A Time of Gifts Read Free

charm and skill, backed by my swift treason and by London and Peter Pan and Where the Rainbow Ends and Chu Chin Chow , my mother succeeded in bringing about a complete shift of affection, and in taming me, more or less, for family purposes. But my early educational ventures, when the time came—at a kindergarten, then at a school of my sister’s which also took small boys, and finally at a horrible preparatory school near Maidenhead named after a Celtic saint—ended in uniform catastrophe. Harmless in appearance, more presentable by now and of a refreshingly unconstricted address, Iwould earn excellent opinions at first. But as soon as early influences began to tell, those short-lived virtues must have seemed a cruel Fauntleroy veneer, cynically assumed to mask the Charles Addams fiend that lurked beneath: it coloured with an even darker tinct the sum of misdeeds which soon began heaping up. When I catch a glimpse of similar children today, I am transfixed with fellow-feelings, and with dread.
    First bewilderment reigned, and then despair. After a particularly bad cropper when I was about ten, I was taken to see two psychiatrists. In a recent biography I read with excitement that the first of these and the most likeable had been consulted by Virginia Woolf; and I thought for a moment that I might have gazed at her across the waiting-room; alas, it was before I was born. The second, more severe in aspect, recommended a co-educational and very advanced school for difficult children near Bury St. Edmunds.
    Salsham Hall, at Salsham-le-Sallows, was an unclassifiable but engaging manor house with woods and a rough lake in a wide-skied and many-belfried expanse of Suffolk. It was run by a grey- haired, wild-eyed man called Major Truthful and when I spotted two beards—then very rare—among the mixed and eccentric-looking staff, and the heavy bangles and the amber and the tassels and the homespun, and met my fellow-alumni—about thirty boys and girls from four-year-olds to nearly twenty, all in brown jerkins and sandals: the musical near-genius with occasional fits, the millionaire’s nephew who chased motor-cars along country lanes with a stick, the admiral’s pretty and slightly kleptomaniac daughter, the pursuivant’s son with nightmares and an infectious inherited passion for heraldry, the backward, the somnambulists and the mythomaniacs (by which I mean those with an inventive output more pronounced than the rest, which, as no one believed us, did no harm), and, finally, the small bad hats like me who were merely very naughty—I knew I was going to like it. The nature-worshipping eurythmics in a barn and the country-dances in which the Major led both staff and children, were a shade bewildering at first, because everybody was naked. Nimbly and gravely, keeping time toa cottage piano and a recorder, we sped through the figures of Gathering Peascods, Sellinger’s Round, Picking-up Sticks and Old Mole.
    It was midsummer. There were walled gardens close at hand, and giant red and gold gooseberries, and the nets over the loaded currant bushes foiled starlings but not us; and beyond them, the trees and the water descended in dim and beckoning perspectives. I understood the implications of the landscape at once: life under the greenwood tree. To choose a Maid Marion and a band, to get the girls to weave yards of Lincoln green on the therapeutic looms and then to slice and sew them into rough hoods with crenellated collars, cut bows and string them, carry off raspberry-canes for arrows and to take to the woods, was a matter of days. No-one stopped us: ‘Fay ce que vouldras’ was the whole of their law. English schools, the moment they depart from the conventional track, are oases of strangeness and comedy, and it is tempting to linger. But vaguely guessed-at improprieties among the staff or the older children, or both—things of which we knew little in our sylvan haunts—brought