Unfortunately Teddy discovered that every character introduced or plot wrestled with was bland or commonplace. The great authors of the past had set standards that made his own attempts at artifice look puny. He could find no engagement with the one-dimensional lives he had created. If an author was a god, then he was a very poor second-rate one, scrabbling around on the foothills of Olympus. You had to care, he supposed, and there was nothing he cared to write about. “But what about the war?” Nancy said. The war? he thought, secretly amazed that she could think that something so shattering in its reality could be rendered so quickly into fiction. “Life then,” she said. “Your life. A Bildungsroman.”
“I think I would rather just live my life,” Teddy said, “not make an artifice of it.” And what on earth would he write about? If you excluded the war (an enormous exclusion, he acknowledged) then nothing had happened to him. A boyhood at Fox Corner, the brief, rather lonely and pointless life of a wandering poet-cum-farmhand and now the quotidian of married life—the log on the fire, the choice between Ovaltine or cocoa, and Nancy’s neat, contained self bundled up in sweaters against the cold. He was not complaining about the latter, he knew he should feel lucky to have it when so many he had known did not.
Oh, teach me how I should forget to think,’ ” a boy whose name he would never remember read out in lifeless tones, and the bell rang, causing the whole class to rise up like a flock of sparrows and jostle their way out of the classroom door before he had dismissed them. (“Discipline doesn’t seem to be your forte,” the disappointed headmaster said. “I thought being an RAF officer…”)
Teddy sat at his desk in the empty classroom, waiting for a second-year English class to make its appearance. He looked around the dingy room with its scents of India rubber and unwashed necks. The morning sun was shining softly through the windows, the dust of chalk and of boys caught in a beam of sunlight. There was a world outside these walls.
He stood up abruptly and marched out of the classroom, squeezing his way past a gaggle of eleven-year-olds coming reluctantly through the door. “Sir?” one of them said, alarmed by this dereliction of duty.
He was AWOL, driving home on the high back road, thinking he might stop somewhere and go for a long hike to give himself time to think. He was in danger of becoming a drifter, a man who couldn’t stick to anything. His brothers were doing well for themselves. Jimmy was in America, leading a fast, glossy life, “earning big bucks,” while Maurice was a Whitehall mandarin, a pillar of respectability. And here he was, unable even to be a lowly teacher. He had made a vow during the war that if he survived he would lead a steady, uncomplaining life. The vow seemed doomed to be unfulfilled. Was there something wrong with him, he wondered?
He was saved by a motorist who had broken down by the side of the road. Teddy stopped the Land Rover and went to see if he could help. The old Humber Pullman had its bonnet propped up and the man was staring at the engine in the helpless way of the unmechanical, as if through the power of his thoughts alone he might get it working again. “Ah, a gentleman of the road,” the man said, doffing his hat, when Teddy drew up in the Land Rover. “This darn thing’s worn out. Like me. Bill Morrison,” he said, extending a meaty hand.
While Teddy fiddled with the alternator they chatted about the hawthorn trees, in full glorious flush, that lined this particular stretch of road. “The May,” Bill Morrison called it. It lifted his heart to see it, he said. Afterwards, Teddy couldn’t clearly recall this conversation but it had roamed “all over the shop,” as Bill put it, from the place of the hawthorn in English folklore—the Glastonbury thorn and so on—to the Queen of the May and the maypole, and Teddy had told him how for the Celts the tree marked the entrance to the otherworld and that the ancient Greeks had carried it in wedding processions.
“University man, I take it?” Bill Morrison said. Admiring rather than sardonic, although perhaps just a smidgeon of the latter. “Ever tried your hand at writing?”
“Well…” Teddy demurred.
How about lunch then, lad? My treat,” Bill Morrison said as the old Humber coughed back into life. And so Teddy found himself in a convoy of two on the way to a hotel in Skipton for what turned out to be a rather boozy roast beef affair, during the course of which he had his life examined from every angle by Bill Morrison.
He was a large bluff man with a high unhealthy colour who had “cut his teeth” on the Yorkshire Post, a long time ago, and was now a blunt old-fashioned Tory. “Avuncular but sharp,” Teddy reported to Nancy later. His God was a robust Anglican, a Yorkshireman who probably played cricket for the county when he wasn’t sending laws down from the mountain. As time went by, Teddy learned more of Bill’s generous heart and gruff kindness. He liked the fact that Teddy was married (“the natural state for a man”) and teased his war out of him. Bill himself had “survived the Somme.”
He was the editor of the Recorder. It was a surprisingly long time afterwards that Teddy learned that he also owned the Recorder. “Do you know it, Ted?”