A Postillion Struck by Lightning

by Dirk Bogarde

  “They’ll find somewhere else, even nicer than the Cottage, you see,” she said with tactful ignorance. “Remember what a lot it needs doing to it! That floor in the hall is all rotten; it needs proper sanitation, and water, and light, and the roof’s bound to go in the next big storm and really I’m sure it’s all for the best. You see if I lie.”

  But we were listless with despair and all her cheering up was to no avail. My father was patient with our hollow-eyed sullenness and promised that he and our mother would go to the auction in December and try to buy it… but I knew as he spoke that it would be only a vague possibility. New brothers and schools and grandfathers cost money, even I began to realise that after a while.

  In fact Lally was right about the repairs which the Cottage needed. But somehow without the old pump, without the lamps in the long winter evenings, without those solitary walks to the privy, the Cottage couldn’t ever be the same again. The idea of turning on a tap in the big flint kitchen might have been delight for her but was abhorrent to me. I knew, even in my selfish and uncaring way, that things were beginning to change everywhere. Caravans had suddenly sprouted up in the fields at Cuckmere Haven. Beastly little white boxes filled with whey-faced Londoners peering through their “cheery” orange and brown caravan-curtains. Even the Downs behind Friston and East Dean were being ploughed up for the planting of a great pine forest, and there was talk of rows and rows of cheap bungalows being allowed to scab and scar the soft dales and swards of the Seven Sisters themselves. It was all changing all right. And if the Cottage did not belong to us, if it had all been a long, glorious dream and if none of it had ever really happened at all, then, so be it. Life, or rather my own life, for I tended, as usual, to see everything in terms of myself, was starting to shred away like a sail in the wind, and I was very well aware that my little boat was far too frail a craft to weather the storms which were to come. Sailless I should be sunk or beached. Neither idea pleased me. Staring dully up at my tit-and-wisteria wallpaper, I had realised that Lally’s words of some time ago were true. “You can’t have a summer without a good winter,” she had said. Winter was now.

  Bishopbriggs was where the trams from Glasgow ended. Clacketting, racketting, lurching their way from Renfield Street through the black canyons of faceless tenements in Springburn, trundling through acres of blighted wasteland, scabbed with wrecked cars, rubbish tips, blackened clumps of thistle and thorn, they coasted gently into the blank granite square of what once might have been a pleasant country village. Here the small gabled houses, empty-eyed windows, draped in white lace, secret with half drawn blinds, gleamed in misty rain. Beyond slate roofs, the pointed caps of the Tips, like my sister’s spilly hills of sugar only black. Dead volcanoes spotting the ruined fields. “The Bingies”, relics of a thriving pit closed since the start of the Depression.

  From the terminus, the steel rails shining like swords in black granite cobbles, past a scatter of gas lit shops, up a brick alley, through a long dripping tunnel under the railway line, one arrived on “the other side” of the town. A straggling, cold, ugly housing estate, in Avenues, Crescents, Terraces, and Drives; no Streets or Roads for the new middle classes. Flat-faced pebble-dash houses; four windows up, four below, pink-grey asbestos tiled roofs, concrete paths, creosoted picket fences and washing dripping in every back garden. All about one there was nothing to see but row upon row upon row of roofs, backed here and there by the pointed nose of a Tip or a few wind-twisted trees high on an, as yet, untouched hillock. It rained gently.

  24 Springburn Terrace was the same as all its neighbours. The only way I could distinguish it for the first few months was by the fact that it stood on a corner and had a slightly larger area of garden around it with a lamp-post at the front gate. The houses were not Houses at all. They were flats. One up and one down. The down one had a front door in the centre, the up one had a front door at the side up a flight of concrete steps. Walls and the floors were made of cardboard. From the front door a long narrow passage. To the right a sitting-room, beyond that a bedroom. At the top of the narrow passage a lavatory and bath together. To the left a dining-room, beyond that the kitchen with a door leading out into the pleasures of a wan garden. Yard more like. A hedge of Golden Elder, a few neat flower-beds, a bit of grass in the middle and in the centre of that a tall iron post for the laundry. A small world for three ill-assorted people.

  Aunt Belle, my mother’s elder sister, was tall, kind looking, with a patrician face and soft auburn hair flecking with grey. Her husband, Uncle Duff, was slightly shorter than she was, with thin black hair parted in the middle and glued to his head with Yardley’s Hair Cream. His small black moustache looked as if it had been smudged on with coal. They welcomed me to this unprepossessing house shyly and warmly with a crackling fire and high tea.

  “All boys like to eat,” said my aunt, “so I did a Baking for you especially!” There were five different sorts of biscuits, scones, and cup cakes, as well as a Madeira Cake with candy peel on top. Sandwiches, toast, anchovy paste, and strawberry jam.

  Also a canary, Joey, who lived in the window in a cage with a yellow silk frill round the base to stop the seed from scattering. Afterwards, in the sitting-room across the hall, we sat by the fire, my aunt sewing, my uncle showing me his bound volumes of Bruce Bairnsfeather’s cartoons. I wondered, vaguely, where I should sleep.

  About nine o’clock he went out to the kitchen to make the cocoa for supper. My aunt put aside her sewing and said I must be tired after such a long day and so many excitements. I was aware that she meant travelling, and trains and farewells and all that sort of thing. She explained gently that they had moved out of their bedroom next door so that I should have it, and that they would sleep on a Put-U-Up Settee in the dining-room.

  “This is a rather small house for the three of us, but I’m sure we’ll manage very well,” she said. “It’s the Depression, you know. Uncle lost everything, I’m afraid, and so we just had to cut our cloth to suit the material. It is not the sort of place we like to live in. But it’ll just have to do. I don’t suppose you remember the other house, do you?”

  I did. Gleaming mahogany furniture, heavy and sombre, shining brass jugs filled with flowers and leaves, a piano scattered with silver frames, high windows velvet-curtained, all looking out over a soft green wooded park. Not at all like this sad, apologetic, squashed little house.

  Some of the old stuff had made the swift descent from gentility to near-poverty and looked defiantly out of place in such cramped quarters. The ladder-backed chairs in the dining room, a tall mahogany bookcase, some bold chintz armchairs with antimacassars pinned to them like maids caps, my grandfather’s water-colours in thin gold frames, a set of Nashes Magazine Covers for 1918 framed in black passe-partout, and the black marble mantel-clock which thinly struck the hours and quarters.

  My bedroom was a square of pink distemper. Two windows over the bleak square of garden and the dead backs of the houses beyond the ragged hedge. A one-bar electric fire, a yellow oak wardrobe with an oval mirror which reflected the entire room, a dressing chest, a dressing table and a wide yellow oak bed spread with a shining pink satin cover. In the bed a scalding aluminium hot water bottle called a “pig” … and a hot brick wrapped in flannel.

  I was told to use the bathroom first. A bath, a basin, a lavatory. His ivory brushes stuck together by their bristles, W.D. entwined in black on the back. The oval tin of Yardley’s grease. Toothbrushes huddled in a tumbler like old men at a wedding. Izal on the lavatory paper. We said goodnight, and I lay in the dark of the wide yellow bed listening to them raking out the fire in the sitting-room and setting the china for breakfast. Then bathroom noises and the lavatory flushing twice. Pattering of feet down the corridor to the front door, a chain rattling, a bolt running home, the dining-room door closing. Silence and then the slow, low, murmur of worried conversation through the wall.

  The clock struck a quarter. Ting Ting Ting. Light from the lamp-post flickered through leaf sha
dows on the buff paper blind. A draught waggled the cord and made the little acorn handle tap tap against the glass. In the house upstairs someone else pulled a chain and I heard a soft cataract of water and a pipe beside the wardrobe started to knock gently.

  I turned into the pillows and tried to smother my blubbing.

  I travelled to school every morning with Uncle Duff. We caught the eight-five. The same compartment, the same faces. Three Glasgow Heralds, two Bulletins, one Express. Queen Street station, an enormous inverted iron colander. Black and sooty, rife with pigeons and the smell of urine. Blazes of brilliant light here and there in the gloom from the bookstalls. Farewell to Uncle, he to his office in St Vincent Street, me to George Square and the long haul up the cobbled stone street to The School. Standing isolated in the centre of a vast asphalted playground, surrounded by high iron spikes, its red sandstone blocks rotting in the filth from the city, it resembled a cross between a lunatic asylum and a cotton mill. Faceless windows gazed blankly over the streets below. Electric lights gleamed dully even on the clearest days. A smell of chalk and concrete dust, of sulphur and soot.

  Green glazed tiles, ochre distemper, red varnished wood. Cold, unloving, unloved. A Technical School for Technical People. What on earth was I doing here? I who could only just about read and write? Chosen by Uncle Duff for a “good solid background under a progressive teaching staff”, it was thoughtfully accepted by my parents as the Final Desperate Measure to try and force some learning into my addled head. They had made a swift tour of the place, dragging me in stupefied horror behind them, had outlined to the Progressive Teaching Staff what was wanted, had shaken hands in a cramped Victorian Headmaster’s Study and departed with relief for the South. Leaving me to sort out the road leading to “The Times”.

  It was only a matter of days before I knew, for certain, that I was in the very worst place for my sort of complaint. I had the technical brain of a newt. Here everyone sat entranced while glum-faced teachers poured one liquid into a flask, and another liquid on to iron filings or something equally inane. They sat with tongues hanging out, and darting eyes crossing the wide blackboards following hieroglyphics which I was told were called logarithms, long division, or agreed, with eager nods, the bold assumption that “if A equals B and C equals D thus E, F, G and X are equal to the sum total Q”.

  I never knew how many apples a farmer had left in his basket if he gave his wife two-thirds. Or how much water slipped away in an hour if the bath-plug was released and the tap dripped at the rate of fifty drops per minute. What the Hell! I was lost. Notebooks were virginal white. Pencils unblunted. Rubbers un-rubbed. Surrounded by a class of thirty I started to observe them in preference to the impossible messages on the blackboards.

  Raw-boned hulks most of them seemed. Red hair and freckles; fair hair and pigs eyes; white faces and acne. Stooped grey-flannel backs, prematurely humped, arms like gorillas stretched out along their desks: booted feet twitching for a football. Or anything to kick.

  No vivid Trevor Ropers, no fat kind Foots, no bespectacled Jones G. C.’s here; these were tough, Irish-Scots, one parent away from the Pits, four years or less from the Barricades. Foreigners. And what made things harder was that I couldn’t understand a word they said, nor could they understand me. A gulf had started from the very first day with the barrier of our common tongue. I was the odd man out, the Sassenach, posh, weedy, incomprehensible, alien. But I knew that because I was New, this slit-eyed raw-boned herd of bullocks was biding its time until the terror which was growing steadily within me should start to leak away, like blood in a sea of sharks. And when they scented it, they would attack. This I knew.

  My desk mate—we sat two to a bench like slaves in the galleys —was called Tom. He was dark, thin, pleasant looking with round tin glasses. He showed me where to hang my cap and coat, where my locker was, where the lavatories were, the classrooms I would use, and where to eat our lunch if we didn’t go home. Which neither of us did.

  A long brick shed, it was pushed into a corner of the Yard almost as an afterthought. It had a tin roof and was euphemistically called the Tuck Shop. Banks of greasy wooden tables, benches on each side, a long counter at one end with tea and coffee urns and racks of soggy hot, or cold, meat pies, sausages, cheese buns, bread and dripping and Mars Bars.

  At the other end, two pin tables for the elder boys. We were not allowed to use them until we were sixteen, but everyone did anyway. In one corner a foul, stinking lavatory which was three walls with an open drain round the edges. Sluggish streams of gently steaming urine bubbled along this trough. Cigarette ends and gobs of spittle bobbed about like floats in a stream. On the walls above the slate slabs against which we pissed, a whole holocaust of wild scribbles and obscenities, none of which I understood any better than their language.

  In the other corner a cabin with doors like a stable so that one could see the feet and the top of the head of the occupant. Sometimes there were two or three pairs of feet scuffling about below the door, and the knowing shouts and bellows of laughter made me sick with apprehension, not understanding what was going on in there.

  Tom used to guide me out of the Tuck Shop as often as the weather allowed and we sat, each with our bottle of Cola, a hot pie and an apple or an orange, on the low wall which ran round the dustbins watching a thousand games of football played with an old tennis ball or a rough block of wood. He talked away from time to time, and I tried to understand him, which made him laugh, and he tried to understand me, which made me laugh too. We were warm together, and I knew that I liked him, but conversation was, of necessity, limited. I did, however, glean that his father was a coal-man and that he, Tom, had won a scholarship to this unenviable school.

  I was deeply impressed. Not that his father was a coal-man, but that he had been clever enough to win a scholarship and could still be so gentle, patient and kind. I liked him very much, and he became my mate.

  One day when the weather was too wet to go out and eat our lunch on the dustbin wall, some of the Herd started to make muffled, smothered, giggling jokes clearly about me across the greasy tables. They were mostly the elder boys, and the younger ones were sniggering and squirming sycophantically at the jokes.

  Tom suddenly stiffened with alarm and mumbled something, but before he was able to say anything more, the Herd had started to move towards me in a slow, undulating wave. With one united lunge they grabbed me and dragged me struggling in nameless terror to the lavatory at the end of the room. I heard Tom shouting, but the doors had swung closed and I was hustled into the cabin, up-ended into the lavatory pan, held firmly by my knees and legs, while someone, as if from a hundred miles down a tunnel, said: “Fuckin’ posh twit. Talking so la-di-da need your wee mouth washin out.” Someone pulled the chain and I thought that I had drowned. Gasping and choking, vomiting like a dog on the wet slimy floor, I was told that until I learned to speak correctly this would happen again. Then they left me. I lay for an eternity, retching and gasping in a sea of filth and undigested meat pie. I thought that I would never be able to breathe again. Tears and dribble coursed down my face from the coughing and choking and the retching.

  Tom helped me to clean up as best I could in the boiler room under the school. I lay on a pile of coke while he tried to apologise and wiped me down with his handkerchief and some newspaper which we had found. I stayed there hiccuping and heaving until the break bell clanged. Damp, creased and smelly I took my place in Class. No one said anything. They watched over the tops of their books or sideways from the edges of their faces. They were all quietly smiling. Through bleary eyes I looked back at them. And decided to learn to speak correctly.

  For days I was in terror that I should catch some disease from my Lavatory Drowning. With some of my luncheon money—I got one and sixpence a day from Uncle Duff each morning on the train—I bought a bottle of disinfectant and, as secretly as I could, gargled and cleaned my mouth out until it was raw and blistered with whatever it was I had used. No one knew what had
happened, of course, and I had a difficult job sneaking into the house and changing my filthy clothes, but managed to convince them that I had been in a fight in the rain and that was that.

  Uncle Duff was quite jovial at tea that evening.

  “A fight already! Well I declare! they’ll make a wee man of ye yet.”

  My aunt was no fool. She didn’t say a word, just went on buttering her potato pancake, but I think she knew that it had been more than a fight.

  For the first month or two I was bullied constantly. Being skinny, having the wrong accent, although I was doing my damnedest to correct that daily, and never joining in the break time football made me as conspicuous as a cripple. And I was accordingly treated as such, for that is really what they thought I was. Deformed, different, weak, a cissie, to be got rid of. Tom was a help, but I felt that I couldn’t shelter behind him all the time, and in any case, he wasn’t always with me. He had his learning to do and was frequently taking a different Class to me.

  Sitting one day on the wall of the Yard (there were no benches) I got clouted on the shin by a whirling block of wood being used as a football. I yelled out in pain and fell off the wall. I was suddenly engulfed in a swirling, kicking mass of roaring footballers who dragged me across the asphalt in the direction of the lavatory. Terror loaned me desperate strength. I fought and clawed and bit and kicked and suddenly found that the crowd had pulled away and I was struggling with one sole boy, older than me, taller, and stronger. His name, I think, was Bell. I don’t know what happened, or how I did it, but as he swung me away from him with one arm to punch me in the face, I swung at him and hit him with all the force I could muster in the eye. He gave a great cry and fell to the ground, his face covered with his hands. I fell on top of him and went on bashing and thumping at him, but his cries grew louder and louder, and his hands flew from his face and flailed the air about his head. I saw that he now only had one eye. The other had apparendy gone.