Authors: Frederic Raphael
‘Which one do you want?’
‘Peter, really, listen – I—’
‘You can have the one with the striped hat on.’
I was looking the other way when we bumped against them.
Peter said, ‘Hullo, girls, are you waiting for us by any chance?’
Maud and Gwen were teachers up from Southampton for the weekend. We accompanied them to Grantchester, where we had tea. For the return journey, Maud joined me in one punt; Gwen and Peter took the other. Maud was fair and nicely made and looked pretty enough as she sprawled amidships while I poled the punt towards The Mill. When we had disembarked, after returning to Silver Street Bridge, Peter and Gwen went off together and I took Maud back to my rooms, where we were soon kissing keenly enough for me to pause and sport my oak.
I did what she would allow me to do, top half only, and she sighed and smiled and, although she avoided meeting my tongue with hers, she settled down to have a good time. I made no serious attempt to go ‘all the way’, as John O’Hara put it, in
Appointment in Samarra
. It is nice to suppose that, while I took mean sensual pleasures where I could, my fidelity to Beetle was never in question. Had my school teacher been experienced, and desirous enough, would I have declined to take her to bed? In another of O’Hara’s expressions, it would have depended more on whether I had a ‘thing’ available than on sentimental loyalty.
Maud and I met up for something to eat with Peter and Gwen, who
seemed content to be together. After spaghetti in Rose Crescent, we checked in the current
Varsity
for some social occasion to attend. The only dance advertised for that night was a Caledonian Ball, in a hall adjacent to the Catholic Church. We went to change (dinner jackets and long dresses were obligatory) and then joined the kilted and tartaned company.
Inside the temporary Highlands, we stood to one side while clansmen, with upraised hands, pranced over the bright blades of claymores, if that is what they were, laid on the parquet. We spoke to no one; no one spoke to us. I suppose that, since we had paid the pipers, we danced for a while and then we left. On the way back to her hotel, I embraced Maud again, and pressed her against the evidence of my desire, which she seemed to appreciate. I suggested that she come to my rooms in St John’s for breakfast before she and Gwen caught their train. After tea and cornflakes, we did some more kissing and then she looked at her watch. I took her in the bus to the station, bought a penny platform ticket and accompanied her to where Gwen was waiting and then I walked back to college.
The next time I saw Peter, he said, ‘How far did you get with her?’
I cannot remember what I said; nor did I probe him for confessional boasts. I ducked further invitations to go fishing, but I did accompany him to an advertised meeting of the (ultra left-wing) Socialist Club. No cadres from the central committee were there to sign up the three postulants, who dispersed without saying anything comradely to each other. My appetite for the Red Dawn had to be sated by reading the
Daily Worker
in the Junior Combination Room, although I never contributed to Walter Holmes’s fighting fund nor did I believe its story that America was using germ warfare in Korea. Along with most liberals, however, I assumed the
Manchester
Guardian
to be right when it insisted that Joe McCarthy was conducting a ‘witch-hunt’.
Resentment of American post-war hegemony soon led the liberal press to assume the innocence of the Rosenbergs and of Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter
White and other palpably guilty tools of Soviet intelligence. Distinguished Hollywood fugitives from McCarthy’s inquisition found sympathetic refuge in England. Flourishing in the light of their presumed martyrdom, Joe Losey and Jules Dassin were later idolised by
Les Cahiers du Cinéma
. ‘Julie’ Dassin had directed the excellent 1948 movie,
Naked City
; Losey nothing better than
The Prowler
(1951) or more overtly red than
The Boy with Green
Hair
(1948). No good liberal repeated Billy Wilder’s remark about the so-called ‘unfriendly witnesses’ who were brought before the Senate committee and sanctified, in liberal opinion, as the (innocent) Hollywood Ten: ‘Two of them were talented,’ Billy said, ‘the others were just unfriendly.’
I did join the Union, but lacked the nerve to speak at its debates, even though I was not impressed by the playground politicians who jostled for office on those mock-solemn, black-tied occasions: among them, Geoffrey Howe, Douglas Hurd, Percy Cradock and Tam Dalyell, who was otherwise known as ‘the Turd Man’. The last, although an Old Etonian laird, liked to prove his earthy saltiness by referring to his honest agricultural labours. Many years later, I debated at the Union with Geoffrey Howe. He told that he should much have preferred to be a movie director than a Cabinet minister. Percy Cradock, who became a diplomatic sinologist, cultivated a mandarin manner even as an undergraduate. He happened to be in the university library when Mr Khrushchev was scheduled to pay it a visit. He and his companion were obliged to abandon their seats while the secret service checked for dangerous devices. Cradock was heard to say, ‘What time is it by your bomb, Douglas?’
While in Fleet Street, I had been behind the scenes, however briefly, with several of the metropolitan politicos whose favours Union presidents solicited by inviting them to speak at the debates. Celebrities of all kinds were recruited: Donald Soper did his smocked, sincere, low churchy stuff and so did a Jesuit who, when proposing a motion that Divorce Was A Bad Thing (or opposing one that claimed it was not), made bold with the phrase
‘Change of life means change of wife’, quite as if it would rally at least a good number of his juvenile audience to the principle of lifelong fidelity. There was not yet anything shameful in the notion of growing up, or old, or even of honouring one’s vows.
The Union’s premises were a few yards away across St John’s Street, behind the Round Church. There was a snooker table and a large library, including many chapped
en regard
Loeb editions of the classics. I read them, rather too quickly, in order to be able, with some sort of honesty, to fill in the blank spaces in Howland’s form. Without the dedicated classicist’s tolerance for dust, I lacked John Sullivan’s systematic resolve. His lecture notes were thorough and legible; mine sporadic and hard to decipher for revisionary purposes. Bluff played no big part in John Patrick’s game. Keen to shine, I was averse to sustained polishing or boning up (I used to put a gleam on my corps boots by working on the toe-caps with the handle of an obsolete tooth-brush).
When I took my verses and proses to Professor Anderson, the old Latinist covered them with red annotations. He pointed, with a quivering nib, to one of my phrases and said, ‘Where did you get that from?’ I said, ‘I made it up, sir.’ He said, ‘We don’t do that.’ Compositions worthy of a scholar were patchworks of certified phrases; no marks for originality. I consoled myself with the thought that Catullus, if he happened to walk that way, would not have been spared Professor Anderson’s querulous quill. I was more interested in ancient history than in irregular verbs, in anthropology (George Thomson’s irreverent Marxism was much to my taste) than in the correct inscription of Greek accents. I continued to distribute
perispomena
and
proparoxytones
with wanton inaccuracy.
Quite early in my first year, Ian Mackay, the combative
News Chronicle
industrial correspondent, and his mistress and colleague Margaret Stewart, called on me in my rooms, perhaps as the sequel to a lunch at the Berkeley with my father. They took me to a big house somewhere behind Sidgwick
Avenue where Sunday tea was poured by a famous Cambridge
salonnière
whose name I failed to catch. There were rows of hard chairs, as if for a conference, facing a dais on which I presumed that our hostess and her familiars were going to instigate a sophisticated causerie to match Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson’s
Modern Symposium
. I sat there until the place filled, teacups were issued, and the proceedings proceeded. I have no idea who the platform performers were nor what topics they broached. I did not exchange a word with any of those who sat near me. As a social climber, I have no head for heights.
I did consider going for an audition at the élite Amateur Dramatic Club, which had its own theatre in Park Street, but I so dreaded rejection that I never even reached the door at which Peter Hall did not hesitate to knock on his way to taking command of the Cambridge stage. I signed up for the second team by joining the CU Mummers, whose presiding committee set no high hurdles for spear-carriers. The Footlights Club was famous for its satire, which (having read Addison and Juvenal and S. J. Perelman) I did not think beyond me, but again I funked an audition, lest I be asked to sing.
When I went to the offices of
Varsity
, the undergraduate newspaper, in the hope that professional experience would earn me a prompt byline, my Fleet Street credentials more alarmed than impressed the editors. I then made contact with the ‘Young Writers Group’, which was presided over (Cambridge brimmed with presidents of various denominations) by a Johnian called Donald Rudd. A small, clerically cut third-year man, he published the first thing of mine, apart from those anonymous contributions to the
Sunday Express
, to appear in print. It was a wan poem, in free verse, about the smoky view across London from the same Manor Fields back bedroom window which had primed the painting that earned me that third prize from Claude Rogers.
The only club I joined with confidence was the CU Bridge Club. I had learned the game by watching Irene and Cedric playing with his parents
before and during the war. My skill was the small dividend of being an only child. After the war, I went with my father, on wet weekends, to Mrs Mac’s club, in South Kensington, where we played for sixpence a hundred. Once I left Charterhouse, Cedric licensed me to play in the Crockford’s two-shilling room. At such elevated stakes, no money passed. At the end of a rubber, one ‘took’ one of the opposing pair and entered his or her name, and the number of points won or lost, on a printed card. Accounts were rendered monthly. Cedric allowed me a generous ‘float’ of £6. If I lost more than that I had to go home.
On an early occasion, I cut Jeremy Tatham, a junior international, as my partner. After our opponents had bid a vulnerable small slam, while missing two necessary aces, Tatham made a bored discard, late in the play, which was almost immediately revealed to be a revoke. It procured no illicit trick for our side, but our opponents had the right to demand two penalty tricks and did so. As a result, they won a twenty-point rubber. I had to go home almost as soon as I had arrived. Tatham took his pipe from his mouth only to tell me that it was my fault for not saying, ‘Having no more clubs, partner?’ He was quite right; but I still rejoiced when the ascendant Jeremy Flint dropped the other Jeremy as his partner. Flint had the habit, if I cut him as partner, of reading the
Evening Standard
when, by some mischance, I rather than he happened to become declarer. When the last trick had been played, he would look up from the racing page and say, ‘How did you get on?’
I was opportunist enough to drop the names of Flint and Terence Reece to Peter Swinnerton-Dyer, a young Trinity mathematics don who had played for England and reigned as the godfather of the CU Bridge Club. Exercising his right to
triage
, he divided suppliant members, with drawling Old Etonian
morgue
(he was heir to a baronetcy), into ‘Probables, Possibles and Awful Warnings’. Mention of my friendship with Guy Ramsey put me, provisionally, in the first category.
Among others in that rank I discovered Richard Bird, my prep school
friend. After four superior years as a Wykehamist colleger, he had won a major scholarship in Modern Languages at Clare. We fell together as bridge partners and invited each other, alternately, to tea in our rooms. Fitzbillies, across the street from Mill Lane, where I went to Guy Lee’s lectures on mornings when I woke up in time, sold very short shortbreads dipped thickly at each end in chocolate, and Chelsea buns, sticky with succulent raisins. Richard and I were among the worst losers in the bridge club, but we did well enough, often enough, in duplicate competitions to win Swinnerton-Dyer’s baleful favour.
Richard had not only taken what I thought of as my place at Winchester; he had, before that, spent the war in the US. He was, in those enviable respects, what I might have been. We must have found things to talk about apart from the Acol bidding system and the gnathous anatomy of Swinnerton-Dyer, whose glistening gums gloved his teeth except for the last tenth of an inch, but our topics never included sex and had little intellectual content. A very conventional pair, we never lent each other books nor, despite Richard’s linguistic scope, did we discuss going abroad.
Johnian scholars were privileged to read the long Latin grace before we all sat down to the evening meal in Hall. I had no crisis of faith before reciting ‘
Oculi omnium in te sperant, domine, et tu das illis cibum in tempore
…’ nor in concluding ‘
per Christum Jesum Dominum Nostrum
’. It was nice to suppose that Jewishness was no longer of significance, to me or to others.
We had to wear gowns at lectures, when dining in Hall and whenever we went into the streets at night. To be spotted improperly dressed led to the proctors unleashing their attendant, bowler-hatted ‘Bulldogs’ in pursuit. College porters doubled as proctorial sidekicks in order to earn a little extra money. They were rarely zealous or fleet of foot. I was too pleased to merit a gown ever to go out without mine. However, having stayed for too many last rubbers at the bridge table, without being forearmed with a late
pass, meant that I sometimes had to climb over the New Court gate. I have a coin-shaped scar in my left calf where a spike went in.
Guy Fawkes Night was a traditional occasion for festive misbehaviour. In the later 1940s, the undergraduate population had included ex-soldiers who had seen active service. Some had had access to the means for creating nostalgic explosions. Lamp-posts were uprooted and used to torpedo shop windows, for the fun of the crash, never for loot. In the 1950s, 5 November remained an inverted saturnalia during which the privileged indulged in playful vandalism, but no loud damage was done. The police suffered to have their helmets knocked off and sometimes purloined (to be returned the following day). While glass was broken and happy louts cheered, I was reminded of
Kristallnacht
, another November night, in 1938, when Nazi mobs were licensed to smash Jewish shops. During my first year, I never heard anyone use the word Jew abusively. I imagined that that kind of nonsense was forever behind me. The Provost of Guildford remained an
ex officio
figure on the panel of my superego: I wanted, at all costs, not to honour his idea of a Jew. On pub crawls, I made a habit of buying an early round, in order not to seem to have dodged the column. I bought cigarettes (Players No. 3, one and tenpence for twenty) less because I liked the smoke – the brown smell on the side of my index finger was more delectable – than in order to be equipped to pass them round. My cigarettes went on the buttery bill and were paid for by my father, unlike the copy of T. S. Eliot’s
Four Quartets
that I bought at Bowes & Bowes. Alone in my happy attic, frowning to mime seriousness, I found that
Burnt Norton
emitted no evocative perfume. What were
The Dry Salvages
to me?