Young Tom or Very Mix Company Read online

  YOUNG TOM

  or

  Very Mixed Company

  by

  Forrest Reid

  What call’st thou solitude? Is not the Earth

  With various living creatures, and the Air,

  Replenished, and all these at thy command

  To come and play before thee? Knowest thou not

  Their language and their ways? . . . With these

  Find pastime.

  Paradise Lost

  First published by Faber and Faber 1944

  TVM edition 2015

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Chronologically the stories dealing with Tom Barber run in the following sequence—Young Tom, The Retreat, Uncle Stephen—though actually they were written in the reverse order and each is complete in itself. All the characters except Roger, Pincher and Barker are imaginary.

  F.R.

  INTRODUCTION

  At any given time there are a number of writers whose reputations languish, awaiting critical rediscovery. Often, as was the case with Barbara Pym, a loyal readership maintains some level of popularity for the works, and particular favourites find their champions, until word slowly spreads or fame suddenly alights upon the neglected name.

  Forrest Reid (1875‒1947) was very highly regarded in his lifetime, and writers as different as Walter de la Mare and E.M. Forster recognised the lasting qualities of his fiction, from The Kingdom of Twilight (1904) to his masterpiece Young Tom, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for the best novel of 1944.

  Reid’s novels of innocence, experience, and the deep longing for companionship are ripe for rediscovery. They have never lacked their supporters, and for those who read them in childhood they hold a special place in the heart. Their subject is almost always childhood, and that special loneliness of the sensitive child, whose longing for an ideal companion takes him into realms of fantasy and dream. It is the realistic world of these dreams that is Forrest Reid’s unique preserve: he creates a complete and immediately recognisable world that is quite different from the fictional world of, say, L.P. Hartley, whose work is in many ways similar.

  Francis King, comparing Reid to Forster, wrote, “If one sets a descriptive passage by Reid against one by Forster it is nearly always Reid—so lucid, so limpid, so totally without affection—who comes out the better.” This unaffected, clear-sighted identification with the emotions and aspirations of childhood and adolescence is Forrest Reid’s contribution to the literature of childhood. But he has been criticised, by Peter Coveney for example, as having an “idealising dishonesty” about his work, and accusations of escapism and over-sentimentalisation have also been made against him. Reid himself was the first to acknowledge that he “preferred the literature of escape, and what I should call the literature of imagination, for the escape is only from the impermanent into the permanent.”

  E.M. Forster, who was to write the introduction to the single volume edition of the Tom Barber trilogy, of which Young Tom was the last to be written, had said of Reid’s work as early as 1919: “When his genius gains the recognition that has so strangely been withheld from it, he will be ranked with the artists who have preferred to see life steadily than to see it whole and who have concentrated their regard upon a single point, a point which, when rightly focussed, may perhaps make all the surrounding landscape intelligible.” Reid’s landscape is a landscape of familiar loss, a world of recent gardens and idyllic summers, a world where the pain of the real world is, however, not denied, as it would be in the work of J.M. Barrie, nor trivialised, as in the work of Hugh Lofting. Reid was a great admirer of Lofting’s Doctor Dolittle novels, bracketing them with the work of E. Nesbit in terms of quality and attractiveness. He wrote of them that they “are not fairy-stories, they are not adventure-stories, they are not matter-of-fact stories, they are not animal stories (at least of any hitherto known type), but are a blend of all four.” It is similarly difficult to classify Reid’s own stories. To stress the fact that young Tom Barber can speak to animals, and they to him, would be to emphasise an aspect of the story-telling which is utterly convincing in its penetration of the child’s thought-processes. But to ignore this essential childish make-believe would be to deny the novel its raison d’être.

  Young Tom is the third of the Tom Barber trilogy, which began with Uncle Stephen in 1931, was continued with The Retreat in 1936, and was concluded only some eight years after that. The three novels form a backward progress from adolescence to childhood: in Uncle Stephen Tom is on the threshold of manhood, in The Retreat he is 13, at the beginning of his adolescence, and in Young Tom he is 11. Reid, then, was almost seventy when he concluded the work he had been thinking about since 1914, a kind of Bildungsroman in reverse. Reid wrote to a friend, “I suppose you may regard this as a sign of my own gradual—or rapid—approach to second childhood”, wondering “if books were ever written backwards before.”

  Yet the trilogy reads as naturally and truly as if it were recently lived experience. It has none of the knowingness of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie, none of the sense of encroaching menace we find in Elizabeth Bowen’s evocations of lost golden summers in Ireland. The absence of adult intrusion into the narrative sensibility focuses the reader’s attention and sympathy entirely on the central character—we believe, with him, in the characters who people his world. These may be real (his family, his enemy Max Sabine, his companion Pascoe, the handsome farm-boy James-Arthur), or animals (Roger, Pincher, Barker, the dogs—described in the Author’s Note as not imaginary characters—and, very importantly, Edward, the squirrel), or even ghostly (the figure of Ralph). The dividing line between real and imaginary is always vague in Tom’s mind—and so it must be for the reader too. The turning-point of the novel, Max’s killing of Edward, should be as shocking and upsetting to the reader as it was to Tom. His desire for revenge, and his carrying out of his plan of revenge are not mere childish over-reaction. They are acute reflections of innocence consciously reacting to the ravages of experience.

  The reader is not, however, asked to judge Tom sentimentally. Max, unsympathetic to Tom from the start, is not portrayed as a villain, but just as a boy. His violence is as unmotivated and inexplicable as children’s violence often is. It is not to be read as a symbol, but is to be accepted as a fact of life. Tom’s interest in “curiosities of natural history” might be seen to be misdirected—human curiosities tend to be outside of his interest, and experience teaches him (if it teaches him anything)` that these are as much a part of the living world as the animals with whom he finds it easier to establish a meaningful relationship.

  The life of the mind of young Tom, rather than the life of young Tom, is the subject-matter of the trilogy. It is a mind that is endlessly attracted to the natural world, to myth, and to beauty. There is a kind of gentle pantheistic paganism, a tendency, particularly in the older Tom, towards a Greek philosophical ideal. This is not an affectation of pre-lapsarian angst—quite the reverse. Reid himself had been at Cambridge with Ronald Firbank and described that writer’s work as “decadent . . . hovering between Wilde and Norman Douglas.” There is nothing decadent in Reid, although his search for ideal companionship, and his celebration of masculine beauty have given rise to various levels of psychological speculation.

  In Young Tom when Tom sees the sixteen-year-old farm boy James-Arthur naked, what is stressed is the natural innocence of the scene—only with the hindsight of adult experience does the situation become questionable:

  . . . in Tom’s eyes he somehow did not look naked. He had simply emerged from his soiled and much-patched clothing like a butterfly from a chrysalis, and the contrast between his fair hair and the golden brown of his body and limbs appeared t
o the smaller boy as attractive as anything could be. In fact James-Arthur, merely by divesting himself of his clothes, had instantly become part of the natural scene, like the grass and the trees and the river and the sky, and the dragon-fly asleep upon his water-lily.

  This is highly characteristic of Reid, with its insistence on nature and naturalness, and with that level of personalisation that “his water-lily” reveals. The reader should see nature as Tom does, and should judge as Tom does, a little later, “it couldn’t be disgusting, however, unless there was someone there to be disgusted, and at present there was no one.”

  Of course, nascent sexuality is important in Young Tom, and the final pages give a brilliant dream image that is imbued with just the kind of ambiguity the young adolescent feels in the face of growing awareness of sexuality. Reid, however, chooses to keep the expression of sexuality repressed in all his works. Brian Westby, his most realistic and most adult-centred novel, is a classic of unstated affection between an older and a younger man. This very lack of affirmation, notably in Uncle Stephen, lends an air of mystery to Tom’s discoveries, and it is this mystery which gives the reader the pleasure of sharing the secrets, the uncertainties. the boy’s eye view of the world. Adult knowingness would destroy that world and that pleasure.

  The world of Forrest Reid resembles a lost world in more ways than one. An Ulsterman, described by one critic as “the first Ulster writer of European status”, his Ireland is a relatively untroubled land. Tom Barber is the child of a well-established middle-class family—tramps, the unemployed, and farm-boys know their station, although the figure of the tramp in Young Tom is nicely subversive. Tom’s world is not very far removed from the real world; he is emerging from his cocoon at his own pace, and treasuring every positive moment as he does so.

  Edwin Muir described the world of Reid’s novels as lying “outside time and society” This is what gives the stories their lasting appeal. It is a commonplace to speak of the past as another country, but Forrest Reid helps us relive that past in an everlasting present. In evoking the minutely observed childhood of Tom Barber he takes us all back to memories, true or false, idealised or romanticised, of our own earliest years. But that difficult passage, where experience breaks in on innocence, where the child is torn between the wish for adult knowledge and the need to cling to childhood security (so often the subject of the Bildungsroman from Dickens to Lawrence and beyond) is handled with a complete lack of sentimentality, regret, or nostalgia.

  It is not a lost world, and it is not a world of eternal childhood. “Beautiful boys in beautiful landscapes” it may be. But there is an underlying ethos to the novels which gives a resonance to Tom’s search for the perfect companion and the perfect day’s enjoyment with that companion. The novels are an expression of the search for what can give a meaning to life. And, simplistic though that may seem, the search is an agonising and complex one. The seventy-year-old writer was still engaged upon that search, and in the Tom Barber trilogy traced the search back almost to its very beginnings. The values of the novels are, indeed, simple values—companionship, nature, philosophy, and a realistic acceptance of the surrounding world. Tom tries, in his way, to shape the world according to his desires. But the world will not be shaped: the Max Sabines of the world are always with us, and no amount of running away to Granny’s can alter that.

  Forrest Reid’s writing was all a kind of search for the childhood ideal of the lost garden, a search which he himself described, in his “spiritual autobiography” Apostate (1927), as “a kind of crying for Elysium.” He treads a very thin line between the sublimated and the sublime, between the scrupulously realistic and the “dreamy contemplation of a world shifting uncertainly between recollection and imagination” (to quote from the final transcendent moments of Young Tom). And the world he presents is totally convincing, an entire world, at the same time personal and universal.

  For Reid this was the function of art, to explore and express “that divine homesickness, that . . . longing for an Eden from which each one of us is exiled.” In taking us back to such a world he fulfils Forster’s dictum of making “all the surrounding landscape intelligible.” A world no longer innocent needs constantly to be reminded of the potential and remembered innocence that is necessary to humanity. It is, as Reid wrote in Apostate, “a country whose image was stamped upon our soul before we opened our eyes on earth, and all our life is little more than a trying to get back there, our art a mapping of its mountains and streams.”

  The greatness of the Tom Barber trilogy is that it takes the reader on a voyage of discovery of that uncharted, but strangely familiar country: its loss a necessary part of life—its rediscovery one of life’s unexpected joys.

  John McRae

  Part One

  THE FRIENDS

  CHAPTER ONE

  TAKE your hands out of your pockets and don’t stand there dreaming,” had been Daddy’s farewell words. Spoken in a distinctly impatient voice too, so that Tom, while he waved good-bye and watched the car receding down the drive, felt both surprised and annoyed. Yet these same words when pronounced by Mother (as they usually were about fifty times a day), never annoyed him in the least. Coming from Daddy—who didn’t even practise what he preached—and above all coming in that irritable tone, they were quite another thing; therefore, having withdrawn his hands in token of obedience, Tom felt justified, immediately afterwards, in putting them back again. True, this gesture of independence was largely directed at William, whose self-righteous and reproving gaze he perceived to be fixed upon him. William said nothing, but he shook his head pessimistically before proceeding with his work. William was clipping edges—and no doubt clipping them very neatly—yet Tom didn’t see why that need make him look so dourly conscious of possessing every virtue—all the less attractive ones at any rate. He ought to have looked like Adam (see Paradise Lost—Mother’s recollected version of it), and he didn’t. In fact, Tom could imagine some thoughtless young green shoot, filled with an ardent zest of life, wriggling excitedly up through the brown soil, catching one glimpse of William’s sour countenance, and hastily retreating underground again.

  The strange thing was that nothing of the kind happened. If anywhere, it was in Tom’s own private garden that plants exhibited signs of nervousness. The struggle for life there was bitter in the extreme, and not a few had given it up as hopeless, while the survivors hung limp and melancholy heads. Turning to this questionable oasis now, he could not help feeling that last night’s attentions had only increased its resemblance to a violated grave, and he stooped to pull out a weed, and to press down the earth round a recently transplanted orange lily. The officious William was watching him, of course, and very soon came his grumpy counsel: “You let them alone, Master Tom, and don’t be always worretin’ and pokin’ at them Plants is like men; they can’t abide naggin’ and fussin’. . . . When I was a wee lad, no bigger’n what you are now, I’d have had that patch lovely.”

  “So you say!” Tom retorted, though a sense of justice presently compelled him to add; “Well, maybe you would.”

  For though William might be a cantankerous, disagreeable old man, for ever grousing and complaining, all his surroundings—flowers, shrubs, paths, and lawn—were undeniable and brilliant testimonials to his efficiency. On this morning of the last day of June the garden was looking its very best—a wonderful blaze of colour—and deliberately Tom inhaled its fragrance—the varied scents of stocks, roses, mignonette, and sweet-briar—all mixed together in one aromatic medley.

  It was going to be very hot later, he thought; for even now, early as it was, he could feel the sun pleasantly warm on his bare head and neck and hands, and penetrating through his grey flannel jacket and tennis shirt. Two young thrushes were swinging up and down on a slender prunus branch as if it were a see-saw. He tried to draw William’s attention to them, but William, continuing his slow methodical progress with the edge-clippers, would not even look, merely grunted. That was because he thought
birds received a great deal too much encouragement in this garden: if he had had his way he would have shot them, like Max Sabine, or else covered up everything eatable with nets.

  The abundance of birds was partly due to the glen beside the house, and partly to the fact that Daddy took an interest in them, hung up coconuts for them, supplied them with baths, and fed them all through the winter. Tom liked birds too, but he very much preferred animals. Doctor Macrory, to be sure, had told him he would like penguins, because penguins were much the same as dogs, came when you called them, and allowed you to pat them on their broad solid backs—good substantial thumps, which they accepted in the proper spirit. But he had never seen a penguin, except a stuffed one in Queen’s University Museum, and even Doctor Macrory thought they might be troublesome to keep as pets unless you happened to be a fishmonger. . . .

  Suddenly there was a tapping on the window behind him, which he knew, without turning round, to be a signal from Mother. The signal was to remind him that he was supposed to be on his way to the Rectory, where he did lessons with Althea Sabine, under the supervision of Miss Sabine, who was Althea’s Aunt Rachel, and the Rector’s sister.

  But there was no hurry; in fact he didn’t know why Miss Sabine wanted him at the Rectory at all this morning, for she had set them no lessons. This meant that the long summer holidays had already begun; and whatever she had to say to him she might just as well have said yesterday. Anyhow, it would be for the last time; since he was going to school after the summer.

  That had been decided at Miss Sabine’s own suggestion. She had called specially to talk the matter over with Daddy and Mother, and apparently her report had pleased them, though what she had actually said he did not know, except that she regarded him as “quite a talented little boy”. He would not have known even this had not Mother let it out inadvertently, for to himself Miss Sabine had always expressed her approval in a very brief and dry fashion. Yet somehow he liked her dryness, and liked doing lessons with her; and though she had never told him so, and never showed it openly, he knew she knew this and that it pleased her.