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ton, Hickleton, Lunt, Hickleton, Longbotham. This incantation of
names at once became vastly symbolic-symbolic of an idle world
of oily sunlit water and willows and willows' reflections and,
mingled with the idleness, a sense of things worn out, scrap-iron
and refuse, the shadow of the gas-drum, this England. Hickleton
Hickleton Hickleton-the long train clanked and rumbled as if it
had endless time to reach wherever it was going. The placid dotage
of a great industrial country.
Graham and I were always searching for phrases. The right
phrase was something with positive, or even absolute, value--even
if, as so often, it was conveying denunciation, irony, scepticism,
defeatism, nihilism.
(If
Nil is a word it can't be nil.) Our experi·
ences with words being a long way ahead of our experience, we
accepted ideas with much less discrimination than we accepted
phrases. Reading William James'
Varieties of Religious Experi–
ence
we said 'That's that.' There were no flies on Graham or me;
we saw through the whole damn peepshow.
While we expressed a contempt for Oxford our world re·
mained Oxonian. Only occasionally something came
in
from out–
side. Thus one day Graham and I were sitting by the fire in my
room when a foreign voice said 'Excuse me' and there in the door–
way was a seedy little man in a green slouch hat who looked like a
crook detective. He had yellow eyeballs and long black nails and
wanted an introduction to Walter de la Mare. An adoptive German
baron he was writing up English life for papers in Germany and
his thick-skinned determination to get copy had already carried
him into all kinds of British inner shrines. For months we were
unable to get rid of him and had to listen to his sickly sentimental
or unsavory man-of-the-world reminiscences-how he had seduced
his best friend's wife or how he had met Lenin in Switzerland and
been particularly struck by his
hum(Olity.
One day he picked up a
Swinburne and began reading aloud the Hounds of Spring in his
German accent and with a fruity Germanic intensity. Some time,
he said, we must go out with him and 'have a dash up channel, as
they say in the navy'; he emanated a sordid sexuality. But as well
as sex and alleged cosmopolitan culture he had a finger in politics,
told us he was a follower of Hitler and, if Hitler got in, was booked
for a Government post. At that time, 1928, we knew almost nothing
of Hitler. Political ideas were those which concerned us least.
