The Last Englishmen Page 2

  And what did freedom even mean? Freedom for the woman who’d broken his heart meant getting out of a bad marriage without becoming trapped in another one. Was freedom for India like getting out of a bad marriage? Was independence incompatible with love? Or was freedom simply another word for power, including the power of the powerful to decide what a war was being fought for and who would fight it. And yet wasn’t he himself part of this elite; hadn’t he aspired to a spot at the top? And then there was his suspicion that his worth came at the cost of the less fortunate and his habit of assuming their freedom spelled his own defeat.

  In the end Louis concluded that Chamberlain’s England was the lesser of two evils. He would return to London and join the Navy. “If one’s going to be defiled,” he had written a friend, “one may as well keep one’s mind out of it.”

  But he had failed his medical. He’d spent the war writing radio plays for the BBC.

  Finally, Louis tried to justify his reluctance to travel to India by telling himself that the world he already knew was confusing enough. Why take on another? Just thinking about India, about freedom, was exhausting. He was tired of thinking.

  Yet a small voice in his head hadn’t let him alone. The earth isn’t the moon, the voice said. There is no dark side. One can easily travel to see how the other half lives.

  Perhaps, he thought, real freedom wasn’t a matter of getting out of things but of getting into them. Perhaps if he stuck a little bit of himself into India, India would stick him back. So he had started reading. He read translations of the Gita and the Vedas. He read Babur on the history of Hindustan and Hume on the Upanishads. He read about the 1905 partition of Bengal, about mass civil disobedience and mass arrests, about viceroys and Government of India acts. He jotted down lines from Tagore, Iqbal, and Kabir in his notebook as well as quotes from Gandhi, Nehru, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

  He began to think that if Indians had a chance to live freely and independently, perhaps something of value might be learned from them. And maybe a look into their lives would throw some light on his own.

  In this way, Louis talked himself into going to India. Then he packed a dinner jacket and rumpled summer suit and caught a flight.

  It was only on his arrival at the reception center in Pakistan that Louis MacNeice understood just how little he really knew, not just about India, but about anything. He had never expected this. This was the kind of thing one read about in newspapers. If this was freedom, then perhaps it was possible to have too much of it.

  The reception center was west of the Indian border, just outside Lahore in the freshly divided Punjab province. Two weeks after the Independence Day celebrations had ended, Muslim families were still coming through the center’s gates, joining the thirty thousand already there. Fearful of what would happen if they stayed in India, these families had run the blood-soaked gauntlet on the road to the border, a biblical-size exodus that stretched to the horizon. For seven years Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, had held out for a dream of a Muslim homeland, a new nation he called Pakistan. That dream had ended for many in the nightmare that greeted Louis now.

  The first woman he saw had a fixed expression on her face. Someone told him she was looking for her son and by then Louis knew she wouldn’t find him. The second woman was holding her child the way a little girl might hold a doll cut open with a penknife. Twenty miles away, in Sheikhupura, the victims were largely Sikhs. Before they could make their escape in the other direction, across the border to India, about fifteen hundred of them had been set upon by Muslims. A good number had been shot, stabbed, speared, clubbed, or set on fire. They lay in a field hospital with eighty beds and one doctor with no medical equipment. Their faces, too, wore a look of puzzled abstraction.

  He found the third woman outside the compound walls. She was lying on her back in a gutter with her legs splayed out. Her skirt was covered with blood the color of rust, and an iridescent spiral of flies moved over the spear wound in her side. The scene struck him as something for which the word tragic was both too precious and miserably insufficient.

  But what other word was there?

  The BBC cameraman, used to Louis MacNeice’s air of icy indifference, was astonished to see him suddenly come to life, loading a family of Sikhs into a lorry and barking at the Punjab Boundary Force to get them out of there.

  From Lahore Louis went to Peshawar in the North-West Frontier Province to meet the eagle-eyed “Frontier Gandhi,” Khan Abdul Ghaffer Khan. Imprisoned during the war for his support of Mahatma Gandhi’s “Quit India” uprising, Khan had lost control over the frontier tribal areas to Jinnah’s Muslim League. Khan told Louis that if Jinnah didn’t accede to his demands for an independent Pashtun state, “We will do what we have to do.”

  As if Pakistan, a nation barely two weeks old, needed a civil war now, too.

  Khan was undeniably a personality, Louis noted, and on the frontier personalities appeared to matter. And weapons. A dozen bearded tribal chiefs from Waziristan had traveled down from the hills to seek Khan’s permission to march on India.

  The situation was akin to another era’s warring Scots, Louis supposed, or the blood feuds between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland. Still, every historical parallel he grasped at felt inadequate. The dead were now said to be in the hundreds of thousands and the bloodshed wasn’t near over. An ox of a man with a black mustache and a chest crisscrossed with bandoliers had stood plumb in front of him and, in compelling and incantatory Pashto, made a cutting gesture across the neck to indicate his plans for the Sikhs and, again with the cutting gesture, the Hindus, and one last cutting gesture, anyone who tried to stop him.

  On his arrival in Delhi a month earlier, Louis had been astonished to find the BBC van cheered wherever it went. Even the viceroy of India was hailed: Pandit Mountbattenji ki Jai! A few months before, he was told, it had been a different story, but on the eve of Independence he’d seen little evidence of the acrimony he’d been led to expect. It was hard not to conclude that Indians had been united only in their hatred of the English and once the English had left they could at last turn on each other. Nancy might have said that India had been freed from one bad marriage only to get trapped in another.

  The London papers were already gloating; the carnage on both sides of the Punjab border was proof Indians were unfit for self-government. But who were we to feel superior? he asked himself. One had only to reflect on the genocides of Europe to be chastened. Was everyone really so certain that the British bore no responsibility for this? Traveling to Srinagar, the capital of the princely state of Kashmir, Louis had a long conversation with the former editor of the Calcutta Statesman. The editor, a liberal soul with a Colonel Blimp’s face, promised that if the violence didn’t abate, blame would fall on the British. Britain’s sole justification for two centuries of rule, he said, was that through lofty, selfless, and balanced administration Britain had unified India. That had been their mantra.

  Gandhi’s contribution was far greater, the editor said. Gandhi had made India a nation and given it a spine.

  A fortune-teller once told Louis he would never get the thing he most wanted. Back then what he wanted more than anything was Nancy Coldstream. After she refused him, a velvet-like sadness settled over his life. It was Nancy who had once suggested he write a poem about Gandhi. Was she the reason he had come? Was she the small voice in his head? And was he now destined to spend the time he had left as a competent writer of radio plays? Was that all life now held out for him?

  After watching Gandhi address the crowds at Birla House, Louis MacNeice would have a small epiphany. If nothing else, he would return from India with an awareness of the vanity of such questions, vanity in the Ecclesiastes “vanity of vanities” sense.

  From Srinagar, Louis rode ponies 14,000 feet up into the mountains, an expedition he referred to, in a private joke with the BBC man accompanying him, as “The Ascent of C3.” Looking out over the undulating ranges of the Himalaya he could
just make out Nanga Parbat. Once upon a time Nanga Parbat had been Nazi Germany’s Schicksalsberg, its mountain of destiny, just as Mount Everest had once been England’s. A vanity if there ever was one. With its white mane of snow, the mountain looked like the tiny head of a lion, one that seemed to float between the clouds and the horizon, like a spirit eternally trapped between heaven and earth.

  PART I

  To Live as on a Mountain

  I wanted to be as great as Caesar

  Great

  As great as Caesar

  I wanted love

  Nothing without trying you know

  To fly the equator

  Control a Blenheim bomber

  And floundering

  I wanted admiring eyes in a restaurant

  JOHN AUDEN, “1938–1939 JOURNAL”

  Hunt the lion, climb the peak

  No one guesses you are weak.

  W. H. AUDEN, “1929 BERLIN JOURNAL”

  CHAPTER 1

  The Lakes

  Skelgill Farm below Cat Bells, Newlands Valley,

  Cumberland, August–September 1917

  The path from the farmhouse door led past a clump of blue willow herb, through a green wicket gate, and down a slope that fell away into the valley. Seen from the children’s bedroom window, Skiddaw’s broad shoulders presided over Newlands Valley like a benevolent paterfamilias. Cat Bells, rising directly behind the house, was more suitable for small legs. On their arrival on August 2, 1917, the children left their mother behind to race each other to the top. Michael, the eldest, passed by his father and Miss Cox, their nanny, on the way up. Arms raised in victory, he gave a shout of triumph as he reached the summit while Stephen, his younger brother, straggled up behind him. This was the first of many mountains Michael Spender would climb.

  “Daddy! What’s that noise like a motor bike in the bracken?” Humphrey had called out three days later, more accustomed to the sounds made by soldiers than the sound of crickets. Humphrey was the baby of the family; his nickname was “Little Mouse.”

  “Look how ripe my hands are getting!” Stephen shouted, extending his berry-stained fingers toward his mother, Violet.

  With war rationing, berry picking was considered a patriotic duty and the three Spender boys approached the task like little soldiers. Stephen wanted to become a naturalist; he kept a collection of yellow-striped caterpillars in matchboxes. When not picking bilberries, he was weaving back and forth over the footpath trying to catch butterflies with the net his father had bought him in Keswick the day before. His sister, Christine, had surprised everyone by hooking a large pike in Derwentwater. She screamed and dropped the rod, but her father had jumped up and landed it for lunch. It had been ages since they’d had fish.

  With his golden locks and bright blue eyes, Michael was his mother’s favorite. After a year of piano lessons his music teacher told Violet she had nothing left to teach him. His first year at Gresham’s had been a brilliant success. Yet since his return from boarding school, Violet had become concerned about a change in his manner. He had taken to a rather slangy way of talking, setting himself apart from his siblings with a schoolboy swagger.

  Even so, she couldn’t help but admire his remarkable appreciation of nature.

  Michael directed everyone to stop, turn around, and take in the way a beam of sunlight was breaking through a bank of clouds. It brushed the flank of the facing mountain and traveled down the valley, striking a clutch of farm buildings among the trees and lighting them up with an irrepressible whiteness.

  On such a day, it was hard for Violet to believe there was a war on.

  Not long after Violet’s death four years later, Christine and Stephen would vie to see who could recall the most about that summer of 1917. Humphrey had been too young to remember much. And Michael, well, he was something of a mystery to them. But for Christine and Stephen the holiday not only marked the early end of their childhood innocence but also represented England, at its dearest and most glorious. Christine remembered how the rain had left the raspberries in a copse of larch looking like tiny ruby-encrusted cushions. Stephen would describe how slugs, sliding through tiny rivulets of water, looked like barges on the Thames and how the sound of his father reading poetry came in through their bedroom window, as if Skiddaw itself were reciting. But at the center of those fairytale days was their mother, Violet, then twenty-seven years old. Stephen was tireless in trying to unravel the tiny knots of feelings his scattered memories of her evoked.

  Once celebrated for her flushed Pre-Raphaelite beauty, Violet Schuster had been sheltered by family wealth. While her brothers followed their father, a King’s Counsel, into the sober field of banking, she nurtured a love of poetry. But after four children in four years—Michael was then ten, Christine nine, Stephen eight, and Humphrey seven—Violet in 1917 was no longer the ingénue she’d once been. Poetry hadn’t prepared her for the household chaos brought about by four young children and a husband often called away on business.

  Before Violet had time to reckon what the war might mean, her youngest brother had been killed at the first battle at Ypres. From that moment the battlefield was never far from her thoughts and each week it came closer. The back garden of their house in Norfolk received the first of the German bombs to fall on English soil. A dud. Soldiers had invaded her home, carrying her children to dugouts below the cliffs while it was safely detonated. A Zeppelin came so close to the roof, she feared it might be scraped off. The fields between the house and the bluff filled up with the tents of billeted troops. Cavalry officers in bright uniforms thundered around on horseback. There were ceaseless drills: “Present arms! Form fours! Eyes front! Eyes right!” The sound of guns reverberated in her small chest, sending her to the edge of collapse. Her black eyes acquired a hunted look.

  In the summer of 1917 it had taken several days in the Lake District before Violet realized that lowing cattle and the drone of haymowing machines had replaced the sound of guns. Yet watching families with picnic baskets filled with sandwiches, she could think only of the insufficiency of the wall that lay between them and the terror overwhelming Europe. Everyone else might pretend all was well, she fretted, but few really dared think of all those boys going off to die in France. No one, not even her husband, Harold, could say why. Being part German, Violet didn’t recognize the enemy the newspapers described with such shocking venom. She knew only that something had gone terribly wrong. “Our laughing children, all too young as yet / to know French fields with English blood are wet,” she wrote.

  On clear evenings Violet and Harold would sit out in deck chairs reading the Romantic poets and admiring Dame Nature, wearing all her jewels, as Harold liked to say. Harold’s engagement with his offspring involved piggyback rides, roaring like a lion, and a daily inquiry as to whether they had done their little duty. But after ten days of steady rain he became eager to catch up with the progress of the war at his London club. One day before he left, the sun broke through the clouds. Violet got up early, leaving Harold snoring in bed.

  Miss Cox was already in the kitchen making sardine and egg sandwiches. After breakfast, Violet hustled the family down to Derwentwater, directing the procession of children, baskets, and thermoses of tea, into the rowboat. Settling in a lakeside cove Violet was a blur of high spirits, flirting shamelessly with Harold, calling him her darling Buffalo, hanging on his neck and covering him with kisses.

  For Christine looking back on that day there was something desperate in her mother’s behavior. She believed the lakeside picnic marked the beginning of the end.

  “But she seemed so well on the day of the picnic!” Stephen protested.

  “That’s what she pretended,” Christine said. “Pretended to him, pretended to us, pretended to herself: Because she didn’t want the operation.” Violet’s death was attributed to a botched hysterectomy.

  “You worked this all out yourself?” Stephen asked.

  In the summer of 1917 Michael was still Harold’s “little man,” the
one he chose to accompany him to Keswick to mail important letters. To his siblings, Michael was a demigod. They never questioned his right to pronounce upon their shortcomings or his instruction on the most efficient way to row a boat. In Harold’s absence, Michael took over the drills. When the sun returned, he marched his brothers and sister off to collect butterflies while he and his mother walked to the end of Newlands Valley to climb the ridge.

  Michael had been impatient to reach the saddle that day, eager for a sight of Borrowdale Valley on the other side. Violet, finding the sodden slopes slippery without hobnailed boots, fell farther and farther behind. At five o’clock she had insisted they stop for tea, though the pass was at most fifteen minutes away. Michael ate his bread and jam while studying the map, loudly insistent that he was not giving up hope of a view. Violet poured a mother’s worries into her holiday journal.

  When Stephen asked why Wordsworth had become a poet, she knew how to answer him. But Michael’s questions were those of a stranger. How many tons of water come over the weir by the Penrith pencil factory in one minute? She hadn’t the faintest idea. If the earth were flat instead of round would there be a horizon? She’d never wondered. Is it possible to determine the weight of Skiddaw? Whatever for?

  A passage from a memoir by a poet all of London had been talking about seemed to directly address Violet’s concerns about Michael. She wrote it down.

  “I now clearly see that the mistake is to judge boys by the standard of grown-ups,” Rabindranath Tagore had written. As a young man Tagore had been plagued by a nameless melancholy. Yet he had gone on to great fame and was now considered a font of Eastern wisdom. In his memoirs he drew on his own example and cautioned anxious parents not to “forget that a child is quick and mobile like a running stream; and … any touch of imperfection need cause no harm, for the speed of the flow is itself the best corrective.” Violet’s worries quieted.