A Time of Gifts Read Free Page A

about the dissolution of the place and I was soon back ‘for a second chance,’ a forest exile among the snakebelts and the bat-oil of the horrible preparatory school. But, predictably after this heady freedom, not for long.
    My mother had to cope with these upheavals. I would turn up in mid-term: once, at our cottage at Dodford, a tiny thatched village under a steep holt full of foxgloves (and, indeed, full of foxes) with a brook for its one street, where she was simultaneously writing plays and, though hard up, learning to fly a Moth biplane at an aerodrome forty miles away; once, at Primrose Hill Studios near Regent’s Park, within earshot of the lions in the Zoo at night, where she had persuaded Arthur Rackham, a neighbour in that cloister, to paint amazing scenes—navigable birdsnests in a gale-wind, hobgoblin transactions under extruding roots and mice drinking out of acorns—all over an inside door; and more than once at 213 Piccadilly, which we moved to later, where a breakneck stair climbed to a marvellous Aladdin’s cave of a flat overlookinglong chains of street-lamps and the acrobatic skysigns of the Circus. I would be hangdog on the doormat, flanked by a master with a depressing tale to unfold. Though upset, my mother was gifted with too much imagination and humour to let gloom settle for long. Nevertheless, these reverses filled me for the time being with suicidal despair.
    But this particular disaster happened to coincide with one of my father’s rare leaves from directing the Geological Survey of India. He and my mother had parted by then, and since these furloughs only came round every three years, we scarcely knew each other. All at once, as though at the wave of a wand, I found myself high above Lake Maggiore and then Como, trying to keep up with his giant stride across the gentian-covered mountains. He was an out-and-out-naturalist and rightly proud of being an F.R.S.; indeed, he had discovered an Indian mineral which was named after him and a worm with eight hairs on its back; and—brittle trove!—a formation of snow-flake. (I wondered, much later on, when white specks whirled past in the Alps or the Andes or the Himalayas, whether any of them were his.) That enormously tall and thin frame, dressed in a pepper-and-salt Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, was festooned with accoutrements. Laden with his field glasses and his butterfly net, I would get my breath while he was tapping at the quartz and the hornblende on the foothills of Monte Rosa with his hammer and clicking open a pocket lens to inspect the fossils and insects of Monte della Croce. His voice at such moments was simultaneously cavernous and enthusiastic. He would carefully embed wild flowers for later classification in a moss-lined vasculum and sometimes halt for a sketch with his water-colours balanced on a rock. What a change, I thought, from those elephants and the jungles full of monkeys and tigers which I imagined, not wholly wrongly, to be his usual means of transport and habitat. At ground level I trailed behind him through half the picture galleries of northern Italy.

    * * *
    Three peaceful years followed. Gilbert and Phyllis Scott-Malden, with three sons and half a dozen boys cramming for Common Entrance under their wing, lived in a large house with a rambling garden in Surrey. (I can’t think of them, nor of Mrs. Scott-Malden’s sister Josephine Wilkinson, who had a strong and separate influence later on, without the utmost gratitude and affection.) He was an excellent classicist and a kind and patient all-round teacher, and she filled out his firm structure with a great love of literature and poetry and painting. I was still an intermittent pest, but calmer existence began and I shot ahead in the subjects I enjoyed: everything, that is, except mathematics, for which my ineptitude seemed akin to imbecility. We made up plays and acted Shakespeare scenes and lay about the grass under a