THE CLIMBING FRAME

by MARY HOCKING

  ‘Yes. I should have known better.’

  ‘He’s been a trial all week.’ Jemima was not complaining. She was a good mother; she was worried about her son and so, though he was reluctant to admit it, was Mylor.

  ‘Do you think there is something wrong at school?’ she asked. ‘He doesn’t seem to get on well with his class teacher.’

  ‘I can’t ask very easily. It would look as though I was trying to run old Hibbert’s school for him.’

  ‘Would you mind if I asked?’

  ‘Leave it for a while. He’ll be in the junior department in September and it may sort itself out then.’

  Jemima looked at the clock. ‘Seven already! That can’t be right, surely? Do you mind if we have supper in front of the television? I want to watch the programme on children at risk. Where does the time get to? I had no idea it was so late.’

  This was her way of referring to his late arrival. She never commented directly because she had found out that it irked him to have his movements questioned; it had been one of the minor disillusionments of married life for her. ‘I thought we were going to share things,’ she had said early on. ‘Sharing isn’t accounting for every minute of the day!’ He had often been angry in those days, but he had learnt his lesson now. She used his anger as an excuse for creating dramas that would last for days during which time she would refuse to eat, or would stay awake at night, insisting on sitting downstairs so as not to disturb him. At the end of such a period it was hard to tell which of them was the more exhausted.

  Although they had supper in front of the television, she did not in fact watch the programme. She started instead to talk about the inadequacies of the house. She was not a grasping person, everything that she demanded was for the children. ‘There’s no garden; and I worry about them up at the top there. Suppose there was a fire?’ Mylor loved the old weather-boarded house, the children peering from dormer windows like half-hatched chicks. It was convenient too, standing as it did in a cul-de-sac that petered into straggling fields. There was no front garden and the garden at the back was the size of a pocket handkerchief; Jemima could weed the borders while the potatoes were boiling.

  ‘Country children don’t need a garden,’ he protested.

  ‘Eastgate is hardly the country,’ Jemima said.

  ‘But we’re right on the edge of the town.’

  This was an old quarrel. He wanted to go to New Zealand which he thought would offer a way of life in which men and women were not confined together in tight little suburban boxes. He had married too young and felt himself in danger of being hemmed in. Jemima, not unaware of this, would not consider emigrating. What was more, she did not want to live on the edge of Eastgate, she wanted to be in the middle of it. She wanted the security of a little estate. Children came and played football in the cul-de-sac during the school holidays; at night it was very quiet and dimly lit, one never knew who might come wandering in from the fields. She went across to the window and looked out, seeing in her mind’s eye beyond the straggle of old cottages and the sleepy high street of the old town to where the new estates flourished, neat little houses and small blocks of flats intersected by well-lit service roads. Quite why she wanted this, Mylor could not understand; she was not a convivial person and tended to repulse neighbours who tried to be friendly. He looked at her and wondered what she was thinking, but failed to guess. Her face had an invariable calm which was achieved by a conscious smoothing of the muscles, a wary watch for any tendency to tauten, to frown, for the mouth to sag, the chin relax; Jemima guarded her facial muscles with the vigilance of a sentry on duty at a besieged castle. Mylor watched her, not unaware that he was the invader against whom she must forever steel herself.

  ‘Sit down and talk to me about it,’ he said.

  ‘It’s no use talking to you.’

  He had a much better brain than she; she could never argue with him and so she had found other ways of defeating him. She ran the forefinger of her right hand across her brow, tenderly, as though tracing a line of pain.

  ‘And, in any case, I want to go to bed early if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Not feeling so good?’

  ‘It’s nothing much. A touch of migraine.’

  ‘Poor you. Perhaps it’s the weather, we need a storm to clear the air.’

  In time, he would find it necessary to move for the sake of her health; but he was not going to be manoeuvred into that yet.

  Jemima went slowly up the stairs. There was a tight band round her head and a pulse in her temple was already beginning to throb. ‘He will never see things my way, never, never! He is utterly selfish. And he despises me.’ She washed her hands, creamed her face, brushed her hair, staring at the taut mask which confronted her in the mirror. She was naturally very attractive, with a small puckish face made for provocation; but marriage had drained her self¬confidence and she no longer believed in anything she did. Mylor was the wrong man for her, there was something in him that went beyond the confines of what she considered acceptable, something a little wild that frightened her, a rough edge to his nature that bruised her, and worst of all, he had a mind that was at once more sensitive and more robust than her own. Yet she loved him; and she still wanted him for the things which had made her yield to him eight years ago on a bright May night when the moon was big and the wind soughed gentle in the cornfield. There was something within him that burnt bright and she had thought that it would irradiate her, too, and that she would never be the same again. That particular dream had faded; but some of the fascination remained. He was so alive, he generated a physical energy which set her pulse racing. When they went to parties or to school functions, she would think ‘he is the only real man here!’ She was tremendously proud of him, yet she wanted to break him because she could not live with him as he was.

  Perhaps she had always realized that her appeal would fade, but she had imagined that before he tried to break free she would have bound him to her; and so in a way she had, though now it brought her little comfort. Their courtship had been passionate and precipitate, he could not have enough of her. She had not nearly as much to give as he, but in those days she could keep him at white heat simply by a carefully-timed refusal; she had inflicted physical cruelty for the only time in her life and had enjoyed doing it. He had taken his revenge in the cornfield and she had enjoyed that, too. And then they had to marry, and gradually his need of her diminished, he no longer wanted to spend every moment with her, no longer rushed feverishly through the day in order to claim her in the evening, there was more restraint in his love-making, the urgency had gone. She could not see this as the inevitable transition from passion to the slower rhythms of married life. She saw it as a complete rejection, something engendered by her own failure. She decided that she no longer satisfied him, and from that time onwards ceased to do so. She became anxious, unrelaxed, fearful, petulant, until now it had reached a stage where she dreaded their encounters while in the lengthening intervals between she desired him more than ever before.

  ‘I must get away from this house,’ she said as she lay still, afraid to move because now every movement produced violent pain in her head and neck and shoulders. ‘I must get away from this house.’

  He liked the house. It was old, the stairs creaked and there were loose floorboards, probably it was structurally unsound. There were no labour-saving devices and it was hard to run. It was not designed according to modem standards, it faced north-south and the bathroom and lavatory were combined. But he liked it. Mylor and the house joined forces to humiliate her.

  ‘I must get away from the house.’ And from the dimly-lit cul-de-sac which terminated in cornfields across which she could hear the wind soughing at night.

  Chapter Three

  Eastgate lay to the north of Sandwich. It had been a port in the days before the sea receded and the old part of the town had the stagnant look of a beached ship that can no longer hope for a carrying wind. One felt the need for the sea at the end of the stra
ggling main street with its old weather-boarded houses and inns with names such as The Schooner and The Mariners’ Rest; but instead there was a marshy wilderness stretching forlorn to the horizon. It was a landscape of horizons, for there were few hills to break the monotony and a lot of trees had been taken down in this part of Kent. Some people, such as Mylor Drew, liked this because the long view gave them a sense of freedom; others, such as his wife, felt in some way exposed and vulnerable. ‘I feel that half Kent can see me when I hang up my washing,’ Jemima complained. While Maggie sometimes felt that half Kent could see her when she met Mylor at villages some distance from Eastgate. In the winter the wind blew harshly across the marshes and in the summer it was often hot and breathless.

  This was the old town. But to the west, Eastgate had developed rapidly. Since the war several factories had moved out from the over-developed Medway towns; they had thrived and in their turn had attracted more industry. In the wake of the factories had come workers’ dwellings which began as sporadic shanty towns, but had now knitted into respectable suburbs. Then came the advent of the hovercraft; a big aircraft manufacturing firm had decided to concentrate on this aspect of the industry and had moved from London to Eastgate. There was another rash of workers’ dwellings, one of which housed Mr. and Mrs. Mellish and their six children. The property developers moved in and provided estates for the managerial and professional classes.

  Eastgate had become important. Hitherto, its main claim to fame had been that it was the County town of South-East Kent, not in itself much of a distinction as this was one of the smaller administrative counties and would undoubtedly cease to exist when the Maud Commission concluded its report. But now Eastgate existed in its own right, and no body was more aware of this than the Borough Council. A feud had developed over the years between the Eastgate Borough Council and the South-East Kent County Council and this had culminated in a disagreement about the site for the new County offices. The site in question had been earmarked for a long time, but the County Council had moved very slowly. In the meantime, Eastgate became more important and one day the Borough Council awoke to the fact that a new municipal centre was needed and the County Council had pinched the best site for it. The County Council, awakened in its turn, accelerated its plans with the result that the County Architect, having been told to go slow for many years, now found himself abused for his tardiness.

  As if this was not bad enough, the County Council became involved in another controversy, and one which aroused more public concern than the building of new local government offices which, while of passionate concern to members, did not have the same appeal to rate-payers. The education system was a different matter.

  The County Council of South-East Kent administered fifteen grammar schools, forty-five secondary modern schools; and a hybrid known as the High School which took the near-misses from the grammar schools and offered extra facilities, not very clearly defined, which justified this further creaming of the secondary modern schools. This system had continued for many years without any major changes. True, in 1963, as a gesture to the new climate of educational thought, the County Council had earned itself a reputation for enlightenment by proclaiming that it proposed to drop the 11+ examination. So great is the power of words that this was accepted without challenge although something referred to as a ‘selection procedure’ was instituted in its place and had the same divisive effect. There were the usual mumblings from parents, contrary as ever, who now maintained that they had preferred the 11+ because it was more straightforward, either you passed or you didn’t and that was all there was to it, whereas under the new system all kinds of unknown quantities, such as the views of the heads of primary schools, were involved. But although this kind of thing caused some minor irritation to County Council members, and much more trouble to their officers, there was no major rumpus. Parents had not picketed the town hall, as they had in a neighbouring area, nor had they marched through the streets bearing banners proclaiming, ‘The country depends on the next generation. Fair play for our children!’ The County Councillors of South-East Kent congratulated themselves on the fact that their parents were of yeoman stock and not given to such hysterical displays. Then came the new developments, bringing families from the Medway towns, and, worse still, some quite impossible people from the London County Council area. But given time, the County might have absorbed this immigrant population without changing its own way of life. The secondary schools in South-East Kent were small and it was easier for the staff to control the more unruly elements; this appealed to some parents whose children had suffered in the more massive comprehensive schools in which order had, on occasions, broken down. Unfortunately, however, the leisurely process of integration was rudely interrupted. The new disturber of the peace was not so easily handled since it was more distant and therefore less amenable to conversion. It was also powerful, inflexible, and, according to the Chairman of the Education Committee, bloody dictatorial. Whitehall decreed that comprehensive education must be established throughout the country; and after three years Whitehall made it plain to the County Council that if it did not stop shilly-shallying it could not expect any projects for South-East Kent to be included in future building programmes. In face of this shameless blackmail, the County reluctantly prepared to deliver itself of a development plan and immediately became the centre of a violent controversy about the future of the grammar schools. The grammar school parents were, of course, in the minority, but they were an articulate minority and they also represented that section of the community from which the Conservative party normally drew its votes. It was a poignant dilemma. And one which concerned many members as they made their way to the meeting of the Schools Sub-committee which was held in the squat, grey¬faced building in the old town which had been the offices of the County Council since its inception at the beginning of the century.

  Major Rudderham, the Chairman of the Education Committee, was against the comprehensive school for emotional reasons; he had been Chairman for fifteen years and his reputation was tied up with the grammar schools. His survival was also tied up with their survival, for there were those within his own party who contended that he was not the man to undertake the difficult task of introducing comprehensive education. County Councillor Miss Kane was against the comprehensive school for educational reasons; she did not think that any one school could cope with such a wide range of ability. She was also unashamedly of the opinion that a country must give the best possible education to its more gifted pupils, and being an ex-grammar school teacher she had no doubt how that goal could best be achieved. County Councillor Wicks, however, had a far more complex problem. He was not an emotional man, nor was he concerned with abstract theories of education. County Councillor Wicks believed that the main function of a political party is to stay in office. The present situation offered an interesting exercise in the best way to achieve this end. If the County Council pursued comprehensive education too wholeheartedly, it would undoubtedly outrage many of its supporters and votes would be lost; but if it refused to conform it would lose any hope of its projects being included in the major building programmes which had to receive the approval of the Department of Education and Science. Its school buildings were already badly in need of attention, Rudderham’s regime had been cheese-paring and the cracks were beginning to show. In the long run, the electorate would become dissatisfied with sub-standard facilities and votes would be lost. And there was another point. The grammar school parents were in a minority; yet the Conservative party was in power, and that meant that it drew some of its votes from the non-grammar school element. Did these voters not warrant consideration? And, even more important, what of the population of Eastgate, which was changing so rapidly? A new kind of elector had emerged, an elector who, whatever his political persuasion, might not be prepared to vote for candidates with insufficient enthusiasm to put new ideas into practice. People tended to regard County Councillors as expendable. County Councillor Wicks, if he had a cree
d, believed in being ‘with it’ on all matters not concerned with sex or violence; old-fashioned notions, however worthy, were death to politicians. His problem, as he saw it, was to wean his party, of which he was Deputy Leader, away from the old system of education and help it to devise a new system which would be broadly based on comprehensive lines but would not be too offensive to the diehards. One might, for example, retain a number of single-sex schools.

  Wicks thought of all this as he walked towards the County Council offices; but he did not take these ideas across the threshold with him. Local politics are fought on small issues. People would not vote for you because you had devised a system that was the pride of the country; it was the fact that you had got their child a bus pass when the education office had refused it that they remembered. The more weighty issues could be brought forward behind closed doors at a party meeting.

  He looked at the board just inside the entrance to see where the meeting was being held. As he stood there, a lonely, dwarfish figure in the lofty hall, he did not in the least resemble the traditional image of a Conservative councillor: there was something vaguely under-privileged about him, a suggestion of poverty if not actual then inherited from not-too-distant forbears. He had a head too big for his frail body and his arms were very short, a fact which he usually concealed by keeping them in his jacket pockets. He was not, however, unduly sensitive and liked nothing better than to attract attention. In this, Nature had abetted him by providing abundant auburn hair which, at thirty-eight, had lost none of its brilliance. Beneath the flaming thatch, his face was very pale, dominated by quick brown eyes and a nose as sharp as a ferret’s.

  Mr. Crocker, fretting over the report on capitation allowances, pushed the attendance book across the table as Wicks entered the room and at the same time tried to signal to Malcolm Punter that more chairs would be required. Punter, who considered himself too important to act as porter, contrived not to notice and began to talk to County Councillor Mrs. Pritchard about his twins.