was said that Francis knew everybody. That wasn’t meant to be taken literally, I think it meant that Francis knew everybody who was anybody in the many fields in which he was interested. That was probably fairly true and it was also true that a lot of them lived in the neighbourhood, or turned up there as weekend guests.
Thus it happened that the short wide frenzied man with a squeaky voice, who bullied people to play games and hated losing, turned out to be H. G. Wells, and the elderly man with a thin ratty voice who was treated with a certain cautious respect was, I was told, Bertrand Russell. I drop those names here out of pure retrospective snobbery, but at the time they didn’t mean a thing to me. I just saw them as fellow guests who were there, like everybody else, to have a good time.
I had already got the message that my parents had come here to have fun and enjoy themselves in their way, and that I was welcome to do the same, in my way, which could be to join in the fun, or not, as I wished. I found I had no quarrel with this situation and was, I believe, fairly sparing in my demands for their attention.
I do remember being a bit of a spoilsport about the nude bathing at the pond. I decided to wear bathing trunks and was ridiculed for my genteel modesty, but I persisted, not because of modesty but because of water-beetles. I had been to murky ponds like that before. I had caught water-beetles in my net and I had noticed that some of them had jaws like bolt-croppers. There was no way I was going to take my unprotected private parts, vestigial though they may have been, within their reach.
But, apart from necessary reservations like that, I was in a very neutral situation and quite happy to be an unnoticed spectator. Francis seemed to take the healthy view that other people’s children were OK to have about so long as they didn’t get in the way and spoil the grown-ups’ games; which was fine by me. His own son, who was a year or two younger than me, didn’t get off so lightly and was constantly subjected to applause and admiration. Surprisingly perhaps, I didn’t envy him.
Looking back, I think I can see why that time and place has left such a powerful flavour in my memory. It may have been because, although London was the place where Ray and Daisy and their friends were serious, anxious for the world and busy at their work, the Meynells’ was where they laughed, put aside doubt, were frivolous and played – and maybe one gets a clearer picture of what people are like and how they feel when they are talking spontaneously together and having fun.
The people we met there were altogether motley, with no shared characteristics except that of being individuals. If they had anything in common it was that they seemed to have in their manner a certain underlying confidence. When they talked they talked as thinkers and innovators. I can see that they were people who quite naturally set the agenda for their own lives. In fact I think they saw themselves as setting the agenda for the future of the world, a future which they were already helping to bring about, a future in which agriculture was going to eradicate hunger, in which Socialism was going to make personal greed a thing of the past and there would be no more rich and no more poor, in a golden age that was already on its way.
I sensed that there was a lot of gladness about, and quite right too! The dragons of moralism, snobbery and conformity had been vanquished. Love, life and liberty were all new, wrested by their own courage from the iron grip of Queen Victoria. They had come into their kingdom and taken their places as part of the new cultural elite, which indeed they were, because the cultural elite was much smaller in those days and quite a lot of it lived in the neighbourhood. So there was no shortage of genuine literary giants to lead them prancing in sandals and Liberty prints through a magic William Morris forest, ringing with licentious laughter. And perhaps the pranciest and most licentious of them all was Francis Meynell.
Of course the future didn’t work out as they had hoped, and I dare say that away from the Meynells’ they could already see that it wasn’t going to. Stalin was turning the Soviet dream into a bloody nightmare, Hitler was rising to rekindle a different, perhaps even more bloody, ambition. But all the same, I think that to have lived at that time, with those dreams, must have been very glorious and exciting.
* R. W. Postgate, No Epitaph (Hamish Hamilton, 1932), p. 98.
A HOUSE, THREE SCHOOLS AND A WAR
I. Finchley.
In 1935 we moved from Hendon to Finchley, a distance of about four miles. Our new house, which had conker trees in the front garden, was immense. Well, it was only immense to my eyes which compared it with our little box-house in Hendon. Nor was it new. It was Victorian, made of dirty greenish-brown bricks.
Ray unlocked the wide front door and led us into the house. The hall was dark and dusty and smelt damp. He led the way up the wide, handsome, creaking staircase. The main landing was as big as a whole room in our Hendon house. He opened a door and showed me into a very large empty room with walls of mottled brown and mauve. There was nothing on the floor except some bits of whitish clinker that had once spilled from the broken fireplace.
‘This will be your room,’ he said.
Then John and I were let loose to roam through the great house from the two big attic rooms to the coal-smelling cellars. I found the idea of living in a house that I could actually run about in very exciting. The same was true of the back garden. In Hendon the back garden was a small patch closely overlooked by other people’s windows. This one was large and secluded. Quite a lot of it was metalled over with cracked asphalt because it had been the playground of the school next door, but there was a large grassy hump right across the back of it and it was lined all round with old pear trees and overhung by a very big walnut tree.
Having more space, John began to collect pets: white mice, white rats, rabbits, small snakes and lizards, even a very large goldfish that had cost five shillings and lived in a sink in the garden until some predator got it. After it had disappeared, Queagh, our cat, helped us to look for that goldfish. He made a great show of turning over the dead leaves and searching the shrubbery all around the sink. That didn’t fool us. He had eaten it.
Queagh was by far the most clear-cut character in the family. He was surly, with crumpled ears and an evil sense of humour. His pleasure was to sit in front of the vivarium where the snakes and lizards lived and gently stroke the glass front with his paw. This would cause the glass to inch itself along its groove until the reptiles could squeeze out. He didn’t try to catch them; he was content just to sit and watch them slither and scuttle across the garden, knowing that the neighbours would soon be ringing up in a state of panic to demand the removal of our revolting creatures from their nice rockery.
Taken all in all the new house was a great improvement, partly because it was so spacious but also because it was convivial. Ray and Daisy had given dinner parties at Hendon but the pokiness of the house had been a constraint. The Finchley house was broad and welcoming. I can see the fire in the long room, bright with a mountain of Coalite, and I can hear the dining room ringing with laughter, not embarrassed, strained or forced laughter but the happy, genuine laughter of people fully at ease with each other in an atmosphere where all undertones of suspicion or anxiety had been dispelled and replaced by whole-hearted trustful enjoyment.
As a neighbourhood, Finchley suited us much better than Hendon because we had family friends and relations nearby. In fact the suggestion that we should move
