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  On another occasion, in what was then St Mary’s Fields, but is now, I suppose, a network of appendices to Priory Road, we found a big boy knocking about a smaller friend. Ken thought that we could appeal to the big boy’s better nature; I thought that we should be late for tea as it was. However, we intervened. There was never any doubt of our success. As soon as we came into the battle area, our superior claims were recognized. The small friend was forgotten; Ken was punched on the nose; the big boy, with all the blood on his hands which he wanted, slouched off defiantly; and I, who relate the story, gallantly picked up the wounded. It always was, it always would be, poor old Ken.

  4

  We lived at Henley House. Ken and I re-visited it after the war; not with any idea of putting up a plaque, though he was now a C.B.E., but to discover whether caterpillars really had frequented Mortimer and Priory Road with the persistence which memory alleged. It was less of a shock to find no caterpillars than to find that Henley House was now two houses, the gravelled playground at the back two gardens, and the road on which we had learned to bicycle (how many years ago) wearing the less homely name of crescent. The house had been two houses before it had been turned into a school; the playground two gardens; and certainly the road had always had the shape of a crescent; so perhaps Time had been more gentle with our birthplace than we had a right to expect. It might have been a Cinema de Luxe, with Shirley Temple (whom at one time we had resembled so greatly) enchanting and infuriating, as we did, all Kilburn.

  Our father had come there—let me get one authentic date into this book—in 1878. His was one of those private schools, then so common, now so unusual, for boys of all ages. At eight I was the youngest of them and the oldest may have been eighteen. Of the fifty boys, perhaps fifteen were boarders. One of my early contributions to English literature describes a typical football match, or fight, in the playground between Boarders and Day-boys. I spend a good deal of time to-day telling young writers that it is the actual writing and not the personal introduction to the editor which counts, but of course it does depend upon how young they are; under the age of ten one wants to know the editor. An early introduction to my father gave me the password into the Henley House School Magazine, my first fully-signed article carrying beneath the signature the disarming apology ‘Aged 8¾ years.’ One wishes that one could still apologize. In this account of the Fifteen-Years-War between Boarders and Day-boys a more mature writer was at work, aged nine years. In the first flush of inspiration I wrote ‘The Day-boys have thousands of chaps all crowding round and the Boarders never have more than eleven, but of course the Boarders always win. Hoorah for the Boarders.’ Of all my memories of those years the one most clear to me is this of myself at my desk in the big schoolroom biting the end of my pen into splinters, and acknowledging sadly to myself that ‘thousands’ is an exaggeration, and that in the pursuit of truth I ought to get it down to ‘hundreds.’ Reluctantly I got it down to hundreds. Hundreds? There were only thirty-five Day-boys in the school, and some would not be playing. Perhaps ‘twenty’ would be the truth. Yet must one keep to the strict truth? Never! So, in my last clean copy for the printer, the Day-boys had ‘about fifty chaps’ . . . and in all that I have written since I have held to my creed that Art is exaggeration–but in fifties not in thousands.

  Really, I suppose, we were qualified for both sides, and could have played for either, as does Royalty in the annual golf-match between Generals and Admirals. We out­-boarded the boarders in that we were there even for the holidays, but even the Day-boy who went home for dinner (as most of them did) could not (as we did) slip through the dividing door during the morning break, and take a glass of milk with his Mama. Boarders, however, we called ourselves, and as boarders hacked the opposition, and shrilled ‘Shoot!’ and cut our knees on the gravel, and screamed, ‘Shut up, you cad,’ and ‘No, I didn’t’ and ‘Come on, boarders!’

  Most of the games in that playground were rough or mildly dangerous or both. Our favourite was a form of leap-frog called ‘Foot-it.’ A taking-off line was drawn in the gravel, a boy bent down and the others jumped over him. At the end of every round he moved one foot’s length away from the line, so that at the end of six rounds the others would be taking off for the jump from about five feet away. Anybody who knocked him over took his place. At a suitable distance ‘one foot in’ would be allowed, one foot, that is, in the sacred ground between line and boy; then ‘two feet in’ and so on. In the end the boy would be at the far end of the playground, and the rest of us would be allowed eight flying strides before putting our hands on his back and vaulting him.

  It was a game, as you see, which provided for an inspiriting number of crashes; a game in which the nine-year-old, however active, however certainly the Headmaster’s Benjamin, was due for more than his share of them. Shortness of stride left him with a succession of a most unreachable, surely impassable, obstacles to negotiate, and on picking himself out of the ruins he had to bend and wait with beating heart for the thunderous approach of the heavy brigade, beneath whose weight he would become one again with the gravel. Yet we loved it, and were deeply disappointed to find that for the public schools it had no message. Our other favourite game was ‘Sunday-Monday.’ Each boy was given a day of the week or of succeeding weeks (as it might be ‘Monday fortnight’) by which to remember himself, a ball was thrown up against the high school wall, and a day called out. The owner of the day had to catch the ball, and, catching it, himself, throw and call out a day. If he missed it, he could only save his ‘life’ by throwing the ball at any boy in range and hitting him. One sees, I hope, the dilemma which was the game’s attraction. Being Tuesday, and seeing a high ball coming to Monday, what should one do? Remain close at hand in case he catches it and lobs an easy one for Tuesday. But if he fumbles and misses? Then one must be as far away as possible. The climax of the game was the Victor’s Reward, he being allowed three shots across the playground at the stationary behind of each player; or, if he preferred it as offering a wider target, six shots at the concerted behinds.

  In one corner of the playground was an erection known as The Gymnasium. Whether one can still buy a ‘gymnasium’ I do not know; nor how one would ask for it, nor at what shop begin. Without the utmost freedom of gesticulation one might return with anything from a mouse-trap to a small nonconformist chapel. It is one of the curses of descriptive writing that one has to translate every instinctive and reinforcing movement of the hands into fixed words; words, to the writer, so uncommunicative. Well then, the gymnasium was a piece of scaffolding fifteen feet high, which consisted of two inverted ‘V’s’ and an ornamental crosspiece. Of the four ‘V’ sides, one was a ladder, one a slider, and the other two were sliders with projecting rungs. The ornamental had been by Time’s fell hand defaced, down-razed and finally destroyed, so that it was now possible to proceed over the narrow crosspiece either cautiously on the stomach, or more daringly in a sitting position; and one boy, otherwise unremembered in history, but at this time famous, had walked across it. Even the most lethargic old gentleman must feel that a game of Follow-my-leader or Keep-the­-pot-a-boiling over this gymnasium, up the ladder of one V, across the top, down the slider of the other V, with each boy treading on the hands of the boy behind as they go up the ladder, being kicked by the boy in front as they cross the abyss, and receiving the full weight of several boys behind as they shoot down the slider–even the more lethargic old gentleman under The Times must see that this was fun. But there was even more fun to be got out of the gymnasium. From the crosspiece depended a swing; so catalogued, no doubt, but to us a flying trapeze. The swing was set in motion, we ran at it from the far end of the playground, took off from a spring-board, jumped, caught it, swung off at the other end, and left it swinging back for the next boy. Every game has its ecstatic moments; indeed, life offers quite tolerable diversions apart from games; but for a prolongation of ecstasy one must return to the flying trapeze: the year at the spring, morning at
nine, and oneself a few months younger. Childhood is not the happiest time of one’s life, but only to a child is pure happiness possible. Afterwards it is tainted with the knowledge that it will not last, and the fear that one will have to pay for it.

  The private sitting-room of the family had its windows over the playground, and it is to be supposed that our mother, looking out from time to time, and seeing her little ones balanced precariously fifteen feet over the gravel, or crushed into it by some bigger boy, said ‘Oh, dear’ to herself, and ‘Must they?’ But she showed none of this, knowing that a mother’s job is not to prevent wounds, but to bind up the wounded. In any case she had the Victorian woman’s complete faith in the rights of a father. It was he who was bringing us up. He conceded her the Little Lord Fauntleroy make-up (for I suppose it was she who liked it) and did his best to nullify its effect. We were to be ‘manly little fellows’ . . . and manly little fellows we were. If I were a psycho-analytical critic, and if I thought that this Edwardian writer Milne were worth one of my portentous volumes, I should ascribe everything which he had done and failed to do, his personality as revealed in his books and hidden in himself, to the consciousness implanted in him as a child that he was battling against the wrong make-up. There was a music-hall song of those days whose refrain was the simple exhortation: ‘Get your hair cut.’ It is possible that an accidental sight of me inspired it. It is also possible that my mother’s need of the reminder inspired, for better or worse, much of my life.

  5

  From time to time people have said to me ‘You are lucky,’ meaning by this that I was leading, as far as they could see, a happy, successful and not impoverished existence. But there has been a suggestion in the tone of their voice (as there has been in mine, when in imagination I have so addressed my opponent at golf) that if the luck had been evenly distributed, the success might have rested elsewhere. Fortune has been over-kind to the lucky ones. Now I suppose one’s instinct is to deny hotly that Fortune has had any sort of hand in one’s career. On the contrary, madam, I have carved out my career for myself; every penny I have spent I have earned; I owe nothing to the advice or the patronage of others but as soon as one has said this, one sees how absurd it is. It is true that I have never walked up Shaftesbury Avenue with a play in my pocket, and bumped into a man who was walking down Shaftesbury Avenue looking for that sort of play. It is true that no languishing work of mine has received the accidental stimulus of a royal or episcopal reference. Fortune has reserved her more spectacular appearance for others. But she must have been there in an unobtrusive way from the beginning, for how else could one begin at all? We may ‘carve out’ careers for ourselves, but our parentage gave us the implements with which to do it, and we certainly didn’t carve out our parents. Everybody’s luck, good or ill, begins on the day on which he was born. I was lucky. It is time that I tried to explain how lucky I was.

  My father, John Vine Milne, was the eldest son of a Presbyterian minister. My great-grandfather was, I believe, a stone-mason in Aberdeenshire. If he shares responsibility for the average cemetery display of Aberdeen granite, I hope that I have inherited nothing from him. But I am not even sure that he was a mason. A second cousin of Father’s died intestate in 1892 and left thirty thousand pounds, this being the only money that any relation of ours has ever left. Unfortunately she also left thirty second-cousins. A first-cousin had died a few months earlier, leaving, more characteristic-ally, three silver teaspoons, two of which went to my father and one to my uncle; and it is reasonable to suppose that the £٣٠,٠00, if she had survived to come into it, would have been divided in the same proportions. As it was, a genealogical tree had to be prepared, proving the equal claims of all these second-cousins, and in this way I learnt all about my grandmother’s family; which included (to the gratification of a boy of ten) an uncle of hers who had been one of Nelson’s captains at Trafalgar, and still had a monument to himself in Bath Abbey. All this may have crowded out any knowledge I had gleaned of my grandfather’s ancestry; or it may be that we were snobs about it. But I seem to remember thinking of my great-grand­father, not even as a carver of tombstones, but as the man who sat by the roadside, chipping stolidly at little heaps of granite, and trying not to get too much of it into his eyes.

  Grandfather Milne was the world’s most unworldly muddler. He was born in 1815; came from Aberdeen to England as a minister; went out to Jamaica as a missionary; converted another missionary to the belief that she could love, honour and obey him; returned to England as a married man; retired from the ministry and started a school; started with equal optimism twelve other schools in other parts of England; fathered hopefully ten children; returned to the ministry; and died in 1874—leaving behind him a widow and four sons to tell themselves that, after all, he was a good man. He was a very good man. His income was never more than eighty pounds a year; his children when they were not dying lived exclusively on porridge, and were educated for twopence a week at the village school; but he could come home triumphantly from a chapel meeting to tell his underfed family that he had promised twenty pounds for the new pews. And somehow the twenty pounds would be paid. It was for The Lord. Yet he was neither sanctimonious nor fanatical. He just believed quite simply that nothing which happened in this world mattered to a good man; to a man, that is, who believed in God and would return to Him. It mattered not if his sons were dukes or dustmen, so long as they were good. Nor did it matter if his wife did all the housework. And if the housekeeping could only allow one egg a day for the whole family, no doubt he ate it himself in an unworldly and absentminded way before giving the tramp at the door the last shilling in his pocket. It is difficult to explain to a tramp that being good is more important than beer.

  I never knew my grandfather and grandmother. I suppose I must have seen their photographs in the family album, but photographs of grandparents, taken in the days when one leant self-consiously against an aspidistra or the rigging of a yacht, give no impression of character. It may be that they loved each other wildly through all their troubles; my father wouldn’t know, and it was from him that I drew all my knowledge of them. When Grandfather Milne died, and the verdict of the current neighbourhood was passed on him: ‘The poor will miss him,’ nothing was said as to the feelings of the very poorest of the poor, his own family. They missed him, no doubt; but who can say whether it was with relief or regret that Grandmother Milne realized that he was now in a place where goodness was taken for granted? It may have been as heartbreaking to live without him as with him.

  Whatever her feelings, she could trust herself safely to her son John, now de jure as for years he had been de facto head of the house. John was twenty-eight. Hovering between duke and dustman, he had been clerk in the counting-house of a biscuit factory, apprentice in an engineering firm, usher in various schools, nurse to his younger brothers, and mouthpiece for a distracted wife. (‘You must talk to your father, John. Do you know what he’s done now?’) He had not reacted, as so many sons might have reacted, from the religious atmosphere of his home; he kept throughout his life the simple implicit faith of his father. But his religion was not a selfish religion, suited only to his personal use in the next world. It met the needs equally of his family and of those who had business dealings with him. I asked him once, when I was of an age not to be sent to bed for asking silly questions, whether goodness was so much God’s concern that He was unable to distinguish between Aristophanes and Mark Twain as humorists, or between Grace and Shrewsbury as cricketers. Was Grace only the better man of the two if he went to church more regularly? I never got the answer and don’t know it now. But I feel, and my grandmother would agree with me, that even in a Heaven for which goodness was the only qualification John would be entitled to a higher place than his unworldly father.

  For years now John’s over-mastering concern had been with education: the education of himself and of others. After twelve hours in the engineering shop, he would walk back to his room, spend an h
our getting clean, and then settle down to the real work of the day, the achievement of a degree. B.A. (London) was his goal. It might seem that that first hour was being wasted: one can read Latin and Greek as well with dirty hands as with clean; but to him the daily struggle to rid himself of the filth of the machines was a ritual which symbolized his approaching escape from the world of manual toil into the more gracious world of the intellect. If he lost the integrity of his hands, he would lose the integrity of his mind. It was too late to be a duke, but he was damned, he would indeed be damned, if he were a dustman.

  He escaped from the machines, and began to teach what little he had learnt, keeping always a chapter ahead of his class. He discovered that he really had the gift of teaching for which he had longed, and with it the gift of preserving discipline among boys bigger, and little younger, than himself. No doubt it was to mark that difference of age that he grew, as soon as he could, a beard. He must have looked very small and lonely without it. But in the rough schools to which his lack of academic qualification con-demned him a beard was not enough; he needed, and had, the two great qualities, courage and a sense of humour.

  Let me give one example from his later period of the way in which his sense of humour served him. He has reached at last the prosperity of a successful preparatory school in Thanet. The boys are having their dinner. ‘J. V.,’ as they call him privately, sits at a separate table with any of the family who may happen to be at home; the boys are at four long tables under his eye, with an assistant-master or a governess at each end. Outside, in a recess between the kitchens and the dining-room, my mother carves. She carves, as she does everything, better than anybody else in the house, and, like a true artist, insists therefore on doing it. When my father points out that it would be much nicer for her to have her lunch with him before the smell of food has sickened her of it, she says: ‘Yes, and then who’d do the carving?’ When he offers, with a twinkle, to get the head-carver from Simpson’s down for a term’s trial, she says, ‘What rubbish, as if I’d let him.’ This conversation has been circling on for years. My mother continues to carve. The Matron stands beside her, helping vegetables in an obviously inferior manner. She has just sent one of the boys upstairs to fetch something for her. The boy comes into the dining-room.