Snow White and the Giants

by J. T. McIntosh

  Jota came to see me at lunch-time (the first school day had been a morning only, but on the second there was a short period of afternoon school too). He was quiet, puzzled, and very contrite. He seemed to think he was responsible for my illness because he had punched me on the chest.

  I told him that was silly, there wasn't even a mark, and I was sorry I'd laughed at him.

  I was ill for three weeks, and never fully recovered that first school term.

  There was a very small incident about two years later . . .

  It was the next time Jota and I really quarreled. Miranda didn't seem to know anything about this. I was quite unable to remember what the quarrel was about, or any details, except that Jota finally grew cold, stared at me, and said: "I'll fix you . . . " in a tone of menace quite startling coming from a seven-year-old boy.

  And that was all. Nothing happened . . .

  Miranda was puzzled. She had been making me remember things, not as I might have expected, by being in possession of all the facts and prompting my flagging memory, but by directing my attention to certain types of incident in my relations with Jota.

  And this incident had her beat. She tried to make me remember that Jota had not really been in a cold fury with me, or that he got over it at once.

  In fact, Jota and I ceased to be friends for fully three months, and during that time he made no secret of the fact that he hated me.

  I was, after all, a much more normal boy than Jota, and I made other friends. He stayed solitary, walking home alone, standing in the playground alone.

  And it was because of this that we finally became friends again.

  One of my new friends was Gil Carswell, who was studious but not always quiet. In those days he was a sort of juvenile Jekyll and Hyde, usually the best boy in the school from the point of view of authority, intelligent, polite, hard-working, good at games, a paragon of schoolboy virtues. But now and then he'd kick over the traces . . .

  However, this incident had very little to do with Gil, not until it was over, anyway.

  It was the morning interval. I was with Gil. Across the playground, beside the bush which divided the junior boys' section from the girls', Jota was standing alone, as usual, staring into space, his mind far away.

  About a dozen boys were kicking a ball around near him. Inevitably the bail went near him and one of the boys chasing it came close to Jota.

  They didn't come in contact, and across the playground I had no idea what was said. I was watching only idly, until the group began to gather round Jota, and I began to have a vague, though fundamentally correct, idea of what was happening.

  No wild animals are as cruel as children. They don't know how.

  Jota, by standing alone, had set himself apart as a target, as a victim. The boys (bigger than us, from a higher class) were taunting him, trying to outdo each other in the wit and the virulence of their insults.

  Automatically Gil and I moved across the playground. Nothing draws boys more surely and quickly than a fight, and it was obvious there was going to be a fight.

  We weren't the only ones. Everyone in the playground was crowding to the same spot. Even some of the girls behind the hedge and fence were beginning to take notice, the bigger girls looking over, the smaller ones jumping up to take a quick look.

  There were three playgrounds at the old Grammar School. Everything was old, dingy and overcrowded, and the playgrounds were far too small. Round at the back, completely cut off from us, were the senior boys. But all the girls, from five to eighteen, were in the same section. The idea was, presumably, that big boys might bully small boys, but girls didn't do things like that.

  One of the boys baiting Jota began to jump at him and touch him, leaping back immediately. Two or three others followed suit.

  Jota tried to pick one of them and fight him, to turn the affair into a simple playground brawl. Nineteen times out of twenty this would have worked and the incident would not have developed further. This time, however, the boy he picked tore himself away, electing to go on with the game, and his pals tacitly agreed on the same course. Every time Jota lunged, he was pushed back, kept at bay.

  Now every boy in the playground was crowded round Jota. I caught only occasional glimpses of him. His face was white and he had gone beyond anger into sheer terror. Half a dozen boys ganging up on one can swiftly reduce him to blubbering misery. Jota was alone against the whole junior school. And it was too late to change the pattern of events.

  Bolstering each other up, the tormentors were becoming bolder. At first they merely touched Jota lightly when they leaped at him. Then they punched him. Then they started pulling his tie, grabbing his shirt, clawing at his buttons.

  Still a few feet of space was left between Jota and the heaving mass of boys, tacitly maintained to keep Jota the quarry and everyone else a hunter.

  His nose was bleeding and blood was running down his chin from a cut at the corner of his mouth. Most of us were howling -- I believe I was howling with the rest. We were huntsmen, and we had cornered the fox. We were out for the kill.

  When his shirt came out of his pants, we shrieked with laughter. Now he was not merely an object of derision, he was an object of fun. He was comic (like a fat, naked old Jew being beaten along a ghetto with gun barrels). Some quick-witted tormentor grabbed a handful of earth from under the bushes and managed to get most of it inside the top of Jota's pants.

  It was about then that I ceased enjoying myself. I was as mindlessly cruel as most boys of seven or eight, I suppose. But even then I knew there were limits, that even a mob has to retain some grasp on common humanity, or the human race is done for.

  I didn't realize until years and years later that there must have been scores among us who felt the same way. What did we do? Nothing; of course. Principally we were afraid that if we did anything we might find ourselves in Jota's place.

  He was near the end of his tether. His shirt, minus all buttons, was now hanging open under his jacket, and his thin white chest was heaving at frightening speed.

  There was no sign of any let-up. On the contrary, the immediate ring of boy-baiters, encouraged by those behind, kept searching for further torments. The time for mere taunts was long since gone -- the noise was such that only screams could be heard over it.

  One boy took out a small pocket-knife, opened it and made passes at Jota with it. He never went very near him: yet if there had been a roar of encouragement, he'd have been emboldened to go in with the knife.

  Flight had never seemed possible for Jota, since from the beginning he had been hemmed in against the bush and fence. But in his extremity he suddenly did something that none of us expected.

  He leaped back, seized the top of the fence and somehow drew himself over. The next moment he was in the girls' playground.

  For a moment the shouts died as if we'd all been struck dumb. Then the whole mass of boys charged the fence, ignoring the bushes, and although none of us got over as Jota had done, we were all hanging over the fence, watching, if not chasing, our quarry, hunting him with our eyes and our shouts.

  The little girls all ran away, screaming. Boys were not supposed to be in the girls' playground. It was a rule, and not one of the hundreds of rules made to be broken. Nobody had expected Jota even to try to get into the girls' playground.

  One massive woman of seventeen or eighteen caught Jota by the collar and lifted him. There was a scream of laughter on both sides of the fence. She did it again . . .

  He fell out of his jacket and she was left holding it. He darted for the gate.

  We rushed to our gate. He was on the other side of the road, panting desperately. Habit was so strong that he wanted to come back (the interval must be nearly over). But scores of boys were hanging over the gate.

  I didn't think. I jumped over the gate and ran across the road. Jota flinched and turned, evidently thinking that even the school boundary couldn't stop the chase.

  But I caught his arm. "Come on back, Clarence," I sa
id.

  Once again the shouting and howling died.

  Suddenly sanity was restored. I had done quite a bit to restore it, but could take little credit for it. By standing with Jota, by allying myself with him, I had reminded everybody that he was one of us, not an outlaw to be taken dead or alive, not a fox to be slaughtered as bloodily as possible, not a mouse to be tortured and broken and perhaps left, mercilessly, still alive.

  I could take very little credit because I should have done this long before, because instead of doing it when I might have turned the entire incident I had been howling with the rest.

  Anyway, as the shouting died, the whistle to end the break shrilled, and we all trooped back into school, including Jota and me.

  The fun was over.

  Gil, Jota and I became friends after that. Curiously, Jota's fifteen-minute ordeal was ignored and forgotten and canceled as if it had never happened.

  The teachers must have known something had happened. Signs of the damage to bushes and fences were still visible six months later. Jota could not have looked anything like his usual self in class, although his nose had stopped bleeding, his face had been washed, and his jacket -- thrown over the fence by one of the girls -- hid the ruin of his shirt.

  In any event, nothing was done. And the boys at the school, too, scarcely remembered the episode. One or two of them, I knew, tried to taunt Jota later -- but they were unwise enough to do it individually, and in such circumstances Jota was perfectly capable of looking after himself.

  Looking after himself . . .

  Two weeks later, there was a special assembly. The Head was very grave. Two boys, close friends, had died in one day, one of hitherto unsuspected heart trouble, and the other in a road accident. A special service was held: all the good things the boys had ever done were detailed, and everything else quietly forgotten.

  I knew, of course, that these two had been the ringleaders in the humiliation of Jota. But no significance in that fact, beyond the obvious coincidence, occurred to me. Jota could hardly have any control over road accidents, especially since at the time it happened he was with Gil and me and clearly had nothing in his mind beyond our search for birds' nests. I might, at that age, have believed that God had punished them for their wickedness. It didn't cross my mind that Jota had.

  Miranda didn't make me remember subsequent events in any detail, except one -- one which introduced an entirely new concept.

  There had been the case of Squire Badgeley . . . He wasn't a squire at all, but he looked like one and he owned an orchard. Probably for every apple that he got, the boys of Shuteley Grammar School got two. In my earliest recollections of the squire, he seemed quite philosophical about this.

  But now it was wartime. We were too young to take much note of the war; the restrictions and shortages we accepted as we accepted the rain and the wind, and our memories of a time when there was no need to pull curtains at night and when unlimited good things were obtainable merely on production of cash were dim and vague.

  But Squire Badgeley took note of the war. He had three sons in the RAF, and his one daughter worked with him, a Land Girl as we called them then. In addition to apples, he grew raspberries, blackcurrants and a wide range of vegetables. And we boys not only stole his fruit, but damaged and destroyed his carrots, turnips, cabbages and lettuces.

  He became an ogre (from our angle). He guarded his orchard, chased us, and reported us to the Head. The Head, whom we dimly remembered being as philosophical as the squire had once been about our depredations, now became astonishingly harsh.

  Jota was caught once, and the squire beat him.

  Two weeks later the squire died. But that wasn't the end of the Badgeley story.

  It was not until long after the war that we broke our vows about girls. Jota broke his first. One week he obviously didn't know any more than we did about the birds and the bees, though we were all becoming hotly interested: the next, he was able to tell us, in remarkable detail, everything we could possibly want to know.

  We didn't really believe his stories at first. But soon it was impossible not to believe them. Girls of all ages swarmed around Jota. (He was Jota now, duly having been christened by Mr. Samuel, the science master.) In juvenile masculine arrogance he used to induce us to deride his chances with a particular girl, often four or five years older than he was, and then make the conquest, and prove it.

  This was before the days of widespread promiscuity at mixed schools. Shuteley was an old-fashioned town, too, well behind the times. Senior girls did not then wear yellow golliwogs to claim loss of virginity. If Jota had not existed, only one or two of the most forward senior girls would have had furtive nocturnal adventures, mainly with boys of the town who had left school. Fewer still of the senior boys would have had such experiences, and they would have been with willing farm girls rather than the supposedly pure senior girls.

  Jota, on his own, created an unprecedented situation. Every apple ripe enough to pluck, he plucked. He collected girls like stamps. It made not the slightest difference what form they were in, from Third to Sixth. He knew enough, of course, not to leave a trail of illegitimate babies behind him. I believe that throughout his life, only when he was too impatient for a particular girl did he ever take chances.

  It was not long after Dina was born that Gil, goaded by Jota's fantastic success and the fact that Gil and I were still virgins, and likely to remain so for some time, hit on a challenge that was to reduce Jota to size.

  He brought up the name of Anne Badgeley.

  All three of Squire Badgeley's sons had been killed in the war. Anne, left alone, ran the orchard herself, with hired hands to help her. Although she could hardly be said to be fortunate, money was not one of her problems. She was certainly the richest girl in Shuteley.

  At the time when Gil made his outrageous suggestion, she was probably one of the most desirable girls in the town, and undoubtedly the most desired. There wasn't much doubt that the reason why she hadn't married was tied up with her wealth. Whether the average young man in town wanted Anne, her orchard or her money most was a matter for conjecture. But he certainly wanted all three.

  She was still in the first half of her twenties, and Jota was not less than ten years younger. She didn't exactly seem old to us, being younger than Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner, whose pin-up photographs we were beginning to stick up in our bachelor bedrooms. Indeed, with her habit of working in the summer in her orchard dressed like our pin-up girls, she was the nearest real thing to the gorgeous creatures of our adolescent dreams.

  She worked in the orchard behind a fence and a high hedge, but peepholes could always be found, and the summer working clothes of Anne Badgeley were a daily topic of inflamed speculation among us. When she wore slacks we lost interest, or some interest, but when she wore shorts and particularly one day when above her tight shorts she made do with a flimsy chiffon scarf, carelessly tied, she rocked the male half of the Grammar School to its foundations.

  But she was as much out of reach as Betty, Rita and Lana. The very idea of Jota and Anne, Anne and Jota, was ridiculous, which was why Gil made the suggestion.

  Jota took the challenge. And a week later, he made us hide in the orchard to watch.

  Late on a hot summer evening, he and Anne came out . . .

  Gil and I were part shocked, part disgusted, but mainly wildly envious. Why had Jota been singled out to be able to do such things? The girl was head over heels in love with him; he could do anything he liked with her, even we could see that.

  In the autumn, Anne died. She fell off a ladder and broke her back.

  Chapter Eleven

  Dina was still asleep. She changed her position easily, regularly, without fuss and without making a noise.

  Around us now, beyond the stasis, was a red glow. It would be many hours yet before it would be possible for Dina and I, unless wearing one of the giants' suits, to leave the spot. But the fire had consumed nearly all there was to consume.
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  The Great Fire of London had burned for days. Wartime fires started by incendiaries had often been blazing still when the bombers returned the following night. Shuteley, however, was annihilated in a relatively small, exceedingly fierce, shockingly rapid fire. What remained would glow for a long time, but little or nothing remained to blaze.

  And there was one suit in the stasis. As I understood it, just before dawn the stasis would disappear and Miranda would be plucked back to her own time. But anyone not of her party would simply be left suddenly without the protection of the stasis, to die.

  Certainly to die. There would be enough heat left to char the ground, to burn Dina and me apparently as all the other victims had been burned -- more slowly but no less surely, so that when people from outside first reached the village green (that afternoon? Next day?) there would be no indication that the stasis had ever existed, or of the identity of the two blackened skeletons in it.