We confessed shyly to one another a common secret vice, "Phantom warfare." When we walked alone, especially in the country, we had both developed the same practice of fighting an imaginary battle about us as we walked.As we went along we were generals, and our attacks pushed along on either side, crouching and gathering behind hedges, cresting ridges, occupying copses, rushing open spaces, fighting from house to house.The hillsides about Penge were honeycombed in my imagination with the pits and trenches I had created to cheek a victorious invader coming out of Surrey.For him West Kensington was chiefly important as the scene of a desperate and successful last stand of insurrectionary troops (who had seized the Navy, the Bank and other advantages) against a royalist army--reinforced by Germans--advancing for reasons best known to themselves by way of Harrow and Ealing.It is a secret and solitary game, as we found when we tried to play it together.We made a success of that only once.All the way down to Margate we schemed defences and assailed and fought them as we came back against the sunset.Afterwards we recapitulated all that conflict by means of a large scale map of the Thames and little paper ironclads in plan cut out of paper.
A subsequent revival of these imaginings was brought about by Britten's luck in getting, through a friend of his father's, admission for us both to the spectacle of volunteer officers fighting the war game in Caxton Hall.We developed a war game of our own at Britten's home with nearly a couple of hundred lead soldiers, some excellent spring cannons that shot hard and true at six yards, hills of books and a constantly elaborated set of rules.
For some months that occupied an immense proportion of our leisure.
Some of our battles lasted several days.We kept the game a profound secret from the other fellows.They would not have understood.
And we also began, it was certainly before we were sixteen, to write, for the sake of writing.We liked writing.We had discovered Lamb and the best of the middle articles in such weeklies as the SATURDAY GAZETTE, and we imitated them.Our minds were full of dim uncertain things we wanted to drag out into the light of expression.Britten had got hold of IN MEMORIAM, and I had disinterred Pope's ESSAY ON MAN and RABBI BEN EZRA, and these things had set our theological and cosmic solicitudes talking.I was somewhere between sixteen and eighteen, I know, when he and I walked along the Thames Embankment confessing shamefully to one another that we had never read Lucretius.We thought every one who mattered had read Lucretius.
When I was nearly sixteen my mother was taken ill very suddenly, and died of some perplexing complaint that involved a post-mortem examination; it was, I think, the trouble that has since those days been recognised as appendicitis.This led to a considerable change in my circumstances; the house at Penge was given up, and my Staffordshire uncle arranged for me to lodge during school terms with a needy solicitor and his wife in Vicars Street, S.W., about a mile and a half from the school.So it was I came right into London; I had almost two years of London before I went to Cambridge.
Tehose were our great days together.Afterwards we were torn apart;Britten went to Oxford, and our circumstances never afterwards threw us continuously together until the days of the BLUE WEEKLY.
As boys, we walked together, read and discussed the same books, pursued the same enquiries.We got a reputation as inseparables and the nickname of the Rose and the Lily, for Britten was short and thick-set with dark close curling hair and a ruddy Irish type of face; I was lean and fair-haired and some inches taller than he.
Our talk ranged widely and yet had certain very definite limitations.We were amazingly free with politics and religion, we went to that little meeting-house of William Morris's at Hammersmith and worked out the principles of Socialism pretty thoroughly, and we got up the Darwinian theory with the help of Britten's medical-student brother and the galleries of the Natural History Museum in Cromwell Road.Those wonderful cases on the ground floor illustrating mimicry, dimorphism and so forth, were new in our times, and we went through them with earnest industry and tried over our Darwinism in the light of that.Such topics we did exhaustively.But on the other hand I do not remember any discussion whatever of human sex or sexual relationships.There, in spite of intense secret curiosities, our lips were sealed by a peculiar shyness.And I do not believe we ever had occasion either of us to use the word "love." It was not only that we were instinctively shy of the subject, but that we were mightily ashamed of the extent of our ignorance and uncertainty in these matters.We evaded them elaborately with an assumption of exhaustive knowledge.
We certainly had no shyness about theology.We marked the emancipation of our spirits from the frightful teachings that had oppressed our boyhood, by much indulgence in blasphemous wit.We had a secret literature of irreverent rhymes, and a secret art of theological caricature.Britten's father had delighted his family by reading aloud from Dr.Richard Garnett's TWILIGHT OF THE GODS, and Britten conveyed the precious volume to me.That and the BABBALLADS were the inspiration of some of our earliest lucubrations.
For an imaginative boy the first experience of writing is like a tiger's first taste of blood, and our literary flowerings led very directly to the revival of the school magazine, which had been comatose for some years.But there we came upon a disappointment.
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