Imaginary Toys

I arrived at Oxford in autumn 1955 wearing a duffel coat – a hoodie before hoodies were heard of. The coat not only kept me warm, but was something of a status symbol. It reminded people that I had done my national service in the Navy, the proud senior service, while the vast majority of my contemporaries had had to plod through their two years as what we cuttingly called ‘pongos.’ Although I had hardly ever been out of sight of land, except when my submarine was dived, and never heard a shot or saw a torpedo fired in anger, some of these ex-pongos had seen real fighting in the scattered parts of what remained of our empire. Someone in my college had even been mentioned in despatches fighting the Mau Mau in Kenya.  Soldiers and sailors alike, we national servicemen regarded ourselves as very much more knowledgeable in the ways of the world than those who had come straight from school. We could usually hold our liquor, for instance, while they were still vomiting about like teenagers – which many of them literally still were. So there was, at least at first, a significant difference in experience as well as age, between us and those who still had their service to come – if indeed they wouldn’t avoid it altogether, which, as it was soon abolished, many of them did.

National service was not the only form of class distinction at Oxford. My college had few public schoolboys and prided itself on its left-wing reputation; it was soon made clear to me that if I thought my Winchester schooling had made me superior to someone from Bradford Grammar School, then I could think again – hard. The porter’s lodge was often full of brown-paper parcels for those who couldn’t afford the college laundry system and sent their washing home to their mothers; I was rather shocked by this, but no one commented on it, which made me feel out of touch with real life. In 1954 Nancy Mitford had written her notorious essay ‘The English Aristocracy’, about ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’ – supposedly a great joke for the middle classes, but sometimes a worrying anxiety. Even genuinely ‘U’ students would sometimes compete with each other for the most proletarian ancestor, as though this made them more respectable. Against this, Dennis Potter, one of the most charismatic of my Oxford contemporaries, and who came from a mining family in the Forest of Dean, questioned the whole value of our education. It was making it impossible for him to talk properly to his own father, he said. The part of
Imaginary Toys
which deals with class is, I think, quite accurate.

One of the advantages of doing national service before university was that, bored almost to extinction by service life, we had had time to decide what we wanted to do and be when it was over. My Oxford, I’d decided, was going to be all poetry and acting. My father, however, was deeply suspicious of both. He was a solicitor, and he hoped I would adapt my theatrical ambitions, at least, to the drama of the courts and become a barrister, so he wanted me to read Law. I wanted to read English, but he belonged to the pre-war world where gentlemen did not need instruction in their own literature – they knew it by instinct, and if it was by P. G. Wodehouse then they had probably even read it. After fierce argument he and I eventually compromised on Law for my first year, after which I could switch to English if I still really wanted to. So after I’d hung up my duffel coat, and sent off a batch of poems to the
Isis
, I went to see the Law tutor. When I told him of my plan, he rejected it out of hand. It was either three years of Law, or none at all. I woke my father from his after-dinner sleep to give him this news and he, not in the best of tempers, said ‘Oh, do what you bloody well like, so long as it’s not English.’

So I read PPE for my first year, a poor choice, as the E stood for Economics, a subject no less opaque to me now than it was then, and though I did a bit of acting and published a few poems, I failed my Prelims. This meant a summer of slogging to get through at the second attempt, and though there were one or two drunken cricket matches with a different kind of slogging, the arts were put aside. I then switched to History, where I was happy. I read the prescribed books with increasing eagerness, wrote three essays every two weeks, and spent what now seems a glorious amount of spare time writing poems and stories, editing a magazine, making friends, falling hopelessly in love – but generally staying clear of the theatre.

As a result I got a First, and decided I would have an academic career to support my literary one. As a subject for research I looked for something which could take me to America, which seemed a much more exciting place to be than post-Suez Britain, and I decided on early seventeenth-century political verse. The poems, often quite rude, were almost all in manuscript, having been passed around among the parliamentary opposition to James I and Charles I when it would have been extremely dangerous to print them. There were large collections in the British Museum and the Bodleian, but also in libraries all over America, and they duly got me a very generous Harkness fellowship for two years, during which I travelled from east to west and back again, did a little properly laborious scholarly work, had my first unhappy love affair, and wrote my first two published novels. I abandoned the thesis soon after my return to Britain, but years later my unfinished work turned out to be useful to younger and more devoted scholars than myself, and they used it in their books, so I don’t feel as guilty about wasting my benefactors’ money as perhaps I should.

There were few of these poems at Yale or Harvard, so I’d filled my autumn in these welcoming places by reading a lot of American novels. I was on my way to the Folger Library in Washington when I spent a cold January night in New York, at the overheated YMCA. I couldn’t sleep, and suddenly found myself thinking of a very elaborate plan for an Oxford novel. It was to have thirty-six chapters, exactly divided between four narrators, each of whom had a completely different style. When I got to Washington I settled in a basement near the Folger Library, sat down, opened my portable typewriter and wrote for, I think, fifteen, perhaps seventeen, days and nights, going out only to eat. It snowed a lot, but I hardly noticed. The book completely absorbed me.

Three of the four narrators are based (at a considerable distance) on real people, though they, I am sure, if still alive, would be the first to say they are not accurate portraits. The fourth, Nicholas, was pure invention. I had never met anyone like him, and I’m not sure I have since. The events, such as they are, are also based, at a distance, on reality; the baleful influence of Pusey House, for instance, on the happiness of believers. The original scheme turned out far too ambitious for the subject, or at least the writer, and in the end there were just half of the planned thirty-six chapters (plus an epilogue). I simply didn’t have the story for more, indeed I didn’t perhaps have enough for the eighteen I managed. But the book was written. I then went to the Folger and did my work.

A few weeks later, I was driven down to North Carolina by my friend the novelist Reynolds Price, who’d been at Oxford and now taught at Duke University. I stayed with him a few days in his then semi-mobile home, before going on down to Florida and then New Orleans for Mardi Gras, ending up in Austin, Texas, with its famous library of English literary manuscripts. And there, when I unpacked, I discovered my novel was not in my luggage. It would, I’m afraid, have been no great loss to literature if it had never been found, but in fact it had been put for safe-keeping in an old fridge which Reynolds used as a cupboard, and there he found it and posted it on. The Texas library turned out to be too modern for my thesis, but if none of my own manuscripts has ever been acquired, I can at least claim I rewrote a book there. It went off to England, and Raleigh Trevelyan at Hutchinson decided to make it one of the series of New Authors. However uncertainly, my career as a novelist had begun.

Julian Mitchell

February 2013

‘You must be mad,’ she said. ‘You might have given me hay-fever.’

The rose flew out of the window and fell, too tight in its bud to shed a petal, in the middle of the road.

‘Well, get on,’ she said. ‘What are you waiting for?’

I wasn’t waiting for anything, really, I was just wondering what the hell I was doing there, how the devil I’d ever got myself mixed up with her, and why on earth she’d chosen that morning, of all the mornings she could have chosen, to tell me she didn’t even like my presents. And I was wondering why it had to be me, of all people, that God, if He existed, was determined to keep out of heaven that particularly beautiful day.

I’d borrowed an alarm-clock to wake me early. I’d gone to the market and paid through the nose to have a dew-wet stupid flower done up for a beautiful girl to wear on the first day of her Schools. I’d played the part of the hopeless young lover as well as I could, and all that white-bearded old man up in the sky had to offer was: ‘You must be mad.’ He was quite right, of course. Only a lunatic would ever have fallen in love with Margaret, and it was my
mis-fortune
to have been the number-one eligible lunatic in Margaret’s life.

The car, sympathetically, refused to start.

‘Switch on the engine,’ said Margaret.

The car started. With exaggerated care I drove her through the gowned and white-tied streets to the Examination Schools. They’d just been cleaned—outside, I mean—and the stones shone like well-scrubbed cheeks.

‘Unwillingly to school,’ I said, drawing in to the kerb.

‘Thanks, Charles,’ she said, and got out. ‘’Bye.’

She twitched her gown about her shoulders, and her long black-stockinged legs tripped along the pavement and up the steps and out of sight. The paper that morning was English History I—from the year dot to somewhere in the middle of all those Edwards. She didn’t have a clue. I’d lent her my notes, I’d virtually given her tutorials, I’d tried to teach her the difference between the
Anglo-Saxon
Chronicle and Domesday Book, but she didn’t have a clue, not a clue. If she gets through that one, I thought, it will show once and for all that it is immoral to allow girls to be examined by men.

But then in many ways Margaret was the most immoral person I have ever met. I don’t mean by that that she slept around—if only she had. No, if she hadn’t used her chastity as a weapon she might have saved me, and a few others I dare say, a lot of time, agony and petrol. She was immoral in that she allowed people to fall in love with her, and then used them. She gave nothing in return but her occasional patronage and the sort of masochistic kicks that only lovers of true bitches can really appreciate. When Margaret left Oxford, I can guarantee, there were more mental masochists around than Dr Kinsey would have believed. For instance,
pretending
to have hay-fever. Now it was true in a minor way that Margaret was given to summer colds, she made rather a thing about them, in fact, and insisted on being given hot toddies at parties, though everyone knew perfectly well that hot toddies were the only drinks she liked. But suppose she really was frightened of it, suppose she thought that innocent rose might harm her chances in the exam, even then she needn’t have thrown it out of the window as though it was someone else’s dirty handkerchief. She knew perfectly well that I’d got that rose for her specially—and it wasn’t a notably sentimental thing to give someone on the
morning
of his Schools. Many, many people have worn roses to their first paper, I wore one myself, actually, that I’d picked from a bush in the college garden, so she couldn’t pretend that she was
disgusted
by a lah-di-dah romantic gesture. It was simply that she didn’t want a rose, she wasn’t going to have a rose, and she didn’t give a damn about whose feelings got in the way. Usually she was much more subtle, it is true. But the stress of impending examination has brought out the worst in some of my very best friends, and no doubt she hadn’t slept too well the night before, and in any case, as I’ve said, she didn’t have a clue about English History I. So exit one rose.

But for me a rosebud on the tarmac was the beginning of the end—the true end, this time. I’d been in love with Margaret for too long, I’d told myself ‘This is the end’ too often before, not to realize that this time something had snapped and I meant it. My feelings were of as little interest to her as the number of the lorry that ran the rose over, if a lorry did run it over. (It was probably picked up by some Romeo on his way to a wooing at her college, actually.) In a way, I felt I was the victim of my society; for a society which has seven men to every girl is not the best place, at least in my opinion, to teach young ladies to care for the feelings of young men. The sheer futility and boredom of Oxford love-affairs is directly related to the disproportion between the sexes, which leaves the women in complete command of the battlefield. I am prepared to bet a large sum of money that Oxford has more virgins of both sexes than any comparable community in the British Isles, with the possible exception of Cambridge, where all the men are queer anyway. But that’s not the point. The point is that I decided quite suddenly that a great epoch of my life was over. (I was wrong, of course; things don’t end just because you think they’ve ended, but I was right, too, in a way.)

Margaret, before her final spastic attempts to learn something of the Glorious Past of her Great Country, had devoted her
undergraduate
career to the stage, usually under a pseudonym of some sort, as the girls’ colleges take the view that acting is not really quite what they were founded to encourage. And when I think of the hours I spent being shouted at by producers, under the
misapprehension
that I was the soldier who comes on in Act Three Scene Eight to be stabbed by the hero after a singularly cowardly fight with an obviously painted wooden sword; of the hours in filthy rehearsal halls with those seedy characters who chew pencils and talk about light-bars; of the hours in theatres watching other men get their grubby lips on to her grubby lips (grubby with
greasepaint
, I mean, of course); of the hours in tawdry coffee-houses and plush bars while she talked with her friends about the way Miranda had stolen the scene from Patrick and what Roger was going to tell Geoffrey to do tomorrow night to put Adrian in his place—when I think of those hours, the months of hours, I spent being in love with that impossible, delightful, exquisite, stupid girl—then the full horror of undergraduate life comes back to me, and I know just how glad I am that I need never, ever, go up that awful sordid sexual back-alley again, to poke in the dustbins for a few stray
smiles and an odd kind word. The crying boredom of that kind of youth, all its emotional agonies and intellectual despairs have gone for good. Not, I dare say, that love isn’t always rather boring in retrospect, particularly a frustrated love. Once it’s over, it’s over; and if you’re in love with someone else, then what you did and felt and thought before must always seem pretty tedious, because the virtue of love is its living kindling quality, and no amount of blowing on dead ashes can ever compensate for the thing itself. And in recollection nothing can match the absurdity of
undergraduates
: the long hair of the boy and the long hair of the girl getting knotted and twisted together till they don’t know where they are, and the roots shrieking with pain as they draw apart. At least, that’s how it seems now, to me. I dare say it could be all right if you found a girl who would love you back the way you loved her, but my experience was that you didn’t. The disproportion always worked against it.

I should say, I suppose, that while Margaret was chucking my rose out of the window I was not myself an undergraduate at all. By no means. I, Charles Frederick Hammond, got a First the year before, no doubt due to some mix-up by the examiners, and for about six months I thought I was some kind of demi-god. When the news came through we opened a bottle of champagne and my father gave me a car, and though he was hoping I’d join him in the manufacture of certain alloys essential to the defence industry, and therefore highly profitable, he was quite pleased when I said I’d like to stay on for a while at Oxford and enjoy myself, since I’d worked so hard (a damned lie) and so hadn’t had time (in three years, would you believe it?) to get all that I could have got out of that great place of learning. A thoroughly decent man, my father; and even now I think he still believes I’ll help him boss the men that make the parts that go to the factories that make the bombs that will blow us all sky-high any day now, once and for all. Anyway, there I was in the most modern of rackets, the
postgraduate
career, sitting in the Bodleian, or so my father imagined, getting my nose down to some really fascinating work on the alum industry in Yorkshire in the late sixteenth century. In fact, of course, I was doing nothing of the kind. I was back in Oxford because that was where Margaret was, and where she was I could continue my self-analysis in the long dark hours, proving night after night that I was a fraud and a failure. I suppose really clever analysts can be absolutely impartial about themselves, but I never
even tried to be. I wallowed in Margaret’s unkindness, sending myself to sleep with imaginary sleeping-pills, or concocting
immensely
long suicide-notes in my head, and planning where to leave them so that only she would know how much I loved her and how bloody she was. Because I did love her, in my own
unpleasantly
juvenile way; because, however young and stupid one is, once one has fallen for a Margaret there is nothing else to think about and one’s whole life becomes a sort of sleep, with rude nightmares from time to time when she throws a rose out of the window of your car, or slaps your face, or smilingly turns from you to kiss someone else.

And at the end of this year, when I should have been flexing my arms to get down to the serious business of life and all that sort of rubbish, when I should have been sated with pleasure, I was just where I had been a year before, only rather worse off, as it
happened
, because I’d gained nothing; I hadn’t done a stroke of work, my mind was becoming as lazy as my body, which hates to take exercise, and I still didn’t want to do anything but be where Margaret was and take my punishment like a he-adolescent. Of course, I did have a pretty clear idea of what Margaret was like by this time, even if I wasn’t so clear about myself. So that when she threw the rose out of the window I was expecting it in a way; it was the sort of thing I was used to. But something snapped then, quite unexpectedly, and I knew it was the beginning of the end. Don’t think I wasn’t still in love with her. Knowing that she was a bitch didn’t stop me wanting to make love to her, to marry her, to trot off to work every morning, if it was absolutely essential, to provide her with food and clothing. But I knew where I stood, and I felt the first spark of rebellion, and I was getting ready to tell her I’d had enough, and she could like it or lump it, I didn’t care—the only thing holding me back being, of course, that I
did
care, and I had a pretty shrewd suspicion that she would be only too pleased to lump it if I gave her half a chance. Because, though she did like me in her own way, so long as I kept
out
of the way, as it were, and I was useful to her with my notes and my car and my slavish slavering devotion, there were a lot of other boys around, and notes wouldn’t be any use any more, and a car wasn’t much use when she lived at her home and I lived at mine, and devotion she thought she could get whenever she wanted it. Her other
boyfriends
were mostly actors, though, and she had no illusions about them being nice or reliable or anything like that. Whereas I had
been the most reliable man in the world. Much too reliable, in fact. Much too reliable.

I don’t pretend that all this went through my head while I sat in my car outside the Examination Schools, but some of it did, and the vision of her lovely black legs tripping up the steps to think about the difference between Aelfric and Offa stayed with me for quite a time. Eventually a policeman came along and threatened me with a parking fine. I don’t know why it is, but a policeman has only to ask me the time and I feel guilty, although I know perfectly well that I’ve never committed any crime worth mentioning at all. I may have left my vehicle for more than twenty minutes where it wasn’t supposed to be left, but apart from that my conscience is clear. But policemen frighten me. I think of the clergymen who used to sweat down at us from the pulpit at school and talk about morality as though only regular communicants had a hope in hell of getting to heaven, and I remember the petty-officers who could see at one and the same time that my left boot wasn’t as highly polished as my right and that my cap-ribbon was three-eighths of an inch nearer to the left ear than it should be. Any kind of disciplinary authority fills me with dread, I feel at once that I have committed some terrible outrage, like pissing into a font or going into Buckingham Palace with my fly-buttons undone—not that I have ever been into Buckingham Palace, or am ever likely to be asked to spend the time of day there, or that I have any
intention
of visiting any church of any denomination except to look at the architecture. But I still feel, as soon as a policeman appears within a hundred yards, that this is it, there is no excuse this time, I’ve had it, and I shall never see green grass growing in the open air again.

Well, as soon as I’d recovered sufficiently from this particular policeman’s visitation, I drove off, wondering whether I shouldn’t go and look at some of the manuscripts which my supervisor described as enriching the Bodleian Library. That’s typical, by the way, of the sort of effect that policemen have on me: they make me feel guilty about absolutely everything. After all, I thought in justification, I am at Oxford, and I might as well show my gratitude by giving my supervisor a few hints as to the nature of those riches. ‘There’s enough there,’ he’d said to me, when he put me on to the impossible subject, ‘to keep you busy for a year, anyway.’ Some dons, you may not know, are simply without any inkling of morality; they use their students for gathering information that
they’re too busy or idle to gather for themselves. Harold Brandon was one of them. He lived in one of the richer colleges, in a magnificent suite, and had a mistress in London, and went to all the parties, and wrote the most savage book reviews, and never contributed anything himself except an occasional article summing up what other people had done and saying how hopeless it was and suggesting the need for much greater research before even a tentative solution to the problem could be adumbrated. He was rather fond of the word ‘adumbrated’. He was much feared and generally hated, but I rather liked him, because he never bothered me at all. He obviously decided at the beginning that I would be useless. I went to see him occasionally, to tell him how I was getting along, and our conversation would go like this: