Lions and Shadows, Page 2

  Such was Mr Holmes’ audience when he entered the Sixth Form room to deliver his first history lecture—faintly patronizing, not unfriendly, prepared to be comfortably amused. Mr Holmes had not, however, come to amuse his hearers; and he seems to have made this plain, mildly but firmly, from the very beginning. He expected them to attend to what he was saying—worse still, to remember it. Breaking an unwritten law, he asked them direct questions in turn, saying: ‘Next … Next … Next …’ as though he were taking a class in the Lower School. The Sixth was first dazed, then resentful. Its self-conceit had been wounded and its lack of knowledge brutally exposed. Nor was this all. It was said that Mr Holmes, in the Masters’ Common Room, had actually referred to his pupils as ‘idle and ignorant.’ Indignation against him reached boiling-point and I seem to remember that there was even some sort of overt demonstration. If so, Mr Holmes crushed it, no doubt, efficiently enough. Later, several members of that Sixth became his personal friends. But all this was before my time.

  As for myself, I accepted Mr Holmes’ influence all the more readily because, during the first four or five terms of my school life, I had scarcely any personal contacts with the staff at all. I had arrived at my public school thoroughly sick of masters and mistresses, having been emotionally messed about by them at my preparatory school, where the war years had given full licence to every sort of dishonest cant about loyalty, selfishness, patriotism, playing the game and dishonouring the dead. Now I wanted to be left alone. The boys I could deal with, more or less, as long as I kept my wits about me. The masters I deeply distrusted: remembering those ‘fatherly’ pi-jaws and the resultant floods of masochistic tears. So I made friends with a very tough character named Dock—a black-haired Liverpool boy with a pale goatish face, older than myself, who wore thick pebble glasses on gold wires. Dock did me a great deal of good. He restored my self-respect. Through knowing him, I ceased gradually to believe that I was—as my preparatory school headmaster had done his best to persuade me—greedier, lazier, more selfish, less considerate and in general more unpleasant than anybody else. I certainly wasn’t lazier than Dock, nor such a liar, nor half as greedy: yet he would have been the very last person to regard his own character with disgust or remorse. He was highly satisfied with himself.

  In the Officers’ Training Corps, Dock played an important if unobtrusive part: he was one of a group of saboteurs whose influence was out of all proportion to its numbers. Alone, he was capable of demoralizing an entire platoon. Because of Dock, I never disliked O.T.C. parades: as for field days, they were among the happiest of my school life. But it was during the period of the O.T.C. summer camp that Dock and his friends really came into their own. I can see them now—loosening the guy-ropes of the big canteen tent, scaring the horses of nervous masters unaccustomed to riding, creeping up behind a smartly turned-out sentry from another school and suddenly planting a large melon on the point of his bayonet. They were caught, of course, and reprimanded, but nothing more. The authorities were embarrassed: they didn’t want to spoil the jolly holiday atmosphere with punishments. The Guards officer who interviewed them, a very nice man, talked unhappily about the team spirit and looked far more distressed than his prisoners, whose faces were as expressionless as their ill-polished buttons. ‘Private Dock,’ ran the official report, ‘failed, for the third time, to obey orders.’ That was it—Dock just failed. There was nothing to be done with him and his kind—unless you were prepared to shoot them. The school contingent left camp with a bad name.

  During my third year, I became attached to the History Sixth. This was in 1921. From that time onwards, Mr Holmes was the director of my studies. Except for divinity and a little classics, I worked for him entirely. It had been decided that I should try for a history exhibition at Cambridge at the end of the autumn term.

  The History Sixth shared with the other branches of the Sixth Form the important privilege of doing its private work in the school library. Here we were supposed to read textbooks, write essays and copy out our notes. The library was a handsome room, thickly carpeted and furnished with most comfortable arm-chairs. In addition to the standard works of history, literature, biography and science, there was plenty of miscellaneous stuff to be dipped into, including five or six of those rare flowers of semi-pornography which always contrive to bloom (like the edelweiss, in some high inaccessible nook) amongst even the most carefully pruned collections. There was no actual supervision; though from time to time, one of the masters might enter, quietly and unexpectedly. However, a number of small bookcases standing about the room provided excellent cover, and it was nearly impossible, if you were awake at all, to be taken by surprise. Dozing in one of the arm-chairs, with Lord Acton’s lectures open and the right way up upon your lap, you might pass a very agreeable hour, and only once in a while a sudden well-placed kick, probably from the Headmaster, would remind you painfully that you were not already a grown-up member of a London club.

  The library privilege was abused in a number of ways. There were those, like Sargent, who simply ragged—launching gliders across the room, lobbing ink-bombs over the bookcases or trying to hurl each other from the tops of the ladders. We, the quiet ones, disapproved of these: they might easily have got us all turned out, to sit on a hard bench in a classroom, for good. Then there were the idlers who chatted, wrote letters and slept. And there were the studious few who were really busy—but for the wrong reasons. Chief among these was Linsley. He had long been engaged in writing a novel of public school life. The novel was no secret. Plump, smiling, always affable, never in the least upset by criticism however adverse, Linsley was at all times perfectly willing to answer any questions, show us the manuscript and outline the forthcoming phases of the plot. Donald Stanton soon became our common property: gleefully we searched its pages for spelling mistakes, double entendres and marvels of grammar. We were seldom disappointed. Mrs Stanton, who is packing, tells her son: ‘I’ve put you in four tins of fruit and two tins of sardines.’ A page or two later, she succeeds in getting ‘a wry smile’ into a suitcase already very full. ‘Mrs Stanton,’ ran a favourite passage, ‘knew the organist very well—though Donald did not know it, he was almost his son.’ Linsley had undoubtedly been influenced by David Blaize, his soliloquies were in Mr E. F. Benson’s most luscious manner and, lacking the polish of their original, considerably more embarrassing. I myself had revelled in David Blaize (though by this time, already, I would have died rather than admit it): my sarcasms at the expense of Donald Stanton were all the more bitter in consequence. I even covered the margins of the patient Linsley’s manuscript with didactic or would-be humorous notes: ‘… and so the matter dropped.’ (Where? Into the Thames?) We thought ourselves very clever, but not one of us could do what Linsley was doing: he provided the library with almost daily entertainment for two whole terms. Donald Stanton flourished, despite the brutality of its literary foster-parents; by the time its author left the school, it was 123 pages long.

  One day Linsley was caught at work upon his novel by Mr Paddington. We expected trouble, but Paddington merely asked: ‘Did you write all this yourself?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ said Linsley, much discomforted. ‘Indeed?’ said Paddington, without a trace of sarcasm, and obviously meaning to be kind: ‘very creditable indeed.’ And he walked away. Mr Paddington was the Maths master and Linsley was reading modern languages, so perhaps his lack of indignation may be explained.

  Another library author was Chalmers. But Chalmers wrote poetry and, unlike Linsley, didn’t show his work to the public; unless, as sometimes happened, it was published in the school magazine. He had recently won the school poetry prize on the set subject: ‘The Surrender of the German Fleet at Scapa Flow.’ Chalmers’ poem began: ‘The Prussian watched the sombre winter sea.’ This was its first and last reference, throughout, to anything German: as for the fleet itself, it was never mentioned at all. Chalmers filled the remainder of his six Spenserian stanzas with his favourite properties: wan blood-red mists, meaningless cri
es of invisible sea birds and the inaudible moanings of the drowned. But his entry was so unquestionably the best that it got the prize, nevertheless; despite the suspicion that it was merely one more expression of the author’s limitless quiet contempt for the authorities and all their works.

  Chalmers was a pale, small, silent boy, a year older than myself, strikingly handsome, with dark hair and dark blue eyes. On the rare occasions when he got excited and began to talk, his face became flushed; he spoke so quickly and indistinctly, with nervous fumblings of his fingers against his lips, that it was very difficult to understand what he was saying. His nervous energy made him extremely good at football; and, if he had taken more trouble, he might easily have got into the school eleven. People in his house liked him but didn’t altogether understand him. He was rather isolated there and had no intimate friends.

  No sooner had I come into contact with Chalmers than I determined to get to know him well. Never in my life have I been so strongly and immediately attracted to any personality, before or since. Everything about him appealed to me. He was a natural anarchist, a born romantic revolutionary; I was an upper-middle-class Puritan, cautious, a bit stingy, with a stake in the land. Chalmers had refused to be confirmed, explaining quite simply to his housemaster that be was an agnostic. I had been through the confirmation process a few months earlier, working up all the emotions prescribed in my little black leather ‘companion’ and delighting the master who prepared me by the complexity and ingenuity of my religious ‘difficulties.’ Now already I had to admit to myself that, as far as I was concerned, the entire ceremony had been altogether meaningless. If only I had been more honest with myself and avoided it, like Chalmers, from the very start!

  Above all things, Chalmers loathed the school to which he invariably referred as ‘Hell.’ His natural hatred of all established authority impressed me greatly and I felt that it was a weakness in myself not to share it; to be guilty, indeed, of having sometimes kissed the rod. It wasn’t as if I had been a success as a public schoolboy. I only fitted uneasily into the system. But I was adaptable; I could always find my feet. And, on the whole, I quite enjoyed my life in a community where cunning and diplomacy could always so easily defeat brute force.

  One of the most admirable things about Mr Holmes was his attitude towards Chalmers. Mr Holmes can only have viewed with impatience his pupil’s contempt for the public school system: he himself belonged to the system body and soul. He did not care much for poetry, and Chalmers’ Francis-Thompsonish verses must have struck him as painfully puerile. But he was a true connoisseur; he knew a good thing when he saw it. So he intrigued to secure Chalmers for the History Sixth and, having got him there, artfully curbed and spurred him on by turns, preaching now revolution, now moderation, and encouraging him to write anything and everything which came into his head. On the whole, the treatment was a great success. Chalmers soon ceased to be on the defensive; he even became cautiously friendly. Under Mr Holmes’ supervision, his school essays began more and more to resemble prose poems; they were filled with weird dream-like phrases such as ‘After 1848, Europe became a filmy hospital of dishonoured causes.’ Most schoolmasters would have waxed very caustic over the ‘filmy hospital’ and perhaps enquired whether the surgeons were opaque or transparent; but Mr Holmes merely smiled. He was perfectly satisfied. He was working along his own peculiar lines for a certain definite result. And nobody could better appreciate than he the market value of the Odd.

  Mr Holmes’ methods of teaching are, I am sure, much more generally employed today. To us, they appeared startlingly unconventional. Mr Holmes fairly staggered us by the impudence of his generalizations: ‘All revolutions occur when the worst period is over and things are improving … All revolutions are followed by a military dictatorship … All military dictatorships are followed by a restoration of constitutional monarchy … Every constitutional monarch …’ He would continue like this, absurdly, preposterously, until he had wrung a protest from one or other of us: ‘But, surely, sir, that isn’t always true?’ Then he would pounce upon the heckler at once, delighted: ‘Of c-course it isn’t. Tell me an exception.’ He liked us to have historical prejudices and loved to bait them: ‘This morning I propose to p-pronounce a eulogy of Oliver Cromwell—for the benefit of Carrick.’ Carrick was supposed to be an ardent Royalist. In the same way, with equal fervour, he would attack or defend Gladstone’s Irish policy, the character of Napoleon or the career of Frederick the Great. He was the first person to make clear to most of us the connection between history and geography: ‘Look at this chain of mountains, now look at this river-mouth. You see, of course, why the people on this side have always been Catholics. Well, I mean to say, simply inevitable—’

  We were now busily preparing for the Cambridge scholarship exams. Chalmers and myself were among the first batch of entrants sent up by our school to Cambridge since the War and there was a good deal of general interest in the possible results. Mr Holmes, himself a Cambridge man, was popularly supposed to have friends at court; certainly, his advice to us showed an almost uncanny knowledge of the examiners’ mentality. As usual, he played the frankly cynical charlatan. The Essay, we were told, was the most important paper of the lot. Historical knowledge was absolutely unnecessary: all you had to do was to sparkle and startle. In the Viva, you merely had to keep calm and be gentlemanly (dozens of brilliant scholars, said Mr Holmes, were rejected because of their provincial accents); and, above all, you must display curious and interesting literary tastes. As for the mere matter of book-learning, Mr Holmes had his shock tactics here, too. He advised us to memorize a few lines of Dante, preferably out of the Inferno, in the original Italian, and quote them casually somewhere in the middle of an answer. I learnt:

  e la lor cieca vita è tanto bassa,

  che invidiosi son d’ogni altra sorte

  —which fits in well almost anywhere, in a paper on the Middle Ages. Whatever you do, Mr Holmes added, never despair if you find you’ve forgotten something; never be at a loss. And he told the story of how, when he himself was taking the Tripos, he had set a question on the religious problems of Tudor England. The question was his question: he had all the facts ready and all the epigrams, he was prepared to be brilliant, he couldn’t, on any account, afford to pass it by. But suddenly, with horror, he realized that he couldn’t, for his life, remember whether Edward VI came before or after Mary! For a moment he lost his head entirely. He saw the whole examination, his whole future, slipping away from him. And then the simple solution presented itself. Throughout his answer he referred ambiguously to ‘the Monarch’!

  The day arrived. Chalmers and I had arranged to travel up to Cambridge by ourselves. We had got to stick together, we told each other. We were venturing, like spies, into an enemy stronghold. ‘They,’ our adversaries, would employ other tactics down there; they would be sly, polite, reassuring; they would invite us to tea. We should have to be on our guard. ‘They’ll do everything they can to separate us,’ I said darkly, for I had adopted Chalmers’ phraseology and ideas, lock, stock and barrel, and now talked exactly like him: ‘every possible bribe will be offered.’ The train clanked through the iron-coloured fen landscape, with its desolate pointing spires, infinitely mournful in the fading December afternoon. Chalmers said: ‘Arrival at the country of the dead.’

  Cambridge exceeded our most macabre expectations. It seemed a city of perpetual darkness, for we spent the few hours of winter daylight almost entirely in the examination hall. When we emerged, the shop lamps were already blurred in the icy fog which stole out of the marshes into the town, bicycles veered shrilly hither and thither in the gloom, and the outlines of college buildings, half seen, half suggested, were massive and shadowy as the architecture of the night itself. Within doors, all was luxury: the arm-chairs, the crumpets, the beautifully-bound eighteenth-century volumes, the fires roaring in stoked grates. Each of us had the loan of an absent undergraduate’s room—bedroom, sittingroom and pantry; all fitted up in a
style which, after the spartan simplicity of a public school study, seemed positively sinful. Each of us was called, every morning, by a college servant with a cup of tea. Both Chalmers and myself were overpowered, by the leisure, by the politeness, by the extravagance, by the abundance of alcohol and rich food. Nobody attempted to separate us, as I had predicted; but the whole establishment seemed to offer an enormous tacit bribe. We fortified ourselves against it as best we could, in the privacy of our rooms; swearing never to betray each other, never to forget the existence of ‘the two sides’ and their eternal, necessary state of war.

  Of the examination itself I remember very little; for me, it was the least important feature of that memorable expedition. But I can see clearly the faces of the other candidates—dazed, earnest, pushing, scared, shy, pimply, reckless. They seemed strangely isolated from us. We took a special interest in one boy, who looked intelligent and rather lost; we nicknamed him ‘the man with the soul.’ We spoke to nobody and discussed our examination papers very little. It seems to me that I knew we should succeed. This was Mr Holmes’ doing. By virtue of his extraordinary hypnotism he was with us, in spirit, throughout; guiding us over every obstacle, warning us of every pitfall. Subconsciously, we knew he couldn’t fail us. Our defeat would have been his own.