, the countryside became more and more rugged and treeless, and I became aware of that heavy, brooding oppression which, directly one leaves the tourist-centres, seems a part of the Sicilian climate itself. One realizes that one’s traditional conception of Sicily as a balmy, fertile and friendly country has been at fault; the truth being that it is a hard land, haunted by a sense of
old, unhappy, far-off things

And battles long ago;
a dour, unwelcoming land, whose occasional uproarious gaieties are counterbalanced by a profound pessimism and a spirit of splenetic, vengeful gloom.

The roads narrowed, the mountains crept nearer on either hand, their rocky slopes carved out into tiny patches of corn and vine. We passed through a village or two—squalid and forbidding congeries of low-built houses from which the inhabitants regarded us with a suspicious, rather malevolent air. As we climbed farther into the hills, the sky became overcast, and it grew colder; there were fewer signs of human occupation—such villages as we passed were perched upon the craggy summits of the hills, aloof and hostile-seeming against the grey, lowering sky.

At last we reached the village—or small town—where Roberto’s mother lived. She received us politely in a rather bleak salone. We were offered small glasses of vermouth, and shown photographs of the family; the room faced north, and I began to shiver. So did poor Ingeborg, who was abnormally sensitive to cold.

‘It would be a pity, I think,’ she whispered to me, ‘if we are all catching the grippe before we meet this Mafia, isn’t it? Oh dear,’ she added, disconsolately, swallowing the remains of her vermouth, ‘how I am wishing that the pranzo would be ready.’

Fortunately for all of us, the pranzo was shortly announced. It was just as well that the mountain air had given us an appetite, for that luncheon was an enormous, a positively staggering meal. Being rather greedy, and fond of Mediterranean food, I have often eaten enormous meals in Italy and Sicily, and I flatter myself that my capacity is above the average; but the banquet provided by Roberto’s mother taxed even my abilities. The meal began with an hors-d’œuvre of those tiny fish called neonati; salame followed; then a large fish, somewhat resembling trout; then spaghetti, an escalope of veal, cheese, salad and finally a sweet. Fortunately there was plenty of wine—a potent and delicious vino rosso from the family vineyard; one often speaks of ‘washing down’ a meal, but in this case it was the literal truth. When at last—as we supposed—the last dish had been cleared from the table, little cakes appeared, and a sweetish dessert-wine called Amareno, made, I believe, from cherry-leaves; then coffee.

‘I should not wish to eat so moch, I make the pig of myself,’ remarked Ingeborg. ‘I think tonight I am sick, but I do not mind, because in this moment I enjoy myself very moch, do not you also?’

Poor Ingeborg—little could she foresee what horrors lay ahead . . . The last glass of Amareno was drunk at last, we made our farewells to Roberto’s mother (who apologized for the poor meal she had offered us), and set off again. We drove on, through narrowing, gloomy valleys, less fertile and more craggy even than before; from the hilltops the grey, isolated villages peered down at us, hostile and impregnable. I was beginning, already, to suffer from slight indigestion; that pasta, I reflected, had been a mistake . . . Presently we began to climb a steep zigzag road out of the valley.

‘Ecco la città,’ announced Roberto, pointing upwards at a small castellated town which had become visible at the top of the hill. About halfway up, he suddenly stopped the car.

‘Pasquale’s estate begins here,’ he said, with a note of reverence in his voice. We looked up, in the direction in which he pointed: the ‘estate’ seemed to consist almost entirely of barren crags ascending in terraces to the hilltop, interspersed with a patch of corn or two and a few scraggy olive-trees. A moment later Roberto pointed again: ‘Ecco Pasquale,’ he said, and looking upward I saw silhouetted against the skyline above the hill’s crest what can only be described as a romantic figure: tall, gaunt and, even at this distance, giving a curious impression of power and authority. Roberto waved; the figure waved back, and began immediately to descend the steep terraces with the agility of a mountain-goat. Within a remarkably short time he was standing beside us: less impressive, on a close view, than he had seemed on his lonely hilltop, yet sufficiently striking—a man of about fifty, with thinning hair and the face of a Renaissance condottiere.

He greeted us with a kind of arrogant courtesy—rather as a victorious general might receive the emissaries from some vanquished army. Would we please follow him to his house? We could leave the car, and walk up through the ‘estate’. There was a moment’s doubt as to whether we should leave our mackintoshes, bags, etc., in the open car—a risky proceeding in this isolated, poverty-stricken spot. Pasquale, when appealed to, raised his hand in a complicated, authoritative, almost a hieratic gesture.

‘You are under my protection,’ he said grandly, and taking his own cap from his head placed it ceremoniously upon the bonnet of the car. Plainly Pasquale’s cap was a potent and recognized symbol of his authority—and a more than sufficient insurance against local pilfering.

Obediently, we began to climb the steep track up the hillside, through Pasquale’s estate, pausing now and again to look at the view, or to admire the small plots of corn and vine so ingeniously carved out of the barren rock. In the uncultivated patches, snake iris, crimson anemones and other less familiar plants tempted me to botanize; but the soul of Pasquale, I felt, was above such frivolous pursuits, and I restrained myself. As we followed our host up the boulder-strewn, breakneck path I began to notice the immense strength and pliancy of his limbs; and, as he turned to direct us or to point out some feature of the landscape, I studied his face—the face of a condottiere, or of a romantic brigand in some early nineteenth-century Gothic novel: dark, aquiline and giving an extraordinary impression of strength and ruthlessness. Pasquale, I thought, would have made an excellent dictator: far more impressive than the obese, frog-like Duce, or the undersized Austrian house-painter, with his lick of plebeian hair and Charlie Chaplin moustache. Pasquale’s most striking feature was perhaps his teeth: a perfect set, strong and very white—the teeth of a beast of prey (I should hardly have been surprised to learn that he lived exclusively upon raw meat). His manner, as he guided us up the hill, remained impeccably polite, yet always with that disquieting undertone of arrogance; one had a sense, all the time, of a restrained ferocity—rather as one might feel in the presence of some half-tamed jungle beast, a panther or a cheetah.

He talked a good deal to Anthea and Roberto, but I could understand little that he said, for he spoke in the broadest Sicilian—a dialect which is, I suppose, as different from pure Italian as Lallans is from standard English. My Italian, in any case, is rudimentary, and I had to depend—if Pasquale spoke to me—on Anthea’s interpreting. Halfway up the hill we came to a sort of fortified hideout into which, with some ceremony, we were conducted. The place had originally, one guessed, been a natural cave, but Pasquale (or some predecessor) had added a thick wall of stone-work at the entrance, provided with slit-windows like those in a mediaeval castle—and presumably for the same purpose. Pasquale proceeded to relate, with considerable brio, the story of a particularly brutal murder which had been committed on the spot: the details emerged vividly enough, but the circumstances of the crime remained suspiciously vague. As to the identity of the murderer, we were left to draw our own conclusions . . . Catching Ingeborg’s eye, I saw that she had, quite evidently, come to the same conclusion as myself.

‘But phwat a man,’ she whispered to me. ‘Do you not think he is terrr-ibly attrr-active? So strong, like a li-on. Do you know,’ she added, regarding Pasquale’s muscular body with a look of frank appraisal, ‘I am wishing in this moment that I am twenty years younger, and then perhaps I inspire this murr-derrer with a grreat passion? Do you not think that would be fun?’

I said that it might, quite possibly, be fun, but not, perhaps, altogether comfortable. Presently a flask of wine was produced—a curiously-shaped flask made of chestnut wood, and beautifully polished. We all took a drink: I remarked, in my halting Italian, what good wine it was—which happened to be true.

‘E vino oneste,’ snapped Pasquale, with a flash of arrogance. That one should feel it necessary to praise his wine seemed to him, too evidently, a kind of insult: for—it was obvious—the wine of a capo di Mafia must surely be of the best.

Leaving the cave, we continued up the winding path and at last reached the village. Pasquale paused for a moment, looking backward at the way we had come: a chieftain surveying his domain. The view from here was impressive, yet there was about it a curiously disquieting, claustrophobic quality: one had a sense of being hemmed in by impassable frontiers. As far as one could see, the high, crag-topped hills rolled away, range upon range, into the unknown, anonymous distance: surmounted, here and there, by a romantic fairy-tale village, and, where the slopes were cult-ivated, chequered with patches of bright, vernal green. Somewhere, I thought, beyond those desolate hills lay the mythical fields of Enna—the final goal of my journeying; yet here, already, one felt that the Plutonic underworld was not so far away; and as I glanced at Pasquale’s swarthy face and his dark, smouldering eyes, it struck me that the capo di Mafia might very well have passed for a citizen—if not for the overlord himself—of the infernal kingdom.

We crossed the ramparts of the village and turned down a narrow, smelly viale; one or two people—mostly women—watched us from their doorways with a lively curiosity tempered by respect. At last we reached Pasquale’s house—not a very big house, and in no way extraordinary. Pasquale ushered us in, and we found ourselves in a smallish, overcrowded room, curiously austere and characterless, and differing in no way from the typical living-room of the well-off peasant or small businessman anywhere in Italy.

We were invited to sit down.

‘La Zia è in campagna,’ announced Pasquale, abruptly: it was not so much an apology for his aunt’s absence as a mere statement of fact; from his tone, one couldn’t tell whether he was pleased or sorry that la Zia shouldn’t be there to entertain us. It struck me as being in some way odd and rather incongruous that the capo di Mafia should live with an aunt—or even, for that matter, that he should possess an aunt at all.

Glasses were set on the table, and an enormous bottle of wine; then, to my horror, appeared plates, knives, forks . . . Anthea explained that we had already eaten; but it was of no avail. I saw Pasquale’s face assume a dogged, almost a truculent expression: he had determined that we were to eat beneath his roof, and quite plainly he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. I met Ingeborg’s eyes, and we exchanged a glance of utter despair; but it was useless, we felt, to protest; already Pasquale had produced an enormous pot of pickled vegetables such as one buys at a salumeria—aubergines, green peppers, tomatoes—and was ladling the contents on to our plates. The mere look of that savoury mess, swimming in olive-oil, was enough to make me queasy.

‘Eat!’ snapped Pasquale, commandingly. ‘Eat!’ And by way of stimulating our appetites he seized a bottle of oil and poured a generous dollop over each helping.

My belly was bulging, already, with rich, oily Sicilian food; it was barely an hour since we had finished that Gargantuan luncheon. What on earth was one to do? I looked at Anthea: pale but determined, she leaned over and whispered to me in English: ‘For God’s sake, you must eat it—I simply dare not offend Pasquale.’

‘But this is terrr-ible,’ murmured poor Ingeborg, plaintively. ‘If I eat I shall die, and if I do not eat, then perhaps this so attrr-active man will murr-der us all, so I think I must eat.’

Encouraged by Ingeborg’s gallant example, I began to nibble at the green, oily mess, trusting to the vino nero—it was Pasquale’s ‘honest wine’—to avert disaster. But worse was to follow: the oily vegetables—a mere hors-d’œuvre—were succeeded by a string of salame sausages. Pasquale produced these with a dramatic flourish, like the sausages in an old-fashioned pantomime. They were sliced up between pieces of bread; and we ate on for dear life, feeling sicker and sicker. It really was, one felt, quite literally a matter of life or death: Anthea and Roberto were under Pasquale’s ‘protection’, and therefore, for the time being, so were Ingeborg and myself. The Mafia had ordered us to eat; and not only the Mafia but all the laws of Sicilian hospitality demanded that we should do so.

The awful meal went on and on, and I began to wonder how long it would be before I disgraced myself. To be sick at Pasquale’s table would be construed, no doubt, as a deadly insult . . . Dried figs and cheese appeared—easier going, these—and, mercifully, another bottle of wine. Pasquale, I noticed, was drinking a good deal, though he had eaten practically nothing; I could see that he was already rather tight, and that it had made him truculent and less in command of his manners. He had been talking, for the most part, to Anthea and Roberto; now, suddenly, he turned and addressed himself to me. There was one thing, he said, which he had always wanted to know and which nobody had ever been able to explain to him—neither the priest, nor the avvocato, nor even the doctor. Why was it, he asked—and I grasped his meaning only with difficulty and after considerable delay—that the earth continued to revolve so regularly round the sun? What caused it to do so, and what prevented it from hurling itself into outer space?

In ordinary circumstances I might, I suppose, have managed to think up some fairly intelligent and plausible answer; but I was in no mood, just now, to give a dissertation upon the motions of the heavenly bodies. Feeling very sick and utterly idiotic, I met Pasquale’s penetrating and truculent gaze.

He repeated his question all over again: ‘Perchè il mondo’, etc., etc., speaking very slowly, as though to a child or a half-wit, and accompanying his words by a series of complicated gestures to illustrate his meaning.

‘I suppose,’ I said, feeling more inadequate than I had ever felt in my life, ‘it’s something to do with the law of gravity.’

Pasquale looked at me as a Spanish inquisitor might have looked at a particularly dangerous and unpleasant heretic. His eyes flashed, he flexed his wrists; he was plainly keeping his temper with difficulty.

‘It’s nothing of the sort,’ he snapped contemptuously.

I glanced at Anthea: she was looking positively green with anxiety.

‘For God’s sake tell him something,’ she implored me.

‘Perhaps——’ I began, and checked myself abruptly. I had been about to say—in despair—that presumably the earth’s motions and equilibrium were maintained by the good God himself. With most southern Europeans—assuming them to be Catholics—this explanation would have gone down well enough, and I should at least have been respected for my piety, if not for my intelligence. But I had remembered, just in time, that Pasquale—according to report—was a violent anticlerical and a professed atheist.

Plainly, by now, his patience was all but exhausted: he glared across at me angrily.

‘Ma,’ he exclaimed. ‘Lei—proffessore, scrittore—you cannot tell me why the earth does not fly away into the abyss?’

I looked at Anthea again, in despair—and not without a certain annoyance, for plainly she (or possibly Roberto) had given me a quite unmerited build-up. True, I was a writer of sorts, but I certainly wasn’t a professor; and how should I be expected to know why the earth did not hurtle, incontinently, into l’abismo? At that moment I only wished to goodness it would; only some such cosmic disaster, I felt, would ever succeed in deflecting Pasquale from his purpose.

Meanwhile he was growing angrier and angrier; and my mind became (if that was possible) more and more blank. ‘Do for heaven’s sake say something,’ Anthea repeated: but what could I say? At any moment, I felt, Pasquale was liable to draw a stiletto and summon his bodyguard; Ingeborg and myself—and perhaps poor Anthea and Roberto as well—would be summarily dispatched. The absence of Pasquale’s aunt assumed an awful significance; there would be no difficulty, I thought, about a quadruple murder in this remote village, of which Pasquale in any case was the uncrowned king, with the whole prepotent force of the Mafia behind him.

Fortunately for all of us a diversion was provided at this crucial moment by Roberto who, having mysteriously vanished for several minutes—perhaps (as I had feared) to call the bodyguard—suddenly appeared with a tray upon which were three cups containing a brownish and unidentifiable fluid. Doubtless, I thought, it was some hellish brew of hemlock or aconite, which we should all be forced to swallow at the point of Pasquale’s stiletto . . .

It turned out, in sober fact, to be tea: procured, apparently—so Roberto confided—with infinite difficulty by Pasquale, especially in our honour. We were English (Ingeborg, presumably, since there were three cups, was included in the same racial category as Anthea and myself) and therefore—it went without saying—we required tea at four o’clock in the afternoon. Pasquale, it might be supposed, knew little about the British way of life; but this one all-important fact had percolated, evidently, even into these mountain fastnesses. Was the Mafia to show itself ignorant of the social graces? Perish the thought!

We had eaten two enormous meals within an hour of each other, and this unexpected manifestation of Gracious Living was the last straw; yet Pasquale’s hospitality was not to be trifled with: to reject the tea—procured at goodness-knew what difficulty and expense, for our special benefit—would have been worse than refusing what had gone before. The tea itself proved to be lukewarm, without milk or sugar, and extremely nasty; yet it did, by some miracle, succeed in distracting Pasquale from the dangerous subject of astronomy. Suddenly he became quite affable—indeed, almost obsequious—before this symbol of Anglo-Saxon supremacy; for almost the first time in my life I felt profoundly grateful that I had been born an Englishman. The conversation switched to politics and the iniquities of politicians. Pasquale delivered himself of a number of trenchant remarks: ‘A man who’s afraid to piss in public is either a politician or a spy,’ he asserted at one point, and proceeded to embellish this promising theme with a number of striking examples.

Meanwhile, Roberto went to fetch the car (owing, no doubt, to Pasquale’s cap, our possessions remained just as we had left them in the back seat); and shortly afterwards we were allowed to take our departure. The Mafia had proffered its hospitality, we had accepted it, and all was well. The March evening had turned cold, and we huddled into the back of the car feeling miserable and extremely ill. I was half afraid that Pasquale might still, on second thoughts, stage some last-minute hold-up; but we drove down the hill unmolested, and soon reached the comparative civilization of Roberto’s village.

‘Oh, but I feel so terrr-ible,’ moaned Ingeborg. ‘Never did I eat so moch—I think already I have the appendicite, I find myself in great pain—but I do not regret, for I have met that so attrr-active man, and I think tonight I dream that he drags me by the hair to his cave, and that I become his concubine, will not that be nice?’

The result of my encounter with the Mafia was, as I have said, an exceedingly severe bilious attack. I stayed in bed for two days at the Villa Aurora, sustained by a frugal diet of dry toast and soup; Ingeborg, I gathered, was in an even worse state than myself: she was quite certain that she would die, but was consoled by dreams of being abducted by Pasquale and living with him, in glorious sin, in his mountain hideout. Lacking such consolations myself, I made vain attempts to reread Wyndham Lewis’s The Apes of God, and became (perhaps not surprisingly) more and more depressed. Even the weather—out of sympathy, perhaps, with my own and Ingeborg’s condition—turned nasty again: Etna was swaddled in cloud, and Taormina, from my windows, seemed indistinguishable from Eastbourne.

And then, once again, the Sicilian climate miraculously reasserted itself: the sun blazed forth; I rose from my bed, feeling ready for anything, and breakfasted on the terrace. Etna had emerged once more: the archetype of all mountains, the frontier guarding our safe coastal province against the lawless territories beyond.

I decided that I would set out, the very next day, for Syracuse.

PART IV

Month’s Mind

Chapter opening

Month’s mind—for years the phrase has exercised an odd fascination over me, becoming at times almost obsessional. I first heard of it, I suppose, twenty-odd years ago, as the title of a piano piece by John Ireland—a rather difficult piece, but I managed to mug it up well enough to give a fairly accurate if hardly a brilliant performance. The piece was prefaced by a quotation from Brand’s Antiquities (that most perennially entertaining of bedside-books): ‘Days which our Ancestors called their Monthes Mind, their Years Mind, and the like,’ says Brand, quoting from an earlier source, ‘being the Days whereon their Souls (after their deaths) were had in special remembrance, and some Office of Obsequies said for them; as Obits, Dirges, etc.’ Brand adds that the expression was still, in his time, ‘retained in Lancashire’, and I have heard that it survives in Eire at the present day (it is mentioned, incidentally, in the ‘Hades’ episode of Ulysses). ‘The common expression,’ says Brand, ‘of “having a Month’s Mind”, implying a longing desire, is evidently derived from hence’, and he appends a quotation from Peck’s Desiderata Curiosa: ‘By saying they have a Month’s Mind to it, they antiently most undoubtedly mean, that, if they had what they so much longed for, it would (hyperbolically speaking) do them as much good (they thought) as they believed a Month’s Mind, or Service said once a Month (could they afford to have it), would benefit their souls after their decease.’

A Month’s Mind, properly celebrated, appears to have been quite a grand affair: thus, in the will of a certain Thomas Windsor, Esq. (1479), one finds copious and detailed directions for the ceremony:

Item, I will that I have brennying at my Burying and Funeral service, four Tapeis and twenty-two Torches of wax, every Taper to conteyn the weight of ten pounds . . . which I will that twenty-four very poor Men, and well disposed, shall hold as well at the tyme of my burying as at my Moneth’s Minde. Item, I will . . . that there be a hundred Children within the age of sixteen years to be at my Moneth’s Minde, to say for my soul. That against my Moneth’s Minde, the Candles bren before the rude in the Parish Church. Also that at my Moneth’s Minde my Executors provide twenty Priests to singe Placebo, Dirige, &c.

Forty years earlier, in 1439, ‘Sir Roberde Chichely, grocer, and twice Mayor of London’, had preferred, rather sensibly, that his ‘Moneth’s Minde’ should serve the uses of charity rather than of self-glorification, and willed that ‘upon his Mynde Day a good and competent Dyner should be ordayned to XXIIIIC. pore men, and that of housholders of the Citee, yf they myght be found.’ (One imagines that, in fifteenth-century London, the appropriate candidates were forth-coming without much difficulty.)

Dr Ireland, I imagine, was chiefly struck by Brand’s gloss upon the phrase, as signifying, in modern—i.e., eighteenth-century—usage, a ‘longing desire’; for the piano piece ‘Month’s Mind’ has that peculiar quality of impersonal, almost mystical nostalgia which is to be found in all the most characteristic works of this composer. Whenever I listen to Ireland’s music I am alert for the recurrence of certain phrases, certain habitual and personal musical idioms, which evoke for me a particular mood and a particular range of associations. Like the ‘little phrase’ in Vinteuil’s ‘Sonata’, these fragments, long familiar from earlier pieces, are apt to recur, unexpectedly and in a different form, in Ireland’s later works; and since the piece ‘Month’s Mind’ has for long typified for me the special mood which they evoke, the title itself has become impregnated with the emotional tone not only of the piece to which it refers but of many others, which are contained in it, so to speak, in a concentrated, quintessential form, so that the phrase has come to serve as a convenient label for a whole wide-ranging, ill-defined area of sensibility, associated with Ireland’s music, yet transcending it: a country of the mind to which I find myself returning, with a recurrent nostalgia, over and over again.

The dominant image evoked is of a wooded and remote countryside, silent and frost-bound in the early twilight of a winter’s evening. It is the dead season, yet there is a subtle, half-realized feeling of spring in the air: a stirring of bird-life in the woods, the catkins lengthening upon the hazels, the first celandine, perhaps, gleaming precociously in the sheltered hedgerow. After a day of rain and unbroken cloud, the western sky is suddenly clear, a broad rift of brightness palely green over the humped outline of the woods: the days are ‘drawing out’, and the land itself seems to extend with the lengthening days, one is suddenly aware of far, illimitable distances. The dimension of Time, also, is extended in this country of the mind, Uricon or Camelot lie beyond those farther woods; and on the beech-crowned hill, where the cromlech rises stark against the rainy sunset, the ancient and bloody rites are celebrated anew, and the beacon fires are lit for Beltane or Samhain.

That, as Mr Eliot so disconcertingly remarks at the end of one of his more lyrical passages,

That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory . . .

In 1943, on a sweltering August day in Tripoli, I wrote a nostalgic poem called ‘Month’s Mind’, all about woe and presages of doom in the remembered, childhood landscape of the Elham Valley:

This is the fell season,

Predestined and foreknown—

With the woe-waters rising

In the hollow hills

Above Ottinge and Lyminge:

The sudden disastrous waters

Flooding the frost-bound valley

And the sullen pastures;

Washing the wood’s fringe, lapping

The low-built farm:

Heralds of the spring-fever,

Foretelling harm . . .

And so on. It wasn’t a very good poem, and its atmosphere of brooding tragedy and disaster seems, as I reread it today, curiously artificial and voulu—for I remember that I was feeling particularly cheerful at the time I wrote it. Yet the discrepancy, I suppose, is not really very surprising, for the character of a poem seldom has any direct connection with the circumstances in which it was written; and most war-poems, after all, are the products of nostalgia.

Some years later I conceived the idea of using ‘Month’s Mind’ as the title for a book about wild-flowers (the book, I should explain, was arranged in twelve sections, corresponding to the months of the year). The association was, it must be admitted, rather tenuous; and my publisher (very rightly, I daresay) rejected the title on the grounds that it might suggest—insofar as it suggested anything—a treatise on menstruation.

A phrase, a first line, a possible title—their effect upon others is unpredictable, but for oneself they can become obsessional, giving one no peace till one has attempted to create the work which their nagging importunity seems to demand. Such words, titles, etc., are the irritant grains of sand which may, given the right conditions, produce a pearl; but too often, alas, even if one achieves it, the pearl is manifestly a false one.

The ‘woe-waters’, those

Heralds of the spring-fever,

Foretelling harm,
are, so far as I know, a phenomenon peculiar to East Kent. Little is known, apparently, of the provenance of these subterranean springs which, rising irregularly, are supposed—as comets and eclipses once were—to presage disaster. They are locally known by the generic name of ‘Nailbourne’—a word of whose etymology I am ignorant. As for their reputed faculty for heralding misfortune, another and well-accredited local tradition asserts (despite all evidence to the contrary) that they rise—or may be expected to rise—every seven years: a hypothesis which—since misfortunes, of whatever kind, seldom oblige us by occurring with so convenient a periodicity—would seem to invalidate the theory that the Nailbournes are harbingers of woe. (Brand, quoting Hasted’s History of Kent, notes that they ‘break out for one, or perhaps two successive years, and at others, with two, three or more years intervention’. Their rising, he adds, ‘is held by the common people as the forerunner of scarcity and dearness of corn and victuals.’)

In fact—as I have observed myself—the woe-waters rise at irregular intervals, and their appearance or non-appearance seems to have no very noticeable relation either to local or to more widespread disasters. True, our local Nailbourne rose with an unaccustomed frequency immediately before and during the first World War, and more than once during the second; on the other hand, it appears to have emerged fairly often (and without any very deleterious effects) during the twenties and thirties. (It is only fair to add, however, that its rising in the spring of 1935 was widely supposed to have portended the death of King George V.)

I remember, in particular, the woe-water—a more than usually copious one—of 1919: a year in which, surely (since the war was over, and no other major calamity threatening), the spring might have been expected to remain dry. As it happened, I was rather pleased by its emergence on this occasion, since the small tributary which, branching off from the main stream, encircled the nut-orchard nearly opposite our cottage, provided a convenient bathing place for the tame grass-snake which I had recently bought at Gamage’s Pet Department (for I had, at last, made the long-anticipated journey to London, where my family had spent the last six months). As for the grass-snake, he seemed to enjoy, in a rather condescending way, his morning baths in the Nailbourne; the stream, moreover, by partially flooding the neighbouring fields, had enormously increased the population of frogs, which were the grass-snake’s favourite prey.

I remember that year, however, for other and more important reasons: for in London I had acquired not only the grass-snake but a box of fireworks—the first I had ever possessed. In London, too, I had been taken to the Zoo and to Madame Tussaud’s, as well as to several ‘grown-up’ theatres (Chu Chin Chow and The Maid of the Mountains); I had also—and it was not the least of the excitements of that eventful winter—made the long-promised descent (in the self-imposed rôle of Proserpina) into the mysterious, Plutonic underworld of the Tube. I travelled daily to school—from Earl’s Court to Sloane Square—by the District Railway, but the ‘District’, since it emerged intermittently above ground, seemed to me a poor substitute for the authentic Stygian darkness of the Tube itself; and sometimes, for a treat, I would be allowed to change at South Kensington, and make the rest of the journey by the Piccadilly line, whose sulphurous, infernal depths were hardly to be dist-inguished—as I believed—from the legendary kingdom of ‘gloomy Dis’.

Despite, however, these metropolitan gaieties and distractions, I was glad enough to return, in that early spring of 1919, to our country cottage. The circumstances of our departure were, in several respects, unusual: for one thing, my mother and father had gone for a holiday to Devonshire, and ‘Ninnie’ and I (and the grass-snake) were going down to the cottage by ourselves. This alone would have been exciting enough; but the journey in itself was destined to provide a special and unprecedented thrill of its own.

In the ordinary way our annual pilgrimage to the cottage—that remote outpost of civilization beyond the hills—was accomplished by train (S. E. & C. R., Elham Valley Line); the journey, moreover, necessarily began at Folkestone, and from long habit I had become so accustomed to it that I should have found it hard to believe that the village could be reached by other means, or from any other direction. This year, however, we were to approach it not from Folkestone but from London; odder still, we were not even to travel by train, but were to be driven down in the large green van which delivered wine for my father’s firm. Mr Mummery, the driver of the van, was a bluff, fatherly figure in whom, if the circumstances had been less extraordinary, I should have had the utmost confidence; yet the journey before us was so strange and unprecedented that I was privately convinced—for all my faith in Mr Mummery’s sterling qualities—that we should never reach our destination. In the first place, I still couldn’t quite believe (despite my newly-acquired metropolitan sophistication) that our village could really be reached except by way of the Elham Valley line; moreover, I was virtually certain, even if Mr Mummery knew the way—which seemed to me highly doubtful—that we should never be able to negotiate, in safety, those wild outlandish territories by which I knew the village to be surrounded, and which, as I had always supposed, must be inhabited exclusively by tramps, Mormons, drunken soldiers, gipsies, white-slave traffickers and all those other dangerous and outlawed categories of the human race whom the grown-ups were wont to discuss, in shocked undertones, when they supposed me not to be listening.

We set out from Earl’s Court, on that morning in late March, at the abnormally early hour of half-past eight; not even the parcel of fireworks, nor the grass-snake which, imprisoned in a well-ventilated cardboard box, I carried on my knees, could wholly distract my mind from the haunting conviction that we were setting forth on a forlorn hope. None the less, I found the journey—at least for the first hour or so—entertaining enough; but London seemed to go on for an unreasonably long time, and, with my thoughts set now upon the country, I soon became bored. Nor was the country, when it did at last begin, in the least like any country I knew: rows of little pink houses with patches of green in between. Later these green stretches became more frequent, but by the afternoon—after a sandwich lunch somewhere near Maidstone—I was feeling extremely tired, and had lost interest in the landscape which, for hour after hour, slipped monotonously past the window. Our route was circuitous, for the van had a number of orders to deliver in out-of-the-way places; and it was late in the afternoon, with the light already thickening into twilight, when at last Mr Mummery turned to me with an encouraging twinkle in his eye and said:

‘Nearly home now.’

I looked out of the window with a sense of complete incredulity: for nothing could have been more unlike our own countryside than that through which we were passing. For the last half-hour or more we had been driving through a network of narrow lanes between dense woodlands; as we went on, the lanes became narrower still, and Mr Mummery was forced to drive more and more slowly. The woods seemed never-ending—dusky, impenetrable thickets of oak and hazel, stretching as far as one could see; here and there a gap would occur, revealing a landscape of rolling hills and valleys, still densely wooded, and stretching away limitlessly into the fading, watery light of the spring sunset.

Wholly unfamiliar and vaguely hostile, this countryside, I was convinced, could not possibly be anywhere ‘near home’, and I didn’t for a moment believe that Mr Mummery was speaking the truth. Once we passed an old man with a beard, squatting by the roadside—almost certainly (I decided) a tramp; and a few minutes later, turning a corner, we nearly knocked over a young man on a bicycle, riding on the wrong side of the road. Something about him—his red face, or his rough, threadbare clothes—reminded me of Jim the Gardener; he shouted after us, angrily; and I was more and more convinced that these remote unknown woodlands were the haunt of blackguards and criminals, and that we should probably, at any moment now, be set upon and murdered. Mr Mummery had certainly been lying—no doubt in a well-meant attempt to keep up our spirits . . . Suddenly the road dipped abruptly, a cottage came into view, then another.

‘Know where you are now, don’t you?’ said Mr Mummery.

I looked at the broadening road, the reassuring cottages; I still couldn’t tell where we were, yet there was something, it seemed, vaguely familiar about that thatched roof, that garden with its clumps of double daffodils gleaming wanly in the sunset light. A moment later we emerged on to a main road, and a cluster of buildings, a church-spire, leapt into sudden view. I recognized the spire as that of Barham Church; and knew that we had reached the Elham Valley at last, at a point only a mile or so from our own village.

I craned my head out of the window, looking back at those distant wooded hills, darkly outlined against the clear greenish radiance of the sunset: threatening and inimical, yet powerless, now that we were safely back in our ‘own’ country, to exert their malign influence; and I realized, from the direction in which they lay, that those woods through which we had lately passed must be part of that remote, unexplored forest-belt in the midst of which lay the inn called the Dog and Clambercrown.

Very different had been, in earlier years, our annual—or sometimes bi-annual—journeys to our summer village, when, starting from Shorncliffe Station, we would chug comfortably along the Elham Valley, through Lyminge, Elham and Barham, to the familiar dactylic rhythm of ‘Ne pas se pencher au dehors’—mysterious words which, inscribed upon a little enamel plate beneath the windows, I conceived to be a sort of spell to make the train ‘go’, rather than a warning to foreign tourists (who, in any case, must have been of infrequent occurrence on the Elham Valley line).

The real journey—the train journey, that is to say—began from Shorncliffe; but hardly less exciting were the preparatory phases of the great expedition: the matutinal bustle of departure, the unfamiliar aspect of rooms covered in dust-sheets or (if the house were to be let for the summer) with their more valuable ornaments removed and the furniture rearranged. Ninnie and I would set forth, at last, in a cab (hired from Clayson’s Garage in Sandgate), upon the preliminary trek to the frontier-station of Shorncliffe—the last outpost, as it were, of civilization, and the gateway to that perilous kingdom beyond the hills. At a later date we would sometimes make the whole journey by car; but at this period our annual migrations followed an invariable routine: Ninnie and I—a kind of advance-party—would travel by train (taking with us, incidentally, the greater part of the luggage), while the rest of the family followed in the motor. (It was called ‘the motor’ in those days—an old-fashioned Singer, with a high driver’s seat, a cumbrous and unmanageable hood, and enormous brass head-lamps.)

The cab, then, took Ninnie and myself—together with a vast pile of luggage—to Shorncliffe Station. We went by way of Coolinge Lane—that semi-rural prelude to the ‘real’ country, haunted by wicked suffragettes; a remote-seeming, alien territory which we seldom visited unless, as now, we were on our way to the station. We avoided it, I think, on our walks, not from fear of suffragettes but because the steep hill which led up to it was supposed to be ‘tiring’ for my not-very-strong legs (and perhaps for Ninnie’s as well). Our rare visits there were occasioned chiefly by a mysterious institution referred to as the ‘Cruelty-to-Children’: my mother, it seemed, had volunteered to collect funds for this depraved, and sadistic organization, and was accustomed to delegate most of the work to Ninnie. (These house-to-house visits were not, I seem to remember, very successful; people were apt to be rather rude, and sometimes slammed the door in our faces.) Often our expeditions would take us nearly to the end of the lane itself, where there was a small farm whose midden-smells would fill me with nostalgia for the country, which, one felt, couldn’t be so very far away, after all. Just beyond the farm, at the corner where Coolinge Lane joined the Shorncliffe Road, stood a squalid and rather forbidding public-house; needless to say we didn’t call there, and seldom indeed penetrated so far.

Apart from the Cruelty-to-Children, I would occasionally be taken along Coolinge Lane to have tea with friends of my mother’s, who inhabited one of the smart modern villas then being built in what was still considered to be ‘almost the country’; and on one never-to-be-forgotten occasion I was hurried up the hill to see an aeroplane (piloted, I believe, by Graham White) which had actually descended in a field at the top. The lane, in fact, had acquired for me, in one way and another, an atmosphere of excitement and adventure: half ‘country’, the haunt of suffragettes and an occasional aeroplane, it seemed the sort of place where anything might happen. Owing to its healthy position above the sea, a number of very ‘superior’ schools had established themselves there, and often, as we passed, we would hear the concerted squealing of little girls playing hockey or net-ball, or the more purposeful and (to me) more alarming shouts and whistles from some boys’ football match. For if Coolinge Lane held the promise of romance and adventure, it portended also the far less attractive prospect of ‘school’—a prospect to which, indeed, I already looked forward with the utmost horror, imagining it as a world in which, when one wasn’t playing football or cricket, one was perpetually being forced to fight bigger boys than oneself—‘stripped to the waist’, according to most of the school-stories I had read—behind the chapel. (The phrase ‘stripped to the waist’ I found especially terrifying, and such was my native modesty that the prospect of having to take off my clothes in public seemed to me far more alarming than the idea of being knocked-out or possibly even maimed for life; though it should be added that, my sado-masochistic tendencies being somewhat precociously developed, I vastly enjoyed reading descrip-tions of such shameless and brutal episodes, provided I could feel sure that nothing of the kind was ever likely to happen to myself.)

Coolinge Lane, for that matter, evoked not only ideas of school but also, the closely-associated conception of the Army; for Shorncliffe Camp lay only a mile or so beyond the lane, to westward, and in our peregrinations on behalf of the Cruelty-to-Children we could scarcely fail to be aware of its proximity. The grim grey barracks were visible across the valley which dipped down towards Sandgate, and the far cries of bugles would be borne to us, faintly, across the high, aery pastures which separated us from that community of males which, even more than the world of school, was associated for me with ideas of violence, nudity and a kind of vicarious yearning for danger and adventure.

Our progress, then, to the ‘frontier-station’ of Shorncliffe was in itself not without excitement; as we approached the station, the hills—Caesar’s Camp and Sugarloaf—loomed nearer: impregnable bastions defending the hinterland beyond. At this stage, too, I would begin to look out for ‘The Chimney’—a tall, tapering structure, with a peculiar enlargement at the top, for which I had conceived a curious and (I suppose) rather sinister passion. The chimney belonged, I think, to the Folkestone Electric light works, and, for almost as long as I could remember, had provided one of the main preliminary thrills of our annual journey to the country. Any amateur Freudian will no doubt pounce upon this particular obsession of mine and identify the chimney as a phallic symbol—and very possibly the Freudian may be right; yet I retain, I’m afraid, a romantic, pre-psychoanalytical prejudice in this matter, and I am inclined to believe that I loved that chimney with a purely platonic passion, for its own sake.

The Chimney, at any rate, was one of the abiding charms of Shorncliffe Station which, to my mind, differed essentially from Folkestone Central, being at least three-quarters of a mile nearer to the country, and already imbued with a quality which, if not exactly rural, was certainly suggestive of wider vistas. Seated at last in the train itself, sealed off not only from the outside world but also (for there were no corridors on the Elham Valley line) from the other carriages, and attended, moreover, by a kind and fatherly person called ‘the guard’, one felt adequately protected against the perils which lay ahead (they included, amongst others, ‘The Tunnel’, which, though a very short one, never failed—for this was long before I had made the facile descent into the Avernus of the London Tube—to terrify me out of my wits). I felt myself in the position of a V.I.P. who is transported, in an armoured car and with a strong escort of troops, through enemy-occupied territory. One wouldn’t, of course (even if one were a Frenchman), be so silly as to lean out of the window: the bilingual warning, partly utilitarian, partly (as I supposed) pure magic, was perfectly clear. Not only did one risk breaking one’s neck—particularly in the tunnel—but one was more than likely (I thought) to fall a victim to the savage tribes who inhabited the interior, and who might only too easily ‘pick one off’ with a stray bullet or, even, with an arrow poisoned with curare . . . One was, in fact—provided one was not so foolish as to ‘pencher’ oneself ‘au dehors’—pretty safe; and if all else failed there was, of course, ‘The Communication Cord’.

This triumph of the hermetic art (the penalty for the ‘improper use’ of which was five pounds) was a last resource, an infallible protection—as I was convinced—against the worst disasters, such as an attack by natives or even, perhaps, by suffragettes. Provided one’s intentions were bona fide, the Communication Cord was a perfectly proper and admissible form of Magic. One operated it, in those days, by pulling down a small rubber bulb, attached to a horizontal chain; the bulbs, nowadays, seem to have vanished, not only on the Elham Valley line (which, alas, has vanished itself) but on every other line too; and only the rather unromantic chain remains. The bulb fascinated me because it suggested a cross between going to the lavatory and having one’s photograph taken; the latter experience had recently been inflicted upon me more than once, and, though I disliked it, I was rather taken by the little bulb which the photographer (a mysterious, mobled figure in a black hood) pressed at the critical moment. It seemed to me that, in the train, the bulb of the Communication Cord, despite the fact that one was adjured to pull it, ought, on the contrary, to be squeezed, as though one were taking a photograph (‘Smile, please’); upon which—if one happened to be in the throes of some mortal combat with cannibals or suffragettes—an omnipotent genie would appear, in a puff of smoke, and summarily vanquish one’s enemies.

For the most part—and always excepting Acrise, which in any case I had to take on trust—the territories between Shorncliffe and our own village were unknown to me. True, at a somewhat later date than that of which I am writing, I had been taken to the top of the hills (where I had found the Bee Orchid), and had surveyed this pays de dissidence from the earthworks upon the summit of Caesar’s Camp; but the view from the hilltop had been, as it happened, extremely disappointing: instead of the expected canyons and savannahs and impenetrable jungles, what in fact met my eye was a prospect of flat, dull-looking fields, bounded by a fringe of rather uninteresting woodland. Nor, for that matter, was the journey through the Elham Valley ever quite so exciting as I expected it to be: the villages which we passed through—Lyminge, Elham, Barham—seemed to me mere extensions of the ‘frontier-station’ of Shorncliffe, bearing very little relation to the real hinterland which lurked behind those deceptively innocent-looking fields and hillocks which bordered the line.

At last, somewhere beyond Barham—and safely past the terrors of the tunnel—we would run into familiar country: the low-lying meadows about Kingston, then the chalky expanses of Charlton Park; a moment later we would pass under the footbridge by which we were accustomed to cross the line on our way to the copse (famous for its bluebells) which we called Teazel Wood. A few seconds more and we would emerge, from beneath another bridge, into our ‘own’ station. The train, with a fussy air of self-importance, pulled up; we descended, to the familiar and ear-splitting noise of belching steam; our luggage (all carefully labelled) was retrieved, by a leisurely porter, from the luggage-van, and we were received, by Mr Dunk the stationmaster (a sympathetic and kindly character, though reputed to Live in Sin with one of the village girls), with only less deference than that accorded to Colonel Bell, the squire of Bourne, or to Major Tattersall—a kind of rival squire, but of a somewhat inferior breed—at Charlton Park.

The perilous journey was over at last.

We had arrived; and when the train, after a good deal of belching and spitting, had at last puffed away down the chalky cutting towards Canterbury, we would be enfolded in the sudden country silence: that silence which, it seemed to me, differed profoundly not only in degree but qualitatively, in its very essence, from the silence, say, of the undercliff (haunted always, on the stillest day, by the murmur of the sea), or, even, from the brooding quietude of the Folkestone hills. If it were April, the sudden stillness would be emphasized, rather than broken, by the calling of a cuckoo somewhere among the trees of Bourne Park; and I would sniff, with an acute, never-failing delight, the unique and delicious country smell—composed (if this were a spring visit) of the scent of violets and the fainter, slightly vinous aroma of primroses, combined with the pervasive exhalations of wet earth and wood-smoke and the lingering, steamy, slightly sulphurous odour of the train itself.

Later in the year—in June or July—we would be greeted by a richer, more complex texture of sensory impressions: the silence now would seem, if not less profound, in a curious way more positive—a dense, palpable element, viscous and fragrant as a honeycomb, composed of the low, perpetual bourdon of innumerable insects, and of the hypnotic cooing of wood-pigeons. No less manifold and closely compacted were the summer odours which assaulted our nostrils: scents of mignonette and sweet-peas from the station garden; of dust, cow-dung, human sweat and new-mown hay; or, if the season were yet later, the pungent tang of hops from the hop-gardens opposite the station—an odour associated, for me, with yet another seasonal ingredient of that country silence: the distant hum—low, monotonous and, after a time, becoming so much a part of the silence as to be scarcely perceptible—of a threshing machine, far away at Langham Park, or at some farm remoter still, beyond Kingston or the wide park-lands of Bourne.

As we emerged from the station the silence was suddenly intensified, and our sense of having arrived, at last, in the country became more immediate and actual. In June the grassy banks opposite the station entrance would be covered with ox-eye daisies and scarlet poppies; the first wild-flowers to greet us, they possessed for me a specialized and symbolic significance, holding forth, as they did, the promise of innumerable other, more interesting and rarer flowers to be sought for during the long succession of summer days that lay ahead.

We would walk down the hill to the village, followed at a discreet interval by the porter, carrying our luggage on a trolley; if it were late summer, the hop-garden bordering the road would be crowded with pickers—an alien, ferocious tribe whom I had learnt to place in the same forbidden social category as soldiers, tramps, miners (from the local collieries) and bank-holiday trippers. Earlier in the year, however, the hop-gardens presented only their long, receding and unpeopled vistas of odorous and embowered green; and earlier still, when we had come to the cottage for the Easter holidays, the gardens would be all but leafless—a prospect of innumerable naked poles, with the young tendrils showing only a foot or two above ground.

It is these Easter visits which I remember with a particular vividness, for they marked our return to the village after a winter-long absence and seemed, indeed, an integral part of the seasonal process itself—natural and inevitable as the budding of the hedges or the first emergence of primrose or celandine. Turning the corner at the bottom of the hill, I would spare a glance for the two big chestnut trees by the church, for I was fascinated by those fat, sticky buds which, if Easter did not fall too early, would by now be bursting open to reveal the bright green fingers of the unfolding leaves.

But another, more important matter than the chestnut-buds would cause me to hurry forward, past the dark, tree-muffled entrance to the dower-house, towards the corner of the nut-orchard . . . A moment later I would turn and run back to Ninnie, with the reassuring news that the ‘river’ was still there: that ‘woe-water’ which, rising once again, suggested to me no thoughts of imminent doom but, on the contrary, the delightful prospect of investigating, throughout the spring and early summer, its varied and fascinating population of frogs, newts, water-rats and moor-hens (not to mention the exciting possibility of an occasional grass-snake). Another hundred yards and we were at the cottage: unchanged after our long absence, and seemingly unchangeable; a ‘home’ which, by contrast with our house at Sandgate, seemed infinitely more homely, with its smaller, more manageable proportions and its air of being rooted and autochthonous, like the apple-tree in the garden, or the dense canopies of ivy which covered the walls and over-hung the windows of the cottage itself. Already a blue pillar of smoke rose from the chimney—for one of the maids had been sent ahead on the previous day to light fires and air the beds; in a moment Edna or Minnie, whichever it happened to be, would open the door to us, and I would sniff, once again, with the excitement of some exile returned home after long banishment, the never-to-be-forgotten cottage smell: a subtle, elusive and wholly characteristic odour compounded of paraffin, drying linen, moth-balls and freshly-scrubbed floors, mingled inextricably with that musty taint of dampness which, in this low-lying valley, with its pervasive mists and seeping, subterranean woe-waters, could never, even in the hottest summer, be entirely dispersed.

The frontiers which bounded this village ‘outpost’, this isolated pocket of civilization, were, if less immediately apparent, no less definite than those which circumscribed the secure, urbanized world of the undercliff and the Little Paths. At Sandgate these boundaries were imposed largely by the configuration of the land itself: on the one hand the sea, on the other the tall bulwark of the cliffs and, beyond the cliffs, the barrier of the hills. In the country, on the other hand, the frontiers of our familiar province were delimited less by the actual topography of the landscape than by the unalterable orbit of our daily walks and excursions. Thus it would have been unthinkable to go farther, in one direction, than the water-tower, which lay a couple of miles to northward, beyond the crest of Barham Downs; nor, by common consent, did our expeditions in the opposite direction—across the railway—take us farther than the copse whose real name was Ben Hill, but which was known to us as ‘Teazel Wood’. (On one occasion, indeed, we had advanced a short distance beyond this acknowledged frontier, only to be confronted by the putrefying corpse of a badger lying across the woodland path—a bad omen, and a sure sign that we had trespassed upon forbidden territory.) Again, if our walks took us up the station hill, along the borders of Gorsley Wood, the limits of possible exploration were firmly marked, in this direction, by Mr. Adams’s farm, Langham Park, lonely and isolated among its surrounding woods (my mother, so I had been told, had once—very foolhardily, as it seemed to me—spent some weeks there, before I was born, recovering from an illness).

More lonely still, and representing a frontier even more impassable, was Woodgate, a small farm lying to the north of Langham Park, and belonging to Mr Friend, who sometimes supplied us with eggs and poultry. Once my mother had called there, probably to order a duck or a spring chicken for some special occasion, and had been told by Mrs Friend that her husband was ‘out in the country’—indicating, vaguely, the unknown territory away to the south-west, and implying, with somewhat the air of a suburban housewife, that Woodgate (which to us seemed the ‘back of beyond’) was hardly to be considered ‘real’ country at all. Pressed for some further indication of Mr Friend’s whereabouts, she had replied that he was woodcutting—a long way away, ‘up by the Clambercrown’, and could hardly be back before evening, and late evening at that.

‘Up by the Clambercrown.’ . . . The exact position of the inn remained as much of a mystery as ever, though I had at least acquired a vague idea, by now, of the direction in which it lay: somewhere beyond Langham Park and Woodgate, which, of all the frontier-posts by which our province was surrounded, I regarded as being the most fixed and impenetrable. In other directions it was at least possible to conceive of trespassing beyond the recognized boundaries; thus, there seemed no obvious reason why our walks should not extend into the regions beyond the water-tower—an open, undulating tract of countryside with nothing, apparently, in the least sinister about it; yet the fact remained that we never did go farther in that direction, and the fields beyond the tower thereby acquired a wholly adventitious atmosphere of ‘foreignness’ and mystery.

Even less forbidding—to the eyes of one unaccustomed to our habits—were some of the other acknowledged frontier-stations upon the outer orbit of our walks: the village of Bridge, for instance, which was reached by the carriage-drive through Bourne Park; or the manor-house of Bourne itself. The latter, as it happened, had at this period been let by the owners, Colonel and Mrs Bell, to some people called Toynbee, and the Bells themselves inhabited the dower-house, Oswalds, to which I would sometimes be taken to tea with Alec Bell, who was about my own age. Bourne itself, therefore, remained for the most part unvisited, though we would penetrate often enough, with Alec and his nurse, through the dark, overgrown plantation known as the ‘Wilderness’, almost as far as the house, whose pink brickwork and white-painted windows would be framed, at this point, in a long vista of lime-trees beneath which, at Easter-tide, the ground would be carpeted with a host of semi-wild daffodils.

But Bourne, if it represented a limit, a boundary to our excursions, was at least on the hither side, as it were, of the frontier and was, moreover, by association with Alec’s family, a manageable, almost a ‘homely’ conception in itself; even the meadows beyond, since they were bounded by the village of Bridge, which we often visited, were, if not exactly familiar, at any rate a recognized department of our own province.

It was quite otherwise with the country beyond Langham Park and Woodgate; the frontiers here were no mere arbitrary demarcations like the demesne of Bourne or the fields beyond the water-tower but a barrier self-evidently impassable, beyond which lay the wild, unimaginable territories of the ‘real’ country. Our walks and picnics, if they took us in this direction, were attended by a special and, to me, not wholly pleasant air of adventure and excitement. Climbing the station hill we would set out along the narrow, dusty road which led up to Langham Park. From here, already, we could see on our right the dense thickets of Gorsley Wood rising against the sky-line; and on the left other woods, less often visited, fringed the summits of the high, sloping fields. As we walked on, leaving the oast-houses of Lenhall Farm on our right, the woods seemed to converge, from either side, upon the narrowing road; and though we were as yet well within the recognized ‘safety-zone’, with Langham Park still a good twenty minutes’ walk ahead, I would begin to feel, already, a faint apprehension, a sense of the dangers lurking in the forest-belt a mere half-mile or so in front of us.

Usually we would leave the road before reaching the farm and turn up a steep track into Gorsley Wood. Famed for its primroses, Gorsley was an invariable objective for our spring excursions, and it was here, perhaps, that I first discovered the Early Purple Orchid, destined to inspire me with a life-long passion. In spring, Gorsley seemed a pleasant and friendly enough place—always provided that we didn’t penetrate too far into it; in summer, with the dense thickets made denser by their undergrowth and the high forests of bracken which bordered the innumerable intersecting paths, the wood took on a less pleasant, rather forbidding air and I would cling more closely to the side of Ninnie or of Alec’s nurse, apprehending the presence of I knew not what hostile forces in the depths of the close-ranked hazels and hornbeams.

My apprehension was largely due to the fact that Gorsley Wood, so far as I could tell, had no ‘end’; we never, at any rate, penetrated to the farther side of it, and it seemed to me only too probable that the dark, overgrown thickets went on for ever. Here, indeed, more than anywhere else in the neighbourhood, the frontiers were ill-defined: there was no definite, recognized point beyond which we ‘didn’t go’, and it seemed to me by no means impossible that we might, without knowing it, pass the boundary line, and find ourselves in the forbidden lands beyond Woodgate from which, in all likelihood, we should never be able to return.

In fact, as I knew, Gorsley extended not only as far as Woodgate but for some distance beyond it; lacking, therefore, the familiar landmark of the farmhouse itself, how were we to tell when we had crossed the frontier into the Terrible Zone on the other side? The paths, moreover, were numerous and confusing, and it was all too easy to get lost; once or twice, indeed, this did occur, and we were only saved—as I was convinced—from death by slow starvation (or possibly at the hands of ‘natives’ or wild beasts) by a timely encounter with one of Colonel Bell’s keepers, who put us on our way.

We never, as I have said, penetrated to the farther limits (if indeed they existed) of Gorsley Wood; on more than one occasion, however, in summer, when we had taken with us a picnic tea and were in no hurry to get home, we would make for a part of the wood more distant and, as it seemed to me, more desolate and unwelcoming than the areas which we commonly frequented. The path which we had been following would emerge suddenly into a field—but a field surrounded by woodland and sloping down to a valley beyond which rose further and more extensive woods. At the top of the field we would unpack our picnic things; despite the illusion of openness one had the sense of being more enclosed, more inescapably confined, than in the midst of the woods themselves. The field bore the odd name of California—a word which seemed to me perfectly suited to the remote, forlorn quality of the place itself. It wasn’t a particularly attractive spot to choose for a picnic, and I have sometimes wondered why we made the special effort to get there. The surrounding thickets produced a curious feeling of oppression and uneasiness; one had a feeling, always, of intruding at one’s peril on some private domain. I, at any rate, took a dislike to California; I even conceived a vague idea that it was ‘haunted’; and I am inclined to think—despite the lack of any very definite evidence—that my suspicion may have been well founded.

One hot summer’s afternoon Ninnie and I had set out by ourselves for California. We sat down in the usual spot and unpacked our tea; the enclosed space was airless and stuffy, the woods seemed more than ever to exhale, from their silent depths, a vague yet perceptible feeling of enmity. I became more and more apprehensive, possessed by an insidious, creeping fear which made me shiver as though I were sickening for a fever. I tried to eat my lettuce-sandwiches, tried to talk about ordinary, everyday things; but at last I could bear it no longer. I pleaded that I wasn’t hungry, that I had a ‘funny’ feeling, and should like to go home.

Ninnie, very wisely, said nothing at the time; only many years later, recalling that distant afternoon in my early childhood, did she confess to me that she had had precisely the same ‘funny’ feeling as I had experienced myself—a sense of lurking evil and imminent danger exhaling from those silent, impenetrable thickets.

It was hardly surprising if, after such an experience, I was inclined to believe that on our expeditions to the place called California we had unwittingly crossed the boundary which separated us from the dangerous lands beyond. Yet on one occasion, at a slightly earlier date, I had penetrated even farther into the Forbidden Kingdom—an experience which, though it entailed no special terrors or disasters, I looked back upon with considerable pride.

The ostensible reason for this perilous jaunt was a flower-show at the village of Upper Hardres, which my mother had taken it into her head to visit. We were to go on foot; the expedition was to consist of my mother and myself, Ninnie, and my aunts Gertie and Ada, who happened to be staying with us. Had I been required to undertake the journey with Ninnie alone, or even with my mother, I might well have found the prospect alarming; but the addition of two large and healthy aunts to our company seemed a fairly adequate insurance against disaster, and I was able to look forward to the outing without too much apprehension.

The village of Hardres lay over beyond the farthest confines of Gorsley—far beyond Woodgate and Langham Park, unimaginably remote from our own familiar country. We set off, on a warm August morning, by the road leading to Gorsley: myself in a push-cart, with the sandwiches and Thermos flasks stacked at my feet. Half an hour’s walk brought us to Woodgate, the point at which, on ordinary occasions, we should have turned back. Today we walked straight on, past the farmhouse with its cowsheds and duck-pond, down a steep narrow lane running between dense hazel-thickets. The over-arching trees made of the lane a dark leafy tunnel which, as we continued down it, seemed to become narrower and darker still. There was, it seemed to me, something vaguely familiar about this enclosed, twilit passage through the woods—a vestigial memory, perhaps, of that long-ago summer at Acrise, from which an indistinct impression remained of gloomy, tree-muffled lanes such as this one, winding on endlessly through unknown woodlands.

Presently we emerged, once more, into sunlight, descending a hill between open fields towards Bursted Manor, which I had once identified, in a tentative way, as the home of the ‘Stumps’ family—a theory which I had lately, reluctantly, discarded, for I had heard that the people who lived at Bursted (and with whom my family were acquainted) were Roman Catholics, and nothing in Stumps had ever suggested that the Grants were anything but the staunchest of Anglicans, and Low-church ones at that.

We passed Bursted Manor and began to climb the hill beyond; soon we were once again involved in a succession of green tunnels, which seemed to continue interminably, leading us farther and farther into the hitherto forbidden kingdom . . . At some stage of the journey we sat down on the roadside and ate our lunch; but fatigue and over-excitement had, by this time, almost totally inhibited my capacity for registering new impressions. I remember little of the rest of the journey, and almost nothing of the flower-show itself: a vague memory remains of a hot, stifling tent filled with masses of purple and crimson phlox, and of the ear-splitting blaring and tootling of a brass band. Of the return journey I can recall even less; it may be presumed, however, that we arrived home safely, having suffered no ill-effects from our perilous excursion other than (and more particularly, as I seem to remember, in the case of Aunt Gertie) a blister or two on the soles of our feet.

Aunt Gertie was chiefly to be distinguished from Aunt Ada by the fact that she wore small, circular gold ear-rings rather like half-sovereigns—a fact which led me to suppose (incorrectly, as it happened) that she was very rich. She was, on the whole, a more familiar figure than Aunt Ada, who, being married to an officer in the Gunners, spent much of her life in India (it was her two daughters, Gertrude and Nancy, whom I had somewhat arbitrarily identified with the Angelica Kaufmann prints of Cordelia and Eurydice). Her Indian background, not surprisingly, endowed Aunt Ada with an aura of romance and exoticism: once she had brought home for me a krait skin, which was one of my most treasured possessions. India, though endeared to me by the number, size and venomous properties of its snakes (I longed to ask Aunt Ada to bring home a live one), seemed to me a place where the most terrifying and improbable events were a matter of almost daily occurrence: Aunt Ada herself, for example, had once got a scorpion entangled in her hair, and was only rescued from a rapid and agonizing death by the gallant behaviour of Uncle Arthur, who had snipped off a sizeable lock just in time. My impressions of India, however, were perhaps derived less from Aunt Ada than from the story of Little Detchie-head—that most terrifying of children’s books, rivalling for sheer Freudian horror even Strewwelpeter itself.

I suppose that Little Detchie-head has, like Stumps, been long forgotten; it is certainly out of print and appears to be quite unobtainable. The little book was published, I think, in the same series as the better-known Little Black Sambo and Little Black Mingo; at any rate, the format and the illustrations were very similar. I should not be surprised to learn that Little Detchie-head had been withdrawn by the publishers, at an early date, in response to the protests of parents whose children, only too probably, had become half-witted or stark raving mad after reading it. The only reason I didn’t go mad myself was, I think, because the scene of Little Detchie-head was, after all, laid in India, and I could comfort myself—as we have most of us comforted ourselves, in recent times, when reading some more than usually terrifying ‘exposure’ of Nazism or Communism—with the thought that ‘it couldn’t happen here’.

Little Detchie-head was about a little girl ‘who lived with her parents in India’. Apparently normal and well behaved in other respects, she suffered from a precocious form of pyromania, which manifested itself in an incurable passion for poking fires. One day, in the kitchen, when the Indian servant’s back was turned, she slipped and fell (it was only to be expected) headlong into the flames, and ‘her head was burned right off’—though the rest of her, oddly enough, remained not only intact but, apparently, alive and kicking. The servant returns—‘And, oh! Domingo’s face,’ says the text, ‘when he saw his little missy-baba lying on the floor with no head.’ Domingo, however, is a resourceful type; hastily seizing a large detchie, or cooking-pot, from a shelf, he paints a pair of eyes, a nose and a mouth upon its side, and sets it carefully upon the heroine’s severed neck, surmounting it (a nice touch, this) by her cotton sun-bonnet, which apparently, by some miracle, has survived the flames. With remarkable self-possession (and suffering, apparently, from no considerable after-effects) little Detchie-head trots off to her parents who, it seems, notice nothing particularly unusual about her, apart from the fact that ‘all she can say is “Clap, clap, clapper-apper-apper.” ’ This rudimentary vocabulary apparently suffices her for the next few weeks, nor do her parents seem unduly troubled by it. Christmas, however, comes at last, and Santa Claus, with an admirable appropriateness, leaves in the little girl’s stocking a large, blonde, pink-faced doll’s head. Delighted by this seasonable Yule-tide gift, little Detchie-head rises with the lark and, discarding the unbecoming detchie, sticks the doll’s head upon her neck, with the help of a handy pot of glue. Then she runs to Mamma and Papa, tossing her expensive, brand-new curls, and chattering away nineteen-to-the-dozen—presumably in her normal, pre-Detchie-head accents. ‘And’, so the story relates, ‘they were very much pleased’—surely, one feels, in the circumstances, a rather tepid reaction on the parents’ part; though they do not, it must be admitted, appear to have been a very sensitive, or perceptive couple. Little Detchie-head, at any rate, is completely cured, thereafter, of her pyromaniacal proclivities, and indeed, as the author (or authoress, as I suspect) concludes, ‘has to be dragged past a fire’ in future.

The surprising thing about Little Detchie-head is, I think, its date—it must have been published in the nineties or the early nineteen-hundreds—and also the fact that it was written, presumably, by a middle-class Englishwoman for English children. Strewwelpeter, after all, was written by a German, and an early nineteenth-century German at that, so that one can explain it—if not excuse it—as a by-product of the ‘Romantic Agony’. But Little Detchie-head is quite another kettle of fish: one doesn’t look for such sadistic horrors in Edwardian England, and it seems barely credible that it should ever have been published in this country, let alone widely read (as it undoubtedly was) in English nurseries.

In my own case, as I have said, the Indian setting made the horrors of the story seem comfortably remote; on the other hand, the knowledge that such appalling events could happen there was to colour my ideas about India for years to come (the only other book about India by which I was ever deeply influenced was E. M. Forster’s novel, which, when I first read it, seemed more or less to confirm the alarming impression made by Little Detchie-head). I developed, myself, a wholesome dread of fires; and the sight of an Ayah, attendant upon some children staying in our village, could fill me with a tremulous apprehension. I was half-inclined, too, to identify the original little Detchie-head with my cousin, Nancy Pullen, whose hair was suspiciously blonde and curly, and who, moreover, had for several years ‘lived with her parents in India’. I never dared to ask her whether she had had, at one period of her life, a ‘detchie’ instead of a head; but it remained a disturbing possibility, and I should hardly have been surprised if, reverting suddenly to her former detchie-hood, she had startled the company at tea-time by rattling out those jangling, metallic syllables (‘Clap, clap, clapper-apper-apper’) which had left her heartless and imper-cipient parents so strangely unmoved.

The trip to Upper Hardres had been a sufficiently foolhardy adventure; yet at a later date we were to penetrate even farther into those savage, unreclaimed provinces beyond Gorsley and Woodgate. On this occasion it was a question of collecting some eggs from a Mrs Hopper, who lived at a farm somewhere beyond Kingston, the village on the farther side of Charlton Park. It must have been in that spring of 1919—when the woe-waters had flowed with so inappropriate a prodigality—that we made the expedition; for I remember insisting that my newly-acquired grass-snake should accompany us. It would be nice, I thought, for him to have a ‘walk’, after being shut up for so long in the Pet Department at Gamage’s; though I suspect, also, that I wanted to ‘show off’ to Mrs Hopper, for I had found that the possession of a live—and supposedly venomous—snake was an almost infallible way of impressing the grown-ups, who, seeing the harmless reptile curled about my neck, were apt to credit me with supranormal and even diabolic powers.

We set off, then, one spring afternoon—Ninnie, myself and our maid Alice—through Charlton Park towards Kingston, accompanied by the snake, who was accommodated, for convenience, in a jam-pot (from which, however, I would release him, at intervals, for a little healthy exercise). From Kingston we turned up a narrow road between high hedgerows, lying on the brink of a deep valley known as Covert Lane. This country beyond Kingston was, to me, wholly unfamiliar; our road lay parallel with the valley for several miles, and from our higher level we could look down on Covert Lane itself, winding away through dense woodlands towards the south-west.

It was, by our scale of measurement, a longish way to Mrs Hopper’s, and when we arrived at her farmhouse I felt that now, at any rate, we were in what Mr Friend would have called the ‘real country’; yet I didn’t, on this occasion, feel particularly alarmed by the fact that we had once again (and more boldly than heretofore) violated our accustomed frontiers. For one thing, of course, I was older; moreover, we had made this particular journey into the interior by a different and, as it seemed to me, an altogether ‘safer’ route. There was nothing, for instance, in the least alarming about Kingston itself—a rather undistinguished village, and reassuringly near home; Marley Lane, too (where Mrs Hopper lived), ran through comparatively open country, and there were other houses, besides hers, scattered along the roadside; the côté de chez Hopper, in fact, was almost wholly lacking in those sinister qualities which distinguished that other, more perilous approach—by way of Woodgate—to the Forbidden Kingdom.

Mrs Hopper and her daughter were duly impressed by the snake; and, having collected the eggs which were the object of our journey, we started homeward. Once or twice, with a faint stirring of curiosity, I glanced back at those wild lands, already darkening against the sunset, which lay beyond Mrs Hopper’s farm. As it happened, I was not to revisit Marley Lane for many years; and little could I foresee that, when at last I did so, I should be approaching it from the opposite direction, on my return from a far more disquieting and eventful voyage into the interior.

Hounds met occasionally, as I knew by family tradition, at what was disrespectfully referred to as the ‘Cat-and-Custard-pot’; but naturally there was not the faintest prospect of my ever attending those mythical saturnalia, remote, thunderous and wreathed about with the viscid and poisonous foliage of henbane, ‘up at the Clambercrown’. Fortunately, however, the meets sometimes occurred elsewhere, and nearer home; and on one red-letter day the portentous event—variable yet predictable as the appearance of a comet or a total eclipse of the sun—took place in our own village, at Lenhall Farm, outside the house of Mr Tanner, Colonel Bell’s bailiff.

We must, I suppose, have gone to stay at the cottage, for some exceptional reason, in early spring; for it is a windy March landscape, flushed already with young green, that I seem to remember from that notable occasion when, for the first time in my life, I was taken to a meet. Lenhall was relatively familiar—we passed it often enough on our walks, but at some little distance from the farm itself; the oast-houses, painted in a rather startling, fulvous shade of red, were one of our accustomed landmarks, signifying, when we caught sight of them from the fringes of Gorsley Wood, that we were ‘nearly home’. Yet I had seldom if ever been to Lenhall itself, and I found the occasion somewhat disquieting, not merely on account of the champing horses and the crowds of loud-voiced men but because, from where we stood, in the lee of the oast-houses, I was presented with an unfamiliar aspect of Gorsley—recognizably the same wood, yet, since we were looking at it from a different angle, more than usually forbidding and inimical.

The hunt assembled: a strange, romantic spectacle, such as I had never witnessed before, and suggesting to me some scene from ‘history’ rather than an event which could happen—and was actually happening before my eyes—in the twentieth century and against the familiar background of Lenhall and the neighbouring shrubberies of Bourne. The hounds themselves, milling about the central space among the riders, were exciting enough; not less so were those strange ladies who, in their bowler-hats and riding-habits, appeared to be undergoing some mysterious change of sex, and who, it seemed to me, were probably rather ‘fast’ if not downright wicked, and might even (who knew?) be suffragettes. Among them I suddenly recognized Miss Wimpole—a former friend of my family, but now (since she had proved to be regrettably fast) discredited—in full hunting kit, though mounted not on a horse but upon a green bicycle.

More thrilling, however, to me than either the hounds or the ladies were the men in their scarlet coats (which I was told were really ‘pink’), their black peaked caps and their riding-breeches. One of them in particular attracted my attention: a stalwart man, with greying hair and a handsome though rather stern and forbidding countenance; he seemed to me quite the most romantic figure I had ever encountered outside the adventure stories in Little Folks. I watched him, fascinated by the athletic movements of his taut, well-proportioned body and, more particularly, by his smartly-cut breeches, which seemed to me more thrillingly desirable even than those of Mr Bilham, the baker’s boy.

The hunt, alas, moved off all too soon, and I was taken home to the cottage where, being overcome by that ill-defined malady commonly referred to as ‘over-excitement’, I was violently sick. Yet the romantic visions engendered by the meet were not to be exorcized by a mere attack of vomiting; and I continued for long afterwards to brood, with a recurrent passion of nostalgia, upon the unique, irrecoverable glories of that March morning at Lenhall.

If a meet at Mr Tanner’s—within our own parish, and practically ‘on our doorstep’—could be so deliriously exciting, how much more so, I thought, must be those other, never-to-be-visited meets at the Dog and Clambercrown. Those romantic ladies, those pink-coated and heroic men in their breeches and top-boots—they had not only penetrated to that legendary Land of Heart’s Desire but were, perhaps, the true denizens of the Forbidden Kingdom. These far-ranging, romantic phantasies became embodied, after a time, in the image of that particular stern-visaged huntsman who had made so vivid an impression upon me. In other words, I fell madly in love with him—retrospectively, in secret, and with no earthly prospect, alas, of my love ever being requited. I was accustomed, however, to these one-sided affairs of the heart, and in this case, as so often before, I adopted what was, for me, by far the most satisfactory course of action; instead of brooding, despondently, upon my fate (or, alternatively, attempting the well-nigh impossible task of making my hero’s acquaintance), I sat down firmly, with a pencil and a penny note-book, and started to write a book about him.

These literary sublimations of my errant libido had lately become a common practice of mine; nor were they by any means confined to human beings: my latest excursion into authorship, for instance, had been an ambitious though distinctly specialized treatise on astronomy, arising from a profound and indiscriminate though wholly frustrated passion for comets. This had been initiated by the discovery, in my father’s library, of a portentous work by Guillemin, expensively bound in red morocco, which my father had received, as a strangely inappropriate prize for ‘Good Conduct’, at his private school (and which he himself had almost certainly never read).

Guillemin, for the time being, became my Bible—though, to be sure, it was the illustrations rather than the text which chiefly captured my imagination. The engravings of the various comets—Halley’s, Donati’s, Moore’s, Encke’s and the rest—enchanted me; the letterpress I found frankly beyond me—though I struggled manfully for several days with it, and, being a literary snob, much enjoyed the comments of the grown-ups upon my precocious erudition (though I can hardly suppose that they were really taken in by it). Soon I had embarked upon a work of my own about comets; it was profusely illustrated in water-colour—the pictures, indeed, were probably a good deal better than the text. My one regret was that, comets being of regrettably rare occurrence, I couldn’t see one myself. Night after night I would rake the skies impatiently, hoping against hope that one of those glittering, long-tailed meteors would swim into my ken; but I was unlucky—and have remained so ever since, for I have never, to this day, succeeded in seeing a comet. At that time, I particularly resented the fact that I had been born just too late to see the famous Halley’s comet, which had last appeared in 1910, two years after my birth; and I was not much encouraged by discovering, in Guillemin, that it was due to reappear in another seventy-odd years or so.

Discouraged by the refusal of any known comet to oblige me by making its appearance, I decided to discover a brand-new one for myself. I began once again to search the evening sky with a renewed enthusiasm; and was at last, as I thought, rewarded by the apparition of a blurred patch of light just below Orion’s belt. I had not, I suppose, heard of the great nebula of Orion; or, if I had, I contrived to banish the knowledge conveniently to the back of my mind. The patch of light must, I was convinced, be a comet; not a very exciting one, certainly—not to be compared, for instance, with Donati’s, which in Guillemin’s engraving was shown hanging, like some immense silvery aigrette, over the roofs of Paris. Still, I had at last seen—and had even (so I hoped) discovered—a real comet; and the fact was duly recorded in my treatise, in which my discovery was illustrated by a rather indeterminate little water-colour, washed in with chrome yellow, and labelled impressively ‘Brooke’s Comet’, together with the date upon which I had first observed it.

A passion for comets—since their distance from the earth was to be measured in millions of miles, or even of light-years—was perhaps easier to sublimate than a passion for huntsmen, who were, after all, terrestrial phenomena, and might, on occasion, shed their rare effulgence upon the landscape of the Elham Valley; though more often than not—as in the case of the comets themselves—the path of their transit was too remote for their glories to be visible to the naked eye. The Dog and Clambercrown, for which in former days I had felt merely an ill-defined romantic yearning, now acquired for me a more specialized, an altogether more terre-à-terre attraction; and I longed to attend one of the famous meets there, rather as an enthusiastic but impoverished astronomer might vainly long to visit some distant land in which—and in which alone—the resplendent comet of Donati was due to reappear.

I suppose that, in the course of time, I must have succeeded in sublimating, through the medium of prose, my passion for the huntsman; yet his heroic, pink-coated image continued to haunt my mind for many years, and I suspect, indeed (for such are the improbable sources from which a writer draws his material), that he contributed something to a character in a novel of mine called The Scapegoat which was not to be written till more than thirty years after the meet at Lenhall.

I never, alas, saw my huntsman again; and the Dog and Clamber-crown remained, as ever, beyond the orbit of our journeyings: a meeting-place for heroes, the chosen scene of many a phantasy of blood and violence, yet as remote from my real, quotidian world as the American prairies or the cannibal isles of the South Pacific. Occasionally, however, I would be reminded of its actual, physical existence: not only by stray references—overheard scraps of talk between Jim the Gardener and the blacksmith, or some passing allusion by my own family—but also by those thunderstorms which, in hot weather, blew up with an appalling suddenness from that south-westerly direction in which the inn was supposed to lie.

‘Blew up’—the phrase is hardly accurate, for the storms of those days seem, in retrospect, to have been more often of that stealthy, insidious kind which, drawing their hoarded substance from a succession of sweltering days, become gradually concentrated into a dense, malignant nucleus, pregnant with terror and destruction. In those torrid afternoons of the dog-days, we would become insensibly aware of a gradual thickening in the atmosphere, an unnatural twilight like that of an eclipse; a sudden gust of wind would stir the garden, flapping the cloth upon the tea-table and rustling the leaves of the plum-trees which, in the livid, crepuscular light, took on the ashen pallor of birch or white-beam; and, glancing at the sky, we would see, away to the south-west, the deep-purple, clotted tumour of the storm-cloud, proliferating, already, in long streamers and festoons of darkness across the upper reaches of the sky towards the zenith. Soon the first mutter of thunder would reach our ears and then, in the deepening twilight, there would be, as it were, a sudden ‘click’ of brightness, as though an electric light had been switched on and off, abruptly, in the day-time.

Hurrying indoors, we would watch, from the back windows of the cottage, the great purple mass creep upwards till it hung, like a tent of darkness, above our heads. The lightning continued to glare, intermittently, in our expectant eyes, but as yet only a muffled rumble succeeded its vague flickering. For several minutes we would sit, unnaturally silent, while the room became steadily darker; suddenly an ear-splitting detonation would startle us out of our false calm—a crash so violent that it seemed as if a bomb had exploded in the rafters above our heads. A deafening clatter, as of heavy artillery, would ensue, followed by a gradually diminishing series of reverberations; and we would wait, in the ever-thickening darkness, for the blinding glare of the lightning presaging the next clap . . . At last a soft but increasing murmur would announce the rain: a good omen, since it was generally supposed that once the rain had started the lightning was deprived of its lethal powers. I would stand at the window, watching the increasing downpour blot out the garden: a dense, streaming curtain of water (suggesting to me those bead curtains such as I had seen in an ‘Oriental’ café in Folkestone), flattening the beds of mignonette and nemesia, tearing the sweet-peas from their supporting stakes, ruining the proud blooms of my mother’s cherished phloxes. The thunder crashed and rattled, the lightning—reassuringly ‘safe’, now that the rain had begun—scribbled its Arabic script upon the dark, tented sky. At length, as the storm receded, I would see, away to the south-west, a rift of paler sky appear: the thunder would lessen, the lightning glare more seldom; and from over those far woods I would see, at last, the sun itself break through again, touching first the high fields above the village, then flooding, with a torrid, vaporous brightness, the drenched lawn and the beds of broken, ruined flowers.

Were those thunderstorms of my childhood really more violent and terrifying than storms are today? Probably not; yet they still, in memory, retain a quality of Gothic horror wholly lacking in their present-day counterparts. Those inky, tumid clouds, ‘coming up’ (as the village people used to say) ‘over the Clambercrown’, seemed by their mysterious provenance to acquire a special and adventitious terror, as if their evil vapours were the very exhalation of that remote, leaf-embowered ‘crown’, fœtid and clammy as the leaves of henbane, and glowing with the lurid, deathly purple of nightshade flowers.

It is, of course, one of the commonest of fallacies to suppose that the English climate has changed either for better or worse during the course of one’s own lifetime. ‘We don’t have the summers nowadays that we had when I was young’—how often one hears it said, and how often one is tempted, uncritically, to agree. Yet a glance at the meteorological records for the past fifty years would soon convince us of our error; and there are passages in (for instance) Gilbert White, Horace Walpole and Pepys which show conclusively that English summers could be quite as cold, wet and generally unpleasant two or three hundred years ago as they are today. But we continue, in Peter Warlock’s words, and despite all the evidence, to ‘cling to our long-standing fallacies’; the truth being, of course, that our memories, like sun-dials, ‘record only the sunny hours’: we remember those unclouded mornings, those golden and endless-seeming afternoons in which our youthful pleasures took on an added and more poignant intensity, and in whose climate, like bees in amber, they lie perpetually embalmed; and we forget, mercifully, the spoiled picnic, the ruined seaside holiday and all those other heartbreaking days and weeks of clouded skies and relentless rain among which, then as now, the ‘fine spells’ occurred like rare islands in some uncharted and illimitable sea.

Bourne House, if it marked the limit, in one direction, of our journeyings, was, as I have said, sufficiently familiar in itself to be included within the safe, comfortable bounds of our own province. Since the Bells, at this time, inhabited the dower-house, we seldom went to Bourne itself, which, isolated in the midst of its extensive park and screened by plantations and shrubberies, acquired an atmosphere of remoteness and mystery disproportionate to its actual distance from the village. Wandering through the ‘Wilderness’, with Alec and Nurse Collyer, we would catch a glimpse of the eastern end of the house, framed by the overarching boughs of the lime avenue; or, more often, walking over to Bridge by the road through the park, we would pause for a moment at the spot from which—and from which alone—the front of the house was visible. There it lay, in a dip in the park-land, perhaps a quarter of a mile from the road: the long, pink façade, with its white-painted, regularly-spaced windows, surmounted in those days by a slate roof (a later occupant has replaced these slates—a Victorian innovation—by the original tiles). The house, so firmly and uncompromisingly enshrined in its setting, seemed to me the very archetype of a house—a wholly conscious and man-made con-ception, in marked contrast to the other houses and cottages in the village (including our own), which, with their crooked roofs and chimneys and their enveloping masses of ivy, had the air of having evolved, like some natural and living growth, from the soil itself.

There was nothing, certainly, in the least ‘natural’, no hint of cottagey quaintness, about Bourne: it looked what it was—a gentleman’s house, foursquare, solid and rather severe, planked down deliberately in a chosen setting, and announcing its function proudly yet without arrogance. To me, in those days—since my taste ran rather to what was ‘old-fashioned’ and picturesque—Bourne seemed, as far as the house itself went, somewhat unromantic: there was, I thought, something rather artificial about it, suggesting those forbidding edifices which were pictured on the lid of a box of toy bricks which I had once been given for a birthday present. Nor, indeed, was I mistaken: for Bourne, of course, was ‘artificial’, in the best sense of the word—a perfect example, in fact, of the medium-sized Queen Anne country mansion. Today—having long since lost my taste for romantic quaintness—Bourne remains my favourite among country houses, a symbol of domestic stability and elegance surviving into our own unstable and graceless age; a symbol, beautiful in itself, yet impregnated, for me, with a deeper, more poignant significance, evoking as it does (and will continue to do for so long as it stands) an epoch of my own life in which the world still seemed a place of fixed and changeless categories, a cosy and self-contained universe inviolably protected, by impassable frontiers, from the lawless and outlandish territories without.

Bourne . . . The very name itself, by association, seemed to contain in essence the atmosphere of the great house, secluded and almost hidden among its surrounding trees: a ‘bourne’ which, though it could hardly be said that no traveller returned from it, remained none the less a bourne—a limit, a frontier beyond which our walks seldom took us. The word, too, had other overtones—evoking the Nailbourne, the woe-water which, in fact, ran through the park, and from which (rather than from ‘bourne’ in the sense of a boundary) the house had probably derived its name; and for me the long, heavy, slumberous syllable seems also—perhaps for no better reason than that our visits there tended to be postprandial—inseparably associated with the idea of ‘afternoon’: a brooding, somnolent atmosphere haunted by the multitudinous hum of insects and the cooing of wood-pigeons in the beechen shades of the Wilderness.

The Wilderness—by which, usually, we approached the house—had for me an exciting and somewhat ambiguous quality of its own. It could almost be considered a ‘wood’, yet it differed from other woods in several important respects. For one thing, it was ‘private’—a fence surrounded it, and a board, announcing the fact of its privacy, hung on the gate which led into it, just behind the church. To walk through the Wilderness, therefore, gave one a sense of being privileged—for you were not allowed there unless you were with Alec and his nurse, or (for Colonel Bell was prepared to stretch a point) were at least acquainted with the family. The place itself, moreover, had a gloomy and somewhat sinister air (largely owing to the yew-trees planted along the footpath), which seemed to me entirely in accord with its ‘private’-ness, for one expected private places to be, generally speaking, rather frightening. Gorsley Wood, for instance—together with most of the other woods in the neighbourhood—was technically private, and one was liable to be set upon, in the narrow, intersecting paths round California, by angry keepers with guns who, if they didn’t happen to recognize one immediately, were fully entitled (so I imagined) to shoot at sight. The Wilderness, therefore, being even more private than Gorsley, might be expected to be particularly alarming; one didn’t, however, encounter keepers there, and its gloom was enlivened, for me, by the flowers which, though the Wilderness was a part of Bourne—almost an extension of the garden—and not a ‘real’ wood at all, I liked to imagine, out of botanical snobbery, were indigenous. Thus, by a harmless self-deception, I could claim to have found the wild daffodil and the wild snowdrop (though, according to the books, the snowdrop was only a ‘doubtful native’), and—an even more important find—the Solomon’s-seal, which grew in the Wilderness in great profusion, and which, in the spring, would fascinate me by its fat, bluish-green and rather orchidaceous-looking leaf-shoots, and later by its elegant, drooping stems, with their small, greenish-white bells secreted beneath the pairs of wing-like leaves.

Our tea-parties with Alec Bell took place usually, as I have said, at the dower-house (later to be inhabited by Joseph Conrad), a small, early nineteenth-century building near the church, which to my mind bore the same sort of relation to Bourne as Windsor or Balmoral to Buckingham Palace. Indeed, I hardly distinguished, I think, in those days, between Bourne and ‘the place where the King lived’, nor, for that matter, did Mrs Bell seem to me wholly distinct from the Queen herself—a misapprehension derived in part, no doubt, from the fact that Mrs Bell, before her marriage, had been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Alexandra, who had subsequently attended her wedding. (I had been shown a photograph of this function, in which the Queen and Mrs Bell, in their Edwardian dresses, looked so much alike that there was, perhaps, some excuse for my confusing them.)

This vague idea of royalty attaching to Bourne and its owners was extended, by association, to Higham, the big house on the crest of Barham Downs inhabited by a mysterious lady known as ‘the Countess’. Higham, indeed, from a purely architectural point of view, was a good deal more like Buckingham Palace than was Bourne itself—an Italianate nineteenth-century building whose white frontage was visible, across the valley, from the edge of Gorsley Wood. The Countess I conceived to be a kind of rival royalty, perhaps even grander than Mrs Bell; my ideas about her, however, remained almost entirely speculative, since she seldom appeared in public, and we didn’t go to her house. Even her name was a mystery, for nobody could pronounce it (it was, in fact, Zborowski); such little information about her as I had acquired was derived from Mrs Dymott, who had once been her lady’s-maid, just as Mrs Bell had been a lady-in-waiting (and I hardly, I think, distinguished between these two functions) to Queen Alexandra. Mrs Dymott had later married Colonel Bell’s butler, a fact which—since one expected royal houses to intermarry—seemed to confirm my theory that the two establishments were closely interconnected.

In later days Bourne itself was to become more familiar; one visit, in particular, I remember by reason of its total incongruity with my previous ideas about the house and its inhabitants. The occasion was, unlike our previous visits, a public one and must have occurred, I suppose, towards the end of—or just after—the first war. A Canadian soldier was to give a recitation—a one-man rendering (in the style of Ruth Draper) of ‘The Sign of the Cross’—in aid of some war charity; my family decided to attend this function in force, more from politeness or a sense of duty, perhaps, than from any lively hope of being entertained; and I found, somewhat to my alarm, that I was expected to accompany them. I consoled myself by the thought that the recital might prove to be something like a theatre, though without any scenery; but I was wholly unprepared for the extraordinary entertainment through which, for a solid hour and a half, I was compelled to sit.

The soldier, a private, was an elderly, grey-haired and rather ill-favoured personage, wearing khaki uniform and a pair of very large, very heavy Army boots. He performed his act, without props of any kind, at one end of the Bourne drawing-room; the audience was accommodated in rows of small gilt chairs tightly packed together, so that for me, at any rate, wedged firmly in the middle of a row, there was no possibility of escape. Insofar as one could imagine the soldier to represent, at one and the same time, the heroine, the Emperor Nero, an amorous centurion and a large and varied cast of Roman ladies and gentlemen, not to mention the lions in the Colosseum and a bevy of doomed Christians, the recital might fairly have been described as a successful tour de force; unfortunately our imaginative faculties were hampered, not only by the performer’s histrionic limitations (which were only too evident) but by the perpetual and thunderous clumping of his boots upon the parquet floor . . . Each time he assumed a new rôle he turned to the rightabout, as though to face the last speaker, and—either to add emphasis to the dialogue, or from ingrained Army habit, or perhaps from some vague and misdirected impulse of patriotism—stamped his feet loudly, as though coming to attention before his Commanding Officer.

Thus, in the guise of the centurion, he would ask, in a deep and avuncular tone: ‘What is thy name, child?’—upon which he would come smartly to attention, right-about turn and, in a sudden and disquieting falsetto, like the squeak of a toy animal when its tummy is prodded, reply ‘Mercia’. Then, with another deafening series of clumps, he would reassume the doubtless more sympathetic rôle of the centurion:

‘Thy parents?’

(Clump, clump)

‘I have no parents.’

(Clump, clumpetty-clump)

My brother and sister, more fortunate than myself, were at the end of the row, and, overcome by helpless giggles, fled incontinently from the room . . . The performance continued; I didn’t, for my part, think it very funny; and I was puzzled as to why a large and beefy soldier, of advanced age, should attempt such a difficult feat, since it could hardly be giving any of us any pleasure, and indeed, in some cases, appeared to be causing actual pain.

I happened to be sitting next to Mrs Eadon, a friend of my mother’s, who lived at Court Lodge, just behind the church. I noticed that, throughout the performance, her lips kept moving, as though in prayer. Like my Aunt Ada, Mrs Eadon had spent much of her life in India, and her two daughters, Ruth and Nasra, might be presumed (like my cousin Nancy) to be potential little Detchie-heads. (Nasra, moreover, had the further peculiarity of actually liking the black burnt crust of bread and—which was stranger still—the scum on hot milk: tastes which seemed to me so perverse and unnatural that I could only charitably conclude that they were peculiar to that unfortunate race of little girls who, like Detchie-head, had ‘lived with their parents in India’.) I watched Mrs Eadon rather carefully, half fearing, half hoping that she might be about to have a ‘seizure’ (in which case the performance would, presumably, come to an end), or, alternatively, that she was muttering some potent Indian spell which, in due course, would cause the soldier to fall in a sudden convulsion to the floor. Neither of these interesting events did, in fact, occur; and it was not till some days later that Mrs Eadon, who had recently been converted to Christian Science, told me that she had been so much upset by ‘The Sign of the Cross’ that she had spent the entire time repeating to herself, over and over again, the Christian Science Statement of Being from Mrs Eddy’s Science and Health.

In retrospect, then, Bourne seems a summer land, lapped in a cool, tree-muffled silence, stirred only by the gentle rippling of the Nailbourne and by the cooing of wood-pigeons. Yet the channels of memory which radiate outward from that still centre of our rural province lead me to many and distant countries of the mind: some leafless and icebound, frozen in a perpetual winter; others vibrant with the shrill, tender green of early spring, and odorous with the first primroses and violets; others, again, humid and leaf-strewn beneath the fading suns of autumn, and sonorous with the thresher’s drone . . . Today, as ever, the rose-pink mansion, standing foursquare among its enveloping trees, remains a symbol of order and stability; yet the house is now untenanted and threatened by the doom which overhangs all such survivals from a pre-atomic age. Bourne may just outlast my life-time, but the world which it represents—that world which survived into my own childhood, and which, with all its injustices and cruelties, its poverty, disease and hardship, was perhaps happier than ours—that world has gone for good: vanished into a limbo more remote than those romantic, unattainable lands which, in that far-off epoch, I imagined as lying beyond the hills and woodlands of Langham Park and Woodgate.

The days and years wheel outward, in an ever-widening circle, from that still centre: days which one remembers with a recrudescent nostalgia—the March sunset stirring the heart with a sudden, romantic wildness and a bitterness as of some old and inescapable remorse; ‘days which our Ancestors called their Monthes Mind, whereon their Souls, after their deaths, were had in special remembrance’ . . .

PART V

The Road to Enna (3)

Caves of Darkness

Chapter opening

Many people who had been there (and some who had not) had assured me—either by word of mouth or in the books they had written about it—that Syracuse was one of the most charming cities in Europe. I was quite prepared to believe them, for my own acquaintance with it was confined to my brief war-time sojourn there: I remembered a glaring white, dust-choked town in late summer, infested by allied troops, and without even a N.A.A.F.I., let alone any indigenous amenities, to recommend it. My memories of it, none the less, were happy ones; my unit had been stationed in the countryside, some miles out of the town, and I had spent most of my free time exploring the Greek theatre and the Latomie, or walking over to bathe at the fishing villages farther up the coast.

Of Syracuse itself, I remembered in particular the fountain of Arethusa, with its famous tufts of papyrus (one wasn’t allowed to miss that, even in war-time); for the rest, a vague picture remained of slummy back-streets, of vast deserted piazzas like pictures by Chirico; the cafés and wine-shops closed or out-of-bounds, British soldiers loitering disconsolately at the street-corners, as they must have loitered, in peace-time, in their home-towns—Barnsley, Northampton or Jarrow; but intolerant and resentful now, snobbishly deploring the primitive sanitation, cracking ribald jokes about the chain-store, UPIM (‘up ’im’), in the street leading up to the main piazza, and alert for a buckshee bottle of vino or a nice clean bint.

Nostalgia, more than anything else, had brought me back here: the idea of Syracuse had become a part of my private myth, a symbol of past happiness which, though linked with a particular moment of time and with a way of life long since abandoned, could still exert an irresistible if largely delusive attraction. Such pilgrimages—as I knew only too well—are almost certain to end in disillusion; and this particular one, alas, was no exception to the rule. Syracuse, in fact, proved—as I might have guessed it would—a disappointment: a harsh, inimical town, exhaling more markedly even than most towns in Sicily that oppressive atmosphere of ancient tragedy and bloodshed which is endemic throughout the island. I have heard it said, with some truth, that Paris ‘smells of blood’; but the air of half-remembered slaughter and destruction which pervades the capitals of northern Europe is not to be compared with that deeper and infinitely more disquieting feeling of primeval guilt which broods over these cities of Magna Graecia.

At Syracuse, in particular, this malign emanation seems to take on a more positive, a more actively hostile quality: the old, ineradicable evil, which elsewhere is felt only as an invisible presence lurking beneath the earth’s crust—a substratum of corruption giving forth no more than an occasional, transient whiff of decay—seems here to have become a free and volatile element, a part of the atmosphere, bubbling up perpetually, like marsh-gas, from the pavements beneath one’s feet; an ubiquitous miasma, infecting the natives (not to mention the casual visitor, who is liable to ‘take’ the disease in a more acute form) with an habitual lethargy and a spirit of profound, limitless cynicism. This mood of perpetual negation, of a fatalism half-tragic, half frivolous, has something in common with a northern city in war-time—London or Berlin—menaced constantly by aerial bombardment; yet here the condition has become, as it were, chronic and incurable—the anxiety is timeless, immemorial, without hope of respite. Chaos and old night are here, one feels, indigenous: like the Marabar caves, the crumbling palaces of Syracuse, the churches, the tall, bleak dwellings and the desolate cafés with their chromium fittings and acres of plate-glass give back a single, unvarying and terrible echo: ‘boom-boom’—the voice of utter negation, of the néant beyond good and evil; older than Magna Graecia, older than the cave-drawings of Lascaux, older perhaps than the earth itself.

*

On this occasion, my first sight of Syracuse was inauspicious, for I arrived in a downpour of rain. The hotel, moreover, to which I had been recommended, was (as usual) full, and so, as it seemed, were all the rest. I plodded about in the deluge, carrying my suitcase, for a good half-hour—wishing that I had followed Mr Douglas Sladen’s advice and brought a ‘Montecarlo felt’, or at least an umbrella. At last I found a vacant room in a small hotel in a side-street; as in so many Sicilian hotels, the bedroom was scrupulously clean, the lavatory filthy beyond description. My room faced upon a small courtyard some fifteen feet square, in which an astonishing variety of animal life subsisted: chickens, a goat, several rabbits and a floating population of cats, besides a couple of caged pigeons, who cooed persistently and with a purely Sicilian, a positively operatic intensity and volume.

The room itself was tiny—no more than ten feet by ten: a claustrophobic box of a place, with a low ceiling and an inadequate light. The walls, up to shoulder-height, were painted a pale, deathly grey; above, a vapid yet sinister floral design glimmered in the dank, rainy light from the window; the bed, a single chair and a bidet completed the room’s furniture. Outside, the rain fell relentlessly, the chickens squawked and the two doves continued their impassioned duet with a merciless monotony which suggested a contemporary version of Bohème rewritten by Monsieur Olivier Messiaen.

I unpacked, changed my clothes and presently wandered out into the streets. The rain had diminished, but the pall of cloud remained unbroken, pressing down upon the housetops like a damp feather-bed. I walked up the sloping street, past UPIM, to the piazza, and drank a cup of coffee in one of the larger cafés—a singularly cheerless, unwelcoming place, like a more than usually pretentious station waiting-room. One or two men were gulping down coffee at the bar—little cups of caffè espresso (‘Mother of neurasthenia’, as Norman Douglas called it); in a corner sat an old gentleman and his wife consuming a vast and peculiarly virulent-looking cassata.

Later I wandered round to the cathedral of Santa Lucia—that extraordinary edifice in whose walls are embedded the columns of a Greek temple, and which has been consecrated in turn to Athena, Allah and Jehovah. I walked down to the sea: the quays were deserted, enormous waves thundered against the sea-wall; in the harbour a crowd of gaily-painted fishing-boats struck a curiously exotic, ‘Mediterranean’ note amid the prevailing nordic gloom—incongruous as some sudden apparition of gipsies and merry-go-rounds at an English watering-place in midwinter.

I returned to the café in the piazza, drank a Bitter Campari and began to feel better. The rain had stopped, and the evening crowd had begun to saunter about the square: they would continue thus to saunter until nine or ten o’clock—a civilized and agreeable custom, peculiarly Italian. Here in Sicily, however, the promenading crowd differed, in one striking particular, from such crowds farther north: for it consisted almost exclusively of men. Sicilians are still fiercely patriarchal: woman’s place is the home, more especially if she is young and unmarried; and in Syracuse or Palermo the evening promenade tends to be a drab, colourless affair compared with its counterpart in Florence or Milan. Watching the dark, slow-moving crowd, passing to and fro before the café windows, I had a curious and not wholly pleasant impression of solidarity—of a closed community of males, united by a tacit bond of sexual allegiance, arrogant and exclusive. Young men and boys predominated: sauntering in groups or in couples, arms linked, or sometimes hand in hand, like lovers. Nearly all were personable, if not handsome, and proudly conscious of the fact; swaggering past in their carefully-pressed suits and snow-white linen, they radiated an air of urgent yet oddly self-contained sexuality. Watching them pass and repass, I was reminded of the male chorus of a musical comedy in which, by some disastrous mishap behind the scenes, ‘les girls’ have missed their cue.

Darkness had fallen, and the cafés blazed with neon lights: the passing faces, emerging suddenly into the brightness, were touched with a leprous pallor. By now the square was densely packed; occasionally a car or a motor-bicycle would nose its way patiently through the crowd; somewhere across the square a mandoline tinkled out Torna a Surriento, Before the café window two young men had paused in their promenade and were disputing fiercely: their voices were inaudible, but from their extravagant and violent gesticulations one might have supposed the argument to be a matter of life or death; probably—I guessed—they were merely having an amicable discussion about the respective merits of Coppi and Bartali. Their gestures became more and more ferocious; in the livid neon radiance their faces were like death-masks galvanized into a horrible, daemonic life. Suddenly they both burst out laughing; one threw his arm, affectionately, about the other’s neck, and they strolled away, passing out of the window’s glare into the living, pullulating darkness of the square.

I dined that night at the Ristorante dell’Orologio, on the opposite side of the piazza—the best restaurant in Syracuse and one of the best in Sicily. The zuppa di vongole was excellent, so were the fonds d’artichauts fried in batter which followed. The restaurant was expensive and comfortable, yet without that tatty, self-conscious quality which almost invariably afflicts a restaurant in England where the food is good. The place was crowded, mostly with prosperous-looking Syracusan bourgeois, and since I was sitting at a small table in the centre I was within earshot of at least half-a-dozen animated conversations. I have acquired, however, a faculty for closing my ears to such ambient talk (barrack-rooms, during the war, provided an admirable training-ground), and my rudimentary Italian being just sufficient to make me inquisitive, though inadequate for effectual eavesdropping, I preferred thus to cut myself off from the stream of conversation which flowed noisily around me.

Among the other books which I had brought with me for the journey was that relatively portable edition of Ulysses published by the Odyssey Press in the early thirties. Over my vongole (small shellfish rather like mussels) I began to read the chapter which describes Stephen Dedalus walking on the beach at Sandymount. ‘Ineluctable modality of the visible’, I read, ‘. . . limits of the diaphane . . . Bald he was and a millionaire, maestro di color che sanno . . .’ It is not, perhaps, the most suitable chapter in the book to dip into over one’s dinner, and I found my attention wandering . . . Two very fat Sicilians nearby were talking about the National Lottery; an even fatter one, at the next table, was discussing with his wife the cost of layettes nowadays as compared with thirty years ago—a somewhat recondite though doubtless an absorbing topic . . . The tide of talk surged about me; after Taormina I found it pleasant to be in a place where one could be reasonably certain of hearing none but the language of the country spoken. In the cafés of Taormina it was as likely (and indeed more likely) to be German, Swedish or American; but at Syracuse, in early April, one could feel fairly confident of avoiding one’s fellow-nordics. The price of layettes, it appeared, had increased by no less than five hundred per cent—‘Davvero, cinquecento per cento’—since 1920: a sobering thought. As for the lotteria—one of the fat Sicilians had a system: it was, he insisted, extremely simple and practically infallible. ‘Ma, è semplice’, he kept insisting, in the face of his companion’s incredulity. Seduced by the ineluctable modality of the audible, I found it harder and harder to concentrate upon the esoteric ruminations of Stephen Dedalus. ‘Warring his life long’ (I read) ‘on the contrans-magnificandjewbangtantiality. Illstarred heresiarch. In a Greek water-closet he breathed his last . . .’

‘Ma senti, al Paradiso dei Bambini, le calze sono——’

‘Nella lotteria del anno scorso . . .’

Suddenly, from directly behind me, I heard a shriller, a manifestly alien voice rising above the prevailing ground-bass of the native Doric:

‘I couldn’t have cared less myself, but when a clot like Stephen . . .’

Startled, I looked up from the closely-printed page, suddenly alert to my surroundings. Surely, I thought, my ears must have played me false.

‘Senti, per bambino di sei anni, bisogna——’

‘Ma, è sicurissimo—la lotteria di mille-nove-cento-cinquanta-tre sarebbe . . .’

‘. . . calzoni, scarpe . . .’

Certainly, I decided, I must have been mistaken. ‘Fiacre and Scotus’, I read, ‘on their creepystools in heaven spilt from their pintpots, loud-latinlaughing . . .’

‘. . . il biglietto di quattrocento venti-tre——’

‘. . . first night of Billy Budd—I was livid, and with Benjy himself standing just behind us, too . . .’

This time there could be no doubt of it. There was no mistaking that voice: shrill, over-inflected, arrogantly ‘cultured’—the voice of the female English intellectual roaring after her prey. Furtively I glanced round at the table behind me. No, I had not been mistaken: there they sat—three English intellectuals, two male and one female. The woman was a youngish blonde with her hair done in a ‘horse-tail’; the men were young-middle-aged, in tweeds; one wore a pink shirt, the other a high-necked green pullover. Mercifully they were unknown to me; but (the alarming thought struck me suddenly) could I be sure that I was unknown to them? I have a deplorable memory for faces, and it seemed only too possible that I had met them at parties. Prudently I buried my face in Ulysses (fortunately they couldn’t, at that distance, see what I was reading); when the waiter came to take my next order, I found myself gesticulating and shrugging my shoulders in a desperate (though doubtless unsuccessful) attempt to appear indigenous. Meanwhile, with a half-reluctant curiosity, I strained my ears to catch the English words as they emerged, fragmentary and discontinuous, above the clamant spate of Italian.

‘. . . sick in the bathroom, after Peter Grimes . . .’

‘. . . a Milano, costava settecento cinquanta, ecco——’

‘. . . frightfully rude, and after all it was my party—Edith was furious, and no wonder . . .’

‘Non si trova così, qui in Siracusa——’

‘. . . I couldn’t get through it myself—so sensitive, if you see what I mean . . .’

‘Diecemila due cento ventotto——’

‘. . . Cyril raved about it in The Sunday Times, of course . . .’

‘Cameriere! Cameriere!’

‘Sissignore, subito.’

‘Madly snobbish——’

‘Ma senti, i calzoni per ragazzino——’

‘Cameriere, il conto . . .’

‘So grand, my dear, they didn’t even have fish-knives, well, I ask you . . .’

‘. . . mille trecento trenta-quattro . . .’

‘. . . “Not to worry”, I told him—the poor lamb was nearly in tears——’

‘. . . camicie di seta . . .’

‘. . . Angus on Zola, can you imagine . . .’

‘. . . quando sono stato a Bari, nell’estate . . .’

‘. . . Peter Racine Fricker . . .’

‘. . . buon mercato . . .’

‘. . . Cyril . . .’

‘. . . Osbert . . .’

‘. . . Evelyn . . .’

Was it for this, I thought, that I had come all the way to Sicily? I ordered another quarto of wine and returned resolutely to Ulysses. Presently the Intellectuals departed; and, after a discreet interval, I paid my own bill and walked out into the piazza. Beneath a starless sky the dark male throng still leisurely perambulated; from somewhere in the darkness came the persistent twanging of a mandoline. The darkened hulks of houses rose like cliffs above the lit square: in one of them, high up on the fourth floor, a bedroom light was suddenly switched on—a square of vivid brightness, flashing like a signal of invitation across the anonymous, unfriendly night.

Next morning the sky had cleared and the day was fine and bright, though with a chilly wind blowing off the sea. I had woken with a curious sense of oppression, as if from a bad dream, though my sleep had in fact been dreamless; walking out into the sunlit streets, I was aware of an overmastering lethargy, a feeling that my presence in this town was not only pointless but probably, in some mysterious way, ill-omened. I had a slight headache and a sensation of heaviness in the stomach—the result, perhaps, of those vongole on the previous evening.

In the bright spring sunshine the town had assumed a different aspect: a kind of shrill, febrile gaiety pervaded the streets and piazzas, goldfinches twittered in cages above the house-doors; yet the sense of underlying corruption, of something profoundly inimical lurking behind these ancient walls, persisted. I decided to take a bus out to the Greek theatre, and walked up to the terminus in the piazza. Waiting for the bus, I caught a glimpse of the three Intellectuals drinking caffè latte in a gelateria; the woman wore a duffle-coat and was absorbed, rather self-consciously, in the New Statesman; the two men glared at me with that mixture of suspicion and ill-concealed curiosity peculiar to the English highbrow abroad. I returned their stares discouragingly; at that moment, fortunately, the bus drew up, and I climbed into it.

Ten years before, the Teatro Greco had been a favourite haunt of mine, and it had become in memory the centre, the quintessential core of that myth which I had created around my war-time sojourn at Syracuse. I remembered it as curiously remote and desolate—a fragment of the ancient world effectually sealed off from the squalid and barbarous age into which it had miraculously survived. I remembered the tree-shaded lane by which one approached it, and the wine-shop called the Osteria del Paradiso, half-way down, in which I had drunk wine in a cool, shadowy bar flanked by innumerable barrels. In those days the theatre and its neighbourhood had been almost deserted, apart from an occasional peasant working in the nearby fields; I had come to regard the Teatro Greco, in fact, as peculiarly my own: a private bolt-hole into which I could escape from the petty misfortunes and hardships of my life as a soldier; and in writing of it afterwards my memories had become infused with a wholly personal nostalgia.

The bus dropped me on the fringes of a gimcrack modern suburb; nailed to a post on the roadside was a notice pointing to the Teatro Greco; yet the road down which, with a sense of mild incredulity, I began to walk was nothing like the lane I remembered. Not far from the main-road stood the remains of a stone pillbox, on the door of which was inscribed, in faded, scarcely legible characters, the legend out of bounds, and the name of an RASC unit. I walked on, with a growing sense of bewilderment, down the hill; I was convinced that I must be approaching the theatre by a different route; yet here, a few yards farther on, was the wine-shop, the Osteria del Paradiso—a squalid-looking bar-cum-café, plastered with advertisements for Coca-cola. Where was the cool, cavernous bar, with its barrels and demijohns, which I remembered? I was aware of an odd sense of duplication, such as one experiences in those dreams in which some familiar place—a house or a tract of countryside—has become subtly and disquietingly transfigured.

I walked on, turned a corner, and there, unmistakably, was the Greek theatre, much as I remembered it, with the little vine-wreathed café near the entrance. Along the roadside was parked a row of charabancs; from one of them, as I passed, a party of plump and very earnest-looking Germans was descending; most of them wore glasses, all carried guide-books. ‘Wunderschön’, they exclaimed, plodding heavily up the incline towards the theatre. From the terrace of the café a small boy bawled incessantly, at the full pitch of his lungs:

“Vino moscato di Siracusa,

Molto buono, molto buono—

Vino moscato di Siracusa,

Molto buono, molto buono . . .”

At the entrance to the theatre itself stood the dark and minatory figure of a carabiniere; and upon the crumbling stone tiers wandered or ponderously sat an innumerable company of nordic tourists—pink, bespectacled, cultured and, without exception, grotesquely ugly.

Rather disconsolately I joined their ranks and strolled round the uppermost tiers; the theatre was, I suppose, in its purely material, factual aspect, unchanged; yet to my inward eye it seemed barely recognizable (I had contrived to forget, among other things, the unromantic prospect of docks and railway-sidings which formed the limit of the view). The rocks above the theatre were carpeted now with a small bright-pink campion, and the asphodel raised its starry panicles against the skyline. Botanizing with somewhat less than my usual enthusiasm, I noticed the black-eyed, caerulean stars of borage, and patches of a small purple vetch. I wandered down to the Latomia del Paradiso, and visited the extraordinary Ear of Dionysius and the colony of rope-makers; it was all more or less as I remembered—yet the magic had departed, the whole scene had taken on the flatness of a photograph. I constated it with a bored attention, my eyes lighting with a momentary interest upon small and marginal details: the ferns growing upside-down from the roofs of the caves, two lovers’ names carved upon an aloe leaf, a discarded French letter beneath a bower of carob trees . . .

With a sense of performing some dull duty, I observed each accredited ‘sight’; it was rather like looking at somebody else’s photograph album and trying desperately, as one’s interest steadily ebbed, to make some kind of polite and relevant comment: ‘How interesting . . . Yes, that’s Norman to the life . . . Oh, that’s a good one . . . And surely that’s Mavis, or is it Doris? . . . And there’s another one of you!’ . . . But the album, in this case, happened to be my own; and my comments, after all, could give no satisfaction to anybody but myself.

So much, I thought, for the recherche du temps perdu: yet another image of past happiness had been irretrievably shattered; my cherished vision of the Teatro Greco had reduced itself to a dull ruin overrun by fat and sweating Teutons. I made my way back, round the edge of the theatre, and turned into the café, where the small boy still intoned his shrill, exacerbating refrain:

“Vino moscato di Siracusa,

Molto buono, molto buono . . .”

I sat down on the terrace and ordered a drink. As it happened, I was the only customer: the Germans, quite evidently, had neither time nor inclination for such frivolous pastimes. The proprietress, a genial woman, served me herself; her son, apparently content for the time being to have hauled a single and rather unprofitable fish into his net, stopped his bawling. I wasn’t, however, to be left in peace for long. Hardly had I sat down when an old man with a mandoline appeared and sat himself firmly down on a chair within a yard or two of my table. Despondently, with an air of performing a profoundly unwelcome duty, he began to thrum, his instrument. He was a very old man—very old and very dirty; presently he raised a thin, gnat-like voice: ‘O sole mio’, he sang, the words just audible above the dispirited twanging. I took no notice. From O sole mio he passed—as was to be expected—to Torna a Surriento. Still I ignored him—not from any unwillingness to part with a ten-lire note, but from sheer obstinacy. At the end of Surriento he turned upon me a gaze of mild resentment tinged with curiosity.

‘Tedesco?’ he asked.

I shook my head.

‘Inglese?’

Suppressing a violent desire to say that I was Japanese, I nodded discouragingly.

A bleary twinkle appeared in his eyes.

‘Canzone inglese, molto bello,’ he announced, and began, with a curiously Italianate distortion of the rhythm, to strum the tune of A Bicycle made for Two.

It was too much; I got up, paid for my wine, and walked away—past the waiting charabancs, past the Osteria del Paradiso, up the hill to the bus-stop.

My slight malaise of the morning persisted; in the afternoon I began to feel unmistakably ill. I lay on my bed in the dark, stuffy hotel bedroom and tried, once again, to concentrate upon Ulysses; but without very much success. It had not, I thought, been a very suitable choice for what publishers, in their advertisements, classify as ‘holiday reading’. Yet I have a taste for such literary incongruities, and to reread Ulysses in Syracuse had seemed an undertaking which might well prove psychologically rewarding. (I once read four plays by Ibsen on the beach at Pescara—an experience which, though I should hardly care to repeat it, proved distinctly stimulating at the time.) But Joyce in Sicily, I reluctantly decided, was a mistake . . . Yet there was, alas, no alternative: a brief search in the local bookshops had revealed no single book in any language but Italian; and my Italian, when it comes to the written word, is pitifully inadequate (though I had, I confess, been tempted by La Strada di Swann, and even more by a weighty volume entitled Vita e Morte del Sindaco di Casterbridge). Feeling more and more unwell, I drowsed over the matutinal activities of Mr Bloom: the kidney, Agendath Netaim, met him pike hoses . . . And presently I slept.

Being ill abroad is my pet phobia. It has ruined many a holiday and seems to increase rather than diminish with age. Like most phobias it doubtless derives from some repressed infantile anxiety: over-cossetted in childhood, I developed a haunting fear of illness from which I have never wholly recovered. I was convinced, at an early age, that I ‘wasn’t very strong’, and that I was more mune to infection than other people (though in fact I suffered from less than the normal quota of childhood complaints). Fire, flood, aeroplane disasters, earthquakes—such perils as these I can face with comparative equanimity; but a case of smallpox or typhoid in my immediate neighbourhood can reduce me, in no time, to a state of twittering panic. On my trips abroad I am careful to fortify myself with all the right prophylactics; I am scrupulous—indeed over-scrupulous—about vaccination, T.A.B. inoculations and so on; but it is all of no avail. No prophylaxis is infallible, after all; and it is always possible that one may encounter the one disease against which one has failed to protect oneself.

Typhoid is my particular bugbear: probably because I was brought up, like most people of my generation, to believe that Abroad (with the doubtful exception of Switzerland) was always dirty, and that ‘you should never drink the water’. In my more rational (or more reckless) moods, it is true, I am capable of overcoming this ancient prejudice, and will drink tap-water in the most dubious places without a thought of the consequences; yet the unconscious fear persists, the least indisposition is enough to revive all my old terrors, and I am convinced that the dreaded Bacillus typhosus has at last managed to lodge itself, fatally, in my intestines.

Waking from my afternoon sleep, I was aware of an increasing heaviness in my stomach and a throbbing headache. I tried to remember all that I had ever learnt, in my Army days, about the aetiology and pathology of typhoid. Incubation period, three weeks—yes, it was just over three weeks since I had arrived in Italy; perhaps I had picked up the bug in Rome, or at the hotel at Taormina. Headache, general malaise, pain and discomfort in the epigastric region—yes, I had all the symptoms. I wished I had brought a thermometer; as an alternative I felt my pulse, which appeared, if anything, to be rather more sluggish than usual.

The light was failing, and I switched on the bedside lamp: the wallpaper, with its wreaths of viridescent and noxious-looking flowers, leapt into sudden prominence. Below the windows the pigeons cooed with an exacerbating persistence; from a house nearby, a wireless blared out an interminable pot-pourri of Neapolitan airs. I addressed myself once again to Mr Bloom, but the account of his visceral processes was hardly calculated to relieve my depression. ‘He felt heavy, full,’ I read, ‘then a gentle loosening of the bowels . . . Hope it’s not too big bring on piles again . . . Costive one tabloid of cascara sagrada . . .’

In the dim light the small print danced before my eyes. ‘General malaise . . . slight epigastric pains . . .’ The words recurred, with a haunting persistence. It seemed only too probable, I thought, that I should breathe my last—an ill-starred heresiarch—in a Sicilian water-closet . . . Or could it, after all, be the effect of those vongole? Suddenly I remembered that I had some calomel in my bag; I unpacked it, and took a couple of grains. Presently I went down to the trattoria on the ground-floor and ordered minestra in brodo, an omelette and a half-litre of red wine. By the time I had finished my meal and drunk a coffee and a cognac, I felt considerably better . . . Perhaps, I reflected optimistically, B. typhosus had been outwitted once again.

Ulysses, I suppose, is the most fascinating and the most devastatingly boring novel ever written. It is the novel to end all novels; it is not a novel at all. Its treasures are inexhaustible; its tedium has to be experienced to be believed. It is also, despite all the claims of its apologists, gratuitously and defiantly obscene, and owes a good deal of its réclame to this fact alone. It is a ‘revolutionary’ book, yet its implied philosophy is profoundly conservative; condemned a quarter of a century ago—not only by the gutter press but by the stuffier kind of literary pundit—as mere ‘filth’, it has become (together with Finnegans Wake) a stamping-ground for professors of Eng. Lit. and Ph.D. thesis-writers. Officially banned for twenty years, it is now classified—along with Dickens and Thackeray—under ‘Fiction, Classical’ in the free libraries of cathedral towns.

Ulysses is, in the strictest possible sense of the term, a ‘literary’ work, conceived in exclusively aesthetic terms; in Stephen Dedal us’s phrase, it is ‘static’ as opposed to ‘kinetic’; yet, paradoxically, it is one of those books whose reputation in the world at large has little or nothing to do with its merits as a literary artefact (in which it resembles the Bible, the Decameron, Mein Kampf and Seven Pillars of Wisdom). Final judgment upon it as a work of art seems likely to be deferred indefinitely; for Ulysses, besides becoming an important department of American industry, has acquired a quasi-Biblical sanctity. There is one God, Joyce, and Stuart Gilbert is his prophet; and woe to the critic who dares to question the fact, for Mr Gilbert and his disciples—fundamentalists to a man—know all the answers; was not Mr Gilbert’s exegesis approved, in detail, by the Master himself? That, surely, should be enough.

It should be; but I will dare to assert (at the risk of proclaiming myself the blackest of heretics) that it isn’t. Ulysses, considered in purely aesthetic terms, seems to me a failure; a magnificent one, certainly, but a failure none the less. It is a work of genius run to seed, a spoiled masterpiece whose faults can be traced, I believe, on the one hand to Joyce’s sexual maladjustment in adolescence, on the other to that streak of callow, undergraduate pedantry which he never outgrew and which, in the later chapters, proliferates like some intractable carcinoma at the expense of the body which feeds it. The Eumaeus (coffee-stail) episode, for instance: the exploitation of journalistic clichés is a good enough joke of its kind; the flat, banal style is entirely appropriate to the mood of extreme fatigue which pervades this section of the book; but it goes on far, far too long—fifty-odd pages—and the result is not only incredibly boring but, aesthetically, a botch, destructive to the symmetry of the book as a whole. Nor will anybody (not even that ‘ideal’ reader whom Joyce so arrogantly postulated) persuade me that every word and phrase in that interminable spate of platitudes is—as we are asked to believe—an integral and essential part of the book’s design. It seems far more probable that Joyce—once started upon what, no doubt, seemed to him a fascinating literary experiment (as indeed, up to a point, it is)—simply found it impossible to stop.

As for the famous Homeric parallelism, the colours, organs of the body, etc., corresponding to each episode, they seem to me little more than an elaborate donnish joke, and I don’t believe anybody would have spotted them if Joyce had given the book another title, or if Mr Gilbert hadn’t (with the Master’s blessing, of course) let the cat out of the bag. The Homeric framework is not an integral part of the narrative; it remains incidental, a design imposed arbitrarily upon the vast sprawling body of the work (it is significant that Joyce—in a spirit of rather Dadaist mischief, one imagines—suppressed the Homeric chapter-headings before the book finally went to press).

Joyce’s pedantry, his taste for elaborate ciphers and literary jokes, was probably linked with his sexual immaturity, and more especially (I should guess) with masturbation-fears. Like Lawrence, he suffered from a lifelong obsession with his own adolescent sexuality; unlike Lawrence, he was neither able nor willing to rationalize his obsession into a ‘philosophy of sex’, or indeed to come to terms with it at all. He remained, in fact, a Catholic schoolboy, a spoiled priestling whose obsessive, never-to-be-absolved guilt found its outlet in the wild, uninhibited obscenity of the Circe episode. That Joyce’s obscenities are ‘significant’, psychologically revealing or what have you, is not really much to the point; in intention, they correspond precisely to the graffiti scribbled by a randy boy in a urinal. The boy, it’s true, happened in this case to be a genius; but l’art du watercloset (as Larionov called it, in another connection) is surely an inferior art-form, even at its best.

The guilt and terror engendered by youthful masturbation and by the squalid wenching in ‘nighttown’ were to haunt Joyce throughout his life. His development as a writer was fatally retarded, he could never escape from his own predicament, and Dedalus’s bold ambition to ‘forge, in the smithy of his soul, the uncreated conscience of his race’ is gradually stifled beneath a vast and ramifying overgrowth of pedantry and private jokes. Mr Gilbert remarks, in his commentary, that the game of tracking down the innumerable associations which give rise to the hallucinations in the Circe episode is ‘as fascinating as a detective story’. Doubtless it is; but to compare Ulysses to a whodunnit is surely a rather dubious compliment.

I remember, many years ago (at the period when Finnegan was appearing serially in transition), reading a poem by an undergraduate in some university magazine or anthology in which the poet described Joyce as hunting in a drain for the ‘lost collar-stud of his genius’. The image still seems to me—as it seemed at the time—an apt one; for Joyce’s genius was, I believe, of a minor order—he lacked the power and range of the great novelists, and his later work is chiefly distinguished by an infinite capacity for taking pains. (Pious Joyceans, it seems to me, are too apt to accept Carlyle’s epigram at its face-value.)

I should guess, myself, that Ulysses was begun merely as a continuation of the Portrait: the style of the so-called ‘Telemachia’ is almost identical—up to the end of the second section (Nestor)—with that of the earlier book; only with Stephen’s soliloquy on Sandymount beach (Proteus) does it become notably more complex. We then switch to Mr Bloom: the technique of the ‘interior monologue’ is here in full play, and the following sections are wholly unconnected with Stephen (the first mention of him—a passing reference only—occurs in the Hades episode, forty pages ahead). I suspect, myself, that Joyce wrote the first three chapters (Telemachia) and then, for one reason or another, got stuck; later—perhaps as a result of reading Dujardin’s Les Lauriers sont Coupés—he embarked on the Bloom narrative: an entirely new novel, and a blessed escape (one may well imagine) from the obsession with his own (Stephen’s) predicament. It is said that, as early as 1906, Joyce had conceived a realistic novel dealing with a certain ‘Mr Hunter’, and had vaguely envisaged it as forming a sequel to the Portrait (or Stephen Hero); however that may be, it seems clear that Ulysses is essentially an amalgam of two separate and quite distinct novels. The ‘Odyssey’ of Mr Hunter-Bloom (perhaps the title may have already suggested itself) was probably intended to be what Ulysses, as it stands, is so often incorrectly described as being—an uncensored account of a single day in a man’s life; and then, one may suppose, Joyce once again got stuck; the thought of the previous book haunted him: it would be a pity to waste those first chapters—the Martello tower, the interview with Mr Deasy . . . Could they not be somehow dovetailed into the story of Mr Bloom? The scene was the same—Dublin in the early nineteen-hundreds . . . Gradually the idea took shape: Stephen as a foil for Bloom, a meeting between the two of them; perhaps, even, Stephen was intended at the finish—as Mr Empson has suggested—to succeed Blazes Boylan as Molly Bloom’s lover (though why this should confer an ‘epical’ quality upon the novel, as Mr Empson says it does, is beyond my understanding). The Homeric parallel now, perhaps, presented itself as a possibility: the earlier sections could stand for the Telemachia, and subsequent chapters could be easily arranged (or rearranged) so as to correspond, loosely, with the episodes of the Odyssey.

As the enormous work went on, it is evident that Joyce became less and less interested in his characters as such, and more and more obsessed with pure technique. The chapter of parodies, for instance, is a joke which must have made a particular appeal to his donnish humour, and the correlation of each passage with a different stage of embryonic growth doubtless added a touch of bawdry which pleased him even more. The Circe episode represents the final release of his youthful inhibitions; and in the succeeding Eumaeus chapter one cannot help feeling that the atmosphere of intense fatigue which pervades it reflects Joyce’s own tiredness as a writer. At this stage of the book each new stylistic device seems designed to make the writer’s task easier—the dramatic form of Circe, the journalese in Eumaeus, the question-and-answer of Ithaca, and finally Molly’s immense monologue, entirely asyntactical and without paragraphs or punctuation. One’s impression is that Joyce, by these successive experiments in technique, is trying not only to ‘ginger up’ the book itself but to stimulate his own failing interest in it.

There is not, of course, a scrap of real evidence to support my theory; it may be that when Joyce began to write the first section of the Telemachia (‘Stately plump Buck Mulligan’) he had already envisaged the novel as a whole, down to the last detail of Molly Bloom’s final monologue. It may be that Bloom and Stephen were conceived, from the first, as complementary characters: the Freudian father and son represented by Ulysses-Telemachus, and so forth. It may be; but I just can’t believe it. Ulysses, whatever Mr Gilbert may say, bears all the marks of a book which, like Topsy, ‘just growed’. It took seven years to write; and during those years—and the preceding five or six—Joyce had developed from the callow Dublin student of the Portrait into the pedantic, middle-aged man-of-letters who was shortly to embark upon Finnegans Wake. I am prepared to believe that, once the rough draft was completed, Joyce took infinite pains over its revision—one has heard all about those elaborate charts, with their multifarious cross-references in different-coloured inks. Parts were doubtless transposed or rewritten, innumerable details may have been added to produce an effect of internal cohesion. Yet Ulysses remains, as a novel, incoherent and untidy: the cleavage between the Telemachia and the rest is fatally destructive to the balance of the work as a whole; and I refuse to believe that the later sections were ever implicit in that first too-‘beautifully’ written chapter.

‘A misfire’, Virginia Woolf called it—she was writing in 1922, when Joycean criticism was less inhibited than it is today (though it should be added that her remarks were not published till thirty years later, and ten years after her own death). ‘Genius it has, I think,’ she says, ‘but of the inferior water. The book is diffuse. It is brackish. It is pretentious. It is underbred, not only in the obvious sense but in the literary sense. A first-rate writer, I mean, respects writing too much to be tricky; startling; doing stunts. I’m reminded all the time of some callow board-school boy, full of wits and powers, but so self-conscious and egotistical that he loses his head, becomes extravagant, mannered, uproarious, ill at ease, makes kindly people feel sorry for him, and stern ones merely annoyed; and one hopes that he’ll grow out of it; but as Joyce is forty this scarcely seems likely . . .’

And of course he never did ‘grow out of it’; twenty years later he remained, beneath the facade of the elderly man of letters, the ‘callow board-school boy’ of the Portrait—‘full of wits and powers’, yet fatally at odds with himself and searching in vain, amid the clueless labyrinth of Finnegan, for the ‘lost collar-stud’ of his genius.

Reading Ulysses again in Syracuse I remembered my conversation with the man in the Swissair plane, and his bold assertion that Joyce’s work was a ‘leg-pull’. Was it possible, I asked myself, that the leg of Mr Gilbert himself had been, ever so gently but none the less firmly, pulled? Heaven forbid! Yet I am tempted, all the same, and despite all those keys, concordances and Ph.D. theses, to wonder . . .

My indisposition resolved itself, after all, into nothing more serious than a bilious attack, and the next morning, purged of my surfeit of vongole and fried artichokes, I felt perfectly restored: a catharsis due less, I fear, to the pity and terror inspired by Joyce’s masterpiece than to a timely dose of calomel.

I lingered for a further few days in Syracuse, revisiting, with a mild and disillusioned curiosity, remembered war-time haunts, The weather remained fine and spring-like; yet Syracuse—despite the beneficent effects of calomel—continued to exert its malign and insidious spell: an atmosphere of unrelieved melancholy haunted the streets and extended to the flat, rather characterless countryside lying inland from the town. I developed a positive hatred for those long dusty roads, hedged with their forbidding jungles of prickly pear, ribboning out interminably into the monotonous landscape beyond the Teatro Greco. I had planned to move on to Catania, and thence to Enna, in time for the famous Good Friday procession; yet Syracuse, by some negative yet potent magic, continued to hold me captive.

I lingered in the echoing, half-deserted cafés, dined again at the Orologio (the Intellectuals, mercifully, were conspicuous by their absence), revisited the Greek theatre; or explored obscure churches in the backstreets (on the door of one of these hung a placard announcing in no uncertain terms the three-hour service on Good Friday: tre ore di agonia). My mood was one of utter negation: it was as though my mind were drugged by the town’s corrupt ambience; the slightest attempt at conscious cerebration seemed an intolerable effort, my thoughts strayed hither and thither without direction, I could ‘connect nothing with nothing’. There seemed no possible excuse for remaining in Syracuse, yet no urgent reason for leaving it; as for Enna, I scarcely cared by now whether I got there or not. The prospect of the long journey from Syracuse filled me with a vague, irrational dread: I was bored with travelling, and the thought of arriving in a strange town, remote, isolated and probably unfriendly, depressed me still further. Cardinal Newman, I remembered, had nearly died at Enna; in my present mood it didn’t seem the best of recommendations; and my chronic fear of Being Ill Abroad began, once again, to haunt my mind. Enna, I was assured—perched high among the mountains of the interior—would be cold at this time of year; I was fretted by visions of pneumonia or pleurisy—picturing myself (in an ecstasy of self-pity) delirious and with a high fever in a squalid hotel bedroom, attended by some illiterate country doctor who, in all probability, would never have heard of sulphonamides or penicillin.

Appalled by this terrifying prospect, I continued to postpone my departure; Good Friday came and still I lingered . . . Tomorrow, I told myself, I really would take the early train to Catania. Meanwhile the morning was brilliant, with an invigorating breeze blowing off the sea; I decided to revisit Santa Panagla, a fishing-village between Syracuse and Augusta which I had known during the war. Like the Teatro Greco, Santa Panagla had acquired for me, in retrospect, a private magic of its own; more even than the theatre, it survived in memory as a vivid and unforgettable image of pure happiness. The tiny, primitive village, built upon a rocky cliff overlooking the bay of Augusta, had struck me as being the most beautiful place I had ever seen: a fragment of the Homeric world existing, as it were, in some timeless universe of its own, miraculously untouched (apart from the railway station) by the passing centuries. It was perhaps (I reflected) unwise to revisit it; yet the place itself could surely have altered little in ten years. No road led to it, only an occasional train stopped at the station, there were no ‘cultural monuments’ to attract the tourist—nothing but a tumbledown village and a rocky cove, with a view of Mount Etna.

On this Good Friday morning I set out by bus: bumping through the raffish, untidy suburbs to the cross-roads from which a narrow, winding lane led across country to the village. Here I left the bus, and set out to walk; vineyards, cornfields, olive-orchards—the flat, unexciting landscape stretched before me: fertile and pleasing enough, yet breathing that same air of negation and hopelessness which had haunted me for the past week in Syracuse. The fields and the roadside banks were starred with small and exquisite flowers: tiny sky-blue irises, pink campion and crimson anemones; here and there, too, were scattered the bigger, dusky-purple cups of Anemone coronaria—the familiar ‘Poppy Anemone’ of English gardens—which, if one is to believe D. H. Lawrence, is the true flower of Persephone:

Caverns,

Little hells of colour, caves of darkness,

Hell risen in pursuit of her . . .

I had, as it happened, reread Lawrence’s poem at Taormina (where, incidentally, it was written): did Anemone coronaria really grow at Enna, I wondered? Lawrence is usually pretty accurate about his botany; but I couldn’t remember that he had, in fact, ever been to Enna himself.

When she broke forth from below,

Flowers came, hell-hounds on her heels . . .

Go then, he said,

And in Sicily, on the meadows of Enna,

She thought she had left him;

But opened around her purple anemones . . .

All at her feet, hell opening;

. . . Hell rearing its husband-splendid, serpent heads,

Hell-purple, to get at her . . .

I picked one of the ‘little hells of colour’: black-eyed, dusky, tinged with the livid threatening purple of a thundercloud. A vague memory stirred in my mind of a picture in washy watercolour, showing a little girl gathering a bunch of flowers: an improbable bouquet, suggesting the squiggly, attenuated flora of art nouvèau. I remembered, too, a window facing upon the sea, a row of books, the spring sunlight falling across an orange Liberty tablecloth . . . The images flickered rapidly through my mind, evoking, like some half-apprehended echo, a sense of ancient and vicarious remorse: a vague, unseizable memory of darkness and banishment, and of ruined, unfruitful fields.

I walked on between the vineyards and the grey, melancholy olives; once I passed a peasant, sitting by the roadside and munching a sprout of fennel; he greeted me courteously, but with a curiously withdrawn, hopeless air, as though he too were infected with the immitigable sadness of this vernal landscape.

Presently the country changed, becoming less fertile and more wild; vines and olives gave place to barren tracts of scrub, littered with boulders—oddly reminiscent of western Ireland. Here again the tiny blue irises sprang abruptly, in sudden miraculous constellations, from the dry, stony earth; and in the rare patches of grass-land the purple anemones flaunted the insignia of gloomy Dis: hell-hounds from the underworld, in pursuit of the risen goddess.

The lane began to descend; suddenly I turned a corner, and saw a band of darker blue drawn firmly against the azure brightness of the sky. The land fell away steeply—rocky slopes descending almost precipitously to a small enclosed bay. The view revealed itself with an odd reluctance, as though breaking some vow of secrecy; uncertain, even now, whether or no I had reached my destination, I looked for the remembered landmarks—the spur of rock, the huddled roofs of the village. Suddenly, unmistakably, the square pink box of the railway station leapt into view: incongruous as some cheap and gaudy toy flung down upon the beach at Ogygia or Ithaca. There was the village, there was the rocky cove; and across the bay Etna rose ghost-like, half-veiled in cloud.

I clambered down the rough path towards the station. The whole place had a curiously deserted air; and I remembered that Santa Panagla was, in effect, uninhabited, save for a few weeks each year when the peasants from the inland villages congregated here for the tunny-fishing. I had half-hoped that I might at least be able to buy bread and sausage and a bottle of wine; from the look of things, however, it seemed that I had been over-optimistic. I walked down to the cluster of low-built, pantiled cottages: not a soul was visible in the narrow street, no smoke rose from the chimneys, and the cottage doors appeared, one and all, to be firmly bolted. Suddenly, from one of the narrow viali leading down to the beach, emerged a dark-haired, farouche young man with a fishing-net over his shoulder. He stared at me without surprise, but with an expression of mild contempt. I greeted him, and asked if there were anybody in the village from whom I could buy bread and wine. Immediately he broke into a flood of explanations—the fishing season had not yet begun, the place was deserted, therefore there was no bread, no wine; the nearest shop was at the Scala Greco, two or three miles along the coast . . . Sensing my disappointment he became, all of a sudden, extremely sympathetic: perhaps, he suggested, the station-master might be persuaded to sell me a piece of bread, even—who knew?—a bottle of wine; if this failed, he would walk himself to the Scala Greca and buy whatever I wanted . . . His kindness, as I could see, was perfectly spontaneous, and sprang from the heart; here was I, a lonely forestiere, without bread, without wine; his sympathies once roused, there was nothing he wouldn’t have done for me—if I had asked for the shirt off his back, he would, without a doubt, have pulled if off then and there, and demanded no more than the price it had cost him.

I refused his offers of assistance as gracefully as I could; he looked genuinely disappointed, and assured me that I should find everything I wanted at the Scala Greca. Santa Panagia, he declared, was a brutto paese, no better than a desert; it was strange that the forestieri should find it so attractive.

Incredulously I glanced round me at the unpeopled landscape: surely, I asked the young man, foreigners didn’t come to Santa Panagia?

‘Si, si,’ he insisted. ‘Molti forestieri’—artists, mostly: English, Germans, Americans. Only this morning, he added, three English people had come from Syracuse: they were evidently mad, for he had seen them taking off their clothes in the middle of the street.

‘Inglesi?’ I exclaimed, an awful suspicion dawning in my mind.

‘Si, si,’ he assured me. ‘Tre inglesi—tutti pazzi.’ He tapped his forehead significantly and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Tutti nudi,’ he added, with a frown of disapproval.

I felt suddenly depressed. My dream of a private bolt-hole, unknown to the tourist, had once again been rudely shattered; Santa Panagia, alas, had been ‘discovered’ after all.

My young friend departed at last, clambering bare-foot up the rocky slopes towards the road. I walked on, down the deserted street and, suddenly turning a corner, heard voices. There, seated on a low parapet above the beach, were the three pazzi inglesi—none other (as I had more than half suspected) than the Intellectuals from the Orologio.

The two men were stripped to the waist, sun-bathing; the lady wore a pair of shorts and a brassière; at their feet was a basket of provisions and a large fiasca of wine. I could hardly, at this stage, turn tail and go back the way I had come; resolutely, trying my hardest (in a Harris-tweed suit) to look like an Italian, I passed them by.

‘Of course, Benjy’s so facile,’ I heard the lady saying.

‘. . . such a poor libretto . . .’

‘. . . if only they’d done the Beatrix Potter . . .’

I pursued my way down the viale to the beach. From the wall above, fragments of what must have been an animated conversation pursued me, diminishingly:

‘Harewood . . .’

‘. . . Aldeburgh . . .’

‘. . . Matyas Seiber . . .’

‘. . . Searle . . .’

‘Mind you, “Wozzeck” isn’t strictly twelve-note at all . . .’

‘. . . an African mass by an Italian—we heard it in Hamburg . . .’

I returned to the station by another path. Climbing the hillside I paused and looked back at the pink station, the village and the rocks beyond; the sea was intensely blue, flecked with white horses; Etna had emerged from her veil of cloud and was revealed, naked and sublime, above the heights of Augusta. The view was as beautiful as ever; yet the spirit which had informed it, the transfiguring magic which, in memory, had invested it with so mythical and so timeless a loveliness, had suddenly and irretrievably departed.

PART VI

Journey to the Interior

Chapter opening

I was on my way back from a music-lesson with Miss Wookie, who had been trying—with but little success, alas—to din into me the more recalcitrant passages in Debussy’s prelude, Feuilles Mortes. Miss Wookie, with those of her pupils who showed the least tendency to make good musicians, was the most patient and painstaking of teachers; with those, however, who—like myself—possessed no natural aptitude whatsoever, her patience was soon exhausted, and today she had all but reduced me (at the age of sixteen and a half) to tears. Five minutes before the end of the lesson, she had banged out of the room in a fury:

‘If your people like to pour their money down the drain, that’s their affair,’ she had spat at me from the doorway, ‘but I’m damned if I’ll waste any more of my time trying to teach music to a moron.’

It was really, as I sadly realized, my own fault entirely: I should have stuck to such relatively easy little pieces as I had been learning during the previous year—a Bach sarabande, Chopin’s Prelude No. 7, Schumann’s Traümerei. But of late I had become ambitious: I had discovered Modern Art (and, more particularly, modern music), and nothing would satisfy me but to play Debussy. I could already stumble painfully—it had taken me the whole of the previous term to learn it—through La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin; and now I had determined, fool-hardily, to wrestle with the intricacies of Feuilles Mortes—not merely because (being mostly chords) it looked deceptively easy but also (and perhaps chiefly) because I liked the title. This, I felt, was wholly suited to my present mood, which was one of gentle, autumnal melancholy . . . (The points de suspension are here peculiarly appropriate, for the poems I was writing at this time were full of dying falls about Eternity and the transience of youth, followed inevitably by a long row of dots . . . . . . a practice which Major Crump, the English master, quite rightly deplored.)

The truth was that, a few months before, it had suddenly been revealed to me—almost overnight—that Life was Futile. This alarm-ing discovery was partly due, no doubt, to my friend Julian Trevelyan, whose Bloomsbury background had made him at an early age a confirmed agnostic; but other, more potent factors had worked towards my undoing—pre-eminent among them being, I suppose, Wells’s Outline of History and, more recently, the novels of Aldous Huxley. I had also discovered the nineties: I had become, like Dowson, ‘a little weary’, and like Webster I was ‘much possessed by death.’ It was all very exciting, and I thoroughly enjoyed my new rôle; other people, however, tended to be rather unappreciative of its outward manifestations—among them Major Crump and Miss Wookie, and more particularly the latter. Feuilles Mortes proved to be a great deal more difficult than it looked; none the less I was determined (despite the futility of all sublunary things) to master it—with the melancholy consequences which I have already described.

I strolled along the asphalt path towards the main school buildings; in one hand I carried Debussy’s second book of preludes, in the other a large pink rose, plucked illicitly from the garden by the music-rooms. I sauntered, with a willowy and aesthetic undulation, past the Hall and the Library; it was mid-June, and hot: the flower-bed by the Hall was ablaze with blue lupins and with the strident vermilion blobs of Oriental poppies; from the Hall itself came a thin trickle of Bach—a gigue from one of the French suites. The frisky little tune darted and quivered across the hot June midday like a small silvery fish in an aquarium (I made a mental note of this image, for I was engaged at that time upon an interminable day-to-day chronicle, in the style of Aldous Huxley, about my life at school, from which I was determined to exclude nothing, however trivial—or unmentionable—which passed through my mind). I walked past the boys’ lavatories (known as ‘the bogs’), the stench from which—for Mr Badley, who suffered from a morbid terror of ‘drains’, insisted upon our using old-fashioned earth-closets—evoked less pleasant associations; and, with my rose held to my nostrils, and still faintly undulating, found myself at last in the open space opposite the Biology Lab.

Just at that moment the door of the Lab was flung open and Mr Bickersteth, the Biology master (who must have observed my approach), popped his head out. He glared at me ferociously, then gave vent to an abrupt and by no means amiable guffaw.

‘Hullo, Brooke,’ he barked at me, in the tones of a sergeant-major, ‘posing as Oscar Wilde, or something?’

At a slightly later date I might, perhaps, have succeeded in sweeping past Mr Bickersteth with what I should have doubtless described, at that period, as ‘an air of ineffable disdain’; at the moment, however, I was too unpractised in my newly-acquired rôle to do anything of the sort. Instead I blushed, gave an embarrassed giggle and said No, I wasn’t.

‘Oh, aren’t you? Well, it jolly well looks like it,’ growled Mr Bickersteth, and without another word popped back into the Lab, like a cuckoo into its clock, banging the door furiously behind him.

I walked on, rather less undulatingly, towards the Studio, and the more congenial company of Mr Meo, the Art master. Mr Bickersteth, perhaps, had some reason for his annoyance, for I had lately abandoned Biology (which I had taken for the School Certificate) in favour of English Literature (at Bedales one was allowed, at an early age, to ‘specialize’). This fact had been deplored by Mr Bickersteth in my end-of-term report, in which he had alleged, rather fulsomely, that I was one of his best pupils; the affair would have been less serious, perhaps, if I had given up his own pet subject for, say, Chemistry or Mathematics. But Literature—it was really too much: Mr Bickersteth had no doubt heard the prevalent rumour (it happened to be a true one) that Major Crump had actually been reading the poems of that unwholesome fellah T. S. Eliot to his senior English class . . . Plainly I was a lost soul, destined to be still further corrupted by the devilish machinations of Geoffrey and Barbara Crump; and now here I was, undulating about in a new and elegant pale-grey suit (I was rather proud of it), carrying a volume of decadent modern music and sniffing, superciliously, at a large pink rose.

Mr Bickersteth’s disobliging remark was perhaps excusable; but its implications were, as a matter of fact, grossly unfair: True, I had firmly decided (though possessing but the haziest notion of what the word meant) to be ‘decadent’; but Wilde himself remained hardly more than a name to me, I had not read his work, and though I was dimly aware that he had done something which could not be discussed in mixed company, I had so far failed entirely to find out what it was. (During the previous holidays I had boldly put the question to my cousin Gertrude, who happened to be staying with us; but she had flatly refused to satisfy my curiosity.) Not unnaturally, therefore, I resented Mr Bickersteth’s unkind accusation, which (though its grosser implications were lost on me) seemed not only unfair but excessively stupid and impercipient. It was just the sort of thing Mr Bickersteth would say, I reflected—a hearty, bouncing Philistine who played football, who read Kipling and Robert Service, and who had probably never so much as heard of Aldous Huxley.

For the truth was that the ‘pose’ to which Mr Bickersteth had taken such exception was borrowed, not from anybody as old-fashioned as Wilde but, rather, from the up-to-date yet decidedly ‘decadent’ young men in Crome Yellow and Antic Hay. I saw myself, in fact, as a mixture of Denis Stone and Theodore Gumbril, with a dash—and perhaps more than a dash—of the exquisite Mr Mercaptan. My soul, I imagined, was—like the soul of Denis in Crome Yellow—a ‘pale tenuous membrane’; like Gumbril, I was by temperament ‘mild and melancholy’ and profoundly convinced of my own futility; and I yearned to inhabit, like Mr Mercaptan, a dix-huitième boudoir (with a large and voluptuous sofa à la Crébillon fils) in which I could devote my days to the composition of ‘delicious little middles’.

That Mr Bickersteth should have confused my Gumbrilesque Weltschmerz with the lilies and languors of the fin-de-siècle seemed to me at the time to display an astonishing lack of sophistication; yet I can see now that he wasn’t, after all, so very far wrong; for—as I have already observed on an earlier page—there is, in the early Huxley novels, a perceptible hangover from the Mauve Epoch, and it was this element which, when I first read them, chiefly engaged my imagination. I had already discovered Dowson; a little later I was to discover Wilde himself; and it seemed to me that the typical Huxley young man was the lineal descendant of Dorian Gray, des Esseintes and the poet of ‘Cynara’. Nor, I think, was my judgment wholly at fault; for, rereading Antic Hay and Those Barren Leaves today, I am still struck by that recurrent strain of Yellow Booksiness—the mandarin prose, with its obvious debt to French models, the carefully-contrived dying fall, the young men with souls like tenuous membranes. What I failed to realize, as a schoolboy, was that Huxley, like Firbank (whom I hadn’t as yet discovered), was, so to speak, turning the fin-de-siècle ethos inside out, and laughing at his own vestigial ninetyishness. I was, I suppose, a rather solemn, humourless young man, and in adopting what I conceived to be the Huxleyan persona I exaggerated the languorous, droopy aspect of Gumbril, Chelifer and the rest at the expense of their livelier qualities; it was hardly surprising that Mr Bickersteth should interpret my innocent ‘camping’ in a more sinister light than it deserved.

At a slightly later date, when I had read Dorian Gray, my behaviour doubtless more than justified, retrospectively, Mr Bickersteth’s slanderous insinuations. I became, in fact, more greenery-yallery than ever; yet I think that, even in those days, I realized that Wilde’s novel was a second-rate, shoddy affair, and its influence hardly survived my first term at Oxford. My admiration for it, indeed, had about it an element of perversity: not only had the book acquired for me an aura of forbidden fruit (Barbara Crump had wisely refused to lend me her copy) but the very fact that I found its style vulgar and novelettish provided an added spice to the pleasure which I obtained from it—the plaisir aristocratique de déplaire (or, in this particular case, de se déplaire).

Today I can still reread it with pleasure as a fascinating period-piece: relishing the curiously stale aroma which it exhales, as of a box of very expensive chocolates which has been kept too long and allowed to go musty. In my schooldays, however, despite my acknowledged cult for it, Dorian Gray made no very deep impression on me; and my ‘decadent’ pose, for all that Mr Bickersteth might think to the contrary, owed far more to Mr Mercaptan than to Lord Henry Wotton. It would hardly, indeed, be an exaggeration to say that Huxley’s novels were to me what A Rebours was to Dorian Gray himself—a poison which, injected into my system at the age of sixteen, was to influence my conduct, my literary style and my general attitude to life for the next ten years or more.

The initial dose of this dangerous toxin had been administered, as it happened, by my friend Harry Grumbar (his very name had a Huxleyan ring), most stimulating of school-fellows, with a histrionic gift which would have taken him far, had he not—with a native prudence which I have never ceased to deplore—renounced the footlights in favour of the stock-exchange.

One afternoon Harry had come up to me in the library, where I was writing a letter home, holding in his hand a smallish volume bound in dull yellow cloth, with a little paper label on the spine.

‘Have you read this?’ he asked me. ‘You really must—I think it’s perfectly charming.’

I looked at the label: Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley; both title and author were unknown to me. I took the book in my hand: it was an odd shape—slightly narrower than ordinary crown octavo—and the binding was quite unlike that of any other book I had ever seen. The paper was thick and expensive-looking, with rough edges; the print was pleasant and clear, with very wide margins to the page; and at the end of the book—a pleasing touch—there was an extra label, stuck by its corner to the fly-leaf, for use when the original one became torn or illegible.

I was delighted, in the first instance, by the book’s appearance, and should certainly have read it for that reason, if for no other; for I was, in those days, a great connoisseur of the outsides of books, and would quite often take an entirely unknown novel out of the library merely because I liked its cover. Certain publishers, I had noticed, produced their books more pleasantly than others—Messrs Cape and Messrs Heinemann, for instance; and I would find, in such cases, that the contents lived up, as often as not, to the promise of the format. The present example was, I think, my first introduction to Messrs Chatto & Windus: their own names struck me as being pleasing and unusual, and so too did that of the author. Aldous Huxley: I repeated the name to myself, a little uncertain as to how ‘Aldous’ should be pronounced; it was an odd, outlandish name, which I had certainly never come across before.

I duly took the book out of the library, promising Harry, rather off-handedly, that I would have a look at it; probably, I thought, if Harry liked it, so should I; but I wouldn’t have admitted this for the world, for I was inclined to be a little supercilious about Harry’s taste in literature. I had decided—or, to be perfectly accurate, Julian Trevelyan had decided—that Harry was not really a highbrow; and being whole-hearted and militant highbrows ourselves, we were wont to judge our friends by alarmingly high standards.

To tell the truth I wished, in my heart, that Harry passed the test: for I found him very good company, even if he did, occasionally, laugh at my own more extravagant pretensions. But I was, I felt, committed inescapably to highbrowhood: any defection, as I well knew, would incur the wrathful contempt of Julian who, besides being my best friend, had been for some years now, so far as I was concerned, the final arbiter of taste. I was by no means sure, for instance, that Julian would approve of Crome Yellow: for one thing, Harry had referred to it as ‘charming’—a word which we did not admit to our vocabulary. Works of art, so I had learnt from Julian, could be described as ‘fine’, ‘significant’ or even, at a pinch, ‘beautiful’ (though this was apt to be condemned, except in very special cases, as a ‘really rather Sturge-Moore, you know’); but such words as ‘charming’ or ‘elegant’ were taboo, and the fact that Harry was under suspicion as a crypto-lowbrow was due largely, I suppose, to his use of such frivolous terms (he had even, I seem to remember, been heard to employ the word ‘pretty’—a dreadful solecism, calculated to make Julian foam at the mouth with ungovernable fury).

My own discovery of Art (with a big A) had been largely due to Wyndham Lewis’s Blast, the two issues of which (there were only two) Julian and I had discovered in a bookshop in Peters field. We had decided that they ought to be presented to the school library; and thereupon (for we could not afford the price ourselves) we raised a subscription among our more highbrow friends—Wally Goetz, Hans Khuner and (if I remember rightly) Harry Grumbar himself. Blast was duly purchased and presented to the library: it was a laudable attempt on our part to épater le bourgeois, but in fact the joke fell rather flat—for Blast, after all, was already (though we didn’t realize it) rather vieux jeu in 1924.

So far as I was concerned, however, it was far from being vieux jeu. I became, overnight, a fanatical modernist; within a week or two I was quoting Pound and Eliot, and jeering superciliously at the lowbrows (among whom was poor Harry) who confessed that they couldn’t see the ‘point’ of Vorticism. (Needless to say, I couldn’t honestly see it myself, but I had succeeded in persuading myself that I thought it very ‘fine’ and ‘significant’.)

It was Blast, I suppose, which—among its other deleterious effects—finally confirmed Julian in his conviction that Harry was not, so far as aesthetic matters were concerned, quite-quite; and I could not but agree, for the case against him was black enough, quite apart from his failure to appreciate the art of Mr Wyndham Lewis. Not only was he in the habit of using such taboo words as ‘charming’ or (even) ‘pretty’, but it was freely rumoured that he went to revues and musical comedies, and that his summer holidays were spent in such sinks of Philistinism as Deauville or Le Xouquet. Worse still, he not only played football but had actually been heard to say, in public, that he quite liked it.

No wonder, then, that I viewed Crome Yellow with some misgiving—not so much because I expected it to offend my own taste, as from fear of its possible effect upon Julian. For my part, I cherished a secret and shameful passion for revue (though I had not as yet been to one), and should, no doubt, have derived an ignoble thrill from a visit to Deauville; but I was careful to conceal such weaknesses from Julian; and I was prudent enough to secrete Crome Yellow in my locker, and to read it only when I could be sure that he wouldn’t surprise me in the act.

My opportunity came at last—a rainy afternoon when Julian had been compelled to go for a ‘wet run’ (I had a cold, myself, and was excused). I read the book in a couple of hours; and my conversion was immediate and complete. I was transported, as it were, into a new world: the effect was as sudden and dramatic as that moment when, after a clouded and glacial journey across Europe, one emerges from the Simplon into the dazzling sunlight of an Italian spring. Galsworthy, Walpole, Sheila Kaye-Smith—all the novelists I had lately been reading seemed to me suddenly as dim and depressing as an English winter. Even Blast, even the works of Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, took on in retrospect an air of solemn and joyless gloom. What had happened? The clue, perhaps, was provided by Mr Scogan, in his tribute to the great Knockespotch—that imaginary genius whose works formed part of the dummy bookshelf in Mr Wimbush’s library. ‘It was Knockespotch’, says Mr Scogan, ‘who delivered us from the dreary tyranny of the realistic novel . . . I am tired [he said] of seeing the human mind bogged in a social plenum; I prefer to paint it in a vacuum, freely and sportively bombinating . . . Oh, those Tales, [Mr Scogan continues] those Tales! How shall I describe them? Fabulous characters shoot across his pages like gaily dressed performers on the trapeze . . . Intelligences and emotions, relieved of all the imbecile preoccupations of civilized life, move in intricate and subtle dances . . . An immense erudition and an immense fancy go hand in hand . . . The verbal surface of his writing is rich and diversified. The wit is incessant . . .’ But alas, adds Mr Scogan, ‘Knockespotch’s great book is like the sword Excalibur. It remains stuck fast in this door, awaiting the coming of a writer with genius enough to draw it forth.’

I was in no doubt, myself, that Excalibur had already been withdrawn, and that the genius who had achieved the feat was none other than Aldous Huxley himself. Bubbling over with my new discovery, I went to find Julian; I hardly cared, by now, whether he approved of the book or not—I was merely determined that he should read it. Crome Yellow, I decided, could almost certainly be counted as high-brow—I was prepared, temerariously, to stake my word for it, if necessary, against that of Julian himself; at the same time, Harry had called it ‘charming’,—and the characters themselves constantly used that very word in their conversations . . . Crome Yellow, in fact, seemed to me in some miraculous way to reconcile the two worlds, hitherto mutually exclusive, represented by Julian and Harry.

Julian read it in his turn and—though not prone to such sudden and whole-hearted enthusiasms as myself—gave it his approval. He had, moreover, not only heard of Aldous Huxley but had actually met him—or at least been in the same room with him. Naturally—for I had a distinct streak of the gossip-writer in my composition—I wanted to know all about him; but here Julian showed plainly that he disapproved of my frivolous approach, and would say no more than that Huxley was ‘very old’ (he must, at that date, have been just over thirty).

My enthusiasm increased by leaps and bounds; during the holi-days I procured Limbo, Leda and Mortal Coils; Antic Hay, however, eluded me—I asked for it at W. H. Smith’s library at Folkestone, but Miss Angel, the librarian, eyeing me with evident disapproval, assured me self-righteously that they ‘didn’t stock it’. ‘It’s a most peculiar book,’ she added, and, in an attempt to fob me off with something more suited to my age, proffered me the latest novel by Sapper.

I refused, however, to be daunted, and I was determined to obtain Antic Hay sooner or later. ‘My father says it’s filthy in parts,’ said Julian—a statement which, naturally enough, whetted my appetite enormously. During that term I inscribed the title on the ‘suggestion list’ for the school library; hardly had I done so when Kitty Cooper, a senior girl and an assistant librarian, rushed up to the notice-board, her cheeks aflame, and scratched it out. ‘We couldn’t possibly have such a book in the library,’ she exclaimed.

By this time, as might have been expected, I was in a perfect fever of concupiscence; and at last, having saved every penny of my pocket-money, I sent a postal-order for seven-and-sixpence to Messrs Chatto & Windus, and received the book by return of post.

To tell the truth I was the least bit disappointed, at first, by Antic Hay, which, at the age of sixteen, I found (though I wouldn’t have admitted it for the world) a little ‘above my head’. Nevertheless, it became my Bible; and, like other Bible-students, I probably interpreted the sacred text to suit my own inclinations and the measure of my understanding. Nor did I omit to spread the gospel—though only among a few carefully-chosen friends. One of these was Joan Burnham, who, rather unfortunately, was caught by Major Crump in the act of reading it. Afterwards the Major treated me to a little talk: ‘I don’t mind Joan reading it,’ he said, ‘but you’d better be rather careful whom you lend it to.’ He added that, if one liked ‘that sort of thing’, The Green Hat, by Michael Arlen, was really more amusing.

At most schools, I suppose, in those days, my precious copy of Antic Hay would have been summarily confiscated, and it says a good deal for Bedales that no such disaster occurred. Yet my Huxley cult was to land me, nevertheless (if only indirectly), in trouble . . .

A year or two previously Julian and I had founded a school magazine called The Ray—inspired largely by Blast, though bearing little resemblance to its bombastic, puce-coloured progenitor apart from the colour of its cover and the fact that we called our editorials ‘manifestoes’. During this summer term of which I am writing, I had composed a story which (though I say it myself) was an extremely competent pastiche—considering my age—of the early Huxley. It was duly approved by my co-editor for inclusion in our next number, and, in due course, towards the end of the term, it appeared. During the day of its publication I became aware that I had achieved something of a succès de scandale; such had certainly not been my intention; but I was, I suppose, by now so soaked in the Huxleyan element that I had lost all power to discriminate between what could and could not be said, in cold print, in a school magazine in the nineteen-twenties. For one thing, I had mentioned Lavatories—and it should be pointed out, for the benefit of younger readers, that in 1925 lavatories, so far as fiction was concerned, were strictly taboo. (Only Huxley himself, I think, among the novelists I had read, had dared to refer to them.) Worse still—far worse—I had referred (though only obliquely and in passing) to Homosexuality. I had actually used the dread word itself (it occurred in Those Barren Leaves, and I had gone to some trouble to find out what it meant); and here again I had broken a taboo which was still, in those days, strictly observed by all but the youngest and most revolutionary novelists.

No wonder, then, that my story created a scandal. My first serious intimation of the fact was contained in a note from the chemistry master, Mr Vernon, which I had found waiting for me on the letter-board after lunch. Since this document would seem to be of some interest to any future historian of morals, I reproduce it here in full:

My dear Brooke,

May I offer my congratulations on your production of the most offensive piece of prose it has been my fortune to read. Your complete disregard of all the accepted standards of decency is as masterly as is the sublime and doubly refined cruelty of the underhand blow you have undoubtedly given the Chief [i.e., the Headmaster]. He has said nothing: but this wonderful parade of obscenity for its own sake reflects so horribly on the school that it does not require much consideration for others—a frame of mind that nowadays is doubtless out of date—to realize what he must have suffered. A Philistine (or are Philistines too a thing of the past) like myself can only view with regret the prostitution of a talent such as yours for pornographic ends.

If you consider my interpretation unjustified, listen to some of the small fry licking their chops over your juicier morsels.

Yours sincerely,

The effect upon me of this extraordinary epistle was not, alas, such as its writer had presumably intended; far from reducing me to a state of tearful penitence, Mr Vernon’s diatribe merely induced in me, I am sorry to say, an agreeable sense of my own Satanic wickedness—a trait in my character of which I had so far been naively unaware, but which now I welcomed as being appropriately Huxleyan. Henceforward my persona, which up till now had been derived chiefly from Gumbril and Mr Mercaptan, was to take on more than a little of Coleman’s romantic diabolism; and it was not long before I had written-up the whole incident, in exaggeratedly diabolic terms, in the autobiographical novel upon which I was engaged.

I was, none the less, a little perturbed about the ‘underhand blow’ which I was supposed to have dealt the Chief; surely, I thought, he would not have taken it (if it were indeed a blow) lying down? Yet apparently he had. Or perhaps, I thought, Mr Vernon had perceived in my story depths of degradation of which not only I but Mr Badley himself had remained innocently unaware. I showed the letter to Julian, rather hoping that he would know the meaning of the word ‘pornographic’, which I did not; nor, as it turned out, did he—a fact which, I am afraid, gave me a rather ignoble satisfaction. We looked it up, eventually, in the Oxford dictionary, and when we discovered that it meant, literally, ‘writing about harlots’ we were overcome, I regret to say (just as though we had been two ordinary schoolboys), by a fit of ribald, irrepressible and quite unhighbrow laughter.

My story, however, had not after all passed unnoticed by the Chief: that same evening, after prayers, he told me that he wanted to see me in his study. There could hardly be any doubt about the subject of the coming interview; and in the light of Mr Vernon’s letter I began to feel less and less like Coleman and more and more like the timid and futile Denis in Crome Yellow. By the time I reached Mr Badley’s study, my soul had become distinctly more tenuous and more membranous than usual. Perhaps, I thought, I should be expelled, or even—for it did happen, very occasionally, even at Bedales—beaten. Being physically a coward, I should prefer, I thought, to be expelled: I had felt for some time that Bedales offered insufficient scope to anybody so sophisticated and so world-weary as myself; and I decided that if I were to be packed off, ignominiously, on the following morning (people in novels who had disgraced themselves were always, as I had noticed, ‘packed off’), I would make my way, like Gumbril, to London, where doubtless I should be received with open arms by the equivalents of Mr Mercaptan, Mrs Viveash and the satanic Coleman.

As it happened, I was to be offered no such glittering opportunities; far from expelling me or even beating me, Mr Badley gave me a grave but kindly little talk, in which he said that, for his part, he had seen nothing very objectionable in my story, but that, being a headmaster, he had to consider its possible effect upon other people, more especially parents. A few words followed upon the purely literary aspect of the matter: Mr Badley himself had once, so he told me, ‘had the privilege’ of meeting Oscar Wilde, whom he had found delightful. Decadent literature, however—thus the Chief urbanely continued—was apt to be a blind alley, and I should doubtless soon grow tired of it. Meanwhile, something would have to be done about that story . . .

I waited, in a twitter of apprehension, to hear my fate. But the Chief’s verdict, when it came, involved no recriminations against myself; it proved, in fact, to be a mere matter of practical politics. Among my other gaffes, I had used the name of Miss Dyce, the matron at the San., for one of my characters; I had intended no reference to her, and indeed had chosen the name entirely at random; Miss Dyce, however, had been—perhaps not unnaturally—incensed at what she considered to be a libellous portrait of herself (and indeed, if it had been intended as a portrait, her anger would have been more than justified, for her namesake was portrayed as an elderly and ill-favoured Christian Scientist of nymphomaniacal tendencies). The Chief’s suggestion was that the whole issue should be withdrawn and the offending pages stuck together (fortunately the story occupied two opposite ones), after which the copies could be reissued. We were at liberty, said the Chief, to give as our reason for this action the putative libel upon Miss Dyce; nothing need be said about the story’s ‘obscenity’.

I duly promised to withdraw The Ray on the following morning; the Chief thereupon changed the subject and began to talk to me sympathetically (and rather flatteringly) about my work and my position in the school. He hoped, he said, to make me a prefect during the following winter term . . . Coals of fire, I felt, could hardly have been heaped more prodigally upon my head. As we talked, I had a curious feeling of kinship with the grave, bearded figure for whom, in the ordinary way, I felt nothing but a vague, respectful awe. We were united, I felt, by our superior intelligence and by our more sophisticated code of ethics against such bumptious and wrong-headed Philistines as Mr Vernon and Mr Bickersteth. I was to realize later, as it happened, that nearly everyone felt like this after a ‘jaw’ from the Chief; it was, I suppose, a part of his very individual technique as a headmaster—or was it, perhaps, merely an expression of his unshakable and slightly naive faith in adolescent human nature? I felt, at any rate, extremely flattered; and by the time the interview was over and I had said goodnight I felt also (and was this too a part of the technique?) a bit of a worm . . .

The Ray was duly withdrawn and reissued, a handsome apology was made to Miss Dyce, and nothing more was said, either by Mr Vernon or by anybody else, about the prostitution of my talent for pornographic ends. Rereading the story not long since I found myself, I am sorry to say, wholly impenitent: it still seems to me a remarkably good pastiche of Huxley for a boy of sixteen, and could nowadays, I suppose, be published anywhere—even in a school magazine—without anybody turning a hair.

At the time, however, the Chief’s little homily had the effect of provoking in me a violent reaction against Aldous Huxley and all his works: the following term I presented my entire collection of his books to the school library—rather an odd sequel, surely, to the banning of The Ray, for if my story could be considered capable (by parents, anyway) of corrupting what Mr Vernon referred to as the ‘small fry’, how should they escape corruption at the hands of the Master himself? True, Barbara Crump—the head librarian—did jib at Antic Hay, but she accepted the other volumes with alacrity. It was an act of generosity which I have never ceased to regret; for those early Huxley editions, with their charming bindings and littlepaper labels, are unobtainable now.

Among the rest, I was foolish enough to part with a first edition of Those Barren Leaves, for which I had paid no less than sixteen shillings, secondhand (Huxley ‘firsts’ already fetched a good price, even at that early date). My remorse was the more galling, since my anti-Huxley phase proved but a brief and transient affair; within a few months I was taking Mortal Coils and Limbo (presented by myself) out of the library and rereading them with avidity. As my own intelligence matured, I found them more and more fascinating: passages which, at the age of fifteen, had seemed obscure, became suddenly luminous with meaning; the names of writers, painters and so on with which Huxley was wont to pepper his pages (and which, a year ago, had been totally unknown to me) became gradually familiar. Spurred on by intellectual snobbery, I set myself to find out more about Baudelaire and El Greco, about Proust, Cézanne and (even) such lesser figures as Crébillon fils and Taddeo da Poggibonsi; for Huxley, in those early works, had a mischievous way of slipping such names, casually, into his discourses, with the omniscient and condescending air of the gossip-writer who refers, in passing, to ‘Lady So-and-so, who of course . . .’ Huxley’s novels and essays had, in fact, precisely the effect upon myself that the Tatler and the Sketch may be supposed to have upon the surburban housewife: of course one knew all about Baudelaire, or Bakst, or Marie Laurencin—or if one didn’t, then it was high time one set about finding out. It is not, perhaps, the best sort of introduction to the world of ‘Culture’; yet it is better, I suppose, than none at alls and I am inclined to think that a little snobbery, when we are young, does none of us any harm.

The Huxleyan poison continued to circulate in my veins for the next ten years or more; indeed, I think I have never succeeded in finally excreting it from my system. As a writer I am liable, like the young man in The Rock Pool, to find that the virus is still unexpectedly working, and that I have lapsed yet again, from force of long habit, into what Cyril Connolly calls the ‘competent intellectual vulgarity’ of my youthful hero. Huxley, in fact, was a kind of Bergotte to my Proust, I idolized him when young, and if I find his later work hard to ‘take’, my difficulty is partly due, perhaps, to the immense expectations which his earlier books aroused in me.

I see him now, after thirty years, as a writer of immense talent and even greater intelligence who, if he had written nothing after 1925, would probably be remembered as a minor novelist of the twenties, of roughly the same stature as Ronald Firbank. I can still read Limbo and Crome Yellow with almost undiminished pleasure, Antic Hay with rather less; Those Barren Leaves, never one of his best-known works, I find wears better than most, though, like Point Counter Point, it derives too obviously from French models (more especially from Proust: Mrs Aldwinkle, for instance, with her proprietary attitude to her ‘view’, etc., is simply Mme Verduri à l’anglaise). Point Counter Point, to my mind, is Huxley’s last really satisfactory book, and even here he is already, as a writer, getting rather tired: the prose is often flaccid and cliché-ridden, the Huxleyan mannerisms are overworked, and images which have been used before are in this and subsequent works trotted out over and over again. (I hope that one day some American Ph.D. thesis-writer will calculate just how many times Huxley has used the image about time flowing ‘like blood from’a stanchless wound’.)

Then came Brave New World (science-fiction for the middlebrow public), then the Gadarene descent—Eyeless in Gaza, with its absurd prep-school nastiness, Time Must Have a Stop (unreadable), down to the frank pornography (shades of Mr Vernon!) of Ape and Essence. Hollywood, Constructive Pacifism, Yoga, mescalin: it has been a sad dégringolade—not, one hopes, for Mr Huxley personally, but for Aldous Huxley the writer. The trouble is, I think, that he has written far too much, spinning out a minor talent into a diffuse web of repetitive verbiage; and not only has he written too much but he has written it in America, the moral climate of which would seem to be fatal to the spirit of English prose. One wishes that Huxley had been content, like E. M. Forster, to write the half-dozen or so books that he had it in him to write, and then stop; but he has been seduced, alas, not only by America but by the lure of professionalism; and whatever one may think of Yoga, it appears (in its Hollywood form, at any rate) to have had, almost without exception, a disastrous effect upon those writers who have embraced it.

Lest this should sound tetchy or merely impertinent, I should add that I still consider Huxley to be one of the three or four most talented English novelists of the century; but how one wishes that he could have been persuaded to stop writing twenty years ago!

At this period of which I write, the Huxley influence was, for me, paramount; yet it remained, I think, largely a pose—though one in which I was rapidly beginning, myself, to believe. In reality, I was very far from being the blasé, sophisticated young person who appeared, as the narrator, in my autobiographical novel; and in my recurrent anti-Huxley moods, I found myself reverting, easily enough, to an earlier phase of my literary development.

Some months before, I had completed a vast and turgid novel written in a style derived, I suppose, from Wells, Hugh Walpole, Sheila Kaye-Smith and other of my pre-Huxleyan favourites. The hero, Ian Grant (the name, no doubt, was an unconscious echo of Stumps), was a broody young man who spent most of his time going for long walks in the country and speculating, diffusely and at interminable length, about the nature of God. I was not, myself, really much interested in God; but I had a genuine passion for the countryside (an aspect of myself which, by the way, I found rather hard to reconcile with my newly-acquired pose of urban sophistication); and my novel consisted almost entirely—apart from the theological digressions—of verbose and juicy descriptions of rural scenery, full of words like ‘lush’ and ‘redolent’, and with as many local place-names as I could squeeze in without sounding like a guide-book (a danger which, indeed, I too often failed to avoid). Needless to say, the scene was set, for the most part, in the Elham Valley; and in describing, nostalgically, that long-familiar countryside, it was as though a new dimension had been added to those remembered fields and woodlands, so that when we returned to the cottage, for our summer holidays, it seemed to me that Gorsley and Forty-acres, the water-tower and Mr Adams’s farm had acquired a deeper and more poignant reality. Their outward lineaments remained the same; but they had now become, as it were, a part of ‘literature’, I saw them through the romantic haze of a novelist’s imagination. It was rather as though one should visit Dorset after being immersed in the novels of Hardy, or—a more probable contingency in my own case—Romney Marsh after an intensive course of Sheila Kaye-Smith (a novelist whom I had much admired, in my pre-Huxley days, chiefly because she wrote about places I knew). The only difference was that, in the case of this particular countryside, I happened to have written the appropriate ‘regional’ novels myself: the Elham Valley, in fact, had become for me already, as it were, the Brooke country.

Ileden, Gorsley, Pett Bottom—the familiar names, already impregnated with the remembered magic of childhood, had now acquired literary accretions: corresponding to (say) Egdon, Trantridge or High Story in the Hardy canon. I would become obsessed, for a whole Easter or summer holiday, with a particular wood or hillside, or the name of a village or country mansion. I remember that Ileden, more especially, took my fancy at one period: a lonely house standing on the peak of Barham Downs, above the village of Kingston. So obsessed did I become with the name that I felt compelled to talk about it on the slightest pretext, just as a lover will seize upon the least opportunity to mention the name of the beloved. My family, no doubt, became extremely bored with Ileden that summer; and my preoccupation must have lasted well into the next term at school, for I can remember asking Julian whether he thought it would make a good title for a novel. Julian looked rather dubious: ‘It depends,’ he said noncommittally, ‘what sort of novel, don’t you think?’

It was due, I suppose, to this renewed (and predominantly ‘literary’) interest in familiar places and place-names that the name of Clambercrown began once again to haunt my adolescent imagination. The ‘Dog-and-Clambercrown’ had never been forgotten: I would still hear occasional references to it, and the name had never entirely lost for me the magic which had attached to it in my childhood. It remained, as ever, a symbol of all that was remote and inaccessible; and now, as a full-blown regional novelist, I began to invest it with a new significance. I became, for a time, mildly obsessed with it, as I had with Ileden; I would mention it, as a curiosity, to my friends at school, and we would speculate as to the possible meaning of the mysterious ‘Clambercrown’—just as I had, myself, so often speculated in the past. Yet the plate remained, as yet, unvisited; nor did I, so far as I can remember, introduce it into any of my writings. It did, however, form the subject of a lengthy and extremely lurid ghost-story which, throughout that summer term at Bedales of which I am writing, I related with considerable gusto to the boys in my dormitory.

As a senior boy, though not yet a prefect, I had recently been put in charge of a small dormitory, where I was faced with the task of keeping three or four unruly small boys out of mischief from bed-time at nine o’clock till lights-out at half-past. I remembered that other dormitory captains, when I myself was a small boy, had been able to hold us entranced for the full half-hour (at the cost, often enough, of subsequent nightmares); and I determined to follow their example. I became, in fact, a rather good teller of ghost-stories: like any Trollope or Dickens, I would contrive to spin out my tale to exactly the required length, and to finish each instalment on a note of suspense.

My most successful effort was, I am sure, ‘The Dog and Clambercrown’; it must have run for at least fifteen instalments, and the discipline of the dormitory remained, for so long as the story lasted, above reproach. I can remember, alas, almost nothing of the story itself, except that it was about a terrifying phantom hound who haunted the neighbourhood of the old inn—a vestigial memory, perhaps, of those East Kent meets which I had never been allowed to attend, but owing something also, no doubt, to The Hound of the Baskervilles. How I explained the ‘Clambercrown’ I cannot remember; I suspect, though, that the crown was connected in some way with magical ceremonies. Witches certainly occurred in the story—one, I seem to recall, was red-haired, with a pasty face disfigured by a hideous birthmark; she was accustomed to liquidate her superfluous neighbours by a decoction of Green Hellebore—a piece of wishful-thinking on my part, for I had never, at that time, found the Hellebore in the Elham Valley or anywhere near it. (In later years I was to discover it in the Lynsore Valley and in a wood at Bladbean—both within easy distance of the Clambercrown itself; which shows, once again, how Nature almost always, in the long run, contrives to imitate Art.)

The old childhood myth of the Dog and Clambercrown had, then (like the water-tower or Mr Adams’s farm), acquired a new dimension; the mysterious public-house had become a literary landmark, a feature in that landscape which, for fictional purposes, I had already made my own. Yet the Dog itself remained still unvisited—an omission which, as the self-appointed Swan of Nailbourne, I was bound to deplore, for it seemed to me that the inn could hardly be pin-pointed upon my private literary map until I had established, once and for all, its exact location in the real countryside. (In my more ambitious moments I envisaged the mise-en-scène of my stories as a semi-fictionalized map, like those maps of Wessex which appear upon the end-papers of Hardy’s novels; one day, I liked to think, a similar map would embellish the ‘Nailbourne Edition’ of my own Collected Works.)

It was, then, no doubt, with some such sense of my obligations as a regional novelist that I decided, during the summer holidays following the success of my ‘Clambercrown’ story in the dormitory, to make at last the long-deferred pilgrimage to the inn itself. As it happened, this particular holiday (for reasons which I cannot now remember) was to be spent—contrary to our usual custom—not at the cottage but at our home at Sandgate) the cottage, meanwhile, being temporarily inhabited by ‘Ninnie’ and the husband whom she had married a few years previously. My expedition, therefore, would have to be made from Folkestone, and by train—a circumstance which invested the projected journey with an additional excitement, for I retained even now a half-realized sense of awe at the prospect of penetrating into the country ‘beyond the hills’.

As for the Dog itself, my ideas as to its exact situation remained extremely vague; by judicious enquiry, however, I had learnt that it lay ‘somewhere up by Stelling Minnis’, and, according to my father (who was himself far from certain on the point), could best, in the circumstances, be approached from the village of Elham. My plan, therefore, was to go by train to Elham, and then ask the way; considered in rational terms, the expedition was not, after all, a very difficult or hazardous undertaking: a twenty-minute railway journey with, perhaps, a five-mile walk at the end of it. Yet the old, legendary conception, surviving from my childhood, of the Clambercrown as a remote and potentially hostile territory, only to be approached at one’s peril and at the cost of unimaginable ardours and endurances, oddly persisted. I wouldn’t, of course, have admitted it, but the prospect of actually setting forth upon my journey filled me with a curious, irrational uneasiness; and I continued, on one pretext or another, to postpone the promised trip from day to day.

At last, however, I decided that the expedition could be deferred no longer) and one morning I found myself—armed with a heavy walking-stick and carrying a packet of beef and tomato sandwiches—climbing the steep incline leading from the Sandgate Hill up to the level reaches of Coolinge Lane. It was a hot, windless day in mid-August, with a threat of thunder in the air; Coolinge Lane, that high aery plateau haunted, as ever, by the ghosts of forgotten aviators and malevolent suffragettes, seemed today preternaturally silent, for the schools were emptied for the holidays, and the playing-fields, which a few weeks ago had rung with shrill cries and whistles, were now deserted. From Shorncliffe Camp—visible, through the shimmering heat-haze, across the valley—came faintly and intermittently the sound of bugles; and high up in the opaque, dust-laden vault of the sky an invisible aeroplane throbbed insistently, like the audible echo of a migraine. In the fields toward Shorncliffe a rash of new villas had erupted; the ‘countrified’ meadows of my childhood were now criss-crossed by asphalt roads and squalid, half-laid tracks between which yet more villas were arising. I should have found it hard, now, to find my way to the house of my mother’s friends, where I used to be brought to tea, and which in those days had marked the outermost fringe of the encroaching town; and it was with a mild surprise—for I seldom walked this way nowadays—that I recognized the small farm which, when we used to pass it on our way to the station, had seemed a kind of outpost of the ‘real’ country for which we were bound. The hills themselves, quivering in the dusty, bluish haze, loomed unchanged upon the sky-line; and against the background of their hoary flanks rose the chimney of the Electric Light works for which I had once conceived such an obsessive—and perhaps deleterious—passion.

I passed the farm, passed the forbidding pub at the corner and walked across the road to the station. Here, too, an unnatural silence seemed to prevail—a silence broken only by the intermittent trundling of milk-cans on the opposite platform; there were few trains, I suppose, at this time of the day, and apparently no other passengers, apart from myself, for the 10.36 train to Canterbury (via Elham). I bought my ticket—a single, for who knew by what perilous and circuitous route I might return?—and waited on the hot, airless platform, haunted by the memory of so many childhood departures. Presently the train puffed, self-importantly, into the station: a small and ancient train with a high, old-fashioned funnel—one of the very same, no doubt, in which we had set forth, year after year, upon those thrilling and long-anticipated journeys up the Elham Valley (nowadays, if we were going to the cottage, we almost always travelled by car, so that the railway itself had already taken on for me a quality of romantic nostalgia).

I found an empty carriage without difficulty. The interior was as hot as an oven; and I recognized the ancient, musty smell of the seats, curiously reminiscent of hard-boiled eggs. The train chugged out of the station to the old, familiar rhythm—‘Ne pas se pencher au dehors’—only to pull up again, in a couple of minutes, at Cheriton Halt, a tiny station with a ricketty-looking wooden platform, at which I had never, for so long as I could remember, seen anybody get on or off the train. From here, one looked across at the vague, characterless prospect of Shorncliffe Camp; and once again, in the sudden silence after the train pulled up, I heard the remote, plangent cry of a bugle.

After the two-minute wait decreed, presumably—for reasons best known to itself—by the S. E. & C. R., the train moved on again and, leaving the main line, branched off to the right between high chalk embankments. Sweating in my corner seat, I watched the tall banks slide past, then dip into the flat, familiar fields beyond Cheriton. I was in a curious, unsettled mood, due partly, perhaps, to the sultry weather, but mainly to the ill-defined and half-realized disturbances of early adolescence. Sitting in the hot train, I was reminded of Denis’s discomfort in the first chapter of Crome Yellow, and for the next few minutes I managed to feel very adult and sophisticated: the motive for my own journey, translated into Huxleyan terms, had, I thought, just the right ‘amusing’ touch of futility. For why, after all, was I going? I might just as well have spent the day bathing and sunbathing on the beach; instead of which, here I sat in an uncomfortable train, faced by the uninviting prospect of a long, weary tramp in search of a public-house which, so far as I knew, possessed no attractions whatever apart from its unusual name. It was just the sort of pointless action which (so I liked to imagine) would have appealed to Denis or Gumbril or even, perhaps, to the iniquitous Coleman. Suddenly, remembering an incident which had occurred a few days before, I felt a wave of retrospective misery and humiliation sweep over me, and my eyes filled with tears—not, alas, the blasé and world-weary lacrimae rerum of a Gumbril, but the hot, sudden and quite un-Huxleyan tears of a frustrated and unhappy boy.

My brother and sister, and a friend who had come to dinner, had suddenly decided, on the spur of the moment, to motor over to Dover and go to the second house at the Hippodrome. My mother, much to my delight, suggested that I should go too; and the others, if they showed little enthusiasm for this addition to the party, made no objection at the time. I was in transports of joy: for the Dover Hippodrome, ever since my childhood, had represented for me the very acme of wordliness and depravity. I was surprised even that my brother and sister should want to go (‘It might be amusing,’ my brother had said, in a casual, take-it-or-leave-it tone which struck me as being very mondain and sophisticated); still more surprised was I to be included in the party. It was just the sort of jaunt, I imagined, that Gumbril and Mrs Viveash might have embarked upon, at a moment’s notice, as a relief from the engulfing boredom of their lives. My own nostalgia for the mud, it is true, was the product not so much of ennui as of a crude but so far frustrated passion for ‘seeing life’ (and by ‘life’, I suppose, I meant, broadly speaking, anything connected, however remotely, with sex); I preferred, however, to disguise my callow desires beneath a Huxleyan veneer of boredom, and I contrived, on the whole, to do so with some success.

So thrilled was I by the prospect of going to the Hippodrome that I could hardly manage to finish my dinner; yet I was determined that I would not appear over-enthusiastic, and was careful to ape, so far as I was able, the casual, disengaged air of my brother and sister. Alas! I must have overplayed my rôle; for, as we left the dining-room, my brother took me aside and said, in that off-putting voice which I remembered only too well from previous occasions: ‘I honestly shouldn’t come, if I were you—you’d be awfully bored.’

My heart sank into my boots; never in my whole life had I suffered a disappointment so tragic and appalling. In the darkness of the hall, I felt the tears pricking my eyes; I gulped, I almost sobbed aloud.

‘I shouldn’t come, really,’ my brother repeated.

It was clear—only too clear—that I wasn’t wanted; at the same time I knew that, if I gave voice to my disappointment, if I begged to be taken to the Hippodrome, my brother could hardly refuse. After all, they had promised to take me—or, at any rate, their tacit assent to my mother’s suggestion had amounted to a promise. I longed to insist, to demand my rights; but I was, as usual, totally incapable of doing any such thing. I was beaten, and I knew it; and, taking refuge in my blasé Huxleyan rôle, I said, in as supercilious a tone as I could manage through my rising sobs: ‘Oh, all right—I expect it would be rather boring, really.’

My brother, his friend and my sister gaily departed; and I was left to explain as best I could to my mother and father why I hadn’t gone too I sat despondently in the drawing-room rereading Those Barren Leaves, and went to bed early. Once in bed, I gave way to my misery: I wept as I hadn’t wept for years, sobbing luxuriously and unrestrainedly, like a child.

I was unwanted, I was ‘left out’; too young and, probably (in my brother’s opinion), too dull for adult society; a solemn young highbrow with spots, who had to be left at home for fear of spoiling the evening. If only they knew, I thought—if only they knew how truly adult and disillusioned I really was! Philistines that they were, they had hardly so much as heard of Aldous Huxley, let alone read his books; they had not, as I had, made the epoch-making discovery that Life was Futile. Yet they thought me ‘too young’ to be taken to the Dover Hippodrome!

I realize now—and even in part realized then—the reason why my brother discouraged me from going with them: for the evening would obviously be a gay one, there would be drinks at the theatre bar, and more drinks, perhaps, at some pub or hotel afterwards; plainly my brother thought such goings-on unsuitable for me, and indeed, if I had gone, I should doubtless have been gauche and tongue-tied, a skeleton at the feast; perhaps, too, my brother feared that I might give too free an account to our parents, on the following morning, of the night’s gaieties.

But such considerations couldn’t console me for what seemed, at the time, an unbearable humiliation; and now, as I sat in the train, consumed by retrospective misery, I felt my ‘sophisticated’ pose crumble into ruins, and I knew that I was, after all, young, callow, unfledged—a spotty schoolboy, with a precocious taste for highbrow novels, and a rather nasty mind.

The train pulled in to Lyminge, the first real station on the line (for Cheriton Halt didn’t really count). One or two people got in; there was a rattle of milk-cans and, in the ensuing silence, country noises became audible: the lowing of cows, the high shrill cry of a plover, and a deep concerted hum of insects from the station garden. The train was in no hurry; we waited, minute after minute, in the country silence. The carriage became hotter and hotter: I took off my tie and unbuttoned my shirt; and, as my hand touched my bare chest, I immediately felt the stirring of a vague, undirected sensuality. The train jerked forward at last, a faint breeze blew upon my chest; with a guilty deliberation I allowed my thoughts to wander, at will, among the lascivious images which lurked, enticingly, in the background of my mind . . .

I was suffering, I suppose, from an abnormally delayed puberty; my ignorance of the ‘facts of life’ was almost incredible: I did just know, in theory, what a man and woman ‘did’ together (or were supposed to do), but I frankly didn’t believe such a thing possible. I ‘believed’ it, that is to say, as one believes the earth to be round and not flat; with my intellect, but not with my emotions—or, as Lawrence would have said, with my solar plexus. Of anything in the nature of direct sexual desire I was as yet all but innocent; nor did it occur to me, I think, that there was any connection between the obvious signs and symptoms of my own puberty and the mysterious ‘act’ itself. I felt not the least attraction towards women; not long since, feeling rather worried about this, I had taken the opportunity to go to a musical comedy (it was called The Street Singer) at the Pleasure Gardens Theatre, Folkestone; I sat by myself in the pit and looked carefully at the legs and the bare shoulders of the chorus, trying to persuade myself that I felt ‘like that’ about one or another of the girls. But it was no good, I just didn’t and couldn’t: the idea of naked women either repelled me or left me blankly indifferent. Plainly, I decided, ‘sex’—as it occurred in novels and, reputedly, in real life as well—was not for me; which didn’t, however, discourage me from trying to find out as much about it, indirectly, as I possibly could. Hence, in part, no doubt, the attraction of Huxley; and indeed, like Huxley’s young heroines, I had become, theoretically, quite well up in the subject—witness my story in The Ray—though without the faintest inkling as to its practical applications.

At the time of which I write I was hovering, I think, upon the brink of a more comprehensive understanding; yet I remained, in the strict sense of the term, innocent. My sexuality, in fact, was confined to a series of elaborate phantasies, often not to be distinguished from equivalent episodes in the novels I was writing; I see now that they were, in fact, extremely licentious, but at the time I simply didn’t connect them with sex (as I understood it) at all. Nor, indeed, did they seem to have any connection with the rest of my own personality: they were something separate, alien from my normal self, a kind of cancerous proliferation of the mind’s texture; I didn’t in the least realize their significance, and, if I had been suddenly required, by some supernatural tribunal, to account for them, I should have described them, I suppose, as ‘just feelings’—something which I ‘thought about’ sometimes, but which I hadn’t made the slightest attempt to analyse, or to relate to my other, more ordinary preoccupations.

In fact, these libidinous day-dreams could be traced back to the far-distant past: elaborated in detail, and activated, nowadays, by a more mature and lively imagination, they differed hardly at all, in essentials, from the phantasies of my earliest childhood. I didn’t connect them now, any more than I had then, with sex; yet now, as then, I was aware—when I gave rein to these mysterious ‘feelings’—of a sense of guilt which (since nobody, after all, had told me that such things were wrong) I should have been hard put to it to explain.

They were associated, then, these phantasies, with ideas of violence and nakedness; by way of (so to speak) preserving the unities—and being, after all, a born story-teller—I had invented, some years before, a desert island, the inhabitants of which, having been cast ashore with very few clothes, proceeded to lose all (or nearly all—for I retained a curious pudeur in such matters) of such garments as they possessed; after which they spent most of their time in boxing and wrestling, or in more serious and bloody forms of combat in which the Queensberry rules were incontinently ignored. Various persons of my acquaintance were included among the inhabitants of this improbable atoll; the personnel, indeed, varied considerably from time to time, but the world which they inhabited differed scarcely at all, apart from a few modifications in the scenery, from that which, in my childhood, I had peopled with such heroic figures as Mr Bilham, Jim, the Gardener and the huntsman at Lenhall. My ‘island’, in fact, had a good deal in common with that forbidden kingdom of Clambercrown which, in earlier years, had seemed the natural habitat of those heroes whom I so secretly and so guiltily loved.

The train chugged leisurely along the valley beyond Lyminge and at last drew into Elham. I buttoned my shirt and, collecting my stick and my sandwiches, stepped out on to the platform. Thus to descend at the unfamiliar station, instead of at that of our own village, two further stops up the line, induced in me a curious sense of outrage, as though I were recklessly flouting, at my peril, some potent and immemorial taboo. As I walked along the platform, I felt the sultry August sun strike through my thin clothes with a renewed intensity, untempered, in this inland valley, by the cooler seaside airs. I held out my ticket to the stationmaster (I was the only passenger to leave the train) and, feeling suddenly nervous and self-conscious—for it must, I thought, seem an unusual and rather outlandish request—asked the way to the Dog and Clambercrown.

The stationmaster did, in fact, eye me with evident curiosity and, absurdly, I felt myself beginning to blush, as though my desire to visit the inn were not only eccentric but in some way reprehensible.

‘Walkin’, are you?’ the stationmaster enquired, running his eyes over me as though, perhaps, he suspected me of secreting a bicycle or even a small motor-car about my person. ‘Well, it’s a mighty long walk, I can tell you that.’ He continued to stare at me with unabashed curiosity. ‘I s’pose,’ he added at last, ‘you’d be visitin’ friends up that way, is that it?’

Blushing anew, and feeling more ridiculous than ever, I explained that I was ‘just going for a walk’.

‘Funny place to choose, just for a walk,’ the stationmaster commented, concluding, no doubt, that I was a lunatic, though apparently a harmless one. ‘Well,’ he began, slowly, with a reluctance due partly to the heat of the day, partly to innate bucolic caution, ‘yer best way, I s’pose, is to make for Stelling Minnis.’ He paused, wrinkling his forehead, as though considering a number of possible routes to that distant bourne. ‘Yer goes through the village ’ere,’ he continued at last, ‘turn right past the church, like, and keep along till you gets to the cricket ground. Then yer turns up to yer left, see, past that there white ’ouse——’ he had led me, by now, to the station entrance, and was pointing out the direction with a large, ham-like hand from which, as I noticed, two fingers were missing—‘then yer bears right, turns right again at the cross-roads, like, and keeps straight on up the hill till yer gets to Wheelbarrow Town, see? After that, you’ll see the Minnis right in front of you.’

Further directions followed: stimulated, perhaps, by the sound of his own voice, the stationmaster had become suddenly more genial and more ready with his information. Having explained the route in detail, he proceeded to repeat his directions all over again. By the time I finally left him and walked out of the station, my brain was a hopeless confusion of right-turns, left-turns and half-recollected landmarks.

I walked down the little hill from the station, the heat striking with an increasing violence through my flannel coat and trousers; I crossed the bed of the Nailbourne—dried-up, now, and overgrown with a rank tangle of weeds—and walked on, past the church, through the somnolent village street. On the window-ledge of the Rose and Crown a big ginger cat basked comfortably; a slatternly woman, standing in a doorway, eyed me with mild suspicion as I passed; from the church came the slow, measured notes of the clock striking eleven, each stroke falling ponderously, like a hammer-blow, upon the taut surface of the silence which, like some palpable element, seemed to throw back a metallic reverberation, shrill and exacerbating as that from a blacksmith’s anvil.

Beyond the village, I turned up the lane which the stationmaster had indicated. The heat was by now almost unbearable: I took off my coat, and once again unbuttoned my shirt almost to the waist. I could feel the thin cotton stuff sticking to me in damp patches; the sweat rolled off my face down my bare neck and chest. Soon the lane, rising steeply between fields, entered the woods which clothed the hillsides above the valley. Despite the trees’ shade, the heat seemed, if anything, more intense than before; the thickets on either side, dense with under-growth, gave forth the corrupt odour of some closed and overheated room. Scarcely a sound disturbed the thick, burdened silence: occasionally a bird twittered, briefly and as if half-furtively, in the leafy gloom; and once or twice I heard—or thought I heard—the rustle of an animal among the rank forests of bracken. Even the tough wayside flowers of late summer—golden-rod, agrimony, nettle-leaved bell-flower—seemed overblown and wilting in this torrid, airless morning. At a bend in the lane I came suddenly upon a dead grass-snake, its body mangled and bloody from the vicious blows of some passing labourer; and a little farther on I became aware of a fœtid, disgusting odour exhaling from the undergrowth. A brief investigation revealed its source—a ‘stinkhorn’ hidden beneath the bracken fronds, a yard or two inside the wood. I had not, as it happened, found the fungus before, though I had read descriptions of it; I peered, with a fascinated disgust, at the erect, whitish phallus, with its swollen cap, projecting shamelessly from the soft bed of humus; then, seized by a sudden, destructive passion, I raised my stick and struck violently, again and again, at the obscene thing, till nothing remained of it but an unrecognizable sticky mess.

I walked on, breathing fast, and sweating more profusely than ever; the lane forked, and I turned to the right; soon a further choice presented itself, but by now I had forgotten the stationmaster’s directions. Overcome, at the time, by nervousness, and distracted, moreover, by the man’s mutilated hand, I had in fact taken in very little of what he said, and had relied upon meeting somebody on the road who would be able to redirect me. So far, however, I hadn’t met a soul; the whole countryside seemed, apart from myself, as desolate and empty of human life as some tropical jungle. At the second fork I turned left—a piece of pure guesswork—and trudged on, hopefully, for another half-mile, along the shadowed, airless lane.

Suddenly I turned a corner and perceived, with a shock of surprise—for the desolation had begun to seem endless—a small cottage standing a few yards back from the road. A man was working in the garden, digging up a rough patch between two beds of lettuces and onions. As I approached, he looked up; timidly, I called good-morning, and saw him pause, leaning on his spade. In a voice which sounded, to myself, curiously strained and artificial, I found myself asking, once again, the way to the Dog and Clambercrown.

Hearing my voice, but unsure of what I had said, the man slouched across the garden, towards the fence. He was a thickset, robust fellow of about thirty-five, with a red, coarse-featured face and fair hair cropped very short.

‘Eh, sonny—what’s that?’ he grunted, staring at me with a not-too-friendly curiosity.

I repeated my question, feeling—as I had felt with the station-master—absurdly self-conscious.

The man continued to gaze at me, stupid and uncomprehending: his rough, collarless shirt gaped open across his chest, and as he stood there, frowning and irresolute, I saw him slide his hand inside his shirt and scratch beneath his armpit. As he did so, I caught a glimpse of the nipple, surrounded by a little patch of reddish hair; and I was suddenly aware, with a curious feeling of shame and humiliation, of the powerful naked body beneath the rough clothes.

My words seemed suddenly to impinge, with a delayed action, upon his mind, and a spark of comprehension dawned in his eyes.

‘Ah, it’s the old Dog you’re lookin’ for, is it?’ he said at last; and I felt once again, unreasonably, that my quest for the inn was in some obscure way open to suspicion. The man continued to scratch his armpit, with a kind of detached, mindless sensuality.

‘Yes, the Dog and Clambercrown,’ I repeated (for I was still unaware that this was not the inn’s correct name).

‘Oh, aye—but it’s a tidy walk from ’ere,’ the man said, ruminatively. ‘Which way did you come, any road?’

‘From Elham,’ I said.

‘Ah, then, you’re right off your road, mate—yer oughta ’ve turned right a couple o’ miles back. It’s a good five miles on from ’ere—six, more like.’

My heart sank, for I was already tired, and the prospect of another six miles’ walk in the heat was not encouraging.

He began to point out the way: ‘Yer walk back a coupla miles, then turn down first left, and keep on to the cross-roads,’ etc., etc.—and this time I listened, with a strained alertness, to the directions. As he finished speaking, he gave me a curious look—puzzled yet oddly complacent.

‘Y’know, I s’pose,’ he said, ‘that the old Dog ain’t there no more?’

‘Not there?’ I exclaimed in astonishment.

The man gave a slow, reluctant chuckle.

‘Well, in a manner of speakin,’ he said. ‘It is and it ain’t, if you get my meanin’. What I mean is, it ain’t a public-house no longer.’

Bewildered, I stared at the red, stupid face: I could think of nothing to say.

‘Naw,’ he went on, in slow, reflective tones, ‘they give up a few months past—didn’t get no trade, not enough to cover the licence. My old dad, ’e was a regular, when we lived over Lynsore way—but there wasn’t more than a ’andful got in there of a night. You’ll ’ave a five-mile walk for nothin’, if it’s a drink you’re after.’

I explained, feeling rather foolish, that I didn’t particularly want a drink—I was ‘just walking’. Soon I left him and turned back on my tracks, trying to keep in mind his rather confusing directions: ‘Yer turn downhill to the right past Wheelbarrow Town, and keep along to Lynsore, then take the turnin’ up to Palmsted’, and so on. The encounter had been, in a curious way, embarrassing: the man, I thought, must have considered it odd, to say the least, that I, a boy of sixteen, should be tramping miles on a sweltering August day to visit a remote pub which wasn’t, in any case, a pub any longer. His rough Kentish brogue, too, had made my own voice sound over-genteel and sissy; and my acute awareness of his strong, muscular body had increased my half-realized sense of inferiority.

As I turned the corner I looked back over my shoulder and saw that he was still leaning over the gate, watching me; I hurried my steps, possessed by an absurd, irrational fear that he might be going to follow me with some malevolent intent. My feeling was, I suppose, a kind of hangover from ancient childhood terrors—fears of tramps, gipsies, drunken soldiers—intensified by my old superstitious dread of this ‘forbidden kingdom’ into which, after so many years, I had penetrated at last.

I walked on quickly for half-a-mile or so; at length, satisfied that I was not, after all, being followed, I slackened my pace. The man’s remarks about the Dog, so casual and down-to-earth, had filled me with a vague depression, and the somewhat tepid enthusiasm with which I had started upon my journey had by now ebbed to the merest trickle. The Dog was a pub no longer; and even if it had been, it couldn’t, after all—so I guessed from the man’s description—have ever been very exciting: a mere public-house like any other, where a handful of labourers, including the man’s father, had gathered of an evening to drowse and gossip over their pints. Yet what, after all, had I expected? Not, certainly, at this date, the mythical ‘Clambercrown’ of my childhood, haunted by the heroes of my secret phantasies; yet I must, I suppose, have hoped—however vaguely—for some experience which would make the long and arduous journey worthwhile. At the very least, I had looked forward to a glass of beer, which, though I didn’t at that time much like the taste of it, would have been something of an adventure in itself—a kind of private initiation into that mysterious grown-up ritual of ‘drinking’ from which, only a few nights before, I had felt myself so humiliatingly excluded. True, I had been allowed an occasional glass of beer or claret at home; but I had never yet entered a public-house, and I had determined that, when I reached the Dog, I would walk boldly into the bar, like any other grown-up, and order a drink. Now, seemingly, even this pleasure was to be denied me; I walked on disconsolately, half-minded to give up the expedition altogether, and go straight home by the next train from Elham. Yet the legendary name of Clambercrown retained, after all, sufficient power to beckon me on, albeit with a diminished seduction, across the hilly woodlands which lay ahead; and I trudged forward, doggedly, along the road which the man had indicated, towards Wheelbarrow Town and the Lynsore valley.

Presently, feeling both tired and hungry, I sat down by the roadside and devoured the sandwiches which I had brought with me, and which should have been accompanied by an illicit glass of beer at the Dog. Relying upon this, I had refused the Thermos of tea which my mother had offered me, and which I now regretted, for I was, by this time, extremely thirsty.

I unfolded the Ordnance map—which I had bought, at some sacrifice of pocket-money, specially for the occasion—and tried to locate my position; but I was a bad map-reader, and it was some time before I could decide upon even my approximate whereabouts. The ‘Clambercrown’ itself was not, as I knew, marked on the map; after studying the sheet carefully, however, for several minutes, I managed to find Stelling Minnis and Wheelbarrow Town, and even to identify—at least, so I hoped—the road leading down to the Lynsore valley. Staring at the brown and green landscape of the map, with its confusing network of roads and contour-lines, I imagined myself a lost explorer, sole survivor of some forlorn hope, wandering without direction in the waterless desert, and doomed, no doubt, at sunset, to fall a victim to prowling beasts or to some hostile band of savages . . . These phantasies became linked with my erotic imaginings, and I felt, once again, a hot, tremulous excitement course through my limbs; at last, still trembling, and feeling curiously unsure of myself, I rose to my feet and walked on. According to my reading of the map, Wheelbarrow Town should lie only a half-mile or so ahead; but after twenty minutes’ walking there seemed no sign of a village, no sign even of a cottage or a farmhouse. The lane still ran between dense thickets, and it was impossible to see what lay beyond; after another five minutes I stopped in my tracks, realizing that I must, once again, have taken a wrong turning.

My phantasies had begun to take on an unexpected and unwelcome tinge of realism: I was now, quite genuinely, lost, and in this remote countryside it would be perfectly possible to walk for miles without finding anybody to direct me. As I stood there, beneath the dense, overarching canopy of leaves, I felt a creeping fear steal over me—a fear which at any moment, I felt, might kindle into panic. I tried, in desperation, to control my own terror: knowing it to be wholly irrational, a mere throwback to that ancient childhood fear of being alone and lost in a strange countryside; I was afraid, not of any exterior danger, but of the power of my own fear. I walked on a few paces; suddenly a cock-pheasant exploded from the undergrowth almost under my feet and flapped squawking over my head. I stopped dead, my last restraints gone, possessed by a panic ecstasy of terror; in that moment it seemed to me that my fear had become a purely physical thing, located in the region of my loins, and that the mounting, pulsating agony must spill over, at last—since one’s capacity for pain is limited—into some appalling and annihilating pleasure. With a desperate effort I managed to resume control of myself; and walked on, purposefully—as though I had not lost my way at all but were hurrying towards some known objective—along the dusky and interminable lane.

My steps quickened, I was almost running—and suddenly I came to a cross-roads; at the same moment I saw, to my infinite relief, an elderly labourer approaching from the opposite direction. As I asked him the way, I was surprised to find that my voice sounded almost normal; I had been convinced, in that instant of panic fear, that my body must have undergone some terrible change, that I had, perhaps, been suddenly struck dumb, or that the moment had left some indelible outward mark upon me.

The old man, however, seemed to find nothing particularly unusual in my appearance or in my manner of speech; he explained, at some length, that I should have taken the right-hand turning instead of the left; Wheelbarrow Town, it appeared, lay just round the corner, and from there the way was easy—‘You can’t go wrong,’ the old man assured me.

I walked on, through the dark, stifling thickets; suddenly. I had left the woods behind and, emerging on to a broader road, saw before me a small cluster of cottages—Wheelbarrow Town. A woman, standing at her garden gate, confirmed the old man’s directions; and I set off, with a sudden renewal of energy, up the road to Stelling Minnis. The village proved a disappointment—a scattered group of rather characterless cottages disposed about a high plateau of heathy common-land (‘minnis’ is the Kentish name for these barren, sandy outcrops amid the prevailing chalk or clay). I found, without difficulty, the road which descended, between high, untrimmed hedgerows, to the Lynsore valley; but the way to the Dog proved to be—as the man whom I first asked the way had observed—a ‘tidy’ walk. I trudged onward—down the hill and along the ‘bottom’, a valley between low, wooded hillsides. Presently I came to the signpost, and the lane leading to Palmsted; I walked on, wearily, up the hill; soon the woods converged, once again, upon either side, the trees forming a dark ceiling overhead.

Here the woodland silence seemed deeper than ever: I had an odd fancy that all life was extinct in these dusky, overgrown thickets. Perhaps, I thought, the whole world had died at that moment when the extraordinary ‘change’ had happened to myself in the woods beyond Wheelbarrow Town. The idea of being the unique inhabitant of a lifeless world filled me with a sudden god-like pride: I would have liked, at that moment, to commit some foolhardy, wicked or merely ridiculous act; nobody would see, nobody would know—I was utterly alone, I was God, I was at last absolutely and uniquely myself.

Suddenly, as I neared the top of the hill, I was overcome by an extreme fatigue; and I was aware, at the same time, of a feeling of frustration, of incompleteness. That moment of agony or ecstasy had seemed to demand some outlet, some unimaginable fulfilment which had been denied me or which I myself, perhaps, had rejected; and I longed, with a half-realized, impotent yearning, for the completion of a process whose true significance remained hidden from me: a mystery to which I possessed as yet no clue, but which—so I was convinced—demanded only, at this stage, some small, inconsiderable gesture on my part to tear aside the veil which concealed its arcane and terrible glories.

Bewildered, frustrated and deadly tired, I sat down on the bank by the roadside; it was intolerably hot, the sweat poured from my body, and I longed to be at home, so that I could strip off my drenched, grubby clothes and plunge into the sea. At that moment I noticed that a narrow, overgrown track led into the wood from where I was sitting—a dark and secret-looking pathway which, for some reason, seemed peculiarly sinister and uninviting. Tired though I was, my restlessness seemed suddenly to get the better of my fatigue: the path was a kind of challenge to my own cowardice—to that mysterious panic terror which had assailed me in the morning, and I was seized by a perverse desire to follow it and see where it led.

A moment later I had entered the wood and struck down the narrow track. The pathway wound through dense hazel-thickets entangled with drooping festoons of old-man’s-beard; in some places the growth was so thick that I had to force my way, painfully, through masses of overgrown thorn and bramble. Once again the idea of the ‘lost explorer’ recurred to me, and in my imagination the wood became a miasmal jungle, haunted by savages and by poisonous reptiles; somewhere, too, at the back of my mind, lurked the image of the gardener at the lonely cottage from whom, earlier in the day, I had asked the ways and, as I thought again of his thick, muscular body and coarse features, the man became obscurely involved in the phantasies of danger and pursuit which possessed my mind. I should hardly have been surprised to encounter his stocky figure barring my path, here in this remote woodland, and demanding, perhaps, my money or my life; and it seemed to me that if I were indeed to meet him thus, face to face and without hope of escape, the strange, exciting process which had begun that morning might achieve, by a renewed and more terrible access of panic, its unimaginable consummation. As I thrust my way, sweating, through the stifling thickets, the man’s image presented itself to me, yet again, with a visionary clarity: the coarse, stupid face, the bare chest and the nipple fledged with reddish hair; and I felt a spasm of disgust which, mysteriously, seemed almost instantly to metamorphose itself into an acute and overwhelming pleasure, drugging my mind as though with the sickly-sweet fumes of some anaesthetic, at once nauseating and delicious.

The track emerged, suddenly, into a small clearing, apparently without other outlet, and hedged closely about with thickets of hazel embowered with clematis and drooping swags of bryony. The space was partially shaded by a large beech-tree, but outside the tree’s shadow the sun beat down with a relentless, concentrated heat. I wandered round the clearing, kicking at the dead bluebell stalks and fading dog’s-mercury; a withered spike of some orchis caught my attention, and I stooped, from force of habit, to examine it; but my interest in such matters seemed suddenly to have evaporated: I was possessed by a single thought, ill-defined but pervasive and inescapable. I stood, for some minutes, irresolute in the hot sunlight; noting, with a vague disquiet, that a bank of dark cloud was rising slowly above the hills beyond the valley.

The sun beat down implacably; my body was hot as fire within the imprisoning clothes. Impulsively, scarcely aware of what I was doing, I began to pull off my drenched shirt; as the sun struck my bare chest I experienced an extraordinary sense of release, as though my mind, as well as my body, were suddenly freed from some intolerable constriction. At the same instant a faint breeze stirred in the thickets, and a waft of cooler air played deliciously upon my bare skin. Quickly I bent down and pulled off my shoes and socks; then, more slowly, and with that prudish reluctance which, on the most ordinary occasions, made me unwilling to expose my own body, I unbuttoned my trousers and let them fall to my ankles. At last I stood naked, possessed by an intoxicating sense of liberation such as I had never felt before. I wandered round the little clearing, feeling the dried stalks and fallen twigs pricking, with a delicious discomfort, the soles of my feet; it seemed to me that I had been made fully aware, suddenly and for the first time, of the potentialities of my own body. As though newly endowed with the tactile sense of the blind, I ran my hands over my chest and shoulders, over my thighs and my loins, conscious, as never before, of the smooth, silky texture of the skin, the hardness of muscle, the rough animal texture of the body hair. At last, greedy for some more acute, more violent sensation, I began to push my way recklessly into the thicket, regardless of the brambles which tore at my thighs and the stinging whip-lashes of the hazels.

Scratched and bleeding, I emerged into the clearing and flung myself down upon the prickly beech-mast. Staring up lazily, and with a sense of complete abandonment, into the sunlight, I saw that the mass of purple cloud had spread rapidly upward towards the zenith; and, as I watched it, I saw a flicker of distant lightning, and heard the mutter of approaching thunder. A tremor of habitual fear passed through me: I was frightened of thunderstorms, and knew that I ought to hurry on, in hope of finding shelter. Yet I continued to lie, with my arms and legs outstretched, in the centre of the clearing: feeling myself passive and vulnerable, a willing victim prepared for the sacrifice . . . I remembered, suddenly, an engraving in an old bound volume of the Graphic, which had for long haunted my imagination. The engraving was one of the illustrations to a serial story, in which the hero, a young officer, was captured by some savage tribe and put to the ‘torture of the flies’. The picture represented the victim, supine upon the ground, his legs and arms lashed to pegs driven into the earth. The man’s head was thrown back at a distorted angle, his limbs were taut and twisted in the effort to break free. The body was naked, apart from a scrap of cloth covering the loins; around the head and face circled a swarm of flies, and in the gathering darkness of the jungle hyenas and jackals could be seen emerging, furtively, from the surrounding thickets . . .

I watched the advancing cloud; the lightning flickered more brightly in the diminished light, and once again a sudden breeze, surprisingly cool, played over my heated body. Soon the cloud hung, heavy and lowering, directly overhead; I continued to lie motionless, possessed by a mounting terror and excitement, yet perversely determined to surrender myself, without resistance, to the perils of my situation. Impatient for I knew not what consummation, I dug my hands fiercely into the beech-mast, thrust my heels against the scattered flints and the prickly runners of bramble. The thunder rumbled nearer, the lightning blazed dazzlingly in my eyes: my fear kindled, once again, into panic; once more I was aware of my terror as a physical thing, lodged in my belly and loins—an agony which, increased to a certain pitch, must relieve itself, like the hoarded menace of the clouds, in some vast, annihilating discharge.

Suddenly I felt a sharp needle-prick upon my naked chest; another followed, and another—the rain had begun. The big thunder-drops stabbed ice-cold upon my heated body; soon it was raining fast. An unbearable excitement made my muscles contract; I thrust my hands more violently into the soft bed of leaves . . . The lightning flashed again—and suddenly came an immense relaxation, the ultimate surrender to that destined adversary against whom I had battled, but in vain, throughout this ominous and unquiet day. For a few seconds it was as if that sickly, anaesthetic fragrance had finally overpowered me: the thing in my belly had found a sudden and terrible release at last, and I struggled in the grip of a sensation more intense and more violent than I had ever known before . . .

I opened my eyes and sat up with a jerk, as though waking from a nightmare. The rain streamed upon my bare shoulders, and a chilly wind rustled through the thickets. Presently I got up and, with a cool, unhurried deliberation, began to put on my damp clothes. The thunder had lessened—the storm-centre could be seen lowering darkly, to westward, over Hardres and Canterbury; a ravelled mass of lighter cloud—the fringe of the storm—scudded overhead s and to southward, already, above the farther hills, the sky was bright again.

I made my way back, leisurely, along the track by which I had entered the clearing, and soon reached the road. The rain had diminished to a light drizzle; I felt rather chilly and immensely tired. Walking up the steep lane between the dripping hazels, it seemed to me that my mind was drained of all feeling, all desire; I didn’t care in the least, now, whether I reached the Dog and Clambercrown or not. The grey, clouded light seemed to echo my mood: the woods and the roadside banks, the tufts of golden-rod and bell-flower, had a lifeless, unreal quality, as though the force which vitalized them were in abeyance; an air of deadness and corruption hung in the drenched thickets.

I reached the top of the lane and emerged suddenly into more open country. A prospect of fields and copses lay before me, and beyond them a further belt of woodland, dark and forbidding beneath the lowering sky. The fields and woods seemed to me like a landscape in a photograph: flat, lifeless symbols of themselves, without depth or significance. A curious idea began to take shape in my mind, that this was what the world was really like: I was seeing it—the ‘real’ world—for the first time, stripped of all those subjective, adventitious qualities with which I had previously invested it. Nor was it the visible world only which had thus, suddenly, become emptied of life and meaning: the interior world of the mind seemed also—since I had left the woodland clearing—to have subsided into an anarchic chaos of meaningless images. The memory recurred, with a startling vividness, of a public urinal in Folkestone in which, a few days before, I had been naively shocked by the obscene monosyllables pencilled on the wall; the words now seemed neither more nor less significant than an ode of Keats or the speeches in Hamlet. My own desire to write—that cherished ambition which, up till now, had been able to console me in my worst misfortunes, and to insure me, like some potent talisman, against future perils and disasters—that too, now, had ebbed like a dried-up stream, and its channelled course lay parched and weed-grown as the bed of the Nail-bourne which I had crossed, that morning, below the station at Elham. All that I had ever written, all that I had read, seemed to me in this moment precisely on a par with the scribblings of some drunken lecher upon a lavatory wall

I walked on, in the soft, diminishing rain, and at last came to a small house—scarcely more than a cottage—standing at the junction of four narrow lanes. I realized that, if the directions which I had been following were accurate, I must now have arrived at my destination: the house before me was none other than the Dog and Clambercrown. Wearily, and indifferent as to whether or no my long quest were at an end, I approached it. No sign hung over the door: if this were indeed the Dog, the young gardener had been right, and it was an inn no longer. As I walked up to the gate I saw an elderly woman come out of the door, carrying a bucket; seeing me, she paused, regarding me with a mildly inquisitive but not unfriendly air. I was half-inclined to say ‘good-afternoon’ and pass on; yet some faint vestige of curiosity remained with me, and moreover—if I were not to return by the same weary and circuitous route—it might be as well to ask my way back to Elham.

The woman nodded and called ‘Good-afternoon’. Was this, I asked, in a voice which, once again, sounded to me strained and unnatural, was this the Dog and Clambercrown?

‘Oh, yes, this is the old Dog all right,’ the woman replied, with a faint chuckle, and in a deprecating tone which seemed to imply that she wished the Dog were something other than itself. ‘But it ain’t a public-house no longer, you know,’ she added. ‘Been closed now these six months—business was terrible bad, and the brewers wouldn’t renew the licence. My old man, he was a bit cut up at first, like, but he’s getting on, like me, and there’s a nice bit of land at the back. He was always one for a bit of farming, and we do a nice little trade with eggs and vegetables—enough to keep going, like—so we mustn’t grumble.’

While the woman was speaking I looked at the house: a large, cottage or small farmhouse, one would have said, probably dating from the seventeenth century or slightly earlier; part of the front was half-timbered, the rest brick. So this, I thought flatly, was the Dog and Clambercrown—a rather dull, undistinguished house at the edge of a wood. I had reached the end of my journey—a journey which, though in fact I had set out upon it only that morning, seemed to have begun many years before, in another world, another age: a quest, indeed, upon which, in imagination, I had embarked in those far-off, half-forgotten days of my earliest childhood.

I murmured something—by way of satisfying the woman’s curiosity—about how I had often heard of the inn, but had never known quite where it lay; I added that I was very thirsty, and that I should be grateful for a glass of water.

‘I could find you a drop of milk, if you’d like it,’ the woman replied, and, returning to the house, reappeared a minute or two later with a brimming glass.

‘Pity you wasn’t here a week or two ago,’ she said pleasantly, as I took the glass. ‘That is, if you’re interested in the old place. I could have showed you the old signboard, with the dog on it—a nice bit of work it was, and ever so old, you could see. But my old man didn’t think it was worth keeping, so he chopped it up for firewood.’

The woman chattered on—about her ‘old man’, about business, the wicked price of meat and groceries, etc. At last, having finished my milk and thanked her for it, I asked her the best way of getting back to the Elham Valley. To my surprise she told me to keep straight on—‘Follow your nose, keep straight across at the cross-roads, top of Turk’s Hill, and that’ll bring you down by Kingston.’ I thanked her again, and set off down the lane which she had indicated. Turning the corner I took a last backward look at the house: undistinguished, rather down-at-heel, it might have been a small farmhouse anywhere in Kent. My quest was at an end: the goal of my pilgrimage had reduced itself to a glass of milk and a few minutes’ banal conversation with the wife of an ex-publican. I walked on down the lane, between the silent woods.

Presently I reached the cross-roads and, following my instructions, kept straight across, down yet another wooded lane. After a mile or so, the woods came to an end, and a stretch of comparatively open country revealed itself—a wooded valley to the right and, on the opposite side, chalky fields sloping up to a crown of trees. In front, the landscape was obscured by the high, untrimmed hedges which fringed the road; yet, as I walked on, I caught occasional glimpses of a high, treeless stretch of downland; and at last, incredulously, recognized the black windmill which stood, high and isolated, upon the peak of Barham Downs. A little farther on I passed a thatched farmhouse which struck me as oddly familiar; and I realized, a moment later, that it was none other than the home of Mrs Hopper, whom we had visited on that far-off spring day in 1919. This, then, was Marley Lane; below, in the valley, lay Covert Lane, winding away southwards between the woods; and before me, only a mile or two farther on, lay Kingston, and the familiar landscape of the Elham Valley.

I walked on for another mile, the lane began to dip, and soon I found myself at Kingston; I turned into Charlton Park, following the familiar bridle-path towards our own village. I was dog-tired, yet the sudden realization that I was near home had filled me with a spurious energy, and I covered the last mile in rather under ten minutes. The walk from the Dog itself had taken me hardly more than an hour; and it struck me, for the first time, that the inn, which I had always imagined as so impossibly remote, lay a mere four or five miles from our cottage. Nor had I suspected, on that spring day so many years ago when we had walked up to see Mrs Hopper, that another couple of miles walk along Marley Lane would have brought us to that legendary metropolis of the Forbidden Kingdom; and I realized that in setting out today from Elham I had chosen the longest and most roundabout route—a kind of ‘north-west passage’—to my destination.

I reached the village at last, and presented myself at the cottage, where Ninnie, overjoyed at this unexpected visit, gave me a late tea. Soon I departed to catch the evening train for Folkestone; from my corner-seat I watched the familiar fields and copses slide past, and as we approached Barham I found myself gazing, with a curious mixture of excitement and retrospective shame, at the dense fringe of woods beyond Marley, darkening already against the declining sun. The sense of blank, unutterable loss—the conviction that I must hence-forward dwell in a waste land of the spirit—remained with me; yet I was aware, watching the fields swim past in the hallucinatory sunset light, of a new tranquillity, a mood of passive acceptance. What had happened—I was oddly convinced—could never, in any possible circumstances, happen again; ignorant as I was, it seemed to me that in the woodland clearing beyond Clambercrown I had reached the peak, the grand climacteric of my existence, and that life hereafter must be a falling-away, a gradual diminuendo into final negation, not-being, death-in-life. Yet I found, now, that I was able to face this melancholy prospect with comparative equanimity; an hour’s rest and a plentiful tea had, if the truth must be told, worked wonders; and, as the train rattled on through the calm summer evening, I began to look back upon the day’s happenings with something very like satisfaction.

I had been, at last, to the Dog and Clambercrown: so much, at least, had to be admitted. True, the place had proved dull enough—hardly worth a visit; but then I hadn’t, after all, expected very much of it. The journey had been undertaken (I reminded myself) in a spirit of sophisticated frivolity: I had pictured myself as a Huxley character, impelled by sheer boredom to embark upon a totally pointless—though rather ‘amusing’—quest. Insensibly, as my vitality renewed itself, I found myself reassuming the Huxleyan rôle: life, after all, was futile—and the events of the past day had only served to underline the fact. Suddenly it occurred to me that my experience would make a rather good story—perhaps, even, it might form the basis of a full-length novel . . . For the rest of the journey I was happily employed in working out the framework of the narrative; ‘powerful’ scenes, passages of ‘redolent’ description, scraps of dialogue even, bubbled up irrepressibly in my mind; the creative stream which, like the Nailbourne, had seemed permanently dried-up and choked with weeds and rubble, had begun after all to flow again.

I arrived at Folkestone dead-tired, but with a feeling of profound contentment and satisfaction; for I was pregnant—or so I firmly believed—with a new masterpiece.

Somehow, alas, that masterpiece never got itself written: other ‘masterpieces’, perhaps, took precedence over it, or its gestation, more likely, was aborted by the mere pressure of outward events. Yet the name of the inn continued, throughout my adolescence—and well into my adult life—to haunt my imagination as the possible title for a book; and many years after my first visit I did indeed write a novel in which, incidentally, the inn occurred, and which I had intended to call The Dog at Clambercrown. My publisher, as it happened, preferred another title, and I bowed—though reluctantly—to his judgment. I refused, however, to be daunted, and a few years afterwards I wrote yet another novel of the same name; this, unfortunately, proved to be so abysmally bad that it had to be scrapped. In the present work, therefore, I am aware of paying off, belatedly, a debt to the past.

PART VII

The Road to Enna (4)

Flowers of Persephone

Chapter opening

The first thing that caught my eye when I arrived at Enna was a British Railways poster near the station exit, advertising the charms of Bury St Edmunds. It was, to say the least, a little damping; yet the slight depression induced by this homely touch was tempered by a feeling of reluctant admiration for the enterprise of British Railways. I can only hope that, by this time, the Ferrovie dello Stato have a poster on the station at Bury St Edmunds saying: ‘Visitate Enna’.

More propitious, perhaps, was the series of local photographs prominently displayed by the municipality; I examined these while I waited for the station bus to the town. One showed the Lake of Pergusa, ‘sulla riva di quale’, as the accompanying caption alleged, with a firm disregard both for Christian dogma and for the rationalist interpretations of modern anthropologists, ‘sulla riva di quale avvenne il ratto di Proserpina’. I decided that, tomorrow being Easter Sunday, I would spend the day at Pergusa; one could hardly, I thought, choose a more suitable date—though, since Easter is a movable feast in the Christian calendar, one couldn’t, perhaps, rely on Persephone being very punctual about her resurrection. But in any case (I reflected) I should be able to satisfy myself as to the presence or absence of Anemone coronaria at Pergusa. What flowers Proserpina had gathered, though it might be—like the sirens’ song or the female pseudonym of Achilles—a puzzling question, was not (I decided) beyond all conjecture.

I had set out, early that morning, from Syracuse—glad enough to it escape at last from those melancholy, haunted streets and from the gloomy squalor of the hotel. The journey, however, had proved quite as tedious and uncomfortable as I had expected, and I arrived at Enna in a mood of profound depression.

From Catania the train had crawled, at a snail’s pace, between high, barren hillsides, stopping at every station, and sometimes—for no apparent reason—between stations. The day was sunless and rather chilly, with a high ceiling of grey cloud; the landscape, exciting enough for the first hour or so, soon acquired an oppressive monotony: the same hills seemed to advance and retreat and advance again as the line wound its way through the narrow, twisting valleys. For a moment Etna would appear, then vanish, later to reappear at some unexpected point of the compass. Perched on their remote heights, the small hill-villages seemed mere spiky outgrowths of the rocky crags upon which they were built; here and there, on the lower slopes, sudden bright patches of green showed incongruously among the barren rocks and scrub, or the windows of a farmhouse peered suspiciously, like the eyes of some animal at bay, from behind a protective screen of olives.

I became—as I am apt to do in trains, when I have nothing to read (and I had abandoned Ulysses by now)—preoccupied with such exiguous examples of the written word as presented themselves to the eye. In particular, I remember from that journey an advertisement for an analgesic called ‘Veramon’ which, as the legend insisted (with a lack of originality less noticeable since it was in Italian), was guaranteed not to harm the heart. There was, also, a picture of a flighty-looking young woman announcing with an unsuitably concupiscent air that ‘KOP fa brillar tutta la casa’ . . . In the matter of advertisements I am, I think, at once more suggestible and more ‘sales-resistant’ than most people: I become, all too easily, obsessed by the pictures and slogans, yet the likelihood of my ever buying the advertised product decreases steadily in inverse ratio to the degree of my obsession. I turned, with a certain relief, to the official adjurations of the Italian State Railways: Si prega di non sputare . . . E pericoloso sporgersi . . . I found myself trying—but in vain—to fit the recalcitrant words to the train’s motion. Ne pas se pencher au dehors—they order these things better, I thought, in France . . . Half-drowsing in my corner seat, I allowed the familiar rhythm to impose itself, and was aware that my mind had swooped backward, across the abysm of time, to those childhood journeys through the terra incognita of the Elham Valley. As the train crawled, ever more slowly, through the gloomy, rock-bound valleys, it seemed to me that I had penetrated, yet again, beyond the barrier of ‘The Hills’ into the badlands beyond; but alone now and unprotected, bound for those remoter territories which lay—beyond Hardres and Stelling and the Clambercrown itself—upon the extreme and perilous verge of a child’s imagination.

The station bus, arriving at last, bore me up the winding road to the town. Under the grey, chilly sky the landscape had a curiously English air: Easter had fallen early this year—April the fifth—and here, among the mountains, the spring was hardly more advanced, it seemed, than in southern England. The dry roadside banks were starred with coltsfoot—a flower which, in childhood, had acquired for me an undeserved aura of romance, for I had confused it with the Alpine Coltsfoot, a plant of legendary rarity confined to the mountains of Breadalbane and Clova. In later years I was to discover my mistake; yet the common coltsfoot remains for me, to this day, obscurely associated with that remote corner of the Highlands, whose ‘mountainous green wilds’ formed yet another inaccessible province of the Forbidden Kingdom; and there was, I felt—despite later and less romantic associations—a certain appropriateness about the occurrence of the coltsfoot here, on this bleak hillside, below the mythical heights of Enna.

The bus dropped me in the piazza—a wide, windswept square, unusually empty and desolate-looking, yet in other respects hardly to be distinguished from the piazzas of other Sicilian towns. I went in search of the hotel to which I had been recommended: it proved to be large, rather forbidding and apparently quite empty—tourists were rare birds at Enna so early in the season, and the proprietor eyed me with frank curiosity tinged with suspicion. I unpacked my bag and walked out, with an odd sense of apprehension, into the town. From the moment of my arrival it had struck me as dour and unfriendly, and, as I wandered round the piazza and the neighbouring streets, my first impression was strengthened. My appearance, it was clear, had created something of a sensation; and indeed, in my tweed suit—and looking, I suppose, very English—I must have produced something of the effect of a Sicilian contadino, in full ‘native’ costume, descending (say) upon some village in darkest Wales.

I was uncomfortably aware, as I walked the streets, of being perpetually watched—by loiterers on the pavements, by women from third-floor windows, by children lurking in obscure viali. Presently I plucked up courage to enter the Caffè Roma, one of three or four cafés in the piazza; it was a forbidding-looking place, all glass and chromium, like the cafés in Syracuse. Ordering my coffee, I discovered that the barman spoke fluent English; and I experienced that profound yet rather ignoble relief which even the most arrant of travel-snobs is apt to feel on such occasions. The barman, it seemed, had worked in one of the big hotels at Taormina, and spoke, as was to be expected, with a broad American accent; he was a friendly soul, and by contrast the town seemed, when I re-emerged into the piazza, more than ever dour and hostile. I walked through the nearly-empty streets towards the ramparts; the name of a side-street—a narrow, slummy lane—caught my eye: Viale Proserpina. It seemed, I thought, an inadequate tribute, coming as it did (so to speak) from her fellow-townsmen, to the Queen of the Underworld.

Local interest appeared to be concentrated, at the moment, upon some giro di Sicilia—a motor or bicycle race; placards were stuck to the house-walls facing the route: Enna sportiva saluta I girini. As I emerged on to the ramparts, sportive Enna manifested itself, appropriately enough, in the shape of two spindle-shanked young men in shorts; they ran past me with that dogged, self-righteous air peculiar to athletes in training: plainly their sportiveness was of the most solemn, Rugbeian type, unleavened by the least trace of meridional frivolity.

From the ramparts one looked down almost vertically upon the valley below—and across the valley to a succession of further valleys, further hills. On the lower slopes the fields were green with young corn—green with an English greenness, brightening and fading in the shifting April light. The sun emerged for a moment, touching the neighbouring hilltop, and the houses and campanili of Calascibetta were gilded with a sudden, magical radiance. In the westering light other hilltops, crowned with smaller villages, sprang into momentary prominence; then, as the sun dipped into a cloud-bank, the immense landscape, with its interminable prospect of barren, rocky hills, sank once again into a uniform greyness.

Here, more than ever, one was haunted by a sense of some ancient, immitigable tragedy; more even than the hills of Santa Panagla, or the mountain hideout of the capo di Mafia, did this landscape breathe an air of deadness and desolation; here, at the ‘navel of Sicily’, the whole dark and vengeful spirit of the island seemed gathered into a central nucleus of potential terror and violence. Nothing, certainly, could have been more at odds with the northern-European, ‘literary’ concept of Enna, with its ‘fair fields’, its lilies and roses and all the joys of the resurgent spring; yet the Greeks, I thought, had been right: for here—and here only—that most ancient and most potent of myths must surely have had its birth; here among these sad fields and desolate hillsides which, on this bleak spring evening of the mid-twentieth century, seemed to be awaiting, with an age-old and undiminished expectancy, the renewal of the miracle—the rebirth of the Corn-goddess from the dark womb of winter.

The light faded, and I lingered by the parapet, watching the hills lapse into darkness. Sportive Enna continued to trot, solemnly, round the ramparts; from a house nearby a wireless blared out a jazz tune from a five-year-old American film, on the heights of Calascibetta scattered points of light gleamed out like fireflies in the thickening dusk. I turned away at last and walked back, past the Viale Proserpina, to the glass-and-chromium discomfort of the Caffè Roma.

I dined alone in the vast, bleak dining-room of the hotel; there seemed a notable dearth of restaurants at Enna. The dinner was dull, the wine rather good—lighter and drier than the usual Sicilian vino comune. Afterwards I wandered out again into the town. The customary crowds promenaded, aimlessly, in the piazza; but here the evening saunter seemed lacking even in that restrained, decorous gaiety which had pervaded the strolling crowd at Syracuse. The Ennesi, indeed, looked about as gay as Aberdonians on a wet Sunday afternoon: if they strolled in the piazza of an evening, it was not, one felt, for the mere pleasure of social intercourse; they seemed, rather, to be performing—either from ingrained habit or from a sense of inexorable duty—some dour and joyless ritual. Once again I was aware of being perpetually watched; and the town itself—like the enormous, lonely countryside below the ramparts—seemed locked in a mood of taut, watchful expectancy. For a Sicilian town it struck one as unnaturally quiet: a wireless played in the Caffè Roma, but with a muted, apologetic air, as though in half-hearted defiance of the Sabbatarian gloom which prevailed in the streets. Watchful and expectant, the sauntering crowds seemed to be awaiting some great event at whose nature one could only guess: some sudden announcement or manifestation, joyful or disastrous—one couldn’t tell which.

What they were really waiting for, I suppose, on this Saturday night before Easter, was the jollifications of Easter Sunday itself. The famous Good Friday celebrations had taken place on the previous day; tonight, the town was ticking-over, so to speak: poised between the gloom of yesterday and tomorrow’s gaieties. Walking the streets, I became infected by the prevailing restlessness; I was tired, yet I couldn’t bring myself to go to bed. I drank a coffee in the Caffè Roma and enquired of the friendly barman as to the best way of getting to Pergusa on the following morning. There was, he informed me rather vaguely, a bus; or there should, in ordinary circumstances, be a bus—though on Easter Sunday one couldn’t be sure. He appealed to a friend of his, a young sulphur-miner sitting at the bar; the young man assured me that yes, there was indeed a bus, but at what hour he could not say. Very kindly, he offered to find out for me from a friend of his on the piazza.

Returning a few minutes later, he said that the bus left at six in the morning—that was to say, on ordinary days; on Easter Sunday, it was only too possible that the timetable might be changed . . . Other habitues were appealed to: one of them insisted that there was no bus, another contradicted him and alleged that there was a bus which left at two o’clock in the afternoon; one young man, greatly daring—and obviously wishing to be friendly—advanced the theory that there were two buses, but, having committed himself to this revolutionary statement, was unable to produce any evidence in support of it.

By this time, several fresh customers had sidled into the café, and the question of the Pergusa bus had become a topic of burning public interest. There were no buses on Easter Sunday; there were two buses, possibly even three; the sulphur-miner distinctly remembered that his cousin’s wife had visited her aunt at Pergusa last Easter; there was only one bus, which left at six in the morning; there was no bus, because it was Easter Sunday—una grande festa, capisce? The discussion, by now, had become purely academic and about as relevant to any practical purpose as the arguments of the Athanasian creed. Finally, in despair, I asked the barman whether it was possible to hire a taxi. It was, I felt guiltily, an ignoble solution—escapist, undemocratic and typically Anglo-Saxon. By this time half the town, it seemed, had become involved in the debate, and to go to Pergusa by taxi might well be construed as a serious affront to civic pride. The bus, in fact, had become a point of honour, involving a complex tangle of ethical, political and even theological issues; I was morally committed to going by it, even if (as seemed only too probable) it didn’t exist . . . The barman, however—accustomed to the high-handed methods of forestieri—was perfectly sympathetic; he insisted upon going himself, there and then, to find the taxi-driver—the only one, apparently, in Enna—who happened to be a friend of his. Presently he reappeared with the driver, and I arranged to be picked up at the café on the following morning at ten o’clock. With the help of the barman we haggled amicably over the price (which proved to be ludicrously cheap); I stood drinks—to the barman, the driver, the sulphur-miner; and at last wandered out again, feeling extremely tired, into the piazza.

Ten minutes later I was arrested by the police. I wasn’t altogether surprised, for the watchful, suspicious glances of the Ennesi had induced in me a mild persecution-mania. I had walked out, once again, on to the ramparts; returning, down a narrow street, towards my hotel, I ran full-tilt into two enormous policemen, who barred my way implacably and demanded to see my passport.

I hadn’t got it—having left it, according to the usual custom, at the hotel office where, no doubt, the padrone had spent an industrious evening in compiling that voluminous, complex and quite futile document known as a Permesso di soggiorno. The police, however, were entirely unconvinced by this implausible story; it was unprecedented, I gathered, for a forestiere to perambulate the streets of Enna after ten o’clock at night without a passport; the thing was unheard of, and quite plainly I could be up to no good. Very possibly I might be a Russian, with a bomba atomica in my pocket . . . I argued, but in vain; I was annoyed, and doubtless showed it. This was more than enough to confirm their suspicions; and I was promptly hauled off to the police-station.

Here the argument continued: why was I, a foreigner—at an hour when all respectable Ennesi were in bed and asleep (it must in fact have been about half-past eleven)—why was I lurking upon the ramparts without my passport? I explained all over again; but explanations were useless . . . Plainly—thought the polizia—it was necessary to take more drastic action; something, in fact, must be done . . .

Being policemen—and Sicilian ones at that—the obvious course of action which suggested itself was to fill up half-a-dozen complicated and unintelligible forms. What purpose could possibly have been served by these documents it would be hard to guess; probably, so far as the police were concerned, it was purely a matter of art-for-art’s sake. To fill up a few nice forms would doubtless provide an agreeable pastime for the next hour or so; and, though the results would presumably be (like all art) quite useless, the process could not, after all, do any harm . . .

Wearily I submitted to the inquisition: nome, cognome, nazionalità, luogo di nascità, condizione, name of father, mother’s maiden name, names and nationality of children (with dates of birth), etc., etc . . . My condizione proved an unexpected stumbling-block: ‘Scrittore,’ I announced boldly, in answer to the question, but the profession of authorship appeared to be absent from the catalogue of lawful and reputable trades recognized by the polizia of the commune of Enna. My inquisitors glared at me with a renewed suspicion: scrittore, indeed! And what kind of profession might that be? I explained that I wrote books; but the two policemen shook their heads, sceptical and uncomprehending.

At long last, after five or six forms had been laboriously completed, the two men rose pompously to their feet. I should now, they solemnly informed me, be escorted back to my hotel, for the purpose of examining my passport. A glint of anticipatory triumph appeared in their eyes as they made this announcement: plainly they didn’t believe for a moment that I possessed such a thing as a passport . . . I was duly escorted, through the deserted streets, to the farther end of the town. It was surprising, I reflected, that I hadn’t been handcuffed. We reached the hotel at last, where, as it happened, the padrone was still sitting in his office, wrestling with the intricacies of my permesso di soggiorno. The passport was produced—to the evident surprise of the policemen—and its details compared with the padrone’s crabbed and nearly illegible transcript, as well as with the multiple dossier compiled at the police-station. I noted that the padrone had painfully copied down my particulars in English: the word ‘author’ appeared on the form as ‘authrot’—a pleasing and perhaps significant variant.

At last, with obvious reluctance, the polizia pronounced itself satisfied; the two men saluted, clumped heavily downstairs, and I was free at last to go to bed. But not to sleep—or not, at any rate, for long. I had perhaps been in bed for an hour or two when I was awoken by a series of deafening explosions, immediately overhead . . . War, I concluded, had been declared—the Russian invasion had begun; thinking myself at home, I reached for the familiar light-switch; then realized, with a shudder, of horror, where I was. To find oneself at Enna, of all places, at the outbreak of the Third World War, seemed a singularly unkind stroke of fate—almost as bad (I thought) as being taken ill there, like poor Newman. The bangs ceased at last, and in the ensuing silence I heard the blaring of a brass band: apparently the invaders (paratroops, presumably) were already marching triumphantly through the town.

The clamour increased: the band must be passing almost directly beneath the hotel windows. Half-incredulously I at last recognized the melody: not the ‘Internationale’ (as I had expected) but the march from Aida. Surely, I thought, the Communists would not play anything so bourgeois as Verdi . . . Fully awake at last, I remembered that it was Easter Sunday and that in Sicily such festas invariably begin with maroons and brass bands at four o’clock in the morning, per far piacere alla Madonna.

Doubtless the custom gives great pleasure to the Blessed Virgin, who is known to be particularly fond of fireworks and of the florid melodies of nineteenth-century Italian opera. To myself (though also a firework-addict) it was, on this occasion, distinctly less pleasing. I dozed off again for half-an-hour, only to be woken by another salvo of maroons and an even louder band; finally I could stand it no longer, and got up and dressed. By this time it was seven o’clock. I drank some coffee in the hotel and walked out into the streets.

The morning was grey again, with the same high ceiling of cloud, and the town itself looked hardly less dour and forbidding than on the previous evening. The piazza was already crowded; the band tootled and thumped away without ceasing; Christ was risen—or was it Persephone? Yet the crowd seemed still to have an oddly apathetic, purposeless air, as though perpetually awaiting some event which never quite managed to come off.

My taxi was not much more than half-an-hour late at the Caffè Roma, and soon after half-past ten I set out for Pergusa. I was glad enough to escape from the town; I was far from feeling in the festive mood appropriate to the day—I had had about a couple of hours sleep all told and was suffering, moreover, from a slight hangover, for the local wine, seemingly innocuous, had proved to be considerably more potent than I had supposed. The car—a ramshackle old Fiat—clattered down the winding road from the town; as we descended, the vast landscape seemed to converge, to shrink upon itself, and the nearer hills rose like bastions barring our way. In the greyish, diffused light the coltsfoot stars gleamed dimly on the roadside banks: exiles from the high mountains of Clova, raising their golden crowns in homage to the risen goddess.

We drove on through narrow, twisting lanes between cornfields and olive-orchards: a pleasant, fertile landscape, yet curiously straitened and confined by the surrounding hills. Enna and Calascibetta appeared and disappeared, with a disquieting abruptness, as the road turned and twisted. Seen from here, remote on its hilltop, Enna seemed a city of legend, inhabited—if at all—by the old, autochthonous Siculians; it was hard to imagine the crowded piazza, the bands playing Verdi and Rossini, the cafés with their chromium bars and blaring radios.

My eyes, unconsciously alert for flowers, surveyed the passing fields; suddenly, in a patch of young wheat by the roadside, I caught a gleam of dusky purple, then another and another: the field was dotted all over with the dark cups of Anemone coronaria. So Lawrence, I thought, had been right—here they were, the flowers of Persephone, ‘little hells of colour . . . hell risen in pursuit of her’.

Presently we pulled up, quite suddenly, outside a wine-shop. This, said the driver, was Pergusa. Surprised—for the journey had proved shorter than I had expected—I looked about me. A cluster of mean houses, an ugly modern church, and the wine-shop—that was all. Round the village loomed the high, rocky hills, rising sharply against the lowering sky; the clouds had thickened, the morning seemed abnormally dark, with the unreal half-darkness of an eclipse. My feeling of oppression increased, tinged with a curious, half-physical sense of apprehension, such as one feels before a thunderstorm.

I arranged with the driver to call for me again at four o’clock; then wandered down the ugly village street in search of the lake which, so the driver had assured me, lay only a few yards farther on. The Lago Pergusa, however, seemed curiously unwilling to reveal itself; I walked for some little distance before I came upon it—a greyish gleam of water screened, from this aspect, by trees. A rough, neglected road led down to it: evidently it was not especially popular with tourists. The shore, at this point, was fringed with a row of seedy-looking eucalyptuses: depressing trees, at the best of times, suggesting as they always do those glossy ‘Technicolor’ photographs of New Zealand or the Australian bush in the Geographic Magazine. Here their effect was more than usually melancholy, giving to the landscape an oddly ‘unfinished’ air: it was as though the municipality had at one time, in a fit of sudden enthusiasm, decided to transform the lake and its environs into a tourists’ pleasure-ground, but had abandoned the attempt in despair; an impression which was reinforced by the ill-made road, deeply furrowed and strewn with boulders, which ran along the lakeside.

As for the lake itself, there was something about it entirely lifeless and without character: it was like a photograph of a lake, preserved as a memento of some dull excursion, in a traveller’s album. Perfectly calm, it stretched away under the dun, clouded sky towards the low hills on the farther shore. It was quite a big lake; yet its stagnant, lifeless air gave an impression of smallness and squalor, suggesting some dreary backwater, hemmed in by factories and warehouses, on the fringe of an industrial town. I stood on the brink, peering down into the dark, motionless depths: to my surprise, the water teemed with some minuscule, unidentifiable fish. In so unvolatile an element, the pullulating swarm seemed faintly sinister—denizens, one might fancy, of some subterranean pool, existing mysteriously and self-sufficiently in a world without air or sunlight. On the brackish fringes a few rushes grew—brown and dead-looking:

The sedge is withered from the lake,

And no birds sing . . .

The silence was absolute: no bird, no insect even, disturbed that heavy, brooding stillness. It was a deathly silence—deathly, yet in some tacit, insidious way alive . . . waiting . . . but for what? The lake, like an unpolished glass, reflected the sky with a dull, tarnished brightness; on the farther shore the pale green fields sloped upward, gently, to the low clouds. From the roadside, where I stood, the hills rose abruptly: steep and craggy, with occasional small terraces planted with vines. Here and there a farmhouse presented itself, perched baldly among the rocks: a stark assertion of human occupation; yet there seemed no sign of life—no smoke from the chimneys, nobody working in the vineyards. On the banks, the anemones gleamed darkly among the rough grasses; and every-where—on the roadside, high on the barren rocks—rose the tall, greyish-pink clusters of the asphodel: that other flower of Persephone, the fiore della morte, which Sicilians, to this day, will not allow inside their houses.

I sat for a few minutes upon the bank above the road. Here, surely, I thought, was the ancestral realm of the Dark Gods: deities more ancient and more terrible than those Freudian demiurges which obsessed the mind of poor Lawrence; true gods of the Underworld, not to be propitiated; implacable enemies of the sun and all fruitfulness, in whose kingdom Persephone might languish, for all eternity, without hope of reprieve . . . Where, I asked myself, was that ‘fair field of Enna’, carpeted with the prolific (if improbable) flora attributed to it by Milton, Arnold and the rest? Not here, certainly; nor did it seem likely—on this clouded and oppressive Easter Sunday—that Persephone should choose this gloomy, infertile landscape in which to emerge from her hivernal thraldom. Yet there were the dark ‘hell-hounds’ of the anemones, and the pallid, deathly spikes of the asphodel; and there, for that matter, was the lake—that very lake upon the shores of which (as one was assured by the local Syndicate of Initiative) had occurred the Rape itself.

Sitting upon the rocky bank I became aware of the silence as something positive, a ponderable element brooding, like some heavy, inert gas, in the lower levels of the atmosphere. The sense of emptiness, of utter negation which had haunted me in the cafés of Syracuse, and again at Enna itself, had become, in this place of death, dominant and inescapable. ‘Boom-boom . . .’ Homer or ‘Told to the Children’, a child’s laughter or the belching of a drunkard, poetry or filth—here in this shadowy limbo, the ultimate province of the Forbidden Kingdom, the answering echo would be identical: the eternal and changeless voice of the spiritus mundi—older than this desolate, lunar landscape, older than the earth, older even than the fathering sun himself.

‘Boom-boom . . .’ The echo reverberated, dully, through remote territories of my mind . . . I remembered a clearing in the August woodlands: the cold pricking of rain upon bare flesh, the faint rumble of retreating thunder and the sense of some sudden and irretrievable loss. Boom-boom . . . Dayadhvam, damyata . . .

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract . . .

Somewhere along the farther reaches of the lakeside, a long way off, a child shouted, a dog barked; but the sounds seemed mere scratches upon the surface of this irrefrangible Plutonic silence. Suddenly I was startled by a nearer sound: a rustling among the cistus bushes a few yards from where I sat. I looked round and saw, peering at me sardonically between two clumps of asphodel, a black, bearded face, surmounted by two curving horns: the face of a satyr—or perhaps of the Homed God, great Pan himself . . . The billy-goat—an unusually big one—tossed its head, gave me a contemptuous nod, and began to crop the pink sprouts of asphodel at its feet.

Presently I walked back to the wine-shop, where I lunched off bread and sausage and a carafe of red wine. It was a gloomy little place, though the family who kept it were friendly enough. I ate my lunch in a small, dark room leading off the shop; a succession of bright-eyed, inquisitive children peered at me through the doorway as I ate. They were finally driven away, protesting loudly, by the proprietress: plainly the strange forestiere in his funny clothes had provided them with a rare—perhaps an unprecedented—treat.

After lunch I walked up the steep hillside on the other side of the village. The sky remained cloudy and lowering, but the afternoon had turned oppressively warm, and I began to sweat. The rocky slopes seemed barren of all growth, save for a few stunted cistuses and the scattered tufts of asphodel. Suddenly a small green and brown flower caught my eye: I stooped to look at it, and recognized it as the Spider Orchid, Ophrys aranifera—that English rarity which I used to find on the hills near Folkestone, and which I had first heard about from poor, dirty old Mr Anderson. In England the Spider is apt to reveal itself shyly, half-hidden beneath the rough downland grasses; here, among these naked rocks, its beauty was displayed with an unaccustomed candour: the green sepals and the brown, velvety lip had an oddly archaic air, suggesting a jewel rifled from some ancient Siculian burial-ground. Another spike caught my eye, and another—about a dozen in all: their small, sullen faces rising as if reluctantly above the stony ground. Like the anemones, they seemed indigenous to the underworld—exiles from their native climate, unwilling harbingers of the Sicilian spring.

Farther on I came upon another species of Ophrys: a non-British plant which I took to be Ophrys lutea—yellow-lipped, less of a ‘hell-hound’ than its arachnoid cousin, but with somewhat the same sullen air of existing in an alien world . . . As it happened, it proved not to be Ophrys lutea at all; looking it up in Camus’s book, on my return to England, I couldn’t identify it) and I suspect that it may have been an unknown species or variety—confined, perhaps, to those rocky hillsides above the lake of Pergusa) a flower of Persephone indeed, and more truly her own even than the ‘husband-splendid, serpent heads’ of Anemone coronaria.

I made my way back at last to the wine-shop, where my car would soon be arriving to pick me up. The door was shut and locked: it was a disappointment, for I was thirsty, and would have liked to sit and drink a glass of wine while I waited for the taxi. I knocked once more) and this time the door of the adjoining house—evidently inhabited by the same family—was flung open and the proprietress appeared upon the doorstep. She beckoned to me, hospitably, to come in: a woman of forty, plump but well-preserved, and far gone in pregnancy. I entered the house, to find the entire family seated round an enormous table; they were evidently just finishing their Easter dinner—always a Gargantuan affair in southern Italy. I was greeted like an old friend: the husband—whom I had barely spoken to in the morning—slapped me on the back as though I were his favourite brother) two of the elder girls—both extremely pretty—invited me to seat myself between them; the bright-eyed children, whom my appearance had so fascinated at lunch-time, continued to stare at me with undiminished curiosity.

The family was an enormous one: at least twenty of them were gathered round the table, and nearly all of them, it appeared, were brothers and sisters. I was plied with glass after glass of marsala—a wine which I don’t much like—and compelled to consume a large plate of some very glutinous and sickly sweet, rather like a trifle. I had thought the Ennesi dour and unfriendly; yet this family, for no conceivable motive other than pure friendliness—and because it was Easter Sunday—had taken me, with an almost embarrassing lack of inhibition, to their hearts.

The party became more and more hilarious: the father, who was of a bawdy turn, told a number of mildly obscene anecdotes: if I missed the point—as too often I did—the two girls between whom I sat kindly explained it to me, at the tops of their voices, and in terms which even I could not misunderstand. Renewed shrieks of merriment, more marsala . . . The padrone, having temporarily exhausted his repertory, enumerated for my benefit his entire family, from the eldest (about twenty-two) down to the smallest bambino. ‘E finalmente,’ shouted the proud father, tapping his wife’s belly, ‘e finalmente, un altro qui!’ The wife went off into shrieks of laughter, her plump body heaving and quivering with a positively seismic violence . . . Fertility, after all (I thought), had returned to this dark Plutonic land; the fat, jolly woman seemed a mother-goddess incarnate: she was Cybele, the many-breasted Diana, Demeter herself—the patron-deity of this unfruitful countryside, locked away among its gloomy and desolate hills.

At last my car arrived to take me back to Enna; but we were not allowed to depart until the driver had drunk a bumper or two of marsala and had been introduced, in his turn, to the family. Suddenly I remembered that, when I left the shop in the morning, I had forgotten to pay for my sausage and wine; now, when I offered money, it was firmly refused: I was a friend of the family, and friends did not pay for such trifles. We exchanged addresses: I promised to send a postcard from England. Did I live at Londra or New Yorkee? asked one of the two pretty girls—for at Pergusa the distinction between England and America is regarded as a somewhat academic one.

We drove off at last—through the fields starred with purple anemones and with those other, scarlet ones (I had not noticed them in the morning) which sprang from the blood of the wounded Adonis . . . It was not till I was back at Enna, sitting over a coffee at the Caffè Roma, that it occurred to me to look at the address which my friends had given me. Scribbled on a grubby bit of paper, it slipped out of my note-case between two ten-lire notes: one of the girls had written her own name and that of her sister, followed by the address itself, which I now noticed for the first time. The name of the wine-shop, at which I had been so royally entertained and where, at any moment, a new bambino would be added to that already vast and pullulating family—the name of the wine-shop was: the Trattoria Proserpina.

PART VIII

The Forbidden Kingdom

Chapter opening

Lieut.-Colonel Bodkin was generally reputed, by the staff of the Royal Crimean Hospital,1 to be a proper bastard. The popular verdict was, as is so often the case, at fault; before I had been many weeks with the unit the Colonel and I were getting on like a house on fire; but as a new intake I had been duly warned of his vagaries, and had schooled myself to expect the worst.

Least uncomplimentary was the summing-up of the Staff-sergeant: ‘The old boy’s not too bad, but he’s a b—— for work. And if there’s one thing he can’t stand it’s dust—got a perfect horror of it, he has; I’ve even known him get up on a flight of steps to look at the insides of the lamp-globes. If you ask me, it’s psychological.’

The corporals were less restrained in their judgment; as for my fellow-privates, their comments were wholly uninhibited and unaminously hostile.

‘Cor, ’e’s a proper shower,’ said Pte Hoskins, with whom I had been put to work in the syphilis ward. ‘There’s no pleasing ’im—you can slave your guts out on the job, and still ’e ain’t satisfied. ’E’ll come snooping into the ward, pokin’ and pryin’ like an old woman, and if ’e finds a speck of dust, or a dog-end on the floor—cor, b—— me, don’t ’e let fly! Shoutin’ and bellowin’ like a bloody madman, stampin’ ’is feet, chuckin’ things about. Cor, you just wait till next Colonel’s inspection and see if I ain’t right!’

Pte Hoskins, as I was soon to discover, had hardly exaggerated, for the Colonel, so far as hygiene and cleanliness were concerned, was indeed something of a monomaniac, and his horror of dust might fairly have been described, in the Staff-sergeant’s phrase, as ‘psychological’. Yet despite his fussiness and his terrifying rages, I was inclined from the first to be prejudiced in his favour. As Officer Commanding the ‘V’ Division at the Royal Crimean, Colonel Bodkin occupied a position of some importance, and he had a perfect right, I felt, to demand a high standard of efficiency. Moreover, since most of his orderlies were National Servicemen, who couldn’t care less about the job so long as they themselves kept out of trouble, it was hardly surprising that the Colonel, a regular officer of the old school, should find the present régime exasperating.

My first meeting with Colonel Bodkin had taken place, as it happened, a few weeks before my posting to the unit. I had lately re-enlisted—two years after my demobilization—as a regular soldier, and I had been sent to the Royal Crimean for a trade-test which included, as part of the routine, an interview with the O.C. himself. Colonel Bodkin asked me several rather difficult questions—one, I remember, concerned the causative organisms of ‘non-specific urethritis’; by a lucky chance I happened to mention, among others, Trichomonas, a rather uncommon infection, and I could see that the Colonel was pleased. He was a tall, somewhat saturnine man of about fifty, with horn-rimmed glasses behind which his grey eyes glinted at one equivocally: one could never be quite sure, at any given moment, whether that persistent twinkle portended an outburst of violent rage or a fit of amiable—though equally violent—laughter. When the questions were over and I was about to be marched out, I plucked up courage to ask whether there was any chance of being posted to the Royal Crimean—my chief motive for this odd request being (though I didn’t say so to the Colonel) that the hospital lay within easy reach of my own home.

The Colonel regarded me, for a moment, in silence, his eyes glinting dangerously: was my question, I wondered, out of order? Suddenly, to my astonishment, he flung back his head and burst into a paroxysm of unrestrained and rather terrifying laughter: he shouted, he bellowed, he roared . . . I continued to stand, respectfully, at attention, wondering if he had suddenly gone mad. There was nothing, so far as I knew, particularly side-splitting about my appearances and my question, after all, had been a quite reasonable one. At last, almost weeping from excess of mirth, the Colonel recovered himself sufficiently to speak.

‘Well, Private Brooke (ha, ha, ha-a-ah), I don’t know about that, you know, but (ha, ha) you can always put in for a posting, can’t you (ha, ha, ha, ha)?’

I was marched out at last by the Staff-sergeant who, though not endowed with the Colonel’s peculiar and immoderate sense of humour, did none the less bestow upon me a friendly grin.

‘I’d put in for that posting, if I was you,’ he said. ‘Bang it in as soon as you get back—the chances are ten to one you’ll get it, if the Colonel has any say in the matter. We’re below strength, and we need a few blokes like you, regular soldiers what know the ropes. Fact is, the Old Man sort of took to you—I can always tell if he likes a bloke, by the way he carries on.’

‘Did I say anything funny?’ I asked.

The Staff chuckled amiably.

‘No, it wasn’t nothing you said—it’s just his way.’ The Staff tapped his forehead, and gave me a significant wink. ‘It’s psycho-logical, you see . . .’ Then, changing the subject abruptly: ‘Live near ’ere, do you? Well, that’ll be just the job—you’ll be able to get a sleeping-out pass, and everything’ll be hunky-dory.’

Everything, in fact, proved (as the Staff-sergeant had predicted) to be hunky-dory: I got my posting and, soon after my arrival, obtained (with not much more difficulty than usual) a sleeping-out pass. It was, as the Staff had said, just the job; I was in the Army, yet sleeping at home in a comfortable bed, and able, for the most part, to meet my friends out of barracks in the evening. In other words, I was having my cake and eating it.

The Royal Crimean, as it happened, was a fairly cushy unit at that time, and the ‘V’ Division ran itself more or less independently; the Staff-sergeant was a fair-minded and efficient N.C.O., and I enjoyed working for him. As for Colonel Bodkin, I managed, for the most part, to keep out of his way, and seldom encountered him except at the weekly inspections, when he would lope round the wards like some lean and hungry bloodhound hot on the scent. Poor Pte Hoskins would slink after him in an agony of terror, furtively removing specks of dust or straightening the bedside lockers; yet only one or twice did I witness one of the Colonel’s celebrated outbursts, and on each occasion his wrath was perfectly justified—the record syringes were dirty, a dressing-bucket hadn’t been emptied, or the shelves in the orderlies’ bunk were dusty. Being a new arrival, I was still more or less on probation, and most of the responsibility devolved upon the wretched Hoskins; the Colonel tended rather pointedly to ignore me, though more than once I caught his bright, equivocal eyes regarding me with a disquieting twinkle, as though, at any moment, he might burst into one of his sudden and inexplicable fits of laughter. Despite the Staff-sergeant’s assurances to the contrary, I couldn’t help suspecting that Colonel Bodkin was enjoying some subtle and very esoteric joke at my expense.

Among the rest of the staff—with the exception of one or two regulars like myself—I was regarded as a kind of harmless lunatic. That anybody should choose to re-enlist in the Army, having once escaped from its clutches, seemed to the National Servicemen scarcely credible.

‘Cor, I can’t make you out,’ said Pte Hoskins. ‘Five years service in the f——g Army’ (glancing with a kind of reluctant respect at my medal-ribbons) ‘and you ain’t bleedin’ well ’ad enough of it. You must be crackers, that’s all I can say. Couldn’t you get no work in Civvy Street, then?’

I said, evasively, that jobs in Civvy Street weren’t so easy to come by nowadays.

‘Cor, don’t give us that—an educated bloke like you, you could ’ave found something better than this. What was you before you come in, like—a clerk, or something?’

I said yes, a sort of clerk, but not a very well paid one (the phrase, I thought, described adequately enough my status as an unsuccessful novelist).

Pte Hoskins gave me a sceptical glance.

‘You couldn’t ’ave got less than you’re gettin’ as a f——g private,’ he retorted; then, with the bewildered, incredulous air of one who grapples with some idea totally beyond his comprehension, he added: ‘Anyone’d think you liked, the Army.’

As it happened, Pte Hoskins’ unlikely hypothesis was perfectly correct: I did like the Army—though ‘like’ is hardly an adequate word to describe my feelings about it. ‘Love’, perhaps, would be nearer the mark, though here again the word requires qualification, for my liaison with the armed forces (and I use the word in its erotic rather than its military sense) was by no means the starry-eyed, spontaneous affair which the word ‘love’ too easily suggests. It resembled, rather, the kind of relationship described by Proust, in which Love itself is apprehended, so to speak, only in its negative aspects—the pain of loss, the absence or infidelity of the loved one, the perverse satisfaction of possessing (like Swann) some woman who isn’t one’s type, whom one doesn’t even like, but with whom one has become so fatally obsessed that life without her is unendurable.

Soldiering had become a habit with me—out of uniform, I felt lost, uprooted, a kind of outlaw with no fixed place in the scheme of things. During the two years since my demobilization I had suffered from a growing sense of loss and self-betrayal: I had cast off my mistress—glad enough, at the time, to be free of her thraldom; yet I knew that, despite her tantrums, her cruelty and her possessiveness, I loved her still. Sometimes, passing a recruiting office, I would feel the old nostalgia creep over me, and would experience a masochistic impulse to throw myself, once again, at the feet of my lost love. She would, I knew, be ready enough to take me back—exacting and possessive as ever, but prepared to let bygones be bygones. Like some would-be convert to the Church, vacillating and as yet but half-convinced, I continued to postpone my decision from week to week; yet I knew (as the potential convert knows) that my urge to surrender would prove stronger, at last, than my will to resist.

*

Eros is no respecter of persons, and his ways are inscrutable: how often do we exclaim, incredulously, of some acquaintance, ‘What can he see in her’—or she in him, as the case may be. Eros, moreover, is multiform (we are all, potentially, polymorphous perverts); one can fall in love with God, with an old boot, with a flower, even with oneself; it is hardly surprising, then (since most of us, after all, possess a streak of masochism), that the Army, too, should claim its votaries.

Yet there was, I think, about my own liaison something inherently improbable. Delicate and ‘difficult’ when young, a muff at all games, terrified of violence and (in short) a born intellectual—I was hardly, to say the least, the most likely kind of cannon-fodder. In my schooldays the idea that I should ever, in any conceivable circumstances, wear a soldier’s uniform would have struck me as flatly incredible. I remember, on one occasion, being immensely shocked by one of my contemporaries—an unusually hearty type for a Bedalian—who, when I asked him what he was going to do when he left school, confessed (as though it were a perfectly normal ambition) that he wanted to go into the Army. I was flabbergasted; for at Bedales (that stronghold of Victorian pacifist liberalism) such a thing was, quite simply, inadmissible; I should have been less surprised had he told me that he intended to be a Buddhist monk or a dustman.

I had, I suppose, uncritically imbibed—from Julian Trevelyan and others—the kind of ideology current in ‘advanced’ circles at the time; moreover, I was in strong reaction against family tradition—my brother had been, till lately, a regular officer in the Buffs, and a number of uncles, cousins, etc., were (or had been) Army officers too. The Army, throughout my boyhood and adolescence, stood for all the things I most feared and disliked: public-school ‘heartiness’ (we were very snobbish, at Bedales, about public-schools), rigid discipline of any kind, reactionary politics and so on. It was, therefore, on the face of it, odd enough that in later years I should fall for so improbable and so unsuitable a mistress.

Yet perhaps, after all, it wasn’t so odd; for the truth was, alas, that for all my intellectual pretensions, I was just a timid, unathletic little muff with a chronic sense of my own inferiority. Secretly, I envied the hearties, and would have liked to be like them; though naturally I would have died rather than admit such a thing, even to myself.

I continued to be a muffish and intransigent highbrow for the next ten years or so; yet the shameful passion which, at a future period, was to possess my heart was already latent, like some incubating bacillus, in my system. I am not sure when exactly the affair began—in the Stendhalian phrase—to ‘crystallize’, though I suspect the process may have had something to do with T. E. Lawrence, for whom, at the time of his death, I conceived a great admiration. (Like Margaret Schlegel, in Howards End, I liked soldiers, though I continued—ostensibly, at any rate—to dislike what they stood for.) For a long time my love remained unacknowledged—an amour qui n’ose pas dire son nom; in moments of desperation with my own unhappy lot I would sometimes play with the idea of ‘going for a soldier’; but I knew—or at any rate firmly believed—that I wasn’t tough enough. (I have always, for that matter, been lazy and timid in affairs of the heart—too apt to let opportunities slip, and to decide at the crucial moment that the game isn’t worth the candle.)

In the nineteen-thirties, staying at Folkestone or Dover, I would frequent the soldiers’ pubs, listening to their coarse, pungent talk, sometimes standing them drinks, and occasionally making friends with them. On these pub-crawls I would be possessed by a vague, quasi-erotic nostalgia for the crude, male simplicity of Army life; a nostalgia which, as I half-realized, was linked with my old childhood phantasies of violence and heroic nudity—that strange, half-forgotten world inhabited by Jim the Gardener, the huntsman at Lenhall and all those other muscular heroes whom I had once so passionately—yet so distantly—admired.

The war came and I found myself, at last, in the Army—an inhabitant of that alarming yet fascinating country which had become identified for me, half-consciously, with the remote and perilous land ‘beyond the hills’. True, I was only in the R.A.M.C., but I was, none the less, indubitably a soldier; and throughout those war-time years I could never quite throw off my initial sense of incredulity at being (I, of all people) in the Army. It was as though, by some fantastic and prepotent magic, the secret, inadmissible days-dreams of my childhood had miraculously ‘come true’; I was a citizen, at last, of the Forbidden Kingdom.

A love-affair with the Army is, I suppose, liable to follow the same sort of pattern as any other: there is the initial passionate attraction, followed by the enervate calm of gratified desire; then the lovers’ tiffs, the misunderstandings, the tearful reconciliations; and at last the conjugal phase of contentment and unpassionate affection—or, alternatively, the falling-out of love, the recriminations and the final parting.

In my own case the affair had followed a fairly normal course; and now, after a legal separation which, in my heart, I had never genuinely desired, I was reunited with the loved one—on a short-service engagement of three years; nor, as yet, did I feel the slightest regret for the ‘freedom’ which I had voluntarily renounced; in a sense, indeed, I felt freer—and certainly a great deal happier—than I had felt since the end of the war.

But all this, as I was well aware, would have been very difficult to explain to Pte Hoskins.

A month or so after my posting to the unit, I was transferred from the wards to the ‘theatre’—a term which, though it suggests operations, in fact refers, in a ‘V’ division, merely to the room reserved for injections, the passing of sounds and other forms of ‘surgical’ treatment.

‘Cor stone a crow, I wouldn’t be in your shoes,’ Pte Hoskins commented, with gloomy relish. ‘Worst job on the joint, that’s what it is—bullshit ain’t the word, it’s a proper shower, mate. If they tried puttin’ me in there,’ he added, with the incurable optimism of the National Serviceman, ‘I’d put in for a bleedin’ posting.’

The rest of the unit seemed for the most part to share Pte Hoskins’ opinion: the theatre was the Colonel’s particular joy and pride; his own office led off it through a communicating door, and he was accustomed to bounce in and out unexpectedly, to the confusion and terror of the theatre staff. The worst of it was (said the Corporal i/c), the Old Man’s office could be entered from the corridor by a second door, of which he himself kept the key, so that you could never tell for sure whether he was there or not. He was widely suspected of creeping furtively into his office, from the corridor, and listening to what went on in the theatre through the keyhole; there was even a legend—probably apocryphal—that he had once, by way of varying his shock-tactics, climbed up the fire-escape and jumped in at the window.

As it turned out, the theatre proved to be far less alarming than such reports might have led one to suppose; and I much preferred it to being on the wards. The work was harder, but I enjoyed it; for I had, during the war, acquired a certain niggling aptitude for preparing injections, taking blood-tests, etc., and I derived a slightly snobbish satisfaction from my own proficiency. The Corporal i/c seldom put in an appearance: he spent most of his time in the Divisional Office, drinking innumerable mugs of Camp coffee and working out his football pools. As an old soldier, and a Special Treatment Orderly Class I, I was perfectly capable—so the Corporal considered—of running the theatre; and indeed I found myself, for the most part, virtually in charge of it, and responsible, moreover, for the two National Service trainees who worked with me.

The Colonel, after a preliminary blitz or two, seemed to take my presence for granted. On my first morning he bounced in at an unusually early hour and inspected the syringes, blood-needles, sounds, etc.; he also ran his finger along the top of the medicine-cupboard and opened the microscope-case (in which, apparently, a few weeks before, one of the trainees had secreted a pair of dirty socks). The cupboard, however, had been dusted, the microscope-case revealed no squalid secrets and the Colonel seemed satisfied. After this, he became notably less exigent and, apart from an occasional and unpredictable irruption, left me pretty well to my own devices.

*

One day the Staff-sergeant called me into the office and told me that I had been recommended for a stripe.

‘It’s the Old Man’s idea,’ said the Staff. ‘He seems to have taken rather a fancy to you—of course, he’s stark crazy, but a Lance-jack’s not a bad rank, you can knock hell out of the bloody trainees, and you don’t have no extra duties on the Company.’

I wasn’t, as it happened, particularly keen on promotion, and felt half-inclined to refuse it. I knew all the disadvantages; yet my native streak of snobbery asserted itself, and the idea of being an N.C.O. (even an Acting Unpaid Lance-corporal) appealed, I suppose, in an ignoble way, to my chronic sense of inferiority. I felt rather as I had felt at Bedales when the Chief had made me a house-prefect: I remembered how Julian—a revolutionary Socialist in those days—had jeered at what he considered my betrayal of the democratic cause; he had quoted Lord Acton—‘All power corrupts,’ etc. (which didn’t, however, prevent him, a few months later, from becoming a prefect himself).

Pte Hoskins did not quote Lord Acton, but his attitude was not dissimilar.

‘You wouldn’t catch ’em makin’ me up,’ he said. ‘They can keep their bleedin’ tapes—I’d rather be what I am, chum, a buckshee f——g private.’

Which didn’t, however, prevent him, a few months later, from accepting, a stripe himself . . .

As the Staff-sergeant had rightly observed, the rank of Lance-corporal carried certain material advantages, while entailing very little additional responsibility. I continued to work in the theatre, and as an N.C.O. found that my task was perceptibly lightened; the trainees could be, when necessary, bullied into some semblance of efficiency, and (which suited me even better) the Corporal i/c was enabled to spend even more time in the office, brooding upon the downfall of Colchester or the sudden and unforeseen ascendency of Chelsea or the Wolves.

As for Colonel Bodkin, my new rank seemed to have added some exquisite nuance to the private joke which he enjoyed at my expense; his fits of laughter became more frequent and prolonged, giving rise to considerable speculation in the neighbouring departments. The noise even penetrated to the office, fifty yards away down the corridor, where the Staff-sergeant, the clerks and the Corporal i/c sat over their mugs of coffee.

The Staff could not restrain his curiosity.

‘What the hell d’you get up to in there?’ he would ask. ‘I’ve never heard such a racket—you’d think the Old Man had gone clean off his rocker. What d’you do, tell him smutty stories or something?’

I assured the Staff that I wouldn’t think of doing such a thing; but he looked unconvinced.

‘Well, he must be laughing at something—he didn’t use to carry on that way before you was made up. Strikes me, he must think you look funny.’

‘Perhaps I do,’ I said innocently.

The Staff gave me a considering look.

‘Well, you may do—but I’m b——d if I can see it. Anyone’d think you was Arthur Askey, the way he carries on.’

The Colonel, as it happened, was extremely busy at this time; in addition to his routine work at the hospital he was engaged upon a thesis for some additional medical degree without which, it appeared, he could not obtain further promotion. The thesis had for its subject the treatment of venereal disease in the Army from its earliest inception up to the present day, it was a work of some magnitude, involving a great deal of research, and the Colonel’s office, during working hours, was a chaotic muddle of files, card-indexes, hospital returns, case-cards, scraps of manuscript and piles upon piles of medical books and pamphlets.

With an increasing frequency, the Colonel would call me into his office and, if I had no patients to attend to, give me odd jobs to do: sorting papers, tidying cupboards, or searching the files for some elusive and urgently-required document. As the work proceeded I began to spend more and more time in the office and less and less in the theatre (where the Corporal i/c was compelled, much against his will, to resume command). The files and documents were reduced, in time, to a state of comparative order; and the famous thesis began, at last, to take shape. Thenceforward, I became a kind of unofficial amanuensis: the Colonel would arrive in the morning, proudly flourishing a sheaf of manuscript, and we would settle down to revise it—a process which involved not only endless transpositions and emendations but also the insertion of innumerable footnotes and additional passages, scribbled on thin scraps of paper and pinned to the appropriate page, with a large asterisk to mark the place where each passage was to be inserted.

To say of Colonel Bodkin that he was temperamental would be to put it far too mildly: no prima donna, I feel sure, could have rivalled him in the tantrums, the sudden, awful rages, the hysteria or the fits of suicidal gloom to which he was perennially subject. Sometimes I was convinced that he really was going out of his mind; and more than once, after some particularly gruelling session in his office, I began to fancy that I was going slightly mad myself. Yet oddly enough, the longer I worked for him, the more I respected him; and my respect, as time went on, was transformed into a genuine liking in which there was a tinge of something very like affection.

Working as I was in close contact with him, I could hardly fail to glimpse something of the private personality beneath the official mask; and what I saw confirmed me in my good opinion. There was no question—at this stage, at any rate—of the least familiarity between us; even in his most unbuttoned moods he maintained the impersonal, authoritative attitude of the regular officer, and I knew that he strongly disapproved of the growing tendency—noticeable among some of his younger colleagues—to fraternize with Other Ranks. For my part, I entirely approved of this reactionary outlook, for I had learnt from past experience that too much familiarity between officers and men is apt to breed not only contempt but a chronic sense of insecurity and mutual distrust. With the ‘fraternizing’ type of officer one never knows quite where one stands: however genuinely friendly he may seem, one runs the perpetual risk of presuming upon his friendliness, of ‘going too far’. With Colonel Bodkin, on the other hand, one knew exactly where one stood: he could be pleasant enough at times—expansive, loquacious, even bawdy; but he never for a moment let you forget that he was an officer, and a senior one at that.

For my part, I was careful to preserve an attitude of strict formality. Only once was I betrayed into overstepping the mark: I had, I think, countered some disrespectful remark of his about the O.C. of the hospital with a mild jibe of my own; and I knew at once that I had gone just a fraction too far—I saw the hilarious twinkle fade, on the instant, into a steely glint of disapproval, and the Colonel, without another word, returned to his work.

Colonel Bodkin—not surprisingly, perhaps, considering his temp-erament—was a great hater. He hated conscription, he hated democracy, and he cherished a peculiarly virulent loathing for the Labour Party. On one occasion a Socialist M.P. paid an ‘informal’ visit to the Officers’ Mess. For several days beforehand the Colonel could talk of nothing else: so outraged did he seem at having to entertain ‘that damned counter-jumper’ that one might have supposed the politician’s visit to have been arranged solely for the discomfiture of Colonel Bodkin himself.

On the day of the reception I waited in some anxiety—though with considerable curiosity—for the Colonel’s return from the Mess. He arrived at last, not—as I had fully expected—in one of his fulminating rages, but in a state of unnatural calm. He began work at once, and continued to labour at his files for the next half-hour, industriously and in perfect silence.

Suddenly he looked up at me, abruptly, and I saw that there was a dangerous glint in his eye.

‘D’you know, Corporal,’ he said reflectively, as though about to give his considered opinion upon the placing of a footnote or the emendation of some overweighted paragraph, ‘d’you know, Corporal, I’ve no particular objection to beggars on horseback’ (here there was a long pause, during which he continued to eye me with a severe and reflective gaze) ‘but,’ he continued at last, ‘if there’s one thing I can’t stand at any price, it’s b——s on horseback.’

*

If there was one thing the Colonel hated more than Socialist politicians, it was the wireless. He believed it, I think, to be quite literally an invention of the Devil, and railed and fulminated against it constantly. The immediate cause of these diatribes was usually the loud-speaker in the adjoining ward, which, like all wireless-sets in military hospitals, was tuned-in perpetually and at full blast to the Light Programme. All efforts to suppress it had so far failed; and the Colonel continued to fume impotently against infernal machines, the corruption of popular taste and the Century of the Common Man.

One morning, driven more frantic than usual by ‘Music while you work’—the programme’s title, if he knew of it, must have struck him as exquisitely ironic—he called me into his office from the theatre, where I was busy preparing arsenical injections for a crowd of outpatients.

‘Ah, Corporal, there you are,’ he rapped out impatiently, his eyes glinting angrily, and with no hint of any humorous twinkle. ‘I want you to take a message along to the skin ward.’ He paused, as though carefully considering the wording of some important dispatch. ‘Give the Sister my compliments,’ he continued at last, in measured tones, ‘and ask her if she’ll be good enough to turn off that bleeding, f——g, bastard wireless.’

The Colonel’s face was as stern and humourless as ever; I met his eyes with a gaze as blank as his own.

‘Very good, sir,’ I said, and, coming smartly to attention, marched out of the room.

I found the Sister in her bunk and asked her, very politely, whether she would mind turning down the wireless a little, as it disturbed Colonel Bodkin at his work. Then I went back to the theatre.

A few minutes later, I heard the Colonel shouting for me. When I re-entered the office, he looked at me with the same blank, humourless gaze as before.

‘Ah, Corporal—did you give the Sister my message?’

‘Yessir.’

‘You did?’

‘Yessir.’

‘You gave it word for word?’

I paused for a fraction of a second before replying.

‘No, sir.’

The Colonel continued to glare at me as solemnly as ever. Suddenly he gave vent to such a terrifying bellow of laughter that it made me jump. I escaped as soon as I could: the theatre was full of patients, and the Staff-sergeant himself had come in to lend a hand.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ he asked ungraciously. ‘Doing your comic turn again, by the sound of it.’

When I told him what had happened, he looked at me severely.

‘I’ve a good mind to bang you on a fizzer for disobeying an order.’

‘What order, Staff?’

‘Why, the Colonel asked you to give a message, didn’t he? Don’t you know that if you take a message for an officer you’re expected to give it word for word?’

The thesis began to take shape at last; the first sections were completed to the Colonel’s satisfaction, and the R.S.M. (a clerk by trade) had volunteered to type them out (little did he know, I thought, what he had let himself in for). We revised the first draft of typescript together, during the next few weeks; in such matters the Colonel was a perfectionist, the typing had to be faultless, and a minor error—a slipped letter, or a comma in place of a semi-colon—would exacerbate him to such a degree that the office (and indeed the whole division) rang with his agonized cries.

During this period I got to know him a good deal better; though maintaining, scrupulously, my ‘official’ attitude I could, I found, afford to take certain liberties.

One day I came across, in The Spectator, a poem by C. S. Lewis about the horrors of wireless in hospitals. I cut it out and presented it to the Colonel, who was delighted with it; he didn’t say much at the time, but he reread it at intervals throughout the day, guffawing over it with infinite relish. Finally it was affixed, by strips of adhesive tape, to the wall behind his desk, and thereafter, when I came into the room, I would find him, as often as not, standing in front of it, giggling quietly to himself and repeating over and over again the phrases which particularly appealed to him.

At about this time I was promoted to the rank of full corporal. Once again I had qualms about being ‘made up’; but having accepted one stripe I could hardly, with any show of logic, refuse the second.

‘One of the blue-eyed boys, eh?’ said Pte Hoskins. ‘You’ll be a bleedin’ W.O.I. before the year’s out, if you go on like this.’ He paused, eying me reflectively. ‘Can’t think what the Old Man sees in you, meself—but I suppose b——s can’t be choosers.’

As it turned out, I was soon to find myself bitterly regretting my second ‘tape’, and cursing myself for the schoolboy vanity which had induced me to accept the first one. Pte Hoskins—though the future was to prove him inconsistent—was perfectly right: it was better to remain the underdog, a ‘buckshee’ private untrammelled by the responsibilities of office. But the process, once set in motion, couldn’t be reversed: I was obviously ear-marked for promotion, and, since I was a regular, it would have seemed not only eccentric but downright undutiful to refuse it.

As a full corporal, my authority extended beyond the ‘V’ Division to the Company itself: I was in charge of a barrack-room (though I didn’t sleep in it), and responsible for its cleanliness and discipline; I was liable to be detailed for extra parades and squad-drill, besides such routine jobs as N.C.O. i/c Fire-picquet and Night Orderly-sergeant. The last was by far the worst of my new duties, and was to prove, in the long-run, my undoing. Had the Company possessed its full quota of corporals it wouldn’t have been so bad; the establishment provided for fourteen or more, but in actual fact the unit included only half this number, several of whom, moreover—being cooks or storekeepers—were permanently excused. The duty, therefore, which should have occurred at intervals of about a fortnight, came round every four or five days; with the result that I soon began to suffer from a chronic and cumulative lack of sleep.

The tour of duty began at five o’clock in the afternoon (after a normal day’s work which had begun at seven in the morning); from five o’clock till eight one was employed in the hospital Reception Office, dealing with admissions, casualties and so on—often an exacting and nerve-racking job in itself; thereafter, for the next few hours, one was kepy busy with various routine duties: clearing the N.A.A.F.I. at 9.30 p.m., touring the barrack-rooms at lights-out, inspecting the night-orderlies’ suppers, checking up on leave passes in the guard-room, etc., etc. For the rest of the night one was supposed, officially, to tour the hospital grounds and, in case of any irregularity, report the matter to the Orderly Sergeant-major (who would not, since his was a sleeping duty, have thanked one for the attention). Unofficially, one might snatch an hour or two’s sleep—either in the P.A.D. centre or on an unoccupied bed in one of the wards. At seven o’clock in the morning, having written up a lengthy dossier of the night’s doings and handed it in to the Company Office, one came off duty; after which one was expected—without any interval for relaxation—to report for one’s usual day-time job.

Not surprisingly, on such occasions, I would find the Colonel’s tantrums more than usually difficult to cope with; once or twice I all but fell asleep in his office. The thesis, however, had reached a critical stage, and the Colonel—though disposed to sympathize with my trials, of which he was perfectly cognizant—was determined to keep me up to the mark. Much of my time was now spent in trotting to and fro between the Colonel and the R.S.M., who was beginning—as I could guess—to feel that he had bitten off more than he could chew. The least slip in the typescript—a misplaced comma or quotation-mark—and I would be sent flying down to the Company Office, where the R.S.M., poor chap, would be obliged to re-type the offending sheet.

Meanwhile, the task of revision proceeded: I would read aloud from the original MS, while the Colonel checked the typescript. Much of the earlier part of the thesis dealt with V.D. treatment in the mid-Victorian period, the details of which were sometimes so appalling that the Colonel, entranced by his own powers of horrific evocation, would be overcome by a ghoulish merriment, and give vent to yells and shrieks of ribald laughter.

‘Now, now. Corporal—that’s enough, that’s quite enough,’ he would splutter at last, as though the interruption had been entirely my fault; and we would resume our task. Soon, however, we were sure to come upon some other passage in which his talent for the macabre was given full scope—an account, perhaps, of the cuppings, the Gargantuan purges or the all-but lethal mercuric inunctions formerly employed in the treatment of syphilis; and the Colonel would dis-solve, once again, into helpless laughter—his hands pressed to his tummy, his whole body heaving, and his face streaming with tears.

It so happened, at this time, that I was somewhat preoccupied with the fate of a small literary effort of my own, which had just been published. The news had leaked out on the unit, and had even reached the ears of the Colonel himself, who, so the Staff-sergeant assured me, had ‘laughed fit to bust’; no doubt (I thought) if the Colonel had found me funny before, he must now think me more exquisitely comical than ever.

I don’t know if he ever read the book; what really interested him, I think, was the question of how I had got it typed. By this time he was nearly in despair at the errors and omissions of the R.S.M.; and he was seriously thinking of sending his manuscript to a professional typist. Could I, he asked, recommend a really first-class one? I gave him the address of a reliable firm who had typed much of my own work; with the manuscript once out of his clutches, the Colonel (I thought) might be restored to something approaching sanity; and I heaved an anticipatory sigh of relief at the prospect of deliverance.

The Colonel, however, after vacillating hysterically for a day or two, decided finally that the R.S.M., having got so far, might take offence if he were not allowed to finish the job. The truth was—as I knew very well—that the Colonel couldn’t bear to be parted, even for a moment, from his precious manuscript; doubtless he had visions (and I have had similar ones myself) of its being lost in the post, destroyed by fire or engulfed in some sudden and unprecedented earthquake in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The work of typing and revision, therefore, went on as before; there seemed no end to it—almost every page had to be retyped and typed again; the R.S.M. grew increasingly irritable, and I myself found it more and more difficult not to fall sound asleep among the files and card-indexes.

One Sunday morning I opened the paper to find that my book had received a long and glowing review from an extremely eminent critic. Seeing my name at the top, I was immediately convinced that my long association with Colonel Bodkin, combined with lack of sleep, had finally driven me out of my mind; and it was only when a friend telephoned to congratulate me on my good luck that I could be persuaded of its actuality.

I read and reread the article throughout the day, still half-inclined to suppose that either myself or the eminent reviewer had suddenly gone mad. Next morning the Colonel bustled into the office with a fresh bundle of typescript under his arm; he looked in the worst of tempers.

‘Goodmorning, Corporal, Goodmorning,’ he snapped, surveying me with an angry glare. ‘Nice notice of your book in yesterday’s paper—very nice indeed.’ He sat down abruptly, swept a few superfluous objects irritably from the table, and carefully spread out the R.S.M.’s typescript. ‘Now look here, Corporal—I’m afraid I’m not really satisfied with this paragraph about posterior irrigations in cases of acute gonorrhoea. The point is, you see . . .’

The Colonel proceeded, with his habitual air of furious concentration, to expound his point; he expounded it in detail and at considerable length. I tried hard to fix my mind upon the subject of posterior irrigation; but without, I regret to say, any very notable success. Working with Colonel Bodkin, I reflected, might have its disadvantages; but at least it supplied an admirable corrective to one’s vanity.

*

That night I was detailed for Fire-picquet, a duty which involved being confined to barracks for a week and sleeping, in extreme discomfort, on a stretcher in the P.A.D. centre. This, too, I found a good corrective to conceit; nevertheless, I continued to read and reread my review—sitting in the Corporals’ Mess of an evening, or snuggled between the rough blankets on my stretcher. It couldn’t, I told myself, it simply couldn’t be true . . . Yet there were the glowing, enthusiastic phrases, permanently embalmed in cold print: the thing couldn’t be a delusion, it must be true after all. And here, meanwhile, was I—a corporal in the R.A.M.C., earning ten shillings a day, and condemned, for the next two and a half years (or more, if an ‘emergency’ supervened) not only to the squalid routine of V.D. treatments, fire-picquets, Night Orderly-sergeant and the rest, but also to the nerve-racking vagaries of a specialist venereologist with the temperament of a Wagnerian prima donna . . . A sense of sudden, bitter frustration descended upon me: for the first time in my life, the bitch-goddess was beckoning, but I was not at liberty, alas, to enjoy her favours.

My reverie was interrupted (I was lying on my stretcher in the P.A.D. centre) by Pte Hoskins, who happened to be on Fire-picquet too.

‘I say, Corp—is it true what they’re sayin’, that you’ve written a book?’

I muttered some vague and non-committal reply, pretending that I was already half-asleep; but aware, none the less, that Pte Hoskins’ question was more pointed and more relevant than, perhaps, he realized: for was it indeed ‘true’—could it possibly, in the circum-stances, be true—that I, 21017154 Corporal Brooke, R.A.M.C., had really ‘written a book’?

As the R.S.M.’s typescript neared its completion, the Colonel’s behaviour became more and more eccentric and unpredictable; and, as my cumulative fatigue increased, I became less and less able to concentrate with any show of genuine interest upon the history of venereology in the British Army. My book received other reviews—less exciting than that first, intoxicating paean of praise, but quite flattering enough to nourish my newly-acquired but already insatiable vanity. Resigned for many years to being a perpetual failure, I had now suddenly been injected with the potent, habit-forming toxin of success, and it had flown—as such poisons will when one is unaccustomed to them—straight to my head. I was convinced, in my more rational moments, that the eminent critic had, perhaps from sheer kind-heartedness, grossly over-praised my book; I knew, in my heart, that it was a scrappy, slipshod affair, which I could greatly have improved upon if I had taken more trouble; yet such mild antidotes could do little to counteract the effects of the poison circulating in my system. I became more and more restless and ill-at-ease, alternating between fits of overweening conceit and an extreme manic depression in which my ‘success’ seemed to me bogus and factitious, a mere figment of my own disordered imagination.

The duty of Night Orderly-sergeant recurred with an increasing frequency—several of the available corporals had, not surprisingly, gone sick—and my exhaustion increased progressively, from day to interminable day. The Colonel’s thesis was due to be submitted to the authorities concerned in less than a month; yet I despaired of its ever being completed. Quite apart from the perpetual retyping of pages marred by a single, inconsiderable error, the Colonel had lately, by some disastrous contingency, been enabled to tap an entirely fresh and apparently inexhaustible source of ‘relevant material’, all of which had to be incorporated in the typescript; much of it, unfortunately, referred to the earlier phases of venereological history, with the result that the preliminary sections of the thesis, which had at last—and with infinite reluctance—been passed by the Colonel, had to be typed out all over again. The R.S.M.—already fully occupied with his company duties—groaned in despair as the batches of typescript, scrawled all over with emendations and additional footnotes, were returned to him.

‘What the hell’s he think I am, a bloody robot?’ he would explode—forgetting, in the heat of the moment, that I was a junior N.C.O. and he my Sergeant-major.

I could fully sympathize, for I was beginning to feel uncommonly like a robot myself. In addition to my other duties, I now had to attend a bi-weekly class for junior N.C.Os at which a staff-sergeant lectured us on elementary drill, King’s Regulations, military law and so forth.

This was bad enough; but worse was in store. A detachment of the Army Education Corps had for some time been carrying on a shadowy and mysterious existence in a hut on the confines of the hospital grounds. A day came when the Company Officer—by some unhappy accident—became suddenly aware of their presence on the strength of the company. Immediately a paragraph appeared in Part I Orders to the effect that all unit personnel below the rank of sergeant were to attend the Education Centre forthwith for a general knowledge test.

Nobody, as it happened, was more flabbergasted by this bombshell than the A.E.C. sergeant himself—a pleasant fellow who, up till now, had been harmlessly employed upon certain rather ill-defined duties, the most exacting of which—so far as I could gather—consisted of sitting in his hut for hours at a time reading Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and Trevelyan’s Social History of England. The claims of popular culture, however—as interpreted by the Company Officer—could no longer be ignored, and the Sergeant, forsaking his Trevelyan and his Russell, set himself glumly to the task of feeding the hungry sheep.

The sheep, thereafter, assembled in batches at the Education Centre, chiefly in their off-duty times. My turn (since my name began with a B) came early: the Centre was arranged like a class-room, with rows of desks; I had always thought of the Army as a kind of going-back-to-school (in the manner of Vice Versa), and the illusion was now complete. The Sergeant handed out the papers: there were two of them, one consisting of general knowledge, the other—to my horror—of elementary arithmetic. I rose incontinently to my feet (I had almost waved my arm and called ‘Please, sir’), and went up to the Sergeant’s desk.

‘Yes, Corporal, what’s up?’ he asked pleasantly.

I held out the arithmetic paper.

‘Look here, Sarge,’ I said, ‘it’s not the least good me trying to do this—I can’t add two and two.’

The Sergeant grinned at me amiably.

‘To tell you the truth, Corp.’, he said, ‘neither can I. But you might as well have a go at it—I expect you can do as well as I could myself.’

I explained that I was no better than a moron at maths—I had got eleven out of a hundred for it in the School Certificate, and must certainly be even less proficient now than I had been a quarter of a century ago.

‘Oh, all right,’ the Sergeant agreed. ‘I couldn’t care less, really—I’ll say your paper’s got lost, or something—but you’d better try and make some sort of job of the “general knowledge”. It’s dead easy—you see I had to submit a draft of it to the Company Officer, and he couldn’t answer half the questions himself, so I had to weed out the nasty ones. O.K., Corp—get stuck into it.’

The general knowledge paper was, as the Sergeant had said, easy enough—being adapted, indeed, with an admirable sense of fitness to the I.Q. of the Company Officer. In addition to the questions themselves, one was required to write a short essay on one of four set subjects: ‘The Films’, ‘My Favourite Sport’, ‘Television’ or ‘The Future of Air-travel’. I chose the films, and wrote a bogusly-erudite little dissertation on the cinema as a source of contemporary folk-myth, with copious—though somewhat vague—references to The Golden Bough and Jung’s theory of archetypes . . . It was a silly, schoolboyish gestures but I was feeling, by this time, in rather a silly mood, and if the Army insisted on treating me like a schoolboy, I was quite prepared to behave like one.

What effect, if any, my essay produced in the Company Office, I never heard; but I can hardly suppose that my views on the contemporary cinema would have made any very lively appeal to the Company Officer.

The weeks passed, the summer came, and with it my restlessness increased. The work of the Division, the routine duties, my whole present way of life, began to seem more and more unreal. At times I wished desperately that I were out of the Army, but these moods were infrequent, for I found it almost impossible, by now, to envisage any other form of existence; moreover, I was committed irrevocably to another two years with the colours, and the knowledge that there was no possible escape from my predicament operated as a kind of unconscious censor upon my feelings of revolt and frustration. I blamed not the Army itself but—with some justification—the unit for my increasing dissatisfaction: the shortage of N.C.Os., the unnecessary duties, the inefficiency of the Company Officer, and so on.

I had not as yet begun to fall out of love with the Army, yet I resented the harsh and exacting demands of my chosen mistress, and I should have been glad enough of the opportunity for a little infidelity. Like a boy beglamoured by his first prostitute, I had fallen for the venal lures of the bitch-goddess; but I could only, alas, admire her charms from afar.

Sometimes I would look at my little book—pathetically ‘slim’ and printed on dingy ‘utility’ paper—and feel a renewed shock of astonishment that anybody could ever have taken it seriously. I was still haunted by the feeling that it wasn’t a real book at all, but a rather shoddy and amateurish imitation of one. Somewhere at the back of my mind lurked a vague but persistent idea of what a real book should look like; something, perhaps, rather like the original edition of Crome Yellow, with its thick laid paper, wide margins and the little extra label on the back fly-leaf . . . I thought of that afternoon at Bedales, a quarter of a century ago, when Harry Grumbar had handed me the queerly-shaped yellow volume; and, like Mr Wimbush himself, I was ‘desolated to think of all the murdered past’.

The Colonel’s thesis was completed at last: not, indeed, to his entire satisfaction—that would have been an impossibility—but the new material had at least been inserted, and the pages retyped; and, on the day before it was due to be submitted, we went through it together for the last time. By now, despite my own preoccupations, I felt deeply involved in the fate of the thesis; and, as the Colonel turned over one freshly-typed page after another, I trembled lest the R.S.M., at the last moment, should have committed some disastrous and irretrievable howler. Mercifully he hadn’t; and on the following day the Colonel departed for London, with the precious typescript neatly bound together with green ribbon and carefully packed, between innumerable sheets of tissue-paper, in a brand-new and expensive-looking leather brief-case.

With the completion and dispatch of the thesis, I had expected to be relieved of my duties as the Colonel’s amanuensis. My hopes, however, were vain; for the Colonel, it seemed, had become so fascinated by the pleasures of literary composition that he now decided to embark upon a full-scale and immensely detailed report upon the methods of V.D. treatment currently in use in the British Army at home and overseas. The report, so far as I could gather, was purely a labour of love; nobody had asked him to undertake it, and I doubt if the Colonel had much idea as to whom, eventually, it would be submitted. None the less, he plunged into this new literary labour with the undiminished brio of a Trollope: no sooner was the thesis safely delivered than he began to ransack the shelves in his office for the monthly returns of every treatment-centre in the United Kingdom and B.A.O.R.; and soon the Division rang, once again, with the familiar shrieks of his laughter or the taurine bellowings of his sudden and implacable wrath.

One evening I was rung up at home by a man at Broadcasting House. His name was unknown to me—which wasn’t surprising, for I knew nobody connected with the B.B.C. The telephone, as it happened, went dead at that moment, and I was left, for several minutes, to speculate wildly as to who was ringing me up and why. At last the voice came through again: it proved to be that of a talks-producer who, he said, had read my book and wondered whether I would care to give a talk about orchids on the Third Programme. Suspecting, once again, that I was going mad, I said that I would like to, but it rather depended on the Company Office—a remark which the producer must (as I realize now) have found a trifle baffling. I promised, however, to meet him in London on my next half-day and discuss the matter.

The meeting duly took place—at the Oxford and Cambridge Club, to which I had once, long ago, belonged myself. The B.B.C. man proved to be extremely nice and sympathetic, and I finally agreed, subject to the exigencies of the service, to give the talk.

The least of my difficulties was the writing of the script; far more complex was the problem of fixing a date and time, a month or so ahead, when I could be reasonably sure of not being Night Orderly-sergeant or N.C.O. i/c Fire-picquet. Since the duty-roster was liable, in the present condition of the unit, to be changed at a moment’s notice, and since, moreover, I might suddenly be detailed for some other and quite unpredictable job, or, for that matter, drafted overseas, the problem seemed nearly insoluble. If I were on duty, I might be able to get someone to ‘stand in’ for me, but such last-minute substitutions could never be relied upon, and were apt (if he were in a bad mood) to be disallowed by the R.S.M. Moreover, I was by no means certain that, for a serving soldier, broadcasting didn’t in itself constitute a crime; in war-time, as I remembered, even a poem in New Writing or Horizon could not appear (at any rate officially) until one had first obtained permission from one’s Commanding Officer. Probably—for all I knew—the same rule still applied, and doubtless the B.B.C. would be considered a far more subversive and dangerous medium than a highbrow literary review. I was prepared, however, to take a risk in this matter; for it seemed to me that the chances of anybody at the Royal Crimean listening-in to a Third Programme talk were so remote as to be negligible.

And then, only a week before the date fixed for the broadcast, I found myself on a draft for British Honduras.

‘It’s a records posting,’ said the Staff-sergeant, ‘so there ain’t nothing you can do about it.’

‘Just the f——g job,’ said the Corporal i/c. ‘Lovely climate, smashing bints—some blokes have all the luck.’

As for the Colonel, his obiter dicta about R.A.M.C. Records were entirely unprintable.

On the whole, I was rather pleased than otherwise by the prospect of a trip to the Caribbean; it would be a relief, at any rate, to escape from the Royal Crimean. And yet—and yet . . . I had another book due for publication in the autumn; and then, of course, there was my broadcast—it would be a pity to lose that twenty guineas.

The day after my posting came through from Records I went up for a medical inspection. Much to my surprise—and rather to my relief—it appeared that I was suffering from something called a ‘systolic murmur’, and I was promptly taken off the draft.

‘Just the job,’ said the Staff-sergeant. ‘I was just thinking we should have to find a new funny-man to keep the Old Man happy. You’d better run along to his office right away—he’s been shouting and bawling for you this last half-hour.’

The day fixed for my broadcast came at last; for a wonder, I was neither Night Orderly-sergeant nor N.C.O. i/c Fire-picquet. At five o’clock I hurried out of the barracks, twittering with guilt and anxiety, and fully expecting to be seized upon, at the last minute, and detailed for some unforeseen and inescapable duty; or perhaps, I thought, the R.S.M. had seen the ‘billing’ in the Radio Times and was waiting in the guard-room to pounce upon me and put me under close arrest. I escaped, however, without disaster, and caught the train to London. The whole episode, by now, seemed to me so inherently improbable that I could hardly believe in its reality; it was as though, I thought, some very inferior anchorite should be summoned from his desert fastness to address the assembled literati of Alexandria.

My producer was not only a very nice but an extremely tactful young man, and the talk itself passed off without any serious mishap. I hoped devoutly that nobody at the hospital had—either from a sudden and unprecedented urge to improve his mind, or (a more probable contingency) by an unlucky accident—switched on the Third Programme. Afterwards, over an enjoyable glass of whisky in the duty-room, I suddenly remembered the A.E.C. sergeant: he, I thought, would be quite capable of tuning-in to the Third . . . But the Sergeant, I reflected (remembering that affair of the general knowledge paper), was a decent fellow, and could be depended upon (at least I hoped so) not to give me away.

Next morning I found that the news had, to my surprise and dismay, leaked out on the unit.

‘Blimey, I fair pissed myself when I ’eard,’ said Pte Hoskins. ‘It was that A.E.C. bloke what listened to it—I ’eard ’im tellin’ the Staff, this mornin’ . . . Cor, I dunno—bleedin’ pox-wallahs talkin’ on the wireless: they must be ’ard up for talent.’ Pte Hoskins looked at me as though I had suddenly, overnight, assumed the fabulous lineaments of Mr Gilbert Harding himself. He added, half to himself and with an expression of horror-stricken awe: ‘And on the Third Programme, too.’

So the A.E.C. sergeant had let me down after all . . . Later in the morning I happened to run into the R.S.M., crossing the barrack-square. He greeted me amiably enough: at any rate, I thought, the news had not yet penetrated to the Company Office . . . Before the morning was over, however, I realized that my broadcast was already public property. It had not, after all, been entirely the fault of the A.E.C. sergeant: someone, apparently, had (just as I had feared) seen the announcement in the Radio Times and had tuned in the N.A.A.F.I. wireless (though with some difficulty, for the machine was not accustomed to such treatment) to the Third Programme. Worst of all, Colonel Bodkin himself had been apprised of my indiscretion; he didn’t say much, but I found him glaring at me more than once during the morning with a peculiarly sinister look; and several times he startled me by bursting into a peal of satanic and blood-curdling laughter.

The Colonel, as it happened, was particularly exigent that morning, and by midday I felt more than usually exhausted. I had suddenly remembered, moreover, that—the day being a Wednesday—there had been a barrack-room inspection at nine o’clock by the Company Officer. I had clean forgotten it, and I was pretty certain that I should find myself in trouble. Nor was I mistaken: before lunch, I was called before the Company Officer and treated to a good old-fashioned ballocking, in which I was accused of disobeying at least half-a-dozen orders, and of being lazy, inefficient and irresponsible into the bargain.

‘Next time it happens, you’ll be on a 252,’ growled the Company Officer, in conclusion. ‘And,’ he added (with a peculiarly ferocious intonation), ‘if I have much more trouble from you, Corporal Brooke, I’ll strip you.’

It was on the tip of my tongue to reply that nothing, at the moment, could have pleased me more; but the Company, as I well knew, was far too short of regular N.C.Os. for this to be anything but the idlest of threats.

In the afternoon I was in trouble again. A case-card, A.F.I1247, had been mislaid in the theatre, and a terrific hullabaloo ensued. I, being i/c Theatre, was, of course, held responsible: the Staff-sergeant raged, the Colonel danced and tore his hair with fury, while the trainees stood round white-faced and mute with apprehension. At last, after the whole division had been ransacked and half the staff threatened with charges, the card turned up in the inside pocket of the Staff-sergeant’s own battle-dress tunic. I was exonerated; but by this time I was suffering from such an accumulation of guilt and anxiety that I fully expected to find myself, at any moment, facing some terrifying and Kafka-like court-martial charge for an offence which, to the best of my knowledge, I had never committed.

Late in the afternoon, when I was just going off duty, a telephone-call came through to the Division. It was answered by Major Holroyd, Colonel Bodkin’s second-in-command, with whom I had been working. As he spoke, I heard his voice alter from its habitually irritable, rather de haut en bas tone to one of almost obsequious respect.

‘Yes, sir . . . No, sir . . . Certainly, sir,’ he said. Then, as he put down the receiver, he turned to me with an air of awe-stricken bewilderment, and said:

‘The O.C. wants to see you in his office immediately.’

So it had come at last, I thought: the piled-up guilt, the sense of perpetual strain and apprehension had culminated in the expected nightmare-climax. I thought of the lost case-card, the barrack-room inspection—but one wasn’t sent before the O.C. of the hospital for such trivial matters as these. Even my broadcast, I thought, though possibly a graver offence, would surely have been dealt with, in the first instance, by the Company Officer. No, I decided, it must be something worse—far worse: some crime of unimaginable gravity, at whose nature I couldn’t even begin to guess.

‘Any idea what he wants you for?’ asked Major Holroyd, with a perceptible note of sympathy—almost of condolence—in his voice.

‘None at all, sir,’ I replied.

I made my way across the square to the O.C.’s office. The situation, I thought, was unprecedented: it was unheard of for an Other Rank thus to be summoned directly before the Colonel, without previously interviewing the Company Officer; I could hardly have felt more astonished if I had suddenly been summoned by the King himself to Buckingham Palace, without the customary mediation of the Lord Chamberlain. My mind boggled: I could imagine the coming interview—‘Are you prepared to accept my punishment, Corporal, or do you wish to apply for a court-martial?’

I reached the Colonel’s office. Outside it stood the R.S.M.: for some reason or other he was grinning all over his face—doubtless, I thought, he was exulting over my downfall. He knocked at the door, opened it, and marched me into the room in proper regimental style. Opposite the Colonel’s desk I came smartly to attention and saluted. The Colonel glared at me with a vaguely minatory air: he could scarcely have recognized me, for I had never as yet crossed his path, save for the weekly ‘bullshit’ parades at which, no doubt, my brasses and webbing equipment—rather than my face—would have claimed his attention.

‘Corporal Brooke?’ he barked.

‘Yessir.’

He glanced sideways at the R.S.M.

‘All right—carry on, Sergeant-major.’

Then he turned back to me, and his face broke suddenly into a beaming smile.

‘Well, Corporal, allow me to congratulate you upon your delightful talk on the Third Programme last night.’

I think I nearly fainted: my head buzzed, I felt myself turning scarlet. I emitted, at length, a feeble and slightly hysterical giggle. Perhaps noticing my state of défaillance, the Colonel asked me to sit down; I did so, convinced that I was involved in some extraordinary Freudian dream, with the Colonel in the rôle of the father-imago.

‘Well, well,’ the Colonel was saying, ‘I’d no idea, no idea at all, that we had anybody like you on the company—most surprising, most gratifying. A charming little—er—disquisition, perfectly charming: my wife and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Now tell me, Corporal . . .’

The Colonel began to question me—why had I come back to the Army, what was my civilian trade, etc., etc. His face expressed a mild incredulity, a puzzled bewilderment which reminded me of a more benign and more courteous Pte Hoskins. A cosy little chat ensued; presently, with the air of one coming at last to the point, the Colonel leaned across his desk and began to fumble with some papers.

‘Well, now, Corporal: the fact is, I’ve just been going through the nominal roll of the Company with a view to—er—possible promotions. As you know, we’re extremely short of—er—responsible N.C.Os.—not enough regulars, that’s the trouble: no good making up these National Service types, no good at all—no sense of responsibility, you see. Now my idea is, Corporal, to give you a third stripe and put you in charge of unit education—the A.E.C.’s all very well, of course’ (here the Colonel gave a meaning though non-committal cough) ‘but what we really need is one or two regular soldiers on the strength of the Company—educated chaps like yourself. Corporal’ (once again I was reminded of Pte Hoskins), ‘who’ll be able to take their share of regimental duties as well as running the—er—purely educational side.’

The Colonel proceeded to enlarge a little further upon the ambitious career which he had mapped out for me. Still more than half-convinced that I was dreaming, I let him talk . . . At last, after a final exchange of pleasantries, I was dismissed; I clicked my heels and saluted smartly, trying my best to look like a keen regular soldier who was, at the same time, an ‘educated chap’. The Colonel beamed at me benignantly as he returned my salute; and I found myself, at last, tottering across the square, trembling all over and giggling to myself like a half-wit.

Such, I reflected—when the faculty of coherent thought was at last restored to me—such was the power of the B.B.C. Yet it wouldn’t do, I decided—it definitely wouldn’t do. Being a sergeant was all very well—at least I should be spared the recurrent nightmares of Night Orderly-sergeant and Fire-picquet—but being a schoolmaster was another matter. The A.E.C. sergeant, I thought, must have kept tactfully silent about that little matter of the arithmetic paper . . . But in any case—and maths, quite apart—the prospect of instructing a bunch of illiterate conscripts in the elements of polite learning was sufficiently intimidating. Yet would I have the courage to refuse that third tape? The process set in motion by Colonel Bodkin a few months ago had begun to operate with a new and startling rapidity. Could it, at this stage, be suddenly reversed? I doubted it; moreover, I had lost my opportunity—I ought to have refused the Colonel’s offer point-blank; instead, I had sat weakly in his office, drinking in his flattery and agreeing with every word he said.

Yet even if I did refuse further promotion, what was the alternative? An eternity of Fire-picquet, Night Orderly-sergeant and the tantrums of Colonel Bodkin . . . I decided, at last, that—in for a penny, in for a pound—I should have to accept my third tape; and, as the days passed, I even—in a snobbish and self-satisfied way—began to look forward to it. A week, two weeks passed, and still I heard nothing; I concluded—quite correctly, as it happened—that the sergeants on the company were at present up to strength, and that no more could be made up until one or another of the current contingent happened to be promoted or posted away from the unit.

Meanwhile, my sense of perpetual strain and frustration persisted; Colonel Bodkin continued to labour with undiminished industry at his monumental report which, though he himself seemed to find it no less fascinating than the famous thesis, seemed to me lacking in the literary qualities of its predecessor. Passing the Sergeants’ Mess, I would peer hopefully in at the windows, trying to imagine myself a member of that august assembly. A month had now passed since my interview with the O.C.; my tour of duty as Night Orderly-sergeant seemed to recur with ever-increasing frequency; and I began to wonder whether the dazzling prospects held out to me by the Colonel had been, after all, merely a part of the dismal and interminable nightmare which my life had become.

Pte Hoskins, despite his terror of Colonel Bodkin and an innate tendency to ‘flap’ in moments of crisis, was a reliable and efficient orderly, and I was not much surprised when he was given a Lance-corporal’s stripe.

At first he pretended to be very off-hand and jemenfichiste about the whole affair.

‘ “You can keep yer bleedin’ tapes”, I said to the Staff. “I knows when I’m well off, and I’d rather be a private than a buckshee f——g Lance-jack”—’

‘I bet you didn’t say anything of the sort,’ I interjected.

L/Cpl Hoskins glared at me defiantly.

‘I did, then—I told ’im straight, I did: “You can stuff it right up”, I says . . . Cor, you should’ve seen ’is face——’ Hoskins gave a reminiscent grin. ‘But it weren’t no good,’ he continued. ‘I ’ad to take it—practically forced it on me, ’e did.’ Hoskins clicked his tongue resignedly. ‘Oh, well,’ he added, ‘roll on my demob., that’s what I say—only another seventy-eight days to go.’

In less than a week, however, L/Cpl Hoskins appeared to have adapted himself with a remarkable facility to the unwelcome privileges which had been thrust upon him. In fact, as I had known all along, he was as proud of his stripe as a dog with two tails; I would catch him, now and again, glancing down furtively at his sleeve and quite obviously gloating over it. One day I noticed, with secret amusement, that his stripes had been carefully blancoed—a practice which was not compulsory, and which Hoskins himself, a few weeks ago, would have jeered at as the most supererogatory form of ‘bullshit’. I said nothing, but I saw him glancing at me, self-consciously, whenever we met; plainly he remembered, only too clearly, his disobliging remarks on the occasion of my own promotion.

Lately he had formed the habit of dropping into the theatre when I was working there and chatting to me amicably about nothing in particular. On these occasions he would adopt an embarrassingly classconscious attitude towards myself (‘we-N.C.Os.-you-know’), which was intended, quite obviously, to impress the trainees, whom Hoskins now treated in a manner sadly at variance with his former democratic principles.

‘Cor, they’re a proper shower,’ he would remark, observing with a weary and supercilious air the efforts of some neophyte to take a specimen of blood from a patient’s arm. I was tempted, at such moments, to suggest that ‘we N.C.Os.’ might—since I was busy myself—demean ourselves sufficiently to lend a hand; but I said nothing—for, despite all his faults, I couldn’t help rather liking L/Cpl Hoskins.

One day the new Lance-corporal—who was now working in the Gonorrhoea Treatment Room, and seemed to have plenty of time on his hands—sidled up to me in the theatre with a curiously secretive, almost a furtive air.

‘I say, Corp—you heard about that A.C.I. 768?’

‘I shouldn’t think so—what’s it about?’ I asked, without much interest. Hoskins was a great barrack-room lawyer, and was for ever quoting King’s Regulations or the latest Army Council Instruction.

‘Discharge by Purchase, that’s what it’s about, Corp,’ he muttered, in the same conspiratorial tone, and clicking his tongue significantly.

I stared at him, scarcely taking in the meaning of his words.

‘Discharge by Purchase?’ I queried, rather stupidly.

‘That’s right, Corp—my mate in the Company Office just give me the griff. It was washed out in the war, but they’ve just brought it in again, see? Only for regulars, of course—ain’t no bleedin’ good to the likes o’ me.’

‘Then that means——’ I stammered, still only half comprehending, ‘that means——’

‘It means you can buy yer self out, Corp,’ Hoskins hissed melodramatically.

‘But does it really?’ I said incredulously, still convinced that I must have misunderstood, or that, Hoskins was pulling my leg. ‘Are you sure?’

‘A.C.I. 768 of 1948’—Hoskins rattled out the formula in a sing-song, ‘official’ tone—‘That’s the one, mate. I’d take a walk down to the Company Office right away and have a look at it, if I was you.’

‘But—but I’ve not the least intention of buying myself out,’ I exclaimed. The words had sprung to my lips spontaneously, without an instant’s pause for reflection. I must have spoken rather irritably, for I saw Hoskins’ face go suddenly blank.

‘Oh, all right, Corp—but i just thought you might be interested.’

He turned away, looking faintly disgruntled but with an air of sly self-satisfaction, and went back to his department.

The late Franz Kafka was never, if his biographers are to be trusted, employed at the Royal Crimean Hospital—a fact which the many admirers of his work cannot but deplore, since the experience would doubtless have supplied him with unique and valuable material for the exercise of his talent.

My attempts to obtain access to A.C.I. No. 768 of 1948 were a case in point. After a time, I became all but convinced either that the A.C.I. just didn’t exist or that I was destined, by some malign fate, never to attain my object. The latter seemed, on the whole, the more probable contingency; though I began to suspect, after several days of unavailing effort, that the hostile forces arrayed against me were by no means so impersonal or so motiveless as I had at first supposed.

‘A.C.I. 768? Now which one would that be?’ asked the Sergeant-clerk, scratching his head and looking at me with a quite uncharacteristic naïveté.

‘It’s the one about Discharge by Purchase,’ I replied, as casually as I could.

‘Ain’t no such thing,’ the Sergeant retorted, firmly. ‘At least, if there is, I ain’t ’ad it through my ’ands.’

‘I’m pretty sure there is one, all the same,’ I insisted; feeling an inward conviction that the Sergeant was quite right, and that Hoskins’ mate had been mistaken.

‘What number did you say—758?’ the Sergeant grumbled.

‘Seven-six-eight,’ I corrected.

‘That’s right, Sarge,’ one of the company clerks piped up suddenly. ‘A.C.I. 768 of 1948—come in the other day. Discharge by Purchase—blimey, I wish I was a regular, you wouldn’t see me for dust.’

‘That’s enough from you, Private Benlow,’ the Sergeant snapped, looking daggers at him. ‘All right, Corp,’ he said. ‘I’ll get ’em to look it out for you. Ain’t in no ’urry, are you? All right, then—come in tomorrow. I’m up to my neck just now, with these bastard returns.’

Next day I returned to the attack, only to find that the Sergeant had a day off. The clerk on duty—not Pte Benlow—looked at me owlishly: it was obvious that he scarcely knew an A.C.I. from a 252.

‘Better come back tomorrow, Corp,’ he suggested, hopelessly.

On the following morning I learnt that the Sergeant had gone sick; Pte Benlow, however, was on duty, and disposed—though in a rather condescending way—to be helpful. After rummaging about for a few minutes he announced apologetically that the file was in the Company Officer’s room, and that I’d have to wait till the Old Man went for his lunch.

‘I’ll nip in and get it for you, soon as he’s gone,’ said Pte Benlow obligingly. ‘Come back after dinner.’

So I went back after dinner: only to find that Pte Benlow had been sent up to Millbank on an escort-duty. The Sergeant was still sick, and the owlish clerk disclaimed all knowledge of A.C.Is. in general and of No. 768 in particular.

Next day the file of A.C.Is. had migrated, mysteriously, to the office of the O.C. himself.

‘ ’E’s checkin’ up on ’em,’ said the Sergeant, who was back in the office again. ‘Might be there a week, I shouldn’t wonder . . . What’s up, anyway,’ he added, with an ingenuous air which didn’t deceive me for a moment, ‘thinkin’ of buyin’ your ticket, or something?’

‘I just want to see that A.C.I.’ I replied stolidly.

It was fairly evident, by now, that a conspiracy was afoot to prevent me from doing any such thing; probably, I thought, the Company Officer was at the bottom of it—or even the O.C. himself. Regular N.C.Os. were rare birds nowadays; the O.C. had his eye on me (I cursed the Third Programme and all its works), and no doubt he had communicated his intentions to the Company Officer, and through him to the Orderly-room staff.

It was Pte Benlow who, after another week of fruitless badgering, finally produced the A.C.I.

There it was at last, in cold print: the system of discharge by purchase had been reintroduced for regular soldiers, including those serving on short-term engagements, w.e.f. such-and-such a date. Hoskins’ mate had not been mistaken after all; I was at liberty, if I so wished, to buy myself out of the Army.

Once assured of the fact, I found it of singularly little interest. My quest for the elusive A.C.I. had become, as it were, an end in itself; now that I had achieved my object, I banished the whole subject from my mind; and might, indeed, never have given it another thought, if it had not been for L/Cpl Hoskins.

‘Did you take a look at that A.C.I., Corp?’ he asked me one morning.

I admitted, rather off-handedly, that I had.

‘Well, I suppose we’ll soon be saying bye-bye to you, eh?’ he queried, with a sly, sidelong glance.

‘What makes you think that?’ I asked.

‘Cor blimey. D’you mean to say you’ll stay in?’ he exclaimed, incredulously.

‘I don’t see why not.’

‘Jesus, you must be crazier than I thought you was, that’s all . . . Cor, if I was a regular. I’d ’ave been back in Civvy Street by now.’

‘You seem to forget it costs money,’ I said, seizing upon the point which seemed most likely to impress him.

‘If it was me. I’d soon lay me ’ands on the lolly, you can bet your life,’ he retorted.

L/cpl Hoskins’ remarks had, as a matter of fact, touched me more nearly than I had cared to admit at the time; I had been Night Orderly-sergeant twice in a week. Colonel Bodkin had been more exasperating than usual, and I would, at the present moment, have given ten years of my life to be out of the Army. At the moment, yes: but how should I feel about it in two—in five years’ time? Prudently I deferred my decision; and the longer I deferred it, the more impossible it became to face the issues squarely. I felt committed to the Army—not only by my voluntary engagement but by my position as a war-substantive N.C.O., and (still more) by my tacit acceptance of that third stripe promised by the O.C. Yet I realized, obscurely, that my sense of obligation was largely bogus: what I really dreaded was the intricate process of obtaining my discharge—the letter of application, the filling-up of forms, the interviews with the R.S.M., the Company Officer, the O.C. himself. The cumulative fatigue of the last months had left me flaccid and drained of all vitality, a too-easy prey to my native indecision. My chosen mistress, I considered, had treated me harshly; I was, at least temporarily, ‘out of love’; yet I suspected—and indeed more than suspected—that the breach was not permanent, that I was undergoing, merely, one of those intermissions du cœur by which, in the past, I had been too easily deluded.

Meanwhile, the bitch-goddess—that shameless hussy—beckoned with an increasing urgency, intent upon seducing me, at last, from my conjugal vows. My ‘success’, as it happened, had ceased by now to give me anything but a negative pleasure; like any other habit-forming drug, it had induced a craving which could be assuaged (though never satisfied) only by the ‘exhibition’—as Colonel Bodkin might have expressed it—of larger and more frequent doses, each of which might be expected, subject to the law of diminishing returns, to produce in the addict a progressive diminution of the initial euphoria; nor was I sufficiently an optimist to suppose that these larger doses were particularly easy to obtain.

The truth was, I thought, that my ‘success’—if one could apply the term to such a transient whiff of celebrity—had come too late; if it had occurred, say, when I was twenty-five, I might no doubt have benefited from it. As things were, I was nearly forty, and the disease of failure had become too deep-rooted to be eradicable by any such superficial, short-term modes of therapy. My condition, in fact, rather resembled those cases of late syphilis (described with so much gusto and in such vivid detail by Colonel Bodkin in his thesis) which refuse so obstinately to react to the routine treatment prescribed in the earlier stages of the disease.

I continued to dither, inconclusively, for the next two or three weeks, wishing desperately that some external event would supervene to bounce me into a decision, and inclined now to deplore that ‘systolic murmur’ which (so conveniently, as it seemed at the time) had excluded me from the draft for British Honduras.

One evening I was rung up again by my nice talks-producer; we had become friendly, and the telephone-call was ostensibly a purely social one—a matter of arranging a date for lunch or dinner. Before he rang off, however, Robert surprised me by asking, casually enough and with apparent inconsequence, a leading question.

‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘how long you thought of stopping in the Army. Are you permanently tied to it?’

I replied, from sheer force of habit, that I had another two years to serve; even as I spoke, I remembered the A.C.I. and realized—as if for the first time—that I was free (assuming that I could raise the money) to leave the Army immediately.

‘It just occurred to me,’ Robert was saying, ‘that if you did think of coming out, you might like to put in for a job as a talks-producer. They’re advertising for them, at the moment—you can see the details in The Times or the Statesman. But of course, if you’re permanently tied-up, there’s nothing to be done.’

‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, cautiously, and with a lingering suspicion that the A.C.I. might, even now, prove to be a figment either of my own or of L/Cpl Hoskins’ imagination, ‘as a matter of fact, I believe I could buy myself out—there’s an A.C.I. about it.’

‘Yes, I seem to have gathered something of the kind,’ said Robert. ‘A chap I used to know in the Gunners was talking about it. Well, if you do decide to come out, and you’re in need of a job . . .’

It was, I suppose, my conversation with Robert which finally tipped the balance. I vacillated for a further day or two, studying the advertisement for talks-producers in the New Statesmans the B.B.C. was the very last job I had ever envisaged for myself; yet my life, during these last few months, had become—so it seemed to me—an affair of pure phantasy, the ‘real’ world had been replaced by a delusive, paranoid universe in which no contingency, however inherently improbable, could cause me the least surprise.

A few days after my telephone conversation I sat down firmly in the Divisional Office and typed out two letters: one to the B.B.C., the other to the O.C., Royal Crimean Hospital. Of the two, the latter was by far the more difficult to compose, for I had acquired (partly, no doubt, as a result of my association with Colonel Bodkin) a niggling pedantry in the matter of official Army phraseology, and I was determined that my letter should be a perfect specimen of its kind. I slaved over that letter with the dogged perseverance of a Flaubert; by comparison, my previous literary efforts had been the merest child’s play. Like the Colonel, too, I had developed a morbid sensitivity to typing errors, and I must have typed out my letter at least a dozen times before I was finally satisfied with it.

At last, with infinite reluctance, I folded the precious sheet, popped it into an envelope and carried it across to the Company Office.

The deed was done: I had applied for my Bill of Divorcement, knowing, in my heart, that it was an act of self-betrayal which, in the future, I should bitterly regret. I looked at the grim barrack buildings, squalid and menacing beneath a dank autumnal drizzle; and knew that the Army, after all, was my Cynara, to whom, despite all my infidelities, I should remain faithful in my fashion.

That night, in the authentic Dowson tradition, I did my best to put her ‘pale lost lilies out of mind’: in other words, I went to a literary party in London, at which, flinging my roses as riotously as the rather dismal throng permitted, I contrived fairly successfully to forget that I was still a war-substantive corporal, R.A.M.C., Special Treatment Orderly Class I, in His Majesty’s Army.

Divorces are seldom accomplished without a hitch, and mine was no exception to the rule.

‘Ho, so you’re thinking of buying your ticket, are you?’ said the Company Officer, when I was marched in for the necessary interview. ‘Well, let me tell you, Corporal, that you can’t do it.’

He paused, with considerable dramatic effect, and I felt my heart sink into my boots. Suddenly he gave a brief, malicious chuckle:

‘No, I’m sorry, Corporal, but it just can’t be done.’ He paused again, then, looking up at me with a broad grin, he added, ‘Not till the week after next, anyway.’

‘Why’s that, sir?’ I asked, as politely as I could. The joke, whatever it was, didn’t seem to me particularly funny.

‘Don’t you read Orders, Corporal? If you did, you’d know you were N.C.O. i/c Fire-picquet w.e.f. Monday next the 27th.’

The Company Officer glared at me with an assumed wrathfulness which—since his expression was habitually choleric—could not easily be distinguished from the real thing.

‘Can’t make up N.C.Os. overnight, you know,’ he grumbled. ‘Who d’you think’s going to do your turn of Night Orderly-sergeant, eh? This company’s a proper shambles already, without half the corporals walking out on us. S’pose the whole blooming lot of us bought our tickets, what d’you think’d happen to the British Army, eh? It’s lucky’ (here his voice took on a tone of withering contempt) ‘it’s lucky we can’t all get jobs on the Third Programme . . . All right, Corporal: you’ll have to do your Fire-picquet, I’m afraid; after that, you can do what you bloody well like.’ He looked up at me with a sudden gleam of curiosity. ‘What are you going to do, anyway—go hunting orchids in Portland Place?’

Outside the office I looked at the Order-board. The detail for next week’s Fire-picquet was already, as the Company Officer had said, ‘on orders’, with my name, misspelt as usual, at the head of it—N.C.O. i/c: Cpl. Brooks. My eyes ran dazedly over the familiar instructions: ‘. . . confined to barracks . . . will NOT be allowed out on pass . . . The Fire-picquet will sleep in the P.A.D. Centre . . . adequate precautions to ensure the safety of their kit . . . Personnel are reminded . . .’ etc., etc. The neatly-typed notice had a curious air of permanence and actuality—a vestigial fragment of the real world surviving among the shadowy delusions of nightmare. Looking at it, I was convinced that the events of the last weeks had indeed been a dream, from which I was slowly beginning to awake.

On the Monday morning I duly paraded the Fire-picquet outside the Company Office, according to standing orders. There seemed no particular reason to believe that I shouldn’t be doing exactly the same thing in a month’s time, in two months’ time. Later in the morning, however, I was summoned to the Company Office to hand in my pay-book and my attestation papers: my divorce was proceeding according to the routine laid down in King’s Regulations and A.C.I. No. 768 of 1948.

The week passed with a nightmare slowness: by the end of it I had completed my negotiations with the Company Office, and my marriage was now officially annulled—at the cost of exactly one hundred pounds.

The Last Day came at last: I was oddly reminded of leaving school—one expected, almost, to see one’s trunk and playbox being carried downstairs by the porter. But on this occasion one was leaving, so to speak, at half-term, with none of the shared excitement of ‘breaking-up’; I was haunted, indeed, by a curious feeling that I was leaving ‘under a cloud’. My surroundings had acquired a peculiar quality of flatness: it was as though one were looking at a series of pictures—photographs, as it might be, of ‘Army Life’ in one of the popular illustrated weeklies. Even my former friends and colleagues—the Staff-sergeant, L/Cpl Hoskins, Colonel Bodkin himself—seemed reduced to flat two-dimensional images of them-selves: figures in a school group, grinning into vacancy; fixed for a moment in time, already half forgotten.

There remained the final interview with the Headmaster—a prospect to which, in the circumstances, I looked forward with a certain embarrassment. The O.C., however, couldn’t have been nicer.

‘Well, Corporal—I presume that our conversation of a few weeks ago must be disregarded, eh? We’re sorry to lose you, of course—but I quite understand your—er—point of view . . . H’m, yes . . .’ The Colonel glanced up at me with a mildly embarrassed air: was he, I wondered, going to give me a little talk about the Facts of Life? . . . ‘All right, then. Corporal,’ he said at last, ‘Goodbye, and the very best of luck to you.’

I saluted smartly and was marched out by the Sergeant-major. Once outside the office the R.S.M. grinned at me broadly.

‘Dunno what Colonel Bodkin’s going to do without you, I’m sure,’ he remarked. ‘I s’pose he’ll be on at me now to do his clerking for him. Well, cheerio, Corporal—be hearing you on the wireless sometime, I daresay.’

Colonel Bodkin, as it happened, had taken an extremely poor view of my impending departure. The report on current methods of treatment had reached a critical stage, and there was nobody in the Division, is seemed, whom he could trust with the work. If it had lain in his power, he would, I felt sure, have cancelled my discharge; since this was impossible, he decided to get as much work out of me as he could in the time that remained. My last few days were spent in a final, feverish campaign of sorting documents, typing out hospital reports, rearranging and collating manuscripts and so on; by the last day the report was well on the way to being completed.

In the evening I went to say goodbye to him.

‘Well, Corporal—so you’re off at last, are you?’ His eyes glinted at me with the’old equivocal twinkle. ‘There’s just one thing, now, before you go——’ he paused, looking down at his desk: no doubt, I thought, he wanted me to type out just one more case-history before I left; probably I should be kept at work till midnight——‘just one thing,’ he repeated. ‘I was wondering if—that’s to say, my wife and I would be delighted if you’d come and have a glass of sherry with us tomorrow evening. Will you do that, Corporal?’

I met his twinkling eyes unsmilingly.

‘Is that an order, sir?’ I said.

It was fortunate that work was over for the day, for the Colonel’s subsequent orgy of laughter so far exceeded, in violence and intensity, any of his previous outbursts that any patients under treatment in the theatre might well have supposed that they had strayed into the psychiatric clinic by mistake. Soon I began, myself, to giggle; and before long I was laughing with hardly less restraint than the Colonel himself. The pent hysteria of the last few weeks had found a sudden outlet: I laughed and I laughed; after all, I had bought my ticket—I was a soldier no longer.

The Staff-sergeant, coming in a few minutes later to report off duty for the day, found us still giggling and hooting at each other like a couple of maniacs. He behaved with admirable tact: only by the faintest of smiles did he indicate that the situation was, after all, a trifle unusual. Yet he must, I thought, have considered my behaviour (not to mention that of the Colonel) highly prejudicial to good order and military discipline.

I escaped at last, having arranged—between hysterical giggles—to drink sherry with the Colonel and his wife on the following evening. I said good-bye to the Staff-sergeant, L/Cpl Hoskins and the rest: aware, despite their friendliness, of a curious remoteness, a sense that I was surveying the whole scene from a great height; there was a feeling in the air—to borrow E. M. Forster’s phrase—of ‘dwarfs shaking hands’.

The dwarfs’ hands were duly shaken: ‘Cheerio, Corp, good luck.’ . . . ‘Come up and see us sometime.’ . . . I walked across the barrack-square, past the guard-room and out into the drizzling autumnal evening: my vows finally annulled, a single man again; yet with a bitterness, a sense of irreparable loss, gathering about my heart.

I returned, two days later, to the country—to that cottage in the Elham Valley where, since the war, I had lived with Ninnie and my mother. Driving out from Canterbury, it seemed to me that the wheel had come full-circle: my life during the past year had been, as it were, yet another ‘north-west passage’, leading me back circuitously—like that half-remembered journey to the Clambercrown a quarter of a century ago—yet with a predestined certainty to the place where, perhaps, my roots went deepest. From the hill above Bridge I looked down across the park to Bourne: the long pink façade, so elegant and so self-assured, was itself unchanged; only the broad avenue of elms behind the house had gone, revealing a prospect of fields sweeping upward, naked and treeless now, towards the fringes of Gorsley and the haunted thickets of California. In the autumn twilight the belt of woodland showed densely black against a clear, greenish sky, in which a single star hung, like a beckoning signal, over the darkling lands beyond. As the taxi turned down the lane to the village, the last fires of the sunset blazed through the bronze canopy of the beeches; in the windless air, the smoke rose vertically, in thin blue columns, from the cottage chimneys. Turning the corner into the village street, I saw the lights of our own cottage shining forth warmly in the thickening twilight; and I knew that the long, uneasy quest was once more at an end, and that I had come home again.

Later, that evening I walked along to the village pub for a drink: that same public-house which, in my childhood, had seemed so excitingly licentious, and through whose open doors, on summer evenings, I would catch an occasional glimpse of Jim the Gardener and his cronies, lounging at ease in the soft glow of the oil-lamps. Today, alas, the lamplight was replaced by the urban brilliance of neon tubes; the heroes had departed; yet the bright-lit room, with its rough benches and wooden tables, seemed haunted, as ever, by the ghosts of those romantic and disreputable figures whom, in those far-off days, I had so secretly yet so incontinently worshipped.

I greeted old friends, exchanged drinks, listening to the slow Kentish voices drawling out the local gossip. The heroes had departed; yet their descendants perhaps lingered on, the mortal progeny of demi-gods: guffawing at the same old jokes, and drinking their waterish ale beneath the livid, fluorescent glare.

At closing time I went home to bed; a sudden wind had sprung up, roaring through the tall elms above the village and rattling the cottage windows. I felt restless and ill-at-ease, unable fully to realize, perhaps, that I was no longer in the Army: that I was free to come and go as I pleased, to lie in bed till midday . . . The familiar room, with its random collection of books and pictures, gave a disquieting impression of unreality, as though it were an elaborate and painstaking ‘reconstruction’ of a room belonging to some character in fiction or to some historical personage long since dead. My eyes fell on the drawing of an orchid done by Gavin Bone at Bedales, in 1924; on the piece of flint, curiously sculptural in quality, and suggesting a ‘Reclining Nude’ by Henry Moore, which I had picked up some years ago in a neighbouring field. Ranged untidily on their shelves, dusty with neglect, the books stared down ironically, like old friends whom one has dropped: resentful of the affront, yet too well-bred to make any but a silent, non-committal protest.

The wind shook the windows, and a sudden gust of rain rattled against the leaded panes; my wandering gaze came to rest at last upon a reproduction of a picture by Picasso—two acrobats, an enormous, muscular man and a young girl, posed against a barren and empty landscape. Once I had been fond of the picture; yet now it seemed to me a mere arbitrary arrangement of forms, evoking no response in my sluggish and unreceptive mind.

I undressed at last and went to bed; as I switched on the bedside lamp, another picture sprang into sudden life upon the wall above the wash-stand; and I found myself gazing, with a peculiar shock of recognition, at the portrait of Aunt Cock. Not since my childhood, I suppose, had I bestowed upon it more than a passing glance; in the years before the war it had hung, unregarded, in my brother’s flat at Folkestone, and since those days I had all but forgotten its existence. Now, thus abruptly revealed by the lamplight, the canvas shone forth with an apocalyptic vividness; and it seemed to me that I was seeing it once again, in this visionary moment, through the naive, uncritical eyes of a child.

In the calm sunset light, Aunt Cock sauntered as ever, with Bijou and Prince at her heels, through the formal, municipal landscape of the Little Paths: an austere and indomitable figure, the archetype of all aunts, eternally opposed to the forces of destruction. At her feet sprang those improbable cinerarias, planted out by the mayor and corporation in honour of her visit; behind her towered the ‘hollyhocks’ which perhaps (allowing for the painter’s ignorance of botany) were really meant to be the wild tree-mallow; and beyond, in the golden haze of the sunset, loomed The Hills—that impenetrable frontier beyond which lay the lawless territories of the Forbidden Kingdom: familiar now, a trading-ground for the explorer with his beads and gin, yet retaining its essential mystery; a country of the mind, remote and seldom visited, haunted by the rumour of thunder and the crying of distant horns.

THE END

1 An imaginary name, invented purely for the sake of euphony.

About Bello

Bello
hidden talent rediscovered

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About the Author

Jocelyn Brooke

Jocelyn Brooke was born in 1908 on the south coast, and took to the educational process with reluctance. He contrived to run away from public school twice within a fortnight, but then settled, to his own mild surprise, at Bedales before going to Worcester College, Oxford, where his career as an undergraduate was unspectacular. He worked in London for a while, then in the family wine-merchants in Folkestone, but this and other ventures proved variously unsatisfactory.

In 1939, Brooke enlisted in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and reenlisted after the war as a Regular: ‘Soldiering,’ he wrote, ‘had become a habit.’ The critical success of The Military Orchid (1948), the first volume of his Orchid trilogy, provided the opportunity to buy himself out, and he immediately settled down to write, publishing some fifteen titles between 1948 and 1955, including the successive volumes of the trilogy, A Mine of Serpents (1949) and The Goose Cathedral (1950). His other published work includes two volumes of poetry, December Spring (1946) and The Elements of Death (1952), the novels The Image of a Drawn Sword (1950) and The Dog at Clambercrown (1955), as well as some technical works on botany.

Jocelyn Brooke died in 1966.

Copyright

First published in 1955 by The Bodley Head

This edition published 2017 by Bello
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ISBN 978-1-5098-5582-7 EPUB

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Copyright © Jocelyn Brooke, 1955

The right of Jocelyn Brooke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)without the prior written permission of the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations or persons,living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

This book remains true to the original in every way. Some aspects may appear out-of-date to modern-day readers. Bello makes no apology for this, as to retrospectively change any content would be anachronistic and undermine the authenticity of the original.

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Table of Contents

- Title

- Contents

- Dedication

- Author’s Note

- Author’s Note
- Epigraph
- PART I
- Chapter opening
- PART II
- Chapter opening
- PART III
- Chapter opening
- PART IV
- Chapter opening
- PART V
- Chapter opening
- PART VI
- Chapter opening
- PART VII
- Chapter opening
- PART VIII
- Chapter opening
- About Bello
- About the Author
- Copyright