For the Time Being (3 page)

Though I well remember performing this wicked act, the time following it is obliterated.

I went into a coma for four days, and nothing, not even salt and water, mustard and water, or being given my father's pipe to smoke, apparently made any impression on me. No one was able to accomplish the essential task of forcing me to vomit up my stolen delight. I lay as for dead, heavily drugged. I recovered; and later drank a bottle of rose-water and glycerine to the dregs. I was thrashed for this by my father, who always did it rather apologetically with one of his paint brushes.

But it did not stop me. I stole from every bottle set high on shelves, or left, carelessly, standing about. The studios were forbidden territory. Not only did I squash the artists' paint tubes empty, I was obviously quite capable of scoffing their linseed oil and turpentine.

A ‘handful' is what I was considered, and handfuls such as I had to be dealt with firmly.

But no one had much time to deal with me, so, apart from being locked out of all the Uncles' rooms, I was pretty well left on my own to play about in the garden and feed my sister with pebbles or anything else which came to hand. And, of course, got another walloping. People simply did not understand that I was being kind.

Some of these fragments I remember with intense clarity. Others less well. Memory, as far back as this, is rather like archaeology. Little scraps and shards are collected and put together to form a whole by dedicated people – in this case my parents – who filled in the sprawling design of my life at that early age, and made real the pattern.

Aunt Kitty's room, for example, I can see as a vague, shadowy place filled with sweet scents and the trembling shapes of feathers and handkerchiefs flickering high on the ceiling. And I remember the gold-and-black striped divan, for it was to become my own many years later, when we moved to the cottage. Equally I remember the polar-bear rug. It was the first time that I had dared to place a timid hand within the roaring mouth: for the simple reason that Aunt Kitty had assured me it would not bite. It did not. I trusted her from then on, implicitly.

I trusted everyone in sight. Unwisely.

I can remember the great spills of cloth, but not the stories of camels and Araby or the scarlet birds swooping across opal skies. These items were added much later by my parents – who had, doubtless, heard her recount them. But I do remember the worms; and the million it took to make a tiny scrap of glowing material. However, most of those very early years are simply the shards and scraps. Vivid none the less.

But from five years old onwards I have almost total recall: although I rather think that Elizabeth, with a feminine mind, has a far greater memory for detail than I.

Telegraph Sunday Magazine,
18 March 1984

My father grew restless in the grey-yellow brick house and decided that he wanted to move out to a quieter area. He suffered from catarrh; and also from hideous nightmares, which his experiences only a few years before on the Somme and at Passchendaele had engendered.

These of course I knew nothing about. Sudden shouts in the night, I can remember those – and my mother's anxious, caring face the following morning as he set off to his work at
The Times,
where he had become the first Art Editor at an absurdly young age.

So we moved away from the grey street in West End Lane, Hampstead, into a small but pleasant house among fields just outside Twickenham. It was the talk of the family, and of its friends, that the sale was a ‘snip'. He had bought it extremely cheaply for some reason, and everyone was amazed. The reason was soon to become apparent.

One morning the dirt road in front of the house began shuddering with trucks and lorries of all descriptions; they droned and rumbled all day long, and when they left in the late evening we discovered the fields before us, and around us, stuck with scarlet wooden stakes and draped about with sagging ropes. My anguished father discovered too late that he had purchased a house in the exact centre of an enormous building development – which was the reason why it had been, as everyone said, ‘so ridiculously' cheap. A ‘snip'.

We were buried among bricks, lime, cement and piles of glossy scarlet tiles. The road was churned into a mud-slide and the windows rattled all day with thudding trucks.

Within the year the fields in front had yielded up a row of semi-detached villas, with bay windows and Tudor gables, their
roofs, as yet untiled, looking like the pale yellow bones of a smoked haddock.

My father was in despair.

I was fascinated by all the work and upheaval and spent as much of my time as I possibly could clambering about in the unfinished foundations of suburbia. Although the workmen were friendly, and seemed not to mind me being among them, there came a time when they shouted at me to ‘bugger orf', and once someone threw a half-brick.

Another time I got a hod-f of lime full in the face, rather like a custard pie. It was, of course, quite accidental and all I can remember is that it burned appallingly and I fled, blinded, from the half-built house, screaming at the top of my lungs, across the battered field and the rutted road. My distracted mother could not understand what had happened, naturally, and I was unable to tell her because I was yelling. She washed my face and hair and tried to get me to explain, to no avail.

At that moment an enormous man burst into the kitchen, pulled me on to his lap and licked, with his naked tongue, the lime from my eyes. Had he not done so, I have been assured, I should in all probability have been blinded for good. Counselling my distraught mother to bathe my eyes with milk and not let me out of her sight ever again, he left. I have often wondered who he was, and thought of him with gratitude.

I only stopped going to the half-built houses because I was warned that I'd be given a thrashing I'd never forget if I did. So I wandered off up the little path towards the deep rubbish-tip in the quarry. It was quieter there, no one came near, and I could explore the tumbled rubbish of Twickenham with complete freedom. Boxes and crates, broken chimney pots, old tin cans, a battered pram; pieces of wood, quantities of smashed tiles and earthen drainpipes; nothing smelly.

I remained always just at the edge, for it was very deep and I had a fear of falling in; which, one day, I did. I heard a kitten crying down at the bottom. Leaning too far over the slippery edge of broken tile and chimney pots I slid rapidly to the bottom and found
the kitten, a skinny creature which had managed to get out of a sack, leaving the dead bodies of its companions. I sat down cradling my find, confident that someone would collect me.

I tried to clamber up, but found that impossible. Each step I took up the jagged slope of rubbish sent me slithering backwards; and there was no possibility of climbing, to me, the sheer sides with a frantic kitten.

Calling had no effect, either, I was soon to discover. For my thin voice never reached the lip of the pit, and my wretched mother, who had quickly discovered my absence, passed and repassed my prison without having the very least idea that her first-born was sitting below among the debris.

Eventually a search-party was formed from the builders and masons on the swiftly growing estate. I was discovered and dragged to the surface with the kitten. I think that my mother had been so frightened that she forgot to punish, or even scold, and I was permitted to keep the kitten, who grew into a fine creature which we called ‘Minnehaha', unknowingly getting his sex wrong.

The little path through the grasses was not exactly out of bounds, although now the quarry was. But along the path a jungle of most attractive plants and grasses grew, and tiny green crickets scissored in the sun. I picked handfuls of bright black fruits from a small bush, ate them and stuffed my unprotesting sister full – with Deadly Nightshade.

Both of us, this time, went into a coma. There was a nurse and a doctor and enemas and thermometers; and the moment I was well enough to do so I upended the nursery fire-guard, shoved my sister into it as a patient, and we played ‘Hospitals'. It was very exciting, but pretty dull without ‘pills'.

So I consumed, because it was my turn to be a patient, a full bottle of aspirin. Another coma.

My mother was told that nothing could be done, I had taken such a massive overdose that I should either die or recover. All that she could do was lie with me, her hand on my heart, and if she felt the least change of rhythm she was to call the doctor instantly.

I slept like a lamb, my heart beating contentedly.

I do not think that I had suicidal tendencies. Certainly I had no murderous ones – then. However, my parents decided that the time was ready for me to have some kind of supervision and discipline in life: I had been altogether far too spoiled.

Miss Harris and her sister ran a genteel school for young children in a square Victorian house overlooking The Green. In their back garden, down among the laurels, and where the teachers parked their bikes, there was a long tin shed, painted dark red. This was the kindergarten.

I landed up there.

A blackboard, a big iron stove, tables. I remember nothing else. I imagine that one was instructed in the very basics: but I never bothered to learn them. Which has had serious consequences for me throughout my life.

Jealousy seething, anger mounting, I sat and thought only about ‘Minnehaha', or how best to build an aquarium, or when we should next go down to Teddington Lock with net and jam jar to fish for sticklebacks.

I simply did not bother with Miss Harris and her silly kindergarten; my brain absolutely refused to see the connection between ‘cat' and ‘mat', and I frankly didn't give a damn which sat on which. As far as I was concerned it was a wasted morning.

My parents found it to be the same thing after one caustic report from Miss Harris herself: ‘He doesn't try. Won't put himself out at all.'

He was not about to.

Stronger medicine was needed, and it was found in the form of a tall red building along the river, almost next door to Radnor Park. A convent school a-flutter with smiling nuns.

I was captivated by their swirling grey habits, by the glitter and splendour of the modest, but theatrically ravishing, chapel, the flickering lamps beneath the statues of the Virgin Mary and Joseph. It went to my head in a trice and I fell passionately in love with convent life.

I liked, above all, our classroom, a high-ceilinged, white-painted room with great mirrored doors which reflected the river, the trees
beyond and the boats. I worshipped Sister Veronica, with her gentle hands and the modest mole from which sprouted, fascinatingly, a single hair; and Sister Marie Joseph, who was fat and bustled, and stood no nonsense, but taught me my catechism and let me come into the chapel whenever I felt the need, which was often (not to pray, you understand, but to drown in the splendour of the lamps, candles, colours, a glowing Christ, and the smell of something in the stuffy air which reminded me of Aunt Kitty).

The colours, the singing of the choir, the altar-cloths shimmering with gold thread, filled my heart and my head with delight. I was lost: and decided, there and then, to be a priest.

Religion – certainly the Catholic religion – was not taught in our house. My father was born into a strongly Catholic family, with a staunch Catholic convert mother, and it was as a Catholic, firm in his belief, that he went to war in 1914. His belief, like that of so many other young men of that time, was shattered on the Somme, in Passchendaele and, finally, for all time when he pulled open the doors of a chapel after the battle of Capoaretto in Italy and was smothered in the rotting corpses of soldiers and civilians who had been massacred and stuffed high to the roof.

‘Jesus,' he once told me, many years after, ‘does not have his eye on the sparrows. But you follow whatever faith you wish. It is your life, not mine.'

And so Elizabeth and I grew up and flourished in a vaguely ambiguous atmosphere. We were sent to the convent on the riverside; I was allowed to have my own altar, which I built with intense care in a corner of the nursery; and we mumbled our ‘Gentle Jesus' and the Lord's Prayer without interference. We were left to make up our own minds about God and Jesus, Joseph and the Virgin Mary.

It was not a difficult process for me, because I had fallen quite in love with everything that Catholic teaching had to offer: without, of course, realizing that what I had
actually
fallen in love with was the theatre. Not religion at all. The ritual, the singing, the light, the mystery, the glowing candles: all these were theatre, and theatre emerged from these things and engulfed me for the rest of my life.
Learning my catechism was, after all, merely the prelude to learning my ‘lines'.

Like my father before me I laid aside my belief – not that it had ever been very strong, to be sure – for ever in my war.

Whenever I make a declaration of this kind I am inevitably swamped with letters from well-meaning people, usually women, who want to convert me to ‘believing' again. I am bombarded with religious books, usually American paperbacks, of all possible permutations and persuasions.

One which turns up regularly is called
Wrestling with Christ;
which appears to be an enormous bestseller but fails to answer any of the questions which have concerned me over the years. I have absolutely no wish to wrestle with anyone: especially with Christ.

It is particularly hard to retain a shred of ‘belief' standing in the middle of a battlefield, at the age of twenty-three, watching piles of dead, frequently mutilated soldiers, their bellies bloated with the gasses of decomposition, being bulldozed into a mass grave. I watched them tumble, spill, slither like old shirts in a spin-drier, and as I walked away retching in the stench of death I knew that, at last, I had come of age, and that I could never recover the happy platitudes of immortality.

Whatever happened, I wondered on another occasion, to that loving, comforting phrase, ‘Suffer Little Children to Come unto Me'? And my first, appalled, uncomprehending sight of a concentration camp, two of the women guards smiling brightly and wearing scarlet nail-varnish among the decaying mounds of bodies, shredded to tatters whatever belief I had and dispersed it in the winds of fact, and hideous truth.