Playing with Water (21 page)

‘Yes but what are you going to
do?
’ I asked miserably.

‘Kill a wasps’ nest, what did you think?’ my father asked.

‘Well actually,’ the Head said, ‘I quite deliberately didn’t tell them what we were up to. If you announce to a lot of small boys that a large wasps’ nest is going to be attacked
at two-thirty with the most deadly poison known to man, and they are on no account to come anywhere near it, there’s not a boy in the school who won’t be there. If, on the other hand, you keep it vague and casual there’s just a chance … Hello! Over here a bit more, I think. Bisley said it was about fifteen yards from the oak and that he’d marked it. Yes, there’s the stick. Good. Now stand back everyone.’

And the sun which had been vertical, molten and glary slumped several degrees and began to shine benignly in a beautiful June afternoon, on this island surrounded as yet invisibly by creeping suburbia. The trees cast their shade in which Tortoiseshells and Brimstones and Marbled Whites fluttered and in the distance white-clad figures scampered and the pock of ball against bat came flatly on the drowsy air. We boys were waved safely back while I proudly watched my father advance with a pint of the world’s most deadly poison to do battle with what were clearly hornets and not wasps at all, probably the biggest and most dangerous nest ever found in the south of England.

And when his crouched figure had straightened up, slightly red in the face from holding his breath, the headmaster sent someone for a spade and they covered it all up with a mound of soil leaving nothing but a faint and pleasant smell of almond essence. How far away those days now seem, not because they are in the least bit faint but because they enclosed a way of life which seems unthinkable in a modern England. What more reasonable and straightforward way to deal with a wasps’ nest than to ring up a consultant neurologist and get him to trot down to Pharmacy for a pint of cyanide and come on over in the car and pour it into the school grounds? Then back to the house for a cup of tea and maybe watch the Second XI in the nets and take your coat off and chuck some nasty balls at the slip-catching machine which even Pollock couldn’t have taken. And finally remember to pick up the cyanide bottle which you think you may have left in the pavilion but later, after a worried search, you discover in the boot of the car where you had put it for safety’s sake, and back down the drive in a low-lifting cloud of dust and away through the
rhododendrons leaving a small son ecstatic with relief and full of pride.

It was a way of life which was really a hang-over from a relaxed patrician world which had ended with the General Election of 1945. On Tiwarik the distant cries of cricketers on slumbrous June afternoons might come back as fresh as ever if I let them; but that regular pock of their play would now sound to me like the ticking of the termites in the night which slowly reduce my house’s framework to dust from within.

It seems incredible now that I should ever have felt myself so terrorised as I did then, at the whim of any figure in authority. But unknown to myself it must have produced an anger in me because after all my father had won in his heroic campaign against the wasps that afternoon: he had punished me with drawn-out terror for once trying to kill him with a wasp. At one level this was only fair; at another it was horribly unfair to blame me for his not being more lovable, better loved. A defiance, a stubbornness grew in me which later resulted in my refusal to think and do as he and his paid deputies, his headmasters, so clearly wished. It had been all of a piece to deny the beauties of the English countryside and to go on failing maths ‘O’ level. Those two incidents were perhaps ten years apart but another twenty-five were to elapse before this simple connection occurred to me, something which to anybody else would appear as trivial as the laboured self-perceptions of others always do.

The cordillera opposite is still busy; the idea that hills are always motionless is visibly absurd. The moon, meanwhile, has slid to another corner of the sky. Its newly angled light has thrown up different aspects of the slopes and screes and ravines which now seem to be poising themselves to roar down and engulf Sabay, asleep without trace among the black line of coco-palms fringing the coast in either direction. Mountains. How predictable that I should have resisted mountains longest of all.

Among my father’s books had always been, discreetly
laid flat beneath other things, an album of text and photographs done up like a book and titled
Those Kingly Days
… It was the record of a fortnight’s climbing holiday which he, his younger brother and two friends had spent in Norway in July 1939. My uncle wrote the text, my father took the photographs, some of which are of great beauty and accomplishment. I am sorry now that my father did not write the text as well. My uncle’s style, eminently readable, was still that of a very young man (he was then nineteen) and leaned slightly back towards the world of
Three Men in a Boat
, poised sometimes on the edge of the facetious without ever quite being so. In fact he adroitly counteracted this tendency by giving detailed accounts and diagrams of climbs the party made each day and in this respect
Those Kingly Days
… is a short and quite serious climber’s journal. Of course the camaraderie was of its time; it is nearly half a century ago now. Reading between the lines one can see the holiday must have been a miraculously snatched interlude. My father was a newly qualified doctor; probably never again did he and his brother spend so long together. If there was a flavour of old times the new times were obtruding remorselessly: six weeks later Britain was at war and some seven months after that Norway was occupied by Nazi troops. But the reason I wish my father had written the book himself is that he might have given something away. All one really learns about him is that he had to go home a day or two early, to the regret of the others, although the reason is not given. In fact he went to take up his first houseman’s job at UCH.

Yet this very muteness of my father’s part in the story is itself eloquent. Nobody who did not possess a tender eye could have taken those photographs: they speak for him. From the text I first learned he had been there at least once before, in 1937, so much of the point of this chronicled trip must have been to re-climb peaks he had already climbed, perhaps acting partly as guide and partly as one who longed to pass on some of the pleasure he had already experienced. Fifty years on a poignancy clings to those neatly laid-out pages, those black and white pictures of pale English young men bathing naked in glacier water. For my father, at least,
the sense of temporary freedom and adventure must have been overwhelming.

To understand why, it is necessary to imagine how it must have been for a child to be packed off from China half the world away to southeast London to live thereafter cut off from his parents as from the magnificent wild terrain which surrounded his birthplace in Kuling – to live out of suitcases in a succession of the suburban homes of devout and elderly relatives for most of his schooldays, like so many other sons of the Raj and the Missions. How those long terraced streets must have mocked him with their ironic and inappropriate names of Scottish scenery: Glenshiel Road, Glenesk Road, Glenlyon Road, Balcaskie Road. How that nonconformist dullness must have oppressed him. (I never remember hearing my father speak once about Christianity: his loyalty to his family was too great. But I am quite certain now he never believed a word of it.) An atmosphere of worthy impoverishment, both financial and spiritual, pervades what few accounts of his youth I ever heard, except for the brief remissions of occasional holidays in the Lake District where he walked and climbed. There he must surely have re-discovered long unstructured days of wild silence and exhilarating exercise, sublime antidote to the cramping admonitions of the Congregationalist zealots of south London whose ugly churches he had dutifully to attend.

It was sad for him when, as a paterfamilias, he wanted to take the family somewhere which had meant much to him, and my sister and I were little enchanted by the Lake District. I was particularly scornful. To a boy already accustomed to roaming the South Downs in search of cordite, a lot of rain-soaked peaks full of gloom and wet sheep was no antidote to anything except good temper. My mean querulousness ruined several of my father’s holidays and probably did much to contaminate our relationship. It was one more of a short enough list of possible pleasures he was destined not to share with his only son.

I believe the Norwegian expeditions remained for him one of the high spots of his life, to judge from what I remember now of his accounts in the days when we were
still talking. There were comrades and good fellowship, a certain amount of expertise and danger, breathtaking landscapes. In those days such parts of Norway were presumably not much travelled except by climbers, probably little more than Iceland was when Auden and MacNeice went there a year or two earlier. There were language problems and discomforts (great stinging clegs) and pleasures (kilos of wild strawberries). Above all, literally, there were mountains. My father returned in states of exaltation: Kolåstind … Vellesaeterhorn … Kvitegga.
The mountains.

Another high spot of his life, like that of many a young man at the time, must have been the war. What other set of circumstances could have turned a recently qualified houseman into a Major in the RAMC and taken him out to India?
The Himalayas
. It is hard to get details of exactly where he went and for how long, but I remember his accounts of climbing and his face would be transfigured by the images behind it of majestic peaks and snowfields and glaciers of savage and unearthly beauty. He had stood, if not on the very roof of the world (for he was an amateur climber and no Mallory), then at least in an upper storey and from it had gazed eastwards across Tibet to the country of his birth, to where his own father was at the moment racked with typhoid in a Japanese concentration camp. He must also have looked westwards towards where he had left a newly married wife and an infant son.

Afterwards he was very quiet about it all, becoming more so as I evinced my assertive uninterest in his boring old mountains. But along the way he had secreted his own treasures, strange and beautiful pictures taken with his Zeiss Ikon. One of the earliest, a picture of Smørskredtind taken for
Those Kingly Days
… he kept framed on the wall of his study for the rest of his life, which for a man of almost painful modesty must have been a token of deep private significance. Perhaps as career and family took their toll he came more and more to recognise the appropriateness of that title. For years I assumed it was a quotation from Shakespeare, a dying Falstaff dreaming of his youth, maybe. It was not until recently that I read the album properly through and on the last page found the stanza from
which the quotation comes. It is by G. W. Young, the mountaineering poet and probably the greatest English climber of his generation:

But at the time all this was wasted on his son. Nor, sadly for him, did I share his passion for ships which in those days pre-dating mass air travel were still invested with a degree of romance quite hard to imagine now. What complex associations ships must have had for any expatriate who necessarily viewed them as instruments which could unite as well as sever families, bearing them laboriously off on journeys across half the globe, each mile of which was truly felt to be travelled. Like many schoolboys then he knew all the shipping lines together with their flags and funnel insignia. He could stand wistfully at Tilbury or Southampton and know merely from its name and livery more or less exactly where each ship was bound, from where it was likely to have come. (It would not be at all the same to stand today at Heathrow and see a Boeing of the British Airways fleet. Not only would destination or provenance remain opaque but the aircraft itself would be identical to that of any other airline, differing only in its paint. My father could say ‘P & O’ or ‘
Viceroy of India
’ just by glimpsing a silhouette far out to sea.)

Under those conditions the world was viewed differently and experienced differently. Journeys meant and felt something different, the lands eventually reached were not the same lands reached today because they occupied a different place in the traveller’s imagination. A change in transportation changes the destination. This sounds strange but nevertheless it is so. In a trivial way this was demonstrated one day when I knew enough about the currents off Tiwarik to swim to Sabay, have lunch and
swim back. At that moment both places took up different positions in my mind and since then each has felt different. This is a mysterious law and it must have been well known to my father as to countless thousands of mariners and passengers who overlapped with the air age.

I can visualise my father most clearly now not with his camera, with which he was so accomplished, but with his battered and treasured pair of binoculars. I think the reason is that whenever I glimpsed him with his eye pressed to his camera’s viewfinder I knew that what he saw at that moment we would later see ourselves and feel obliged to admire. But when I glanced sideways and saw his face concentrated into the eyepieces of his binoculars I knew he was somewhere else and seeing things nobody would ever be privy to except when he elected to share them. One holiday when I was very young I walked with him to the top of a cliff somewhere on the southern coast of England. Down below was a small port and outside this in the roads a warship of sorts lay at anchor. My father became excited.

‘By golly, look, it’s the
Matapan
,’ he said and trained his binoculars on it to confirm his certainty. He then handed me the glasses, taught me how to focus the individual eyepieces and then the entire instrument, and spent some time on his stomach in the grass next to me pointing out details of the ship below. I now remember only its grey paint, its small size, the circular all-weather clearview windows set in the raked panes of the bridge and, above all, its name.
Matapan.
For quite thirty years this name had associations of something sweet and bitter: ‘marzipan’ and ‘pa’, probably. Then after I had first visited the Philippines I had a vivid dream about the ship which seemed to come out of nowhere, out of the depths of memory. The ship itself wore my father’s face: its face and hair were grey and it seemed to be snarling as if in terrible rage. I awoke in the grip of infantile fear. The source of this dream was one thing, but I puzzled for days to find what had made it take that particular shape. Then I thought of the new language I was learning. In Tagalog
matápang
means ‘strong’ and ‘courageous’ with, in the case of alcoholic drink, connotations of ‘fiery’ and ‘fierce’. It was quite precisely my
father’s rages I had feared. Living with him in the school holidays had been like walking across mined territory. One never understood quite why a particular step had been false beyond the fact that it had blown one up. The explosions were terrible.