Owning Up: The Trilogy (36 page)

Theoretically, as an enthusiastic if ill-informed admirer of the Surrealists and a rather precious young man in general, I should have detested both his work and him. I was, however, in part impressed by his scatological and sexual Rabelaisian turn of phrase, and equally won over by his kindness and the way in which he treated my aspirations to become a writer with apparent gravity. Always a chameleon, I found myself, in his company, assuming a bluff and noisy neo-Georgianism redolent of beer and wenches and long tramps through damp bracken. I was impressed too at his output (albeit self-published), and by his friendship with the then celebrated Professor Joad, a popularising philosopher, the mainstay of the BBC’s Brains Trust and, according to Donald, as randy as a goat, as drunk as a judge, and much given to climbing up lampposts and similar japes.

Later, Joad was savagely discredited, quite absurdly in my view, for riding on a train without paying for a ticket, but at the time he was a national figure almost as famous as Tommy Handley, and much imitated for his philosophical catch phrase ‘It all depends what you mean by…’ and his rapid, precise – if rather high-pitched – delivery. For the friendship of a writer who knew Joad, I was prepared to put aside any reservations. Not so Percy. I only took him there once, but it was a sour disaster. Percy’s literary seriousness was appalled by Donald’s facility, while his equally puritanical homosexuality was offended by Donald’s uxorious celebration of heterosexual monogamy. There was one sentence in particular, a sentence which began ‘Last night my fingers were exploring the nocturnal interstices of my wife…’ which turned him crimson with embarrassed distaste. His comments afterwards were withering on both an aesthetic and personal level. We had begun to drift apart.

Not that Donald Cowie was the sole reason for that. More important was a new friendship with a tall boy from Wolverhamp-ton, a warm-hearted, slightly cynical person with a lopsided grin and the look of a younger Joseph Cotten. His name was Harry Wakefield and like me, but with more natural aptitude, he was training to be a writer. I fell head-over-heels for Harry and he, while interested only in girls, was prepared to accept my adoration in return for the amusement I provided him and, I believe, genuine affection.

All through my life I have been attracted by people like Harry Wakefield, at first, although fruitlessly, in the sexual field but soon (sex more or less sublimated if not all that far below the surface) as platonic friends.

Harry knew a great deal more about jazz than I. It was he who pointed out that if I really liked improvisation above all else, both Muggsy Spanier and, come to that, Duke Ellington and Jelly Roll Morton, relied in the main on arrangements, so in praising them I was talking nonsense and must either revise my opinions or discard them. This really threw me, but he added that as, within the scored passages, there were plenty of holes for improvising, why not admire both their skill as composers
and
the brilliance of their soloists? This view seemed and seems to me extremely sensible and although for many years I remained suspicious of the saxophone, I soon became less rigid and more open.

At all events it was with Harry’s star in the ascendancy, and Percy’s in decline, that we finished our basic training as writers and were sent home on leave. As for the Cowies, we kept up a correspondence for some time and indeed, when a sortie North on a bookselling expedition took them near Liverpool, I was able to repay some of their hospitality by asking my parents to put them up. My mother didn’t ‘care for his beard’. My father was very amused and indeed impressed by the fact that, under various pseudonyms, Donald wrote all the critical puffs on the dustcovers of his own work and, more conventionally, the publishers’ blurb as well. But distance and diverging views soon put an end to our letters, and I never met nor indeed heard of him again.

3

My leaves in Liverpool have by now fused into one long leave. The Blitz was long over and the northern port had never suffered under the doodle-bug attacks which had, until the success of D-Day, made life in London and the South so nerve-wracking a phenomenon. Still the sense of being at war persisted: the gaping bomb-sites as yet nude of weeds, the partial black-out, the notices in the butchers’ windows announcing what numbers in which streets were entitled to offal. On arriving at Lime Street Station I’d board a 1 or 33 tram-car, and walk with my kitbag over my shoulder and my ditty-box (a small cardboard suitcase) in my hand towards the comforts of home. For ten days or so I’d see my relations, chat to my small sister, stroll the public parks of my childhood, and go to the theatre with my mother or a friend of hers, a fat, highly literate and intelligent queen who had decided to take in hand my education and plied me with books, magazines and advice.

At the end of each leave, my woollen underwear restored to approximate whiteness (for my own efforts at dhobying never achieved more than what I called ‘hammock grey’), I’d stagger back down to Lime Street to face the long journey back to wherever I was stationed. ‘Leave,’ they told us frequently in the Navy, ‘is a privilege, not a right.’

This time my destination was the writers’ training camp at Wetherby, a small town near Leeds in frozen Yorkshire. It was the week after Christmas.

It wasn’t exactly that I’d no intention of passing my exams at HMS
Demetrius,
an establishment appropriately far from the sea. My moments of revolt, rare but extreme, have always been public, either the end result of accumulated angry frustration or the unpremeditated effect of a rush of adrenalin through the system. The notion of deliberately faking stupidity was foreign to me. Nor, in this case, was it necessary. My mathematical sense has always been shaky. I can’t add up a row of figures twice and reach the same answer. I’m not however one of those who try to present this failing as a virtue: the proof of unworldly, seer-like preoccupations. It’s very irritating and has cost me dear. I comforted myself on this occasion that at least I’d pointed it out in advance to those who had insisted on allocating me to such an unsuitable role and did my best, given a persistent inability to concentrate on something which doesn’t interest me, to work out how much pay less tax would be earned by a first lieutenant, acting-captain of a motor-torpedo boat, with a wife, two children and a dependent mother. The lieutenant, had he existed, would have become somewhat nervous as each pay-day drew near, never knowing whether to expect a salary rather higher than an Admiral of the Fleet, or considerably less than the expectations of a Victorian crossing sweeper during a heatwave.

As each exam approached I reacted, as I’d often done at school, by a series of genuine but undoubtedly psychosomatic diseases. Glands swelled, teeth abscessed, flu struck. Harry and Percy were almost ready to pass out before I’d taken and failed my first test.

Happily, the camp’s Training Commander, a squat, ruddy-faced, blue-jowled Jewish officer given to twinkling, found me absurdly amusing or, more accurately, amusingly absurd. I’d first come to his attention when a prudish lady sorter in the Wetherby post office had sent back with a complaint an envelope addressed to my mother which I’d decorated with some sub-Rex-Whistlerian cherubs modestly, indeed almost vestigially, hung. He’d returned this to me, forced, because the complaint had been official, to issue at least a formal reprimand, but making it perfectly clear that he thought the woman was a prurient fool. He suggested that in future I confined my
putti
to inside the envelope. From then on he kept a sardonic eye on my antiprogress. He gave the impression of boredom and impatience with his job, and at least my passionate defence of my right to give male cherubs appropriate if minute sexual organs made a change from deciding what to do about ratings late off shore, or cooks apprehended smuggling out a pound of butter on weekend leave.

Our next encounter seemed more serious. At Christmas, after a beery dinner served to us, as was the naval custom during that period of traditional misrule, by the officers, Harry Wakefield and I fell asleep on the same bunk and were roughly awoken by a fiercely heterosexual Warrant Officer who had long suspected and resented my propensities. He put us on a charge but the Commander would have none of it.

‘Far too drunk to have done anything about it even if they’d wanted to,’ he commented dismissively. Our accuser reddened, and Harry and I, he with justifiable innocence, me at any rate technically not guilty, saluted, turned about and marched out of the room.

In between working up to being ill during exams or recovering after them, I quite enjoyed Wetherby. Physical exercise was minimal. Football was voluntary, and even the obligatory twenty minutes of PT before breakfast required no more effort than was necessary in order not to freeze. The classes were boring enough but there was a reasonably warm canteen, a piano player stumbling through boogie-woogie, the tick-tock of ping-pong balls, Harry or Percy to chatter to over the watery pints of NAAFI mild. The war too had begun to swing in our favour. We didn’t talk about it much, but it meant a diminution of possible risk and that was cheering.

So we sat, played dominoes, talked about jazz or painting, speculated as to why the smoke was blue when it curled up from the end of a cigarette but grey when expelled from the lungs, indulged in horse-play, listened to Bechet or Jelly Roll on a gramophone borrowed from the Chaplain; inadequately, in my case, washed our underpants, gave blood to a travelling unit known as ‘the mobile Dracula wagon’, slept heavily on ‘make and mends’, masturbated often, and got drunk in Leeds or Harrogate.

Harry and I didn’t often go to Harrogate. A refuge for the elderly, it seemed too like another Malvern although we were temporarily impressed and amused by its enormous Edwardian hotels where a few old ladies ate their meagre lunches in the Baroque wastes of the under-heated dining rooms, and a palm court trio, wearing cardigans against the cold, scraped out selections from
Floradora
or
The Yeomen of the Guard.

We much preferred Leeds, a wide-open city with enough tarts and drunkenness to earn itself one of those ‘revealing’ articles in the
News of the World.
Although the war continued, there was now no question of an air-raid and modified street lighting had been re-introduced. This made our reeling sorties from pub to dance-hall to pub to café to YMCA or Salvation Army hostel less hazardous, and revealed also the Victorian Gothic fantasy of the town. In the city square, a platoon of solid nymphs held lamps aloft. There were elegant glass-roofed arcades to explore and a huge town hall, a sooty metaphor for the civic pride of the High Victorian dead.

I discovered eventually that you could take a tram out to a large Elizabethan manor house on the outskirts of the city where the Corporation housed many of its treasures including what was, for those days, a rather adventurous modern collection.

The tram-ride itself was a dreamlike pleasure. The last few stops were among woods, the rattling tram was old and Emmet-like, with an ornate spiral staircase and little panels of engraved blue and red glass above the windows. The house, Temple Newsam, had Latin mottoes picked out in stone around the parapets of the great courtyard. It was usually empty, and Harry and I wandered its crimson rooms full of Rubenses and Canalettos and roped-off eighteenth-century furniture, and spent a long time admiring the Graham Sutherlands, Henry Moores and Paul Nashes in the modern collection. Later, after I had met the Surrealist Group in London, I rapidly recanted my admiration for these artists, apostates all, and shamefacedly tucked away those oblong Penguin Modern Masters which extolled their work, but at Wetherby I still found anything ‘modern’ admirable.

Culture in the afternoon then, a habit I was to keep intermittently throughout my naval career because, for one thing, it was very economical, and vice, or at any rate aspirations to vice, in the evening.

Vice in Leeds, that last winter of the European war, centred for us on The Dick Turpin, a garish public house in the Thirties’ cream and green, not far from the city centre. Percy came once and didn’t like it, but Harry and I did, and in no time were on friendly terms with the rather drab and pathetic little whores and their lord and master, a Spanish pimp called Tony Angelo.

As to why I was so impressed, the answer, I suppose, lay in my association of whores with the Storyville era in the history of New Orleans jazz. To talk to real whores and pimps seemed to me to create some kind of spiritual link with Buddy Bolden, Tom Anderson, Lulu White and Jelly Roll Morton.

There was one girl with whom I became quite friendly. She charged, she told me, three guineas, a curiously pedantic sum, but threw in breakfast and kept the place spotless (or so she said, for at three guineas a throw I hadn’t the means to find out even if I’d had the inclination). She was worried because she had no identity card. She despised good-time girls ‘who “go” for nothing’. I listened to her for hours, hearing the tinkle of the whorehouse piano in my mind’s ear and, about once a night, in exchange for buying him a gin and orange, I was allowed a few moments’ audience with Tony Angelo himself. Dressed in a wide-lapelled black-market suit, wearing a mauve silk shirt, kipper tie and pointed leather shoes, sporting an amazing amount of jewellery, heavily-scented, his Bryl-creemed hair worn long for those days, his hairline moustache almost invisible in its precision, he seemed to me the most glamorous person I’d ever met. His arrogance too was God-like. When I asked him, rather nervously, about his reaction to that article in the
News of the World,
he’d shrugged dismissively. ‘I not frightened of those beeg fat City Halderman,’ he said examining a beautifully manicured nail, ‘I know too much haybout them.’ City corruption too, I thought to myself. Here I am talking to a man described in the newspaper as ‘a slimy foreign beast earning a fat living from battening on to women of a certain sort’, and he feels perfectly safe because he knows too much about the City Fathers. Orgies in the Mayor’s parlour perhaps? Gross old men in their sock suspenders chasing Tony Angelo’s tarts round a solid mahogany table with the mace on it? I wished he’d tell me more but, the gin and orange once dispatched, the audience was at an end.