Appetite for Life : The Education of a Young Diarist, 1924-1927 (9781551996776) Page 3

  All the same it is not fair. Sometimes Mother paints such pictures of my future, saying I should get out of this place and live in the great world and meet interesting people, and then in the next breath she says it is all impossible. One day she puts ideas in my head and in the next she wipes them out. Of course it is all a matter of money. She wants me to have what I want but we cannot afford it. When I stagger up to my room after one of these sessions about my future I fall into bed and sleep as if I were drugged.

  All this talk about the future, my future. How do I know I’ll be alive this time next year? I may die young like Meisner at King’s who died of pneumonia last year, just my age. I don’t mind dying all that much. I often think of it. There could be a lot worse things, only I don’t feel that I will die. That seems to be something that happens to other people. No, I shall go on and on as a bank clerk in a small town, and take to drink like so many of my family, and day after day write this damned diary about nothing, and Nothing will be my name.

  7 February 1925.

  Lord Curzon is dead. In her memoirs Mrs. Asquith says that his face had an expression of “enamelled self-assurance.” How I wish my face had.

  I took a walk with dog and stick in the woods and in Gorsebrook fields and went down to the stables to see William, who has been drunk for two days. He looked very yellow and was very bad-tempered, saying how clumsy I was and would never be any good at riding unless I rode every day. But of course, as our stables are now livery stables he gets paid when we ride, except that Mother says he owes us so much for the rent that the only way to get it out of him is to ride every day. He is supposed to look after the furnace in the house too and has not done so lately, so that it went out. I helped him feed the horses. He railed against Mrs. Mulroney, who has been so kind to him and helped him financially. He says she does not know “a bee from a bull’s foot about horses.” I enjoy being with William. He is a human being and never makes me feel self-conscious.

  Mother would like to convert the lodge into a pretty small house and offered it to Mrs. G., but she replied, “We may be hard up, but not to the point of living at your lodge gates.” Mother says she is a silly ass.

  9 February 1925.

  I dreamed of Katherine last night. Her body was beside me in bed, her lips on mine. When I got up and went to the window all I could see was a patch of gravel glistening wetly. The lawn and the flower beds and the big maple tree in front of the house were all blotted out by motionless, silent fog, and I could taste the salty taste of the fog as I leant out of the window. I could hear Georgina banging about in the kitchen, so I got dressed and went down and got her to give me a cup of coffee and decided to go for a walk in the park before breakfast. The fog was so thick that crossing the bridge over the railway cutting I couldn’t see the train that was rumbling and jangling past below me under the bridge. In the park the trees were dripping. I was the only living thing about except for a few scuttling squirrels. I felt weightless and empty, drained by my dream. I thought, I don’t love Katherine now, and it seemed worse than her not loving me.

  12 February 1925.

  In the afternoon I went to call on the Ritchie cousins, Ella, Eliza, and George. They have to be wound up like toys to talk and then Ella and Eliza both talk at once, while the bearded George sits by the window smoking Egyptian cigarettes and snorting occasionally; he never speaks. Cousin Ella is nearly eighty and Eliza a little younger. They used to live at Winnick on the Northwest Arm until their coachman burned down the house in a fit of spite. Their father was my great-uncle John and his wife was an Almon. In that generation four Ritchie brothers and one Ritchie sister all married Almons, who were their first cousins, and they had been brought up together. My mother says it was almost incestuous and so unenterprising. Ella and Eliza go to Europe every year to visit the art galleries, which I don’t think George enjoys much. Their clothes are the same as they were forty years ago. They can only find them in one dress shop in London. There was another sister who married. It was considered an “unsuitable” marriage, but when she was only seventeen she had encouraged this suitor and when she wanted to get out of it her father said, “A Ritchie’s word is as good as his bond. If you said yes you must abide by it.” She walked out in the snow in her nightdress in the middle of winter, hoping she would catch pneumonia and die rather than marry him, but she did not die and she did marry him.

  13 February 1925.

  Lent begins next week and I intend to bring into force a new Lenten regime of work and efficiency. Every waking moment will be accounted for by the system. Also I shall save money. That part will not be difficult as I haven’t got any to save. All my money is spent and I owe Peter. My allowance of $5 a month is not enough. All the other boys have more but I cannot say this to Mother as I know how hard up we are for ready cash.

  Of course Peter has a car and we haven’t, but I don’t care – I don’t want a car anyway. I went into town with him today. He was wearing a new grey fedora with the brim turned down and smoking a pipe, which is a new development. We wandered about the stores feeling very superior and then went into The Green Lantern for milkshakes from the new pretty waitress and went to a ripping movie called “The Perfect Flapper.” I got home to find a lot of people here: one group playing mah-jong, another bridge, and some dancing to the gramophone in the hall. Major Uniacke was among them, Aunt Lucy’s cousin and admirer – he had “drink taken” and was very funny and nice. He and Aunt Lucy talk to each other by the hour. What about?

  As the people here tonight were all older I went up to bed early and read a book on Australia by Bryce. I do hope I shall never have to go to Australia.

  15 February 1925.

  At breakfast Georgina, the maid, put before me a plate of porridge with a pair of scissors in it. She really is getting too queer for words.

  Tonight was the night of the Dalhousie dance. I took Katherine, who promised me or half promised me four dances, but she danced three of them with Bill Macaulay, who she is determined to enslave although he is only an overgrown schoolboy. During our one dance I asked her to return my ring and said that from now on everything was completely over between us. She hardly bothered to listen. Finally I was so fed up that I started dancing with Sue Maloney and she pressed up against me and we went out to her car and we sat or rather lay on the back seat and she let me do almost everything. I had a good time of a sort but I kept thinking of that brainless flirt, Katherine, dancing with Bill, and she happened to look so damnably pretty tonight. When I got out of Sue’s fleshy embraces I felt disgusted with myself and her. I should feel grateful to her. She is a kind creature and Katherine is far from kind. The only consolation is that Peter had just as rotten a time as I had. He took Miss Henderson, who is supposed to be ultra-respectable, but she spent five dances in a car with the Pemberton boy and Peter had to dance with his sister.

  I invited Sue to go to the movies with me next week. She is quite attractive in a way.

  17 February 1925.

  Mother and Aunt Lucy had an argument about religion at breakfast. Mother is the most wonderful woman in the world but her arguing methods would enrage a saint. She said she was going to ask Mr. Logan to dinner tomorrow. He seems quite devoted to her but I consider him a bore, especially as she unwisely said to me that she thought he would be a “good influence” for me. Who wants a good influence?

  I walked to King’s along the railway cutting, which saves time, instead of going through the woods, and I like it. I am the only one who walks there along between shining railway lines, shut in on either side by the high cliffs of rock and then under the spanning bridge. I meet no one and so I do not have to compose my face into the right expression as one has to do passing people in the street.

  There was a talk today at King’s from a Northwest policeman about Mount Everest. He was a fine man but a damned dull speaker. I walked home with Mr. Wilmot, an Englishman with a beautiful white moustache. He told me things about our jails here; the filth and corruption and mi
sery that go on in them remind one of descriptions of eighteenth-century prisons. A maniac of seventy is put in the same cell as a boy of fourteen. Mr. Wilmot spoke to the Attorney-General about it and all he said was, “The bloody buggers all need their necks stretched.” How disgusting to think that all this is going on under our noses and nobody cares except Mr. Wilmot. Hearing this took me out of myself – a rare occurrence. I went back to tea with the Wilmots. Mrs. Wilmot is rather a formidable lady. I sat on a seat made from elephant tusks and talked incessantly. The Wilmots have a niece staying with them whose father and mother were killed in a train accident. She is called Miss Ferguson and is peculiarly plain and fat and wears glasses cut in shape like a pie-crust table. She told us about California where her family lived and how much more friendly the people are there than here. She said she didn’t expect a boy to spend money on taking her out but would be quite happy to go for a walk in the woods. That is one walk I do not intend to take.

  21 February 1925.

  I walked into town in the rain wearing my new Oxford bags and my brown tweed coat, smoking a cigarette as I went, feeling very jaunty. I stopped off at the Almons’ en route to have a chat with Katherine, although I had been talking to her on the telephone half an hour earlier. She was sitting on the steps wrapped up in a rug as if on a sea voyage – pale and silent and looking quite plain. When she is like this I love her all the more.

  Passing the Roman Catholic cathedral I thought I would go in as I have never seen the interior. I hoped no one would see me going in as they might think I had been “converted,” but once inside I felt a sensation of calm and peace as if I could pray here if I knew what to pray for. I sat on one of the back seats for nearly an hour. There was no service going on, just one or two old women on their knees and the stillness of the crimson lamps flickering.

  22 February 1925.

  In the morning I read some Hegel for my political science course. I hate Hegel when I understand him. How can one compare him with a thinker like Spinoza, who is so lucid, or with St. Thomas Aquinas. Hegel and algebra … what a diet!

  Today at tea-time a horrible Englishman came to call on us. He is in the cable ship and said he had some kind of letter of introduction to Mother. The minute he came into the hall he looked around at the portraits and said, “What jolly ancestors.” No one knew what to say. Then at tea he began saying to Aunt Millie, “Of course you know Lady X or Lord Y,” and each time she said she didn’t, so he switched onto the subject of the Jews, and a book called The Protocols of Zion, which showed that there was a Jewish conspiracy to undermine all institutions and how they sacrificed Christian babies in secret. Mother got more and more impatient and finally said, “That’s all stuff and nonsense,” so he shut up. I don’t think he’ll come back in a hurry. When he had gone Mother said, “There’s nothing nicer than an English gentleman but nothing worse than that kind of third-rate Englishman. They should not be allowed to come out here. They do so much harm to the Empire.”

  25 February 1925.

  When I came out of the barber shop today who should I see come strolling down the street but Peter, wearing his new grey fedora, a grey suit, and grey spats, and smoking his pipe. We walked back together to the Archibald house. His grandparents were out. Peter said to me, “How about a drop of whisky?”, so we went into the dining-room and helped ourselves out of the decanter on the sideboard. I said, “Won’t your grandfather notice that there is less in the decanter?” Peter said, “We could fill it up with water,” so we did, although I have always been told that that was the unforgivable sin. Then we went into the sitting-room and Peter began talking about going to Cambridge, which he expects to do next autumn, and of the adventures that he and I would have when he was at Cambridge, how we would conquer Mayfair, and shine in the fashionable world, and meet beautiful women like the heroine of Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat, and how different it would all be from our dull life in Halifax. Then he told me about all the trouble he is having with his grandparents. He says he is quite out of favour. His grandmother complains all the time about his being extravagant and coming in at all hours and not working hard enough. Poor Peter, why can’t parents and grandparents get it through their heads that we are now grown up and not schoolboys any longer? Peter was at his nicest today and I felt so fond of him, but just as I was leaving he couldn’t resist telling me that Katherine had telephoned him and said that I was annoyed with her but that she could make me come around any time she wanted to. This made me feel quite sick, disgusted with Katherine and with Peter for telling me, and, most of all, with myself for being such a damned fool as to be taken in by her.

  26 February 1925.

  In the morning Mrs. Cady noticed in the paper the death of Admiral C. Mother was a little upset … not much. I remember the summer when I was fifteen when he was in love with her and used to come to the house so often when he was in command of the fleet here. He was a cheery old boy with poppy eyes, very kind to Roley and me. He owned an ancient castle in England and wanted Mother to marry him but unfortunately he had a wife already, but he said he thought she would give him a divorce. Mother never took him seriously, but she did write to a friend in Bermuda to find out whether he had gone about proposing to women when he was in command there and the answer was, “Nothing of the sort,” so she thought that at any rate he was in earnest, which pleased her.

  1 March 1925.

  I have very few friends here, I mean friends of my own age, apart from Peter. Of course, there are lots of people about the house always and I am not at all lonely, but I can’t seem to get on with my fellow students at King’s. I am afraid they think I am affected or stuck up, when I want to be accepted by them, but I can’t seem to put a foot right, and the harder I try the worse it gets. For instance, last summer we were all swimming in the Northwest Arm and three or four of the boys were lying sunning themselves on the wharf in their bathing suits, including Fabian and Harry and Dick, and I climbed out of the water and up the ladder to join them. They were talking among themselves but when I appeared they shut up. I made some joking remark but no one replied. They made me nervous, with the unfortunate result that I went on talking and the silence continued. I wished I could escape but I seemed rooted to the spot. Finally, with a supreme effort, I got to my feet and said as nonchalantly as I could manage, “Well, I must be going. I didn’t realize it was so late.” Dick just raised his arm in a kind of mute gesture and when I got back to the bathing hut I heard a shout of laughter. I shall never forget the humiliation I felt. Every time I go into that hut the smell of the wet wooden floor where people have thrown off their bathing suits brings that moment back to me. Yet perhaps it was my imagination and they were just sleepy from swimming and then someone made a joke that had nothing to do with me … but I delude myself … Peter has told me that the students at King’s laugh at me.

  I dropped in to see Cousins Ella and Eliza this afternoon. Cousin Ella is a nineteenth-century Whig in politics; Macaulay is her gospel. Eliza, when she was a younger girl, I suppose about 1870, went off to Cornell University to study Sanskrit when no girl in Nova Scotia had ever been to a university. What is more, she announced she was an atheist, which shocked her evangelical family. She once told me that being an atheist “was like coming out of a darkened room into the light of day.” She should be more interesting to talk to than she is but her conversation is mostly dry pebbles. She and Ella are tremendous self-scratchers. When Ella was talking today she nearly tore her necklace to pieces with clawing at it. When Eliza gave a lecture last term at Dalhousie on Sanskrit she scratched herself all the time in her most intimate parts. It was quite embarrassing but she was unconscious of it.

  Walked to town in the rain in my brown tweeds with the coat collar turned up, smoking a cigarette, when I ought to have stayed at home working at algebra. If I do not do some study work at algebra, I shall never pass the examination, which I have failed twice already. The trouble is that I don’t really understand why “X” should equal anyth
ing. No one has ever been able to get through my head the idea behind algebra. I am being tutored by dear old Miss Stewart and I pretend to understand when she explains out of politeness, so she always thinks I will do well in the exam and is surprised when I fail.

  15 March 1925.

  The visiting Professor of English is a po-faced ignoramus with bristling hair like steel filings. I walked back with him after a lecture today and happened to mention Rupert Brooke. He said, “That is the man who wrote ‘In Flanders’ Field the poppies grow.’ I haven’t read much of his stuff.” I was too dumbfounded by his ignorance for utterance. Also he considers Swinburne to be “unhealthy.” His lecture was about nature poets: the birds and the bees and the pretty flowers, that sort of stuff. It is a scandal that he knows nothing of Rupert Brooke, that wonderful poet. When I got home I took the volume of his poems out of the bookshelves and began to read it through again, although I know most of them almost by heart. Then I copied out the sonnet that begins: “Oh death will find me, long before I tire of watching you,” and ends: “Toss your brown delightful head amusedly among the ancient dead.” I decided to send it to Katherine. Of course her hair is yellow and not brown. I felt such an ache of longing for her that it hurt like a real ordinary pain, then I thought I can’t go on mooning about like this. I must do some work. The geometry test is next week and this time I must pass. Oh, the torment of maths. Will I never be delivered from them, and what is the use of them? What has an isosceles triangle got to do with me, and why the hell do I care what the squares equal?