Growing Up In a War (37 page)

Today it seems obvious that I was an already insecure person whose insecurity was being screwed up to pathological levels by my own persistently radical questioning of my nature, and of the world around me. I was imposing on myself insecurities that I
could
not bear. My personality was not strong enough to cope with the positions I kept putting myself in. But at the time, all I was aware of were the questions themselves, and the terror they plunged me into. In any case, my questioning was involuntary: I tried to stop myself from doing it, but was only patchily successful. It was a curse of which I could not rid myself, and which visited me every day – in fact my internal nickname for it became ‘the curse’.

Luckily for me, although most of my wonderings had this terrifying character, not all of them did. Some were compellingly interesting, and I tried to take refuge in those. One day I was sitting in our living room gazing idly at the standard lamp when the thought wandered into my mind that if it were sentient it could not possibly appear as an object to itself, and therefore could not be an object in its own world. It would be able to see everything else in the room, just as I saw it, but would not be able to see itself. In what terms, then, could it conceive its own existence? There it stood before me, with its wooden base, tall stem and big shade, and I could form no notion of that particular standard lamp in any terms other than these – what they looked like, would feel like, and so on. Allowing for the laws of perspective, it would look the same for any other observer in the room, in any position – any position, that is, except one, the position the standard lamp itself occupied. To the standard lamp, thought of as being itself the observer, no standard lamp was to be seen anywhere in the room, and therefore no wooden base, no tall stem, and no big shade. Only if there had been, which there was not, a mirror in which the standard lamp could see itself would it have had any way of knowing what it looked like. Having no arms, it could not feel its own shape. So if it had spent its entire existence in this room it would never have experienced, and would have no way of conceiving, what were in fact the only elements out of which I could form any conception of it. If it was aware of its own existence this
awareness
would have to be in terms that were unrecognisably different from those of the only apprehension
I
could form of its existence. What could such terms be? Could it know even that it was a standard lamp? I did not see how. Perhaps all it could do was
be
, inside itself, without any understanding of what or why it was.

I was transfixed by this realisation of the disjunction between being and knowing. Every object in the room would be equally incapable of knowing its own nature if it were sentient. And this must be true of everything everywhere. Then, of course, the penny dropped. It must be true of me. I was a material object, and if I had been born without eyes and arms I would be just as incapable of knowing what I looked like, or what my own shape was, as the standard lamp. Even with eyes, it was only because of mirrors, reflections and photographs – images external to myself, images
outside
me – that I knew what my face looked like. What all this meant was that no sentient being, purely from inside itself, could possibly know, still less understand, its own nature.

For some reason I did not find this frightening – if anything, it gave me a kind of hope. There was something welcome in the fact that there must be more to me than any idea I could form of myself. For a long time, something like a couple of years, I thought about it obsessionally, but nearly always with regard to other objects. I would look, for instance, at a building. There it was, a huge great thing: it unquestionably existed. No one could deny that the building
was
. But what was it to be the building? I could see its details, and its overall position and size and shape; but the building itself could not be aware of any of these things; yet nevertheless it existed, it was doing
something
. What was it doing? Being, evidently. But what was that? Whatever it was, I could not get my mind round it – and nor would the building itself have been able to either. I never made an inch of headway out of this impasse. But that fact kept me aware that I was in it.

I have difficulty even now in expressing any of these thoughts in words, and at that time I was quite incapable of doing so. The insights themselves were not in words: they went much deeper than that. So I did not try to talk about them to anybody. But this meant that in some respects a disconnection developed between my outer life and my inner (rather as with the other things I was so obsessionally thinking about). My inner life was partly a cauldron of what I can see now as neuroses and pathological terrors – even what were not terrors were still obsessions. But little or none of this showed on the surface. I was reasonably good at coping with life and getting on with other people. No doubt I often seemed self-absorbed, but that is common, even normal, among adolescents. Perhaps one or two others caught hints of the highly charged goings-on inside me, but I do not think many did, and even they can have had no idea of their nature, extent, depth, power or intensity. I continued much of the time to be with companions at theatres and cinemas, sporting events and social occasions. I was hyper-communicative about everything else, always talking nineteen to the dozen, and being teased about it. An observer’s eye would have seen me as a social creature, actively bound up with several other people in many different activities. This disparity between inner and outer became normal to me, and has continued ever since. To this day I have an intense inner life that goes on all the time, and sometimes has a neurotic dimension to it; and yet I reveal very little of it to anyone else. I cannot talk about it to anyone because the words in which it would be possible to do so do not exist. But I continue to function well enough in working and social relationships – for instance, I have never taken a day off work because of it, and my work has always been done as it should be. However, it does make intimacy difficult for me. This fearsome inner world dominates much of my life, and I cannot help that, but there is no way in which any other human being could enter it.

Because I was already so full of terrors, as a young teenager, when the bombing of London started up again in 1944 I found it almost unmanageably frightening. This was in complete contrast to my insouciant enjoyment of air raids only four years earlier. I was offered a way out of this situation, but did not take it. Christ’s Hospital made arrangements for boys whose families lived in areas that were being bombed not to go home during the school holidays but to spend that time with other boys’ families in safer parts of the country. My mother wanted me join in the scheme, but I refused. The life I lived in London had become indispensable to me, and I could not, even at this price, bring myself to forgo it. I returned to London for every school holiday, bombing or no bombing. Nevertheless, I was frightened out of my wits by the V-1s. If I heard one coming and was alone in the flat I would get under the living-room table and crouch there in mortal terror, listening to the ever-approaching bomb and convinced that I was about to die. Most of the bombs exploded south of us, in central London, but you could never be sure they were going to – quite a few got as far as us and beyond; and I could always hear them coming. One seemed to cut out its engine immediately outside the window, and I thought it was about to plunge into our block of flats and blow me to bits, but it passed over.

The V-2s were even more frightening. Because rockets travelled faster than sound, you heard them coming after you heard them explode. That was ghostly as well as ghastly. There would be an almighty explosion, completely unexpected and out of the blue, and then you would hear the
swoosh
of the rocket as it approached through the sky. It chilled my blood each time I heard it – though the fact is, of course, that if you heard it you were all right. During the V-2 bombings I moved around central London half expecting to be snuffed out instantaneously. Once, just as I was stepping out into daylight from Oxford Circus underground station, there was one of these huge explosions frighteningly close, and for a
moment
I felt like turning round and going straight back underground and returning to Arnos Grove – but I did not, I stayed in the West End. And that is how I managed to carry on, combining extreme terror with an obstinate attachment to my pursuits.

But it meant I was in a fairly fraught state for most of the time when I was at home, and that must have aggravated the normal difficulties of adolescence. I was rubbing up against my parents in all the usual ways. In the rows that erupted they hurled at me the fact that I was incredibly lucky, free to come and go as I liked, generously provided by them with pocket money out of their three or four pay packets whenever I was at home. All this was true. But I was painfully conscious that the whole set-up was theirs, not mine, created by them, belonging to them, run by them; and that I had no alternative but to fit in; so I did not feel anything like as free as they said. I was powerless. And I hated Arnos Grove: the truth is I did not want to be
there
at all. As is usual for adolescents, I wanted to throw off my family’s influence on my attitudes and outlook, and establish my independence of thought and behaviour; so I opposed them and contradicted them unnecessarily. Inevitably, it was my father, whom I loved most of all, and whose influence on me had been so much greater than anyone else’s (and also, I could have added, so much more beneficial), that I felt most need to free myself from. So I started behaving badly towards him.

My relationships with the other close members of the family were not good. My mother disapproved of the fact that I had passed the school-leaving age without leaving school, and she saw me from now on as a layabout who should be earning his own living. I was constantly reminded by her of the fact that she and my father were standing on their own feet when they were my age, and this grated with me especially, because of the sense I already had of my lack of independence. Even so, I took the necessity for a good education for granted, and thought my mother
was
wrong about that. But then there was also my sister, bitterly resentful for opposite reasons. She was deeply jealous of the fact that I was getting a better education than she had had. One way and another, I was disapproved of by all of them.

By now I rarely had occasion to go to Hoxton any more. I was keeping up with the remaining members of my family during the school holidays by visiting them on Sundays at their homes in Southgate. Often I would spend the first couple of hours of the afternoon with my grandparents and their daughter Hilda – she being my maiden aunt and godmother – and then call in on the Petts, my aunt Peggy and her husband Bill. The two households received me very differently. At the first my grandparents and Hilda would ply me with questions about my life at school, and be interested in the answers. Then they would ask what I was doing now, during the holidays, and be interested in that too. The Petts, on the other hand, took the view – which I heard Bill formulate openly – that to tell somebody something is to exert a kind of dominance over him, while to be told something is to be subjected to the other person’s dominance. So they tried to avoid being told anything. The example Bill cited when he urged this course of action on me was: ‘You don’t want to just sit there saying nothing while he tells you all about the wonderful holiday he’s just had:
you
tell
him
about
your
holiday.’ They applied this principle to me. As soon as I started telling them anything about what I was doing, Bill would interrupt and insist on telling me what
they
were doing. He was even given to telling me what people unknown to me were doing. ‘Oh, I know,’ he would interrupt. ‘Our friends the So-and-so’s have a son at Highgate, which is just like Christ’s Hospital, and he …’ So instead of sharing my life with them, which is what I was longing to do, I would find myself sitting there while they told me about the doings of some total stranger. Peggy’s practice was even odder. She would tell me what I myself was doing. ‘Oh, I know,’ she would interrupt. ‘I can just
imagine
you sitting there and …’ Given that she knew nothing about what I was telling her, her resourcefulness in keeping up a flow of uninterrogative talk was a phenomenon. ‘You must be thinking … What you’re bound to want is … Anyone in your circumstances would naturally … Believe me, I fully understand how …’ and so it would go on. And on. And on. There was something mad about it. I spent hour after hour, year in and year out, listening to a lot of rubbish about my own life from people who knew almost nothing about it and were refusing to let me tell them.

Peggy continued this practice for almost, but not quite, the rest of her life, which was another half-century or more. When I joined the army, she told me what life was like in the army; and when I went to Oxford, she told me about life at Oxford; and so on, with every succeeding stage, until she was in her eighties and I in my sixties. Only in the last few years of her life, before she died at the age of ninety-two, did she ask me questions and listen to the answers. Until then, however determinedly I tried to share anything with her, she interrupted with undiminished determination and stopped me. It was pathetic, of course, and exasperating, but also tragic in its way, because it meant that she and Bill remained almost entirely ignorant of my life. Because they would never allow themselves to be told anything, they never knew anything. After a few years of this I had become a stranger to them. The only consolation was that it was what they wanted, and indeed were insisting on. They behaved like it to other people too. Decades later, when they found themselves in New York on a visit to my sister, the person who tried showing them round found that while he was pointing out the spectacular sights of Manhattan they were not looking or listening at all, but were deep in conversation with one another about their life in Southgate.