The Man Within My Head (10 page)

So we got into our small blue Plymouth Valiant and drove
down the intercontinental freeway to Los Angeles International Airport. A woman in a stylish uniform took me over from there and put my passport and other papers into a plastic bag. Then I was waving and waving at my mother and father, and turning around to follow the woman into the front of a plane. My parents were left to drive the hundred miles home by themselves, while I headed back to the strange, cloistered world of Victorian England.

A
t the other end, a wispy-haired man in a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows was waiting to lead me into an estate car (the previous day I’d have called it a “station wagon”), along with other boys coming from Buenos Aires, Nairobi, all the imperial postings, and to deposit us in our new red-brick houses around Bardwell Road. The room where I would soon sleep was called Pterodactyl, named, like all the rooms in School House, after a creature long extinct, and in those early days all I could think of was California. I buried myself under my blankets after “Lights Out” and under threat of getting thwacked on the backside with a tennis shoe, fiddled with my tiny transistor radio to try to catch a college football game on the Armed Forces Radio Service, broadcasting from Germany. My only piece of home was an NFL handbook that soon I had read so often I could recite Raymond Berry’s touchdown statistics as fluently as if it were Kipling’s “If—”

Yet children are often much readier to adapt than their parents are, and before long I was putting on my blue corduroy shorts, my grey Aertex shirt and my blue corduroy jacket—all
with “S. P. R. Iyer” in green Cash’s name tapes sewed into them by my mother—and was happily flinging conjugations of the Greek irregular verb
at my classmates instead of curses. The Dragon was the rare school that allowed boys to bring teddy bears with them to their beds. But, wise to the dangers of life in the trenches, I took along only a stunt bear, so that the creature I really cared for could remain safe at home, out of view.

S
chool House was, of course, the name of the building where Graham Greene lived, too, both as a student at Berkhamsted and, in holidays, as son of the headmaster; the name itself might have stood for the universe of his fiction, where even in their forties, Old Boys are putting on the ties of schools not quite their own, reminiscing about faraway teachers, even urging other alumni, met at the club in West Africa, to send reports or love poems back to the old school magazine. In Greene’s day, the names of students newly fallen in war were recited every day in chapel (the two hundredth to be killed, by a horrible irony, was called “Dear,” the five hundredth “Good”). In our day, the war was long behind us—Empire had been seriously wounded in the First War and then killed off in the Second—but tall memorials stood above our playing fields, with the names of the dead all around them, and everywhere we turned were plaques and poppies.

On Sunday afternoons hundreds of seats were laid out in School Hall, so we could watch
Zulu
and
The Bridge on the River Kwai
and learn about what loyalty to king and country
meant, and how to suffer silently; on Saturday afternoons, a teacher read to us from
Esprit de Corps
and
Stiff Upper Lip
, Lawrence Durrell’s stories of life in the Foreign Office, to prepare us for our own detachment abroad. We had to run through a long line of freezing cold showers every morning at dawn, though, by some topsy-turvy logic, the number of warm baths we could take was limited to two a week and had to be overseen by young female Matrons.

In chapel we sang, “There is a green hill far away,” and I thought, inevitably, of our house, now painted yellow, on the ridge in California, on the far side of the world; on the last day of every term, just as my mother and her friends had done at Cathedral and John Connon School in Bombay, we all but shouted out William Blake’s lines about building a new Jerusalem in “England’s green and pleasant land.” When I was allowed “out of bounds,” occasionally, to buy sweets from the shop round the corner from where I’d grown up, it was to think of the dentist down the road, in the same street where Graham Greene’s wife and children lived. The name of our school magazine was
The Draconian
.

O
nce a year, perhaps, through an elaborate lottery system, each of us had a chance to win the ultimate prize: freedom from school lunch. If a letter was chosen close enough to the “I” in “Iyer”—I can remember even now the sensation of crowding around the magic box in the room lined with lockers—I was given a small paper bag and told, at 10:40 on a Sunday morning, that I didn’t have to show up again till dinner at
6:15. Inside the bag was a small packet of potato chips, a Penguin chocolate bar, an apple and a 6½-ounce bottle of Coke. Fully aware of how special a luxury this was, I ran upstairs to my room, searched around for the compass in my pencil box, jabbed a few holes in the rusty bottle top and proceeded to sip the elixir through the pinpricks for the next four hundred and fifty-four minutes.

Outsiders would seldom understand why we would later, with complete sincerity, call our years at school the best days of our lives. But we were situated within a very clearly ordered universe, in which an omnipotent authority determined everything. Every tiny pleasure felt earned, legitimate, and we always knew exactly where we stood. We were learning how to live with other boys, how to work with them and give them space, how to gauge their secrets as spies (and novelists and priests) do; our regimental comrades, as they quickly came to seem, would remain our closest friends through life, even if we couldn’t always tell how much we knew them (or they us).

The second biggest dorm in the school was called “Gunga Din,” in honor of the native water bearer in Kipling who dies to save a British officer’s life; on Sunday mornings, we assembled again in our classrooms and wrote twice-folded blue Air Letters to our parents. “Dear Mummy and Daddy,” we wrote, “this week Cherwell beat Linton 3–1. You can imagine how excited we all were! Reader-Harris’s parents are taking him out for tea next month—and he’s invited me to come! In Divinity we’re doing the Pharisees and the Gallic Wars are really galling! The School Play this term is
Oliver
!, about the boy who asked for more. But Podge asked for less last week, and he got six of the best with a tennis shoe.”

In English class, they taught us about a whisky priest, who
drank and fathered a baby and forgot his prayers; when he offered Mass, the only bread he had to offer was from his mistress’s oven. His parishioners were the other unwashed sinners in his prison cell. Perhaps we understood this somewhat, by intuition, as we headed back to our own cells: simple broken humanity was the sacrament, and even a holy man was “just one criminal among a herd of criminals.” The rest of the world—the places of need and desperation that we were being trained to go out and administer—lived in a realm as barren and magical as that of the Gospels.

And then, overnight, as it seemed, the eighty-four days were up and I was walking down the steps of TWA 761 into the born-again sunshine of California once more, and the relieved indulgence of my parents. My father was explaining the symbolism of
Sgt. Pepper
, his eyes bright with mischief, to his students, and serious young philosophers, prom queens from the beach towns to the south—now called “Radha” and “Parvati”—were asking him earnest questions about
Walden
and “Kubla Khan.”

Mountain lions could sometimes be seen in the dry hills through the window in my father’s study; a mother bear had been spotted with her cub up the road. We might have been in one of the cowboy-and-Indian movies we’d so excitedly devoured on TV in Oxford (though now the Indians were of a somewhat different kind and the cowboys were mostly shy men from the south, speaking Spanish). Sometimes fires broke out on the ridges up the road—humans were surely never meant to live in wilds like these—and those who had taken my father’s course on anarchist thought might note that you had to get rid of the old if a new order were ever to come into being.

N
o,” I said, one day, many years later, in another small room in an old island empire, when Hiroko asked; it wasn’t really the fact that I’d instinctively given the name “Mr. Brown” to the little sketch I’d written, imagining seeing Greene in Havana (or the fact that “Brown” was the name of his protagonist in
Brighton Rock
and
The Comedians
, his recurrent nom de guerre); it wasn’t the fact that he traveled—all of us had been taught to take off across the world, and for me as for him, travel was mostly a way to see more clearly the questions and shadows it was easy to look past at home. It was that he was always on the move in some deeper sense, never ready to assume he had the last word, reflexively able to see around the corner of his beliefs and to recall how he and his world looked to the person on the far side of the street.

Always there was a dance in him between evasion and an almost ruthless candor, his instinct for privacy and his need to purge himself of his secrets on the page; he was one of those men who would often tell more to his unmet readers than to his oldest friends. He almost had to guard his public life, in fact, in order to have more to offer, less compromised, in his private; the less you let out freely to every stranger—California had taught me this, along with many of the other laws of restraint—the more and deeper the material you had to share when it most mattered.