by Adam Thorpe
We were the last to leave, because Uncle had to ‘take a recce’ of their technical equipment and scenery. I couldn’t believe that the back of our slumbering and its magic dream could be full of so many nails and strips of wood and primed canvas and ugly things like hinges and hooks. The junk spread around the floor turned out to be the very same gorgeous things Puck and the others had held, and a rather rough fellow in a cloth cap, who was talking to my uncle about ‘running flats’ and ‘stage screwing’, was slouched on the throne of the king, smoking a cigarette.
I thought: if life is so much jollier and brighter on a stage, why do we ever come off it?
I decided where my own stage was, in the beechwood; a flat area falling quite abruptly into a natural hollow, where I imagined the faces looking up at me over the lip, out of the coppery-silvery mould. Through the quiet of afternoons, when it wasn’t raining and I wasn’t finishing off my cell, I acted on my own and out loud in a sort of hoarse stage whisper almost drowned by the rustle of my feet on the leaves. I used a spare volume of the Complete Works of Shakespeare my uncle had given me from his library. There was a picture of Shakespeare’s house and a portrait of Shakespeare with long hair and a debonair moustache, looking rather cross. The book said it was ‘To Henry Irving, who, by his fine intellect and splendid accomplishment, has, for many years, illumined several of the great plays of SHAKESPEARE throughout the stages of England and America’. There was a ‘Biographical Introduction’ that began: ‘There is no name in the world of literature like the name of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.’ It said he knew woods very well and also human nature, and that he wasn’t Bacon. There were photographs of Mrs F. R. Benson playing Miranda, Mr Lewis Waller playing Brutus under little coils of greased hair like the postman’s, Mr C. Croker-King playing Slender in striped tights, Mr A. S. Homewood playing Florizel in a leopard-skin skirt lying in Perdita’s lap played by Miss Irene Rooke in long white muslin, Mr Gordon Craig in what I thought was the same leopard skin playing Arviragus, and so on. I used these photographs as my guide, to help me know how to stand, to use my arms, my hands, my legs, my face, and how to use the few bits of costume I carried down. I took every part and scared the jays now and again when my voice screeched instead of staying quiet. In the soft light falling between the grey trees I saw the air of Sicilia, of Arden, of the park in Navarre; the trunks became the columns of palaces and castles; a toadstooled stump bubbled into a cauldron crouched round by witches played with my fingers crossed. Then everything was swept away on one still and misty morning for a blasted heath in a storm. I had a toy recorder and when music was needed I blew on it softly, always variations of ‘Greensleeves’. The only properties I had were a wooden sword and a battered old chair from one of the sheds, which served as everything from throne to hill to tavern bench. I mostly forgot about the faces in the hollow, or the fact that I was on stage at all. I played favourite scenes many times, and knew them by heart, page after page after page.
I kept my props in the cell, which I repaired each holidays. It stood a little way off between three grey trunks of beech: I also had a little lamp in there, and some Boy’s Own annuals wrapped in cellophane. Sometimes I would sneak out very early, just before dawn, and read ‘with devout lips’, pretending I was Alcuin. Mostly, however, I was Ralph Rover on his coral island, or Colonel Fawcett with a pair of binoculars in Bolivia, or David Balfour in a Jacobite hideout. When I saw my mother again the following summer, I couldn’t show her my cell, or even tell her about Shakespeare. This was something to do with the fact that she hadn’t been around when I’d started both those things. My father was wearing a trick mask to make himself look old, but it turned out to be his real face; he’d lost a lot of his hair. Just before I went to bed, he told me how big I looked. For the whole day I’d been waiting for my mother to hug me; she’d only kissed me once on the cheek as she’d kissed my uncle on her arrival, but now I realised that it was because I was big that she couldn’t hug me tight to her chest. I’d either have to have a crisis or be very ill with a fever.
We went to Bexhill again for a few days and it was sunny and bright. When we were on the beach one morning, my mother said there was something wrong with my pupil, that even in the glare it was big, it must be letting in too much light. She took me to an ophthalmologist in London, who said that it didn’t matter how much light went in, because I could only see it a tiny bit. She wasn’t pleased with me for hiding my eye’s near-blindness; she mumbled something about a curse, but she often said things were a curse. My father went back early and the days were easier; I enjoyed the late summer on the lawn alone with my mother, playing cards. She said how nice it was that I was big enough now to entertain her. But when she looked at me, her mouth had lines down the sides which stopped it smiling properly. This must be what happens when you get older, I thought.
My uncle read the whole of Miss Edith Sitwell’s Gold Coast Customs out loud one evening, and afterwards she said it was so like a chant that she thought my uncle might take off or turn into a worm. I sat there too frightened to speak: it was like the Witches in Macbeth but worse, and was full of things about bones and Death and blood and white masks and leopards that brought back the moments in Bamakum when I had lain awake thinking Sir Steggie or the cemetery spirits or the monster with long legs or the Big Beef or the members of the Leopard Society would come and drag me away. I didn’t want to upset my uncle, so I kept a smile fixed on my face. My mother looked at me and said that I mustn’t ever put on that silly face again. The lines by her mouth were very deep in the gaslight. But on the lawn they would vanish from time to time, even in the lovely late sun of September, when she was playing cards with me and telling me about her childhood on this same grass. It wasn’t the same grass, I thought, because it kept being cut.
She laughed sometimes, remembering, but never as much as she did when we went up to London together, just before she left. She bought clothes for Africa – white lightweight things and a long, cherry-red coat for chilly Buea – and then we had tea in the Langham Hotel after a children’s concert in the Queen’s Hall opposite. She pointed to a woman with a nose like a beak, sitting in the lounge, and said, ‘That’s Edith Sitwell, won’t Uncle Edward be excited when we tell him.’ Edith Sitwell was dressed all in black and covered in huge necklaces and gold brooches and rings; she reminded me of the way the girls looked when dressed for their special ceremony in the villages around Bamakum. I said this to my mother – that Miss Sitwell looked as if she was waiting to be ‘circusised’ (I thought it was to do with circuses, a special test like tightrope walking) and to my surprise she laughed so much that we had to leave quickly before anyone noticed. For the rest of the day she kept giggling suddenly, without warning. It was as if my comment had made her drunk.
By the time of the very bad news, I had acted right through every play in the Shakespeare book, and was starting again on the Island of strange noises. It was chill and echoey in the wood, and for once the book felt too heavy for my wrist. The leaves were frosty and Prospero had just made his long speech to Miranda while sitting on them, her head in my lap. I was now trying to contort my body as the deformed Caliban and the book refused to stay open in that position. My muscles ached. I heard cars arrive, and loud voices between guttural laughter. I closed the book and wandered back to the house, my basket of costumes banging against my knees.
The jolly Germans had arrived, members of something called the Thule Society. My uncle was keen on them because they were pagans, they liked astrology and standing stones and celebrating the important bits of the year that had been forgotten. Most of them were men. They drank a lot of beer and wrote in funny letters called ‘runes’. They taught me some German words, calling my uncle’s winter solstice celebration a ‘Julfest’. This always involved a girl dressed all in red with blood-red make-up smeared on her face, who had to fall down on the lawn near the bonfire. The local mummers then waved their arms about and hopped around her, and she got up again. Then my uncle plunged a big fa
t stick into the ground and shouted out his poem about trees and sap and so on. I didn’t understand how this saved us from winter going on and on, especially as the girl was usually Alice Punter, the chief mummer’s daughter, who always giggled between her sticking-out ears, but apparently it did. This year she had scarlet fever and so they used one of the German women. She was a big wobbly girl with blonde plaits and a big voice and spoke quite good English. She let me watch her ‘making’ her plaits, and wrote out for me where she was from: Schleswig-Holstein. Her nickname was ‘Queen Gunhild’, which she didn’t seem to mind, because Queen Gunhild was a very great and strong queen of the Norse peoples a thousand years ago and they’d found her in a deep bog and people went to see her in a church. There was a chance Queen Gunhild might come back, she said, to put things right. Her real name was Ingrid. She did the dance very well, not giggling at all, though the red costume was too tight for her and she looked like a pork sausage. Later, around the fire, she let me drink some of her punch and I realised that it was the kind of warm wine Mother had mentioned at home. There was plum cake, but no muffins. They had the same idea about an eternal winter as my uncle, but gave it their own name: ‘Fimbulwinter’. They told me stories from the Brothers Grimm without looking, and stories about Loki and Wotan. These were full of frost and fire, of hideous black shapes whistling though the air, of wolves and winds and worlds drowning in blood. Wotan was one-eyed, which made me like him, and was the most powerful of all the gods. Yet Loki finished him off in the Ragnarok, the last great battle which had something to do with Fimbulwinter. I was never quite sure whose side they were on, Loki’s or Wotan’s, because when the story-teller described Ragnarok and the burning of heaven, his voice went high and excited, and the eyes of the listeners shone in the firelight as if delighted by it all.
Some of them put on a play the day before the celebration: it was called ‘Scenes from Faust by the great Goethe’, and the bad one called Mephistopheles wore a little cap on his head and a big false nose; this made everyone laugh except my uncle. It was all in German, but I enjoyed it anyway – mainly because Mephistopheles was funny and horrible at the same time, limping about crookedly and even ’letting off at one point. The little cap was, I realised, like the one Sir Henry Irving wore as Shylock, in my Complete Volume. Perhaps Goethe was as great.
But my uncle stood up at the end and in a quiet, stiff sort of voice said that he was very disappointed and walked out. Someone sniggered. The group never came again after that – it was my turn to be disappointed.
‘Why were you all upset by the play?’ I asked him, as we stood by the ashes of the bonfire. It was damp and cold and grey. I saw winter as a thimble over a warm flame, putting it out. It was Christmas in two days, though.
‘They had promised not to be rude about the Jews.’
‘Was Mephi-thing a Jew?’
‘Yes. They have all the right ideas and interests and think Hitler is a vulgar little fellow, then they go all Teutonic and silly, especially when drunk, and are nasty about the Jews.’
‘Mother’s father was a Jew.’
‘He was indeed. I’m half-Jew and they don’t even like those.’
‘And quarter-Jew?’
‘Not even sixteenth-Jew, Hugh.’
He thrust his shooting stick into the ashes. They made a little cloud, as if there was still heat down there. My head was freezing, because hats prickled me. I felt like burying my scalp in the ashes. It was Christmas in two days. I wanted Mother and Father so I could go into the room with my stocking. As it was, ‘I didn’t have a stocking. Uncle didn’t even believe in presents. All we had was a Christmas tree and lots of mistletoe. He believed in the Druids and that’s all they had. It was lucky that Mother and Father usually got things sent – including a hamper from Fortnum and Mason’s full of stuff, some of which I quite liked – and that friends of my uncle gave me ‘a little something’ when they called round. Also, Mrs Stump and Susan made sure we had a proper Christmas luncheon and a box of crackers, though my uncle called them ‘gewgaws’ and always ‘absented’ himself by the time we were starting to pull them. Then Mrs Stump and Susan would go home and have another Christmas meal at dinnertime. This was why, I decided, they were rather fat.
He went on: ‘I don’t mind them going on about specific Jews, especially when they’re bankers and businessmen, but I don’t like this general thing. It’s childish. They’re not coming back, not all at once anyway. People go queer in groups. Never join a society, m’boy. Bang your own drum.’
I burst into tears. It was the mention of the word ‘drum’. It made me think of the drum I’d had on the beach in Victoria, which someone had ripped. My uncle was astonished: he’d never seen me cry before. But I couldn’t stop it. It was coming up from the ground, up my legs and into my eyes and nose and mouth. He mumbled something and went inside and got Mrs Stump to come out and see to me. She blamed the Germans, the over-excitement and the punch they’d made me drink, silly fools. One or two of them had pinched her bottom. She giggled, though, when she said this, so I knew she was pleased.
Her giggle went higher and higher. I wasn’t sure whether we were inside or next to the bonfire, but someone must have lit it again because I was very hot. The giggling went on even when I woke up in bed, in what might have been my room if it hadn’t been made of rubber, pressing me down. People came and went, mostly with cold hands, and wolves ran in packs past my bed very silently on their way to swallow the moon.
Among the people was my mother. She might have had cold hands too, but she didn’t come near enough to touch me. In fact, she stayed on the threshold, by the open door. She said ‘Darling Hugh’, then the words twisted up into a question, panting among lots of hands that were reaching up behind her. She wore the bright red coat we’d bought together in London three months earlier. It was going to be for Christmas in cool Buea and she’d said it was ‘almost vermilion, it will clash with the hibiscus’. The shopkeeper had laughed. I saw it going into the cellophane and wondered for a moment whether we were back in the shop. Then she was in it again.
There was snow in her hair. It was melting, the big white flakes silvering at the edges, and some lay on her shoulders and on her broad lapels. It was a ‘fancy’ coat but her hair was loose, as if it had fallen from its grips. She must have been running for her hair to have been loosened like that: all the respectable women I knew had it bunched up around the ears and pinned to a small hat. In fact, she had no hat on at all: this worried me. She was always particular about a hat in cold weather, saying that one caught a cold by the head.
I tried to say something, but my words were balloons tied to my mouth. She was stage-screwed to the threshold: I wanted her to come in and give me a cuddle, or stroke my forehead. I looked at her feet to check them for screws. She had on her heavy shoes-for-England, and they were muddy. Her ankles went up a little way and then stopped at the hem of her coat. This was definitely my mother. But there was snow in her hair. Maybe she’d just come off the top of Mount Cameroon, walking down quickly all the way to me. My curtains were drawn; through them came a metal light that might have been snow. The thought of snow was pleasing, since I felt extremely hot. Then a kind of yawn in white rose up from my bedclothes and tried to smother me. The door was closed: my mother was gone, the hands or hand had pulled her away. There followed a terrible, echoey shouting, which might have been issuing from my own throat, and screams, and suffocating smells. My uncle’s face appeared, and that of the doctor with a crab-apple on the side of his nose, and then a nurse with smiles and an ice-cold flannel.
I have no precise idea of the hours or even days this all took, but I know that I was very seriously ill with pneumonia at one point, and the voices around me were deep and sober. I found myself in the corridor, opposite my mother’s bedroom door. The door opened and there was an arm with a frilly wrist balanced in her old doll’s house. The hand must be stage-screwed to it, I thought, or it wouldn’t stay horizontal like that. I looked along the
arm and it finished by being attached to Mother on her knees, not looking back at me but at a piano in her fingers. Then her face turned. It was not very jolly, not happy to see me at all. In fact, it was frightened. I was sucked away.
When I was better, a couple of weeks before my uncle broke the news, I decided not to mention my visions of Mother, as I had not mentioned Herbert E. Standing or the fear of Sir Steggie over the last four years. I felt older and wiser after the illness, somehow, and was convinced that my mother’s spirit had visited me. It reinforced my old beliefs, that had been gradually fading in the English light. I knew very well that fever gave rise to hallucinations; I had suffered from vivid visions at home, and my parents as well as visitors had impressed me with their malarial experiences. I had once watched my father moan as imaginary spiders attacked him in his bed, and heard a sick trader gabbling about a blue-and-red kite falling through the floor. Then there was the legendary story about the consul who thought he was a poached egg, and you had to pretend his chair was a piece of toast. But I chose to forget all that. What do I think now, some thirty years later, in our humdrum world of Omo and gramophone records and take-over bids? I do not think, but feel. I feel an immense sadness that my three words trapped in their balloons did not reach my mother’s ears, for everything I wanted to say to her was in them.
‘Mother, please stay.’
‘Hugh,’ said my uncle, ‘I have some worrying news.’
I had been better for two weeks, but I still felt weak, and couldn’t leave the grounds because I was more infectious now than when I’d had it. I gripped my cocoa, on the way up to an early bed, and stared at a knot on the kitchen table. His hands were trembling. They were large, hairy hands, and I fancied sometimes that I was Jack, trapped for ever in the ogre’s castle. He was already drinking quite heavily at this time, and was studying his mug of beer as fiercely as I was studying the dark swirl in the table. The wall lamps sputtered in the silence, giving off not only their harsh, chalky light but a smell of gas. My uncle hated electricity, though the village had been wired up three years earlier in a blaze of lamplight.
