to see the world through their eyes; and with this interest there often came at some point a sense—almost a sixth sense—of what was uppermost in a person’s thoughts.
So Bray began to talk one day of his holiday service in the manor. But something then occurred—perhaps a stop at traffic lights, perhaps some altercation or exchange of greetings with another driver. And then the pain of the memory overcame Bray’s wish to tell me his story; and the days he had spent as a servant in the manor remained secret. Perhaps it was his acquiescence in the role that caused him pain; perhaps he saw it as an exploitation of his innocence, his childishness. Children, whose experience is so limited, readily accept an abused condition. Even his play can encourage a child to live with his abused situation: can encourage masochism in someone meant to be quite different.
Thinking back to my own past, my own childhood—the only way we have of understanding another man’s condition is through ourselves, our experiences and emotions—I found so many abuses I took for granted. I lived easily with the idea of poverty, the nakedness of children in the streets of the town and the roads of the country. I lived easily with the idea of the brutalizing of children by flogging; the ridiculing of the deformed; the different ideas of authority presented by our Hindu family and then, above that, by the racial-colonial system of our agricultural colony.
No one is born a rebel. Rebellion is something we have to be trained in. And even with the encouragement of my father’s rages—political rages, as well as rages about his family and his employers—there was much about our family life and attitudes and our island that I accepted—acceptances which later were to mortify me.
The noblest impulse of all—the wish to be a writer, the wish that ruled my life—was the impulse that was the most imprisoning, the most insidious, and in some ways the most corrupting, because, refined by my half-English half-education and ceasing then to be a pure impulse, it had given me a false idea of the activity of the mind. The noblest impulse, in that colonial setting, had been the most hobbling. To be what I wanted to be, I had to cease to be or to grow out of what I was. To become a writer it was necessary to shed many of the early ideas that went with the ambition and the concept my half-education had given me of the writer.
So the past for me—as colonial and writer—was full of shame and mortifications. Yet as a writer I could train myself to face them. Indeed, they became my subjects.
Bray had no such training, no such need. The prewar depression, the war, the postwar reforms and boom lay between him and his past. The further away he was taken from that past, the more the world changed, the more perhaps it pained him.
Politically he was a conservative. “You know me,” he would say. “I’m a down-and-out Tory,” running together “downright” and “out-and-out.” By that, being a conservative, he meant really that he worked for himself and was a free man; that he had less regard for people (like Pitton) who lacked the will to be free and worked for other people; and that he had no regard at all for people who were parasites on the state, and hated the idea of paying taxes to support these people. With this Toryism, however, and his hatred of the Labour Party and the “commonest,” there went a strong republicanism. He depended for his livelihood on people with money; he liked the odd ways of the rich and liked to talk about these ways. But at the same time he hated people who drove Rolls-Royces; he hated landowners, people with titles, the monarchy, and all people who didn’t work for a living.
He hated titled people and old families and people of inherited wealth in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible for an English person, until I read William Cobbett. There, in the prejudices and strongheadedness and radicalism of one hundred and fifty years before, a radicalism fed by the French Revolution (which in the pages of Cobbett, in the living, breakneck speed of his prose, could still feel close), I found many of the attitudes of Bray. An empire had intervened, a great new tide of wealth and power; but the passions of Bray were, miraculously, like the passions still of a purely agricultural