This was a very fair test because the bird and the bus were going at about the same speed and, as far as any human could estimate, were going to pass the pole and the pillar-box at about the same moment; so it would only require a minute twitch of omnipotence to slow the bus down a shade and let the bird win. Nobody else would notice.
In the event the bus and the bird arrived exactly simultaneously. This told me that if God was there He probably wasn’t paying attention. So I repeated the tests a few times. God scored one, Non-existence two, with three draws.
Then it began to snow, which was unusual in April. I watched the big white flakes swing slowly down and melt away on the wet ground. They fell so thickly that I could hardly see the road, let alone the pillar-box. It suddenly occurred to me that God, if He was there, might have decided He’d had more than enough of this carry-on. So I rather quickly turned away and ran back down the empty brown lino corridor to find the others. I was cold and I wanted, more than anything in the world, to go home.
VI. Bloomsbury -on- the-Marsh.
For all its pokiness, our house in Hendon was far more full of life than the bleak impersonal school house. Although John and I didn’t see all that much of our parents, even I could sense that this was because Ray and Daisy were busy people, joining enthusiastically in with, if not an actual ‘movement’, some common social purpose which they shared with their friends.
However, we were sometimes able to take more of a part in their world because Daisy had obtained a car, a second-hand bullnosed Morris, with an open top and grey-green oilcloth seats. Its gearbox sang a different note for each gear and its bulb-hooter didn’t just go ‘HONK’ when you squeezed it, it went ‘SqueeeAHONK’ like an outraged sea lion. Most of the trips we took in it were fairly local but occasionally we took longer journeys, real holiday journeys with luggage, to stay with their friends in the country.
I guess the first time Daisy drove us to Bloomsbury-on-the-Marsh must have been in about 1931. She took us up the Cambridge road, turned into Essex and drove through Toppesfield to Bradfields, which was the country house of Francis and Vera Meynell.
I had never consciously seen a really old house before and I was astonished. It looked as if a giant had sat on it. All the walls were crooked, either leaning in or leaning out, and the roof was bent and dented, like an old hat.
The Meynells’ garden was large and glorious, the grassy side of a hill, rolling down to a stream with a bridge at the bottom. Under some trees at the top of the garden was a large pond. Beside this was a patch of lawn with a wooden diving platform, and it was all surrounded by a modest hedge. But, once I was sure it wasn’t going to fall in on me, it was the house that I found really fascinating. None of the doors was quite door-shaped and they didn’t have handles but latches. The floors were particularly alarming because they sloped in all directions and the boards were odd-shaped, but they smelled most sweetly of beeswax.
Also, while they were there, our parents and their friends seemed to be so full of fun that the house rang with laughter. I hoped we would be able to go there often, which indeed we did, for many years.
Needless to say there is no such place as Bloomsbury-on-the-Marsh. The name was probably invented much later by some wit, but it could be taken to refer to an undefined area covering part of the south of Suffolk and the north of Essex in which some of the better-off, cultured, vaguely left-wing lot seemed to have bought themselves country houses.
Our host and master of ceremonies, Francis Meynell, was a large, loud, exuberant man. Born in 1891 to a family of distinguished poets – his mother was Alice Meynell, his godfather Francis Thompson – he grew up into the world of the literary avant-garde in Bayswater, in a house where well-known poets and authors came and went, where there was much singing and poetry reading and endless literary talk by his mother’s devoted admirers.
Francis’s political life was forged in the same revolutionary fire as that of Ray and Daisy. George Lansbury was his hero and, later, his employer. Like Ray he had been a conscientious objector in the First World War. He worked on the Daily Herald, and later smuggled diamonds into the country in jars of butter for the Soviet trade delegation. Once, to Lansbury’s embarrassment, he brought in a Soviet contribution of several thousand pounds to the funds of the Daily Herald, a gift which, to everybody’s regret, had to be declined.
After that their paths diverged. Ray went on to his life in history and politics, Francis to his lives in poetry, typography and publishing and to his loves, which were cricket, tennis, sociability, games, fun and women. Although Daisy could be a bit sardonic about the last of these, he remained my parents’ close friend throughout their lives.
It was said that Francis knew everybody. That wasn’t meant to be taken literally, I think it meant that Francis knew everybody who was anybody in the many fields in which he was interested. That was probably fairly true and it was also true that a lot of them lived in the neighbourhood, or turned up there as weekend guests.
Thus it happened that the short wide frenzied man with a squeaky voice, who bullied people to play games and hated losing, turned out to be H. G. Wells, and the elderly man with a thin ratty voice who was treated with a certain cautious respect was, I was told, Bertrand Russell. I drop those names here out of pure retrospective snobbery, but at the time they didn’t mean a thing to me. I just saw them as fellow guests who were there, like everybody else, to have a good time.
I had already got the message that my parents had come here to have fun and enjoy themselves in their way, and that I was welcome to do the same, in my way, which could be to join in the fun, or not, as I wished. I found I had no quarrel with this situation and was, I believe, fairly sparing in my demands for their attention.
I do remember being a bit of a spoilsport about the nude bathing at the pond. I decided to wear bathing trunks and was ridiculed for my genteel modesty, but I persisted, not because of modesty but because of water-beetles. I had been to murky ponds like that before. I had caught water-beetles in my net and I had noticed that some of them had jaws like bolt-croppers. There was no way I was going to take my unprotected private parts, vestigial though they may have been, within their reach.
But, apart from necessary reservations like that, I was in a very neutral situation and quite happy to be an unnoticed spectator. Francis seemed to take the healthy view that other people’s children were OK to have about so long as they didn’t get in the way and spoil the grown-ups’ games; which was fine by me. His own son, who was a year or two younger than me, didn’t get off so lightly and was constantly subjected to applause and admiration. Surprisingly perhaps, I didn’t envy him.
Looking back, I think I can see why that time and place has left such a powerful flavour in my memory. It may have been because, although London was the place where Ray and Daisy and their friends were serious, anxious for the world and busy at their work, the Meynells’ was where they laughed, put aside doubt, were frivolous and played – and maybe one gets a clearer picture of what people are like and how they feel when they are talking spontaneously together and having fun.
The people we met there were altogether motley, with no shared characteristics except that of being individuals. If they had anything in common it was that they seemed to have in their manner a certain underlying confidence. When they talked they talked as thinkers and innovators. I can see that they were people who quite naturally set the agenda for their own lives. In fact I think they saw themselves as setting the agenda for the future of the world, a future which they were already helping to bring about, a future in which agriculture was going to eradicate hunger, in which Socialism was going to make personal greed a thing of the past and there would be no more rich and no more poor, in a golden age that was already on its way.
I sensed that there was a lot of gladness about, and quite right too! The dragons of moralism, snobbery and conformity had been vanquished. Love, life and liberty were all new, wrested by their own courage from the iron grip of Queen Victoria. They had come into their kingdom and taken their places as part of the new cultural elite,