Читать книгу The Inside Story - Anthony Westell - Страница 11

~ Chapter 2 ~

Growing Up in the Old World

Shortly after the end of the First World War, my father got a job as an insurance agent and inspector in Exeter, the capital city of the county of Devon in the rural southwest — one county up from Land’s End. My brother, Woodroffe John, was born there in 1921,1 in 1926, and my sister, Diana Wescombe, in 1930. I grew up in that old city and it was part of my nurture. It has a city wall, part of which was built by the Romans, a Norman castle built by William the Conqueror, and a Gothic cathedral built by generations of craftsmen on the site of an earlier Anglo-Saxon church. Translated from Latin, the inscription under the cathedral clock warns, “The hours perish and are reckoned to our account.” More cheerfully, it is said also to be the clock in the nursery rhyme:

Hickory dickory dock

The mouse ran up the clock;

The clock struck one

and down he run

Hickory, dickory dock!

John Graves Simcoe, first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, attended school in Exeter, and died in a house in the ancient Close surrounding the cathedral. Exeter’s Guildhall, where the city council met, is Tudor, as is Mol’s Coffee House in the cathedral Close, and the nearby Ship Inn where Elizabethan sea captains swaggered with bags of Spanish gold. Sir Francis Drake, greatest of the Elizabethan exploring adventurers, is supposed to have said that after his own ship he most liked the Ship Inn in Exeter. The city sent three ships down the River Exe to fight the Spanish Armada, and Queen Elizabeth rewarded it with its motto, Semper Fidelis, or Ever Faithful.

Among numerous churches there is St. Olave’s, thought to have been originally the house chapel of Gytha, Countess of Wessex, sister-in-law of King Canute who sat on his throne on the beach and ordered the tide not to rise. Was he really trying to command the tide, or was he demonstrating to his sycophantic courtiers the limits of his power? I prefer the latter version. Gytha was also the mother of King Harold, the last Anglo-Saxon King, who died with a Norman arrow in his eye at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The Norman conqueror, William, handed Gytha’s chapel over to French monks, and built his red sandstone castle on a hill in the city. Naturally, he called it Rougemont, now also the name of a hotel. I can’t say that as a child or even as a young man I was much interested in the city’s history; familiarity bred not contempt but indifference. But growing up in such an environment must surely have influenced how I came to view time and change. The past was everywhere. By contrast, in most Canadian cities everything is new, or soon will be. Attention is focused on the future rather than on the past, on mastering change rather than accepting and enduring it. (I exclude from this sweeping generalization the Aboriginal and Québécois peoples who are steeped in folk history. Perhaps that is why the rest of Canada has so much trouble understanding and coming to terms with them.) Arriving in Canada when I was thirty, I was excited by the newness of the country, even if the cities were drab and the suburbs appallingly raw. But with roots in the Old World, I probably don’t think about time and change in quite the same way as someone raised in Toronto or Vancouver. Europeans have been in North America for about four hundred years, which might seem to guarantee permanency unless you have grown up with the fact that the Romans remained in Exeter, which they called Isca, for about four hundred years, then marched away never to be seen there again.

When I was born my stomach was not fully developed, which meant spending a few months on a diet, preferably in a mild climate, and this led me to another and vastly important part of the physical environment in which I grew up. The kindly doctor’s first idea was that mother and I might spend some months in the south of France, but my father objected that he could not possibly afford such a thing. Ah, said the doctor, then he might try a handy line of sand dunes which had their own mild weather system. This magical place was Exmouth Warren, now Dawlish Warren, the home of many rabbits in the mouth of the River Exe less than ten miles south of Exeter. The river first broadens into a mile-wide estuary, passing the deer park at Powderham Castle and villages with such splendid names as Starcross and Cockwood, and then swings around in a bay formed by the Warren sand dunes, which project from the mainland. The river flows out into the English Channel through a passage a few hundred yards wide between the end of the Warren and a resort town called, appropriately, Exmouth. Where the Warren begins at the mainland there were, and still are, golf links, and at far end, opposite Exmouth, there was before Second World War a colony of maybe thirty ramshackle summer homes. A couple were on stilts so that the tide could rise and fall beneath them, one of which always flew a line of signal flags which said, we were told, “If you can read this come in and have one.” There was also the beached hull of an old sailing vessel, with windows cut in the sides to make a house, called Kate. But most cottages, as we would call them, were nestled in sand dunes, amid the tall spiky grass.

It was here that father bought a bungalow called simply The Cabin, for £200 (perhaps $10,000 today). It was built of wood, with a corrugated iron roof, with the bay in front and the sea behind. There was no power on the Warren, so we cooked on primus stoves which sometimes flared alarmingly in our wooden house, and went to bed by oil lamp. We drank rainwater collected in iron tanks and boiled, and the outside toilet was connected to wooden barrels buried in the dunes to function as a primitive septic tank. There was one large living room and a double bedroom, a kitchen of sorts and four tiny sleeping rooms, hardly more than closets. When my father bought it the furniture consisted of one table painted with a poker layout, suggesting that the previous owners had been sporting gents. The family spent fourteen summers there, with our cook and a nursemaid in the early years. There was a store of sorts which sold essentials such as candies — we called them sweets — and a mile or so along the beach, where the Warren joined the mainland, there were a couple of cafés for day trippers. But for serious shopping we had to go to Exmouth, which meant taking a boat. There were boatmen who plied for hire, rowing or sailing across the gap between Exmouth and the Warren, which could be turbulent as the tide squeezed in and out of the bay, and every Warren family had a favorite. Ours was a beery old salt who, at the start of every season, met us at Exmouth, loaded us with all our baggage into his little open boat until the gunwales were only a few inches above the water, and set off. If there was a suitable wind, he raised a tiny triangular lugsail and stuck an oar over the stern with which to steer. No breeze, and he rowed, sweating beer and grumbling. He took us as close to The Cabin as the tide would allow, and we had to to walk the rest of the way across soft sand and up and down dunes, carrying our cases. It was inevitable, of course, that we would soon get our own boat, and the first was a heavy, clinker-built — that is, the planks overlapped each other instead of being edge to edge — eleven-footer, called Devonia, and probably a cast-off ship’s boat. Perhaps my earliest memory is sitting with my father in the stern, dressed in a blue coat with brass buttons, as my brother John rowed along the path cast by the moon on the still sea. I suppose I was three or four. We began to learn to sail in that old boat, and John went on to become a self-taught but well-known boat designer and builder.

When still in his teens — I use that word although there was no such a thing as a teenager then; you were a boy, a youth or a man — he designed and built for me, in our third floor playroom at home, an eight-foot sailing boat, with paddles for alternative locomotion. He pulled a piece of old black oak out of the rose bed in the garden and shaped it to make the prow, and for a sail we cut and hand-stitched the thick canvas of an old sailing vessel. When it was finished, he rigged a block and tackle and we swung it through the window and down into the back garden. Unfortunately, he used a composite wood for the hull, and no matter how often we painted and caulked, it sopped up water and had to be dried out every few weeks. But I still have a photo of me, aged about ten, scooting along under sail in that little boat. John’s most successful design was a racing dinghy called the 505 — 5.05 metres — and they are still raced all over the world, including here in Toronto. As a youth, he loved to race with the Exmouth sailing club, and as any sailor will tell you, racing skippers who are mild ashore can become tyrants in a boat, so while I often crewed for him, I learned to detest racing — and in fact lost whatever competitive spirit I might have had. But the love of cruising has stayed with me, and with friends I have explored Lake Ontario, Lake Erie, and the North Channel of Georgian Bay. When I hear people complain that the lakes are cold even in summer, I think that they should try the English Channel at any time.

We were able to run free and wild on the Warren, in or on the water almost as much as on land, sailing, rowing, swimming, and enjoying all sorts of adventures with hardly an adult in sight. A mackerel fishing fleet went out on most days from the village of Lympstone — now the site of a huge Royal Marines base — and once they caught a small shark in the nets and brought it ashore to kill it on the beach. They told us they would sell it to a fish and chip shop, but I suppose they were pulling our legs. But what excitement! When porpoises drove millions of mackerel into the bay we could go out with no more than a piece of silver paper and a hook on a string and pull in the little fish until it became boring. Ruthlessly, we pulled soft crabs from their hiding places when they were changing shells and cut them up for bait. I couldn’t do it now. But there was retribution: Once, casting with a rod and line, I managed to lodge a hook in my finger while the weight went seaward. My father had to take me in the boat to Exmouth hospital where the doctor had an easy solution; drive the hook right through the finger, snip off the barb, and pull out the shank. I had the scar for years. Airplanes were not common in those times but one day a pilot lost in the mist landed on the beach. The people in the next bungalow entertained him to lunch while we hovered enviously outside, then pointed him towards the nearest airfield, and off he went. The railway line between London and the southwest ran along the seawall on the mainland facing us across the estuary. At night we could see the lighted trains and dream of where they were bound, north and east to a London we had never visited, or south and west to Penzance near the very tip of England, Land’s End.

Nowadays when my wife and I visit Britain we take the train to the south west. Just outside Exeter the line joins the estuary and it’s a wonderfully scenic trip for miles, tunnelling through the red sandstone headlands, and following the coast so closely that it runs along the seafront of villages and towns. It used to be, perhaps still is, that if you took a window seat in the dining room of the Courtenay Arms Hotel in the estuary village of Starcross — Courtenay being the family name of the Earls of Devon whose castle is nearby — you could look up at the underside of the trains as they raced by a few feet away. I suppose people were so anxious to get railway service that they would accept almost any condition the Great Western Railway company demanded. The line was built by a visionary engineer with a towering reputation, Isambard Kingdom Brunei, but he overreached himself and lost a huge amount of money when he chose the stretch of line at Starcross to experiment with the madcap idea that engines could be powered by atmospheric pressure. Rather more reliable is the ferry from Starcross across the estuary to Exmouth; it has been running since the twelfth century.

We children were at the Warren in the summer of 1932 — I was six years old — when my father, who had commuted to Exeter, returned to tell us our mother was dead. She had gone into a nursing home for an operation to remove gallstones obstructing her bile duct, and died from pulmonary embolism, or blood clot in the lungs. I know no more about it than that; it was never discussed and I never thought to ask my father for information. Why a nursing home rather than a hospital? I don’t know, although I believe that the middle and upper classes tended to favour private nursing homes over public hospitals. The death of my mother must of course have been a defining event in my life, but I have few memories of her. I do remember, or think I do, picking raspberries for breakfast with her in the back garden of our first home in Exeter. My father told me that when she dressed as Father Christmas and appeared in the living room, I asked why Santa was wearing Mummy’s shoes — perhaps the first signs of the observant and skeptical reporter. I have a faint sense, more a feeling than a memory, of how it felt to hold her hand, sort of warm and cool at the same time. Less pleasantly, I had for some reason a horror of brown apple cores and I seem to remember her teasing me with a core, pushing it toward me. Perhaps that is why I still find them distasteful. And that’s about it for memories.

There was a housemaid/nursemaid who looked after me, as was common in the middle class, so perhaps I did not see that much of my mother. But I do remember, and wish I didn’t, what I thought when, having heard of her death, I went along the beach to find a friend to with whom to share the news. I thought, “I should feel sad, but I don’t.” My brother, aged eleven, was devastated by mother’s death, but he was more aware of her than I was. She had, for example, been teaching him to play golf with a set of clubs cut down to his size. My sister was only two and unaware of what had happened. But there was I, apparently unmoved and wondering why. Was I already a detached, introspective, unemotional child, or was I instinctively raising psychological defences against a loss I could not acknowledge? Certainly, as an adult, I have never been much moved by death — except of animals. I shed no tears when my father died of a stroke at seventy; I was having breakfast in Toronto when my brother called with the news, and I went back to eating toast and marmalade. Nor were there tears when my brother died of cancer at seventy. I can rationalize my lack of feeling; death is part of life and comes to us all, so why make a fuss when a relative or friend departs? But that did not work when I took our much-loved family dog to be put down. I was with him when the vet gave him an overdose of anaesthetic and, watching him go to sleep and die, I was torn between grief — the tears came later — and the feeling that we should all be so lucky in the manner of our going. But, then, I have always been fond of dogs; they seem to me on the whole to be of better disposition than most humans: faithful friends, cheerful, good tempered through thick and thin.

In my own defence I can say that if the death of others leaves me unmoved, so does the prospect of my own death, which at my age cannot be long delayed. My brother accepted early death as preferable to the prospect of a painful old age as his incurable cancer spread, and I feel the same. I have completed a living will requesting that there be no heroic — strange word — measures to keep me from dying. But for me the troubling question remains: Was I already an unfeeling and introspective child when my mother died, or did her death make me so?

My mother was buried in Weston, perhaps because she grew up there and her sister Babs still lived there. I remember nothing of the funeral, but I do remember that when my father was driving my brother and I home to Exeter, the canvas top of the car was folded down and I was allowed to sit up on it with my head in the wind. And then we stopped halfway and I had a ginger beer. Aunty Babs came to Exeter to look after us, but that lasted only a few weeks, no doubt because of the mutual dislike she shared with my father. The burden then fell on my father’s mother, Alice, a formidable widow. I have a photo of me, aged about four, with my two grandmothers. My mother’s mother, Catherine, is a plump, cheerful old lady, and she has her arm around my waist. Grandma Alice is standing erect, stern-faced and in black from her enormous hat to her shoes, perhaps still in mourning for her husband who had died a couple of years earlier. I realize now what a sacrifice she made in selling her comfortable home in Weston, leaving her friends, and moving to Exeter at the age of seventy-two to run her son’s household of three children and two servants. But I have no warm memories — and there I go again, coldly detached. Her main concern, naturally, was my two-year-old sister. My brother was soon sent off to board at a minor public school, as my mother had wished, and I was pretty much left to my own devices. I remember that granny scraped her fork on her false teeth when she ate, which at least has made me conscious in later life of how easy it is for adults to offend children. And she did take me to tea in a grand restaurant on my birthdays and allow me to dive into a parfait, an ice cream and fruit concoction which came in a tall glass requiring the use of a very long spoon.

She also took me to visit relatives; he was a tenant farmer and his wife was probably the worst cook ever, producing every day meals that could be eaten only with fortitude. On hot afternoons granny and I lay sweating on a featherbed while she read sad stories that reduced us both to tears. I remember being hoisted onto the back of a terrifyingly tall horse, and have never been there since. In my view, horses are too large and nervous to be trusted. And I can still see the sad, accusing eye of a rabbit shot by the farmer at harvest time. Granny died in 1940, aged seventy-nine, and my father said later it was probably a blessing because she would not have been able to cope with the difficulties of running a household in time of war — a questionable idea because she was a tough old lady who had lived through one war in which casualties were much more numerous than in World War II. On learning of her death, I did not cry.

I was a shy child who retreated to my bedroom rather than meet visitors, and while I thought I had overcome that defect when I grew up, it was pointed out that as an adult I pose for pictures, which I hate having taken, with my head on one side, apparently because I am still trying to escape notice. I never went to children’s parties because I was afraid I might be embarrassed by girls, of whom I knew none except my sister, until I went to work at sixteen and, despite my best efforts, found them unavoidable. Music, particularly swing, was pleasant in my ear but meant nothing to my feet so I have never been able to dance. The last attempt was when, emboldened by drink, I persuaded my wife to try again. I fell over, and she said, “Never again.” I did not stay at school for lunch, or dinner as we called it, because I was afraid I would have to eat food I did not like and would then be sick — throw up, we would say — in public. I cycled a mile-and-a-half home to eat, and then returned, all in about ninety minutes. That fear of eating in public stayed with me until, as an apprentice reporter, I had to travel to country towns and would have died of starvation had I not overcome my problem. In those early years I developed a way of coping with fears, if not conquering them, by asking myself what was the worst thing that could happen. I could then accept that the worst thing would not be the end of the world — close perhaps, but not the end.

But if I was an insecure, mixed up and introspective kid, I did have close friends, one a neighbour at home and the other at school, and with both I still have occasional contact. And I did get on quite well with my father. Many of his insurance clients were farmers, and he sometimes took me in the company car to visit them, usually on market day in one of the rural towns around Exeter. He liked to tell a story which both amused and horrified me, and then provided the same delicious thrill for my own children when I retold it: A farmer once took him to lunch in the village pub where they enjoyed a hearty meal, the standard “Soup, meat and veg., apple pie, and cheese,” washed down with a pint of ale — all of which the farmer pronounced so good that they would have the meal again, which they did.

On weekends, father played golf at the Warren links, where in fact he ended his days as club secretary. He often took the Exeter city clerk as his guest, and I’m sure it was entirely coincidental that he insured the city buses. I sometimes went along to carry his clubs, or to take our dog, Chips, for a run in the sand dunes. It would be wrong to say that father and I were close; I never discussed with him my feelings or problems, nor he with me. After he died, my brother and sister discovered when going through his papers that he had been paying maintenance for an illegitimate daughter, born in 1947. As he had obviously not wanted us to know about it, they decided not to try to identify the mother or the child, and in fact did not for years tell me, in Canada. Somewhere, I may have a half-sister. My father had been living on his pension and left almost nothing, but my brother sent me a pair of gold cufflinks. I suppose that I never really knew my mother or my father, but at least my father and I were comfortable with each other, which is better than some father-child relationships of which I have heard.

I quite enjoyed school, which was of course a formative influence. My family was not religious; I was not christened, which could have been because of my health, but I don’t recall ever going to church as a family. However, the school a few hundred yards from our first house, to which I was sent at the age of three or four, happened to be much influenced by religion. It was called Mount Radford, but was better known as Vine’s, after the proprietor and headmaster, Theodore Vine, a member of the Plymouth Brethren, a form of Lutheranism combining, says my dictionary, elements of Calvinism and Pietism. There were perhaps a dozen boarders who lived in the big house with Mr. and Mrs. Vine and were mainly the sons of missionaries serving abroad. The masters tended to be enthusiastic Methodists, and the hundred or so day boys, of which I was one, were mainly the sons of shopkeepers and other small businessmen. Sons of farmers were let out early, to the envy of the rest of us, so that they could catch trains to their homes in the country. We followed the national board of education curriculum, preparing us for the Oxford school leaving certificate. But Vine seemed to me to put a special emphasis on Bible studies, with prayers and a hymn every morning, and occasional visits from missionaries who, in return for our pennies, told uplifting and sometimes entertaining stories about converting the black heathen.

Vine was an excellent teacher but an austere man who stalked about in a mortarboard and black robe in which there was a pocket for a bamboo cane, a hidden intimidator seldom used but always threatening. I was a casual student, interested in history, English literature, and composition, a class in which I somehow internalized rules of grammar and syntax which I can’t articulate but which send an alarm signal when something is wrong. These days I get signals with almost every newspaper or book I read. I accept that language and usage change, and that I became obsessive about some rather silly rules, such as split infinitives. But I insist on drawing the line at misusage that changes meaning. For example, even the most respected writers misplace the word only in sentences and so change meaning. To explain this to students, when I was teaching at Carleton University in Ottawa, I invented a handy guide:

“Only I drink sherry in the morning,” means that no one else does.

“I only drink sherry in the morning,” means that I do nothing else.

“I drink only sherry in the morning,” means that I drink nothing else.

“I drink sherry only in the morning,” means that I do not drink it at other times.

A student once remarked that if I drank less sherry I might not have this obsession with usage, so I changed sherry to coffee. But I trust this guide will now lurk in the mind of every reader, and rise to worry them when they write a sentence using the word only.

I enjoyed some mathematics because numbers are so reliable — they always add up the same way, or they ought to — but science was and remains a mystery; I never did figure out whether the 2 in H₂O referred to the parts of hydrogen or of oxygen. It could be either, couldn’t it? I was hopeless at French; Vine gave up in disgust after I got two marks out of fifty despite his special coaching. Maybe it was the illogicality of irregular verbs that got logical me down. And then there was the Bible. Vine taught us the Gospel According to St. Paul in preparation for our leaving exam, and it involved verse-by-verse scrutiny and a good deal of memorizing. Shakespeare, incidentally, was taught in the same way, with the assigned play in my year being The Tempest: all that wonderful language reduced to nit-picking analysis and mental drudgery. But I read recently that London cabbies actually enlarge their brains when they memorize “The Knowledge” of streets and addresses, which they have to do to obtain a licence, so maybe forcing kids to memorize texts did pay off.

But back to the Bible, as they say. I can’t remember exactly when I came to the conclusion but, ever the detached analyst, I left school an agnostic. I should explain my reasoning, but I do not wish to give offence to those of other opinions, so let me say at once that I do not claim to know the truth. Indeed, it is precisely because I see no conclusive evidence either for or against the existence of some sort of directing or superior power that I am an agnostic. Nor do I mock faith by saying, as I think Oscar Wilde did, that faith is believing in something one knows to be untrue, or as H.L. Mencken put it, faith is having an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. Faith may be given to some and not to others, and for all those capable of faith in a kindly God it must be a comfort in our turbulent and uncertain world. But that is not for me. While I am prepared to accept that there might be some sort of superior power, I see no evidence whatsoever that there is a loving God who sees every sparrow fall and has a personal interest in me — and I see plenty of evidence to the contrary. The Old Testament God was clearly far from loving. We are told that when he became displeased with his handiwork in creating the world, he drowned almost every living thing. The God of the New Testament is hardly better; he is said to have arranged matters so that his son had to be crucified in order that the rest of us might have a chance of being forgiven our sins and admitted to his presence. Some loving father.

Who Jesus was, and what he actually did and said, is still being debated after some two thousand years, but the notion that he is worthy of worship because he gave his life for us hardly bears scrutiny. Lots of mortals have endured torture and death for much less without being proclaimed gods. But perhaps Jesus has suffered the fate of many prophets: In trying to translate the master’s hazy vision into regulations for the faithful, disciples become bureaucrats and the essence of the teaching is lost — or, worse, turned into a tyranny. St. Paul was perhaps the first Christian bureaucrat, mullahs seem to mess up Mohammed, and Lenin made the worst of Marx. The question remains, however, of why, if there is no God and no accountability at the end of life, we behave even half decently instead of indulging our worst instincts. The best answer I have is that it is in our own interest to treat others as we wish them to treat us, and if that comes from the Sermon on the Mount I don’t think it proves Jesus to be anything more than a wise man. So, lacking conviction, I have to be content to do the best I can to make the world a slightly better place, or at least no worse than I found it, without asking or expecting divine help. But, and this is a sobering thought, questions such as these may not bother modern children who seem hardly to be aware of the Bible which, right or wrong, has been such a central part of our cultural history.

It was usual to take the Oxford school leaving exam at sixteen, but I became eligible in the winter of 1941, when I was still fifteen, and, to Vine’s considerable surprise, passed with sufficient honours to have won “Exemption from Matriculation” had I had the requisite foreign language credit, the mystifying French. The explanation for my modest success was in part that I had always enjoyed exams, writing around a question to which I did not know the answer, to influence the examiner by displaying what I did know. Later in life, I used this technique in journalism to persuade editors and readers that I knew more about the subject than I really did. But looking back on the school years, I think I got a pretty good grounding in the basics. I learned also that I was hopeless in sports of all kinds. In the school yard we played cricket with balls we made ourselves by encasing a bundle of rags in a string net and soaking the result in water. The explanation for that curious custom, I think, was not poverty but respect for the school windows and a healthy fear of what damage a hard ball could do when bounced on an asphalt surface. There was a school sports field about a mile away, and there we played with the proper equipment. By appearing regularly as a volunteer to umpire games or, with others, to replace a horse in tugging an enormous roller over the wicket, I earned a place eventually in the school’s cricket team. I was opening bat with the less than heroic role of dispiriting the opposing bowlers, not by scoring runs but by stonewalling their best efforts. But we weren’t much good as a team anyway and always lost our annual game with the inmates of a nearby asylum, perhaps because we were distracted by the hope that they would act like lunatics, which they never did. I was as averse to competition in school sports as I was in dinghy racing, but that may have been because I knew I was without talent and would lose. In other words, I was unwilling to face defeat. Against that painful thought, when I played chess I preferred to lose a good game than to win a poor one. But for whatever reason I have never been interested in professional sports, which cuts me off from an important element in male culture, even from the Canadian national culture of hockey. I never read the sports pages in the newspapers or watch games on TV — and I couldn’t care less who wins in the Olympics, which I suppose makes me an alien in today’s culture, and an agnostic alien at that. So much for my childhood.