All this driving placed a lot of strain on my shoulder, which could freeze even in the warmest weather. Three-point turns were my nightmare — despite Dad’s best drilling, they tended to have five or seven points. So one summer evening my passengers sweetly relieved me of the need to perform them.
There were four of them, strapping boys who had been playing cricket on Parker’s Piece before I drove us all to Midsummer Common for a pint in a pub they liked. They wore their hair at a timidly daring length, creeping down over the collar, enough to needle their parents when they visited Cambridge for the ritual of Sunday lunch at the Blue Boar — roast flesh carved from the trolley, and is it so hard to find a proper tie? — but far too short to impress their contemporaries.
The pub was popular, and parking spaces were very limited. ‘Just stop here,’ said one of the party, and they all got out, innocently slamming the doors with a force driven from the shoulder and suited to flinging a ball or wielding a bat. If the windows had been closed I imagine my eardrums would have burst. There’s an anvil in the ear, you know, and those doors banged like hammers.
After a little chat in murmurs the lads took up positions round the car and simply picked it up, taking advantage of those open windows to get a good grip.
They lifted the Mini as if it weighed nothing at all. It wasn’t a heavyweight among cars, admittedly, and now it was transfigured and airborne, levitated into the balmy Cambridge evening by eight beefy arms. I’m a leg man myself, a leg man to my fingertips, but I have to say that I enjoyed watching the arms I could see from the driving seat, the tanned ones and the pale with freckles. I could see white shirts with rolled-up sleeves, and summer sweat staining the armpits. There are days when the world seems entirely peopled with giants, but this was an evening when I felt I could meet anyone’s eye and hold anyone’s gaze.
Truthful bitterness of hops
After they had parked the car and I had struggled out of it they picked me up in a compact version of the same formation and conveyed me in state to the outside seating area of the pub. It was like riding in some human sedan chair.
Local people had grazing rights on the Common, and while we sipped our drinks we could hear horses tearing up mouthfuls of grass, that placid ripping. I like the way horses’ eyes are set in their heads, on a soft edge in a long skull. That’s a particularly pleasing touch.
These young men were cider drinkers, leaving me with my half of bitter to claim maturity of taste. Their green palates preferred apple sweetness to the truthful bitterness of hops. I spent most of the evening perched on one broad knee or other. I would have one sturdy arm wrapped round me while the other hand took care of the precious pint of cider. Dandled by the group I listened to the conversation with abstract rapture.
Young people at university at that time behaved as if they spent their days in the underground youth culture of resistance and revolution, surfacing only rarely to deal with The Man (by attending a lecture or supervision). Every now and then they might have to have lunch with those aliens their parents. Asked what they were going to do with their lives, students would give rambling answers in which the words ‘kibbutz’, ‘start a band’ and ‘underground newspaper’ stood out.
Lads like these cider drinkers, sons of doctors and solicitors in county towns, mumbled less convincingly than most. Their hearts weren’t in it. The turmoil of youth and social upheaval would pass like the measles, leaving most of them unchanged, without even a scar. What’s that folksy saying? The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree (unless it’s wrenched tenderly off the branch to make cider). This was a period when the apple was determined to turn into an orange or a pomegranate. I loved this attitude all the more because I couldn’t share it. This banana doesn’t change his spots.
Even among themselves these young men stuck devotedly to the generational clichés. Asked why he had turned up late to play cricket, one of them said, ‘I couldn’t get my act together.’ ‘And what act was that, pray?’ I wondered to myself dreamily. ‘Billy Smart’s Circus? The Mormon Tabernacle Choir? Is it too much to expect that you be punctual, since you’re installed in a body that anticipates your every wish?’ I’ve always been slightly cracked on the subject of timekeeping. I admit it.
In fact I was enjoying myself too much to make trouble. As I was passed from lap to lap over the course of the evening, I tried to see if there was even one of these young groins that didn’t stir when sat upon at the proper angle. In every lap there was a hydraulic response ignored by its owner. Young flesh salutes a change of pressure. It’s a purely barometric pleasure.
Meanwhile I enjoyed their stoical conventionality, their casual social weight. These were men as reliable as the rhythms of a hymn, sung by a congregation with most of its mind on Sunday lunch. Was there also something left over from public-school loneliness, the residue of tears after lights-out? I like stolidity and stolid men, the slow processing of emotions. It’s a great luxury not to respond right away. The redhead of the group must have been told three times a week since he went to kindergarten that his colouring gave him an ungovernable temper, and he was still stupendously phlegmatic.
At the end of the evening I was carried back to the car in the same processional fashion as I had been delivered to the pub. I loved being so high above the ground yet feeling so safe. Even if one of my bearers stumbled the others would keep their footing. When I was at school at Vulcan, one of the boys had tried to run away to be a truck driver’s mate — perhaps this was really what he wanted, not just rough company and the dream of sounding the horn, but the elevation of the cab.
The Mini certainly had a comical aspect to eyes enlightened by drink, hemmed in so snugly by its neighbours. It looked like something dropped from the sky, or else thrust up by stage machinery. After I had been slid tenderly into the driving seat, my four porters picked up the car again, disengaging it from its narrow space and then serenely rotating it in the middle of the road, to save me the trouble of making the turn myself. The evening was still light, and there was no real need to turn the headlights on, but I did it for the sense of occasion.
Why is this memory so radiant, verging on the radioactive? It wasn’t just the beauty of the young men which powered my joy. Of course mammals spend a lot of their energy trying either to generate heat or to lose it, and there’s something peculiarly inviting to happiness about those moments when we are at one with our surroundings without having to work to make it so. Our bodies can turn off the fans and radiators for a while. We stop squandering energy to maintain the status quo. Summer night a case in point, bringing the human body close to the bliss of the reptile, organism which submits without a struggle to the conditions in which it finds itself.
Those tiny spasms
There were more specific inducements to happiness. The smell of earlier sweat, relatively fresh but dried in, voluptuously blended with grass smells, released and combined with new secretions as the young men exerted themselves in an improvised sport calling for a different sort of teamwork. The slightly laboured breathing of healthy young people, within earshot of each other, trying to pretend to be that little bit fitter than they were. The sound of cricket boots on road metal, long paces, regular gait, the crunch of the little nails on their soles, ominous, military, but also like little boys wearing Dad’s shoes and wanting to sound just like him, striding with a manliness maintained by conscious effort. There’s so much poignancy in the state of trying to be a man, nothing remotely comparable about being one.