Hitch-22

Was My Valley. One day I took up a tattered paperback copy of Richard Llewellyn’s classic (it was a Pan or Penguin edition, proclaiming it “the best-seller of the war years,” which meant that it seemed kosher to me) and then sat as if snared by an enchantment until I had finished it. Then I read it again. In the next few years I inhaled and imbibed it dozens of times and could at any moment have sat for an examination on its major and minor themes. The world and experience of its boy narrator, Huw Morgan, became more real to me than my own. It was an earthquake, a climacteric, a revelation.

I was one of those rural and suburban boys who, like Ruskin when taking the railway across North London, would feel the impulse to pull down the blinds as my train went through scenes of ugliness and misery and desolation in places called Hackney Downs and London Fields. Once, after staying with a school friend on the Mumbles peninsula of South Wales, I had been as distressed as William Blake by my brief glimpse of the hell-mouth scenes of the steelworks and coal-pits around Port Talbot. But now I realized that, just on the other side of the bright Bristol Channel from the lovely moors and uplands of my upbringing, there was a world as remote from my own as the moon, or as Joseph Conrad’s Congo.

Several aspects of this hitherto-occluded other Britain lodged in the mind. First of all, its inhabitants worked mostly under the ground, like the Morlocks in H.G. Wells. Second, they spoke a non- English language at home and at church, and considered themselves conquered and dispossessed as a nation as well as suppressed as a class. Third, they thought of going on strike as an act of unselfish solidarity and emancipation rather than as “holding the country to ransom.” Fourth—though I do not know why I am placing this last on my list—they conceived of education and learning as the avenues to a better life, for their fellows as well as themselves, and not as an expensively bought means of declaring themselves superior to others less fortunate.

This was a jolt to my system and no mistake: indeed it was a severe and seismic shock to all the other systems that had undergirded my own little position. In the annals of “good-bad,” then, I would put How Green Was My Valley in the same class as Uncle Tom’s Cabin: a work that leaves an ineradicable “scratch on the mind,” to borrow Harold Isaacs’s useful phrase. There was another element as well. At a certain point, on some springy-turfed Welsh hillside far above the scenes of alienation and exploitation that lay below, young Huw contrived to part with his irksome virginity. Richard Llewellyn handled this transition with very slightly too much quasi-poetic euphemism, his crucial error being (to my fevered imagining) the idea that the inflamed heat of young manhood could be assuaged only by the relative “coolness” of a feminine interior. One had had a vague hope that the ardency would be appeased by an even greater heat, rather than sizzled like a red-hot horseshoe dipped in water, but at this stage I would have been willing to settle for anything that offered incandescence in either direction.

It interested me very much, later on, to discover that Huw’s creator Richard Llewellyn was not at all the fire-eating partisan of the coal miners’ struggles that I had taken him to be, but rather a conservative and old- fashioned type who had been setting down a world he had lost. It only goes to show. If you spend a certain amount of every day memorizing the following incantations, the effects may not always be the ones that are intended:

Teach us, good Lord, to serve thee as thou deservest:
To give, and not to count the cost,
To fight, and not to heed the wounds,
To toil, and not to seek for rest,
To labor, and to ask for no reward,
Save that of knowing that we do thy will.

That is from Ignatius Loyola. Or this, from Sir Francis Drake himself:

O Lord God, when thou hast given thy servants to endeavour any great matter, grant us also to know that it is not the beginning but the continuing of the same, until it be thoroughly finished, which yieldeth the true glory; through Him that for the finishing of thy work laid down his life…

Even when you have learned later about Loyola’s fanaticism or Drake’s piracy, verses like these have the faculty of recurring to one at apt or critical moments. Years later I read Lionel Trilling on George Orwell’s attachment to “traditional” and “martial” values. Trilling guessed that Orwell esteemed these supposedly conservative virtues because he thought they might come in handy later on, as revolutionary ones.

And this is partly why I can’t entirely second or echo his own great memoir of prep-school misery. For me, the experience of being sent away at a tender age was, at any cost, finally an emancipating one. I knew I hadn’t been dispatched to boarding school to get me out of the way (an assurance that I don’t think the young Orwell shared). I knew it was my only eventual meal ticket for a decent university: that undiscovered country to which no Hitchens had yet traveled. I knew that I owed my parents the repayment of a debt. True, I did get pushed around and unfairly punished and introduced too soon to some distressing facts of existence, but I would not have preferred to stay at home or to have been sheltered from these experiences, and it was probably good for me to be deprived of my adoring mother and taught—I can still remember the phrase—that I wasn’t by any means “the only pebble on the beach.” Why, I once inquired, was the school boxing tournament into which I had been entered against my will called “The Ninety Percent”? “Because, Hitchens, the fight involves only ten percent skill and ninety percent guts.” This seemed even then like a parody of a Tom Brown story, and I had the socks knocked off me in the ring, but why do I remember it after half a century? The school motto was Ut Prosim (“That I May Be Useful”), and when one has joined in the singing of “I Vow to Thee My Country”—especially on 11 November by the war memorial—or “The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended” (“To sing is to pray twice,” as St. Augustine put it) then one may in fact be very slightly better equipped to face that Japanese jail or Iraqi checkpoint.

I have just looked up the gleaming new website of Mount House, and realized that if I have set all this down in my turn, it is because I was among the last generation to go through the “old school” version of Englishness. The site speaks enthusiastically of the number of girls being educated at the establishment (good grief!), of the availability of vegetarian diets and caterings for other “special needs,” and of its sensitivity to various sorts of “learning disability.” Now I cannot say I am completely sorry to think that there will be no more “eat that mutton, Hitchens” or “bend over that chair, Hitchens,” or “shall we call him Christine, boys, he’s so feeble?” but something in me hopes that it hasn’t all become positive reinforcement, with high marks constantly awarded for mere self- esteem.

Cambridge

MY MOTHER HAVING DECIDED that Tonbridge was out of the question for her sensitive Christopher, some swift work had to be done to reposition me in the struggle—the whole aim and object of the five years at Mount House—to make me into a proper public-school boy. Mr. Wortham proved adept at the string-pulling of the system. It was quite rapidly decided that I should instead apply to go to The Leys School, in Cambridge. The atmosphere there was more intellectual and the headmaster, Alan Barker, was a friend of Mr. Wortham’s. Since I was being taken as a “late” applicant, I would still sit the same exam—the “Common Entrance” that has been the fate of the English prep-school boy since records were kept—but would have to achieve a scholarship mark at it. This I was able to do without much of a strain. For many years I kept the telegram (ah, those days of the telegram) which was received by my proud parents: “PASSED FOR LEYS CONGRATULATIONS WORTHAM.” This also enabled me to “score” a bit over my thirteen-year-old playmates. English public schools have names like Radley and Repton and Charterhouse and Sherborne and Stowe (not to mention the Eton and Harrow to which we knew we could not aspire), and it was quite the done thing to debate the relative merits of these status-conscious destinations. “Hah, Pugh is going to Sedbergh—moldy old prison.” “Oh yes, well you’re going to Sherborne,