II.

London was not a cheerful city to return to, even in spring. Once jubilance and relief had settled there came the strain and hardship of repair, and the grief of an immeasurable carnage tallied up. Europe once again was dripping in blood. War graves appeared in the cratered turf, like so many white mushrooms, and up went the wreaths and cenotaphs. Never Again, again. Britain was virtually bankrupt, rationing continued and, for me, an intense, almost pathological boredom set in. Clear skies were smeared with grey, and the vistas – which in Gloucestershire had stretched as far as the horizon – were drawn close. Perversely, it was quietness of the farm that I missed most; the enticement of lethargy.

I did not flourish at my new school, academically, theatrically or athletically. Teachers reported my being in all things “lackadaisical”, which struck me at the time as a very ugly, inelegant word. (And it struck my parents too, though not for its verbal disharmony.) Aunts and uncles were consulted, and the local vicar too, and it was decided I should attend public school. Discipline and well-brought up peers and round-the-clock diversion would, they believed, knock the idleness out of me. Dulwich College, being close by, was naturally the first choice. The issue was one of money; my family were as poor as dogs, relatively speaking, and all hope was placed in my gaining a scholarship, which I did. Intelligence was not something I lacked, it was simply a matter of application and I could, when so inclined, harness and channel my neurons in short, sharp bursts of genius. But the admissions staff were suitably impressed by my interview (or, I should say, suitably deceived) and I began as a day boy in Michaelmas term in nineteen-forty-seven, on a generous scholarship. My parents were still beggared, but with rationing in full swing it was genuinely quite difficult to tell if one was rich or poor.

Their penury in any case was justified by a dramatic upswing in my grades. After just one term I was in contention for a number of subject prizes, including English and History (albeit not close contention). The Dulwich masters were not in fact much more competent than my former masters, and nor did the lush, manicured expanse of the playing fields inspire me to succeed where the murky, muddy pitches in Denmark Hill had not. Rather, my new success was the happy by-product of an awakening; a coming to life. Diligence replaced idleness, eloquence replaced incoherence, and for a quite curious reason: I fell in love with letters. It sounds pretentious, but it is the truth. I fell in love with the coolness of the paper beneath my fingers, and the feel of the pen between them. I fell in love with trying – vainly or otherwise – to express myself in written words. It was no sudden epiphany and I would not pretend, either, that it was not a part-emulation (typical of precocious adolescents the world over) of the quixotic, poetic, glassy-eyed wordsmiths of historical fame: Baudelaire, Byron, Da Ponte, Diderot, Horsley et cetera (alphabetised as they appeared on the school’s library shelves).  What boy has not dreamed of lyrical mastery?

I had written a great deal to Florence since leaving her, but it was only in those few months – upon my move to Dulwich – when the very act of writing became an addiction: conjuring a sentiment, watching it immortalised a moment later in bright blue ink, trailing a silver nib. It was a revelation, and not only to write letters but to read them – it was all part of the same craving. Prose and theses bored me as ever they had but letters, anybody’s, became a fascination. Streams of consciousness, terse rejoinders, billets-doux; anything which marked one human reaching out to another; anything which marked the author’s style and the way in which he expresses, and simultaneously betrays, himself. And the more I read, the more frequently I wrote in turn to Florence and the more carefully I dissected her replies when eventually they came. In free time I was rarely found outside the school’s library, scribbling away, and according to whichever luminary’s correspondences I happened to be reading at the time, so my own style adapted.  My pen-hand was chameleonic. With Donne I was florid, with Chesterton I was cynical, with Rimbaud, morose, and so on. But if Florence ever noticed the change she did not comment, and in any case she was not one to be swayed by semi-plagiarised turns of phrase. Florence transcended the coarseness of real life, and by the same token was immune to charm. To her credit her own style remained constant all her life: disordered, sweet and archaic. No sentiment, however straightforward, could be expressed in less than a page, and there were many sentiments to express. (I should have liked to see her RSVPs – a simple “yes, delighted”, or did she exasperate the hostess with endless, effusive, ambiguous rambling? I fancy the latter.)

There was, it should be said, nothing very romantic about our exchanges. They were more like letters between separated siblings. I was physically late into adolescence and although I knew of sex and romance – or of the mechanics, at least – it was a superficial understanding, part rumour and part extrapolation. I was satisfied when eventually, aged fourteen, the “facts of life” were straightened out thanks to a charmingly evasive biology textbook, supplied to me by a crooked prefect in return for a term’s worth of boiled sweets. Judging by the extensive graffiti in the margins of the book and the crisp, yellowed paper, this fabled tome had passed down through many generations of naïve and curious schoolboys. It was riddled with euphemisms, incomprehensible Latin phrases and curious black-and-white diagrams, suggestive more of an architectural floor-plan than anything recognisably human, let alone female.

Nonetheless, I digested the material within a fortnight and sold the textbook to a boy in the year below for a sixpence. But I had, of course, entirely missed the point. And so when adult love struck a few years later – tremendously hard, like the blow of an axe – it caught me in the dazed revulsion of a medical student who, for the first time in his training, stares down at the flayed, open torso of a cadaver. Everything is in its place, just as the anatomical guides had indicated, but in reality not comparable to those clean-looking, sanitary illustrations. For as anyone who has felt it knows, there is nothing clean or sanitary about love. That version belongs to fairy tales.

But now, this is to leap ahead prematurely. Let us step back and take everything in its order.