Appetite for Life : The Education of a Young Diarist, 1924-1927 (9781551996776) Read online

  ALSO BY CHARLES RITCHIE

  The Siren Years

  Diplomatic Passport

  Storm Signals

  My Grandfather’s House

  Copyright © 1977 Charles Ritchie

  Convocation Address © 2001 The Estate of Charles Ritchie

  Originally published in hardcover by Macmillan of Canada 1977

  McClelland & Stewart trade paperback edition published 2001

  by arrangement with the Estate of Charles Ritchie

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  National Library of Canada cataloguing in publication data

  Ritchie, Charles, 1906–1995

  An appetite for life : the education of a young diarist, 1924–1927

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-677-6

  1. Ritchie, Charles, 1906–1995 – Diaries. 2. Diplomats – Canada – Diaries. I. Title.

  FC 561.R58A3 2001 327.71’0092 C00-932576-X

  F1034.R573A3 2001

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street,

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  To Sylvia

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by this Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  FOREWORD

  PART ONE

  Halifax, 1924–1925

  PART TWO

  Oxford, 1926–1927

  EPILOGUE

  Diaries: A Convocation Address

  FOREWORD

  The notebooks containing my old diaries are stacked on dusty, toppling piles in the cellar of the apartment house in which I live. They are not, as they should be, arranged in chronological order (a task I have always shirked). After the appearance of my book The Siren Years, which covered the years 1937–45, I intended to follow it up with the records of the next decade, and with this object in mind I descended to the cellar in search of those diaries. While pulling notebooks at random from the stacks, I happened to open one much earlier in date than those I was looking for. It was dated September 1924, the beginning of my eighteenth year.

  I began to read, and having once started, read on and on. As I did so, an idea struck me. Why not – instead of plodding on with my middle-aged diaries – go back to the youthful ones? The notion appealed to me, yet I realized the risks. Whatever the shortcomings of the later record, it did deal with the worlds of international politics and diplomacy in which by then I moved. It included anecdotes of the famous and the not so famous. If I continued with its publication, I could offer the reader some measure of historical interest, but if I decided in favour of the early diaries, there would be no supporting props of this kind. The youthful diarist would have to stand on his own two feet. Yet in the end I could not resist giving him a chance. It seemed callous to leave him to rot in the cellar when he was plainly longing to get out and tell all.

  However, there are limits to one’s tolerance of the adolescent ego. To publish the whole of these diaries would be to flood the reader with a spate of words – often repetitious and finally exhausting. So there has had to be a good deal of “culling” – also some telescoping – of the material. This has at times involved the joining up of scenes and episodes originally scattered in fragmentary form over a number of entries. Also, for reasons which will become obvious, names of certain persons have had to be changed.

  It is with some trepidation that I introduce my earlier self to the reader in the hope that his company may prove enlivening. For, with all his faults and absurdities, he had a great appetite for life, and not least for the comedy of life.

  C.R.

  Chester, Nova Scotia

  June 1977

  PART 1

  HALIFAX

  1924–1925

  19 September 1924.

  I spent the morning trying to write a short story. I had written some of it last night, and it seemed to flow along as though I were doing “automatic writing.” For the first time I thought, “I really can write,” capering about my room and saying out loud, “I’m going to be an author!” I wanted to tell someone and went down to the library. Mother and Aunt Millie had not gone to bed yet. They were discussing household finances. I listened to them talking for a few minutes and the impulse to tell them dried up. It is just as well, because this morning when I re-read what I had written I was appalled. It is no good, no bloody good at all. The dialogue is like someone trying to mimic who has got the voice and accent just wrong. As for the story, it stands still. Nothing moves forward and the characters are cardboard.

  I crumpled the whole thing up and threw it into the wastepaper basket and took out a new sheet of paper, determined to begin again, but I just stared at the blank page for nearly an hour and nothing happened. Not a thought, not a word came. I found myself looking out of the window at the leaves flittering in the breeze at the edge of the lawn. I watched Aunt Millie come out of the house with her shopping bag over her arm, walking slowly out of sight down the drive. “What is she thinking about?” I wondered; “what she’s going to buy for dinner, or about making over last summer’s dress, or is she worrying about Eileen’s future? She is a mystery, everyone is a mystery. But the characters in my story are not mysteries, they aren’t people at all.”

  I thought I might as well go for a walk as sit here staring into space. I took the short-cut past the stables, over the new bridge, across the railway cutting, through the village, and into the park. It was a funny sort of day. There had been fog but it had lifted, and it was neither hot nor cold. The sun just not out, the tops of the pine trees just moving. I went down to the point where you can look out to sea and sat on a bench. There was a liner moving out of the harbour mouth. It seemed to be moving slowly, hardly at all. The next time I looked it had almost disappeared. I thought, “Oh, to be on board, doing anything, a stowaway, or swabbing the decks, going anywhere. There must be another place different from this. The whole world can’t be the same. But what if it turned out to be?” A big raindrop plopped down on my forehead out of the still sky and I turned home. As I walked under the trees in the park the rain came on. I was thinking, “I cannot invent. I shall never, never be a novelist. At the same time, I must write. Why? God knows. So that I’m left with this diary, this useless, drivelling diary. If that is all I have, I had better get on with it.”

  So little happens to me that is worth recording. No great adventures or tremendous experiences, or passionate love affairs. I know no famous people whom I can describe for posterity. For instance, what has happened today? You may say, “Nothing at all.” But something has happened to me. I have given up dreaming of being a great writer. That and nothing else, except that we had fried eggs and bacon for breakfast and Georgina, the maid, broke a coffee cup and Aunt Millie said, “Oh, for mercy’s sake, that girl again.” And Mother said to me, “When you are on your own
and have to look after yourself perhaps you’ll learn not to throw your clothes in a heap on the floor of the bedroom and just leave them there for someone to pick up.” So what am I to write about? I think I will try my hand at describing this house where I live and the people in it. This place is called The Bower and it is on the outskirts of Halifax, Nova Scotia. The tram only goes as far as the corner of Inglis Street, so you have to walk the rest of the way (or we have to, as we have no car). Coming home, you go past the big iron gates at the entrance of Gorsebrook, which is the place adjoining ours, and along beside the stone wall enclosing Gorsebrook’s fields and their woods. You turn right beside the dilapidated paling fence enclosing our woods and you come to two squat, square, stone gate-posts and turn into our drive. On the right is the lodge, a little wooden house badly in need of painting, which we let to a family who are behind in the rent. On the left are the barn and the stables where an old Irishman named William Robinson now runs a livery stable and is supposed to look after our furnace in his spare time and when he is sober. The drive winds up on a slight incline under arching trees. On the right there is a meadow sloping down towards the woods. Near the top of the drive you come out onto a square of gravel with the house on one side and lawns and flower beds on the other. The house itself is old, built in 1817, with a Victorian front added later. Its dark-red shingle is overgrown with Virginia creeper. The house seems to slumber away as though nothing had ever disturbed it, but if you go round to the back you get a surprise. Within yards of the kitchen door you are on the edge of a cliff of tawny rock a hundred feet deep; it is the railway cutting. When they put the new railway in it went right through our orchard and so near us that when you see the house from the other side of the cutting it seems almost to be perched on the brink. You can hear the trains rushing and rattling down below and the sound reverberates from the steep rocky sides of the cutting as from the bottom of a canyon. When I was a child and they were still blasting through the solid rock, there would be a siren of warning and crashing dynamite explosions which made the house itself shake. Some people might be bothered by having the cutting so near but it does not worry us in the least, we are so used to it. In fact, I love listening, especially at night when I’m in bed, to the hooting of the engines, the ringing of the cow-bells, the jangling of the couplings, and the sound of the mournful whistle as the trains draw out in the distance, so that I picture them tearing along with their lighted windows through the darkness and dwindling away to the edge of sleep.

  When you come into the house through the outside front porch you are in a square hall with two white wooden pillars in the middle. On the walls are portraits, some real ancestors, others, the grander ones, bought by my great-grandfather at a sale, although I like to pretend to myself and sometimes to other people that one of these, a romantic young man wearing a flowered waistcoat, is really a relation of mine. Once someone said they could see a resemblance to me, and I agreed. Fortunately, Mother did not overhear us or I should never have been allowed to forget it. She despises affectation. There is a big fireplace in the hall in which sits a black Franklin stove, not beautiful but giving a lot of heat. The gramophone is on a table by the window. We often roll up the rugs to dance on the parquet floor even if it is not a party but just friends dropping in or people staying.

  On the left of the hall is the drawing-room. It is a double room with two fireplaces. It must once have been two rooms. The windows are low, almost on the floor level. One end of the drawing-room is cheerful with chintzes and armchairs; the other end is like an unused parlour. I don’t quite know why, except that an upright piano is there and it looks rather neglected as hardly anyone ever plays it. None of my family are musical, although my mother took singing lessons in Dresden when she was a girl but the teacher said her voice lacked something – I cannot remember what. On the right of the hall is the dining-room, which is just a dining-room with red wallpaper and a built-in oak sideboard with knobs and scrolls.

  At the end of the hall is the library. This is where we all assemble. There is always someone there, usually several people discussing plans for the day or just talking or sitting about. For this reason it is not a good place for reading, except when Mother reads aloud to us in the evening. I usually read in my own bedroom, taking a book from one of the tall mahogany glass-fronted library bookcases. The glass fronts of the bookcases reflect in the summer the green of the trees outside and in the autumn and winter the firelight. There is a big and very comfortable sofa in front of the fireplace. Mother has her desk by the window. Whenever I think of The Bower I think of this room.

  I cannot be bothered describing the upstairs and the bedrooms. There are quite a lot of bedrooms but not so many as you might think considering the number of people who come to stay. There is only one upstairs bathroom and it is very unpopular to stay there any longer than you must.

  My own bedroom is sacred to me. In it is the table at which I am writing and looking out of the window at this moment when the sun has just come out and is drying the wet gravel in the drive. I have a small bookcase of my own next my bed in which I keep certain favourite books such as Rupert Brooke’s poems in a dark-blue stiff cover with thick deckle-edge pages, Horace Walpole’s letters in a limp red-leather binding, some books of my childhood, and whatever novel I am reading or book I am studying for college.

  The inhabitants of the house are as follows: My mother, who I shall not attempt to describe as it would be like trying to describe a picture which you are standing too close to. I can see details but I cannot see the whole. Here are a few details. She is a widow. My father, who was much older than she, died nearly ten years ago. I don’t know exactly what her age is. I never think of her as being any particular age – probably forty something. I suppose you would say she is handsome rather than beautiful but neither word is quite right. She has the most magnificent dark eyes that can fascinate or scare you depending on her mood. She is generous, compassionate, impatient, and easily bored. She is a born mimic who could imitate anyone. She is a chain-smoker and a terrific tea-drinker. She would do anything for my brother Roley and me and she expects us to achieve something remarkable in life. Roley is away at boarding-school most of the time. He is four years younger than I. When we are together we get on awfully well and can say anything to each other as each knows what the other is feeling.

  Aunt Millie and her daughter Eileen live with us and Aunt Millie shares the expenses of the house-keeping. She is not really my aunt but an old friend of Mother’s. She is also a widow. Her husband was an Irishman, an officer in the army. He was drowned years ago in an accident. She is fair, and not exactly fat but comfortable. She is placid, sweet-natured, and tactful. Eileen is a few years older than I. I suppose she is about twenty-one. She is fair-haired with brown eyes and a pale skin. Some days she looks beautiful. She was the first love of my life from the age of six till about fourteen. As children we could hardly bear to be apart and, when we were, we wrote each other letters under the assumed names of characters out of books by Baroness Orczy or Stanley Weyman’s Under the Red Robe. She went to a finishing school in Switzerland and now she is back and it is different. Of course we are still great friends but she is rather critical of me, like an older sister.

  Georgina, the maid, comes from Newfoundland. She is young and cheerful. She has an admirer – “my fellow,” she calls him. His name is Green and he comes to the house to call for her on her night out. Mother says he is up to no good. The cook is called Mrs. Bright. She is gaunt and old with an immensely deep voice.

  Then, of course, there is myself. I am seventeen years old at the moment but will be eighteen next week. By occupation I am a freshman at King’s University here in Halifax. I have no character that I know of. I try to be the characters I read about or the people I admire, to enter into their skins and act as they would, but no one notices. They think I am just the same as ever. My main vices are selfishness, vanity, self-consciousness, and talking too much. Also, what the masters at school
used to call “impure thoughts,” but I don’t know if that is a vice or not. I am not altogether lacking in intelligence but I do not care about that. I want to be handsome and dashing and self-assured, but I am angular, beak-nosed, narrow-chested, and wear glasses. I am quite tall, but what is the good of that? I am a compulsive diarist and a greedy reader.

  These are the permanent inhabitants of The Bower, but that does not account for the semi-permanent ones, as there always seem to be one or two people staying. Apart from that, the dropping-in is incessant. Never a day passes when I am sitting here like today at my window that I don’t see someone or other coming up the drive either in a motor-car or walking, sometimes just for a gossip or a cup of tea, or for no particular reason.

  The following will be my diaries for the coming year, beginning January 1, 1925. I want this to be entirely truthful. I am writing because I do not want my life to slip through my fingers like sand.

  1 January 1925.

  I am in love with a girl called Katherine Akroyd. Or I imagine I am. She has come to be the governess to the Almon children. The Almons are my cousins (I don’t believe anyone has as many cousins as I have in this town). They live quite near us, not far from the tram stop in Inglis Street. Katherine is quite young – seventeen. Her family are English. Her father was in the army and they live down in the Annapolis Valley where they have bought a fruit farm which is not doing at all well as they had no experience of fruit-farming. Katherine is as pretty as it is possible to be. She is tall, with a ripping figure. She has a pink and white complexion, adorable nose, grey eyes set wide apart. But that is not all. She goes to your head, to your heart, to every part of you. In herself she is changeable, laughing, teasing, sulking, whatever she pleases. She can twist and turn you round as quick as a flash.

  The complication is that Peter is in love with her too, or he says he is. Or is he just playing some kind of game, perhaps to show me that whatever I want he can take easily? Perhaps he can. She seems to prefer his company to mine. I don’t altogether blame her. He can always think of something to amuse her or tell her one of his fantastic tales or come to see her with some little joke present. And then, he is better looking than I am, quite handsome in fact. Of course he is only seventeen and I am eighteen and she will be eighteen next month, so Peter is a year behind us. Not that that really helps much.