Charles Snow - Last Things

CAMBRIDGE in May. Margaret and I walked through the old streets, then along Peas Hill, where in winter the gas flares used to hiss over the bookstalls. The gas flares would have looked distinctly appropriate that afternoon, for a north-west wind was funnelling itself through the streets, so cold that we were bending our heads, like the others walking in our direction: except for one imperturbable Indian, who strolled slow and upright, as though this was weather that any reasonable man would much enjoy. The clouds scurried over, leaden, a few hundred feet high. It was like being at Fenners long ago, two or three of us huddled in overcoats, waiting for ten minutes’ play before the rain.

Soon Margaret and I had had enough of it, and turned back. Cambridge in May. It was so cold that the early summer scents were all chilled down: even the lilac one could scarcely smell. We were staying with Martin (I had come up, as I promised Charles, to have a look at his friend Bestwick), and we hurried back to the tutorial house. There in his drawing-room we stood with our backs to the blazing coal fire, getting a disproportionate pleasure from the wintry comfort and the spectacle of undergraduates haring about in the wind and rain below.

We were not so comfortable in the early evening, when Charles, in order to produce Gordon Bestwick without making him suspicious, had arranged something like a party in Guy Grenfell’s rooms. It was the least lavish of parties. As I had noticed before, the young men and women drank very little, much less than their predecessors. Some of their friends smoked pot, and they didn’t condemn it, any more than they condemned anything in the way of sex. But they condemned racism, which had become, even to contemporaries of theirs who weren’t militant at all, the primal sin: which meant that when Grenfell, as a concession to the past, gave Margaret and me small glasses of otherwise unidentifiable sherry, one knew that it was not South African. Most of the group (it might have been because they intended to have a meeting that night, or even because Grenfell, who was well off, was also mean) contented themselves with beer or even the liquid emblem of capitalism, Coca Cola.

The room was on the ground floor, and very handsome: but it was also very cold. Before the war, there would have been a coal fire, as in Martin’s sitting-room: but now Grenfell’s college had installed central heating, and turned it off for the Easter term. I remarked to Bestwick, soon after I met him, that privileged living had become increasingly unprivileged, ever since I was a young man. Just in time to do him completely in the eye, he said, which pleased me, being less stark than I expected. Young men came in and out, sometimes meeting Margaret or me, usually not introduced. There were some good faces, one or two (as in any company of the political young that I had ever seen) with idealists’ eyes. There was plenty of character and intelligence moving through the room. A young woman, voice strained with distress, blamed me for Vietnam. One or two asked questions about Russia, which I knew, and China, which I didn’t: but were more interested in the second than the first. Charles March’s younger daughter passed by, and my niece Nina, who must have made a special trip from London. Someone spoke angrily about students’ rights.

It was no use speaking to the young as though you were young yourself. If you did, they distrusted you. Often they suspected you of a sexual motive: and they were sometimes right.

Students. They all called themselves students. Yet the term was scarcely heard in Cambridge when I first arrived there. They wouldn’t have been interested in that reflection. They were singularly uninterested in history. Not that that differentiated them much from other generations. We had all believed that we were unique: and these, as much as any.

Did anything differentiate them? On the surface, looks and manners. When one couldn’t see, or didn’t notice, their faces, some did look unlike anything this century. Guy Grenfell, for instance, grew his hair as long as a Caroline young man. Which seemed odd since his face had the port-wine euphoria, the feminine (but not effeminate) smoothness, of one of his eighteenth-century ancestors, and his manners once more struck me as strangely managed, as though he were determined to forget any he had ever known and was hoping to invent some for Year One, and to find the equivalence of citoyen and tovarishch . The result was not, as he presumably hoped, that he sounded like my forebears or Gordon Bestwick’s, but like his own at their most aggressive, on a foreign railway station in brazen voices hailing a porter.

But all that brushed off (if they were different, and they might be, it was because of their time and place) when I had a word with him alone, or later with Gordon Bestwick. Talking to Grenfell I felt obliged to bolster up his confidence. He was a nice and humble man, inconveniently torn between an embarrassing pride in his antecedents and the necessity of feeling more passionately modern than anyone around him. He wouldn’t have felt like that if he hadn’t been quite humble: he liked tagging on to people whom he believed with simplicity to be cleverer and better than he was. This led him to displays of exaggerated sensibility. His school had been ‘beastly and brutalising’. The mere thought of the army, his family profession, was beastly and brutalising too. He was very much preoccupied with the number of examination suicides at Cambridge, almost as though, frail plant that he was, he couldn’t expect both to pass his first-year Mays and to survive. In fact, he was a tough and hardy character, who didn’t need so much sympathy as he felt entitled to and modestly induced.

Whereas, in some respects, Gordon Bestwick needed more. With him, not long before Margaret and I were due to leave, I sat down on a window seat. Charles had had the intuition to guess that Bestwick and I would have something in common, and I had been told what to look for. Physically, he was gawky and tall, taller than Charles or Guy Grenfell, themselves over six feet, but he had not been as peach-fed as Grenfell; as he stretched out his legs, the thighs were thin, and there were deficiency lines from nostril to mouth. There were also other lines, premature furrows, on his forehead: his face was not exactly ugly, but plain, with wavy hair already thinning, hard intelligent eyes, square jowls. It was a physical make-up not uncommon in those whose temperament wasn’t easy to handle, what with natural force, ability, and a component of anxiety. It was the anxiety that Charles had asked me to watch; for Bestwick had been complaining, to Charles alone, of physical symptoms, and Charles had heard something of similar troubles of mine as a young man.

At that time I had been too proud to say a word. My first impression was that Bestwick was at least as proud. All I could risk was to let fall reminiscences about what it was like in my youth to be born poor. Charles had probably told him that I wasn’t stupid. It didn’t matter if he thought I was a bore. Reading for the Bar. Gambling on nothing going wrong. Strain. Lying awake at night. Sleep-starts. Pavements giving way underfoot. When the game looked in my hands, sent away ill.

If none of that applied to him (his expression was lively, but gave nothing away) he must have thought me a remarkably tedious conversationalist. Before we sat alone, he had been analysing the economic thinking of the old left. Informal, confident, not rude but dismissive. I thought I would test him. Sometimes the brightest demolition men weren’t so easy with the biological facts of life. ‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘there wasn’t anything much wrong with me. I recovered well enough to have my heart stop last November.’