A Distant Prospect

by Lord Gerald Hugh Tyrwitt-Wilson Berners

Overview

A witty, poignant account of Eton, early adolescence, awakining to the spell of Wagner.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781885983329
Publisher:	Turtle Point Press
Publication date:	04/01/2000
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.30(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Lord Berners (1883-1950) was a composer, novelist, painter, memoirist, conspicuous aesthete and the real life character on whom Nancy Mitford based Lord Merlin in The Pursuit of Love. This versatile peer has been called the English Satie. His ballets have been choreographed by Balanchine and Ashton.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Goodbye to Elmley

In the spring of 1897 I was fourteen and a half. The time had come for me to leave my preparatory school, where I had spent over four years, to go to Eton.

    It was commonly believed at Elmley that when you went to say goodbye to the headmaster and take your leaving prize, invariably a volume of Scott's Poems bound in crimson morocco, it was his custom on that occasion to give you a little lecture on the mysteries of sex.

    In my case the initiation was not forthcoming. Mr Gambril spoke to me very earnestly about my future, about my duty to my God and my Country, about the importance of games in the development of character, and he regretted that I had not done better in this respect. He warned me against allowing music to interfere with my studies. He quoted Longfellow, "Life is real, life is earnest." He spoke to me of this and of that, but there was never a word about sex. Whether he considered that I was not yet ripe for so portentous a disclosure, or whether he was not feeling physiologically inclined that morning, I shall never know.

    I was a little disappointed at not getting something I had been led to expect. At the same time I felt relieved--just as when one goes to the dentist, braced up to bear the expected pain, and is told that the tooth will be dealt with at the next visit.

    I must confess that I had been a little alarmed at the prospect of the revelation. I had a presentiment that it might be going to add a further responsibility to my already sufficiently complicated life. I had anticipated it almost with the dread with which, in the Legend of Glamis, the heir might be supposed to look forward to his initiation into the family secret.

    As far as matters of sex were concerned, Elmley was an innocent school. No doubt the state of terror in which we were kept by Mr Gambril checked all tendency to prurience. In any case, boys who may have been sexually enlightened kept their enlightenment to themselves.

    In those pre-Freudian days it had not yet been discovered that children experience the stirrings of sex at a very early age. Their innocence in this respect was taken for granted. Now we believe them to be little sponges of iniquity, absorbing matter for horrible repressions, and, as beliefs have a way of conjuring up realities, perhaps children of the Victorian age really were more innocent than those of the present day in whom even the "clouds of glory" are darkened by the murky fumes of sex. I am sure that in my own Recollections of Early Childhood there were no Intimations of Immorality. There had been many delightful things to engage my childish curiosity, but sex was not one of them. I soon discovered that there were certain subjects which seemed to cause embarrassment to grown-ups. There were incidents, too, such as dogs being suddenly shouted at and torn hastily apart, and I can remember being hurried away by my nurse from a cow that was about to have a calf. But these things inspired repulsion rather than curiosity. No doubt I was an unduly prim child. I certainly gathered the impression that this mysterious thing which seemed to inspire so much apprehension and disapproval in my elders was distasteful in its nature, and that I should not have gained any pleasure in knowing about it. I never deliberately embarrassed my pastors and masters with awkward questions. It had never been necessary to delude me with pretty fables of storks and gooseberry bushes. Nor did I ever come across anyone who, unsolicited, seemed anxious to give me any information on the subject.

As I left the headmaster's study, clasping my volume of Scott's Poems to my bosom, I could hardly realize that I had gone out of that den of torment for the last time, that the great day of deliverance had come. Time, at Elmley, had seemed to move so slowly that it had almost assumed the quality of eternity. I had looked forward passionately to this day, which never seemed to be getting any nearer. Now that it was actually at hand I could scarcely believe in its reality. I wondered how I could make the most of it, and thought it might not be a bad idea to celebrate my last day at school by trying to reverse in the sense of joy all the miseries of my first.

    After packing my meagre effects and saying goodbye to the Matron there was still an hour left before my departure. Most of the other boys had gone away by an early train and the school was nearly empty. I decided to take a last look at all the spots connected with the most unpleasant memories of my school life. The idea was ingenious but not wholly successful. I opened the door of the class-room of one of the assistant masters I had particularly disliked, to thumb my nose at the interminable hours of boredom and bullying I had spent there, but in its emptiness it seemed to have completely lost its ominous character. I walked out into the playing fields, the scene of so many humiliations, but here again painful recollections were dissolved by the soft sunshine and the mild breezes of the early spring morning. I climbed up on to the roof to view the scene of the disastrous incident that had put an end to my friendship with my idolized hero, Longworth. But I only succeeded in evoking a sentimental resurrection of his memory. On my way down I was tempted to abandon this thorn-extracting process and take a last glimpse at the dormitory I had occupied one summer term when my friendship with Longworth had been at its zenith. That particular summer stood out in my memory as one of the few periods of my school life when I had been comparatively happy. During convalescence after a slight illness I used to sit up in my bed as evening came on, gazing through the window at the placid landscape fading into darkness, my heart filled with nostalgic yearning. I hoped to recapture the emotion. When I entered the room I found Creeling, a boy I very much disliked, peering out of the window. "Hullo," he said. "You know, I've always liked this view. It's pretty, isn't it? I was just taking a last look at it."

    Many years later, when I was sketching in Rome, a grim-looking Englishwoman came up to me and said with some asperity, "I see you are painting MY view." That the wretched Creeling should be admiring "my" view was intolerable. The discovery of a community of taste in landscape did nothing to reconcile me to Creeling. He was one of those smug kind of creatures whose agreement on any point immediately induces a change of opinion. I also realized that we should both be leaving by the same train, and that the pleasure I was anticipating from the journey would be spoilt by his presence. It seemed as though the ghosts of Elmley were conspiring to spoil my last moments there.

    After this, I renounced any further emotional experiments and began to make my way slowly to the station, preferring to wait on the platform rather than risk any further encounters. I might even see Mr Gambril again.

    Elmley station was about three hundred yards from the school, perched on an embankment that skirted the playing fields. From this platform one could survey the whole of the domain. Beyond the playing fields, through the straggling line of elm trees, were visible the grey stucco Georgian house, the chapel, the gymnasium and the fives courts, and in the distance a low line of wooded hills. The prospect, enveloped in a soft golden haze, had the appearance of a nineteenth-century aquatint of a "Gentleman's Seat."

    I had not experienced much happiness at Elmley. I loathed the headmaster. I had made few friends. I ought to have felt an infinite relief at bidding farewell to the place for ever. Yet, as I gazed for the last time on a scene that, in the last years, had grown as familiar to me as my own home, I was overcome by a sense of melancholy which culminated almost in tears. I realized that, in spite of the many humiliations, disappointments and hardships I had suffered there, I had acquired a genuine affection for the place. Its personality, at the moment when I was about to leave it, seemed to have detached itself from its inhabitants and all the human memories associated with it, and to have become endowed with a friendly charm of its own.

    In addition to this, I experienced for the first time in my life the sensation of growing older, and for the first time I was conscious of the poignancy of bidding farewell to a period which, unpleasant as it had often been, could never be re-lived.

Table of Contents

I. Goodbye to Elmley	3
II. The Holiday Tutor	10
III. Eton	20
IV. The Matron, the Household and Two Friends	25
V. The Microcosm of Eton	34
VI. A Musical Adventure. Incursions into the Demi-Monde	50
VII. Marston	63
VIII. Marston (CONTINUED)	80
IX. Wagner and Deniston	88
X. Illness	107
XI. Bayreuth at Home	121
XII. A Snobbish Chapter	126
XIII. Country Life	132
XIV. The Bassetts. Lady Bourchier's Visit	142
XV. Happy Return	153
XVI. Pantomime	159
XVII. Vale	167

Editorial Reviews

In this sequel to First Childhood, Lord Berners looks back on his years at Eton with enough distance to forgive the indignities and recall the terrors with honesty and humor. He begins and ends by exploring the twin adolescent mysteries of sex and schooling, as if therein lay the key to the world. Given Lord Berners's later life, as chronicled in Mark Amory's Lord Berners: the Last Eccentric (1998), his time at Eton contains all the richness of a chrysalis, and then some. According to Berners, he owes to his few interrupted school years his full adult awakening. And so, in this slim volume, he charts his boyhood trials in one of England's most exalted institutions, attacking the cruel insensitivity of his teachers and his rejection by peers for being what society deemed as a disaster, an aesthete, incompetent at sports, obsessed with boys, and enchanted by Wagner. Yet out of his struggle, Berners discovered that intellect can "flash and sparkle and agreeably illuminate." To this realization he clung (and clings) with brio. He longs for the transcendent brilliance of Marston, a friend whose social standing his family would never accept, and later for the classic beauty and style of Deniston. He is generous in his descriptions of tutors and icons of his social class. And as his blind devotion to his mother subsides, he revels freely in opera and succumbs to reveries about the way women dress. (Meanwhile, the rest of the boys scuttle off to the smoking room to review the day's events in sport.) Lord Berners is clearly seduced by artistic luxury and enchanted by title. Yet when at last he leaves Eton, he's no longer the shy boy bettered by girls on horseback. He's is amaster of subtlety, a snake charmer who never lets us peer into the troubling depths of his basket. The two volumes of memoir are marvelous together.

Kirkus Reviews