Will

by Christopher Rush

  ‘You were a Dane in drinking.’

  Once. But that came later. Our feet were in no real danger and neither were our arses – it was hardening of the brain that was the hazard. You came out of that school full of knowledge but with hardly a thought in your stuffed noodle. Information and authority were the fashion, a ready-made morality, and a pile of absolute certainties. And if you begin with certainties you will end in nakedness and doubts – and nakedness, Francis, wears out the moon. Under which belief turns pale and dies. A caster of shadows, the moon, that old glimmering spinner of distrust.

  But no such moon shone in school, except the hard wolfish moons of winter dawns. What school gave me was matter and discipline, which I sifted and stored. Acquisitive, eclectic, open unto the universe, I learned under the steady barrage of instruction and booklore. History was turned into moral philosophy and political viewpoints were passed around like fossils, for observation, not for discussion. Very little was up for discussion in Church Street, where Higges was in charge. Small have continual plodders ever won save base authority from others’ books. And Higges was a great plodder. He referred to the long afternoon as the posteriors of the day and kept himself warm by beating the posteriors of small hungry boys.

  ‘A muttonhead.’

  Who’d lived on the alms-basket of words and existed solely for sniffing out blunders and bogus Latin, and for flogging and repetition. Jesus, it must have been soothing to his absolute absence of intellect to listen to us all day and every day chanting the unchanging truths of all the worlds, natural, political, temporal, eternal, according to and beginning with Our Father.

  Our Father, Our Queen, Son and Holy Ghost, make me to know mine end and the measure of my years, that I may know how frail I am, and make me to know mine a b c, my one two three, that I may count my blessings and my beatings all the days of my life, three score years and ten, January, February, and shun my sins, Pride, Envy, and know thy Word, Genesis, Exodus, and accept my strokes, one, two, one to six, one to seven, six graces, seven deadlies, six days of the week, seven penitentials, schooling forty-six weeks of the year, spring, summer, autumn, winter, what freezings have I felt, what dark days seen, December days of Latin and the lash, correctness and correction, with one solitary lapse intolerable to Higges, for that was a sure sign of the devil that was known to lurk in all boys and must be birched out at all costs just as soon as Satan betrays himself by a wrong answer, a moment’s loss of concentration.

  ‘For what is youth but an untamed beast,’ said Higges, ‘and what is the rod but a divine weapon against that beast and a sword against Satan? Therefore when I beat you I love you, for I drive out folly and let in wisdom and save your souls from hell, so to spare you is to hate you and to fail most miserably in my duty, for which I am paid four pounds a year, and by God’s grace and the strength of my right arm I shall earn them every penny, so bend over now you little bastards, and we’ll begin.’

  ‘He was right, of course.’

  Learning saved souls, everybody knew that, and boys who turned out as thieves and murderers, ending their damnable days on the gibbet, were the victims of bad schoolmastering, or none at all. In either case a plentiful lack of flogging. You’re right about the theory. So the principal vocation of Higges was to flog us until we were seven, after which we passed out of his correction and care and into that of the schoolmaster, who advised us that if we wanted the flogging to cease we should address ourselves for the next seven years to the perfections of the Latin grammar, at the end of which period of plenty our minds would be crammed full like the granaries of Egypt in the time of Joseph. From now on therefore our lives were entirely latinized and we submitted every day to the grinding disciplines of Lily and his infernal accidence.

  ‘But old Jenkins wasn’t so bad, was he?’

  By the time Thomas Jenkins arrived at the King’s School in my twelfth year I was ready for the diet of literature he served up daily: Ovid and Virgil, Lucretius and Horace – with Ovid always first on the table, the main dish every day, sometimes garnished with Golding’s fourteeners, but always Ovid, honey-tongued Ovid, the first and lasting taste in the mouth. Turn around the letters in the poet’s name and you get VOID – which is what my schooling hugely was till Ovid came along and filled it like a god. ‘Ah, Mantuan! Good old Mantuan! Old Mantuan! Who understandeth thee not loves thee not!’ So crooned Jenkins. He melted so much at the touch of Ovid, it was almost possible to believe that our stern schoolmaster was, just like ourselves, the proud possessor of hic penis, and that if hic vulva had bloomed like a rose out of Ovid’s pages he’d have thrown off his gown, cast his Lily to the winds and got stuck in.

  10

  ‘You stuck in at school, Will.’

  And beyond.

  ‘Your little Alison now –’

  Talking of sticking in, you mean. Leave her out of it. She’s not my little Alison. And she’s a sweet child.

  ‘You stuck in more than you should have done though, old man.’

  Not at school.

  ‘Jesus, I should hope not.’

  That’s not what I meant. The keyhole was about the only place at school you could stick into. And Ovid was the keyhole through which I peered excitedly into my teens. What I saw there, caught in the forbidden frames of those pagan metres, was a sex scene that changed my life – Venus and Adonis hard at it, hic penis and hic vulva coming together and making sense of things at last. Not that Ovid provided the details, but on the doorsill of adolescence it was enough. Out the window went Adam and Eve’s furtive fucking in the bushes in the cool of the day, with God gloating knowingly on. Away too went sheep-shagging Dick and Marian with her bursting udders and bovine belly. No more o’ that, sirs. Those bucolic lunges now disgusted me.

  ‘Good old Mantuan had done it for you, eh?’

  Transience, longing, change, the inevitability of it all. And he’d brought sex right out of the cupboard, (where the bible stood on the shelf), and away from the shithouse door. When I looked through the keyhole I saw the open countryside round Stratford, with gods and mortals making love there under the wide sky.

  ‘Saw nothing but sheep myself. And sheep-shaggers.’

  In that infinite blue emptiness there was no Jehovah to be seen and not a cloud in sight. There was no serpent under the flowers, no god lurking among leaves.

  ‘A schoolboy’s dream.’

  I ran up to Snitterfield where the long hot grasses of June lashed and maddened me beyond reason. They were well flattened in one frequented spot where Venus had lain down there with her Adonis less than an hour ago. I put my nose to the ground like a hunter. Those grass blades quivered with the recent memory of breasts and thighs. In those green dents her fair elbows had rested fleetingly, imprinting the earth – in those deeper mounds her buttocks.

  ‘Couple of copulating rustics. You disturbed them.’

  She’d long ceased caring for her sea-shores, stopped going to sea-girt Paphos, to Cnidos, fecund with fishes, or Amathis with its mint of minerals. Olympus itself could hold her no more. She spent her days roaming the rocks and ridges, the woods and fields, her dress up to her knees, exposing her legs, heedless. She’d searched the globe for the one she wanted.

  ‘And naturally she’d come all the way to Stratford and lain on the Snitterfield rise.’

  Where else should she have come but here?

  ‘It was Marian down on Dick.’

  For here was her Adonis, right here in Stratford, just waiting for the goddess to come round a corner, rise up out of the grasses, and pin me to the earth. Yes, Francis, I was Adonis, all right, there was no doubt of that. I’d drunk that verse so deeply it had washed out of me anything that existed of the pre-Ovidian Will. He was a ghost. I looked down at my feet and they’d gone – I saw only grass. I’d disappeared. I was that wind-flower trembling in the breeze. Metamorphosis was mine. I was the anemone, Adonis, bloodstaining that hot compacted grass, where she’d lain and languished. And she wouldn’t leave off, I knew
it for certain, she’d be back on the hunt, flushed with lust, dripping and sweating, to find me in the fields before the start of school.

  ‘I hope you got up early.’

  Absurdly! In the summer dawns to meet her in the meadows and lie with her a full two hours before running back ravished into town to sit before Jenkins and translate. But little did he know and little did my classmates realise just who was in their midst, interpreting Ovid with the inward eye of one who knew. I myself was Ovid. Will Shakespeare was my oafish English alias, my Stratford disguise. Hot from the mould, I was a newly minted myth, drunk with experience, protean knowledge of the gods, and nobody had a clue just how rare and randy I was.

  ‘Naturally you kept it to yourself, this information.’

  Naturally. Then I’d get into school and find Jenkins in his harsh historical mood, ready for Livy, Tacitus, and Caesar, and my spirits would be dashed for a day. Unless of course he brought out North’s Plutarch and a rougher magic worked its spell.

  ‘Rough’s the word.’

  Not one to send me out into the fields to wait for gods. But Plutarch’s stories filled these dry classical days with purple.

  ‘Filled mine with boredom. Still, you need Latin for the law. Livy was even worse.’

  Not even Jenkins languished over Livy. He gave us Plautus and Terence too, and some Seneca –

  ‘Gleefully godless and shockingly horrible.’

  Go on through the lofty spaces of high heaven and bear witness where you ride that there are no gods. It is the mind only that makes a king – the kingdom each man bestows upon himself. A lesson in tragedy. I never forgot it.

  ‘So old Seneca left his mark.’

  The drama was good. But in the morn and liquid dew of youth it was Ovid that bore the palm away. He was my man. He fell like dew on ignorance and nothing was left untransformed. Not that I was alone in knowing Ovidian delights. Others had been there before me, as I now realised, understanding now from my earliest days certain sounds from my mother’s bed on certain nights.

  ‘Oh God, yes. I knew what was happening, though. Didn’t you?’

  I wondered if she were in pain and I lay awake, listening, wanting to go through to her, to comfort her, asking myself why my father didn’t wake and soothe her. Till it came to me that he was lying awake with her and making her moan, and that he was moaning too, making a fiercer music that I couldn’t understand.

  ‘Where ignorance was bliss.’

  Not all bliss. The bed they lay in creaked like a ship in a storm and that combined moaning of theirs was the hurricane that howled about their vessel as it ploughed and dipped and bucked and rolled in the surge.

  ‘Jesus, you took notes.’

  And yet it was a sweet storm too, in which they seemed to want to go down and perish. I listened, amazed, to the crescendo and melody of their anguish, their sheer willingness to die, to expire together and leave me desolate in my bed, unwanted, ignored.

  ‘You poor little fucker.’

  It wasn’t the first betrayal. The first happened long before then, when my mother banished me from their bed, where I’d burrowed into the soft nest of her belly and buried my blind pink face in her queen-bee honey bags.

  ‘You don’t remember that!’

  Ample udders on my mother, I can assure you, memory’s the warder of the brain, and I stayed longer than I should have done, longer than my father wanted, I shouldn’t wonder. I was two years old when Gilbert came, and though I must have been cuckooed out of the nest well before then, I can still capture the Judas moment, the first evidence of female treachery.

  ‘Frailty! thy name is woman.’

  I was excluded from their private paradise. I was outside the gates. Adam was long dead but in my father’s mansion he was alive again. And kicking. John Shakespeare knew his wife. Mary Arden was in Eden, and the two of them going at it bush to bush, thinking themselves unheard, little knowing that I heard everything and that I, the Lord their God, was a jealous god.

  ‘Master John Shakespeare, Mary Arden, a well-left wench,’ Agnes said. ‘Whoever marries her shall have the chinks, that he shall. And your father did just that, he heard the chink of silver when he saw our Mary, and she’s done well by him with her own sweet chink, done her duty has that lass. Well, Joan and Margaret are with God, but that’s past matter. Mary Arden has given him the chink, over and over, and the chinks in plenty too. A good man. And a lucky man, your father, luckier than a king.’

  The king my father. Master of the Mary, master of the chinks.

  ‘A good man, Will?’

  He was a man. Take him for all in all. His beard was grizzled. But he looked smilingly.

  ‘Something wrong with that?’

  One may smile and smile and be a villain, Francis.

  11

  ‘And was he – a villain?’

  We are arrant knaves all. I can only tell you how he was. John Shakespeare: glover and whittawer, dresser of white leather; also fleece-dealer, wheeler and dealer, trader in timber, talker and smiler, house-owner, shop-runner, glove-shopman, wool-shopman, investor, landlord, and money-lender too – yes, usury, that’s my word – a good man, a sound man, for twenty years a solid man, – since he climbed out of the shoe-sucking clay and came to Stratford in ’53, where he quickly made his way. And there you have him: John Shakespeare, man of business, fee simple, an uncomplicated man.

  ‘That it?’

  I can do him for you another way, if you like. Tell you about the civic man. John Shakespeare: ale-taster, constable, affeeror, burgess, chamberlain, alderman, bailiff – and as such last, almoner, coroner, escheator, Clerk of the Market and Justice of the Peace, with mace-bearing sergeants conducting him to the Guild Hall through all the town streets, a matter of some pride to me when I was small in years and understanding, before I saw through furred gowns, yes indeed, sirs, a man of standing, a man of consequence. A front-pew man when he went to church – a thing he did less often as time went by.

  ‘No more but so?’

  I can also do you the spiritual man. Not a tedious business, I can give it to you in one word: Catholic. But if you ask me was he a good Catholic, I’d have to answer that’s two words, and more than twice as difficult to determine. All the same I’d be bound to admit that good Catholics didn’t always die in their beds and they sometimes lost their bowels before they died, and their balls before that. They were made of sterner stuff than my father. So by the highest standards of the day I’d have to say that he was like hundreds around him – believed one thing, did another, talked about neither, kept his tongue tight behind his teeth, a hypocrite survivor, nothing much wrong with that, and not so deeply religious as to die for a belief, still less for the family tradition of the old Catholic Shakespeares. Tradition? Belief? What do they count for compared with a comfortable living and a clean death, genitals intact? Easy for me to say, I know. I should be grateful. And am. My father had a wife and family to think about. He was looking out for them, not just for himself. He was taking care of me. A good man, then.

  ‘And yet?’

  And yet this same John Shakespeare, the king my father, once the top dog of Stratford, this Catholic cur, drove out the curate Roger Dyos with his vote – Catholic Dyos who only the year before had baptised his first child, my dead little sister, Joan. Yes, Catholic Dyos was expelled from Stratford by proscribing, pricking voices such as my father’s. They kicked the scapegoat out into the wilderness to starve, the bastards, the survivors, the ruthless pragmatic men. And it was John Shakespeare and his fellow burgesses who obliterated the old Catholic art of Stratford, swept away pictures and monuments, dismissing them as the dust on antique time. Into the Guild Chapel they came with their brushes and buckets, the year before I was born, and whitewashed out a thousand years of culture, St George and the Dragon, Constantine’s vision, Becket going down like a beast in the Canterbury shambles, and the whole old Vision of Judgement, complete with Catholic purgatory and red-hot chains cordoning off the damned.


  ‘Call that culture? Maybe it hurt him, though.’

  Knowing him, I doubt it. They saved the vestments, the stained glass, and as many of the paintings as they dared. And whitewash comes off again – should the times change. A practical man, my father, a realist untroubled by imagination or belief, a doer not a thinker. He swam with the stream. He kept his balance in a world grown slippery underfoot and succeeded in living on into his seventies and dying between clean sheets. Not a bad achievement for a man who once took me to Sir William Catesby’s house to receive a personal copy of the Catholic Testament from the hands of Father Edmund Campion himself.

  ‘You never told me that, Will.’

  I never told anybody.

  ‘Why now?’

  Look at me. I’m inches from eternity. I reckon I’m safe. So is the book.

  ‘I won’t ask where. But when was this, if you don’t mind the question?’

  I don’t mind, not now. It was during the Jesuit mission to Warwickshire in 1580. I was sixteen at the time so I remember Campion well. Eyes that burned with an unearthly fire.

  ‘Unhealthy.’

  A fire that only Tyburn could put out.

  ‘Men with eyes like that seldom die in their beds. A man should keep his eyes down.’

  I could read Tyburn in those eyes. Tyburn was his destiny. It was what he was born for. It was where he was headed – and he probably knew it – when he first stepped off the boat at Dover in a black hat and cloak, the greatest scholar of his day disguised as a gentleman but bent on his mission, fighting for freedom with the weapon of terror. The following year he was caught, interrogated, starved, thumbscrewed, fingernailed, compressed in the Scavenger’s Daughter, and left for a week in the darkness of the Pit – all without a result.

  ‘Strength from somewhere, god or devil.’