Fathers and Sons Read online

  What a poor wavering leaf in the wind am I. I know that I worry too much about Alec, and expect too much. But, you see, I have built my earthly hopes on him, and one must have something to keep one's ambition young and fresh. Once I had a certain amount of ambition for myself. Then I learned through bitter experience that I must give up ‘running’ myself as a spiritual speculation and that the only possible way for my life was to forget myself in somebody else! There, that is a true confession, and Alec's career has, no doubt, in consequence grown too large in my imagination. But I do want to see him doing some of the things I have had to give up hope of doing – not only on the cricket and football fields (where he romps to triumph weekly) but along the hard, beaten, stony path of life.

  Despite the blatant attractions of Sherborne, with its golden ham-stone abbey and its winding streets of quaint shops and cottages, Arthur had hated his time at the school. He had been lonely and miserable, especially in the first two years, and the discipline was onerous. Sherborne was not his first choice for Alec: Charterhouse, Rugby, Shrewsbury and Winchester were all on his list, but when Alec failed the Winchester examinations and his attempt at a scholarship to Rugby, the idea of Sherborne suddenly presented itself. The school had changed since the brutal old days when Arthur was there, but K, who had heard all the stories, strongly disapproved of Alec going there. Arthur, however, was impulsive and could not abide discussions for fear they would evolve into acrimonious disagreements. As Evelyn recalled in his autobiography:

  He detested controversy and to him all deliberation smacked of it. When any discussion arose, however amicable, and however little directed against him, he was liable to cry, as though in agony:

  ‘Let the long contention cease!

  Geese are swans and swans are geese.

  Let them have it how they will!

  Thou art tired; best be still;’

  And to leave the room declaiming behind him in the passage:

  ‘They out-talked thee, hiss'd thee, tore thee.

  Better men fared thus thee…’

  His decisions, even on matters of some importance, were instantaneous.

  So it was that Alec was sent to Sherborne.

  Four years earlier Arthur had taken a similar snap decision concerning Alec's prep school. Sitting on a train he had struck up conversation with a thin, blue-eyed stranger, with gleaming white centrally parted hair and a curled moustache. He was the headmaster of a new prep school in Surrey called Fernden, and before the journey was ended Arthur had agreed to send Alec to him. What he did not know was that Norman Brownrigg was a perverted and pathological disciplinarian. On his first day Alec's fingers were dipped into sulphuric acid to stop him biting his nails. The food was filthy but Brownrigg insisted that the boys finish up whatever rubbish was plonked on their plates. Alec particularly detested semolina pudding and, on one occasion, just as he had rammed down the last dollop of this hateful substance, he was suddenly, quietly and unostentatiously, sick into his bowl. Brownrigg, who happened to be watching, barked across the room, ‘Finish up your pudding, Wuffy’, and stood over his eight-year-old charge until the last spoonful of vomit had been reintroduced to the poor boy's system. Because of this, Evelyn was not sent to Fernden.

  Arthur had experienced similar cruelties when he was at Sherborne, but when he showed Alec round the school in November 1911 he had either forgotten or wilfully suppressed his negative memories of the place. Indeed, he was exhilarated by the sight of it. The school houses, the chapel, the vaulted dining-hall rejuvenated him instantly – ‘I felt no more than 14 when I walked across the court’ he told a friend. Alec and Arthur spent ‘four days of sheer delight’ meeting masters and looking at classrooms. When they left Alec had been offered a place and ‘I,’ wrote Arthur twenty years later, ‘had learnt a little more of the secret of keeping young in a world that will never grow old.’

  Soon, Arthur was deep in love with Sherborne in a way that he had never been as a child. The place became for him the symbol of an extraordinary spiritual bond between himself and his son, and on this precise theme he composed an ode and posted it to Alec.

  ’Tis thirty years since my Father said ‘Goodbye’ to the dear old school,

  And laid his brief authority down in exchange for a harder rule,

  But I know thro’ the rugged ways of life he has held her precepts dear,

  And has lighted his path in the shadowy world by the light that was lighted here. For the years may come and the years may go, as clouds go over the hill,

  But the love of Sherborne binds the son to the love of the father still!

  ’Tis thirty years since my Father sat in the seat where I sit today,

  And it's hard to believe he was young as I, who is now so old and grey,

  But I've seen his name on the study door, and the date below to tell

  Of the days when he loved the dear old school that today we love so well.

  For the years may come and the years may go, as clouds go over the hill,

  But the love of Sherborne binds the son to the love of the father still!

  Another thirty years may pass, another race may run,

  Till the place I have filled, that I fill today, shall in turn be filled by my son.

  He will walk on the slopes above the field and fight our fights again

  While the Abbey chime, like an ageless rhyme, rings out its old refrain!

  For the years may come and the years may go, as clouds go over the hill,

  But the love of Sherborne binds the son to the love of the

  father still!

  At the same time Arthur wrote a winding, amorous article about the school for Country Life magazine in which he lost himself in heady sentiment: ‘Most fathers like to send their sons where they know that they themselves are certain of a welcome. But when we acknowledge that Sherborne is a dreamer, we would not for a moment have it imagined that her energy is apt to lose the name of action…’ In 1915, he published, in book form, a collection of his best literary essays, called Reticence in Literature. Not only did he dedicate the book to Alec but went to great pains to ensure that the cover was printed in precisely the same tint of blue and gold as the Sherborne School colours. ‘As for the book itself,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘I only did it to please Alec.’ When Alec won his colours for cricketing prowess Arthur wrote to him: ‘The blue and gold of Sherborne have always been my Eldorado, and much as I would have given to see them on myself, I value them much more upon you.’ Arthur's new-found love for Sherborne invigorated him. But the excitement was transient for, as he knew only too well, Alec was growing up, he was boarding a hundred and fifty miles from home, and he was making new friends. Naturally Arthur was excluded from much of his son's life. Seven years after leaving Sherborne Alec (always one to generalise from personal experience) wrote a book entitled Public School Life - Boys, Parents, Masters. In it this problem is seen from the boy's angle:

  To a public school boy his parents’ interest in his school life must appear superficial. When his father comes down he has to answer innumerable questions as to his prowess on the cricket field; and very often indeed the chief pleasure that his athletic successes brings him is the thought of the delight that his father will experience. But the intimate side of his school life, his thoughts, his friendships, his troubles, his ambitions, do not enter into his relationship with his parents… Home and school present to the average boy two water-tight compartments.2 They are different lives, a different technique is required. And human nature has at least one property of the chameleon.

  Arthur was desperate that Alec should treat him not as a parent but as an equal, as a friend, and tell him everything that was going on in his life:

  And, above all things remember, keep nothing from me, for I know all. I beg you always to trust me, and to tell me all your troubles and to be sure of my best help. For I am not your ‘governor’, your critic, or your judge, but always in the darkness and in the light, your true friend, your real
sympathiser, and your devotedly loving Father.

  At first Alec was obliging, but as his behaviour at school led him into deeper and deeper water he began to withdraw confidences from his father and to polish up his performance as a chameleon instead. Naturally enough he tended to inform Arthur only of the good news. Although at school he was a rebel, and a bolshy one at that, his years there were crowned with enough solid achievement to make any modest parent proud. He won the school prize for English prose, he gave a precocious speech on Byron to ‘The Duffers’, the school literary society, in which he offended many masters by recommending marital infidelity. Initially Arthur had been involved in writing it, but stopped when his rebellious son refused to moderate its tone. When Alec delivered it Arthur, back at Underhill, was stewing himself into a frenzy of nervous anxiety on his boy's behalf: ‘All yesterday afternoon when you were reading your paper I was as restless as a hyena before feeding time. I kept prowling from one room to another – picturing you and wondering how it went. That is ‘one way of love’ – it is mine – and like all true love it is full of pain.’

  There were successes, too, for Alec on the sports field. Arthur was convinced that he would grow up to be a champion cricketer – either that or a famous poet: he did not seem to mind which but wallowed equally in both fantasies. For a time life for Arthur was sweet. As he recalled, a year after Alec had left Sherborne: ‘I think your terms in 4a and 5b were the happiest in my life unless it was the weeks when you were getting into the cricket 11.’

  The only black cloud seemed far off on a distant horizon. Every week brought news of Sherborne masters and old boys killed in the trenches of the war that was raging in Europe. In 1914 Arthur believed, like many others, that the conflict would be over by the time Alec left school. That autumn all the boys were keen to enlist and Alec was no exception, but he was still too young. For Arthur, the prospect was not then a pressing worry. What he failed to realise in his happy, dream like state was that Alec's life at school was not all that his letters made it out to be. He had problems, most of which concerned sex.

  On Alec's last day at Fernden School, Brownrigg had called him into his study to lecture him on the traps and pitfalls of senior school: ‘How can you ask some pure woman to be your wife if you have been a filthy little beast at school?’ he had asked. Alec had no idea what he was talking about. When he got home he begged his father to explain to him what his headmaster had meant but Arthur became flustered and ducked it. A year later Alec told him that one of the boys in his dormitory at Sherborne had been expelled for ‘smut’ and that when he had asked a master what ‘smut’ was he had been informed only that it was the same as ‘immorality’. What? Arthur, guilty at having passed on the first round, gave his son an equivocal explanation as they marched, hand in hand, over Hampstead Heath one summer evening, telling him that ‘immorality’ concerned ‘urges’ and that these ‘urges’ would one day erupt within him, but he was not to concern himself with such things until he was older. Alec, who was only eleven, still could not understand.

  It was not long, however, before he knew from personal experience exactly what those ‘urges’ were all about. One day he was caught misbehaving and, by way of punishment, was ordered to spend the night kneeling on the stone floor of the school chapel. It was there that he first worked out how to masturbate. He had been warned of the evils of this habit, but found the temptation nevertheless irresistible. Soon he found ways to fuel his imagination and magnify his pleasure. A corny novel published in 1912 called Joseph in Jeopardy fired him off – so to speak. I recently discovered a copy in a second-hand bookshop and read it with assiduous attention to every paragraph in the hope of understanding my great-uncle better. He must have been very innocent in those days: a few kisses, a whiff of scent, the possibility, but not the actuality, of an adulterous liaison – these were the things that had ‘turned him on’. Marlowe's Hero and Leander was another inflammatory source, but for Alec, in those early days, the pleasure of his habit was far outweighed by the grief that it caused him. This I have extrapolated from another passage in Public School Life:

  The boy who practises self-abuse suffers from the misery of an incommunicable grief. He is apart from his fellows. If he told them his secret he thinks they would despise him. He becomes morbidly introspective. He makes vows to break himself of the habit, fails and despises himself. He begins to search for symptoms of his approaching physical and intellectual collapse. If he makes a duck at cricket, misses a catch in a house game, or fails badly in his repetition, he tells himself that the process has begun. There are times when he wants to steal away by himself like an animal that is sick.

  In despair he ripped the offending pages from Joseph in Jeopardy and threw them away. But even without them his habit continued unabated – until, that is, in May 1914, tormented by guilt and confusion, he confessed all to his housemaster who despatched an unclear letter to Arthur. Arthur wrote immediately to Alec. This last is a minor masterpiece of some sort (though I cannot say which) so I shall reproduce it in its entirety for you here. I have taken the trouble to include a few erudite footnotes in the hope that they might curb your levity and give your reading of it at least the illusion of sober scholarship:

  My Own Dear Boy,

  Stuart-Prince3 will have told you that he has written to me. I found his letter waiting when I came back this evening; and at first I was rather dazed (as I thought all was going well), and I could not quite make out what he meant. I did not know whether you had got into trouble with a small boy, or what it was exactly. But now that I have been out alone on the Heath, and read his letter several times, I think I understand it all. I gather that you have been unable to break yourself of the habit of self-abuse, and have told him about it, and that you let him tell me. I know by experience that there is nothing that eats into and corrodes the soul more than a secret. Now that you know that I know, you can feel that there are two of us to fight this trouble – two of us absolutely as one. And I think that ought to be some help to you. At any rate I mean to try and make it so.

  And, first, let me carry you back… back to your first term at Sherborne. Do you remember how you wrote and asked me what immorality was? And I told you that the time would come when these feelings would get hold of you, and that until then you would rest content, and be thankful to God for your innocence? Well you see, the days have come, as I foretold: and we must reckon with the situation together. And I have not the slightest doubt that you will come out the better and the stronger for having confided in your father.

  It is quite natural that you should experience these temptations. Everyone does. As a boy emerges into a man, the sap (as it were) in his body rises, as with trees in spring: and these desires are the result. But nature affords a certain safety valve in what we used to call as boys ‘wet dreams’ – when you lose a certain amount of sap or seed in the night. Now, if you are old enough to have had one of these dreams, you will know that in the morning you feel slack and weak after it – perhaps with a slight headache. That is because the seed comes from near the backbone, and the backbone is the thread of life. Every time seed is lost from the body, the backbone is slightly affected. But if one feels weaker after a natural loss, it follows that a forced loss of seed, such as self-abuse entails, is much more mischievous. It is indeed a deadly danger because it undermines the very seat of life. The result of self-abuse, if carried on persistently, is first weakness both of body and mind, and finally paralysis and softening of the brain. This is absolutely true: and that is what makes it so perilous.

  And something more. The man who is addicted to self-abuse generally becomes the father of feeble and rickety children, even if he is not incapable of being a parent at all. It is an awful thought that someday you might take to a pure girls arms a body that will avenge its own indulgences upon children yet unborn. It is a deadly thought. It must be prevented at all costs.

  So far I have spoken of the effect on the body only: but it is equally bad for the
character. Any secret vice is poison to the character – secret drinking, secret drugging, self-abuse. The man who has a secret is never quite frank with you. You know there is something he is keeping back. But more, unless this thing is resisted, it grows. Crescit inlulgens sibi,4 and the end is damnation. For unless you learn to resist this temptation young, the power of resistance leaves you, and then, when you are independent in London, and women are at large upon the streets, you go the easy way, and before you know where you are, you are actually dying of the most awful of all diseases. For 75 per cent of the women who live by sin are infected with a disease, which they give to every man who lies with them. And then the body rots away in horrors which I will not dwell upon. It is only too true, Dear Boy, that the wages of sin is death.5

  And now I will tell you something in return for what you have told me. When I became engaged to your mother, I was able to tell her that I had never had anything to do with any woman in the world. And the chief reason why I had that inestimable gift to give her (for a mans innocence is the finest of all marriage gifts) was largely the fact that, as a boy, I broke myself early of the habit which is worrying you, and so learned to make resistance a daily law of life.

  But how to resist? You say. Well I will tell you. Say it is Saturday night and the idea attacks you. Put it from you at once. Think of cricket6 or the day's game, of the probable team next week: and say I swear I won't do it till Wednesday at any rate. If you swear to yourself (and to me) you will keep it: and then Wednesday comes, you can say – ‘Well: I managed to resist for one half of the week. Why not for the next? I swear I won't until Saturday.’ So by degrees, as Hamlet said of a precisely similar temptation, resistance will bring its own reward.7 The more you abstain, the easier it becomes.