SOCIAL OBSERVATIONS
On the 55th anniversary of the outbreak of a prewar childhood in Wey bridge, Surrey
INSIDE `South Lodge' was a large Burmese gong, beaten gently (except when I or one of my brothers gave an imitation of the J. Arthur Rank muscle-man) to announce that a meal was about to be served. The dining-room itself was where, on anniversary occasions, my parents donned evening-dress to eat. There was also a billiard-room, redolent of the Egyp- tian cigarettes my father smoked — strict- ly live a day. Five also was the number of the living-in servants (the maids, in the early days, in mob-caps and uniform), some of them 'devoted', others 'tempera- mental' or 'difficult'. The teak-seated lava- tory was called The Magnate — fittingly, for my father was a businessman in a firm of East India merchants.
Outside the house was a 11/2-acre gar- den with a fishpond, a miniature waterfall, a greenhouse with grapes, a crazy pave- ment (but no gnomes), and a fine grass tennis court on which our neighbour War- wick Deeping, now a deservedly forgotten best-selling novelist, used to display his curious, tananiforrn' as we called it, serve. This was the gardener's realm. More excit- ing for me was my friend the chauffeur's kingdom, a combined garage and work- shop, the home of a daringly exotic Hudson Terraplane. I never loved it, though, as much as its predecessor, a Sunbeam of the year of my birth with a horn that sounded like an eructation and a glass partition between driver and passengers through which my mother would sometimes have to shout, 'Would you please stop for a moment, Jennings? Master James wishes to be sick.'
How this pleasant world was created I still can't quite make out. Both my parents came from families of extremely slender means; my father had left school at 14, and though he was now in his mid-40s and suc- cessful, the Slump must have taken its toll. But of course I accepted my happy lot, as children do and should. I have no memory to suggest that the servants, meagrely but not meanly paid, repined at theirs. Wey- bridge was not Jarrow. I once visited the gardener's home, bringing a present for his sick wife, and was struck by the sparseness of the furnishings, but also by the smell of fresh floor polish and the obsessive neat- ness with which the knick-knacks were arranged.
By the time I was seven, I had become aware of 'class'. I was discouraged from playing with two local boys on the grounds that they were 'rough'. Figures were point- ed out to me who had 'come down in the world', even let the side down' — a young man, for instance, 'from a good family' who was working in a garage (the accent placed on the second syllable). When we had a cocktail party, if one of the guests was an alcoholic, a bookmaker or a homo- sexual, afterwards my mother would cate- gorise them for me. As I handed round the chipolatas, I was becoming an acute social observer — excellent; but was I also becoming a precocious snob? It was all a bit of a puzzle.
My father was Scottish and therefore democratic in attitude, as was my mother, who was an American who had been to a predominantly Jewish school in New York, and yet they were palpably prejudiced against Jews ('diamonds on dirty fingers'), Eurasians ('mixed marriages are always a disaster'), and Roman Catholics ('they actually believe that the Pope is infallible). And yet, again, one of my father's good friends was a Jew, another was a Catholic, and my godmother, I realise in retrospect, had a touch of the Indian `tarbrush'. As for the Irish, they were 'unreliable'. That was certainly true of the only Irishman I knew, our incompetent dentist who used to attempt to divert his open-jawed young victims with surrealist asides, such as 'Enter the Archbishop of Canterbury, singing and dancing'.
Beware of 'the golf-house quick one and the rector's tea' was Auden's message in the Thirties. Tea with a clergyman I never had, but two golf clubs, microcosms of the middle-class world, played a great part in my childhood — St George's Hill, Wey- bridge, and Lossiemouth in Morayshire. The former was snobbish all right — Mr Clancy, whether because of his ancestry or his dentistry, was long denied member- ship, and it wasn't until after the war, when Max Faulkner, the British Open champion, became the club pro that a pro- fessional was allowed into the bar — but it was also pleasantly Wodebousian. The baggy-tweeded secretary drank, and looked, like a giant cod. There was a major who did conjuring tricks at chil- dren's parties, but not, of course, for money. Beside the short tee of the 14th, the pond hole, was a well-stocked hut bar, where I would watch fascinated while soz- zled, high-handicap members launched Dunlop 65 after Dunlop 65 into the water. Often they didn't bother to retrieve them with the fishing-net provided; often I did.
Lossiemouth, where Ramsay Macdonald was born, was very different. On the credit side was the unexclusive Scottish golfing tradition. At 6 o'clock the teenage boys, already working for a living, could play the course for sixpence, and were often kind enough to let me join them. The profes- sional, a stone-deaf, elderly Scot, surpris- ingly called George Smith, was notoriously eccentric and unsubservient. One dry, hot summer's day he played a round with me wearing patent-leather pumps in order to demonstrate that 'balance is all'.
. It was here, not in Surrey, that I first saw painful poverty. The nearby port was dying, and the unemployed fishermen eked out a half living by caddying and beating the gorse bushes for lost balls, which they sold for pennies to the pro's shop for recovering and repainting. Their faces were stark and gloomy. I remember one old man with a wooden leg whom sen- sitive members preferred not to employ because he used to look at death's door as he lugged the big bag of clubs up the last fairway. My father, more humanely, always asked for his services. Lossiemouth made 'Just make sure he wipes his feet.' me a potential Labour voter.
As for the menace of Germany, my brothers and I were untypically alert to it. Not only did we have a beloved Bavarian governess who was the sole anti-Nazi mem- ber of a large peasant family (a mystery I still ponder), but we had also visited Ger- many annually for skiing holidays. There, in the billiard halls we frequented, large men in lederhosen had gripped our biceps, and on one occasion even groped our testi- cles, proclaiming, 'You English. Good. We German. Together we rule the world, ja?' We wriggled and shook our heads, not in imperial pride but out of squeamish embar- rassment — and stored our memories.
Back at St George's Hill more and more planes from the nearby Vickers aircraft fac- tory began flying over the course, to the irritation of nervous putters. Had I read Auden by then, I might have thought of:
The sky is darkening like a stain; Something is going to fall like rain, And it won't be flowers.
But it was in Lossiemouth that I heard Chamberlain's declaration of war on the wireless. I was among golfers. One of them wept silently. I had never seen a grown man cry before. 'This,' I said to myself, is really pretty serious.' And so it was.
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