Cramming for the Cavalry

by SIR OSBERT SITWELL

1

MY accomplishments as a boy, and my lack of them, have been duly charted in Left Hand, Right Hand! and The Scarlet Tree. I have confessed that at school, and for long after leaving, I knew no French — yet only yesterday I met an old companion from Bloodsworth, who, falling in to tell me of his son’s school days, and then reverting to our own, remarked, “We didn’t think much of you, I remember — you were too good at French!”

This summing-up shows once more how difficult is the path of objective truth, even when the writer is most sure of the accuracy of his statements. Nevertheless, this much I can say for certain: the phrase that seemed to sound like a theme through the miserable composition of my school days, and subsequently through my career in the Army, and occurred in every report, public or confidential, was the truncated but haunting sentence: —

MIGHT DO BETTER IF HE CHOSE.

Such, however, was not my belief, for I was most diffident, though full, as well, of senseless pride.

By disposition I was fond of nature, but preferred to it, as I prefer today, the study of art and the enjoyment to be obtained therefrom. And in nature itself, I was more interested by those things that approached nearest to art, flowers and shells and trees and falling water. Outwardly, my character had altered: for when I had gone to school, I had been intensely sociable, but now I had grown shy, as well: and, by another contradiction born of my schooling, had become both melancholy and gay, being as silent with those I disliked, as talkative with those I liked. I loved the solitude as much as I enjoyed, too, the life of cities. Extremely high-spirited as I was, my greatest advantage was that my constitution did not allow me to be depressed, even by the most severe occurrences, for more than forty-eight, hours at a stretch. That I must have inherited; its origin was no doubt physical, and connected with my large frame — I am over six feet, and even then was by no means meager — and with my whole physical setup; for the fair and florid are perhaps less prone to melancholy than the dark of hair and skin. In addition, I suffered to an extraordinary degree — and, looking back, this seems strange in a young man of seventeen or eighteen — from boredom: a fact that deeply shocked my father. People, he said, were never bored in medieval times. It was a modern and degenerate emotion. And I recall that once, forgetting his attitude in this matter, I complained of feeling bored, and he reproved me with the words “I never allow myself to feel bored.” He became very angry when I unwisely retorted, “That’s just the difference between us — I never allow myself to bore other people!”

This boredom, perhaps, was symptomatic of the artist, constituting a premonition of the feeling he experiences in those terrible moments of repose, when he finds himself unable to create. . . . At any rate, works of art, to go to a picture gallery or concert, or to read great poetry, were the only things that lifted it from me. About works of art, as about people, I had always possessed a great and consuming curiosity. I would be happy for hours, talking to someone I had not met before, and reading the strange book of his or her character. There were other qualities, too, that I knew in my heart to be derived from my heredity; among them, the more than ordinary share of pride and vanity that in those days I possessed.

2

THESE qualities were humbled every day by my father’s continual snubbings and condemnation of all my ways; they were to be further mortified by events. He had begun to make the most singular plans for his children, when they grew up — or so, at least, it always appeared to me. Often he used to deplore the strange chance by which, having taken so much trouble to get intelligent children, his whole early life having been modeled, apparently, on a sort of Nietzschean-Darwinian uplift scheme towards that goal, we three had been sent down — or up — to him. Just as Dr. Arnold had prayed before the procreating of his children, with what beneficial results we all know, so my father, representative of a less pious and seemingly more scientific generation, had entered upon periods of the most rigorous training, loth physical and mental — and look what he had received for his trouble! It was really very unfair, most disappointing.

And that the Life Force should have shoveled my sister onto him was even more patently unjust than that It should have allocated to him my brother or myself. Birth, no less than marriage, was, plainly, a lottery: but whereas he had gone in for it to obtain for the next generation a straight nose and charm, he had drawn a booby prize, an aquiline nose and a body inhabited by an alien and fiery spirit.... It was difficult to know, really, where to begin the list of just complaints.

The girl was grown-up now, and seemed to have developed a most objectionable sense of pity, which made her an uneasy companion for one. You never knew what she might say or do. Once, though her whole allowance was only fifty pounds a year, he had caught her giving five shillings to a beggar. “Such a mistake!” And, after all, it was really his money. He should have been consulted. She seemed unable to pass a tramp or a beggar without, giving him something, whereas the correct thing to do was not to see a person of that kind. . . . There had also been that unfortunate episode at Bournemouth.

I asked what the “unfortunate episode” was. It had occurred thus: My sister had been paying a long visit to my grandmother Sitwell, to whom she was much attached, at Bournemouth; in which camping ground of godly invalids, everywhere breathing heavily in red-tiled shelters, pitched à la japonaise under pine trees, or reclining on beds and sofas under turrets and pepperpots of red brick and rough cast, behind luxuriant hedges of arbutus and fuchsia, over which they can distinguish the spires, rain-gray, of many churches, my grandmother had taken a house. The prevailing atmosphere of religion and old age may at times have been a little uncongenial: but the life to which my sister was exposed at home made her eager to pay as many visits to my grandmother as possible; at least she was always treated with kindness and consideration, and was allowed that dignity which is so precious to a young human being.

At first, therefore, my sister was very happy, for she was away from home. But the circles of visiting clergy that, wherever my grandmother might be, at once sprang up round the old lady like a circle of plainly inedible fungi took soon to wrestling daily with my sister over the poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, with whose works she was at the time intoxicated. They were immoral, the toadstools pronounced, and she should not be pennitted to read them. Canon Groucher urged on my grandmother that they should be impounded and burned. Any reasonable girl should be content, so far as poetry was concerned, with the works of T. E. Brown and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In the course of time, my sister became so much enraged by the continual attacks made upon her favorite poet that she determined to show her feeling for him in a manner that could not be mistaken.

Very early, then, one lovely September morning, she had flitted, having given no previous notice to my grandmother of her going, and, accompanied by her maid, had boarded the small boat that plied from Bournemouth to Ventnor, Isle of Wight. There, a few hours later, under the bright pennons of the summer weather, with its fleecy white clouds and high-flung seas, a singular spectacle must have greeted the curious eyes of any passers-by. A tall, fair, rather thin young lady, paler than usual after her rough journey, yet with color coming and going from the love and defiance in her heart, disembarked, bearing a large sheaf of red roses: after her, the second figure in this frieze of two, came, with faltering steps, a woman of about thirty, with all her lady’s maid trimmings disheveled by the crossing, her face a sour green, and wearing this morning an expression of the plainest condemnation of the whole enterprise in which she found herself engaged, and of dislike (if the spectator could discern that much) both for poetry and for the sea; she carried a jug of milk, a honeycomb, a wreath of bay leaves, and the young lady’s coat.

After a few moments, my sister found an open cab, drawn by a horse so old that Swinburne himself as a boy might have ridden behind it, and drove, with her maid still disapproving, through lanes just tinged with autumn’s first fine gold, to Bonchurch; where, alighting, the procession entered the churchyard. After a furious battle with a sexton, who objected to such foreign ways, Edith triumphed and, bending low under an enormous fuchsia, its tasseled flowers of scarlet and purple trailing over a headstone, in the Grecian mode poured the milk, and placed the wreath of bay leaves, the honeycomb, and the red roses upon the grave of Swinburne. . . . This safely accomplished, she drove back with her maid to Ventnor, and returned to Bournemouth and my grandmother. An appalling storm broke and long raged round her head, alternating with calm patches of religious resignation.

My father, when news of this exploit reached him, was most displeased: it was plain that the girl would never make a success of anything. He began to lay his plans. Later on, in a year or two, she had better enter the shop, near Piccadilly, of a once fashionable photographer, whose bankrupt business he had been obliged to take over in cancellation of a bad debt. He could afford to pay her a salary of a pound a week, and she could find out of it her own money for dress and all the pleasures to which in these days the young considered they possessed a perfect right!

It was his elder son — well, that entailed its own place, ex officio, in the Universe. For the rest, he wouId reserve judgment on what it would be best for me to do, until it became clearer for what precise profession I showed least aptitude and liking. But for my brother Sacheverell’s future, he had already arranged: he could either become a lawyer in Sheffield or mineral agent to the Sitwell Estate; which in either case could offer him a considerable amount of work, which he must, of course, for his part, undertake to execute at special rates. (“In late medieval times, younger sons often did such things, went in for trade, and lived in provincial cities, Sheffield or Birmingham. . . . Charmin’ life in many ways.” “Certainly not! Why should provincial cities be different from what they are now, in medieval times.'' . . . Such a mistake to quibble.”) . . To return to plans for my own future, it was not so important to make his own as to prevent mine.

3

DURING these years, I could do little that was right. Golf had succeeded puffball, as puffball ping-pong, for the test of a man’s ability as leader. Everywhere in England and America, statesmen were already preparing their triumphs of 1914 and 1939 by spending long days on the golf course, and long nights at the bridge table. One would be lost in an uncharted world without some understanding of these games. But I showed no capacity for golf—and so, every day in the summer holidays of 1909, when I was sixteen, this singular man would send for me, and storm at me about my failures in this respect, as in many others.

There seemed no one to help me. Sacheverell was too young, though he always fought valiantly on my behalf. Edith was still away a good deal, in Paris and Berlin and staying with friends — and, had she been at home, her own state of subjugation would only have been worse than mine, and she could have done nothing to aid me. Nor did my mother seem now to possess any inclination to come to my rescue. Her own affairs were now starting to worry her. She complained, too, of feeling middle-aged. She attended to nothing in the house, chose no wallpaper or cover, undertook no household duties — nor, indeed, would she have been allowed to do so by my father, had she attempted it. She contented herself with sitting in her room, among bunches of tuberose and sweet geranium, reading innumerable newspapers. Occasionally she would give vent to a favorite maxim. One I remember well, because in subsequent years it seemed strange to hear it coming from the lips of the mother of three authors: “Never put pen to paper.” ... In reality, however, this was said in allusion to the growing number of quarrels — mostly on matters of business, for he did not write letters to friends — in which, owing to his habit of letting his pen indulge in comments and strictures that were far more disagreeable than those he was accustomed to pass orally, my father involved himself.

So courteous in ordinary conversation with strangers, and in many directions both kind and imaginative, it yet seemed as if, when my father took up a pen, he just could not put things in an agreeable way. On the contrary, he went to the greatest trouble to render his letters sufficiently unpleasant, writing them over and over again in quest of perfection. So well did he succeed in this respect that one near relative, and a trustee of his marriage settlement, came so greatly to dread the sight of my father’s handwriting on an envelope that he taught his valet to distinguish it, pick it out, and burn it, without informing his master. Let me give an instance of how he wrote to me when I was eighteen: —

Thanks for the accounts. I am always struck by how much better off you are than I am. You give a footman ten shillings when five shillings at the outside is the proper thing, and porters a shilling, when I give sixpence. It is very generous, but reminds me of Jack Brale, who, when he travelled with me, bought franc cigars when he could put them down in my hotel bill, and half-penny ones when he had to pay for himself.

Yet, since I was inexperienced, and my fault venial, all that was necessary was for him to tell me quietly, without flourish, that in his opinion I was inclined to give too much. Ascetism had begun to constitute for others a duty; but the standard no longer applied to himself. The chief and most noticeable point in his private relationship was a system of fault-finding, as with a divining rod, that continually grew and strengthened. This, in its effect, militated against his ever getting the best out of the people round him: in fact, to sum up in the words my agent has frequently used to me in the past, “The worst of Sir George is, he’s so damned discouraging!”

To the disagreeable letters he wrote — and in the next few years I was to receive my fair share of them — my father would refer in the phrase “a rap over the knuckles” ... “I had to give Major Viburne [who was supposed to be keeping an eye on the household expenses] a rap over the knuckles.” . . . And here let me offer an example, more subtle than some. For the past twenty years, my father had been writing books, chiefly of local, genealogical, or antiquarian interest. Since his serious illness of a few years before, he had written with more regularity, and in 1909 John Murray had published his remarkable volume of essays on the principles governing garden architecture. A year or two later, at the period with which I am now beginning to deal, he produced a small volume entitled The Pilgrim. These few pages, bound in brown paper, were to have formed a chapter in the family history—at which, his magnum opus, he worked for so many years, though it unfortunately remained uncompleted at the time of his death in 1943 — and concerned an ancestor, called Walter de Boys or del Bosco, father to Symon Cytewel, first of our name, who died on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the year 1250 or 1251.

This little book abounds in gothic inglenooks, and contains a great deal about the wild flowers that grew then — or, at any rate subsequently, in the author’s imagination — round the gloomy windings of the Rother, the waters of which river are today dark and desolate as those of Lethe. As in many books written by gifted amateurs, and dedicated to the presentation of an idealized past, all the flowers of the year are out at the same season.

A letter from my father to his agent Turnbull shows that the author had sent his agent the proof or manuscript of The Pilgrim, and had asked for—and, in fact, received — his advice. The phrasing, I think, indicates that, after the manner of most authors who forward their work, accompanied by a request for “honest criticism,” that which he really sought, indeed craved, was by no means the reader’s frank opinion, of which he would be resentful, but, in its place, applause, congratulation, and fulsome flattery. In this letter of his, one of my favorites among all of them, to me the sound of his voice underlines every word — and that, I believe to be one of the main though least recognized ingredients of literary style. The sudden breaks, the snubs, the bland assumptions — that concerning garlic is particularly delightful — the mixture of pretending to agree, and, even, to admit error, and then the sudden masterly bounce out from ambush to administer a sharp “rap over the knuckles” — all these are familiar to me.

March 26th. 1911.
DEAR PEVERIL TURNBULL
THE CURZON HOTEL,
MAYFAIR, W.I.
So many thanks for your note on The Pilgrim, I think you were a very sound critic, and some of your suggestions I have adopted, though not all. You were quite right as to the sentence “with wares of cloth and bronze and amber” in it, but the only thing really necessary was to replace the comma after “amber” with a semi-colon. The punctuation was wrong as it stood. No! — hollies were cut for feeding sheep in the winter before roots were invented. Gorse is very black when the buds first open. And I think the smell of garlic charming at a distance — though not too near. Nor can I agree with you when you say that one must remember weeds are weeds. I do not think there are any such things. You should not look at them from the utilitarian point-of-view. . . .
Yours very sincerely,
GEORGE R. SITWELL.

Nor was the letter to which he refers the only criticism he received. Well do I remember the time when The Pilgrim came out, because, while we were at Renishaw, my sister took up a copy which my father had left lying on a table in the ballroom, and, as she read it, becoming a little fatigued by the Wardour Street panoply of it, seized a pen, inserted in one place an omission mark after the recurrent name “Walter do Boys,”and wrote above it the two words, “né Hopkins”; a simple joke, but one received by the author of the book with particular displeasure.

4

DURING the summer of 1909, while at home, I was in such continual disgrace that I hid myself as often, and for as long, as possible, and, if I heard my name called by my father, kept out of the way, since I knew it must portend something of an unpleasant nature, another explanation or rebuke, either in private, with a formal air of solemnity, or — this in order to satisfy a sense of power — in front of people for whom I did not care. What my character needed to regenerate it, my father told me constantly, was for me to have to do something unpleasant every — and, if possible, all —day; a doctrine born of the puritanical sense of sin which I have already noticed as so strange a trait in a man of his origin and outlook in other directions.

What was there? What tasks offered themselves, that were sufficiently odious and oppressive? . . . Then an idea came to him. I had said that the idea of the Army as a profession did not appeal to me. The very thing! A fine, healthy time in the open air; and knocking about with a sword provided excellent exercise: and proved splendid training for afterlife. (This constituted always a favorite phrase of his, but I was never clear in my mind whether it referred to some later incorporeal state of existence — in which in any case he himself did not believe —or to a subsequent period of this earthly life. . . . At any rate, if anyone made some such remark to him as, let us say, “Poor old Miss Catesby! Have you heard? At the age of seventy-eight, she’s lost all her money, and been obliged to take a post in an office,” he would always reply comfortably, “Such a good training for afterlife!”)

What branch, then, of the service, should it be? Well, I particularly hated horses, so it had better be the Cavalry. A wonderful life in the open air, which gave one a good appetite — one felt fit for anything. And what an opportunity to use your brains — you could always play polo. He proceeded to recall to my memory what he had told me before; that, some five or ten years previously, when he had been in command of the local Volunteers, a general who had come down to inspect the regiment had said to him, “When politics took you away, the British Army lost a Napoleon.” Then, again, he would go on to sketch life in the Army; of which he knew a good deal, for he had read Froissart and other Chronicles, had been as a young man in the Yeomanry, as well as later in the Volunteers, and had talked to Major Viburne about it. One never felt so well as under canvas! And if it was bad weather, one could always go and sleep at home.

Instead, then, of being sent to Oxford, where — who knows? — I might really have learned something at last, I was packed off, very suddenly, to an Army crammer’s; an institution now defunct, rendered happily obsolete by the reformed system of obtaining commissions.

I rather enjoyed it. I had, indeed, dreaded going there, and when I first arrived, had been ill at ease. Every moment I could spare, I spent in reading Shakespeare — to my surprise, nobody seemed to object. I here was no attempt, as there would have been at Eton, to “rag” my room, or burn the books. For the assembled “young gentlemen” — in the terms which Fagin applied to his similar select band — though most of them, refractory by nature, and uncompetitive in spirit at examinations, had been sent here by dissatisfied, and often enraged, parents, as to a more genteel Borstal Institution, showed themselves to be unusually tolerant; perhaps because they were treated as grown-up persons. Of course, there were exceptions to the Borstal trend, and among this section I soon found friends; notably two, who remained among my most intimate until they were killed five years later in the First Holocaust. These were James Glass, a young man of intelligence, feeling, and the highest spirits, and Rafe Barclay, a great-nephew of Trelawny, who seemed to bring into a duller world something of his uncle’s vehemence.

And here, moreover, in this crammer’s, I found myself, for the first time, popular with my comrades. In consequence, the months passed quickly. I did not do much work; but for French had as tutor a genuine Frenchman, and I learned at last to speak it after a fashion. Moreover, I was encouraged by the teacher of English to write essays, at which he thought I showed some ability. He was a Scot, and I have always remembered his looking up from an essay of mine he was reading, and saying, in his Doric voice, with an expression of delight, “Hist! It’s an epigrum!” He then read aloud to my fellow internees some rather feeble but snappy sentence which I had written. It was almost the only word of commendation that I had earned throughout the lengthy days of my education.

In the world outside, the usual calm prevailed. Little seemed to happen. King Edward still reigned. It seemed unlikely that the great historic calm would break—why should it? If Germany went to war — and no other foe was to be seen — she would gain nothing. And the world now recognized that it was governed solely by the wish for economic welfare. . . . The prospect of an Army career seemed pointless.

5

I SAW little of such friends as I had possessed before this time, for, perhaps owing to the punitive nature of the establishment, holidays were as rare as must be those from Borstal, and never seemed to coincide with holidays at other places, such as Eton; to which my brother had now passed. But I contrived to see a certain amount of him, motoring over to Windsor from time to time, to meet him. When I did so, if possible, I avoided passing through Eton itself, so much did it depress my spirit.

The summer before I went to my crammer’s, I was, as I have said, in continual disgrace at home.

I suppose all this time I must have been very much attached to my father, or I could not have been so wretched. My self-respect had entirely perished; for of what use was I, if my father so little esteemed me? After all, he was the most intelligent and learned person of his generation who was within my range, the most intellectually developed and nervously equipped. But my feeling for him must, within the space of a year or two, have very much altered, until, resembling in truth for once my relative whom I have mentioned, I would feel ill for an entire day at the sight of his handwriting on an envelope,

By the middle of December, 1911, it was recognized that I was a failure, too, at the Establishment for Young Gentlemen in which I had by then spent a little over two years. Indeed, I had contrived that autumn not to pass the Entrance Examination into Sandhurst — in those days no easy matter, especially for one who, like myself, suffers from a race-horselike eagerness to win, even if engaged against his will in the contest. After the result of this examination had been announced, a pause of a month or more ensued; during which period I seemed to be in a No-Man’sLand, a vacuum, a spiritual Coventry in Pont Street, London, where my parents had taken a large, hideous, and rather haunted house.

No leaf moved. One waited for the storm, and wondered what maneuvers, if any, were taking place behind the screen of silence. . . . Sacheverell was on holiday, and we spent much time together. I was now just turned nineteen, and was promoted to have a shilling a day as pocket money; it did not go very far. However, we would contrive somehow or other to visit the current exhibitions, or to go roller-skating at Olympia, where the idle of all ages bumped and rolled and clanked and danced along the vast wooden floor to music; for it was the moment of one of the periodic crazes for this form of exercise.

Then a portent occurred: a General Sitwell, a cousin of whom I had never heard previously, now sprang, fully accoutred, from the pavement of Pont Street. He was a singularly simple, highprincipled, courageous, and delightful man, and I grew later to appreciate his character — but at the time I did not regard him with much favor. He and my father were much closeted together; the silence that surrounded me became greater. Something, at last, was in the air: what could it be? Even Henry, the butler, who usually appeared to possess a special insight into the workings of my father’s mind, could not help me.

Then, one morning, I found out: for I read, suddenly turning a page of the newspaper that had just arrived, that a 2nd Lieut. F. O. S. Sitwell had been granted a commission. For a moment, I wondered who this stranger, bearing my name and the initials that I associated with school life and had grown to hate so bitterly, could be. . . . Then I understood.... I was now under Military Law. For me to refuse to fall in with these plans would have rendered me guilty of mutiny.

It seemed better to go quietly.

(To be continued)