Any Human Heart Read Online Free PDF Page B

on the shoulders and on the back. Smith minor was shouting in my ear, ‘You mad bastard, you mad bastard!’ We had won and my inadvertent block had brought the win about: and somehow the pain I was in diminished, magically. Even Whitt, pipe jutting, thin hair strands blowing wildly, called out, ‘Damned good effort, Mountstuart!’
    Later, after I had showered and changed and the redness had faded to a blushing, warm pink, I was heading for our set when I encountered little Montague. ‘Well done, Mountstuart,’ he said. ‘Well done for what, you filthy harlot,’ I replied (uncharitably, I confess). ‘Well,’ he said, ‘your charge-down. Everyone’s talking about it.’
    My ‘charge-down’… So, this is how myths and legends are born. I realize now, with a small sense of absolute revelation, what the way ahead involves. The only possible route to the First XV and my colours is now revealed to me: I have to play with reckless, careless stupidity, the grossest foolhardiness. The more senseless I am, the more I risk life and limb, the more I will be recognized — and hailed. All I have to do is play rugby like a suicidal maniac.
     
     
5 February 1924
     
    Letter from Mother announcing that the Mountstuart family will be going to Austria for Easter, to Bad Riegerbach, to be precise, where Father is to take the waters. ‘He has a sort of anaemia,’ Mother writes, which is making him lose weight and become easily tired. So he is now officially ill, it is no longer just a confidential matter between him and me — but what, pray, is a ‘sort of anaemia’?
    Ben had his first session with Fr Doig yesterday, which he described as ‘eerie’. Ben’s account sounded very Doig, to me, the man full of ill-concealed self-satisfaction at this potential scalp rather than displaying any concern to explore young Leeping’s religious doubts. They are to meet at least once a week at Mrs Catesby’s. Ben said that Doig could not conceal his huge disappointment that he was a lapsed Jew. An Anglican was small beer. At least, he’d said to Ben, you
look
Jewish. I think he was expecting some sort of bearded rabbinical figure with long curls dangling around his ears. Ben thinks his challenge will now be a walkover, Doig is so desperate. We both agree I have the most onerous task of the three of us.
    Wrote a Spenserian ode on loss of faith. Not very good. I quite liked the line: ‘When faith has died
we
must paint the colours on the sky.’
     
     
11 February 1924
     
    Scabius, me, Lacey, Ridout, Sandal and Tothill all travelled to Oxford by train for our scholarship examinations. Eleven others went to Cambridge — Abbey boys have always been favoured by Cambridge colleges; but we are more of an unknown quantity in the City of Dreaming Spires. Peter and I deliberately lingered in the train until the last moment, so as to separate ourselves from the others, and then hired a pony and trap (more like a horse and cart) to take us and our luggage to our respective colleges. We were deposited on Broad Street — the Broad, as I must learn to call it — and Peter went to Balliol while I wandered up Turl Street with my suitcase looking for Jesus. As it happened I chose the wrong one (why do these colleges not post their names outside the main door?) and the porter at Lincoln, a surly brute, pointed me in the right direction.
    Jesus was neither inspiring nor disappointing: two rather elegant small quadrangles and a perfectly acceptable chapel. But no college, however grand, could have looked its best on a damp and drizzly February afternoon — the sooty façades of the quads rendered almost black by the rain and the lawns tufty and unmown. I was shown to my rooms and I dined in hall. There seemed to be a lot of bearded, moustachioed, older undergraduates and I was told they were war veterans taking up their places at the university after their time in the army. I slipped out of college and went to Balliol to meet Peter but found the