Джеймс Хилтон - Time And Time Again

Anyhow, it was his secret intention that the book should reveal rather startlingly that behind the façade he really did know his job, and it pleased him in rueful moods to invent comments he would most like his friends to make—not to him but amongst themselves. ‘Really, you know, I’ve read worse. Well-documented—almost scholarly in spots. Didn’t think Stuffy had it in him. The Observer gives it the big article—calls it “a footnote to history”.’ The phrase suited Charles’s humility at the shrine of Clio, and also his own experience, derived from Gibbon, that footnotes were apt to be more interesting than the larger print. Not, of course, that there would be much of that sort of thing in it—just a few titbits here and there… mostly it would deal with the Balkan and Greco-Turkish problems, would record matters of which he had been both witness and student, such as that delineation of the Macedonian frontier that had made him (for what it was worth, and it appeared nowadays to be worth nothing) the greatest living authority on the ethnographic history of the Sanjak of Belar-Novo. (Which was the only unique distinction he ever claimed for himself, and often, like so much else that he said, it raised a laugh.)

So he replied to Gerald, thinking of all this and trying not to seem portentous: ‘I really ought to tackle the damn thing, Gerald. My career, though far from outstanding, hasn’t been entirely uneventful… Rome— Bucharest—Athens—I happened to be there at interesting times. And other places. Some day I’ll tell you about them.’

‘I’m looking forward to the book.’

‘Oh yes, that would probably be easier for both of us. You could skip when you were bored.’

Gerald gave his father an appraising glance which he turned into a smile. ‘You know, dad, you’re a bit prickly, aren’t you?’

‘Prickly?’ Now came the perfect cue. ‘I’ve been called STUFFY in my time, but PRICKLY… Well…’

But Gerald passed over ‘stuffy’ without interest. ‘I mean, you put up your defences even when nobody’s attacking.’

‘Do I? Maybe a conditioned reflex after so many years in the Service. I’ll try to unlearn it when I’m just a retired old has-been writing a few pages a day in that terrible handwriting of mine—or perhaps I ought to learn to type and spare the eyesight of some unfortunate secretary.’

‘How long do you think it will take you?’

‘Two or three years—maybe more. I won’t mind.’

‘Sort of a labour of love?’

‘Well, certainly not of profit. As I said, my career hasn’t been outstanding enough to send the public scurrying to the bookshops.’

‘Still feeling prickly? I don’t know what’s eating you, but I’d say you haven’t done so badly. Whatever sort of life you’ve had, you’re fifty-three and you don’t look anything like it.’

Charles beamed; from his own son, on his own son’s seventeenth birthday, and at such a moment, there could have come no more timely reassurance. ‘Fifty-TWO,’ he corrected. ‘Not fifty-THREE. I was born at the turn of the century, on July 28th, 1900.’

‘That’s a fine beginning. The Story of My Life, by Charles Anderson. Chapter One: “Early Years”.’

‘Good heavens, no; not that sort of thing at all. It’s my WORK I shall deal with—I’ll begin when I took up my first post.’

‘Why? What’s wrong about the early years? Didn’t you have a good time then?’

‘Of course.’ Charles seemed slightly embarrassed. ‘Nothing to complain of. That’s why there wouldn’t be much to write about.’

‘NOTHING TO COMPLAIN OF’

Charles had just finished prep school in the summer of 1914; he started at Brookfield while those tremendous opening battles of the First World War were ending an age. The Somme, Jutland, and Passchendaele came to him later as headlines in the daily papers that reached Brookfield about mid-morning, at which time the school butler clamped them to the stands in the reading-room. Not till the lunch hour did the boys get a hasty glimpse over the shoulders of other boys, and usually after they had satisfied a much greater eagerness to discover who was on the list for the afternoon’s compulsory games. There was neither stupidity nor callousness in this—merely the knack (so often necessary in life) of putting first things second. Many of them had brothers and some fathers in the war; all knew that if it lasted long enough they would be in it themselves. Charles had joined the school cadet corps, and with more effort than zeal was picking up the rudiments of being a soldier, drilling twice a week under a ferocious sergeant who taught him exactly where to lunge into an enemy’s body with a bayonet. He did not think he would be very good at it, and was comforted to learn from Old Boys on leave from the front that most fighting was done with other weapons. In the evenings, when drills and games and lessons were over for the day, he relaxed in his School House study talking to friends and drinking coffee— sometimes, when he was on his own, reading poetry. He even wrote some, which was duly published in the Brookfeldian under the pseudonym ‘Vincio’. It had no special merit.

The school was then in charge of old ‘Chips’, who had been summoned from retirement to plug a hole in the wartime shortage of masters. Chips ran things with a benignity that made Brookfield more than tolerable to several boys who might otherwise have found it unpleasant. Charles was among them —by no means a misfit, but temperamentally not what many people would have called a typical public schoolboy. Since Chips doubted that such an animal existed Charles got along with him very well indeed, and it was Chips who made him a prefect despite warnings that boys who were bad at games were rarely good in authority. Charles, however, proved excellent—somewhat on the lenient side, but wise in his decisions and a steady handler of crisis. One of his duties was to keep order in the junior dormitories during the hour before lights-out, and he found this easiest to do by being friendly and chatty. The youngsters liked him and called him ‘Andy’, a nickname that spread throughout the school. On Sunday nights he would read aloud a chapter from some favourite blood-curdler; he read well and enjoyed reading, and once, during a tense moment in Dracula, a listener fainted—an event which gave Charles singular and lasting renown.

Considering that he was bad at games (which he pretended to enjoy, nevertheless, but which he actually detested), Charles was quite popular at Brookfield, and fairly, though not enormously, happy there. He made a few close friends who stayed friends in later years, and besides Chips there was another master who influenced him—a young Frenchman named Brunon who visited the school once a week to give art lessons to a few eccentrics. Art at Brookfield was an alternative to chemistry; on reaching the fifth form one could choose, and as the laboratory promised better fun than the studio, it was favoured by most. But Charles liked M. Brunon and was encouraged by him to develop an aptitude for painting, so that he whiled away many a pleasant hour in the school grounds, producing small water-colour landscapes so quickly that he would often give them away to onlookers and thus conciliate those who might otherwise have scoffed at such a hobby. One such painting by Charles hangs in the head’s study at Brookfield today; it shows the school roofs beyond the trees in winter when clouds are rolling up for a storm. It is not as mediocre as the poetry he wrote (indeed, for his age, it shows distinct promise), but its chief interest perhaps is that a schoolboy should have wanted to go out in such weather for such a purpose. You can almost see that the clouds on the horizon will bring snow, not rain.

Like most male members of his family, Charles was intended for Cambridge when the time should come, and it was Chips again who suggested his entering for a history scholarship, despite an absence of encouragement from home. Charles did not win the scholarship, but came so near to it that he was awarded an exhibition entitling him to enter the University in the following September—that is, if the army did not claim him first, which it probably would.