The Lonely Sea and the Sky (3 page)

My first adventure was the snakebite. I was eleven, and I had been out in the woods in the spring. There was a sheltered valley with a stream, the Yeo, running down it, which led from my Aunt Rosalie's lake at Arlington; a lush little valley with huge clumps of a broad­leaved plant like a giant rhubarb. I saw a snake twisting through the undergrowth beside a ride through the wood where it had been sunning itself. I caught it by the tail, got out my handkerchief and stowed it in that, then fastened the four corners together and set off for home, about 3 miles away. Halfway across a big hillside field I saw a beetle in the grass, and thought it would be nice for the snake to have a feed. I took it out and put it on the grass, but it paid no attention to the beetle. Holding it by its neck, I touched its mouth with the beetle, but still it paid no attention; instead, coiled itself up and, bending its head back, hissed at me. I moved my hand to put it back in the handkerchief and it struck my second finger. This stung like six wasp stings, and I danced about sucking the finger which quickly swelled tight and went blue. I put the viper back in the handkerchief and set off for home (I wonder why it did not bite me again?).

  I was alternately running and walking. My arm was swelling and painful, particularly in the armpit. I got very frightened and, being intensely religious then, knelt down on the grass track through the wood at the top of the hill and prayed that I would not die. It was a lovely spring day and dappled sunlight was coming through the trees. When I reached the road in the valley at the back of our house, I met a farmer on horseback and told him I had been bitten by a snake; I undid the handkerchief and showed it to him. He got down from his horse and killed it with his heel, for which I was sorry. When I reached home and told my father what had happened he said, 'What a thing to do, bringing the snake home; it might have bitten your sister.' (He was very fond of my sister.) He then told me to get on my bicycle and set off for the infirmary in Barnstaple, 4½ miles away. By the time I reached Barnstaple I was getting light-headed and lost my way in the town, although I knew it all perfectly well. I remember sitting on a bench in a waiting room. I was very hazy by this time, but I can still see the semi-oval white gauze-covered frame being put over my face, and still recall the dreadful feeling of suffocation when the chloroform that was poured on the mask began to take effect. I think that was the worst of the whole affair. I saw my father, who had harnessed the buggy and followed me, standing by my bed. There was a very sharp pain, presumably as they started slicing open my finger, and then I passed out.

  I heard afterwards that they had sent my father back to fetch the snake, so that they could use some of the poison as an antidote, but then decided not to do so, and waited until some stuff came down from London on a train. This arrived in the evening, and it rippled round inside me as they squirted syringefuls of it into the skin of my stomach. Afterwards, my father told me that they did not know until next morning if I was going to survive.

  This was my first experience of publicity. The adventure was reported in the local paper, and I seemed to have a stream of visitors in the hospital. They included Nancy Platt and my cousin Margaret, whom I adored.

  I do not know if I was born with a passion for spending all day alone in the wildest parts of the countryside. I suspect it was due to circumstances, such as the start of my school life. When I was seven I was sent off to school at Ellerslie, about 7 miles away. My parents used to drive me there in the family buggy. During my first term, the senior boys of the school were having a game, which was to prevent some of them from entering the building. I was standing on the concrete floor of the washplace at the time, with a row of basins round two sides of the room, and above the basins a row of oblong windows, hinged at the top, which pushed outwards. Through one of these windows appeared the head and shoulders of my brother, trying to get into the building. I picked up a handful of sawdust from a box on the floor and threw it in his face. It was a silly, thoughtless thing to do, but certainly not done from malice, only excitement. A bit of this sawdust went into his eye, and I can remember his bending over the basin and bathing it.

  As a result of this I was 'put in Coventry' for three weeks, and for the whole of that time not a single boy in the school spoke to me. My brother, who was four and a half years older than me, was one of the senior boys. I do not know if he had any part in the 'Coventry' punishment, but he never spoke to me during the period of it. It seems hard to believe that senior boys would do such a thing to a seven-year-old new boy, just because of a stupid joke that went wrong. I can assume only that I must have been very objectionable, perhaps precocious; I don't know.

  This episode turned me into a rebel against my fellows; every boy was an enemy unless he proved himself to be a friend. I seemed to have to fight for everything, and the school appeared as tough as a prison. To make matters worse, I was often in trouble with the headmaster. My first term I was up for a beating seven times. The headmaster, who was a big, powerful man, sent one up to one's dormitory at a fixed time. Here, one waited beside one's bed. Being kept waiting was the worst part, and I couldn't stop myself from trembling. He made us strip off our trousers, and beat us on the bare bottom. But not always. Sometimes he made us strip off and bend over, and then didn't beat us. Outside the windows of that dormitory there were creeping plants like Cape gooseberries with bobble-shaped fruit dangling in the wind. Waiting there, I used to see the sparrows flitting amongst this creeper, and this stayed in my memory as a picture of misery. After a year or so my parents took me away from this school; but not because of the tough conditions, only because I was always ill there, which was a nuisance.

  I made no friends at that school, and I had none at home. I had two sisters, but the older, Barbara, was five years younger than me, and we hadn't much in common in the way of adventure. I gradually drifted into the habit of setting off on my own into an escape world of excitement and adventure.

  By the time I was transferred to another preparatory school, the Old Ride, at Branksome, Bournemouth, I must have been a thorough savage, a rebel against everybody, including my parents. But I loved the Old Ride. I liked the boys, I liked the masters and I liked the place itself with its strong, pine smell, and the sandy soil covered with pine needles. In summer we used to go down to the sea through a chine in the cliff, and bathe every morning. The salty water and the hot sunshine made one feel so languorous that it was difficult to struggle back up the chine. I usually found time to scan some of the silvery-sided leaves looking for puss moth caterpillars, with their tapered green bodies and huge, dark-faced heads with two horns. We would be quite content to get a little brown egg or two on the underside of a leaf, and rear the caterpillars ourselves, until they made cocoons in a piece of pine bark. The headmaster, S. A. Phillips, with his stubby, round figure, walrus moustache (off which he would suck drops of soup) and big round spectacles which he pushed up his forehead, made his mistakes, but who doesn't? Perhaps one of the worst that I got involved in was when our dormitory was caught after Lights Out with everybody visiting some other boy in his bed. There was the most frightful hullabaloo about this, and we were brought up for questioning one at a time for week after week, and finally all flogged. We were told we were very lucky not to get the sack, and I believe that if we had not all been involved, we would have. No one mentioned the word 'homosexuality', and I would not have known what it meant if it had been mentioned. And as we used to visit every other bed in turn, I am quite sure that I must have known if any of the boys were interested in this vice. I don't think any of them knew anything about it, and that we merely used to go and swop yarns, and the whole spice of the matter was that it was forbidden to talk after Lights Out. Later, I nearly got expelled from my public school for the same offence when I was caught handing back a piece of India rubber that I had borrowed from another boy, and which was suspected of being a note. At that time I still did not know what homosexuality was, and was not in the least interested. Maybe this was unusual at a public school. My view is that only one or two boys went in for it, though the masters seemed to think that every boy in the school was at it.

  One of the first excitements at the Old Ride was a visit from HMS
Eclipse
, a cruiser training ship for Osborne cadets. We played cricket against them and, after dark, they turned their searchlight on to the school from where they were anchored in Bournemouth Bay, and I thought this was thrilling. From my dormitory window I could see the Old Harry rocks at Swanage, and I wonder what I would have thought if a fortune-teller had told me that fifty years later I should be navigating
Stormvogel
in the dark to an anchorage near these rocks so that a new main halyard could be rove during the Fastnet race. One of the masters was a young parson called Copleston, who was a tremendous favourite with us. He came to stay at my home one holiday. My mother liked him, but I don't think my father did, and the visit was not a great success. Another great favourite as a master was a brother of Beverley Nichols; later he introduced me to Beverley at Marlborough. There was another young master who could not control boys, and I got involved in an episode that made me squirm with shame afterwards. We were out for a walk and crossing an open heathland on a hot summer's day. We were teasing this master, who was very well dressed (it was a Sunday), and wearing a bowler hat. While one boy distracted him in front, I tipped the hat over his eyes, whereupon he lashed out with his stick and hit the wrong boy, which caused tremendous joy amongst the rest of us. At that moment two of my cousins, who happened to be staying at a house near by, although I did not know it, arrived on the scene, also out for a walk. They called me over and gave me a good dressing down. Years later, I thought how awful this must have been for the master, who was really an extremely nice chap.

  Then we had a German woman who taught music. She had a sharp nose and straggly, thin hair, and disliked me very much. She let me know this on every possible occasion. One day I said that my mother wanted me to learn music. I didn't, however. How could I be fond of music at that time, when I had to spend every singing lesson without uttering a word? I could not get out the sound I wanted to, and as a result had to stand up with the others and mouth the words without uttering a sound. With the possibility of my taking music lessons, Fraulein was as sweet as honey to me; but I don't know what the outcome would have been next term if the war had not intervened. She disappeared without trace. The school boiler stoker was called back to the Navy, and during one of his leaves he visited us, and held forth to an admiring group of boys telling us how the H
ood
and another great battleship were about to be launched and would blow the Kiel Canal gates up. Copleston, whom we called 'Pebbles', was a great one for Secret Service tales, and our walks along the cliff tops were made exciting by the thought of all the submarines near us at sea, and the spies round us on land.

  Somehow, I became captain of the cricket XI, although really I was never much good at cricket, I was also captain of the school. One of my friends of today, Air Commodore Allen Wheeler, who is now one of the brains of aircraft design, was a junior at the Old Ride at that time. He told me recently that he had been entered in a swimming race at the end of one term, and that I said to him, 'You have got to win – or else . . . ' and that he was so frightened that he went ahead and won. I expect I was still somewhat of a bully, and wonder if my experiences at Ellerslie were any excuse.

  I was also Number One in the drill squad which the school became as soon as the First World War broke out. This was the last time I 'took a parade', if you could call it that, until the middle of the Second World War when I was sent down to the Empire Flying School and had to take the parade as Duty Officer. I was scared stiff. Thirty years between parades is quite a long while, but we must have been hot stuff at the Old Ride, because I succeeded in foozling my way through the ordeal.