Hitch Read Online Free Page A

seem to havechanged very much. There are no records of friends at school. Cardinal Heenan says he was in the same class at St. Ignatius, but Hitchcock cannot recall him; Hugh Gray, eventual translator of André Bazin’s cinema essays, was also in the same class. Hitchcock seems to have been abnormally sensitive and retiring, and describes himself as a ‘particularly unattractive youth’. Girls too figured not at all in his life: when he met his wife-to-be in his early twenties he had never been out with a girl other than his sister, and it is probably not stretching fantasy too far to guess at the first hint of how he latterly delighted to treat the cool, remote-seeming blond heroines of his films in the resentful dreams of a plain, pudgy fourteen-year-old watching some evidently unattainable blond girl near home or school and thinking, ‘If only I had her in my power, just for a few moments …’
    Whether this is true or not, being away from home at a very strict boarding school, he did not see so much of his parents or have much chance to spread himself on his own interests out of school hours. Two maiden cousins, Mary and Teresa, seem to have taken a particular interest in the boy, and encouraged him to strike out on his own: at least there never seems to have been any idea of his going into the family business. In 1914 his father died. He was called from school and told the news by his brother, who took over the business; he then went over to his sister’s and remembers her greeting him by saying almost aggressively to him, ‘Your father’s dead, you know,’ giving him a surreal sense of dissociation. Shortly afterwards, at the age of fourteen, he left school; he was asked what he wanted to do and answered, for want of anything better to say, that he was interested in engineering. On the strength of this he was put to study at the School of Engineering and Navigation, where engineering drawing, drafting, and making working drawings of machines like the globe valve were an important part of the curriculum: draughtsmanship certainly, but nothing in the slightest artistic.
    After a short period of specialized training there, Alfred took his first job, as a technical clerk at the W. T. Henley Telegraph Company, a firm which manufactured electric cable. The 1914-18 War did not impinge much on him. One air raid left him with a vivid memory of going into his mother’s room at home in Leytonstone to see if she was all right: ‘The whole house was in an uproar, but there was my poor Elsa-Maxwell-plump little mother struggling to get into her bloomers, always putting both her legs through thesame opening, and saying her prayers, while outside the window shrapnel was bursting around a search-lit Zeppelin—extraordinary image!’ The detail of the bloomers he recalled years later and slipped into the opening sequence of his sound thriller
Murder
. In 1917 he had his Army medical, but was classified C3 and excused service. He enlisted instead in a volunteer corps of the Royal Engineers; they used to meet in the evenings at the Inns of Court Hotel in Holborn Viaduct to receive theoretical training in laying charges and the like, and once took part in practical exercises in Hyde Park. He went with another lad from Henleys, feeling a sorry sight because he could never get his puttees wound properly and they kept falling round his ankles, so they buried their sorrows in a lunch at Lyons’ Marble Arch Corner House.
    At this period he possibly had some scientific leanings—at any rate he must have had some reason for saying he wanted to be an engineer. But artistic interests also began to make themselves felt. His parents had been enthusiastic theatregoers, and he picked up the habit from them, becoming a regular (and usually solitary) attender of first nights up in the gallery, while among his favourite reading were the small paperbound volumes of Dodds’ Penny Plays. The