Myself When Young: Confessions

by Alec Waugh

But that is the way with time-tables. There would seem to be no half-way house. You must either scrap them or become their slave.

Habits are different, though. It is nice to know that, at a certain time of the day, you can always find a certain person in a certain spot. E. S. P. Haynes, for instance. You know that any day of the week you have only to drop into the back room of a certain oyster shop at half-past two to find him, lunching off oysters and white Burgundy and port. And that as you enter he will wave a large, genial hand and start filling glasses for you.

There is something essentially companionable about the man with habits. A habit is a proof of contentment, of satisfaction. The man with habits accepts life as essentially a good thing. Otherwise he would have made experiments. He would have sampled new clubs, new restaurants, new houses. I admire the old gentlemen who lunch day after day in the same club and at the same table. It is good to hear a man say, “I have been to the same tailor now for thirty years, and he has not made me a bad suit.” We ourselves feel no inducement to carry our patronage to that particular house; but in these days of change and revolution, faithfulness, even to a tailor, is a commendable and righteous act. Laziness? Perhaps. But then, is not laziness a philosophy, the expression of a mellow, placid, harmonious nature. The war presented us with few more pathetic spectacles than that of the tired, harassed mortals turned out of commandeered hotels, adrift in a strange world, torn from the habits that had sheltered them for twenty or thirty years. They had grown old there, they had hoped to die there. They were trees planted firmly and happily in congenial soil. It was cruel to uproot them.

It is through our habits that we strive at harmony. They are the feelers that our timidity flings out towards an illusion of permanence in an impermanent and fleeting world. There is a rhythm in the recurrence, day by day, of simple tastes indulged, of prejudices flattered. It is only the superficial people who have no habits; the rudderless, inconsequent people and those fortunate few who carry in the stability of their own temperaments a balance, a sense of continuity; and because it is towards that state of poise that we are aiming in literature and life, because it is pattern, because it is rhythm that we are seeking in our lives and in our work, we draw up time-tables and describe ourselves in interviews as persons of routine and method.

One Saturday last November I made the discovery on a football field at Tonbridge that the human head is a far more solid object than the human knee. For a fortnight I stayed indoors, my leg supported by a bank of cushions. In some such way, I told myself, in four or five, in six or seven years’ time, I should make an end of Rugby football. Not many people play Rugby much after they are thirty. How many were left, I asked myself, of the odd forty-five or fifty who had turned up for those first post-war trials at the Old Deer Park. How many of those who had played in the 1919 A sides were still playing? Half a dozen? Barely that, perhaps. You do not notice them as they slip out. A side alters so little from one week to another, from one season to another. You always seem to be playing with the same people. But when you compare the team photograph of 1919 with the team photograph of 1923, then you realise. Where have they all gone, you ask yourself. Have they gone abroad, or have they married or taken up golf? Usually the end comes abruptly. There is no gradual retirement. Rugby is a game that you play every Saturday, or not at all. You cannot pick it up and drop it, and pick it up again as you can cricket and golf and tennis. You go on playing till a knee goes, or an ankle, or a shoulder, and your doctor tells you that rugger is a young man’s game.

That is why, perhaps, we value it so highly: why we are ready to sacrifice for it so much that tempts us. We know that it is an excitement that will be soon taken from us. I am twenty-five. It is nine years since I spent a day in bed. But already I am beginning to find football something of a strain. The stiffness that used to last rarely over Sunday is still with me on Tuesday night. And as I pondered this, I began to realise to what an extent football, during the last four years, has given pattern to my life. For four years I have been unable during the winter to accept any invitation to lunch on Saturday. I have never been able to go away for a week-end. Saturday evenings I have striven hard to keep free from parties; and I have done my best for Friday nights as well. I have never been able to go away anywhere between October and the end of March for more than six days on end.

But this, you will say, is folly, a supreme example of the perverse slavery of habits. So be it: but there is only one way of playing Rugby football, to play it regularly, to come on the field fresh, and not to worry during the last five minutes, when so many matches are lost and won, whether you will be able to catch the only train that will allow you to change in comfort for that dance. And you have to decide whether or not the thing is worth it. It is an affair of personal preference. Myself I know that for myself rugger has a thrill, a sensation for which the equivalent can be found in no other sport, nor in any other interest. On a cold October day, when ball and ground are greasy with a morning’s rain, and the halves and backs have to go down to it if they would stop a rush, life is for the forward a very rich, a very splendid thing. It is a fine thing to feel a half-volley on the very drive of one’s blade, to see cover dive for it and miss it. It is a fine thing to run fifteen yards backwards and sideways in the deep, to feel that hot, tingling stab as the ball lands within one’s palm, to know that sudden beat of the heart that says, “It’s there, you’ve held it.” It is a fine thing to see a man play forward and miss the pitch of it, to watch the ball pass between the bat and leg, to hear the rattle of stumps. Fine and noble things, with life at such moments marvellously rich. But it is a finer thing that dribbling on a wet day of a slippery, bouncing ball; a finer thing that hard-won sense of battle, as your shins crash against the half who falls in front of you. His fingers clutch at the ball. You kick blindly at them; you stagger; but the ball is free; it bounces into the open; you follow, panting, a singing in your ears. The back is rushing at the ball. Your feet are heavy with mud and a long day’s shoving. Somehow you get to the ball before him. You kick just clear of him. The wing three is coming up behind you. He is fresher, he is faster than you are. Ten yards; will the ball bounce right for you? Your toe turns it ever so slightly to the left; the line is muddily white beneath you. You dive forward, flinging yourself upon the ball, your arms close over it. The three-quarter crashes over you, half-stunning you. You do not care. You hardly notice. You have scored a try.

You get at rugger something that you can get nowhere else. It is the game of youth, the supreme expression of youth, and it is taken from us, not unfittingly, perhaps, in early manhood.

To give up football is to change the pattern of your life. You will drop suddenly a whole series of habits. Someone will invite you down to Winchester for the week-end; there is an admirable train from Waterloo, they will tell you, on Friday night. Without thinking you will begin to excuse yourself. You are very sorry, but Saturdays ... and then suddenly you remember—that is all over now. You can go when you like, and where you like. And you are appalled by the enormity of your liberation, and hastily begin to form other habits, to fling out fresh feelers, to take up golf, or to join dining clubs that meet on the second and fourth Wednesdays of the month; to be once again entangled in the pattern of recurring engagements; once again to be the lackey of custom, the creature of use and wont.

There is always cricket, though; and summer weaves of its four short months a surer, clearer pattern than the winter does. There is cricket every day, and there is the county championship. And if you follow closely the fortunes of any county, as I follow those of Middlesex, you have a firm framework for your personal peradventures. I find it difficult, even now, at this early date, to place with immediate accuracy the date of any given winter circumstance. “When did that happen?” I ask myself. I try and build round it a frame of associations. What else was happening at about that time? What book was I reading? What suit was I wearing? What friend had I just seen?