Hindsight Read online

  The path beyond the gate was wide and gravelled, with lawn to the right, and to the left a stone balustrade with steps leading up to a flagged terrace behind which rose the main cause of the glitter, an enormous greenhouse with a dome at the centre. The lawn lay level for a couple of yards; sloped abruptly, levelled and sloped again, running on in a series of green undulations down the hill for almost a hundred yards to an area patterned with little box hedges round geometrical flower beds. Statues were dotted about, as the woman had said, and small dark trees clipped into cone-shapes. Paths ran down either side of the greenness, gravel where the levels were and balustraded steps at the slopes. Two women were coming slowly up the right-hand path.

  Stocky and the dreadful-war woman led the procession along the top path, so that the girls were strung out across its length and the boys only just through the door, with Mr Floyd and the other schoolmistress waiting to close it, when the madness came. It happened all at once, or seemed to, though probably a few girls in the middle had begun it, but in an instant the whole troop of them, hand in hand to make a chain right across the lawn, were charging down the slope, long hair streaming; a wild whoop, wobbly with giggles, echoed between the garden walls.

  ‘No! Girls! No!’ shrieked the dreadful-war woman.

  They swooped across the next level and on to the second slope. The yell changed note, the line wavered. Some of the girls were trying to stop, but the slope was too steep and the impetus carried them down, while the girls on either side of them, apparently blind to what was about to happen, gripped their hands and rushed them on. The green of the third level was not that of grass, but of duckweed. And, of course, water, as the woman had said. The same was true of the level two beyond. It was obvious the moment you realised what you were looking at. The paired statues on each of those levels were in fact fountains which, because of this dreadful war, had not played all summer and so had allowed the duckweed to accumulate into its perfect, lawn-imitating smoothness. All but two or three girls went straight in.

  The boys stood appalled. Later they would recount the adventure, much embroidered, with laughter that almost prevented them getting the words out, but at the time it seemed to them a perfectly appalling thing to happen. Shame at such an exhibition, so unspeakably punished, held them stock still. The girls floundered in the mucky water, some still laughing, some screaming. Pretty or plain, shy or bouncy, they had become weed-bedraggled pond-monsters. The water must have been less than four feet deep and most of them seemed to be standing. The first to recover was a tallish girl, over on the right. She put her hands on the stone kerb of the pond, straightened her arms to heave her body up, got a knee on the kerb, crawled out, rose and stood dripping while she pushed her weed-streaked hair out of her eyes with a furious, proud gesture.

  The two women Paul had seen on the path had been passing the pond while the charge and plunge took place, and now the taller of them came gently up to this girl as if to comfort her but at the last moment took her by the shoulders and shoved her back into the water, laughing. (In the boys’ embroidered versions of the incident the woman’s laugh was usually described as ‘like a silver tea-bell’, but it is unlikely that any of them could have heard it at the time. It seemed right to them, though in fact, as Paul found later, nothing like a proper description of Molly’s bubbling tenor chuckle.) The woman did the same to three other girls before Mr Floyd and the second school-mistress got down and stopped her. The moment they came on the scene she faced them, head thrown back, her face pale and smooth and her blue eyes looking them up and down with calm scorn; then without a word she walked back to her friend who had been waiting by the end of the pond, leaning on her walking-stick and nodding solemnly to herself.

  It was thus that Paul saw within a few seconds of each other two apparently contradictory aspects of the famous Molly Benison, her readiness to demean herself and others almost limitlessly for the sake of what she decided was ‘fun’, and her ability to confront worldly powers with an indifference and dignity that seemed to derive from other and more mysterious sources of authority. It was thus too that the boys of St Aidan’s, as well as most of the staff, came to refer to her as Mad Molly.

  4

  As may be imagined, it took me several drafts to compose a suitable covering letter with which to send this material off to Dobbs. It is difficult to convey (I won’t even attempt it now) the sense of urgent excitement, of compulsion, which can be quite unpredictably triggered off in a writer by a sudden idea. I certainly didn’t want to present myself to Dobbs as being that sort of writer, or person, but I had to face the fact that when a busy biographer has asked for three lines of fact he is unlikely to be pleased with a dozen or more pages of fiction.

  In the end I simply told him that his request had stimulated me to write a novel about my time at St Aidan’s; that I had always found it fatal to anticipate, either in talk or writing, scenes which I was planning to use in a book; and I added by way of bait, or sweetener to his tolerance, that this was the reason why I would prefer not to tell him about my regular Sunday teas with Molly until I’d got them down in their fictional form. I was a quick writer; as far as I knew nothing had been said in my hearing that could have any bearing on the relationship with Steen; and if it had, I was more likely to be able to recover it from the sediments of memory by letting it float to the surface as I wrote the novel than by deliberate attempts to dredge for it. Finally, to save him time I had put a double red line down the margin by the passage at the end which actually answered his question. This, I said, was an eye-witness account of an event that had really occurred.

  So I made my excuses, all reasonably true, but disingenuous. I could perfectly well have sent him an extra carbon of the last couple of pages. But I wanted to know that Dobbs had read with attention and enjoyment something that I had written. That mattered absurdly. So I was disappointed to get a brief note from his secretary saying that he was away for a couple of weeks and would respond on his return, as soon as pressure of work permitted. Equally I was astonished two days later to receive a long hand-written letter from Dobbs himself. He had a very precise hand in the italic style.

  Dear Rogers,

  Thank you very much for your screed. I wish there had been more of it. It would exactly have suited my need for light hospital reading which I can pretend is work. I am in here for some extremely disagreeable and please God unnecessary tests, which should take about a fortnight. This does not quite put paid to my hopes of getting the Steen book out for the centenary, but takes up precious slack.

  To get the so-called work out of the way first: my inclination is to quote in a slightly abbreviated form your description of MB pushing the girls back into the pond. As you say, it is true to at least two of her personae. But it all depends on what other material I find I have to fit in. There may even be something among her papers more suitable. If I decide to use your piece I will of course approach you formally for permission.

  I am now going to amuse myself by reciprocating in kind. You presented me with material I may or may not want for my book, insinuating your fantastic and imaginative world into my world of plodding facts. I am in a position to fling a few facts about St Aidan’s back at you. I hope they do not prove disruptive to the creative process.

  If they do, you may put it down to jealousy on my part. Do you realise that it would, on average, take me at least a month merely to gather and organise the material necessary to produce an equivalent amount of words to what you have sent me? You seem to have taken six days in all, about what I would spend in the process of getting the words on to the paper. So the gathering and organising took you no time at all. It wasn’t necessary. The stuff was there. Forgive me: almost all my work has been concerned with fundamentally intuitive artists, writers mutatis mutandis of your kind; and yet I know I can never hope to get fully ‘inside their skins’, or comprehend what it can be like to enjoy (or suffer) the processes by which their art is pro
duced. Though I try not to let it show in my work I find this a matter of almost obsessional interest.

  Well, facts: in 1947 I taught for two terms at St Aidan’s. The school had by then, as you presumably know, moved back to the South East; not to Brighton but to a large Edwardian mansion near Tunbridge Wells. The experience was an eye-opener. To judge by your MS you regarded Smith as a fully charismatic figure. Hindsight is a treacherous guide, but I believe that even as a boy I took him with an occasional pinch of salt. Certainly as a member of his stain found him very difficult to cope with.

  For a start he was not a very intelligent man, but vain, jealous of ideas other than his own, and particularly jealous of anyone who seemed to be achieving popularity with the boys. He had a military view of his staff: he was the commanding officer; Stock, Floyd and Hutton were his NCOS; the rest of us privates. He would speak to us, often in front of each other, as if that were really the case. Our salaries were low, even by prep-school standards. He was in general extremely mean with money except where it concerned the boys; and even there he was only generous in particular ways; feeding them well, for instance, but not considering that he could attract better staff and thus get better scholarship and CE results if he paid better wages. I remember studying the Scholarship Boards. They used to hang in the Chapel at Brighton, and I expect stayed there throughout the war, but when the school moved permanently to Fenner Green he had them hung in the entrance hall. Yours, I think, was the only Eton Scholarship in fifty years. There had been two or three to Winchester. The rest were practically all soft options, Lancing and so on. Yet Smith was extremely proud of them.

  You will gather I took a considerable dislike to him during my two terms. I admit, with an effort, that he had an intuitive genius with boys, a real love for them which disaffected staff were wrong to write off as suppressed sodomy. I did so at the time, but now believe the love to have been much more parental than erotic. The trouble was that Smith saw himself not in loco parentis in the mundane sense but more as a surrogate God the Father. St Aidan’s was his creation. The boys were all young Adams, doomed eventually to eat the apple. He saw potential serpents everywhere.

  No wonder he found it so difficult to keep staff; you will recall the incessant comings and goings of people like myself. Only Stock, Floyd and Hutton stayed year after year. All three had the same odd relationship with Smith, a kind of despairing loyalty to him and the school. You will remember Stock as a grammarian and martinet. That was what he was, and that was all. Life for him was an exercise as pointless as translating sentences about Balbus and his wall, and the only task was to get through it correctly. He could remember the name of every boy who had been at St Aidan’s in his time, but took no interest in their personalities or their later careers. In his spare time he would read and re-read the detective novels of Freeman Wills Croft, which he described as ‘boring, but less boring than other books’. He had, I believe, been married, but I know nothing of his wife or what became of her.

  Floyd was that tragi-comic creature, the repressed pederast. Of course in that era both the tragedy and the comedy were of a different hue from what they would be now. You will recall how the boys knew that he had favourites. For the staff he was always a soft touch when it came to getting him to take on such chores as duty master, because he preferred the boys’ company to ours. He was both frightened and disgusted by his own drives and stayed at St Aidan’s because he could cope with them there. His bond to Smith was particularly strong; he would not hear one word against him. Smith may have represented to him the barrier of authority which kept his urges in check while allowing him continuous contact with the objects of his desire. I believe Smith understood the situation very well and exploited it by keeping a good teacher on a low salary.

  Both of these were dull dogs, really. Hutton was more interesting, despite being a much worse teacher with little patience with the intellectual limitations of children. He had a good brain, wide interests, kept up with the arts, bought and read books, etc. An amusing talker when in the mood. Stock told me that Hutton had turned down a Fellowship at some Oxford college, I think Queen’s, because he wanted to travel. He had money: you remember he used to drive that Bentley? But something had happened to him in the first war, a wound, but also some kind of accompanying horror. Smith I know had been in the same regiment, and my impression is that some years after the war Hutton simply turned up at Hove out of the blue in a fairly ghastly state. The loyalty of the trenches, now almost incomprehensible to us, operated. Smith took him on. Hutton was always fully aware of Smith’s failings, sympathetic to the rest of us over the way we were treated, but only rarely prepared to intervene. Once, after some particularly despotic display on Smith’s part, I muttered to Hutton, ‘If I stay here I shall go mad.’ He nodded, accepting the remark as perfectly justified, but then said, ‘If I left here I should do the same.’

  Is that any use to you? It may even, I suppose, be a hindrance. How curiously different our tasks are, even when we are both writing about the past; and, in the case of MB, about the same person.

  —After re-reading the above: I meant, when talking about my problems in making the imaginative leap into the inner world of the intuitive writer, to ask you whether you have any opinions on Steen and his works. This is not a serious enquiry. I am merely inquisitive.

  More to the point, the woman you saw walking up the path with MB. If as you say you went to Sunday teas with her, you may know who this woman was. In Paris MB was almost inseparable from a woman called Désirée O’Connell, a minor poet, half French, as notorious for her ugliness as MB was for her beauty, but a much more shadowy figure, rumoured to be the illegitimate child of one of the literary Irishmen of the Nineties, but with no agreement about which. I ask because Steen refers to her in two letters with an intensity of loathing that comes strangely from him, though she was far from the only woman to persecute him with her attentions.

  Yours sincerely,

  Simon Dobbs

  My reactions on reading and re-reading Dobbs’s letter were extremely mixed—irritation at being classed as light hospital reading mixed with pleasure at then being considered, even mutatis mutandis, as a writer of the same type as those about whom he had written his own books; doubt amounting to distrust about what he had told me about the inner workings of the St Aidan’s staff room, which as he said might prove a dangerous intrusion into my imaginative processes, mixed with reassurance that those processes had so far functioned well enough for me to have got my fictional senior staff fairly close to the facts (I had by then started to work on them in pages only partly presented here). There was too an odd sense of seeing my mirror image, accurately reversed, in what Dobbs said about imaginative writers and his own relation to them—it was, for instance, inconceivable, that I should recall having seen his name over thirty years ago on a Scholarship Board, and presumably it was this type of knack, and lack of it, that had helped turn each of us into the kind of writers we were. I felt an idiot pleasure at the possibility of getting a whole paragraph of my writing into a serious work of scholarship. And then there were the odd little illuminations about my own past self, such as the reasons for Smith’s resistance to my attempting the Eton Scholarship. But in the end I was surprised to find that the problem the letter chiefly posed was how to answer Dobbs’s casual enquiry about what I thought of Steen.

  Isidore Steen, Great Writer, the apposition so automatic as to be almost abbreviable to GW, in my case accompanied by the no-less-honorific GU, or Great Unread. My regular response to the mention of Steen’s name was a collage of ennui, revulsion and jealousy. Revulsion was strongest. I was repelled for the very reasons that made him attractive to others—the gossip about the man drew them to the books, but put me off. I dislike that whole myth of the artist as shaman, the general larger-than-lifeness, compounded in Steen’s case by his ferocious sexual energies and appetites for both men and women, as well as other forms of rumbustiousness. I rea
lly preferred to think of him as a phoney, and there seemed to me to be quite enough evidence without the chore of ploughing through The Fanatics. That whole business about the Life Force, for instance, which accounts for much that is tedious in Shaw—I gathered that Steen took it even more seriously. You couldn’t believe that sort of thing and remain a tolerable artist, surely?

  My resentment was strong enough to make me feel irritated whenever I read, say, a review or article that mentioned Steen and accepted that his early Saharan explorations had actually achieved anything, or that Baston’s demolition job on the veracity of Steen’s account of his own Lawrence-like exploits in East Africa during the first war had not really demonstrated that To Live like the Jackal was a pack of lies. I had of course read that book at Eton but unlike most of my friends had not been bowled over by it. The feeling that Steen was not my kind of man or writer was already strong.

  As I say, the distaste was reinforced by what I learnt about Steen as a person. I tended to shut my mind to anecdotes of his friendliness and casual generosity to young writers short of luck or money; I assumed it was a method of getting them into bed with him. Occasionally I came across a quotation from one of his books, and I remember turning on Radio 3 halfway through what was clearly an archive recording of a talk and then listening with real interest and stimulus before learning at the end that the voice had been that of Steen. It was impossible at times like this not to acknowledge that the style was muscular and uncluttered, the point of view sane, some of the individual ideas perceptive, subtle and occasionally prophetic, and the whole approach far less egotistical than I would have expected.