13 AUGUST 1965, Page 9

John Bull's First Job

A Season in the Country

By PETER VA'NSITTART I HAD begun a novel which, could it but get finished, seemed likely to be the best book ever writ- ten. It was going well: I had written the last chap- ter, though not yet the first, having seen too many of my fellows abandon their books through in- ability to work out the ending. My assessment of it later proved inexact. It gained but one review —in John 0' London's—which began, rightly enough, 'This is not the silliest book ever written: it is certainly the silliest ever published.' I had supposed, from the evidence of a few pieces in my school magazine, that publishers Would pay me, and pay me well, to work on this novel at leisure. I was mistaken. A job was necessary. Having just §een Turgenev's A Month in the Country, I now coveted the role of tutor in a country house: it was insecure, unpre- dictable, presumably well paid. The work negligible, the food delicious.

Nor, in those pre-war days, was it difficult to procure. The Times at once turned up a west- country family with a backward son. I was en- gaged at once, over the phone. It was almost all that I had hoped for.

, My employer was tall, bald, crumpled, speech- less; his wife, beefy, chatty, but seemingly in- effective. I don't recall the son, whom I seldom saw. The house was enormous, shabby, com- fortable, and well staffed. That first afternoon We had tea on a patch of scrub called, though not to its face, the croquet-lawn. A little maid appeared, staggering beneath a heavy tray: then another and •brawnier maid, with a cakestand: then the housekeeper, with the silver tea-pot finallY an enormous man carrying a minute cream-jug. • My employer said nothing at all, ' though when I mentioned that 1 had brought a tennis racket he seemed to become more cheerful. At dinner, only he and I were allowed wine. Doled out lemonade, rather grudgingly, were his wife and miscellaneous women who inhabited the house but appeared in public only at meal- times, scarcely speaking except to refer to 'the villagers,' as they might to a tribe with uncertain habits and vile disposition. My pupil, too, must have been present. Next morning, before breakfast, my employer appeared, rather surreptitiously, in my bedroom, in white flannels and blazer. He could, after all, talk. 'Don't tell the others,' he said gently, 'but there's a tennis party at Clavering's.' So began an almost daily routine. On those sunlit morn-

'nits we stole out and drove to country houses to

, Play tennis. The summer was rare and cloud- less, we took our rackets far and wide: to Lyme and Chard, Taunton, Norton, Shepton Mallet, Bridgwater, as if charting the Monmouth Re- bellion. In the country houses, 'queer, half- Cocked intrigues could be sensed, almost within flute-shot of A Month in the Country. A melan-

choly Canadian colonel slipped me ten pounds for an introduction to an apparently pretty but arrogant girl called Barbara, whom I did not know. I remember, too, a dark, affable man who had owned a hotel. 'There was a fellow,' he told me, 'who owed me three months' rent. So I went to him and gave him a large cheque. He asked me what for, and I said that it was cus- tomary at that time of the month for money to change hands. It worked.' This impressed me. Pro-semitism in a nutshell.

There was beauty. The flat brilliant lawns and darting captious figures, the damp rising smells as we drove back; old moon over new ricks. Trees. Manors lit and decorated as archdukes.

The wife was watching us with deceptive wist- fulness, occasionally wondering aloud when lessons would begin. More energetically she told me about flowers. Tulips, she said, had a cruel streak, violets were over-sensitive, roses the most fulfilled, pansies had apparently been responsible for numerous wars. She spoke respectfully of a former Minister of War, remarking that he was a Jewish version of Einstein. Once, after dinner, she caught me writing my novel. 'If I ever wrote a book,' she said, 'a real book, I mean, I'd call it "Destiny Bay." That's about the most wonder- ful picture I can imagine.'

Her relationship with her husband seemed at best a mutual-assistance pact against undesirable neighbours. She always referred to him as 'the Boy,' which was confusing. 'The Boy's getting very deaf . . .' always made me look round for my pupil.

The Boy had been something 'out East.' She spoke of this as if it were a single and deplor- able country unlikely now to survive. She said that he had once thought of entering Parliament, but they had eventually decided that it wouldn't be fair.

At home he only ever used two sentences: 'Yes, yes, of course,' and/or 'It simply can't be done,' like a prep_ school headmaster talking to parents. These utterances were mechanical, offered without much inspection of context.

'I see the Royal Family have gone to Bal- moral, dear.'

• 'It simply can't be done.'

`Do you think the vicar dislikes me, dear?' I'Yes, yes, of course.'

Driving to country houses, he'd expand, men- tioning two previous wives, though impersonally, as if they had been previous editions of a rather dull book. He once said that marriage was a sheer drop. He seemed elderly without having passed through middle age. 'Old Hugh Walpole yarning his head off,' he once said abruptly, then giggled as if at a filthy joke. When off the courts he would sit alone in the study and I'd wonder what he did. He did not read, though I think he knew how to. Sometimes I thought he wept.

The backward son I saw rarely, though we did have several lessons, on rainy days and once when the Boy had hurt his wrist. These lessons were unsuccessful. He was either loyal to his school, or resentful, or merely obstinate. 'I've been taught something quite different,' he would say, whenever I paused. He did once remark that Chaucer was no good. Once, on a dripping after- noon, the mother drove us out for a walk. After some hours he announced that fizzy lemonade was foul, before resuming not so much silence as nothingness.

I was being paid fifteen guineas a week, my tennis was improving fast, the novel flagging. There was a library in the house and I'd lie reading through the nights. Some sentences nearly drove aside the novel altogether, though, unfortunately, not quite. Chesterton on Dickens.

He did not dislike this or that argument for

oppression; he disliked oppression. He disliked a certain look on the face of a man when he looks down on another man. And that look on that face is the only thing in the world that we have really to fight between here and the fires of hell.

I have always remembered that 'certain look.'

It all ended abruptly. Rains came, tennis nets were wound up. The wife said without warning, 'I'm sorry you're so unhappy,' and, suddenly vast and inexorable, produced a ticket to London, third class. There was no point in arguing. The season was over, the Boy was in the study until next summer: I had cleared over £250. The epi- sode was to set a pattern fOr subsequent jobs. Particularly the one in a progressive school, where the children were rather anxious to attend lessons but never did through fear of offending the head- master. Parents' Day, and the art teacher hurriedly painting scores of pictures and signing them with the children's names.... The Boy, and I thank him, had paid me more than he realised.