Читать книгу Long Before Forty - Cecil Louis Troughton Smith - Страница 4

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It may be that those early years in a hot climate conduced to precocity; or it may be that as the youngest of five I tended to copy my seniors, but however it was at three years old I could read with ease and could make some sort of show at writing. I was never taught either—I learnt to read by studying the big bound volumes of Chums which my brothers read. They contained, among other things, most thrilling serials by S. Walkey, about pirates and Spaniards and shiploads of treasure. It was only later (probably under the influence of The Scarlet Pimpernel) that Mr Walkey turned his attention to the French Revolution. At that time he dealt with a period indefinitely post-Elizabethan; there are bits of his stories which I can remember now. In one story the villain was called Perefixe (Don Something Perefixe, I suppose), and in another story (possibly the same, although I do not think so) there were two low comedy but high mettled characters called Captain Slapper and Lieutenant Bang who turned out eventually to be Admirals in the Dutch navy. In one story the hero had the advantage of understanding the conspirators’ conversation because he had learned Spanish at Leyden University—I had not the foggiest notion where or what Leyden University was, but I was entirely convinced by that bit of local colour. And in another story the hero and his faithful friend Brumby are being pursued by bloodhounds, when Brumby cuts his leg so that the blood running down leaves a trail behind him, and then, dashing away from his friend makes certain in this manner that the brutes will follow him and forsake the hero’s trail. But the hero must have been caught by those bloodhounds sooner or later despite Brumby’s action, for I can also remember his being traced by a pair of them, catching and killing one of them, and escaping by distracting the attention of the remainder by throwing the dead bloodhound to them carved in slices ‘the head to the biggest’, I remember. The mental picture of cutting a bloodhound into slices with a rapier was one particularly pleasing to my mind at that time.

But when I went to school at three years and a week I do not think my reading had yet progressed to such heights. Yet I remember struggling with boredom when I found myself dumped in a class and taught to read and to write. Writing, as I say, had come to me naturally in the way that some people learn to swim, yet here was I being tactfully initiated into pothooks and pothangers, in a class where the production of one recognisable pothanger in five minutes was an achievement accorded praise. Nowadays, I understand, children do not begin to read or write at school until they are seven or so—if I had been sent to a school like that I shudder to think of the enormities my restlessness would have urged me into.

The school, by the way, was a Council school, for my father, thank God, had no snobbery in the matter. He had five children to educate, and although he had an income which was considered large in those days he had plenty to do with his money—himself to maintain in Egypt, and all of us in England, and the expenses of the voyages to and fro whenever leave came his way, and so on. If we went to a Council school when we were young there would be all the more money to spare when we grew up and needed it; moreover, and more important than all, we could win scholarships from a Council school at an earlier age than we could win scholarships from any other school. Christ’s Hospital, for instance, offered scholarships to boys at L.C.C. schools; the lucky winner of one was fed and clothed and educated at quite a good public school at no cost whatever from the age of ten to that of seventeen. There was nothing to compare with this open to any child at a preparatory school—most of the scholarships at public schools still leave a large hiatus between the award and the total of fees and expenses, as I was to discover later.

So to a Council infants’ school I went—first in a perambulator pushed by the faithful Maggie and later on my own legs escorted by bored sisters. Straightaway came the first introduction to a sensation which I came to know well later on, and to hate more powerfully every year—the sensation of being different. I was not as the other children were—not because of the beauty of my soul or my body, but because of circumstances. I had no father (or old man or dad) at home. I had been born in Egypt. I had travelled in big steamers, and I had looked camels in the eye at other places than the Zoo. I wore better clothes than most of the other children there, I was the only Cecil among dozens of Tommies and Berts, and, try as I would, I could not talk Cockney like them. All this marked me out in the eyes of the children, just as my ability to read and write marked me out in the eyes of the teachers. It is perfectly horrible to feel different from one’s fellows, although I cannot recall any single example of ill treatment by the other children on account of my difference. We were an astonishingly tolerant crowd. I can remember a general knowledge lesson when the teacher dissected a fresh herring in front of us, and later announced that she would give the result to the child who answered her recapitulatory questions best.

We all of us laid ourselves out to win that prize—as children will do for any sort of prize—and we were mildly astonished when it was given to one of the duller children in the class who had not been asked a single question. It never occurred to a single one of us that he was given that herring because he had no boots to his feet and probably had not had a good meal in his belly since the day of his birth, poor little devil. We never realised in the least that the teacher had performed a prodigy of tact in not asking him questions, because the poor stunted little blighter could not have answered one of them. I don’t expect that any of us, for that matter, had ever paid any attention (beyond an indifferent mental note) to the fact that he was barefooted!

Rags and poverty made no difference to us, but curiously enough my smart little suits and white socks, and most especially my manner of talking (described as la-di-da or swanky) often excited comment, scornful or amused, although public criticism never went as far as blows or even the mildest physical annoyance. I was admitted as an equal into their games, and even as a leader in times of war, but I was never allowed to consider myself a normal human being. And as time went on and my wretched family began to distinguish itself the difference became more marked—my elder brother, too old for Christ’s Hospital, won a scholarship to a good secondary school (the Headmaster now is admitted to the Public Schools Headmasters’ Conference, and so it calls itself a public school) and my next brother brought off the coup my father had planned for him and won a Christ’s Hospital scholarship (one of twenty distributed among twenty thousand candidates) and went off to become a contemporary of Edward Blunden’s and my sisters both won scholarships and I was clearly expected to do as well or better. The rumour had gone round that my brother and I were intended to become doctors—in a school where ninety-nine children out of a hundred had no ambition beyond becoming office boys or shop boys at fourteen this made me a phenomenon as remarkable as a pink tiger.

How I hated it! How I wished that I was not two years younger than anyone else in the class! At one period my child’s mind deduced that the cause of the difference lay in the fact that I was not allowed to play in the streets as every other child did. I used to beg my mother to allow me to do so. I was firmly convinced that a course of top spinning in the gutters, or of kicking a tennis ball about in a quiet, side street, or of cricket against a lamp-post was a sure route to the paradise of the ordinary. But my mother would not see my point of view, and I soon came to realise that even if I could persuade her that playing in the streets would stop my becoming a doctor she would never agree to my playing in the streets.

I tried to gain my ends by stealth, of course, in the end—no child is ever going to brook without a struggle restrictions which he thinks unreasonable. On one occasion I climbed out of an upper bedroom window and scrambled down to ground level by way of the ornamental stonework round the front door. That won me a Saturday morning in the streets, but as the performance had been carried out in broad daylight under the eyes of at least twenty mothers, all of whom hurried to tell my mother about my terrible deed, my reception on reaching home did not encourage me to repeat the experiment.

My mother emerged victorious in the clash of wills eventually, and I had to resign myself to the amusements of a lonely child indoors. Long battles with lead soldiers on the playroom floor (my brothers had worked out the rules of a system of Little Wars long before H. G. Wells wrote his epoch-making monograph on the subject) or still more complicated naval campaigns with highly conventionalised paper ships (the game was devised by my elder brother who was a positive genius in such matters) representing battleships and frigates of Nelson’s time. Before I was ten I had marched armies in dozens to Berlin and Moscow, and directed uncounted squadrons to places like Cape Coast Castle and Singapore, while expressions like ‘turning a flank’ and ‘breaking the line’ fell from my lips as mere commonplaces. Those brothers of mine, ten years or so older than myself, had indicated these possibilities to me, had even condescended to play with me on occasions when high and mighty eighteen year olds had nothing better to do than to play with a lonely eight year old, but for some obscure motive I concealed from them the results of this initiation—the Army Lists covering scores of pages of foolscap, the Naval Operation Orders beginning, in a style copied from the letters in Laughton’s Letters of Lord Nelson, with ‘I hereby require and command you’, the newspapers and bulletins proclaiming the victories won on land or sea—masses and masses of scribbled paper stored with conscientious secrecy in my toy boxes, and of which I still have a very few samples remaining.

I read, of course, during those years, enormously, voluminously. There were five tickets at the Public Library round the corner available for my use, and at least once a week (later on it became once a day, honestly) I would toil round there with an armful of books to change. Partly as a result of practice and partly by accident, I was able to read very fast; I suppose I was not more than seven years old when I formed the habit (which I have maintained ever since) of reading one book a day at least. No public library can stand that sort of strain very long. The standard authors like Henty and Ballantyne and Collingwood (a boy’s author who does not seem to me to have been awarded his full meed of recognition) and Robert Leighton (one of his books, a good one, is called The Thirsty Sword, and naturally appealed to me) were devoured in enormous gulps. Circumstances forced me into new paths, such as I had heard my elders discussing. By the easy gradient of S. R. Crockett and Rider Haggard I ascended to the heights of Dickens (whose work I found I disliked intensely) and Thackeray (whom I enjoyed) and Mrs Henry Wood and Charlotte M. Yonge and Jane Austen and G. P. R. James and Henry James and H. G. Wells (why, I thought, did a man who could write The War of the Worlds bother about stuff like Kipps?)—absurd stuff for a child to read. At first, I suppose (for I cannot remember clearly) I did not understand one sentence in three of what I read, but the pressure set up in an inelastic library remedied that, because inevitably I was forced into re-reading, again and again, until I had got hold of some glimmering of what the author was after. There is a very definite memory still remaining of how I felt when, sitting lonely in the quiet playroom, I first began to realise (I was ten years old or so at the time) that there was a meaning to that hitherto meaningless story The Turn of the Screw.

And on those occasions when nowhere in the library could I find any fiction which appealed to me, I was urged by slow degrees into reading non-fiction—some of it the oddest, most poisonous stuff imaginable according to some; Suetonius and Gibbon along with Cherry Kearton’s nature books and W. H. Hudson and so on. Suetonius, of course, despite the fact that large chunks of his were left in the original Latin which I could not translate, exactly suited certain moods of mine. The fantasies of a child, especially a lonely child, centre frequently about omnipotent power. The maddest freaks of the Caesars roused neither horror nor surprise in my mind. They had my fullest approval and sympathy. The kind of thing they did when they found themselves (as no mortal has found himself since) at the head of the civilised world with absolutely no check, moral or political or religious, upon their actions, was just the sort of thing I had already considered doing were I ever to find myself (as I described it to myself) ‘with no policemen and no God’. Caligula in one direction, and Vitellius in another, and Nero in another, as Suetonius represents them, are very good presentments of children freed from control.

When all else in the way of reading failed, there was always the Encyclopaedia—Harmsworth’s, which was published when I was six or seven. It was good sound stuff, most of it—a far better production than the Harmsworth’s Universal Encyclopaedia which appeared soon after the war—and eventually I was lured into reading most of the contents of its seven volumes. The study began, of course, by going to it for confirmation or explanation of things found in Suetonius and my other favourites, and the temptation to read the next article frequently overcame me, until an hour or two later I would find I had reached the end of the volume. Some of what I read stuck in my mind. I must have been a curiously horrid child—W. S. Gilbert reserved a place in his little list for ‘children who are up in dates and floor you with them flat’ and I was up in many subjects besides dates. The one solitary engaging trait I exhibited was my complete inability to pronounce three-quarters of the words I wanted to use.