A Sort of Life Read Online Free PDF

agitated by all the fish’. Then came ‘The ocean is calm’ and there was a scramble for chairs. I didn’t care for this game. Even at an early age I found the chant ridiculous.
    Hide-and-Seek in the Dark . This was a game containing the agreeable ingredient of fear, and we played it on the ground floor and first floor of the School House with all the lights out and in the big school hall during the holidays.
    Hunt the Slipper . We played this rarely, but always at Christmas.
    Musical Chairs . This was a ritual part of the Christmas Day tea-party, when the rich Greenes joined us from the Hall. On such occasions we would play in the old school hall, and I don’tthink anyone enjoyed it except perhaps the aunts and uncles.
    General Post . Played on the same occasion, and with as little pleasure. Party games never seemed like real games (which were games without adults). They were obligations like going to church.
    There were Charades, too, and Dumb Crambo, a kind of charade without dialogue, and a game called Clumps, which had been played in my father’s childhood.
    I have the impression that such games are becoming as obsolete as the street games described by Norman Douglas. Certainly I played none of them with my own children, for games like this demand a large family.
    There was a real game too, not a party game, played in the old school hall and invented by my eldest brother Herbert, who was always of an adventurous character until he was changed by the continual and sometimes shameful failures of his adult life. We divided into sides and each side started from opposite ends of the hall. The lights had been turned out and one side must reach the opposite wall in the darkness without being caught. Benches had been piled on benches as obstacles. We listened with agreeably tense nerves for the creak of a board, scanned the blackness ahead, and felt our slow way, hands outstretched. I imagined myself a franc-tireur of the 1870 war of which I had read in a book of Henty’s. War was still romantic, and every summer Herbert organized all-day manoeuvres with our cousins in the country lanes and fields behind the Hall. We carried sandwiches and ginger beer in bottles with glass marble stoppers, and the object of one side was to penetrate unseen to the stables and capture them. Scouting behind hedges, crawling along ditches, making heroic forays across an open space, one experienced the first hint of sexual interest for the enemy – the girl on sentry duty in the stable yard.
    There was one entertainment I was not allowed to attend until I was much older. It was given, whenever he visited my parents at Berkhamsted, by an old clergyman called Canon Baldwin, who held the living at Harston. He recited the more grisly scenes from Shakespeare, in the dark of the drawing-room, taking all the parts himself: male and female. Sometimes, listening from a discreet distance in the hall outside, I heard muffled gurgles,chokes and screams, as Duncan lay laced with his golden blood or Desdemona strangled. They were tense occasions for my parents, as a single cough from one of the privileged guests would stop the Canon in mid-speech and he would call angrily, like Hamlet’s uncle, for lights. Perhaps it was not surprising that his daughter married Doctor Dover Wilson.
    The Canon and my father were great chess-players. My father played for his county by correspondence, but he admitted that the Canon was the better man. The Canon would sometimes take my father for a walk up to the Common and play chess with him on the way. ‘I open with Queen’s Pawn Two,’ he would say, and my father would make the appropriate response, but after about ten moves he lost his sense of the board, and the Canon would announce triumphantly and irrefutably, ‘Checkmate.’
    1 Perhaps there is an understandable failure of memory here, for my brother Raymond writes to me: ‘You did in fact see the man cut his throat, standing by a first floor window, or the nurse