Lions and Shadows by Christopher Isherwood

Author:Christopher Isherwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

5

At my preparatory school, during the last two years of the War, there had been a boy named Hugh Weston. Weston—nicknamed ‘Dodo Minor’ because of the solemn and somewhat birdlike appearance of his bespectacled elder brother—was a sturdy, podgy little boy, whose normal expression was the misleadingly ferocious frown common to people with very short sight. Both the brothers had hair like bleached straw and thick coarse-looking, curiously white flesh, as though every drop of blood had been pumped out of their bodies—their family was of Icelandic descent.

Although Weston was three years younger than myself, he had reached the top form before I left the school. He was precociously clever, untidy, lazy and, with the masters, inclined to be insolent. His ambition was to become a mining engineer; and his playbox was full of thick scientific books on geology and metals and machines, borrowed from his father’s library. His father was a doctor: Weston had discovered, very early in life, the key to the bookcase which contained anatomical manuals with coloured German plates. To several of us, including myself, he confided the first naughty stupendous breathtaking hints about the facts of sex. I remember him chiefly for his naughtiness, his insolence, his smirking tantalizing air of knowing disreputable and exciting secrets. With his hinted forbidden knowledge and stock of mispronounced scientific words, portentously uttered, he enjoyed among us, his semi-savage credulous schoolfellows, the status of a kind of witch-doctor. I see him drawing an indecent picture on the upper fourth form blackboard, his stumpy fingers, with their blunt bitten nails, covered in ink: I see him boxing, with his ferocious frown, against a boy twice his size; I see him frowning as he sings opposite me in the choir, surpliced, in an enormous Eton collar, above which his great red flaps of ears stand out, on either side of his narrow scowling pudding-white face. In our dormitory religious arguments, which were frequent, I hear him heatedly exclaiming against churches in which the cross was merely painted on the wall behind the altar: they ought, he said, to be burnt down and their vicars put into prison. His people, we gathered, were high Anglican. As a descendant of a Roundhead judge, I felt bound in honour to disagree with him, and sometimes said so: but I could never work up much enthusiasm, even in those argumentative days, for ritualistic questions.

Weston and I met again, by purest chance, seven years later. Just before Christmas, 1925, a mutual acquaintance brought him in to tea. I found him very little changed. True, he had grown enormously; but his small pale yellow eyes were still screwed painfully together in the same short-sighted scowl and his stumpy immature fingers were still nail-bitten and stained—nicotine was now mixed with the ink. He was expensively but untidily dressed in a chocolate-brown suit which needed pressing, complete with one of the new fashionable double-breasted waistcoats. His coarse woollen socks were tumbled, all anyhow, around his babyishly shapeless naked ankles. One of the laces was broken in his elegant brown shoes.

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