Hitch (3 page)

St. Ignatius was, this time a day school, and Hitchcock seems to have led an unobtrusive, not in any way very remarkable life there. He had his moments of obtrusiveness, however. He had been a regular altar boy for some time, but prompted by ‘a childish desire to be a ceremonial figure', he envied the two principal acolytes who carried the big candlesticks. One day he begged the head acolyte to let him do this. ‘What will you give me?' asked the boy. ‘Got any Sexton Blakes?' He had never come into direct contact with Sexton Blake—even in detection his tastes were a cut above that. But he went out and bought ten or a dozen Sexton Blake stories to bribe the master of ceremonies and get his way. The trouble was, he did not realize until the moment came that he did not know the necessary responses to the priest. There was an awful silence, then he saw the priest irritably motion the head acolyte to get him off the scene, like a music-hall turn that had outstayed its welcome, and that was the end of his moment in the limelight.

Understandably, he preferred in general to keep a low profile, to watch rather than actually join in games whenever they could be avoided. Nor was he very noticeable academically, remaining safely neither top nor bottom of his class—his best subject being geography. Here too he tended to be solitary, more given to observation than participation, and pursuing his own slightly eccentric private interests whenever he could. He became fascinated, for example, by the London omnibus system, collected maps and timetables, and eventually realized his ambition of travelling every
yard of the London General Omnibus Company's routes. By the age of sixteen he knew the geography of New York by heart from maps; his favourite reading was railway timetables and Cooks' travel folders, and he prided himself on being able to recite from memory all the stops on the Orient Express.

At this time he did not appear to have any strong artistic interests, though in tune with his particular interest in geography he enjoyed drawing maps, real and imaginary. He invented for himself games with ship routes on maps of the world, marking them out with coloured pins and planning imaginary journeys—always by himself, for he recalls no playmate to share his childish enthusiasms. Indeed, there is no escaping a feeling that there was something curiously desolate about Hitchcock's childhood. It does not seem to have been particularly unhappy, but all his memories are of being alone (though by choice, it seems), separated by age from his brother and sister, curiously distant from his parents because they, for all their evident concern over their youngest child, obviously had difficulty in expressing their emotions, frightened of his teachers, the police, authority figures of all sorts. It is not for nothing that the characteristic subject of his art, often taken to be suspense, is more accurately anxiety. He himself admits, even as an adult, to endless irrational anxieties, such as a terror of getting into trouble with the police so intense that he has scarcely driven a car since his arrival in America and on one occasion had a prolonged anxiety spasm as a result of merely throwing a cigar butt that might not have been totally extinguished out of a car during a drive to northern California. The story of his token incarceration by the police seems to be no joke, and it is difficult not to see the origin of much in the mature man's character—deviousness, shyness, impassivity, insistence on total control of his environment and all possible circumstances of his existence, personal and professional—as lying somewhere in the plump, secretive, watchful child, convinced that if he stepped out of line in any way, if he revealed anything of what he thought and felt, betrayed his emotions to anyone else, THEY (the harsh, rationalistic, disapproving ‘they' of Edward Lear's nonsense poems) would somehow come and get him. As Norman Bates says at the end of
Psycho
, ‘I want just to sit here and be quiet just in case they suspect me. They are probably watching me—well, let them. Let them see what kind of person I am—not even going to swat that fly.'

And as Hitchcock moved into his teens things hardly seem to have
changed very much. There are no records of friends at school. Cardinal Heenan says he was in the same class at St. Ignatius, but Hitchcock cannot recall him; Hugh Gray, eventual translator of André Bazin's cinema essays, was also in the same class. Hitchcock seems to have been abnormally sensitive and retiring, and describes himself as a ‘particularly unattractive youth'. Girls too figured not at all in his life: when he met his wife-to-be in his early twenties he had never been out with a girl other than his sister, and it is probably not stretching fantasy too far to guess at the first hint of how he latterly delighted to treat the cool, remote-seeming blond heroines of his films in the resentful dreams of a plain, pudgy fourteen-year-old watching some evidently unattainable blond girl near home or school and thinking, ‘If only I had her in my power, just for a few moments …'

Whether this is true or not, being away from home at a very strict boarding school, he did not see so much of his parents or have much chance to spread himself on his own interests out of school hours. Two maiden cousins, Mary and Teresa, seem to have taken a particular interest in the boy, and encouraged him to strike out on his own: at least there never seems to have been any idea of his going into the family business. In 1914 his father died. He was called from school and told the news by his brother, who took over the business; he then went over to his sister's and remembers her greeting him by saying almost aggressively to him, ‘Your father's dead, you know,' giving him a surreal sense of dissociation. Shortly afterwards, at the age of fourteen, he left school; he was asked what he wanted to do and answered, for want of anything better to say, that he was interested in engineering. On the strength of this he was put to study at the School of Engineering and Navigation, where engineering drawing, drafting, and making working drawings of machines like the globe valve were an important part of the curriculum: draughtsmanship certainly, but nothing in the slightest artistic.

After a short period of specialized training there, Alfred took his first job, as a technical clerk at the W. T. Henley Telegraph Company, a firm which manufactured electric cable. The 1914-18 War did not impinge much on him. One air raid left him with a vivid memory of going into his mother's room at home in Leytonstone to see if she was all right: ‘The whole house was in an uproar, but there was my poor Elsa-Maxwell-plump little mother struggling to get into her bloomers, always putting both her legs through the
same opening, and saying her prayers, while outside the window shrapnel was bursting around a search-lit Zeppelin—extraordinary image!' The detail of the bloomers he recalled years later and slipped into the opening sequence of his sound thriller
Murder
. In 1917 he had his Army medical, but was classified C3 and excused service. He enlisted instead in a volunteer corps of the Royal Engineers; they used to meet in the evenings at the Inns of Court Hotel in Holborn Viaduct to receive theoretical training in laying charges and the like, and once took part in practical exercises in Hyde Park. He went with another lad from Henleys, feeling a sorry sight because he could never get his puttees wound properly and they kept falling round his ankles, so they buried their sorrows in a lunch at Lyons' Marble Arch Corner House.

At this period he possibly had some scientific leanings—at any rate he must have had some reason for saying he wanted to be an engineer. But artistic interests also began to make themselves felt. His parents had been enthusiastic theatregoers, and he picked up the habit from them, becoming a regular (and usually solitary) attender of first nights up in the gallery, while among his favourite reading were the small paperbound volumes of Dodds' Penny Plays. The cinema he found for himself, went as often as he could to see anything he could, and from about the age of sixteen began buying all the film magazines he could lay his hands on, though, as befitted a serious lad, only the trade and technical magazines, not the fans. He had also discovered an interest in and a certain talent for drawing, and chose to supplement his training in mechanical draughtsmanship with a course at London University, taught by a distinguished book illustrator of the period, E. J. Sullivan. There students were taught the rudiments of drawing from life, being given projects such as to sit in a London railway station with a sketch pad and draw faces, attitudes, clothing. They were also given an outline course in the history of black-and-white illustration, which nourished Hitch's lifelong enthusiasm for the great English magazine illustrators and cartoonists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This spare-time interest did not go unappreciated at Henleys, an old-fashioned, rather paternalistic firm very keen on social activities for their employees. The young Alfred, as he made his way up in the world from technical clerk to estimating clerk, also drew caricatures of his colleagues for the firm's house magazine and
contributed articles and short stories. In June 1919 the first number of
The Henley
, a duplicated magazine put out by Henleys' Social Club, contained this brief pointer to the shape of things to come, signed ‘Hitch':

—GAS—

She had never been in this part of Paris before, only reading of it in the novels of Duvain: or seeing it at the Grand Guignol. So this was the Montmartre? That horror where danger lurked under cover of night, where innocent souls perished without warning.—where doom confronted the unwary.—where the Apache revelled.

She moved cautiously in the shadow of the high wall, looking furtively backward for the hidden menace that might be dogging her steps. Suddenly she darted into an alley way, little heeding where it led—groping her way on in the inky blackness, the one thought of eluding the pursuit firmly fixed in her mind—on she went—Oh! when would it end?—Then a doorway from which a light streamed lent itself to her vision—In here anywhere, she thought.

The door stood at the head of a flight of stairs—stairs that creaked with age, as she endeavoured to creep down—then she heard the sound of drunken laughter and shuddered—surely this was—No, not that! Anything but that! she reached the foot of the stairs and saw an evil-smelling wine bar, with wrecks of what were once men and women indulging in a drunken orgy—then they saw her, a vision of affrighted purity. Half a dozen men rushed towards her amid the encouraging shouts of the rest. She was seized. She screamed with terror—better had she been caught by her pursuer, was her one fleeting thought, as they dragged her roughly across the room. The fiends lost no time in settling her fate. They would share her belongings—and she—why! Was not this the heart of Montmartre? She should go—the rats should feast. Then they bound her and carried her down the dark passage. Up a flight of stairs to the riverside. The water rats should feast, they said. And then—then swinging her bound body two and fro, dropped her with a splash into the dark, swirling waters. Down, she went, down, down; Conscious only of a choking sensation, this was death

—————————then——————————

‘It's out Madam,' said the dentist. ‘Half a crown please'.

HITCH

The Social Club also brought Hitchcock, quite by chance, another introduction to a lifelong interest. Part of its activities took the form of evening get-togethers in a hall in Leadenhall Street, near the famous Victorian cast-iron market building, during the course of which the young ladies and gentlemen of the firm were brought together in circumstances of the greatest decorum and were taught, if they so wished, some of the social graces such as ballroom dancing. Young Alfred was taught to dance by a spruce, white-moustached senior employee of the firm called Mr. Graydon. It was three or four years later, in 1922, that he realized the freaky significance of this, when Mr. Graydon's daughter Edith achieved a certain unhappy celebrity as Edith Thompson, of the notorious Thompson/Bywater murder case, one of Hitchcock's favourite famous British trials, which he claims still to know off almost by heart.

And what sort of a figure did Hitchcock cut in those days, in the offices of Henleys? By all accounts, he seems still to have been quiet and watchful, but quietly self-confident and by no means shy. At the age of eighteen or nineteen whatever interest he ever felt in engineering and electric cable seems to have evaporated. He recalls that his way of working was spasmodic, as it has remained: he was capable of intense concentration over a limited period, but rebelled against, or was too lazy readily to support, a regular daily grind. As an estimator he would constantly have requests for estimates arrive on his desk, would let them pile up, and then deal with them all in a brief frenzy of activity which impressed his superiors with the extraordinary amount of work he had done that particular day. Until, that is, complaints started to come in about the inordinate delays certain customers were experiencing in receiving their estimates.

But relief was at hand. Since he seemed to be a bright young man with ideas of his own, and had some demonstrable gifts as a graphic artist, he was promoted to Henleys' advertising department. Here he was put in charge of writing or editing the copy for newspaper and magazine advertisements and brochures, and, more importantly, for laying them out and supplying any graphic illustrations required. He loved the job, and mystified his colleagues by staying on in the offices off London Wall long after everyone else had gone home, to see the proofs of the advertisements as soon as they came in. For the first time some call was being made on his imagination and powers of invention; for the first time he was in the business of
directing the public's responses through practical psychology. One example of his inventiveness in this direction was a brochure for a certain kind of lead-covered electric wire designed specially for use in churches and other historic buildings where it would be virtually invisible against old stonework. The brochure was upright, coffin-shaped, and Hitchcock designed it so that at the bottom of the cover was a drawing of an altar frontal, with two big brass candlesticks on top of it, and then above, at the top of the page, the words ‘Church Lighting' in heavy Gothic type. No mention of electricity, and of course no indication of wiring, since the whole point of the selling line was the discreetness, even to invisibility, of the product. When the advertising manager of Henleys was shown the design he said, ‘Very clever. But don't tell him I said so.'