Any Human Heart Read Free

question and I vaguely muttered something about not having given the matter much attention. ‘Not like you, Mountstuart,’ he said and wandered off. At supper I asked Leeping what he considered H-D was up to. ‘He wants you to be a fanatical atheist like him,’ Leeping said. We talked on about faith in an interesting and not too pretentious vein, I thought. Leeping has a good mind, I suspect, if only he could get over his amazing complacency. I asked him why, if he was a Jew, he didn’t go to the synagogue in the same way as we RCs went to Mass. I may be Jewish, he said, but I’m a third-generation, Church-of-England Jew. It was all a bit obscure to me and now I understand why I don’t give religion much thought. The awful boredom of uncritical faith. All great artists are doubters. Perhaps I might work this idea into my next essay for H-D. It would please him. Leeping confessed, as we filed out of the dining hall, that he has developed a bit of a passion for little Montague. I said little Montague was a corrupt brute in the making — a brutette. Leeping laughed loud. That’s why I like him.
     
     
18 December [1923]
     
    Writing this on the train to Birmingham, a feeling of sour and persistent depression coursing through me. It was galling to see Scabius and Leeping and what looked like 90 per cent of the school boarding the train for London and the south. After the locals dispersed, about twenty of us were left standing around the station waiting for the various trains to our distant and unsavoury provincial towns (Norwich Station, it strikes me, represents the epitome of the dullness at the soul of provincial life). Eventually my train arrived and I managed to find myself a solitary compartment at the rear. I have picked up a few companions as we’ve travelled, however, but I sit here crouched over my notebook writing, and covertly watching, my heart growing ever more leaden as the miles between me and ‘home’ diminish. The burly sailor and his painted doxy, the commercial traveller with his cardboard suitcase, the fat woman eating sweets, taking two for every one she feeds her tiny, bright-eyed, quiescent child. Rather a good sentence.
     
     
    Later. Mother’s interior decoration has continued apace in my absence. She has papered my room — without permission — in a dark caramel brown with a motif of blurry silvery grey shields or crests. Perfectly vile. The dining room has been converted into her ‘sewing room’, so we are now obliged to eat in the conservatory, which, it being the middle of winter, is infernally cold. My father appears to accept these and other transformations without complaint. Mother’s hair is as dark as a raven’s wing and I’m afraid she is beginning to look absurd. And we have a new car, an Armstrong-Siddeley, which sits resplendently undriven in the garage under a tarpaulin. Father prefers to take a tram to work.
    Went for a walk through Edgbaston, already consumed with boredom, and looked in vain at the big houses and villas for any sign of individual spirit. The Christmas tree must surely be the saddest and most vulgar object invented by mankind. Needless to say we have a giant one in the conservatory, its tip bent over by the glass ceiling. Popped into a cinema and saw thirty minutes of
Bride Fever.
Left overwhelmed with lust for Rosemary Chance. Thank God Lucy arrives the day after tomorrow. I shall kiss her this holiday or else become a monk.
     
     
24 December 1923
     
    Xmas eve. Lucy says she wants to go to Edinburgh University to read archaeology. I asked, are there any women archaeologists? And she said, well, at least there’ll be one. She is beautiful — to my eyes, anyway — tall and strong, and I love her accent. 3 Though I do miss her long hair. My mother said, contrariwise, that she thought Lucy’s bob was ‘très mignonne’.
     
     
    Wrote to Scabius and Leeping suggesting possible challenges. I also declared that we should call each other by our