to know that I was living openly with a woman twice my age; but I could have introduced her to my aunt.) When Aunt Estelle was killed in a motor accident when I was sixteen I was less upset than I expected. I had other troubles by then. But it is sad to think that, although she was so kind to me in her absent-minded way, she probably never thought of me except as James’s awkward boorish undistinguished little cousin. She was a marvel to me, a portent. Sorting out oddments at Shruff End two days ago I came across a photograph of her. I could not find one of my mother.
My mother did not exactly dislike Aunt Estelle, nor violently disapprove of her, though she shuddered at the noise and the drink; and she was not exactly envious because she did not want the worldly things that pleased Aunt Estelle. She was just thoroughly depressed by her existence and cast into the gloom and irritation which I mentioned earlier by her visits. It may be that my uncle and aunt thought that my upbringing was too strict. Outsiders who see rules and not the love that runs through them are often too ready to label other people as ‘prisoners’. It is conceivable that clever Uncle Abel and liberated Aunt Estelle actually pitied my father and myself, and blamed my mother for what they regarded as a repressive regime. If my mother suspected the existence of such judgments she must have felt pain and resentment; and this resentment may even have had the effect of making her still stricter with us. It is also possible that, divining my childish fantasies concerning that ‘America’ which Aunt Estelle represented to me, she felt jealous. Much later I wondered if she imagined that my father was attracted by his vivacious sister-in-law. In fact I am sure that he had no deep feelings of any sort about Aunt Estelle, except again in relation to me, and that my mother must have known this. (How egoistic I sound as I describe myself as the centre of my parents’ world. But I was the centre of their world.) In the end I ceased looking forward to Aunt Estelle’s visits, although they always excited me when they happened, because they made my mother so depressed and cross. Our house was always somehow
I was happy at school, but there were no close friendships, no dramas there, no dearly beloved schoolmasters, though some influential ones, such as Mr McDowell. My aunt and uncle loomed as large significant romantic figures, focuses of obscure emotion, in a childhood which was in a way curiously empty. Yet also they were remote, a little hazy, a little cloudy, partly of course because they were only marginally interested in
As I have indicated, part of my unease about my cousin consisted in a fear that he would succeed in life and I would fail. That, on top of the ponies, would have been too much. It is scarcely possible to say how far my ‘will to power’ was inspired by a deep original intent to outshine James and to impress him. I do not think that James felt any special desire to impress me, or perhaps he knew that he did not have to try. He had all the advantages. He received, and this is where I really began to grind my teeth, a better education than I did. I went to the local grammar school (a dull decent school, now defunct), James went to Winchester. (Perhaps this was a mixed blessing. In a way he never recovered. They say they rarely do.) I got myself a reasonably sound education, and especially I got Shakespeare. But James, it seemed to me then, was learning everything. He knew Latin and Greek and several modern languages, I had only a little French and less Latin. He knew about painting and regularly visited art galleries in Europe and America. He chatted familiarly of foreign places. He was good at mathematics, he won prizes for history. He wrote poetry which was published in the school magazine. He
Rereading these paragraphs I feel again that I am giving the wrong impression. What a difficult form autobiography is proving to be! The chagrin, the ferocious ambition which James, I am sure quite unconsciously, prompted in me was something which came about gradually and raged intermittently. When we were younger, and even when we were older, James and I played together as ordinary boys play. I had few friends, partly because my mother did not want to invite other children to the house. (I did not mind. I did not like other children very much.) And if James had friends he kept them away from me. So we played alone with each other, watching each other, but not always as crammed with consciousness as the above description might seem to imply. Even in ordinary play however some effortless superiority of James’s would tend to emerge. He knew far more than I did about birds and flowers, and was very good at climbing trees. (As a small child I remember his most seriously attempting to learn to fly!) He could find his way across country like a fox. He had a sort of uncanny instinct about things and places. When the ball got lost it was always James who found it; and he once instantly recovered an old toy aeroplane of mine simply on the basis of my having told him I had lost it.
When I was causing misery to my parents by learning the histrionic arts in London, James was being a golden boy at Oxford where he studied history. At this time I lost touch with him; I did not crave further news of his triumphs and quite positively did not want to know what cousin James was up to. Whatever it was he never finished it because the war arrived. He joined something called the Rifle Corps, later called the Green Jackets, and thus began, though I think he did not realize it at the time, a lifetime as a soldier. Indeed it is now hard for me to think of James at all except as a soldier. He had quite an interesting war, while I was going round in buses playing Shakespeare to coal-miners. After a while I heard he was in India, at Dehra Dun. I had my own problems, notably first love and its after-effects, then the opening skirmishes in my long war with Clement. I heard the outlines of James’s adventures later. He climbed various mountains. He became interested in Tibet, learnt Tibetan, and was constantly disappearing over the border on his pony. (All that early training must have come in useful.) Then he was sent on some embassy or embassies to some nearby Tibetan ruler about something to do with German prisoners of war. He had a picturesque time, but I think he never saw any real action. I was always afraid of hearing he had won the V.C. Of course I have never doubted that he is, in a sense in which I am not, a brave man.
My parents were very surprised when it turned out after the war that James had decided to become a professional soldier. They said that Uncle Abel was disappointed by the decision. Uncle Abel saw James as prime minister. (Aunt Estelle was dead by then.) I felt obscurely cheered because I intuited that James had taken a wrong turning. I was by then just beginning to do well in the theatre, my ‘will to power’ was bringing in results, and Clement was in my life like a sort of travelling carnival. So cousin James was to be a soldier. Uncle Abel said that it was only temporary and he was doing it so as to have more time to write poetry. My mother said that Uncle Abel was whistling in the dark. It did not seem to occur to any of us then that the army too is, and traditionally, a road to power and glory.
I saw a little of James after the war in that rather moving time of the reunion of survivors, but then he vanished again. He was always vanishing. He came back from India and was posted to Germany. Then he was in England again at the Staff College, then back to India. Someone told me later that he was sent on a secret mission into Tibet to investigate Soviet activity there. Of course James never told me anything about his work. I knew minimally of his travels because, with increasing regularity, he sent me picture postcards at Christmas and on my birthday. I paid him no such attentions, but if he wrote me a letter I always sent a brief reply. His letters were usually dull, always uninformative. Then he turned up in London just after the Chinese invasion of Tibet. I never saw him, before or since, display so much emotion. This was clearly for him a personal tragedy. He exclaimed bitterly about the stupidity of those who had failed to see that China, not Russia, was the real menace. But what grieved him was not this ignoring of (perhaps his own) good advice so much as the destruction of something he loved. This emotion was soon muted and he never spoke of the matter to me again.
The next postcard I received was from Singapore, and the next letter, also from Singapore, was a condolence on my father’s death. (I wonder how he knew?) After that I lost sight of James because for a time I lost sight of
