That suited Mr Vesey very well. He had no desire to take decisions, but an insatiable passion for attracting the notice of his superiors. When I first went into the office, I rather liked the look of him. He was a spruce, small man of about forty, who must have spent a large fraction of his income on clothes. His shirts were always spotless, he had a great variety of ties, all quiet and carefully selected. His eyes, which were full and exophthalmic, were magnified still further because of the convex lenses that he wore, so that one’s first impression, after seeing his trim suit, was of enormous and somewhat baffled and sorrowful eyes. He told me my duties in a manner that was friendly, if a little fussed, and I was young enough, and enough of a stranger, to be grateful for any kindness and not overcritical of its origin.
It took me some time to realize that Mr Vesey spent fifty-nine minutes in the hour tormenting himself about his prospects of promotion. He was a departmental officer grade one, salary scale two hundred and twenty-five pounds to three hundred and fifteen pounds; his entire activity was spent in mounting to the next grade. As I came to know him, I heard of nothing else. A contemporary of his in another office got promoted. ‘Why don’t they do something about me?’ sounded Mr Vesey’s cri de coeur. His technique for achieving his aim was, in principle, very simple. It consisted of keeping in the public eye. If ever he could invent an excuse for calling on the director, he did so. So that every child who left school before the age of fifteen secured a visit to the director’s room; a trim, spectacled figure, holding a file, knocked briskly on the door, the director was entangled in an earnest consultation, found himself faced with enormous exophthalmic eyes. The director soon became maddened, and sent down minutes about types of case which it was unnecessary for him to see. Mr Vesey went to see him to discuss each minute.
When any senior person came into our room to inspect the work, a trim spectacled figure stood beside him, on the alert, agog and on tenterhooks to seize the chance. The visitor asked one of the clerks a question. Mr Vesey leapt in to answer it. The visitor asked me to describe some of the statistics. Mr Vesey was quicker than ever off the mark.
All lists, charts, notes of any kind going out from our room had to be initialled NCWV. For a time he experimented with hyphenating the W and V, possibly in the hope that it would make the initials impossible to miss. There were rumours that his wife wanted to be called Mrs Wilson-Vesey. However, the assistant director asked him brusquely what the hyphen was put in for. All superiors were important to Mr Vesey, though some were more important than others. The hyphen disappeared overnight.
His worst moments were when, as occasionally happened, the assistant director — instead of asking for information through Mr Vesey as head of the branch — demanded a clerk by name. Mr Vesey’s enmity towards me first showed itself after a few such calls. The assistant director found I knew my lists inside out (which was child’s play to anyone with a good memory), took a fancy to me, said maddeningly once that if I were still at school the department would make a grant to help me go to a university. Meanwhile, Mr Vesey was raising cries to heaven: how could he organize his branch if people did not go through the proper channels? How could he secure discipline and smooth working if people went over his head? Junior clerks did not understand the whole scope of his responsibilities — they might give a wrong impression and that meant his promotion would never come. There was such a thing, said Mr Vesey in a tone full of meaning, as junior clerks trying to draw attention to themselves.
So it went on, a blend of monotony and Mr Vesey. So it went on, from nine to one, from two to five-thirty, from my sixteenth birthday to my seventeenth and beyond. Often, during those tedious days, I dreamed the ambitious dreams of very young men. Walking past the lighted shops in the lunch hour of a winter’s day, I dreamed of fame — any kind of fame that would put my name in men’s mouths, in the newspapers, make people recognize me in the streets. Sometimes I was a great politician, eloquent, powerful, venerated. Sometimes I was a writer as well known as Shaw. Sometimes I was extraordinarily rich. Always I had the power to make my own terms, to move through the world as one who owned it, to be waited on and give largesse.
The harsh streets were lit by my fancies, and I was drunk with them — and yet they were altogether vague. There was a good deal of ambition, I knew later, innate within me; and I had listened since I was a child to my mother’s prompting. But those dreams of mine had not much in common with the ambition that drives a man, that in time drove me, to action. These were just the lazy and grandiose dreams of youth. They were far more like the times when, lying awake on windy autumn nights or sitting under the apple tree in the garden after my parents had gone to bed, I first luxuriously longed, through a veil of innocence, for women’s love.
Even at sixteen, however, I felt sometimes guilty, because I was only dreaming. The pictures in my mind were so heady, so magnificent — they made all practical steps that I could take seem puny. Puny they seemed, as I took the opportunity one day to talk to my acquaintance, the assistant director. He had sent for me again, inflaming Mr Vesey to transports of injured dignity. Darby was a decent pale man with a furrowed forehead, sitting in his small, plain office. He gave me prosaic but sensible advice. It might be worth while thinking of the possibility of an external London degree. It might be worth while picking up some law, which would be useful if I stayed in the office. I ought to consult the people at the College of Art and Technology.
I did so, and enrolled in the law class at the college — which everyone called ‘the School’, and which was at that time the only place of higher education in the town — in the summer of 1922, when I was not yet seventeen. The School was the lineal descendant of the mechanics’ institution, where my grandfather had learned his mathematics; it was housed in a red-brick building, a building of remarkable Victorian baroque. There was a principal and a small permanent staff, but most of the lecturers had other jobs in the town, were secondary schoolmasters and the like, and gave their school lectures in the evening. The first law class I attended was given by a solicitor from the town clerk’s department. It was a course on a dull subject, dully taught. It lasted through the autumn: I used to walk down the Newarke on Tuesday and Friday evenings after the office, wondering whether I was not wasting my time.
I was still wondering, towards the end of the year, whether to give up the law courses, when I happened to see a notice in the School, announcing a new course in the spring term — ‘Fundamentals of Law, 1. Criminal, by G Passant’. I thought I would give him a trial. Before I had listened for ten minutes to the first lecture, I knew this was something of a different class, in sheer force, in intellectual competence and power, from anything I had ever heard.