She frowns, pursing her lips. “What I’m trying to say is that you’re free to do what you like. Shall I help you with your case?”
“It’s alright, I—”
She lifts it up onto the bed anyway. “This is heavy. One of those lovely old ones that last forever. Not like the cheap modern things. But what have you got in here? Books, I suppose—I know you academics…”
That evening, Cumbernald—or Eric, as I may now have to start thinking of him—prepares the dinner for us out-of-doors using a crude iron device filled with charcoal. It’s an American idea, he tells me as I duck the spiralling smoke. One of their few good ones. There’s white wine from the fridge and salad tossed in a Pyrex bowl and rolls and the new ready-salted Smiths’ Crisps that come without the little blue bag inside the packet.
Christine and Barbara pedal off along the paths between the trees on the bicycles they keep here, half-blackened sausages gripped like cigars between their teeth. Looking over the forest crown, I see the smoke of other cooking fires rising like Indian signals. As it gets darker, Eileen sets a lantern on the outdoor table where we’ve eaten, and we watch the moths flutter into oblivion on its hot glass. Away from Oxford and his suit, Cumbernald looks pleasingly ridiculous in sandals, baggy shorts, a Fred Perry top, a charcoal smudge across his forehead.
The children finally return out of the night, flushed and bright. When I look at my watch, I see that it’s already nearly eleven. After the commotion of their late bath has diminished to a few odd shrieks indoors, I decide it’s time that I also went to bed.
“You look a better man already,” Cumbernald says, wine glass in his lap. “Eileen tells me you’ve brought lots of books—so just do what you like tomorrow. This is some place, though, isn’t it, eh? A real breath of England.”
He gestures around. It’s suddenly night-quiet, with the faint stirring of the pines, the distant hoot of an owl. It wouldn’t take much imagination to hear the growl of a bear, the rooting chuff of a wild boar, the howl of wolves—the return of all the beasts of old to the vast Wood of Albion.
I’m about to say that—or something like it—when I hear a thin shriek. The sound is so strange here, yet so familiar as it grows louder, that it takes me a moment to realise that all I’m hearing is the passing of a train.
“It’s just a goods line,” Cumbernald explains as it goes by unseen, not far behind the lodge. “Never quite worked out where it’s from or to. But I shouldn’t worry, old chap. That’s the latest I’ve ever heard one go by. They won’t disturb your sleep.”
In the morning, the girls career down on their bikes to buy breakfast from the site shop. Eggs and Bacon, Eggs and Bacon… The sound of sizzling mingles in my head with the clack and roar of the trains that fractured my night as Eileen, back in her traditional role now the cooking’s indoors, prepares our fry-up.
Sitting blinking in the yellow and pine kitchen, I’m complimented on looking better, and it’s obvious from their faces, their voices, from the way they’re swallowing gallons of orange juice and coffee, that the Cumbernalds slept like logs.
“I was thinking we could go down to the Sun Area this morning,” Cumbernald says, flapping out a copy of the Times. There’s a photograph above the page-fold of John Arthur shaking hands with Roosevelt. My Modernist books tell me that even lesser dignities are never searched before they come face to face with the great man.
“The Sun Area today. That okay with you, Brook?”
“Oh? Yes. Fine…”
The girls, for some reason, both start to giggle until orange juice dribbles out of their noses.
Penrhos Park is much bigger than I imagined. Not only is there a shop, but a whole central complex where the children can play table tennis and outdoor chess, watch television in a big dark room, slide around on the parquet of the dance hall, or splash and scream at each other within the giant fishbowl of the indoor pool.
The atmosphere is cosmopolitan. I detect a surprising number of American accents. Not long ago, Greater Britain was regarded as unstable, racist, a powder-keg, an international pariah. But these things never last. Now that Soviet Russia has been revealed as the grey and uninspiring place it always was, Britain has become the greatest object of international fascination. What Modernist Britain does today, so the saying goes, the rest of the world will do tomorrow. Look at our cars, our roads, our televisions, our politics—look at places like this! Everybody wants to come so that they can tell their friends back in Philadelphia or Baden-Baden, even if they still feel a little afraid.
The Sun Area is lavishly signposted, yet still requires a long trek down through the tents and the trees. Eileen Cumbernald struggles with a canvas bag whilst the girls skip ahead and husband Eric manfully carries his Times. I limp behind on my walking stick in an open-neck shirt and hot woollen trousers.
“Don’t mind the sun, do you, ah, Geoffrey?” he asks me from beneath his Panama. “You’re not sensitive?”
“No… Not at all…”
The Sun Area is shielded by high hedges and long walls which we must walk around, then queue at a turnstile. The swing doors beyond lead to a hot wooden tunnel lined with benches: some kind of changing area. Eileen Cumbernald removes the same halter top she wore yesterday evening and hangs it on a numbered peg. She isn’t wearing a bra. Cumbernald, contrarily, removes his shorts and his baggy y-fonts before taking off his sandals. The children, by some instantaneous process, are already naked. They scamper off down the smooth wooden floor towards the bright square of light at the far end, fading into thin outlines, then skeletons, then nothing at all. It’s as if they’ve been swallowed by the sun.
Cumbernald really is brown. He must do this sort of thing all the time. Eileen is too; although I can see now that she’s not as blond as she pretends to be.
“You okay, Brook? You can take your walking stick with you if you like. Or just leave it behind. Nothing ever gets stolen.”
I undo a few token buttons of my shirt, wondering how easy it would be to wake up if I pinched myself. The most amazing dream. I was with the college principal and his wife. They took all their clothes off, then asked me to do the same…
“I’ll get you a sun-vest,” Eileen says, and strides off into the sunlight herself, dimpled buttocks jiggling.
“Can’t beat this for an experience,” Cumbernald says, slapping bits of himself. “They say John Arthur does it. Of course, Jim Toller—fascinating article by him in last month’s H&E…”
I nod. I’d slump down on the bench, but for the unfortunate level that it would bring my gaze to. Cumbernald’s saggy in the way that all middle-aged men are, although in good enough shape. No surplus fat. I think of Bracken’s blue pigs. Blam, blam. People are such big beasts. The light from the frosted window shines on the sloughs of skin beneath his ribs.
“There we are,” says Eileen, returning with an off-white ball of cotton scrunched up in her hands. She’s still wearing her earrings, I notice. And her wedding ring. The puckered scar from some abdominal operation smiles lopsidedly back at me. “A sun vest. On a hot day like this, it’ll help to stop you burning. Come on, Eric—don’t need our help, do you, Geoffrey? No. We’ll just be outside at the cafe. Shall I get you an ice cream…?”
A truly hot day at the honeyed edge of August, here on this Summer Isle. The people stroll about, shining with oil. They play sports and eat simple food and dispose considerately of their litter. Different ages and shapes, lumpy or skinny, effortlessly young and effortlessly beautiful, breathtakingly ugly, shrivelled and brown, or white, stooped and cadaverous like me—amputees, even—they all talk, walk, smile, shade their eyes to look up at the hot bright dot of the sun as they wonder once again at the goodness of this feeling, the goodness of this weather, the goodness of this place where we happen to find ourselves.
Having promised to keep an eye on the children, I sit by the lake with a copy of something called Future Past whilst Cumbernald and Eileen go off to rustle up a team for the volleyball. No one se
ems to mind my wearing a sun vest, and I’m as naked as the rest of them underneath. The white sand along this lakeside looks natural, but must have been carted in by the lorry-load. The water is impossibly dark, impossibly bright. Bodies crash in and out, sleek as otters. A woman breastfeeds her child on the towel next-door to mine, engaging me in snatches of conversation. Out in the distance, white sails are turning.
Occasionally, I glimpse Christine and Barbara. There’s a lido that juts into the lake beside the trees. At this moment, Barbara is hanging onto the bottom of the low diving board there whilst Christine jumps up and down on top of it. A young Adonis strides by at the water’s edge. There’s barely any hair on his body. Amid all this display, his genitals are disappointing—a small afterthought, but then sex seems a remote abstraction here. It really is true what they say; people in the nude are impossibly decent. We should all go around like this. It would probably be the answer to all this world’s troubles. I can see it now—Naturism—A New Theory Of World History… The only trouble is, I have a feeling that it was one of the titles I drew the line at when I was stocking up for my researches in Blackwells.
Christine and Barbara have vanished again. I squint at the pages of my book and wiggle my toes into the hot sand. Chapter Five. The Greatness of the British Heritage—Truth or Myth? I can feel my sweat prickling beneath my sun vest. Looking around to see if anyone’s -watching me—unlikely possibility—I drag it off and the moist shock of the air passes over all of me. It’s strangely exhilarating, and my skin feels closer to the sun as I lay back on the towel and let the pages of Future Past splay unread in the sand. I’m part of the water, the air, the shouts and the cries…
I wake up to the odd sensation of being naked, and a cool shock of water. Christine gives a gap-toothed grin as she uncups the rest of her dripping hands over me. Barbara’s giggling. Cumbernald and Eileen are standing a little way back on the beach, towels draped over their shoulders.
“You look a little red if you don’t mind me saying so, Brook. Better have some of this sun oil…” says my college principal, stooping down and whistling faintly through his teeth as he proceeds to oil my back.
Noon comes and goes. The afternoon glides by. I go for a swim, leaving a rainbowed slick of sun oil in my wake like a leaky trawler. I eat ice cream and a Melton Mowbray pork pie. I drink gallons of Vimto. I let Christine and Barbara bury me in the sand. I take another swim. Eileen helps me with more of the sun oil, and I reflect on the way that women’s breasts hang down like udders when they’re on all fours. I suppose they are udders really when you come to think about it. And they have this clever knack of keeping their genitalia well out of sight even when they’re naked. Men are such show-offs… By evening, when cooler air comes rippling the lake, my skin is itchy as we grab our few belongings and head back up the slope to the changing rooms. The hot water burns like molten lava on my shoulders as I splash around in the white-tiled communal showers, and my prick, I can’t help noticing, looks a bit like one of Cumbernald’s barbecued sausages; cooked on just the one side. My clothes feel like sandpaper.
That night, as, glazed in minty unguents, I shiver and roast beneath the one sheet I can bare to have covering me, the trains are busy again, clanking chains and couplings, hissing brakes as they trundle back and forth. Then a creak of springs comes through the lodge’s thin walls as the Cumbernalds indulge in their own bit of coupling. And there are children’s cries, too; the clatter of the showers from which they emerge like drowned figures with their hair lank, thinly naked as they walk on to be swallowed in the bright blaze of light…
At three o-clock, feeling stiff and nauseous, I wrap myself in the sticky sheet and hobble to the toilet. Once I’ve relieved myself and decided that I’m not going to vomit after all, I pad through the dim parlour to the French doors. Silvery night lies over the trees outside in the clearing, and the air as the doors break open silently smells of pine and pollen and dew. The stars are out in amazing profusion. And I can hear the breath, like a great animal sighing, of the train that must be waiting almost directly behind the lodge. Barefoot, wrapped in my crumpled shroud, stung by nettles, I wander towards it.
A bank and then a line of trees separate the lodge from the railway line. Once you’re close, it’s funny that you can’t see more of it, but then the final chain-link fence is engulfed in ivy. I don’t know what I’d expected to find, but it’s just some goods train as Cumbernald predicted. The huge engine sighs in impatience as it waits for a signal to change. The fireman’s face is lined red as he leans from the footplate, whilst the driver waits at the track side, smoking a cigarette and kicking at the gravel. The engine is high and vast; black, nameless, numberless.
Finally, the driver checks his two watches and climbs back up. The tracks wheeze as the great piston elbows of the engine begin to slide. The wheels slip as they take up the tension, then squeal and grip and begin to move, hauling at the vast burden that stretches behind into the night. The goods wagons are endless, open-backed, covered in mottled camouflage. Here and there the tarpaulin has slipped back or been roped down less thoughtfully, and it’s easy as they clack past to make out the huge outlined bodies of bombers, their wings plucked from them as if by some cruel boy. Eggs and Bacon, Eggs and Bacon, Apple and Custard, Apple and Custard, Cheese and Biscuits, Cheese and Biscuits, Fish and Chips, Fish and Chips… I watch them jolt and rumble. It seems like fully a mile of wagons go by before the red light of the guard’s van finally disappears south.
I pick my way back through the wet undergrowth, then across the grass. The lodge is quiet as I click on the light in my room and sit down at the dressing table. Balancing my weight on the least-burnt of my buttocks, hearing nothing now but the quiet of the night and the faint sound of my hosts snoring, I open my books and set to work.
I have a theory that the decision to enter politics tells you far more about someone’s nature than their choice of party. Politicians as a race have much in common—as shown by the bonhomie with which John Arthur can greet figures as diverse as Franco, Stalin, and now even Roosevelt.
As an ex-boxer, an ex-corporal, a leader of small groups of men used to the harsh decisions and horrors of war, John Arthur would have been well equipped to make his mark in the strange and violent world of 1920s fringe politics. It’s on record that he moved to London in 1922 and lived in a cheap boarding house in Balham (now another museum). There, jobless and without food, he almost died of pneumonia. I see him emerging from the chrysalis of fever with boxing and the War and the rest of his life put firmly behind him. At last he truly is John Arthur.
Everyone in Britain knew we’d been treated harshly after the War. There was a sense after the Treaty of Versailles that the French and the Germans, although recent enemies, had plotted to destroy our Empire. Why, otherwise, were Syria, Iraq, Palestine, the Sudan, Rhodesia, Nigeria, Cyprus—admittedly places that most Britons were only aware of as part of the reassuring pinkness on the maps they’d seen on school walls—made into protectorates of Wilson’s new League of Nations, to be policed by virtually anyone but the British until they were deemed ready for self determination?
This hurt was the one thing that united Britain. True, we still had South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and India, even the Falkland Isles. But with the exception of India, these were white nations, and all had suffered at least as badly as Britain in the War.
In Italy, Il Duce was already in power, building Romanesque temples and thumping his chest from balconies, whilst John Arthur was still trying to make his voice heard in the corners of East End bars. For Britain, as South Africa plunged into civil war and the Russians expanded across Afghanistan towards the Indian border, there were only other losses to face, and then one final crushing humiliation. In 1923, with the open support of many United States congressmen, the Irish Republicans defeated the British forces street by street in Dublin, then savaged them again as they withdrew north. The notorious terrorist De Valera became head of a new Irish Gover
nment.
Nothing seemed to have much value then. Britain’s economy was wrecked by the War and the reparations payments. Demoralised, we were drawn into the terrible spiral of hyper-inflation. Fresh coinage was issued: one new pound for every hundred old. Within weeks, everyone was saying it should have been a thousand. I too went hungry; I queued outside the grocers for £10 then £50 and then £100 worth of rotten cabbage as General Election followed General Election and MacDonald succeeded Baldwin and then Baldwin took over again. Bevin gained ascendancy in the Labour Party, but was never able to control the anger of the workers he supposedly represented, and the succession of General Strikes in the early twenties finally brought about the dissolution of the liberal left. India was in famine. There were street-battles and demonstrations. One man in three was said to have a job.
The fringe parties, not just the extreme right and left, but religious fundamentalists, eurhythmic dancers, gurus and back-to-naturists, were loud, colourful and often very violent, although most people had little time for them: there was simply too much disillusionment. When Churchill took power during the Third General Strike of 1924–5 and succeeded in defeating the miners and the train drivers, then issued a Guaranteed Pound that people somehow actually believed in, it seemed as though the worst of Britain’s post-War nightmare might soon be over.
But money was still short. There was still high unemployment. The Communists and the Fascists didn’t go away. Neither did the reparations payments, the feeling of defeat, the whole sense of national crisis which Churchill was often so good at exploiting. We were weak. In this new world order, Britain was a third-rate nation; a little island off a big continent, like Tierra del Fuego, Ceylon, Madagascar.
I saw John Arthur once at that time—a privilege so many people claim nowadays that a meeting of them would fill Wembley Stadium. I was still working as a teacher at Lichfield Grammar, although often there weren’t enough books, enough children, enough coal for the boiler in winter—enough chalk, even—and we had to subsist on credits and half pay. Still, I was lucky to have a job, and to own a house.
The Summer Isles Page 15
