A Time of Gifts Read Free Page B

holm-oak with a dish of plums and listened to Mr. Scott-Malden reading Gilbert Murray’s translation of The Frogs ; he would switch to the original to explain and give point to the comic passages and the onomatopoeia. We had built a hut in an enormous walnut tree, with rope-ladders climbing half-way, then hand over hand; and I was allowed to sleep in it all my last summer term. In spite of maths, I scraped through Common Entrance in the end and looked forward to Public School life with ill-founded confidence.
    * * *
    Copious reading about the Dark and the Middle Ages had floridly coloured my views of the past and the King’s School, Canterbury, touched off emotions which were sharply opposed to those of Somerset Maugham in the same surroundings; they were closer to Walter Pater’s seventy years earlier, and probably identical, I liked to think, with those of Christopher Marlowe earlier still. I couldn’t get over the fact that the school had been founded at the very beginning of Anglo-Saxon Christianity—before the sixth century was out, that is: fragments of Thor and Woden had hardly stopped smouldering in the Kentish woods: the oldest part of the buildings was modern by these standards, dating only from a few decadesafter the Normans landed. There was a wonderfully cobwebbed feeling about this dizzy and intoxicating antiquity—an ambiance both haughty and obscure which turned famous seats of learning, founded eight hundred or a thousand years later, into gaudy mushrooms and seemed to invest these hoarier precincts, together with the wide green expanses beyond them, the huge elms, the Dark Entry, and the ruined arches and the cloisters—and, while I was about it, the booming and jackdaw-crowded pinnacles of the great Angevin cathedral itself, and the ghost of St. Thomas à Becket and the Black Prince’s bones—with an aura of nearly prehistoric myth.
    Although it was a one-sided love in the end, for a time things went well. I liked nearly everybody, from the headmaster and my housemaster down, and prospered erratically at dead and living languages and at history and geography—at everything, once more, except mathematics. I found my mind wandering at games; loved boxing and was good at it; and in summer, having chosen rowing instead of cricket, lay peacefully beside the Stour, well upstream of the rhythmic creaking and the exhortation, reading Lily Christine and Gibbon and gossiping with kindred lotus-eaters under the willow-branches. Verse, imitative and bad but published in school magazines nevertheless, poured out like ectoplasm. I wrote and read with intensity, sang, debated, drew and painted; scored minor successes at acting, stage-managing and in painting and designing scenery; and made gifted and enterprising friends. One of these, a year older, was Alan Watts, a brilliant classical scholar who, most remarkably, wrote and published an authoritative book on Zen Buddhism—years before the sect became fashionable—while he was still at school. Later, he became a respected authority on Eastern and Western religions. (In his autobiography In My Own Way , which came out shortly before his premature death a few years ago, he writes at some length of my troubles at school—and especially of their abrupt end—in the warm spirit of a champion; and if he didn’t quite get the hang of it in one or two places, it was not his fault.)
    What went wrong? I think I know now. A bookish attempt tocoerce life into a closer resemblance to literature was abetted—it can only be—by a hangover from early anarchy: translating ideas as fast as I could into deeds overrode every thought of punishment or danger; as I seem to have been unusually active and restless, the result was chaos. It mystified me and puzzled others. “You’re mad!” prefects and monitors would exclaim, brows knit in glaring scrum-half bewilderment, as new misdeeds came to light. Many of my