The Last Englishmen Page 3

  But a few days later a sleepless night found her staring out her window at the moon. A letter from Harold said the earliest he could get away was the coming Saturday. Violet’s thoughts, like the waterwheel at the pencil factory, tumbled fast and furious. After the boys left to go fishing, she’d unburdened herself to Miss Cox.

  She’d ruined her husband’s life. Marriage had held Harold hostage to her fears, her headaches and spells of weakness. Harold had once been a great climber. He climbed monuments, statues, chimneys, and mountains. But his love for her was destroying him. He would be better off alone. If she died he would be free. What should she do?

  Miss Cox, a sensible woman, had pointed out that there were plenty of opportunities for climbing in the Lake District.

  “You have missed my point entirely,” Violet cried. “I was speaking metaphorically.”

  Christine, listening on the other side of the door, hadn’t entirely understood what her mother meant by “metaphorically” but she’d known even then it was important. After Violet’s death she tried to explain this to Stephen.

  “Mummy was saying that she’d lost Daddy and poor Coxie was trying to reassure her.”

  “How could she lose him?” Stephen asked, still not getting the metaphor business.

  “She said that he was a man of action, who needed excitement and adventure.”

  “She told Coxie all this?”

  “Yes but Coxie made the great mistake of taking Mummy seriously. She said, very sweetly and humbly: ‘But if Mr. Spender wants action and adventure, might he not go fight in the war?’”

  “And what did Mummy say to that?”

  “She was absolutely furious. She shouted at Coxie: ‘How dare you have the impertinence to answer me like that.’ And then Mummy got out of bed, flew across the room and shook the old woman so hard her spectacles flew off and false teeth popped out. I had to run into the room to stop her.”

  “You never told me all this,” Stephen said.

  If the act of pitting the steel of an ice ax into the icy white rump of Dame Nature was a metaphor, Harold missed it. Coming upon his wife writing a poem, in a sea of papers and cross-outs, he saw a woman possessed. It worried him. He believed poetry, like music and art, had to be rationed. He made a point of leaving concerts at intervals, and never spent more than half an hour looking at pictures in the National Gallery. When he returned to the Lakes from London he took the children on a long hike, leaving Violet under a nurse’s care.

  The mist made it easier to believe they were so high up, the clouds were below them. The path became a knife-edge arête high in the Swiss Alps. Unless they were roped together, Harold told them, one careless step might send them plummeting to their deaths. Stephen, who suffered from nosebleeds and had a fear of heights, distracted himself by noticing how the scraggy lines of his father’s neck collected at his collar like sedimentary layers of rock. With his snowy hair capping the summit of his head, his father seemed more mountain than man.

  Why climb mountains? Harold asked them. Why seek to scale impossible heights, reflect on the Great Questions? Whence the spirit of adventure? After thirty years of public life, Harold had a parliamentarian’s love of rhetorical questions and a Victorian notion of what constituted a manly pursuit. Climbing mountains was paramount among them.

  That is what all must ponder, he would say, looking at their upturned faces before turning to narrow his gaze on some distant prospect. One’s entire life can be spent asking why, he continued, as if speaking to himself, while pretending to whack ice steps at his feet and tighten the rope at his waist. As a man of action, Harold wasn’t truly interested in why.

  After Oxford, Harold had written for a string of Liberal newspapers and was a much-sought-after dinner party guest. He saw himself as a Liberal crusader. Good-humored rants against vested interests were a staple. He often found himself resigning his position on principle, before embarking on a Continental climbing holiday. Unusual for Fleet Street, Harold had a great many principles.

  When war was declared Harold had just turned fifty. He took on the self-appointed duty of preparing the Sheringham Home Guard for a possible invasion, mustering a force of five thousand. He spent nights tramping up and down the bluff until he was nearly bayoneted by British soldiers on patrol. Still, it was hard for Harold not to compare his war with that of his elder brother, Alfred. In weekly Downing Street meetings with Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, Alfred, the editor of the Westminster Gazette, was kept abreast of the true conditions on the Western Front and prevailed upon not to publish any of it. Yet when Harold’s idol, David Lloyd George, supplanted Asquith as prime minister, Harold had been left to sit in the lounge of the National Liberal Club waiting for a call that never came. The envelopes from his clipping service thinned. He would not have a good war.

  That fall every day would bring news of another raid, and when they were over Violet would be hollowed out with terror. In October a package from Harrods arrived—three sets of matching brown corduroy knickerbockers, brown stockings, and brown mercerized cotton jerseys with blue cuffs and collars. Violet liked to dress her children like dolls, forcing her boys into stiff Eton collars, patent leather dancing pumps, and gaiters that cut into the backs of their knees.

  But Michael now refused to wear such outfits and hated being kissed. Soon Stephen, too, would go to Gresham’s and have his hair close cropped. Were the trenches going to swallow all her boys before the war ended? In the years that remained to her, Violet left it to Harold to deal with the war and the doctor to handle her health. She fussed over velveteen jackets or took to her bed, consumed by fears of going mad.

  Harold’s London of gas lamps and hansom cabs, frock coats, five-course meals, and the two-party system would not survive the war. After Violet’s death, he became the one having to appear, hat in hand, before Granny Schuster, begging her to cover his overdrafts. He would travel and give dinner speeches on the prime ministers he had known, but it was his brother Alfred who was appointed to the Milner Mission in 1919, Alfred who would cover the Paris Peace Conference the same year. And it was Violet’s brother George who would receive the Military Cross and the Commander of the Order of the British Empire, George Ernest Schuster who would oversee the family fortune that sustained them all.

  Sometime between the summer of 1917 and his mother’s death in 1921, Michael realized that both his parents were irrational. They’d had too many children. They couldn’t keep servants or run an efficient household. Once he understood this, he began to sit out his father’s speeches in stony silence. He walked glumly ahead during Harold’s climbing performances on Hampstead Heath while Stephen, angling for the newly open seat of favorite son, egged Harold on. No longer his father’s “little man,” Michael became “the bear with the sore head.” He had his own latchkey, coming and going as he pleased, not answering to anyone. To keep himself free of his family’s entanglements, he used the language of scientific expertise, exaggerated for effect, to build a wall around himself.

  Michael shared this detachment with his lab partner at Gresham’s, an ungainly and freakishly pale boy named Wystan Auden. Wystan and Michael were the school scientists; their names were posted on the honors board side by side. In 1925 both would win science scholarships to Oxford. Michael’s arrogance didn’t put Wystan off; his knowledge of steam power engines sat nicely with Wystan’s fascination with the beam engines, pithead gear, and water turbines used in mining ventures. Indeed, Wystan’s friendship with Michael was not unlike his alliance with his elder brother, John, who left Cambridge the year Wystan and Michael began at Oxford. Where Michael and his brother Stephen would become perfect foils, apt to exaggerate their differences or use the existence of the other to define their own, Wystan and John, though nearly three years apart in age, had more in common.

  Fatherless for the four war years and living with a succession of aunts, they discussed pyrite, smectite, ammonite, and coprolite, marlstone, carstone, Carbonicola, and igneous with the singleminded
passion of adolescent boys eager to escape a home life ruled by a high-strung mother. They made boyhood expeditions to exhausted limestone quarries, walking down narrow gauge rail beds overgrown with melancholy thistle. They explored the Blue-John Cavern near Bradwell in Derbyshire and derelict mines of lead and gold. Such places seemed to promise an underground passage to a time when England was not the ponderous imperial power they were taught about in school but a vast swamp, a rain forest teeming with exotic ferns and horsetails.

  Though the bond between John and Wystan was not without rivalry, it was steadfast. They kept no secrets from each other. They shared everything, including a dimly grasped sense that something formidable was expected of them, a task that might redeem the great blood sacrifice of the war. So how might they prove themselves worthy? By John’s final year at Cambridge, his oldest brother, Bernard, had already left for Canada. Had there been money for a stake, John might have chosen Africa. Had he had business connections, a stomach for trade, and a readiness to start at the bottom he might have tried that, but here too he was lacking. Those were the options for young men with impeccable educations and fertile imaginations, but few practical notions and no independent means.

  And then there was India.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Steamship and the Spinning Wheel

  SS City of Venice, at Sea,

  October–November 1926

  In October 1926 John Bicknell Auden arrived at the landing stage at Birkenhead, near Liverpool, a trunk by his side and a steamship ticket for Bombay in his pocket. Having left university with a first in geology, he was en route to Calcutta to take a post at the Geological Survey of India. Before he knew what was happening, a slight figure stepped out smartly from a long line of Indian porters, his feet bare in black slippers and talking excitedly in a way an English sailor never would. Suddenly, his trunk was atop this man’s embroidered red cap and he was left to watch it sail away, as if his belongings had acquired a life of their own and had no further need of him.

  The scene in the hallways of the City of Venice just then was pure chaos. Mailbags filled with Christmas presents bound for Australia were being crammed haphazardly in storage rooms on the lower decks, while innumerable public school boys crowded in to the first-class cabins, heading off to join business concerns in eastern ports they would be hard pressed to find on a map. When the ship got under way they would be needlessly fussed over by young wives going out to join husbands in Siam, Ceylon, and Singapore. Eyeing the goings-on, older Empire hands were reminded of their own maiden voyages.

  At the Marseilles dock fine-featured men in silk waistcoats with matching turbans followed a procession of enormous trunks up the gangway. There was always a royal entourage or two on steamships bound for Bombay. Nizams or rajas returning to their palaces and princely states, flush with Paris purchases, were often accompanied by trunks heavy with pearls, gold, and brocades, with perhaps a sparkling new Daimler in the hold. In the lounge they spoke of politics with the knowingness of Westminster wags, but it was their changes of costume that were most remarked upon at dinner.

  A scrum of high-spirited English ICS officers, returning from their first furloughs home, also drew the attention of the diners. In the aftermath of the 1914–18 war, recruitment to the Indian Civil Service had practically halted. The Secretary of State for India had devised a new pitch, urging idealistic young Englishmen to go to India to witness the final triumph of England’s great mission. Though no one would ever have said so, it was as if the deadliest war in human history required an absolution of equal scale in India. Unlike the war their fathers fought, India was an adventure to feel good about. Enlistment surged.

  At Port Said, as if by prearranged signal, everyone hauled out enormous pith helmets, freshly whitened with pipe clay, to protect their eyes from the glare of the starboard sun in the Gulf of Suez. All at once, a hundred singing Egyptians emerged from a fleet of lateen-rigged sailing boats to pour baskets of coal into the ship’s side. While Gali-Gali men boarded to perform magic tricks for baksheesh, packages bound for the African interior were offloaded and passengers disembarked for a brief tour. Touts would have seen in John Auden’s large, pale presence a beacon of wealth. Men in long white dresses would have surrounded him, hawking pornographic postcards, belly dancing venues, and boxes of Turkish delight.

  The ship entered the canal at nightfall. The bronze statue of Dr. Ferdinand de Lesseps, right hand hailing welcome, left hand holding a map, glowed as the sun set. For reasons no one recalled, it was considered bad form to dress for dinner once the canal had been reached. That night the groaning steam whistles and chugging of trains along the canal likely kept John awake and tossing restlessly in his cabin. The next morning khaki shorts replaced trousers and the matrons on board became slightly more la-di-dah, exclaiming over the deep indigo green of the Red Sea, or the distant blue moors of Somaliland’s coast. Their husbands had also come to life, given to summoning stewards with a stentorian cry of “Boy!” By the time the ship reached Aden, the desert air smelling of incense and camel, newly minted Indian officers of the Indian Civil Service had noted the change in manner.

  But John Auden hadn’t changed. He was more at ease watching lascars swab the deck with Dettol than raising toasts in the smoking lounge with strangers. Extremely conscious of his newly exposed knock-knees, he remained his unalterably awkward twenty-two-year-old self. John was nicknamed “Dodo” at school, a name that captured a handsome but ungainly appearance, a sepulchral air of gloom, and the unerring cruelty of schoolboys. He cultivated a casual air to camouflage his shyness, but he was trapped by the paleness of his skin. If teased or scolded he would flush to the roots of his white-blond hair, pleasing his tormentors no end.

  As a child his sensitivity was such that there had been no escaping Wystan was their mother’s favorite, chewed fingernails, appalling table manners, and untied shoes notwithstanding. Bernard, the eldest, was a peaceable fellow and didn’t seem to mind, but with John it hurt. Plump and cheeky, Wystan treated his brothers’ disfavor as his good luck. He always got to ride pillion. He sang church hymns in the bath at the top of his voice. He reveled in the scatological. John could not fathom how Wystan managed to be so coddled and adored, though he never ever ceased trying. He lacked his younger brother’s cherubic command, his easy way with words. On a holiday in Wales just before the war Wystan, six years old to John’s disbelieving nine, was carried most of the way up Cader Idris.

  It was on another Welsh holiday that John first became interested in geology. His father, a medical man of wide and varied interests, would have explained to him how the earliest geologists delineated the Cambrian, Ordovician, and Silurian epochs from the fossils they found in the stone of the Welsh hills. John became an avid collector. He was ten when his father left for the war, Bernard fourteen, and Wystan only seven. Though the credo “Live as on a mountain” was carved in Greek on a plaque outside his study, George Augustus Auden’s service as a medic had soon quenched his appetite for adventure. For all the family’s scrambles in bracken and gorse, Dr. Auden was more at home among books.

  The Audens had wrapped themselves in a weave of ideas set permanently at cross-purposes: a belief in science and rationality as well as a deep and sustaining piety, liberal views tempered by donnish restraint. Egalitarian, they nonetheless kept a coachman, a Swiss nanny, two maids, and a cook. By the time John left for India, the upper-middle professional class to which his family belonged had begun to unravel. The trickle of revelations that followed the end of the war, the accounts of secret treaties and false propaganda undid it further. Those like Dr. Auden who survived the war unscathed were too benumbed to fully acknowledge the scale of the disaster.

  In this stunned silence a generation of young Indians found their voice. The news, still only half grasped, of Lenin’s revolution in Russia riveted them. And though they weren’t entirely sure what to make of Gandhi, his Non-Cooperation campaigns of 1919–22 awakened them further. Their parents had lef
t their positions as civil servants, solicitors, doctors, and educators in service to the Raj to protest the imposition of laws enabling the viceroy to convict political cases without juries and imprison without trials. Invisible to their peers at Oxford and Cambridge, these young men began to ask themselves: did Western civilization entail anything beyond these perpetual bloody wars over colonies? England needed an empire to entice its young men to leave, goading them into ruling over others by tarting it up as the stamp of honor, duty, and good intentions.

  They knew better.

  Stowed in a trunk in John’s second-class stateroom was a pamphlet, The Cinematograph Record of the Mount Everest Expedition of 1922. He’d picked it up at a school lecture given by a dashing young mountaineer named George Mallory. Mallory’s 1922 expedition was the first ever undertaken to reach the top of the highest mountain in the world. The lecture was accompanied by a screening of footage taken on Everest and the daunting mountainscape surrounding it. Accustomed to the rounded hills of the Lakes and the rocky fells of the northern Pennines where no peak reached 1,000 meters, John had been deeply impressed by the idea of mountains seven or eight times higher. What accounted for such phenomenal heights? When did they arise? Two years later, during the summer following John’s first year at Cambridge, Mallory and his climbing partner, Sandy Irvine, made another attempt on Everest only to suddenly disappear 800 vertical feet from the summit. Their bodies had never been found.

  The 1922 and 1924 expeditions had come in the long aftermath of the war. The hope then was that by reaching the summit a traumatized nation would find the perfect Englishman, and through him the perfect means, to memorialize all the lives lost. Instead, in George Mallory England was landed with yet another martyr to exalt in the florid language that now came all too easily from the pulpits (Irvine’s death didn’t seem to count as much). So alongside a trunkful of books and belongings, John Auden was traveling to India with a secret ambition. He wanted to succeed where Mallory had failed.