Read Ebook: Myself When Young: Confessions by Waugh Alec

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Ebook has 612 lines and 73020 words, and 13 pages

There is always cricket, though; and summer weaves of its four short months a surer, clearer pattern than the winter does. There is cricket every day, and there is the county championship. And if you follow closely the fortunes of any county, as I follow those of Middlesex, you have a firm framework for your personal peradventures. I find it difficult, even now, at this early date, to place with immediate accuracy the date of any given winter circumstance. "When did that happen?" I ask myself. I try and build round it a frame of associations. What else was happening at about that time? What book was I reading? What suit was I wearing? What friend had I just seen?

And gradually, detail by detail, I re-create the scene. But it takes time. And football only occasionally helps me. There are no championships in rugger. There are no figures, no individual scores, to help one. One game is so like another. Season after season one plays against the same teams, on the same grounds, and with only slightly varying results. It is difficult sometimes even to place offhand any particular game in its right season. And anyhow, football is only a key to week-end associations. It is of small assistance in the dating of a meeting that took place in the middle of the week.

It is different, though, with cricket. People tell me sometimes that I have an uncanny memory for dates. "Did you ever," they will say, "see that film 'The Old Nest,' that was on at the Alhambra about two years ago?" "Yes," I will answer, "I went there the last Monday in August 1921--the 29th, I think it was." But it is not "The Old Nest" that I remember. I only remember it through its associations of Lord's and the second day of that wonderful Middlesex and Surrey match; the morning of inexplicable failure; Donald Knight's magnificent innings in the afternoon; tea-time with Surrey in an impregnable position. Two fifty runs ahead and eight wickets still to go. And then afterwards that startling, that glorious collapse. Nigel Haig taking wicket after wicket from the nursery end. Fender trying to play for keeps, and being taken by Murrell wide on the leg side off Hearne. The match a match again.

And I remember that evening riding on a bus down Oxford Street and reading the red placards of the newspapers that had been printed while Knight and Shepherd were in. I remember the shriek of the paper boys: "Surrey making sure. Paper! Surrey making sure!" And because it was the climax of an unforgettable day I remember afterwards dining with my mother at the Spanish Restaurant and taking her to "The Old Nest" at the Alhambra.

But I begin to detect in the reader an ominous stir of irritation. "Has this man," he is beginning to ask himself, "no sense of proportion? Does he think that a book or a picture or a romantic episode is of less importance than a game of cricket? Does he seriously discuss in the same breath an innings by Knight and a novel by Mackenzie? Cricket and football! what do they matter, anyway?"

Little enough, no doubt; but then in the face of eternity does anything matter so very greatly? What are we and our works, our triumphs, our ambitions, our disasters, but accidents in the long process of effect and cause. We talk of the eternal verities, but the flowering of art is as temporal as the enjoyment we draw from it. In sixty years we shall be no longer here to admire El Greco's painting. And in six hundred years its colours will have faded, the canvas will have lost its beauty. It will be valueless. And in the presence of eternity what is six years, or sixty, or six hundred?

Already we are ceasing to read the classics. The Latin and Greek quotation has passed from the leading article and the debate in Parliament. The past is being rapidly immersed in the ever-widening flood of modern literature. The past and present are always at war with one another. China has produced no poetry for two thousand years. "There is already," they say, "so immense a collection of excellent work that it would be a folly to attempt to add to it." In China the past has stifled and killed the present. Here in the western world we are busy making an end of Greece and Rome. Will anyone be reading Virgil in the nineteen-eighties? And of Shakespeare as of Virgil.

We are always asking ourselves, "Who will be reading what in 1980?" We have always in our minds that unborn generation that we would influence and address. But either way, does it matter very much? These buildings of ours, these restaurants, and shops, and cinemas, that we are flinging up on all sides of us so recklessly, so haphazardly for purposes of convenience and display, they will speak of us far more distinctly to the men and women of the twenty-second century than these poems and plays and pictures, this music and these novels that we are producing in such profusion.

Contemporary political thought, and its resulting bills and measures and defences, will be as obsolete as is to-day the policy of Gladstone. Our points of issue in religion and morality will doubtless be the occasion for music-hall derision. But our buildings will be there; and as, to the majority of us to-day, the sense of Augustan repose and polish and formality is most easily suggested by the rectangular windows and low lines of London squares; and as the vulgarity, and the pretentiousness, solemnity, and solidity that were the worst characteristics of the Early Victorian age are forced continually on our attention by the elaborate porticos and columns, the theatricality of over-decoration that obscure for us so much that was at that time excellent and that make us exclaim contemptuously, "How typically Victorian," so shall we too in our turn be judged.

As I am carried on the top deck of a bus down Oxford Street, and see at the end of that avenue of brightly decorated windows the majestic fa?ade of Peter Robinson's emporium, and consider how it dwarfs the circus it surveys, and when I see from the top of Regent Street, far down beyond the jagged row of roofs and chimney stacks, the lovely low-roofed curve that the demands of utility are busy condemning as a piece of unserviceable decoration, I grow a little wistful, not so much because a beautiful thing is being taken from us, but out of a distrust as to what manner of buildings will take its place. I look nervously into the future. I see a young man, his coat and waistcoat flowered with the brocade of early twenty-second century fashion, passing here in whatever means of locomotion the young blood of that period elects to honour. I see his eye resting contemptuously on this jagged mosaic of ill-assortment. "They made that mess," he will say to his companion, "in the beginning of the twentieth century." I am afraid that of the Georgian poets and novelists he will be as ignorant as the majority of us are to-day of the obscure contemporaries of Wordsworth; that he will find a history of our political practices as tedious and as corrupt as those of the other periods with which he has had to acquaint himself for the satisfaction of his university examiners. He will be merely interested, casually, in his spare time in the form life took in 1923 for the average man and woman, and, as he will have inherited from us the amiable quality of laziness, he will favour the short cut; he will be content to contemplate, to absorb the atmosphere of our public buildings, and I am more than a little afraid that, as he passes through Regent Street to Oxford Circus, he will shudder, as we do when we wake from a bad dream, with the shudder that becomes a smile, with the slow reassurance through familiar objects of an averted evil. And he will laugh and point to the fa?ade of Peter Robinson's, "Typical Twentieth Century!"

But will it matter? Will it affect us how people live on this earth in 1990? We shall not be here to see them. They will be unable to distract and confuse and harass us with their intelligence or stupidity. It is only our egotism that makes us humbly prostrate ourselves before them. It is considered unworthy in a writer to address himself to the men and women of his own generation. But surely it is more sociable in us to wish to be of service and entertainment to our friends than to their grandchildren, who may develop, for all we know, into singularly unpleasant persons. Personally, I would much prefer my books to be read now by my contemporaries, by people I know and like, than by strangers when I am dead, with my books incidentally out of copyright.

George Moore has protested that each man finds heaven in his own way, claiming characteristically that he himself discovered it in the bedroom of that mistress who was so faithless and so constant. And I could produce, as a witness in his defence, a parson of my acquaintance who has discovered heaven in the gallery at Lord's. A small, wizened, weather-beaten parson, in a long chesterfield coat that looks in the sunlight sadly green; a guinea-pig, I suspect. For if he has a flock it can be rarely shepherded.

A familiar, an unmistakable figure; I do not know his name, though we have chatted together once or twice. He carries always with him a little black notebook in which he enters every score of over fifty that he has ever watched. When a wicket falls and a new batsman walks down the pavilion steps, he takes out his book, verifies the newcomer's identity with the aid of the scoring card and telegraph and proceeds to examine his record. "Ah, yes," he says to his companion, "Miles Howell; a number of good innings he has played. Let me see--99 against Kent. I remember it; the silly fellow! Ran himself out: an impossible run. I don't think he will ever make a hundred for Surrey; he gets so nervous in the nineties. Just the same at Lord's in that big innings of his. He could have got the record easily; only another two runs. Then he flings away his wicket. After being missed, too, three balls earlier."

An old man he is, nearly eighty. During the war I used to wonder if I should ever see him again, whether he would be able to survive, at his age, four years of rationing and air raids and overwork. And no cricket. Very lonely, very much at a loose-end he must have been. Very many hours he must have spent studying that small black book of his, wondering whether the good days would ever return in his lifetime.

I think that more than anything else, the sight of that old man in that Armistice summer, reassured me of the changelessness of the human heart, of its stability under altering conditions. And I think it was on that day I first appreciated the native wisdom of that old man.

Before the war I had always felt that he was sadly neglecting his duty to his congregation. He watched cricket all the week; he thought cricket all the week; what could he find to say to his flock on Sundays? But I learned on that first day of post-war cricket that as long as you see life steadily in terms of something, you can acquire a true sense of human values, and that county cricket is as serviceable a spade as literature if you would unearth the absolute.

Someone, I half think that it was Flint, had just missed Saville rather badly. The old man shook his head. "Poor, poor," he muttered, "and they were a bad fielding side in the eighties." Suddenly I saw the parson's life in relief. He had seen life in terms of county cricket. He had seen in the varying fortunes of the field as surely as has the historian in the rise and the crash of empires, the arrogance and impermanence of success, the courage of despair, the vanity of ambition. He had seen men rise to fame and sink into mediocrity. Counties had had their hour. There had been the years of Surrey's domination, then of Yorkshire's, then of Kent's. Middlesex was now the rising power. There was all history in his recollection of "Nottingham's weak fielding in the eighties." And I felt that he would be able to give true wisdom to his flock on Sunday; he would not be easily misled by the shouting in the market-place; he would have a sense of values. He would have a norm with which to judge the traffic and confusion of modern life. We are children, he would say, with the child's right to choose such toys as please it; or rather, perhaps, we are in search of some trumpery half-crown clothes-peg on which to hang the sixty guinea fur-lined coat of our immortal natures. One must have a peg; but it is the coat, and not the peg, that matters.

And so back upon my traces. Habits are good things; a framework gives purpose to one's life, and cricket and football make as good a hat-rack for literature and romance and friendship as the routine of a civil servant or a bank clerk or an income-tax surveyor. There must be a background for bright colour, and that is mine.

Everyone has some sort of framework, some series of pigeon-holes that divides the year arbitrarily into its component parts. For Mayfair there is Ascot and Goodwood and the London Season. For the sportsman there is the 12th of August. For the cricketer summer begins on 1st May with the pitching of the first wicket, and ends when the last ball is bowled midway in September. He cannot say, as may the gardener: Summer began earlier this year than it did last. There may come the St Martin's summer of late October, the days of blue sky and mellow sunlight, when girls put on their light frocks again and when tea is taken in the garden, and butterflies wake from their winter sleep. But he will not care how blue the sky may be, nor how warm the air. Football has begun; the white screens are stacked out of the wind between the pavilion and the wall.

On the whole he is inclined to resent the unseasonable aspect of the weather. He considers it a waste of sunshine. He remembers the wet days of June when he tramped up and down the pavilion in his spiked boots, listening to the rain beat upon the corrugated-iron roof, watching the wicket turn slowly to a quagmire. Winter sunshine rarely fails to rouse in him a feeling of homesickness. So nearly cricket weather, he thinks, and he remembers that May is still four months distant. Equally he distrusts the summer that begins almost before March is over. He would prefer to have April a month of rain and cold. We are only entitled, he thinks, every year to a certain number of fine days. We shall want all we can of them when cricket is again with us. Sunshine is wasted when it does not fall caressingly on white flannels and parasols and the sound of bat on ball.

He would prefer April to be cold and wet, although, probably owing to the peculiar formation of his time's hat-rack, he will be forced to take his holiday in the course of it, forced because it is the one month that provides a gap between the demands of cricket and of football. September does not. We play our last cricket match somewhere about the 13th, and on the next Saturday the District Railway is bearing us to the Old Deer Park and the rugger trials. There is no breathing space in September. But in April there is no cricket, and only a few desultory games of rugger; the grounds are too hard, the sun is too hot, and seven months at one game is quite enough. We dubbin our boots, put them on the shelf, begin oiling our bats, and spend a couple of Saturday afternoons in comfortable leisure.

I nearly always go away myself in April, not because I particularly want to, not because I need a rest,--is not cricket, the most complete of all rests, imminent? but because a holiday which involves a sudden dropping of routine and interests and relationships is our one chance of recovering that sense of proportion which we tend to lose so rapidly in London. It is the equivalent of the Catholic retreat; a pause; the provision of an angle of detachment. If one has a varied and amusing life; if one enjoys one's work; if no place nor person has particularly got upon one's nerves, then a holiday is, from the mere point of enjoyment, an unnecessary extravagance. I rarely return home from one without thinking that I could have enjoyed myself more thoroughly and less expensively in London. I look on a holiday, a formal holiday that is to say, not an impromptu four days' stay in Brussels, or in Paris, somewhat as a duty.

In London we are always meeting the same people. Everyone knows everything about everybody, their literary and domestic arrangements and entanglements, their tastes, their ambitions, their peculiarities; and it gives us an overweaning sense of our own impotence. It is healthy for us to be transported into a society where books are not read and writers not discussed, where we are all strangers to one another.

That is the chief charm of isolated country inns. One never knows whom one may meet, one is always encountering new types; and it is often easier to talk intimately to an acquaintance than a friend.

Three years ago I went away for a fortnight to a small Sussex village, ten miles from any station. It is right underneath the Downs, and from my bedroom window I could see the shadows moving across them in the early morning. I have sometimes thought, as I looked down on it from a balcony in Hammersmith, that I should never see any natural object more varying than the river. Its greys and greens and browns flow continually into one another, the lights and the water taking on different shades under the influence of the tides and currents. "I shall never see anything better than the river," I used to say, and I don't know that I have. Not better; but the Downs are as good. They are as full of colour as the river--brown, green, black, in certain aspects very nearly red. It is wonderful to see the sunshine moving over them; the long shadows changing their positions during the afternoon, revealing unexpected projections of the ground. It is the Downs, I suppose, that draw people to the place; no celebrity lives there, there is no artistic colony, no local industry; it has not been written up by the Sussex Cyder School. And yet there are enough visitors to support a really quite tolerable hotel.

It is not smart; I can hardly compliment our host upon his cellar, and there is not much choice of food; but the bedrooms are large, and two of the smoking-room windows can be opened. It is not too cheerful on a wet day, but I have been less comfortable in a smart hotel in Brussels at eighty francs a day.

Half an hour later, however, I had to confess that he might have found me a more interesting companion.

He was a heavy, thick-set man, square-jawed, clean-shaven, middle-aged; the sort of fellow who acts the part of the strong business man in American films, who sits back in a chair with a cigar stuck into the side of his face, his hand on the receiver of his telephone, while a secretary in the corner watches the fluctuations of the tape machine. The sort of man, in fact, whom one meets too often in London to be able to welcome with any enthusiasm on a holiday.

And he would not talk.

I hazarded a few remarks about the trade slump, to which he listened with interest, agreeing that things were in a bad way. I discussed the situation in Russia, and he was of opinion that drastic measures were required. He agreed with everything I said, and one does not get very far in a conversation when one's companion never says much more than: "Yes, I think that's quite true. That's exactly what I feel myself."

I should be unable to refuse. He would insist on walking to the very top of the Downs. With what had I saddled myself? Directly after dinner I went straight up to my bedroom to avoid an increased intimacy over a cigarette and a liqueur.

Next morning I woke to see the line of the Downs hidden in mist and rain. "A day spent in the smoking-room," I said to myself, "and in so small a place I shall be unable to avoid my comrade of yesterday evening. Perhaps he plays chess." Fortified with this hope, I had my bath, shaved, dressed, and went down to the breakfast-room. My friend had been before me. There was a teapot and a dirty plate upon the table. I was glad of the respite.

So that was it. A schoolmaster. Why had I not thought of it before? A schoolmaster, who had long ago abandoned the habit of independent thought, who was interested in little except athletics, and was even there distrustful of himself, basing his opinions on standard authorities. "A mind," I said, "that has been dead many years, but that continues to acquire information. He has heard someone speak of Einstein in the common-room, and considers that a schoolmaster should know something about everything. So he buys a handbook at the railway station--a short cut to knowledge, that is his idea of education."

And that evening at dinner I decided to draw him on to his own ground. I spoke of the educational systems of France and Germany. I contrasted the Lyc?e with the Public School.

"We don't understand education in England," I said. "We send boys from one classroom to another, a bit of Latin here, a bit of French there, half an hour's mathematics, and a little science. We call it a general education. It's nothing of the sort. It's knowing a little about several things, but nothing thoroughly; and it's better to know one thing thoroughly than fifty things in bits."

I paused, waiting to be contradicted.

"You may very well be right," he said. "But I'm in no position to judge. I don't know anything about Public Schools."

"No; I never went to one, and, though I've met a good many Public School men in my run of life, I've had few opportunities of contrasting their standard of intelligence with that of the French and German. Your criticism would not apply to the men I know, because we are all more or less specialists in the army."

A soldier! And to be reading Einstein. I should have been hardly more astonished if I had discovered a parish priest reading Casanova.

"You are surprised?" he said.

"Well, a little; I hadn't thought of you as a soldier."

"So I would suppose; one wouldn't, but I am, though. A Major in the Inniskillings."

And, in order to cover my surprise, I began to ask him about the war; which had been his division; where had he been at Cambrai; had he been to Ypres?

But, after dinner in the smoking-room, I drew the conversation round to philosophy and science. I forgot how I managed it, probably through Plato. The theory of platonic love provides an easy bridge for a discussion of army life to cross over into the fields of speculation. And the Major proceeded to define with real enthusiasm the difference between the Socratic and the Aristotelian view of knowledge. His eyes glowed as he spoke. But there was no originality in anything he said. His conversation was a pr?cis of the preface to the Socratic Dialogues in the Everyman Edition. On no subject was he capable of independent thought.

"You must have made a considerable study of philosophy," I said.

"Yes. It's the one thing I really care for. I have not done badly in the army, and, on the whole, I suppose that I have been happy there. But I have always thought that my mind's natural bent is towards speculation, rather than towards action. It has always been an effort to me to concentrate my attention on my army work. I should have preferred a life of quiet study."

A look of wistful resignation crossed his face, and I waited for him to continue. He was in the mood when confidence comes easily, and it is less difficult to reveal even the most intimate secrets of one's life to a stranger, a person whom one has never met before, and will, in all probability, never meet again, than to an acquaintance with whom one is brought in contact every day.

"Yes," he said, "I should have preferred a life of study. I never wanted to go into the army. It was a question of money. I was an only child. My father, a civil servant, died when I was three years old, and I was brought up by my mother. I never went to school. I had few friends. I used to sit and read for hours together; there was an idea of my going into the Church. But my mother died when I was fifteen years old, and I went to live with an uncle of mine--my father's eldest brother. He was not well off. I doubt very much whether, even if he had wanted to, it would have been possible for him to send me to the University. But he never entertained the project. He did not regard the Church as a suitable career for a man--at any rate, not for his brother's son. For a month or so after my mother's death he was patient with me and sympathetic. But, when he thought the first grief had passed, he reassumed his usual business manner. One morning after breakfast he asked me to come into his study.

"'Ah, come along, John,' he said. 'Now come, bring your chair up in front of the fire and let's have a chat about what's going to happen to you!'

"I am sure that he did his best to understand me. He regarded me then, I know--for he has told me so since--as an absurd molly-coddle.

"'You would not be the man you are now, John, if I hadn't sent you into the army.'

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