Out of the Shelter

by David Lodge

  – I don’t know, Timothy said, truthfully. He knew nothing about universities apart from the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race.

  – Would it, er, cost a lot? his father asked.

  – It shouldn’t cost you much at all, Mr. Young, perhaps nothing. University education is free now, and the maintenance grants are quite generous. Getting in is the difficult thing.

  – I think it’s a good idea, said his mother. But his father wanted to know what it would lead to.

  – We thought draughtsmanship was a good idea, Art and Maths being his best subjects. It sort of combines them. That’s what his Uncle Ted said.

  – Yes, well, what about architecture?

  – Architecture?

  In the end they left it that Timothy would go into the Sixth Form in September, take his O-Levels the next summer, and make up his mind in the course of the year what he wanted to do. Riding home, on the bus, the word architecture echoed in his mind, mysterious, alluring, intimidating. To be an architect was certainly a pleasing notion, but beset with difficulties and uncertainties. His mother was elated at the prospect of Timothy going to University, but his father was not so keen. He discovered that you could become an architect through an apprenticeship and that many people thought it was the best way – you got practical experience from the beginning. Timothy would have found it easier to make up his mind about the future if he had been allowed to sit the O-Level exams. As it was, he existed in an academic limbo, neither passing nor failing.

  Other, less definable and less discussable frustrations weighed on Timothy’s spirits when they went to Worthing again in the summer of 1950, making him, as his mother said, moody. He was lonely and bored – bored with his parents’ company and bored with Worthing; bored with the promenade and the pier and the putting green and Mrs. Watkins’ Spam salads. Though he could swim quite well now, it wasn’t much fun swimming on your own. He usually went in as soon as they settled themselves on the beach in the morning, to get it over with. After that there wasn’t much to do except to sit on the beach and read and watch the girls covertly from behind his sunglasses. There was one girl with dark curly hair and a pale blue swimming costume that he thought was rather pretty. He used to watch her tiptoeing over the pebbles to go swimming with her father, plucking at the bottom edge of her swimming costume, and then, as she came back again, pulling her shoulder straps straight and taking off her rubber cap to shake out her hair. But she never took any notice of him.

  In the evenings he dressed in his new brown gaberdine trousers and the yellow pullover his mother had knitted for him at his request. As he stood before the wardrobe mirror in his room to slick down his dry, salty hair with Brylcreem, he admired the effect of the clothes, the first he had chosen himself. But putting them on only created a sense of expectancy that could not be satisfied. After supper there was nothing to do except to take a stroll along the promenade with his parents as the sun set beyond Littlehampton and a chill breeze blew off the sea, or perhaps go to the pictures. He preferred to go to the cinema on his own, and to walk back along the front afterwards in the dark, brooding on certain scenes in the film he had just seen, or on the girl in the blue bathing suit, or on both, in some confused way, together. One night there was a gale which blew the waves in great rollers against the sea wall and sent spray lashing over the promenade. He walked for miles that night, soaked to the skin, the phrase defying the elements ringing in his head.

  The next morning the sea was calm under a hazy sky, and the beach was strewn with pieces of driftwood. Some of them were branches of trees stripped, bleached and worn smooth by the sea. They were strangely beautiful and he amused himself by sketching some of them. He was alone: his parents had gone shopping and would join him later. The girl in the blue bathing costume and her family came and settled themselves nearby, and he was conscious that she was sneaking curious glances at him. Close up, she wasn’t as pretty as she had seemed before, and when she was drying herself after a swim he noticed, with a slight shock of disgust, that she had hair under her arms. The recent appearance of his own body hair had made him uneasy, particularly the growth that had suddenly sprouted at his groin and swayed in the bathwater like seaweed. He knew that men usually had hair there, but he thought his was appearing abnormally early and copiously. The hair in his armpits didn’t worry him so much, but it looked ugly on a girl.

  The sun dissolved the haze and it grew hot. He took a long swim, going further from the shore than he had ever done before, then threw himself down on his towel, cradling his head on his arms. Gradually the hot sun dried his skin and a delicious languor poured through his limbs. He dozed. After a while he heard his parents’ voices, and the sound of deckchairs being dragged across the shingle.

  – Give your mother a hand, son, his father called. Reluctant to stir, to disturb his delightful relaxation, he kept his eyes shut.

  – Don’t bother him, Geoff, I think he’s asleep.

  – In the middle of the morning?

  – He’s been in the water. I expect he tired himself out.

  – Hmm. Got no energy, that boy.

  Timothy stayed immobile, feigning sleep. The trivial chat of his parents, as they settled themselves in their deckchairs, came to him like a radio play.

  – Well, this is a bit of all right.

  – Lovely. Why don’t you take your jacket off?

  Pause.

  – You got a paper, then?

  – Last one. Last Express.

  Pause.

  – What did you think of the kippers this morning?

  – I think I will take my jacket off.

  – I thought they were a bit dry myself.

  – What?

  – The kippers.

  – Oh, yes, they were a bit dry, I suppose.

  – I didn’t like to say anything.

  Pause.

  – Anything in the paper?

  – MacArthur says he’s confident.

  – MacArthur?

  – In Korea.

  – Oh, yes.

  – They’re talking about calling up the Z Reserves.

  – Sst! Like the war all over again.

  – They’ll be putting petrol on ration again soon, I wouldn’t be surprised.

  Pause.

  – It’d be nice to have a little car, Geoff.

  – Twelve months’ waiting-list for most models.

  – I didn’t mean a new one.

  – New one or old one, it doesn’t make much odds. We can’t afford to run one, anyway.

  – Kath said she was thinking of learning to drive.

  – When was that?

  – In her last letter. You read it.

  Pause.

  – Pity she couldn’t come over this summer.

  Pause.

  – She wouldn’t have come anyway.

  – What?

  – She’ll never come over. She’ll always find some excuse.

  – But she was all booked to come. It was this Korean business that stopped her. You read the letter.

  – If it hadn’t been that it would have been something else.

  – I don’t know what you’re talking about, Dorothy. What are you talking about?

  – When was the last time she came home?

  – I know, but –

  – Nineteen forty-seven. Three years ago.

  – Two and a half.

  – All right, two and half. But this is the third year running she’s got out of coming home.

  – What are you getting at?

  – I don’t know. But there’s something funny going on over there.

  – What d’you mean, something funny?

  Timothy was now fully alert, though he kept his eyes shut and didn’t move. His mother dropped her voice and he had to strain to hear her reply.

  – Some affair, some man, something she doesn’t want us to know about.

  – What, our Kath?

  – She’s not our Kath any more, Geoff, you might as well face th
at. She’s only spent three weeks at home, all told, in the last three years.

  – Well, I know, but that doesn’t mean . . . She’s still a decent Catholic girl.

  – Is she?

  – What do you mean, is she?

  – How do we know? Remember that Rod?

  – Oh, that was just . . . she thought he was lonely. She didn’t even know he was married when she first met him.

  – So she said.

  – Anyway, just because she hasn’t been able to get home lately, you’ve no right to . . . More likely it’s you that’s put her off.

  – Me!

  – Yes, you, Dorothy. You were always getting at her when she was at home. You can’t deny it.

  – Well, that’s a nice thing to say!

  – What I mean is, just because she hasn’t been home for a while, you jump to conclusions . . .

  – I don’t suppose I’m the only one.

  – What d’you mean?

  – When a daughter goes away, stays away from home for three years –

  – Two and a half.

  – Never gets married and shows no signs of doing so.

  – She’s young yet.

  – The neighbours think it’s funny.

  – The neighbours should mind their own bloody business.

  – There’s no need to use language.

  – What are you getting at, anyway?

  – You remember that Wilkes girl, up the road. Veronica?

  – What about her?

  – She disappeared suddenly and never came home. They said she’d got a job up north. Then someone saw her in Manchester, pushing a pram. And she hadn’t got a wedding ring.

  – Are you suggesting . . .

  – I’m not suggesting anything, I’m only explaining to you why people talk.

  – You’re mad, Dorothy, that’s what you are.

  – Well, we’ll see. Now let’s drop the subject. I’m going to wake Timothy up, his back’s getting quite red. Timothy!

  He felt his mother’s hand on his shoulder. He went through an elaborate mime of waking up, yawning and squinting at the sea, sparkling in the sun.

  – I’ve got some Nivea in my bag. Shall I put some on your back?

  – No, I’m going to get an ice cream.

  He didn’t really want an ice cream, but he wanted to be on his own.

  Timothy sometimes wondered whether he really had been asleep that morning on the beach, and dreamed the conversation between his parents. The idea of his big sister Kath, plump, heavy-footed, convent-educated Kath, being involved in the most spectacular sort of sin, seemed to him almost incredible, even if she did smoke and paint her nails. But if it was true (and he had little doubt that the conversation, anyway, had really happened) then it domesticated the sin, brought it excitingly, disturbingly out of the realm of fiction, or moral theology, into real life, his own life. For if it was possible for Kath to do it, if his mother could actually acknowledge that possibility, then it was possible for him to do it, too, perhaps, one day. And he had never thought of it as a real possibility before – without being married, that is, a condition too remote to imagine very vividly. You might think about it, you might want to do it, but it was so enormous a sin that you would never actually do it. It was whispered that two of the boys in the Sixth had done it, with two girls they met on a camping holiday, all together in one tent, and it excited him just to think of it, but he didn’t believe the story. They were just boasting. They had made it up. And yet, if Kath had done it . . . perhaps lots of people did it. It was still a sin, of course, a mortal sin. If you died suddenly with such a sin on your soul you would go to hell. It was a terrible risk. But if lots of people did it . . . There was a kind of safety in numbers.

  He recalled his guilt over what he had done with Jill when they were five, and how he had been too ashamed to confess it, and wondered for years afterwards whether all his confessions had been void because of that one suppression of the truth, and all his communions sacrilegious. Until one day he was reading a book, a grownup’s book he had taken at random from the shelves of the local library, and started to read. And there suddenly was the whole episode, as if the writer were describing himself and Jill – the two children left alone in the house, I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours, and the boy looking but not wanting to show his own, it was all exactly as it had happened. And although it was only a story, it showed that other children had done the same thing. And it wasn’t described as anything very awful, or surprising, but as if it were quite ordinary. The relief had been tremendous. He was not alone. He belonged to a community, curious about the bodies of the opposite sex. It had been quite easy, then, to mention the business with Jill in a general confession he made during a school retreat, and the priest had made no comment.

  Until now, the limit of his sexual ambition had been to see a grown-up girl bare, like he had seen Jill. To see the part that was always hidden, somehow, in paintings, or photographs, like the ones in Razzle, the magazine that was passed from hand to hand at school, and that he would sometimes glance at with affected scorn. But now, with the new possibilities revealed about Kath, his mind moved on, uncertainly, hesitantly, to the act itself, only to collapse from a simple want of information. He knew that you put your thing into the girl’s. But what happened then, how long did you do it for, what did it feel like, did it hurt the girl, how did it make a baby, and how did the baby come out? He didn’t know, he didn’t know. It was partly his own fault. A year ago his father had come out into the garden where he was reading (he remembered it vividly, he was sitting in the red deckchair and there was a plane high in the sky making a vapour trail) and started a conversation on the subject that had never previously been mentioned between them. But he had been surprised by the suddenness of it, and embarrassed by the sight of his mother shooting anxious glances at them from the kitchen window. He had given the impression that he already knew everything he needed to know, and his father, visibly relieved, had let the subject drop.

  For the rest of the holiday at Worthing, he kept away from his parents more and more, to think. His favourite place for thinking was the western end of the promenade, towards Littlehampton, where the cafés and hotels petered out into ordinary suburban houses and the road swerved inland towards the downs. Few holidaymakers walked that far, and there was a Corporation shelter, the last one on the front, where he could usually sit undisturbed.

  He walked along the front to his shelter on the last evening of the holiday, after supper, leaving his mother packing their cases, and his father reading the evening newspaper in Mrs. Watkins’ lounge. The sun had set, but still cast a rosy, reflected glow on the clouds, which in turn were reflected in the sea. The tide was coming in, and the waves churned the shingle on the beach. A poem in the book they had done for O-Level English came into his mind. He had answered a question on it in his mock examination.

  Listen! you hear the grating roar

  Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

  At their return, up the high strand,

  Begin and cease, and then again begin,

  With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

  The eternal note of sadness in.

  He had written:

  The poet, hearing the sound of the waves on the shore, feels sad. There is a good onomatopoeia in this verse. We seem to hear the sound of the waves on the beach. Note the alliteration of the hard g in the line Begin, and cease and then again begin.

  But repeating the line to himself now, and listening to the waves on the beach below him, he thought that the best word in the line was cease. It was like the hiss of the wave as it broke and spent itself on the beach: cease. And there was a rhythm about the whole verse that was just like the rhythm of the waves, regular, but not monotonous, because each wave came just before, or just after you expected it. He wished he had thought of this before, so that he could have brought it into his examination answer. It was a good poem, Dover Beach. By Matthew Arnold
. Whoever he was. There was a funny word at the end of the poem – darkling.

  And we are here as on a darkling plain . . .

  He hadn’t been able to find darkling in the dictionary at home, but you could guess what it meant. It was darkling now: the pink had faded from the clouds, they were grey now, and the sea a darker grey. Over to the east it was quite black, except for the lights of the two Brighton piers twinkling in the distance – and as he looked, the lights of Worthing pier came on suddenly, and extinguished, by their brilliance, the last natural light of evening.

  And we are here as on a darkling plain . . .

  Something, something . . .

  struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  That was before they had radar. It was radar that won the Battle of Britain. Fighter Command watched the German planes coming over on their radar screens and sent our squadrons to intercept them. The Jerries must have had a nasty surprise when the Spitfires and Hurricanes came zeroing in out of the sun, their machine guns hammering: der-der-der-der-der-der-der-der-der-. . .

  Alone in the shelter, under cover of night, safe from observation, Timothy lapsed into a heroic dream of his childhood. The dark shelter became the cockpit of a Spitfire. Crouched in his seat, he eased the joystick forward and squinted through the spider’s-web gunsight at a Heinkel bomber. He pressed the button on the joystick and eight streams of bullets, marked by tracers, converged on the enemy aircraft, which burst into flames, tilted over, disintegrated and fell, in spinning, burning fragments, into the sea. Leaning back against his seat, he pulled the Spitfire out of its dive and banked steeply, scanning the skies for his next target. His back was to England, and his face, set in an expression of watchful defiance, was turned towards Europe.

  TWO

  Coming Out

  1

  ONE MORNING LATE in July 1951, Timothy Young woke early from a dream-troubled sleep. Half awake, he tried to recall his dream. He had been trapped in a convent run by some crazy nuns who thought the war was still going on and that he was a pupil left in their charge. When he attempted to escape, they chased him through the dark echoing corridors of the convent, and a huge nun loomed up out of the shadows and tackled him like a rugby full-back. Her face was unpleasantly familiar, and just before he woke up he realized that it was Hitler’s, with the moustache shaved off, and that all the nuns were Nazis in disguise. It was a ridiculous dream, but he was left with an oppressive sense of anxiety and foreboding that he was soon able to trace to its source: he was leaving for Germany that morning.