Rain bombards the windows of Arbuthnot’s House. Christmas this year is not white, but dank, sodden and utterly joyless. On the plus side, the foul weather – which seems to have set in not just for the day, but permanently, as if it intends to continue for the duration of the war – makes it unlikely the Luftwaffe will leave their bases in northern France until the festivities are over.
And such festivities. Mrs Arbuthnot has torn colourful pages from ancient magazines, and made them into paperchains, with which she has draped the otherwise sludgily colourless sitting room. Mournful carols seep tinnily from an ancient gramophone. And Mr and Mrs Arbuthnot have exchanged gifts (pipe cleaners for him, a tortoiseshell hair slide for her), in blatant disregard of the official War Council advice not to waste precious resources through needless seasonal extravagance.
My Father, far from his family on Christmas day, has received no gift. (His parents have, in fact, arranged for a book token to be sent to him, but its non-arrival counts as one of the lesser disruptions of wartime life.)
My Father is 14. He is spending Christmas with his house-master Mr Arbuthnot and his wife because he has nowhere else to go. Meal-times aside, he passes the days revising for the exams that will follow when school resumes in January, in the tiny, bare box-room that has been allocated to him, which forms part of the House’s largely deserted servants’ quarters. (The Arbuthnots have just one remaining maid, a slow docile woman of indeterminate age called Ellen, who seems literally unaware of My Father’s existence, despite occupying a slightly larger box-room on the same landing, and sharing an antiquated loudly clanking lavatory.)
On one or two occasions since the holidays began, Mrs Arbuthnot has attempted, with no real conviction, to encourage My Father to leave the house, and take a bracing winter constitutional in the school grounds. But My Father – who has grown up in a warm climate, and is, in any case, a physically lazy boy – has not found this a tempting prospect, and has preferred to lose himself in his well-thumbed Latin primer, as the most effective means of getting through the interminable days.
Now, however, it is a meal-time – and time for not just any meal, but Christmas dinner – and My Father is seated at the Arbuthnots’ dining room table, tie carefully knotted and tweed jacket recently brushed, hair slicked down with water, waiting for Mr Arbuthnot to say grace.
My Father wishes he were at home, pulling faces at his two younger sisters, trying to make them laugh, to the stern disapproval of his parents, seated formally at either end of the table. His eyes feel hot and uncomfortable in his head.
Ellen plonks down a serving dish in front of him. The vegetables it contains have been boiled to unidentifiable mush. There is, to My Father’s surprise, a chicken; the school’s attempts at wartime self-sufficiency include keeping a small amount of livestock, one of whose number has been sacrificed to Mr Arbuthnot’s Christmas feast. But it’s a pathetically small scraggy fowl, which barely seems worth carving to My Father. He thinks longingly of Ibrahim’s celebrated lemon chicken with almonds, a bird on an altogether more heroic scale, borne in from the kitchen with great solemnity, atop a small mountain of fragrantly spiced rice. My Father is almost as moved by this thought as by the absence of his family. His stomach – permanently aching with hunger, in these deprived times – surges within him, and his mouth fills with saliva.
Mr Arbuthnot, who teaches Classics, lowers his head, and mutters: “Quidquid nobis apositum est, aut quidquid aponetur – “
Oh for god’s sake, thinks my famished father, what’s wrong with Benedictus benedicat?
“ – benedicat Deus haec Sua dona in usum nostrum,” Mr Arbuthnot drones on, “necnon, nosmet ipsos in servitium Suum, per Iesum Christum, Dominum nostrum”.
And at last he is finished, and the meal begins.
There is nothing at all to delight the discerning diner, but the food – thanks largely to the School garden’s success with root vegetables – is plentiful, for once; and My Father, who will perhaps always remain more of a gourmand than a gourmet, eats like an under-nourished boy with no certainty about when his next square meal will be.
There is nothing to drink but water, which may partly explain why conversation falters – though My Father, head down over his plate, barely notices. And soon, the festive meal descends into near-silence, broken only by the clink of cutlery, and the distant mewling of a small infant. Glances, heavy with meaning, are exchanged by Mr and Mrs Arbuthnot. An acute observer might possibly interpret these as indicative of a disagreement over parenting best practice. Correctly; Mrs Arbuthnot is gripped by a first-time mother’s instinctive desire to tend to her distressed baby; Mr Arbuthnot is reminding her, wordlessly, that he is firmly of the view that no child, whatever its age, is ever improved by the reckless and precipitate indulgence of its wishes.
Mrs Arbuthnot wriggles miserably. The baby – Nigel, nearly 12 weeks old – is crying more loudly.
“Alec?” She looks imploringly at her husband, making to rise from the table.
“Susan,” he replies, with a sternly upward admonitory intonation that compels her to sink back onto her chair.
How do Mr and Mrs Arbuthnot feel about playing host to My Father, this Christmas? Certainly not enthusiastic. On his side, there is resignation; he sees it as a wearisome responsibility pursuant upon his recent unexpected promotion to House-master. (Perhaps not entirely unexpected. Although Alec Arbuthnot is a sickly specimen – so myopic as to be practically blind, asthmatic, and partly lame through childhood polio – he is one of the very few remaining members of the school’s teaching staff under the age of 50, and in possession of a wife; this last not quite a mandatory requirement, but considered highly desirable in a man taking charge of the physical and moral wellbeing of around 90 adolescent boys. He is, in fact, 26 – though he hopes that smoking a pipe and sprinkling his speech with Latin epithets make him seem older.)
For her part, his wife – who is 23, but with the unformed, whey-faced pallor and protuberant bones of a teenager – feels far from hospitable towards My Father. She is too exhausted to be capable of active hostility; little Nigel seems permanently enraged or distressed; and, unable to feed satisfactorily from a bottle, he rarely sleeps for longer than 20 minutes. Her breasts are swollen and sore, and continually spout milk, to her considerable embarrassment. And her husband, like her son, is also angry and unhappy for most of his waking hours, for which he seems to hold her exclusively responsible. Motherhood is not going well for Susan Arbuthnot, and while My Father makes few demands upon her, the last thing she feels her home lacks is a miserable-looking pubescent boy, moping around under her feet, day after day.
The baby is howling now, achieving impressive decibel levels for one so small.
“So how is the Latin vocab coming along, young fellow?”
She is aware that, although her husband is listlessly attempting to engage their young guest in conversation, his eyes are still fixed upon her, alert for any sign of maternal weakness. It is, she notes miserably, still nearly two hours until Nigel’s next scheduled feed.
“Not bad, sir.” My Father is reluctant to talk more than strictly necessary, when he could be eating.
“Because that was what wather what let you down last half, wasn’t it?”
Mr Arbuthnot is unable to pronounce the letter r; it is one of the lesser reasons why My Father, like all the boys in his form, feels a bottomless contempt for this pompous but essentially harmless young man. His pathetic attempts at gravitas, his limp, his non-combatant status, and his complete inability to maintain any semblance of order in class are other, more significant factors in the universal derision that he attracts.
“Yes, sir,” replies My Father.
Mrs Arbuthnot twists and twitches in her seat, looking towards the door, as if trying to gauge the probability of being able to escape, without being rugby tackled by her husband.
“You’re an able young fellow, extwemely able, in my estimation. It would be a shame – a cwying shame – to let yourself down for want of a few hours scwutinising vocab. Wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” replies My Father, “a crying shame”.
The razor’s edge of his hunger now somewhat blunted, he allows himself a small satirical fling at his host and House-master. His face gives nothing away. Mr Arbuthnot strongly suspects, but cannot be certain, that he is being treated with disrespect by his young house-guest. Later in life, this ability to communicate obliquely – to hint at one thing, while saying another; to proclaim loyalty while implying a willingness to betray; to tease and tantalise and intrigue – will serve My Father well professionally; much better than anything else he learns at school.
But what of My Father now, at this very moment, just after 2.30 pm on Wednesday 25 December 1940? What kind of 14-year-old boy is he? What – apart from the probability that he misses his home and family, and that he is good at Latin (he will fairly soon gain a Classics scholarship to Oxford) – can we say about him that amounts to more than guesswork?
What, for example, is his day-to-day life at this second division English public school actually like? Is he popular? Is he bullied? Or a bully?
Based on what we know, it seems likely that he is none of these things, to any marked degree. He is certainly no athlete, and neither does he possess the obvious charisma or reckless flamboyance that are the other characteristics which boys tend to admire in each other. As for being bullied, it’s true he is an academic high flyer, but – unlike his House-master – he isn’t burdened with any of the physical signifiers of socially maladjusted swottiness. And by now, he must possess the beginnings of real charm, too; an unshowy ability to make himself likeable, when it’s in his interests to do so. And being a bully? The least plausible of these possibilities. Throughout his life, My Father will never show any predilection or talent for obtaining his ends through force or threats. His methods are altogether more subtle. So, while violence is not his métier, we probably can imagine him orchestrating a whispering campaign against an unpopular classmate.
Little Nigel is in a frenzy now. As babies do, he has frightened himself with the vehemence of his own cries, and is screaming with all the force his tiny lungs can muster, in pure terror.
His mother can bear no more. She pushes back her chair and gets to her feet, eyes demurely lowered as if hoping to make herself invisible by not seeing others. But if that is her stratagem, it’s ineffective.
“Susan, do NOT go to him!” hisses her husband, with extraordinary sotto voce venom.
She hesitates, in her place. A wracking sob escapes her.
“If you leave this woom, Susan, I pwomise you there will be consequences.”
My Father is appalled by the scene he is witnessing, though the two participants are almost entirely oblivious to his presence. But as Mrs Arbuthnot stands there, her shoulders heaving as she tries to control her tears, he can’t help noticing her breasts. (One thing we can say with certainty about My Father at this point in his life is that, in this respect at least, he has the interests of a typical 14-year-old boy.)
And as he tries, unsuccessfully, to avert his gaze from the altogether captivating spectacle of her agitated embonpoint, something strange happens. The front of her pale blue muslin dress – exactly where his eyes are fixed – suddenly darkens, as if – well, My Father thinks, it almost looks as if Mrs Arbuthnot’s bosom has been drenched with water. From inside her clothes.
She sobs again, pulls her cardigan protectively across her chest, and bolts for the door.
For a moment, her husband is non-plussed, and continues to sit slack-jawed, in his place at the head of the table. His wife can clearly be heard running up the stairs, to the nursery above. Spurred, finally, into action by her insurrection, he rises with what he hopes looks like ominous calm to his feet, clamping his pipe masterfully between his jaws, and limps painfully out of the room in pursuit of her.
My Father is left alone, with what’s left of his Christmas dinner.
He clears his plate. He eats the remaining roast potatoes and carrots, from the serving dishes. He picks up the chicken carcass, which has been stripped bare, and sucks the bones.
Upstairs, the baby is still crying, though a perhaps a shade less hysterically, and My Father can hear the muffled sound of further angry words being exchanged by his hosts.
My Father doesn’t know what to do. He considers retiring to his room, but doesn’t want to vacate the dining room if there is still any possibility of Christmas pudding being served.
He sits, and waits. He wishes he were at home. His stomach is full, for the first time in months, but he feels a vast resounding emptiness inside him.
He looks around. Something on the sideboard catches his eye. A decanter, containing a dark liquid. Sherry, he supposes. My Father empties his water glass and takes it across to the sideboard, where he fills it from the decanter, very nearly to the brim. Close up, the liquid looks even less alluring; muddy-coloured and viscous. My Father raises the glass to his lips and drinks it down, not fast but steadily, as if taking an unpleasant medicine and not wanting to prolong the ordeal. (My Father was right, it is sherry; an indescribably filthy British blend, originally decanted – then tasted, and judged unfit for human consumption – by Mr Arbuthnot’s predecessor as Head of House, shortly after the Abdication.)
My Father sits back down at the table. He feels different, better. He must, he supposes, be drunk. It as, as far as he can tell, a state clearly preferable to not-drunk.
He fills his glass again with water from the jug on the table, then takes it, a little unsteadily, to the decanter, which he fills to roughly its original level. Though drunk, My Father is still capable of clarity in thought and action.
The carriage clock on the mantelpiece measures the passing of the winter afternoon. Outside, December darkness starts to fall. Mr and Mrs Arbuthnot do not reappear, although the baby has finally stopped crying. My Father allows his head to slide forward onto the table, where he cradles it in his arms.
Christmas pudding does not appear to be on the cards.
*****