William Boyd - The New Confessions

Everything changed for me that weekend when my delusions were exploded. A deep unhappiness settled on me. I felt an alien in that house, felt like a monoglot foreigner in that countryside. Another world, another identity waited for me, to which I was condemned to belong forever. But my fantasies about Faye, and about Donald Verulam and my mother, only indicated how urgently I had longed to escape from them. I couldn’t go home to our dark empty flat and my dour father, at least not in my current state of mind. I was reduced to a Cartesian proposition: I couldn’t be sure of anything and so chose to rely entirely on myself.

Growth and decay. Something had decayed in me and I had to grow again. Hamish said later that I should have applied the calculus to my problems. He was only half-joking. “The calculus,” he said, “is the study of continual change.” But I wasn’t quite ready for his theories in those days. The beautiful mysteries of mathematics and physics — their profound secrets — indicated no particular direction I should follow at that time. Hamish, I knew, sensed he was heading towards some illumination, but I was still a novitiate, untutored. I could feel that something was there, instinctively; I could sense the scope and potential, acknowledge the power of numbers, but as yet was blind to their truths. The next stage of my life was to educate me better to perceive them.

Had I thought about it, I might have rebuked Hamish thus: the calculus deals with growth and decay, but it follows their elegant parabolic curves, exponentially rising or falling. It cannot deal with discontinuity, the sudden random change, which is the real currency of our lives. In due time Hamish supplied me with an answer to that. As for myself, I was about to experience discontinuity in all its strict brutal force.

My villa is quite secluded, backed into the hill that separates me from the small nearby village. If I take a few paces up this hill and advance cautiously onto a large rock ledge that overhangs the sea, I can get a good oblique view down onto my neighbor’s house. He has a large terrace with a swimming pool (filled).

The owner is a German — Herr Günther. The villa had been empty for years. Then eighteen months ago he bought it and built a swimming pool. He has a sizable grown-up family that visits him for several weeks during the summer. Two unmarried daughters, two married sons, daughters-in-law, boyfriends and four or five grandchildren.

From my rock ledge I can see them all quite clearly as they disport themselves around the pool — loud, fit young people. The girls are attractive (the very word “girl” is attractive to me these days) but, being German, they stir old uneasy memories. I managed to avoid them almost entirely last summer. They are curious about me. They have tried to talk to me when we met in the village, but I find the past seems to crowd round, jostling at our backs, like a hostile crowd or a pack of pye-dogs.… It’s all a bit of a strain. I mutter abrupt pleasantries and leave.

Around this villa there are many lizards. They are slim snakelike creatures, a dun olive-green with a chalkstripe. Some months ago, when my swimming pool had water in it, one of these lizards — a small one, four inches long — fell into the deep end. I saw it on the bottom and fished it out with the long-handled net I use for cleaning leaves and insects from the surface. To my surprise it was still alive, its mouth making tiny gaping movements. I put it on the pool surround and positioned a large leaf over it to provide some shade. It recovered fully in about half an hour and scurried off into the rocks.

In the lizard world, in the saurian scheme of things, that rescue and survival must have seemed like divine intervention of the most miraculous and inexplicable sort. Such fantastical things happen in our world too, I know. But at that stage of my life, in May 1916, I felt like that lizard. I had fallen in and was sinking to the bottom. I had some time to wait until my deliverance.

It’s still insufferably hot. Yesterday Herr Günther arrived with his family. I think I’ll take my binoculars and go and watch them turning their strong white bodies brown.

I was the first man on the Western Front. Literally. By the time I arrived in France — August 1916—the line of trenches stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss border. The Western Front began at Nieuport-Bains in Belgium on the coast. There was the sea, the beach with its minefield and wire, and then in the dunes the trench line started.

I was standing leaning against the revetted end of the Allied line, looking east towards the Germans. On my left was the beach and the sea, and on my right a trench system six hundred miles long. I was at the very tip of an attenuated snake uncoiled limply across Europe. It provoked a curious sensation in me standing there, almost physical in its effects. The left side of my body, for example, felt unusually light — airy and untethered. But my right side felt burdened by the immense weight of this chain I started. All the armies of Belgium, France and Britain spread like the tail of a comet from my right side. The Belgians called this position l’homme de l’extrême gauche . It was more than mere description: it was like participating in a metaphor. I often found myself unconsciously massaging my right shoulder. And, strangely, my left side always felt cold, as if I stood in a strong draft blowing off the sea.

The German trenches were a thousand yards away at Lombartzyde, in the direction of Ostend. Between us lay pleasant dunes and strong barbed wire entanglements. It was a quiet sector; so quiet as to be almost inert. In fact this northern end of the Western Front was, strictly speaking, the responsibility of the Belgian Army, but for some reason we had been sent here as replacements for one of their units. The fact was no one really knew what to do with the 13th (Public School) Service Battalion of the Duke of Clarence’s Own South Oxfordshire Light Infantry.

At the outbreak of the war a Universities and Public School Brigade had been raised, entirely of volunteers. The four battalions became the 21st, 22nd, 23rd and 24th battalions of the Royal Fusiliers. However, keenness to enlist was such that the Army Council allowed other regiments to create privately funded service battalions similarly composed. The Middlesex Regiment, for example, had a battalion of ex-public-school boys — the 16th. And so too did the Duke of Clarence’s Own South Oxfordshire Light Infantry. Its 13th Battalion was made up at the outbreak of war by boys from public schools in and around the Thames Valley — Eton, Marlborough, Radley, St. Edward’s — and overflow from the Public School Brigade. However, as the war advanced and as the casualty rates of officers soon outstripped supply, the ordinary rank and file of the battalion found themselves, as Peter Hobhouse had told me, in great demand as potential officer material. By 1916 there were few battalions left and those were very understrength as the initial flood of recruits died away. Back in England there were depot companies that went through the motion of recruiting, but in reality the day of the public school battalions was over. Indeed, I think my intake was among the last. After that, any spirited public-school boy could find a place in an established regiment without much difficulty.

A further problem was the constant poaching of our numbers. Our officers were the first to go, then the NCOs and finally any moderately capable private found himself being offered a commission. The remainder found themselves obliged to occupy the roles of those who had left. Consequently our level of ability — as soldiers — remained consistently low. By the time I joined we were a depleted bunch of unintelligent, initiativeless misfits, and all from minor public schools (the old school tie operated in the army too: connections were everything). We were not much in demand as soldiers.