course with a complex institution like a school there were occasional failures of communication. It was as a result of one of these that I could be said to have dived for the House. One of the house-prefects came up to us in the field and said: ‘Any of you rabbits dive?’ So I, foolish but, as always, anxious to help, admitted that when I was on holiday I had once dived off some rocks.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘You’re diving for the House,’ and went away.
I was proud, but only for a minute. When I read the list of awesome types of dives that I had been entered for I went, cap in hand, to the Head of House to tell him I couldn’t dive and that it was all a mistake. He told me not to be modest and that it was my duty to the House to do my best. I went to the Sports master but he was too busy to talk and directed me back to the Head of House. He again refused to hear that I couldn’t dive, told me not to be a ninny and said that they were all depending on me to put up a good show.
The Swimming Sports Day came. The diving was announced and duly took place. Six times I was called and six times I managed to find the courage to drop myself off the end of the board into the water, gaining for my House a total of nine points out of a possible sixty and for myself a red patch all down my front where my body had slapped the water. I was an object of ridicule and for most of my life I have been deeply ashamed of that disgrace. Only very recently have I been able to revise that view and look on the incident with something like pride. I had been ordered to dive for the House and I bloody did it. The fact that it was a complete fiasco was not my fault. I had told them it was going to be – and it was!
IV. Mocking Providence.
For me the spring of 1938 was full of excitement; I had been promised a brand-new full-size bike for my birthday. I had pored over the coloured catalogue of bicycles for hours and, with the expert advice of John and his friends, had eventually chosen a green Raleigh with half-drop handlebars, cable brakes and a Sturmey-Archer three-speed gear. It was priced at £5 19s 6d.
This was quite a large sum of money for Ray and Daisy to fork out but it was all part of a Grand Plan which they were hatching. We were to undertake a valedictory tour of France, on bicycles. Even for Ray and Daisy, this was an enterprising idea. They were not in the bloom of youth. Ray was ponderous and overweight. Daisy was in her late forties and rheumaticky. Neither of them was in the habit of taking exercise and neither of them had been on a bicycle for decades. But, with the war-clouds looming, they both felt that this might be the last time they would see their beloved France.
That was one serious reason for the trip. The other was that the franc stood at 1,750 to the pound, a rate of exchange that was not so much advantageous as mythically bountiful. A practical difficulty arose from the fact that our parents were very short of money at the time. Although once we had got to France the living would be very cheap, getting there was going to be expensive. So, obviously, bicycles were the logical choice.
Bicycles were obtained, saddlebags and panniers were bought. Our cousin, Peter Thurtle, and his wife-to-be, Kitty, joined the project and Daisy made divided skirts with box-pleats for her and Kitty to wear. Ray enrolled us all in the Cyclists’ Touring Club.
The start of the tour proper was a triumph worthy of Jacques Tati. We left the small hotel in La Ferte´ Alais, just south of Paris, and proceeded ‘en crocodile’ along a quiet wide road. At the edge of the town we came over a gentle hill and rolled down to a roundabout.
Ray, in the lead, put out his arm to signal his intent and rode steadily round the roundabout, to the left. John, knowing better, put his other arm out and rode steadily round it, to the right. I, confused, swung round and rode back towards the others, seeking instructions, but in vain. Kitty followed Ray to the left. Peter followed John to the right. Daisy jumped off and pushed her bike across the middle of the roundabout, shouting. I rode across behind her. The gendarme, his Gauloise hanging from his lip, stood with his hands on his hips observing the spectacle, but in the end chose not to comment.
That holiday has left me with the most glorious pictures. We rode along a set of stone bridges across a wide-spread river and in through the gates of a medieval town. Everything – the sun, the sky, the glittering of the leaves in the lines of trees, the lazy flat river rippling gently over gravel – was part of a fairy tale. Every roof, every dark shadow, every patch of sun-warmed stone in that town was full of glory and magic. I was drunk with amazement and delight and that night, when I went to bed filled with excellent dinner, I wished with all my heart that I could take the feeling of that place with me for the rest of my life.
A few years later I came across the work of Alfred Sisley. He too had seen Moret-sur-Loing and had spent much of his life painting the very scenes that I had taken in that day. When I saw his paintings I jumped for joy, not so much because they were great paintings but because, for me, they were like a magic snapshot album – each painting filled to overflowing with the light and essence of places that I had already seen and loved. In fact I found out later that the whole of that holiday was being painted by the Impressionist and Post-impressionist schools. We rode along the towpaths of canals under the poplar trees and passed slow barges with washing on their lines, gently turning over the brown water as a plough turns soft earth. Camille Pissarro must have been there with his easel. The long straight Roman roads were lined with stalky plane trees leaving dabs of shadow for us to ride through, singing at the tops of our voices as the warm wind blew in our hair. There must have been half a dozen painters there. But I, being pig-ignorant, knew nothing of art. I was scooping in, through my eyes, ears and nose, the impressions that those great painters had immortalized, but I was taking them in neat, for the first time, just as they must once have done.
For John and me the riding was easy. We were both experienced cyclists, light and wiry. Each morning our bicycles were like young horses, circling the yard, eager to be away on the road. We developed a habit of whizzing on ahead, leaving the others to trundle after us at their own speed. Then we would stop at a wayside estaminet, order vin rouge-grenadine a ‘l’eau de selz, and wait for the elders to catch up and pay the bill, which would only be about five francs. They couldn’t very well refuse such a small sum and the slight tint of rosy inebriation that was my happy condition on those mornings was soon burned away in leg-work.
Lunch was bought – a long loaf, some pâté, tomatoes, cheese, wine and water – in a village, and eaten, with the bottles chilling in the shallows and the toes fingering cool sand, on the green bank of some shady stream.
Towards evening we would come to the designated town. There John and I would drop back, leaving Ray, riding slow and high on his high, slow bicycle, to make his entrance and sniff the atmosphere, but circumspectly, as at dusk a bull elephant approaches a waterhole, leaving the herd to await his signal to follow.
Ray would come to a hotel and heave to outside it. The herd would follow and an important discussion about price and suitability would ensue. At St-Valerien, madame of the hotel came out to greet us. She spoke most highly of her establishment and intimated that if we were to take dinner as well as bed and breakfast all would be felicitous and of good price. The herd acquiesced and madame led us in, shouting orders as she did so to bring the dormant hotel to life. Small children with baskets, on foot and on bicycles, were despatched to the shops. A boiler was lit, bags were unpacked, baths were taken, and after a short cool stroll through the village we came back to find, not just dinner but a proper menu with choices. Later, the sheets were coarse but clean and I slept, as always in those times, still as a stone angel.
Waking up in a French village was always the same and always surprising. The sun would be up first, trying to find a way in through the shutters. It would reflect blurred green and gold stripes on to the ceiling, which would move and change with the passing shadows. Then, as if by a signal, somebody outside would drop a bucket, clang, on to
