Джеймс Хилтон - Time And Time Again

His last term at Brookfield was in the summer of 1918, when the war, despite a heartening turn of the tide, still looked desperately far from a finish. He was now of military age, but found that by joining the Cambridge University O.T.C. he could, for a short time at least, combine the profession of arms with actual residence at a college. It seemed a miraculous device for getting a little pleasure before being killed, for at that stage of the war second-lieutenants on the Western Front did not live long. To Charles the war was something he would face, like compulsory games, when he had to, but he had no romantic illusions, and the poetry he wrote, if it ever touched on the subject, was more in the spirit of Siegfried Sassoon than of Rupert Brooke.

During that autumn of final battles that few could guess were final, Charles formed fours on the cobbled quadrangles and night-manoeuvred on the fenlands along the Ely road. He wore a uniform that looked like an officer’s, and sometimes on dark days he was mistakenly saluted by non-commissioned men on leave from France. When this happened he felt he wanted to run after them and apologize, but of course that would have been absurd; so he either saluted back, which seemed presumptuous and was certainly incorrect, or else ignored them, which made him feel churlish. (The problem, with its absence of any completely satisfying solution, was a sample of many that plagued him in later affairs.) In the main, though, life was pleasant and not too military —the O.T.C. adjutant, for instance, was a history professor who could lecture on the machine gun as gently as on the Holy Roman Empire.

Charles was given college rooms that dated from the early seventeenth century, and when he returned to them after a route-march old Debden, who was his gyp, always had a hip-bath and a can of warm water waiting in front of the sitting-room fire. (The college had not yet installed any other kind of baths.) After rinsing himself in this meagre but traditional fashion Charles would dress, drink a cup of tea, and sally forth into the twilit town. The buildings in the narrow streets had an air of stooping over him protectively as he walked; he liked to push open the side-door of Heffer’s bookshop in Petty Cury and spend an hour or so reading what he could not afford to buy. Then back to college in time for dinner in Hall, where he would drink his pint of beer under the portraits of old collegians who had been in their time the kings and counsellors of England.

Charles loved Cambridge with an ache because separation hovered so close and perhaps so tragically. Then all at once the war ended. Along with millions of other youths throughout the world he was reprieved— catapulted without warning into the idea of a future. After the initial thrill there was a curious feeling of anticlimax. He got drunk several times and took part in a riot with which the armed forces stationed in the town and district celebrated the end of the slaughter. The change was so abrupt that emptiness rather than happiness followed the withdrawal of other sensations, and as day after day passed by, each one so full of events abroad that even the palate of a historian must be jaded, Charles sought peace of his own by a process of wishful reasoning. England had won, and as a young Englishman he might well concede the timeliness of having been born in that birth-year of the century, so that he was old enough to have been ready, yet too young to have been called upon. He had been luckier than his best friend at Brookfield, killed in Mesopotamia, or than his brother Lindsay, stuck in a German prison camp awaiting repatriation. Perhaps these were reasons why he lacked the completely festive spirit, though he knew his own good fortune was to be alive. And also to be English. For with half Europe starving and another half in revolution, England, after the long ordeal, was still recognizably herself, and Cambridge was beginning to breathe again to an ancient rhythm of its own. The long Latin grace, which had been discontinued when there were so few undergraduates to read it, was resumed in Hall before dinner; professors brushed up their old lectures (Bury on Rome, Quiller-Couch on English Literature, Coulton on the Middle Ages), and for a victory banquet the gold plate of the Tudor founders was taken out of bank vaults and laid reverently along the high table. Meanwhile in some vague way the O.T.C. disbanded or dispersed or seemed merely to vanish, and there was nothing left for Charles to do with his khaki uniform except pay an exorbitant tailor’s bill for it and have the overcoat dyed chocolate brown for civilian use. Then term ended and he went home to Beeching to spend that first Christmas of the new era that people would call post-war till the word became far too sadly confusing.

Beeching is gone, and there are hardly traces of it except on old maps and in the memories of a later generation of combatants who will soon themselves be no longer young. For during the Second World War an airfield was laid out almost at its front door, and the house itself, for some time derelict, was patched up and made into an R.A.F. club. One night in 1943 a bomber taking off for Germany crashed into the roof and exploded; there was nothing much left when the fire had burned out. Because of censorship no mention of the disaster appeared in the papers. Charles, who was then at the Foreign Office, did not hear of it for several days, and then, of the house itself, he spoke whimsically rather than sadly, for the moment was not one for sentiment over bricks and mortar. ‘It was a decent house, and a great many people must have had fun in it. They were having it, too, up to the end.’ He recalled also that his father had always had a premonition that the place would some day be destroyed by fire. ‘It bothered him whenever he thought about it. He had a sort of canvas chute made to let down from the top-floor windows and at least once during every school holiday when I was young we had a fire drill with everybody sliding down to the front lawn and getting sore bottoms.’

There is a photograph in an old Gloucestershire guidebook that shows Beeching with a landau waiting in the drive outside, and this may well have been the vehicle that preceded Sir Havelock Anderson’s first car, which he bought when Lindsay and Charles were children. In the photograph the house looks imposing, with its three floors grouped around and above the much enlarged portico—a merging of inherited elegance and Victorian solidity that somewhat spoilt the proportions but not at the expense of character. The house and surrounding glebe-lands had been with the Andersons since about 1700. Before then the family had lived in Yorkshire and Scotland, and there was an Anderson who had fought under Sir Philip Sidney at Zutphen in 1586.

At the side of the house a small square breakfast-room overlooked the terraced gardens; it was in this room that Charles, whenever he recollected or dreamed about him, could most often see the father he had known as a small child—the tall, already silver-haired figure, not stout but plain big, staring out of the window with his back to the door through which Cobb bustled in and out with cutlery and crockery, and through which, about eight o’clock, Charles himself would cautiously enter—cautiously, not because he was in any fear, but from an unwillingness to face an ordeal of contact which he instinctively felt was mutual. Charles was seven years younger than Lindsay, so that his feeling for him was one of hero-worship rather than partnership; it had always seemed to him that his brother lived with his father in a world of grown-ups. The other meals of the day Charles took in the schoolroom with a governess, Miss Simmons, but breakfast was the immovable family feast, and for this reason marked inexorably the passage of early years—winter mornings when the lamps were lit and dawn paled on the frosted panes and Cobb would hold each page of The Times before the fresh-lit fire to dry out the dampness—smells of coffee and bacon and kedgeree along with those of warmed paper and the methylated spirit flickering under sideboard dishes; summer mornings when sunlight moved in slow slabs over the carpet and wasps buzzed in for the marmalade… chatter about plans for the day, in none of which he was ever included… the handful of mail which Cobb brought in with a wastepaper basket… Aunt Hetty’s glance across the table as envelopes were slit one by one and their contents amiably destroyed or grimly noted or merely stuffed into one of the huge poacher’s pockets that his father’s tweed coats always had… his aunt’s look of relief when a familiar crunch sounded on the gravel outside, this being the signal that Havelock had ordered the car and was going to be away for at least the morning.