after a long pause.
‘Five seconds,’ Richmond said.
Towards the end of my stay with the Richmonds my rich Greene uncle, Eppy, who perhaps did not wish to be outdone by his intellectual brother, sent his elder daughter Ave to be analysed, and she too stayed in the house. Perhaps if she had come a little sooner my transference would have been directed towards her, for she was a very pretty girl, who, a few years later, was courted by all the Greene brothers, except Hugh who was still too young. Herbert and I particularly entered into rivalry. Tennis on summer evenings, exciting car-rides to the King’s Arms in the neighbouring town of Tring … there were even moments when my German aunt became worried: another first-cousin marriage in the Greene family would have been a disaster. Now in London with all the opportunities open nothing occurred. In those days at sixteen a boy was still very young. With daring I took her to the first London production of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie (her family, I learnt afterwards, considered it an unsuitable choice). I was still so heartfree that I could wonder, with cynical amusement, how long it would be before her emotions began to be transferred towards our bizarre and spotty analyst. But I was not there to see. Before that happened (if it ever did) I was returned – repaired – to the world of school.
Chapter 5
1
I T was a life transformed. I was no longer a boarder at that hated brick barracks called St John’s, which had become so mysteriously changed from the home of a happy childhood, and I had no fear of the old routine of classes. Classes, when once I had outwitted and outgrown the gym, I had never hated, and I returned to them with the proud sense of having been a voyager in very distant seas. Among the natives whom I had encountered there, I had been the witness of strange rites and gained a knowledge of human nature that it would take many years for my companions to equal, or that was what I believed. Had my grandfather returned to England from the long morning rides among the sugarcanes and the black labourers of St Kitts with the same exhilarating and unbalanced sense of superiority? I had left for London a timid boy, anti-social, farouche : when I came back I must have seemed vain and knowing. Who among my fellows in 1921 knew anything of Freud or Jung? That summer I invited Walter de la Mare to a strawberry-tea in the garden with my parents. He had come to lecture in Berkhamsted and I posed proudly as the poet’s friend, though I wished my father had been more impressed by his poetry. ‘It lacks passion,’ he argued with me, and to refute him I showed him a poem in The Veil .
‘Poor hands, poor feeble wings,
Folded, a-droop, O sad!
See, ‘tis my heart that sings
To make thee glad.
‘My mouth breathes love, thou dear.
All that I am and know
Is thine. My breast – draw near:
Be grieved not so!’
He shook his head sadly, remembering Browning. ‘Tenderness,’ he said, ‘not passion.’
I found it easy now to make friends. The domination of Carter was over for good. He belonged to another geological age, a buried stratum of school society. A school has many backwaters, but I was at last in the main stream. Instead of those petty gangsters of St John’s there were Eric Guest (later a distinguished Metropolitan magistrate), Claud Cockburn, Peter Quennell. I escaped in company with Quennell the loathsome O.T.C . on condition that we both took riding lessons from the gym master, an agreeable red-faced ex-cavalryman called Sergeant Lubbock. I was always a frightened rider and later, when I had left school, I would take a horse out only in order to scare myself with jumps on the Common and escape the deep boredom which I had begun to suffer, a belated effect of the psycho-analysis, or so I believed then, not knowing it would pursue me all my life. Quennell always rode a far more spirited horse than mine, galloped faster, jumped higher. Sometimes
‘Five seconds,’ Richmond said.
Towards the end of my stay with the Richmonds my rich Greene uncle, Eppy, who perhaps did not wish to be outdone by his intellectual brother, sent his elder daughter Ave to be analysed, and she too stayed in the house. Perhaps if she had come a little sooner my transference would have been directed towards her, for she was a very pretty girl, who, a few years later, was courted by all the Greene brothers, except Hugh who was still too young. Herbert and I particularly entered into rivalry. Tennis on summer evenings, exciting car-rides to the King’s Arms in the neighbouring town of Tring … there were even moments when my German aunt became worried: another first-cousin marriage in the Greene family would have been a disaster. Now in London with all the opportunities open nothing occurred. In those days at sixteen a boy was still very young. With daring I took her to the first London production of Eugene O’Neill’s Anna Christie (her family, I learnt afterwards, considered it an unsuitable choice). I was still so heartfree that I could wonder, with cynical amusement, how long it would be before her emotions began to be transferred towards our bizarre and spotty analyst. But I was not there to see. Before that happened (if it ever did) I was returned – repaired – to the world of school.
Chapter 5
1
I T was a life transformed. I was no longer a boarder at that hated brick barracks called St John’s, which had become so mysteriously changed from the home of a happy childhood, and I had no fear of the old routine of classes. Classes, when once I had outwitted and outgrown the gym, I had never hated, and I returned to them with the proud sense of having been a voyager in very distant seas. Among the natives whom I had encountered there, I had been the witness of strange rites and gained a knowledge of human nature that it would take many years for my companions to equal, or that was what I believed. Had my grandfather returned to England from the long morning rides among the sugarcanes and the black labourers of St Kitts with the same exhilarating and unbalanced sense of superiority? I had left for London a timid boy, anti-social, farouche : when I came back I must have seemed vain and knowing. Who among my fellows in 1921 knew anything of Freud or Jung? That summer I invited Walter de la Mare to a strawberry-tea in the garden with my parents. He had come to lecture in Berkhamsted and I posed proudly as the poet’s friend, though I wished my father had been more impressed by his poetry. ‘It lacks passion,’ he argued with me, and to refute him I showed him a poem in The Veil .
‘Poor hands, poor feeble wings,
Folded, a-droop, O sad!
See, ‘tis my heart that sings
To make thee glad.
‘My mouth breathes love, thou dear.
All that I am and know
Is thine. My breast – draw near:
Be grieved not so!’
He shook his head sadly, remembering Browning. ‘Tenderness,’ he said, ‘not passion.’
I found it easy now to make friends. The domination of Carter was over for good. He belonged to another geological age, a buried stratum of school society. A school has many backwaters, but I was at last in the main stream. Instead of those petty gangsters of St John’s there were Eric Guest (later a distinguished Metropolitan magistrate), Claud Cockburn, Peter Quennell. I escaped in company with Quennell the loathsome O.T.C . on condition that we both took riding lessons from the gym master, an agreeable red-faced ex-cavalryman called Sergeant Lubbock. I was always a frightened rider and later, when I had left school, I would take a horse out only in order to scare myself with jumps on the Common and escape the deep boredom which I had begun to suffer, a belated effect of the psycho-analysis, or so I believed then, not knowing it would pursue me all my life. Quennell always rode a far more spirited horse than mine, galloped faster, jumped higher. Sometimes
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