‘Oh, it is,’ said Dudley, ‘I’m so sorry!’ with a momentary bleak laugh. ‘How very unfortunate!’
Still too confused to feel the shock fully, Paul said incoherently, ‘I won’t trouble you now, Sir Dudley. I’ll see you at your lecture.’ And he hung up the phone again and stood staring at it incredulously.
It was during General Colthorpe’s talk on Wavell that Paul suddenly understood, and blushed again, with the indignant but helpless blush of foolish recognition. Very discreetly, under the desk, he got out Daphne Jacobs’s book from his briefcase. It was somewhere in the passage on Dudley’s exploits as a practical joker, those efforts she retailed as classics of wit and cleverly left it to the reader to wonder at their cruelty or pointlessness. As before, he felt General Colthorpe was watching him particularly, and even accusingly, from behind his lectern, but with infinite dissimulation he found the place, her account of her first visit to Corley, and looking up devotedly at the General between sentences he read the now obvious description of Dudley taking a telephone call from his brother:
The well-known voice came through, on a very poor line, from the telegraph office in Wantage: ‘Dud, old man, it’s Cecil here, can you hear me?’ Dudley paused, with the grin of feline villainy that was so amusing to anyone not the subject of his pranks, and then said, with a quick laugh of pretended relief, ‘Oh, thank god!’ Cecil could be heard faintly, but with genuine surprise and concern, ‘Everything all right?’ To which Dudley, his eye on himself in the mirror and on me in the hallway behind him, replied, ‘For a frightful moment I thought you were my brother Cecil.’ I was confused at first, and then astonished. I knew all about teasing from my own brothers, but this was the most audacious bit of teasing even I had ever heard. It was a joke I later heard him play on several other friends, or enemies, as they then unexpectedly found themselves to be. Cecil, of course, merely said ‘You silly ass!’ and carried on with the call; but the trick came back to my mind often, in later years, when a telephone call from Cecil was no longer remotely on the cards.
7
Paul wrote in his diary:
April 13, 1980 (Cecil’s 89th birthday!) /10.30pm.
I’m writing this up from skeleton notes while I can still remember it fairly well. On the coach back from Birmingham I started to play back the tape of the interview and found it goes completely dead after a couple of minutes: the battery in the mike must have given out. Amazing after twenty interviews that it should happen with this one – now I have no documentary proof for the most important material so far. Astounding revelations (if true!)
My appt was for 2.30. The Sawles have lived in the same house (17 Chilcot Ave, Solihull) since the 1930s: a large semi, red brick, with a black-and-white gable at the front. It was new when they bought it. George Sawle walked me round the garden before I left, and pointed out the ‘Tudor half-timbering’: he said everyone at the university thought it was screamingly funny that 2 historians lived in a mock-Tudor house. A pond in the back garden, full of tadpoles, which interested him greatly, and a rockery. He held my arm as we went round. He said there had been a ‘very ambitious rockery’ at ‘Two Acres’, where he and Hubert and Daphne had played games as children – he has always liked rockeries. Hubert was killed in the First World War. Their father died of diphtheria in 1903 ‘or thereabouts’ and Freda Sawle in ‘about 1938’ (‘I’m afraid I’m rather bad with dates’). GFS told me with some pride that he was 84, but earlier he’d said 76. (He is 85.)
Madeleine opened the door when I arrived – she complained at some length about her arthritis, which she seemed to blame largely on me. Walks with an elbow-crutch (shades of Mum). Said, ‘I don’t know if you’ll get much sense out of him.’ She was candid, but not friendly; not sure if she remembered me from Daphne’s 70th. Her deafness much worse than thirteen years ago, but she looks just the same. Her sense of humour is really no more than an irritable suspicion that someone else might find something funny. She said, ‘I’m only giving you an hour – even that may be too much’ – which was a completely new condition, and put me in a bit of a flap.
GFS was in his study – looked confused when I came in, but then brightened up when I said why I was there. ‘Ah, yes, poor old Cecil, dear old Cecil!’ A kind of slyness, as if to imply he really knew all along, but much more friendly than I remember at D’s 70th – in fact by the end rather too friendly (see below!) Now completely bald on top, the white beard long and straggly, looks a bit mad. Bright mixed-up clothes, red check shirt under green pullover, old pin-stripe suit-trousers hitched up so tight you don’t quite know where to look. I reminded him we’d met before, and he accepted the idea cheerfully, but later he said, ‘It’s a great shame we didn’t meet before.’ At first I was emb by his forgetfulness – why is it emb when people repeat themselves? Then I felt that as he didn’t know, and there was no one else there, it didn’t matter; it was a completely private drama. He sat in the chair beside his desk and I sat in a low armchair – I felt it must be like a tutorial. Books on 3 walls, the room lived-in but dreary.
I asked him straight away how he had met Cecil (which oddly he doesn’t say in the intro to the Letters). ‘At Cambridge. He got me elected to the Apostles. I’m not supposed to talk about that, of course’ (looking rather coy). What they called ‘suitable’ undergraduates were singled out and assessed, but the Society was so secret they didn’t know they were being vetted for it. ‘C was my “father”, as they called it. He took a shine to me, for some reason.’ I said he must have been suitable. ‘I must, mustn’t I?’ he said and gave me a funny look. Said, ‘I was extremely shy, and C was the opposite. You felt thrilled to be noticed by him.’ What was he like in those days? He was ‘a great figure in the college’, but he did too many things. Missed a First in the History tripos, because he was always off doing something else; he was easily bored, with activities and people. He sat for a fellowship twice but didn’t get it. He was always playing rugger or rowing or mountaineering. ‘Not in Cambs, presumably?’ GFS laughed. ‘He climbed in Scotland, and sometimes in the Dolomites. He was very strong, and had very large hands. The figure on his tomb is quite wrong, it shows him with almost a girl’s hands.’
C also loved acting – he was in a French play they did every year for several years. ‘But he was a very bad actor. He made all the characters he played just like himself. In Dom Juan by Molière (check) he played the servant, which was quite beyond him.’ Did C not understand other people? GFS said it was his upbringing, he (C) believed his family and home were very important, and in a ‘rather innocent’ way thought everyone else would be interested in them too. Was he a snob? ‘It wasn’t snobbery exactly, more an unthinking social confidence.’ What about his writing? GFS said he was self-confident about that too, wrote all those poems about Corley Court. I said he wrote love poems as well. ‘Yes, people thought he was a sort of upper-class Rupert Brooke. Upper class but second rate.’ I said I couldn’t work out from the Letters how well C knew Brooke – there are 2 or 3 sarcastic mentions, and nothing in Keynes’s edition of RB’s letters. ‘Oh, he knew him – he was in the Society too, of course. RB was 3 or 4 years older. They didn’t get on.’ He said C was jealous of RB in many ways, C was naturally competitive and he was overshadowed by him, as a poet and ‘a beauty’. Wasn’t C v good-looking? GFS said ‘he was very striking, with wicked dark eyes that he used to seduce people with. Rupert was a flawless beauty, but Cecil was much stronger and more masculine. He had an enormous cock.’ I checked that the tape was still going round nicely and wrote this down before I looked at GFS again – he was matter-of-fact but did look vaguely surprised at what he’d just heard himself say. I said I supposed he’d gone swimming with C. ‘Well, on occasion,’ he said, as if not seeing the point of the question. ‘C was always taking his clothes off, he was famous for it.’ Hard to know what to say next. I said were there real people behind all the love-poems? This was really my central question. He said, ‘Oh, yes.’ I said Margaret Ingham and D of course. ‘Miss Ingham was a blue stocking and a red herring’ (laughed). I felt I should come out with it. Did C seduce men as well as women? He looked at me as if there’d been a slight misunderstanding. ‘C would fuck anyone,’ he said.