I Once Met… E M Forster
Visitors to King’s College, Cambridge, in the 1950s on a sunny day would often pass by an elderly man sitting or sleeping in a deck chair. This was the novelist E M Forster (known as Morgan), who died 50 years ago in 1970, aged 91.
Then in his late seventies, he had been made an Honorary Fellow. His rooms, off a staircase shared with students, were once invaded by tourists seeing his name over the door and thinking it led to a museum.
Unassuming, shy, dressed in old tweeds, he was a friend to many undergraduates, including me. Quietly spoken, he had a knack of muttering some remark just as one was driven to blurt out something to break the conversational impasse. Shifting from one leg to the other, with eyes screwed up as if in pain, he would occasionally issue personal invitations to his rooms for pre-supper sherry.
Once, after a mention of his friend ‘Ben’ Britten, he played a few tentative chords from Billy Budd on his piano, singing along in a quavering tenor to the libretto he had written.
The only time he spoke about his own writing was after a possibly somewhat obtuse remark from me questioning the ultimate direction of the plot for Howards End. ‘But novelists create characters, not types,’ he replied quite sharply. ‘My characters don’t always do as I would wish, but that is their right.’ One Saturday, I invited some local Borstal boys, out on day release, to tea, and Morgan joined us. The boys let rip, bragging about the life of crime they intended to lead once free. Morgan soon left. ‘They have turned their back on life,’ he told me afterwards. They were equally unimpressed by him, asking me why I had invited this ‘old homo’. Although he was discreet about his sexual orientation, the boys had recognised it immediately. A more Bacchic side to him did occasionally appear. One freezing winter night, guests at a party spilled out onto the college lawn. Norman Routledge, an exuberant young maths don, traced the outline of a giant and very priapic figure in the snow, caught in a moment of full emission. Morgan was there, and was told that this was supposed to represent our humourless bursar. Was he shocked? Not a bit. Chuckling contentedly, he went over to inspect Norman’s crude artwork more closely.
The last time I saw him was when his adored friend Bob Buckingham was staying. Every morning he would help Morgan – who then had back trouble – get out of bed. A married ex-policeman, Bob was a big, friendly man with a loud voice. ‘I’m training to be a probation officer,’ he boomed. ‘Morgan says this means I have to fake relationships with clients rather than having real ones.’ Morgan smiled, his love for Bob visible to everyone except perhaps the man himself. He hated it when Morgan spoke out about what their relationship meant to him, particularly when this was in front of Bob’s actually extremely understanding wife.