Age of Innocence

A while ago I attended a talk by a writer who had grown up in East Germany. What was it like, his audience wanted to know, living in a police state? ‘The truth is’, he replied, ‘that when you’re a teenager, politics are much less important than girls and football.’

I thought of this when I rediscovered Godfrey Smith’s novel The Business of Loving (1961) among my father’s old books. Although the core of the story is set during the Second World War, the conflict barely registers beside what is, to the young hero, his raison d’être: the pursuit of an idealized lover. I must have been 16 when I first read it, and nothing I had come across described more perfectly my own state of mind. It clutched at my heart; returning to it in middle age, I found certain phrases and sentences echoing across the years with haunting vividness, like a bell tolling from a submerged city. The book opens in 1960 with a chance meeting between two childhood friends. Now in their mid-thirties, they haven’t seen each other for thirteen years. Felix Weston is a failed writer, while Peregrine ‘Benny’ Benedict has built up a hugely profitable record company. But Benny’s success masks an emotional void. When Benny asks after Laura, a figure from their youth, it becomes clear that the two men represent opposite ends of the romantic spectrum. ‘I sometimes wish I could believe in love as he does,’ Felix muses to himself; ‘because what else is there? Yet what has it brought him but pain and emptiness? And what has not believing in it brought me?’ The story then moves back to the summer of 1939. Benny and Felix are about to leave Valhalla, their Hampshire prep school, and to the dreamy, academically promising Benny life has never been sweeter: he is brimming with a new-found passion for jazz, and thrills his kindly father – a widowed rep for the Margrave Brewery – by scoring fifty in his final cricket match. Above all, he is in thrall to the idea of love, and as he cycles past the grammar school to which he is about to move, he catches sight of two people who will dominate his adolescence:

They were a boy and a girl: the boy was about sixteen, the girl looked a little less . . . they sped down the hill and the boy said something which made the girl laugh. Then they were gone.

Benedict cycled on, but he was in a trance. He had never seen anything so – perfect . . . They must be in love, he thought. How could any other emotion between them be possible? Benedict tingled with pure, unentangled happiness.

The boy turns out to be the school’s brightest star, Tony Hammond – a sportsman, scholar and musician for whom anything seems possible. The girl is Laura Mackay, daughter of the local doctor, and though she appears inseparable from Hammond, Benny falls instantly in love with her. Such is his obsession that he throws away his chances of a scholarship to another school by writing a two-sentence answer to an exam question: ‘The poet is right. There is only love.’ Benny is just level-headed enough to realize that Laura is out of his reach – for now at least – and as his teens progress he turns to three other girls for guidance in the ways of women. There is his friend Milo’s sweet, timid sister Tessa; his formidably bright classmate Constance, who teaches him how to dance and gives him his first kiss; and, above all, Felix’s absurdly young stepmother Arabella, a 19-year-old former artist’s model who mesmerizes the boys with her revelations about what women find attractive. But though Benny tells Tessa, ‘I’ll have to find another girl one day, a real flesh-and-blood one, not a dream girl,’ his devotion to Laura and his belief in romance are unwavering. Then, on the eve of Benny’s seventeenth birthday, something extraordinary happens – Tony Hammond disappears in the wake of a mysterious scandal. Laura is now approachable and, to Benny’s wonderment, comes to reciprocate his feelings. But the war finally catches up with them: Benny joins the RAF and is sent overseas. As the date of his return approaches, a growing note of panic in Laura’s letters makes it clear to the reader – though not to Benny – that things are about to go terribly wrong. The pages describing the collapse of his world are ones that I can still hardly bring myself to read. As the 1960s strand of the narrative makes clear, the shock has never left him: the question is whether his reunion with Felix can help him finally put it behind him. If there is a more heartfelt prose account of adolescent longing – from the male perspective at least – I can’t think of it. Though Benny’s friends never tire of telling him how ridiculous his belief in love and honour is, to anyone who shares his romantic disposition he is a hugely sympathetic figure; and part of The Business of Loving’s appeal is that the 1940s world it portrays is imbued – despite the war – with an innocence which mirrors Benny’s own. The fictional Cressbrook valley in which he grows up is a kind of Eden (‘the little hills of the Hampshire Downs cupped it so gently that it was impossible to see the hard-limned horizon. The most distant woods lay in a haze of purple turning lime under the declining sun . . .’); Benny’s father inhabits the idealized England beloved of John Major, with its warm beer and long shadows on cricket grounds. The book, indeed, brims with nostalgia: its most characteristic phrase is ‘he would always remember’. And yet as a teenager I hardly noticed this beside the freshness and immediacy of its emotional landscape. Godfrey Smith thought of his book as a riposte to the Angry Young Men of the late 1950s: the bright yellow cover of the Victor Gollancz first edition proclaims it as ‘a contemporary novel by a novelist who is very far from being “angry”’. For the young Benny, life is the greatest gift imaginable, and the world is divided into those who affirm and those who deny it; the ‘angries’ are miserablists who don’t realize how lucky they are. I prefer, however, to see The Business of Loving in the context of what came after: the rock ’n’ roll-fuelled teenage revolution of the 1960s. It is possibly the last novel about adolescence to be blissfully free of the rebellious discontent which has come to be known as ‘attitude’. This is not to say that Benny and his close circle of friends are wedded to the Establishment – far from it. Benny’s friend Ken Heppel is a pacifist and chooses to work in the mines rather than fight in the war, while Tony Hammond professes Marxism. But these are intellectual positions that their elders respect or even share (Felix’s father is a wealthy communist): there is no sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’. Instead of complaining that they are misunderstood, the teenagers knuckle down to their studies, in the hope of reaching a good university and bettering themselves and the world. It is the young Benny’s intoxication with being alive that makes him such an appealing hero. Even when his love for Laura seems hopeless, he doesn’t mope, but manages to see her relationship with Hammond as a splendid thing. What gives the novel a particular edge is that the overwhelming vitality which propels Benny is something much more ambiguous in Hammond, ‘like a marvellous and powerful engine with the controls all set in reverse’, threatening him with self-destruction. Education is another theme of the book, and the headmaster of Valhalla, Mr Varley, deserves a place in the pantheon of great comic schoolteachers. A military man of uncertain qualifications, his eccentricity finds full expression in a unique morning service with mimed prayers:

‘Help all doctors and nurses,’ Mr Varley continued, his eyes tight shut. ‘And guide the surgeon’s knife.’

A mighty crash shook the room as a hundred small hands came down on the desks in front of them. With the expertise of long practice, the hundred fists slid down the desk lids, performing an imaginary incision with a scalpel. ‘Bless all cashiers’ – the boys doled out imaginary notes across a putative counter – ‘with their special temptations. Bless all sailors and those in peril on the sea’ – the boys paid out imaginary anchors . . .

At the end of the novel, Ken Heppel passes judgement on Benny’s romanticism: ‘We live in the age of the picaresque hero and the positive philosopher; we must do without our illusions. There’s no magic in the world except what we put in it.’ But while Benny seems to come to terms with his lost love, Godfrey Smith leaves the door open just wide enough to suggest that emotions which run so deep can never be entirely sublimated. I have always assumed The Business of Loving to be heavily autobiographical. Godfrey Smith went on to write two more novels but then abandoned fiction in favour of journalism. Now almost 90, he still occasionally writes newspaper articles, and when I see them I can’t help wondering how much of Benny lives on in him – and in me.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 53 © Anthony Gardner 2017