Vine was an excellent teacher but an austere man who stalked about in a mortarboard and black robe in which there was a pocket for a bamboo cane, a hidden intimidator seldom used but always threatening. I was a casual student, interested in history, English literature, and composition, a class in which I somehow internalized rules of grammar and syntax which I can’t articulate but which send an alarm signal when something is wrong. These days I get signals with almost every newspaper or book I read. I accept that language and usage change, and that I became obsessive about some rather silly rules, such as split infinitives. But I insist on drawing the line at misusage that changes meaning. For example, even the most respected writers misplace the word only in sentences and so change meaning. To explain this to students, when I was teaching at Carleton University in Ottawa, I invented a handy guide:
“Only I drink sherry in the morning,” means that no one else does.
“I only drink sherry in the morning,” means that I do nothing else.
“I drink only sherry in the morning,” means that I drink nothing else.
“I drink sherry only in the morning,” means that I do not drink it at other times.
A student once remarked that if I drank less sherry I might not have this obsession with usage, so I changed sherry to coffee. But I trust this guide will now lurk in the mind of every reader, and rise to worry them when they write a sentence using the word only.
I enjoyed some mathematics because numbers are so reliable — they always add up the same way, or they ought to — but science was and remains a mystery; I never did figure out whether the 2 in H2O referred to the parts of hydrogen or of oxygen. It could be either, couldn’t it? I was hopeless at French; Vine gave up in disgust after I got two marks out of fifty despite his special coaching. Maybe it was the illogicality of irregular verbs that got logical me down. And then there was the Bible. Vine taught us the Gospel According to St. Paul in preparation for our leaving exam, and it involved verse-by-verse scrutiny and a good deal of memorizing. Shakespeare, incidentally, was taught in the same way, with the assigned play in my year being The Tempest: all that wonderful language reduced to nit-picking analysis and mental drudgery. But I read recently that London cabbies actually enlarge their brains when they memorize “The Knowledge” of streets and addresses, which they have to do to obtain a licence, so maybe forcing kids to memorize texts did pay off.
But back to the Bible, as they say. I can’t remember exactly when I came to the conclusion but, ever the detached analyst, I left school an agnostic. I should explain my reasoning, but I do not wish to give offence to those of other opinions, so let me say at once that I do not claim to know the truth. Indeed, it is precisely because I see no conclusive evidence either for or against the existence of some sort of directing or superior power that I am an agnostic. Nor do I mock faith by saying, as I think Oscar Wilde did, that faith is believing in something one knows to be untrue, or as H.L. Mencken put it, faith is having an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. Faith may be given to some and not to others, and for all those capable of faith in a kindly God it must be a comfort in our turbulent and uncertain world. But that is not for me. While I am prepared to accept that there might be some sort of superior power, I see no evidence whatsoever that there is a loving God who sees every sparrow fall and has a personal interest in me — and I see plenty of evidence to the contrary. The Old Testament God was clearly far from loving. We are told that when he became displeased with his handiwork in creating the world, he drowned almost every living thing. The God of the New Testament is hardly better; he is said to have arranged matters so that his son had to be crucified in order that the rest of us might have a chance of being forgiven our sins and admitted to his presence. Some loving father.
Who Jesus was, and what he actually did and said, is still being debated after some two thousand years, but the notion that he is worthy of worship because he gave his life for us hardly bears scrutiny. Lots of mortals have endured torture and death for much less without being proclaimed gods. But perhaps Jesus has suffered the fate of many prophets: In trying to translate the master’s hazy vision into regulations for the faithful, disciples become bureaucrats and the essence of the teaching is lost — or, worse, turned into a tyranny. St. Paul was perhaps the first Christian bureaucrat, mullahs seem to mess up Mohammed, and Lenin made the worst of Marx. The question remains, however, of why, if there is no God and no accountability at the end of life, we behave even half decently instead of indulging our worst instincts. The best answer I have is that it is in our own interest to treat others as we wish them to treat us, and if that comes from the Sermon on the Mount I don’t think it proves Jesus to be anything more than a wise man. So, lacking conviction, I have to be content to do the best I can to make the world a slightly better place, or at least no worse than I found it, without asking or expecting divine help. But, and this is a sobering thought, questions such as these may not bother modern children who seem hardly to be aware of the Bible which, right or wrong, has been such a central part of our cultural history.
It was usual to take the Oxford school leaving exam at sixteen, but I became eligible in the winter of 1941, when I was still fifteen, and, to Vine’s considerable surprise, passed with sufficient honours to have won “Exemption from Matriculation” had I had the requisite foreign language credit, the mystifying French. The explanation for my modest success was in part that I had always enjoyed exams, writing around a question to which I did not know the answer, to influence the examiner by displaying what I did know. Later in life, I used this technique in journalism to persuade editors and readers that I knew more about the subject than I really did. But looking back on the school years, I think I got a pretty good grounding in the basics. I learned also that I was hopeless in sports of all kinds. In the school yard we played cricket with balls we made ourselves by encasing a bundle of rags in a string net and soaking the result in water. The explanation for that curious custom, I think, was not poverty but respect for the school windows and a healthy fear of what damage a hard ball could do when bounced on an asphalt surface. There was a school sports field about a mile away, and there we played with the proper equipment. By appearing regularly as a volunteer to umpire games or, with others, to replace a horse in tugging an enormous roller over the wicket, I earned a place eventually in the school’s cricket team. I was opening bat with the less than heroic role of dispiriting the opposing bowlers, not by scoring runs but by stonewalling their best efforts. But we weren’t much good as a team anyway and always lost our annual game with the inmates of a nearby asylum, perhaps because we were distracted by the hope that they would act like lunatics, which they never did. I was as averse to competition in school sports as I was in dinghy racing, but that may have been because I knew I was without talent and would lose. In other words, I was unwilling to face defeat. Against that painful thought, when I played chess I preferred to lose a good game than to win a poor one. But for whatever reason I have never been interested in professional sports, which cuts me off from an important element in male culture, even from the Canadian national culture of hockey. I never read the sports pages in the newspapers or watch games on TV — and I couldn’t care less who wins in the Olympics, which I suppose makes me an alien in today’s culture, and an agnostic alien at that. So much for my childhood.
~ Chapter 3 ~
Going to War
I was vaguely aware from childhood that war was approaching. There were black-shirted fascists handing out pamphlets in the High Street, and I was told that they scuffled with Communists on Saturday nights, even in sleepy old Exeter. After the Munich crisis in 1938, we were all fitted with gas masks, and there was much talk of civil defence against air attack with bombs that might explode, create fires, or shower us with poison gas. But life went on, and we spent the summer of 1939, as usual, on the Warren. I remember when we were shopping in Exmouth one morning seeing the front page of the Daily Express announcing that Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact, and being told that this made war more likely. We had no radio and heard that war had been declared when a police