stream in the middle of the valley and here the path turned away from it to the left beyond a five-barred gate which, because I could not open it unaided, I squeezed underneath, to find myself in a beautiful and what seemed to me immense green meadow, hemmed in by hedgerows and huge trees and filled with buttercups, while high above it to the right were the hanging woods we had seen the previous morning from the car, the open down above them alive with gorse.
At the far end of this field the now augmented stream was spanned by a small wooden footbridge with a white painted handrail. When I eventually reached the stream, in spite of all these distractions and making a number of more or less unsuccessful attempts to spear on the end of my stick some of the older, harder sorts of cow flop in which the field abounded, and launch them into the air, the water tasted even funnier than it had done in the village outside Mrs Hutchings’s shop and I stung myself on the nettles getting down to it.
Beyond the bridge the path continued uphill, dappled with sunlight under the trees, and here the air struck chill after the heat of the meadow. Then it dipped and suddenly I found myself out in the sun on the edge of an immense shingle beach which had some boats hauled out on it, and in my ears there was the roar of the sea as with every wave it displaced and replaced millions upon millions of pebbles. To the left it stretched to where a cluster of ivy-covered white pinnacles rising above a landslip marked the last chalk cliffs in southern England; to the right to the brilliant red cliffs around Sidmouth; and beyond it, out to sea, on what was a near horizon, for there was already a haze of heat out in Lyme Bay, I could see the slightly blurred outlines of what Harry Hansford, the local fisherman who lived opposite the blacksmith’s shop, would soon teach me to identify as a Brixham trawler, ghosting along under full sail.
‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise –
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.’
Many years were to pass before I read these words of Keats, but when I did the memory of that morning came flooding back.
There was a sound of feet slithering on the pebbles behind me. It was Kathy, panting slightly, as she had been running. ‘Whatever did you do that for, Eric, you naughty little boy, without telling me?’ she said. ‘Your mum’s ever so worried, and your dad, too. He’ll be ever so cross if he finds out where you’ve been. You’d better keep quiet when you get back. I’ll say I found you in the field.’
Together, hand in hand, we went back up the hill towards the village where the church bells were now beginning to announce the early service.
CHAPTER SEVEN Journeys Through Darkest Hammersmith
In the autumn of 1928 I was sent to Colet Court, the Junior School of St Paul’s which stood opposite it in the Hammersmith Road. By a quirk similar (but not the same) to that which locates Harrods in SW1, when everything else in Knightsbridge is in SW3, Colet Court was in Hammersmith W6 and St Paul’s in West Kensington W14.
As if to emphasize the connection between the two schools the architect or architects, who were obsessed with this material, had embellished both sets of buildings, which were constructed of purple brick, with what seemed like acres of shiny, orange terracotta. A large part of my schooldays were spent in these disturbing surroundings, which suggested some more restrictive uses than seats of learning, and it was quite common for boys waiting outside St Paul’s in the evening for a bus to take them home to be approached by some stranger, often a foreigner, wishing to know what kind of ‘institution’ was this enormous pile of Victorian Gothic in the Hammersmith Road, and of what sort were the inmates. Eventually, after some exceptionally earnest or morbid sightseer, wishing to see and know more, had enquired at the porter’s lodge, an order was promulgated to the effect that when such a question was posed by a member of the public we were forbidden to say that the place was a ‘loony bin’.
A photograph probably taken in 1929, in the summer term of my first year at Colet Court, shows me, at least after the extensive retouching to which it had been subjected, to have been a healthy, cheerful-looking boy with large, protruding ears and a large mouth full of very slightly protruding teeth.
Because my ears stuck out (whichever ear I slept on flapped over on itself, like an envelope) at night when I went to bed I was made to wear what were called ear-caps. They were made of cotton, had what looked like miniature fishing-nets on either side to keep the ears against the head, and were kept in place with a couple of bits of ribbon tied under the chin. Just as a hairnet or a bath cap imparts to the wearer an excessively senile or infantile appearance, according to whether the wearer is old or young, so did ear-caps, and for this reason I was extremely sensitive about wearing them, just as I had been sensitive, years before, about wearing red rubber waders on Bournemouth beach. These ear-caps proved to be useless for restraining ears as powerful as mine. After a few days my ears broke through the netting, and after I had worn out something like half a dozen pairs in a month, according to my mother, I was made to wear something more robust that looked like a pair of metal earphones with leather ear-pads in place of phones. However, these were so uncomfortable that I eventually refused to wear them at all, in spite of having been ‘given the slipper’ by my father to encourage me to do so. After this nothing more was done about my ears, as nothing was done about restraining my teeth, and eventually ears and teeth returned to where they should have been in the first place, of their own accord.
This photograph, my last studio portrait for many years, was taken by Mr Spencer, whose studio was in an early Victorian villa next door to St Paul’s School, and it was he who had been responsible for photographing me ever since I first sat up, unaided, and wore nothing but a loincloth.
It was Mr Spencer – a mild, pleasant man who used to wax the ends of his moustache into needlesharp points with the aid of a preparation called Pomade Hongroise, an operation which he once performed for my benefit at my earnest request – who first engendered in me an interest in photography, although a number of years were to pass before I had the opportunity to gratify it. Mr Spencer’s camera was a massive affair, made of mahogany and brass, which used glass plates. When he was going to operate it he used to put his head under a black velvet cloth and gaze into a ground-glass screen on which whatever he was photographing appeared upside down, which must have been disconcerting until he got used to it.
Mr Spencer had various backgrounds against which one could be photographed: woodland dells, palace balconies, simulated sunsets, that sort of thing. He could even paint in gnomes and fairies, and did so in one unforgettable picture of me, with a fringe and aged about four, wearing a pale blue knitted-silk round-necked pullover and shorts to match. Much to my disappointment, apart from the picture with the gnomes and fairies, which I do not think she herself could really have liked, my mother always insisted that whatever background I happened to be taken against should be eliminated, so that I invariably appeared in the finished portrait against a white or sepia nothingness.
Another important piece of equipment, with which Mr Spencer used to keep his younger sitters in good humour, was a little, brightly feathered bird, which spent the time in a small box when it was not called upon to play its part. Whether it was a real bird that had been stuffed, or an artificial bird, it is difficult to say; but the entire contraption came from France.
‘Watch
