Young Pattullo Read online

  Copyright & Information

  Young Pattullo

  First published in 1975

  Copyright: John Stewart Literary Management Ltd. 1975-2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of J.I.M. Stewart to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2012 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AU, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  EAN ISBN Edition

  0755130405 9780755130405 Print

  0755133412 9780755133413 Kindle

  0755133722 9780755133727 Epub

  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

  www.houseofstratus.com

  About the Author

  John Innes Mackintosh Stewart (who also wrote as Michael Innes) was born in Edinburgh where his father was Director of Education. He attended Edinburgh Academy before going up to Oriel College, Oxford where he was awarded a first class degree in English and won the Matthew Arnold Memorial Prize and was named a Bishop Frazer scholar. After a short interlude travelling with AJP Taylor in Austria, including studying Freudian psychoanalysis for a year, he embarked on an edition of Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays. This subsequently helped him secure a post teaching English at Leeds University.

  In 1932, Stewart married Margaret Hardwick, who practised medicine, and they subsequently had three sons and two daughters. By 1935, he had been awarded the Jury Chair at the University of Adelaide in Australia as Professor of English and had also completed his first detective novel, ‘Death at the President’s Lodging’, published under the pseudonym ‘Michael Innes’. This was an immediate success and part of a long running series centred on ‘Inspector Appleby’, his primary character when writing as ‘Innes’. There were almost fifty titles completed under the ‘Innes’ banner during his career.

  In 1946, he returned to the UK and spent two years at Queen’s University in Belfast, before being appointed Student (Fellow and Tutor) at Christ Church, Oxford. He was later to hold the post of Reader in English Literature of Oxford University and upon his retirement was made an Emeritus Professor. Whilst never wanting to leave his beloved Oxford permanently, he did manage to fit into his busy schedule a visiting Professorship at the University of Washington and was also honoured by other Universities in the UK.

  Stewart wrote many works under his own name, including twenty-one works of fiction (which contained the highly acclaimed quintet entitled ‘A Staircase in Surrey’, centred primarily in Oxford, but with considerable forays elsewhere, especially Italy), several short story collections, and over nine learned works on the likes of Shakespeare, Kipling and Hardy. He was also a contributor to many academic publications, including a major section on modern writers for the Oxford History of English Literature. He died in 1994, the last published work being an autobiography: ‘Myself and Michael Innes’.

  J.I.M. Stewart’s fiction is greatly admired for its wit, plots and literary quality, whilst the non-fiction is acknowledged as being definitive.

  I

  For my generation, or rather for my age-group in the narrow sense of the call-up, sudden death remained to the end of the war at a substantial remove. Short of random annihilation from the sky (of which there was little in Edinburgh), we were assured of life until enlisted, and almost assured of it through the further months required for our training in one form of combat or another. We were still in the enjoyment of at least the tail-end of this security when, quite suddenly, it was all over. The bell had sounded, the winning glove been raised in air, and the contenders were back in their corners being mopped up.

  For us it had been a spectator sport; we had simply kept our seats. But boys who had been little more than a year ahead of us, with whom we had played in the same eleven or fifteen and whose successors we had become as prefects and the like, had endured the counting of their remaining days in missions, knowing what the statistics said. When we realised we had got off we professed not to believe it. Badly as modern history was taught us, we said, we had picked up too much of it to be taken in. Vast convulsions don’t abruptly cease at the sounding of a gong. After a great war come nasty little ones all over the globe. If we weren’t booked for curtains above Normandy or Berlin we could still be sure of some lethal occasion in swamps or jungles or arctic snows. Somewhere the Japanese would go on fighting and fighting and fighting, or somewhere else the British government would decide to support a white army against a red one – or, failing that, a red one against a white.

  These were persuasions bred of guilt at having escaped rather than of clear thought. Seventeen and eighteen, or even seventeen and nineteen, are virtually the same age. So, like Achilles, we had been hiding among women while great things were going on, and we’d have felt better had they continued long enough to allow us a brief whiff of them. But although fighting did persist in one corner of the globe or another, very few of us indeed were to be drawn into it. What lay ahead was post-war National Service, which meant being rapidly turned into imitation officers on some god-forsaken Perthshire moor or – more exotically – at Oswestry or Mons. And even this, if we passed the right examinations and got into the right university, we might have the choice of deferring until after we had taken a degree.

  Such was my situation when I unexpectedly won my scholarship. In any circumstances the prospect of Oxford might have alarmed me, and the few days I spent there writing my papers and being interviewed revealed in addition one exacerbating consequence of being an artist’s son. My father had chosen the college at which I was to compete entirely on the score of its visual appeal, after a perambulation of the city in which he had turned down even Magdalen as architecturally not quite up to the mark. So I found myself scribbling furiously amid surroundings which showed to my provincial sense as oppressively august, and as quite without that hint of the modestly domestic which I detected during my more or less furtive prowlings, each afternoon, through the quadrangles of Oriel, Jesus, St Edmund Hall, and similar foundations of what might be called the middling sort. I had been tumbled, I told myself, into a haunt of the most shattering privilege, like a beggar upon whom some trick is played in a folk-tale. My fellow-postulants at the long tables in the college’s lofty hall were the sons of dukes and earls to a man. Or, rather, to a boy, since the notion that we were men didn’t occur to me.

  So convinced was I of this that I found myself taking comfort from what my brother Ninian termed the Glencorry connection. It was an ignoble resource. One has to be true to one’s order, and my order was my father’s. It was because he was a painter that I was going to be a playwright. Whereas the Glencorrys were – next after our Pattullo uncle, the minister in Aberdeenshire – the principal figures of fun in Ninian’s and my own family zoo. It was pitiful that I should seek to derive confidence from Uncle Rory simply because he wrote letters to The Scotsman (on the iniquities of hydro-electric schemes and anything else that might make sense of the Highlands) signed Roderick Glencorry of Glencorry – to which he would have liked to add, had convention permitted, twenty-second of that Ilk, intimating
thereby that the Glencorrys had sat tight through several centuries on the same tumps of heather.

  When I became conscious of this frailty (for I was still concocting answers to a paper ambitiously entitled ‘Outlines of English Literary History’) I shoved into an answer, whether appositely or not, a couplet of Dryden’s which says something about a successive title, long and dark, Drawn from the mouldy rolls of Noah’s Ark. I can’t be certain that it wasn’t this display of erudition that won the heart of my future tutor, Albert Talbert, and resulted in my being informed by telegram a few days later that I had become the college’s next John Ruskin Scholar.

  It was with a duke’s or earl’s son – or at least with a boy from a school catering for such people – that I had some conversation during the days in which this faintly absurd examination was going on. His name was Stumpe, which didn’t sound particularly ducal but at least was as old as John Aubrey. (For I must record that, at that time, I had acquired a respectable amount of totally random reading: something which conceivably emerged as meritorious in one grappling with the Outlines of English Literary History in three hours by the clock.)

  Stumpe explained to me, during the drinking – cautiously, on my own part – of a pint of beer in the bar of the Mitre Hotel, that for us it was pretty well an open award or nothing: this because of all those bloody men back from the war. I hadn’t thought about that aspect of the competition, and Stumpe had to amplify. There were several categories of such people, and the college was bound to find room for them ahead of us. Some had been in residence for a year or more before being whisked away to fight, and now the fortunate survivors among them would be coming back. Others, known for some reason as cadets, had been sent up to Oxford as an obscure temporary expedient, and with little regard paid to either their intellectual or their social eligibility; the unmassacred among these would also be returning. A third lot – about whom Stumpe seemed a shade less censorious – would be as new to Oxford as ourselves, having done no more than secure places in the college before being called up. The whole crowd were bound to be as bumptious as hell. But at least they wouldn’t stand for being treated as kids – not after years of having got drunk when they pleased and sleeping with no end of women as well. So there was bound to be a general loosening up, and those of us who did get in straight from school would benefit from sundry resulting freedoms.

  I listened to Stumpe respectfully, and even ventured to express my appreciation of his society through the offer of a second pint of beer. To my relief he declined this, pointing out that it would be embarrassing if, during the afternoon paper, we had several times to ask leave to go to the loo. (I was hearing this word, I believe, for the first time.) We might meet again that evening, he suggested, and go round a few pubs. He would probably bring along a couple of friends.

  The proposal was quite agreeable to me. With each paper I wrote it seemed that my chances of establishing any permanent connection with Oxford were becoming steadily slimmer, and if as a result of some drastic introduction to intemperate courses I performed yet more feebly on the following day – well, it wasn’t going to matter a bit. But I might as well study the natives during my brief English foray, and Stumpe was sufficiently unfamiliar to me to represent quite promising material for a page in my journal. I had recently taken to keeping a diary thus entitled – inspired, I imagine, by the marathon performance of Arnold Bennett a decade or so before. Stumpe’s friends might yield something as well.

  The proposed conviviality didn’t, however, happen. As we went in to dinner in hall Stumpe drifted past me unregarding and sat down at a remote table. Afterwards he just vanished. I was disappointed by this – the more so since the boy I sat beside didn’t utter a word to me throughout the meal. I comforted myself by observing that he appeared to be of an uncommunicative temperament in general, for in reply to a question addressed to him by somebody on his other hand he uttered the one word ‘Downside’ with freezing curtness, and remained completely silent thereafter. He struck me as most disagreeable, and I even blamed him for sending me back to my room in a gloomy mood of my own.

  The room itself was gloomy, being situated on the ground floor of Rattenbury. This is the Victorian part of the college, and a guidebook had told me (as my own sensibilities would have done) that it is inferior in aesthetic pretension to the other buildings. I now managed to manufacture a grievance out of this. It was because I was judged of inferior pretension myself that I had been thrust into so bleak and ill-proportioned an apartment, through the inadequate windows of which the summer dusk could be viewed only between the interstices of much pseudo-mediaeval wrought-iron, rather as if I had been incarcerated like Bonivard, or Faustus’s unfortunate girlfriend in the opera. The room felt, for some reason, quite as damp and chilly as I imagined the castle of Chillon to be; its lighting was crepuscular; and I was facing it after a meal which had been meagre and unappetising beyond even the standards of that time. Here, at least, there wasn’t much that was august in evidence. The scanty furniture included numerous empty bookshelves, a Medici print of a droopy Corot tree, and a large fly-blown lampshade in tattered pink silk. On a table covered with an ink-stained serge cloth lay my open notebooks: a sprawl of puerile appraisals of Milton and Fielding and Hardy. It was beyond me to take another glance at them. I sat down and sombrely considered what Stumpe had said.

  His notion of a licentious returned soldiery behind whose bayonets, as it were, we might ourselves advance upon emancipated pleasures didn’t stir my imagination at all. I believed that if I did fluke a place at Oxford I should there work very hard indeed – a conviction stemming from the view (later to be considerably modified) that the study of literature at a university is the best preparation for becoming a writer. But much more important than this was the fact that I was in love.

  I was – to use the word my mother would have liked – ‘romantically’ in love: to the extent, indeed, of having existed for some months in that state of enchantment sheerly through the eye which Romeo was obliged to endure for several minutes before engaging Juliet in the extemporaneous composition of a sonnet. I had not yet so much as spoken to the beautiful Janet Finlay. Indeed, since I simply sat in front of her in church, and since she there seemed wholly indisposed either to join in the hymns or audibly to repeat the Lord’s Prayer, I couldn’t have sworn that she was not both deaf and dumb. Such intense states of feeling, bred entirely in the imagination, and in their inception floating free of any specific erotic design, can appear merely bizarre in retrospect. But this one was potent with me, so that Stumpe’s remark about sleeping with no end of women passed me by as foolishness – as it might not have done some years later.

  What chiefly depressed me in recalling Stumpe’s remarks was the suggestion of a barrier, in age and experience and interests, between myself and a majority of the people with whom – if I had unexpected luck – I should be living at Oxford. At school, although not myself much of a games-player, I had tended to make my friends among the athletically inclined. This was partly because they were nicer to look at than the stars of the Classical Sixth. But it was partly because I owned an undisciplined mind, and disliked more industrious and successful boys whom, in my conceit, I judged to be no cleverer than I was. So I was consciously rather short of mental stimulus, and had just lately been reckoning (not altogether erroneously) that in an Oxford college heterodox characters like myself would be rather thicker on the ground. And now I couldn’t imagine that men three or four years senior to me – and back from anything so tremendous as a war – would be disposed to pay me the slightest attention. This was to turn out a misconception in itself. Moreover it ignored the possibility that the knowledgeable Stumpe, although broadly right about his facts, had got the proportions of the coming set-up wrong. Actually, the intake of schoolboys was going to be quite large. I might have guessed as much had I reflected on how many of them had been encouraged to have a go at the current set of examinations.

  As it was, I spent half-an-hour su
nk in despondency. I was still despondent when I heard a knock on my door. That anybody should thus civilly apply for admission to my presence was disconcerting in itself. Nobody ever knocked at a door of mine – except occasionally my Uncle Rory during my summer holidays at Corry, when he had taken it into his head, at some hideously early hour, that I ought to be out and scouring the heather in the interest of my health. On these occasions I would reply from beneath the bed-clothes – and often, I am afraid, as sulkily as was at all prudent in the light of my uncle’s exigent standard of the manners proper in the young. But now I called out confidently enough. It was Stumpe who entered the room.

  ‘Oh, hullo,’ Stumpe said. ‘Do you mind if I come in? Or are you mugging up for tomorrow?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ As I said this I felt rather ashamed of my open notebooks. ‘Do sit down.’

  ‘Oh, good. Missed you in hall.’

  ‘Yes. I’m afraid there’s nothing to drink in this room.’ I offered the apology out of some vague sense of the canons of academic hospitality. ‘Not even the end of a tin of cocoa, as far as I can see.’

  ‘I’ve had a drink, thanks. I went over to the Bulldog with a Colleger. He was a bit of a bore.’

  ‘I see.’ I wondered whether a Colleger was Stumpe’s equivalent to a star of the Classical Sixth. ‘Clever of you to run me to earth.’

  ‘One of the porters knew.’

  ‘They seem a knowing crowd.’

  ‘Lord, yes. Never forget a face, and so on. Recognise your crumbling features after thirty years. Like royals and the idle classes generally.’

  There was a short silence, in which I felt I had shown an inadequate sense of the sophisticated character of Stumpe’s last observation.