“He did me a great injury once”, he said meditatively, “but I have prayed that he may be forgiven.”
If unction can ease the path to the Almighty, Bevan’s prayer reached God; it may even have got through to Freddie. The angels would like his laugh, “Ooh—sorry!”
Freddie’s raid on the domain of the Almighty—which in my theology had a mixed population of God, Gawd (Baptist in those days), Gud (C. of E., privately educated and Cambridge University, Civil Service), the Devil (not a bad sort with many disguises), various demons (Nickel Sehn, Hodson or Hodson’s Horse—I was not sure whether he owned the horse or the other way round), and the most awful Arf Arfer—was not the only rebellion that began to erode my oppressor’s power.
Once every two weeks we had a hymn-singing class taken by a mistress who I thought was nice despite her ominous name—Miss Good. She was not smart like the Matron, not like the maid in the hymn and only smart on Sundays. She was clever, like Nigger our headmaster, but curiously and very frighteningly gave me the wiggling’ feeling when I “hadn’t done a thing”—”really and truly”— but who on earth would believe that?
Some hymns expanded my Pantheon; Gideon for example—the ‘prowl and prowl around’ one. This was a bit sinister with Gideon prowling around and I wasn’t quite sure if he was A or B—Powers of Darkness, or the other crowd. Anyhow, it was a fine hymn; while ‘they’ were prowling and prowling around we sang very softly, ppp, gathering our breath ready for CHRISTIAN UP AND SMITE THEM, fff; we gave it everything we had. That, I used to think, must have scared the slats out of ‘them’. At night time I didn’t like Gideon and the powers of darkness prowling around our dormitory and under my bed.
This hymn-singing period gave me great pleasure and on one occasion a surprise. The hymn ‘Art thou weary, art thou languid?’ had a lovely, sad tune and brought me much comfort. I found out that five or six little boys liked it and were just as weary and languid and sore distressed as I was. Grown-ups, including I am sorry to say Miss Good, seemed to think we couldn’t be weary and languid; we knew we were—most of the time. This hymn and another, ‘Summer suns are glowing’, were my favourites. I did not have to ask for ‘Art thou weary’ because five or six others always did so. ‘Summer suns’ was not so popular; that I had to support all myself or we would not have it. On this particular day the drizzle was coming down in its usual determined, anonymous way, more like a fungoid growth of the air than what I was used to calling rain. I put up my hand.
“Well?” said Miss Good in what I thought at the time was an unwelcoming way.
Stimulated by the ghastly weather, not laughing, not crying, not happy, not sad, and spurred by the fire of that wonderful sun, the great leaves drooping in the heat, the flowers blazing in colours of unimaginable splendour, ‘“Summer suns’”, I said.
There was a stupefied pause. “Oh Wilfred!” she expostulated, “not again /Just look at it—pouring with rain! You can’t want that!”
I had looked at it. It was not pouring with rain. What rain? It was just a dirty… well not rain. Rain! Now that was something like—if only it would rain—like when you heard it coming, roaring and hissing and moaning and sighing over the trees and the grass in the distance till suddenly—there it was! That was rain! That was sun! Still, there were buttercups. When I saw my mother on my next Sunday out I meant to pick her a big bunch of them to show her. ‘Frail as summer flowers we flourish, blows the wind and it is gone’—that was a nice hymn too.
“Well?” It was Miss Good again. I felt tense, anxious, stubborn.
‘“Summer suns are glowing’”, said my small, almost inaudible voice. She, mercifully, did not persist. The others were looking at me; they were more than ever curious when we were all singing and they could see I was hardly singing at all. I never asked for ‘Summer suns are glowing’ again.
When Sunday came I did not collect the buttercups. My mother told me she could tell by the buttercups if I like butter; she held one under my chin and… yes! I liked butter because it showed yellow on my chin. She herself seemed unconvinced; so was I, but I was weary and languid; maybe even ‘sore distressed’ thinking about going back to school—though I had only been away about an hour. I did not think much of the riddle; I could not think about the marvellous, incredible, unimaginable buttercups which blazed unconsidered in the meadows around us.
It was time to go. We were in the parlour of the lodgings. She had a present for me—a half pound size Lyle’s Golden Syrup tin, the container in Indian days for so many of our luxuries, filled with chocolates. I shook my head.
“You are a funny boy! Don’t you want them?”
“Yes”, I said dully.
“Then take them back with you.”
But I persisted; I shook my head again. I wouldn’t take them back to that… gymnasium… school.
Was I unhappy, she asked. No. Did I like it there? I nodded, yes. But I wouldn’t take them back.
4
RELIGION was a sore trial. It was difficult to avoid the certainty that / would be a sore trial to God if he knew about my existence. Sometimes, as when I laughed at Freddie treading on the feet of boys saying their prayers, I thought He might suppose that my involvement was more active than in fact it had been. Dean Farrar contributed to my suspicion of God, and my suspicion of God—”I haven’t done anything; really I haven’t”—gave ghastly reality to Eric’s school in which the mortality should have attracted the attention of authority.
The sense of brooding disaster was made real by the tragic life, unknowable by us, of our headmaster. He was a man of whom my father, like others, was very fond. How my father came to know him, since his visits to England were infrequent, I do not know, but so it was. Masters from the main school visited him regularly; one in particular played billiards with him once a week on a miniature table—the one luxury he possessed. The weekly click of the billiard balls exercised us curiously and was the signal for giggles which I did not understand.
The story circulated by one boy, that Hirst had married in his early twenties a girl of twenty-one who had to be admitted immediately to a mental hospital, I discovered years later to be true. To my contemporaries of nine and ten this story meant no more than any other fact about ‘Old Nigger’—our name for him—such as that he wore carpet slippers, or a new tie, or—as I announced loudly one day as I scrambled upstairs to bed, unaware that I was helping myself by clutching the leg of his trousers—”Old Nigger says it’s to be a half holiday tomorrow!” “Oh no he didn’t”, said the trouser leg gruffly; I let go hurriedly. “Ooh sir, sorry sir!” I said, filled with confusion but not afraid, for he was not a man one feared—though I had been afraid of him when he said I might have to be sent away if I ‘wiggled’. Well, he must have known because his wife had been sent away. It could not have been for wiggling because my sister had not been able to wiggle. On the other hand Mrs Hirst may have been able to; and that might have caused it and that might explain why Mr Hirst was so sad. He was sad; of that there was no doubt at all. Like the church bells that reminded me on Wednesday of the last Sunday and the one to come, his sadness reminded me of something. “Are you feeling homesick?” the boy in the dormitory had asked. He had not meant was I A or B—that was clear. But the church bells, and St Winifred’s of The World of School’, or Nigger Hirst—it was none of it quite ‘homesick’ but I was not sure what it was. ‘Search the Scriptures’ was a bit like it; so was Willy Bevan who was an orphan. Everyone said it in a hushed voice.
One day I tried saying it out loud. “You’re only an orphan!” I shouted at him. For a moment I thought I had solved it; Willy flopped suddenly and became religious—but with his eyes open, unlike saying your prayers when you shut your eyes or pretended. His friend Pickett was there and he, as he proclaimed, heard me say it. I had meant him to—that is why I had shouted.
In less time than it takes to write, the whole pack were on to me— then stopped and watched. The goggle-eyed parrots, the hosts of Midean or Gideon. “Let’s chas
e him”, said Pickett. “No, not now. Wait till we get him on the Mountain”, said Morgan, “We can use stumps then.” It was agreed; even Bevan was recovering at the suggestion. We all cheered up—in the prevailing optimism even I began to feel better.
Bevan, who had been overcome by religion, though still mournful, became as exalted by ‘stumps’ as he had been hurled into religion by ‘orphan’. When I tried to join the prevailing gleeful anticipation I was given a cold reception. “Look at the little swine”, said Pickett, “he’s not a bit sorry for what he’s done.” It was rather frightening—like the ‘box-on-the-ears’ which I had said I wanted at Woodstock. I modified my rapture.
The Mountain was our cricket field, very uneven and well described by our name for it; we were supposed to play football and cricket on it. By the time we got there the prevalent air of cheerfulness seemed to have dissipated the former mood till Pickett and Morgan said, “Come on now chaps! Let him have it!” Six of them took a stump each, and with shouts of “Run! you swine!” they started after me. I ran.
As I was still the smallest I had no choice. Physically I did not come to any harm other than a few bruises. Most had forgotten what it was all about, but Bevan had a tenacious religion; when he ‘forgave’ someone he did not do it in any half-hearted manner. I likewise did not easily ‘forget’ being ‘forgiven’; it added a zest to my determination to steer clear of Arf Arfer and his trespasses.
It was disconcerting to discover, soon after this, that Trespassers will be prosecuted’. I did not dare to ask whether it was with stumps or without, but it was evident that orphans, church bells and God, to whom Bevan habitually prayed even when he was not going to bed, should be given a wide berth.
Not long after this an extraordinary thing happened on one of our Sunday trips to the main school for chapel. It was clearly in the next term; it must have been winter because we trooped up in darkness. This was usually a pleasant occasion because from the time we set off nothing particularly awful could happen till Monday morning, except nightmares and the usual squares which I continued to accumulate till I had perfected my scheme of playing trains on the Walk. The big boys were large and impressive, not frightening or nasty like Hodson with his horse, and Havelock who believed in God and bagpipes.
The gaslight in Hall was dim, the flames burned with a sinister blue tinge. A cold draught which used to spring up and moan through Hall as the sermon ended seemed that night to add a heavier message.
“It is quite wrong that no one said anything to me; not a word at any time.”
I came to my senses suddenly. These were not the tones with which I was familiar when the Headmaster was preaching. The level monotonous phrase, the uninspired message, those I knew and dreaded as I composed myself for the weekly ordeal; nor had I on this occasion expected anything else.
“But”, he continued, “surely if you knew that one of you, however esteemed for his games or work, was putting poison in the food of another boy you would go to one of the masters and tell him. Yet when a boy is poisoning the mind of another you say nothing.”
The school had become silent and tense. This made the event even more exciting to all of us in the preparatory school. As soon as service was over the pent-up curiosity broke.
“Has he died?” I asked.
“Who?” said my friend.
“The chap he poisoned.”
“No, you chump; he wasn’t meaning that kind of poison.”
“But he said poison; what kind of poison was it?” I asked.
My friend became embarrassed and confidential. “Tell you later.” And he ran off. But he did not tell me later; a name was mentioned, of a boy in the main school; he had been expelled it was said. ‘Expelled’ sounded dreadful; for long the flaring gaslight, the gloom, the thrillingly serious voice of the Headmaster as he spoke of poison, dwelt in my mind. But I dared not speak of it after I had discovered that mention of… what? Besides, I did not wish to be called a fat-head or a chump.
‘Expelled’. That was fine I Expelled I Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden—by God or some archangel with his flaming sword. Then it came to me suddenly, in the ‘twinkling of an eye’ like Death. Of course! It was wiggling! It seemed absurd that I had not grasped the point earlier. But then doubts crept in. Mr Hirst had only said I would be sent away. That sounded awful but was not so awful as ‘expelled’. I was sure I was on the right track. The wages of sin is Death’. Clearly I was done for and, like kittens, would sooner or later be ‘put down’. On the other hand, it was ‘the Mighty’ who were put down… really it was too boring, depressing. I gave it up. But it did not and would not give me up.
5
LOOKING back on that appalling period of my life I do not feel, as I did then, that it was my fault; nor the fault of my contemporaries, or the local school authorities. The parents, staff, all were caught in a web of undirected menace. Sex, ‘wiggling’ of whatever variety, was the only redeeming thing in our lives. It was not the cause of anything; it obtruded because it shone out—as anything that brought relief in that dreadful darkness would have done. Since it obtruded it became the target for hostile attention. It did not dawn on me that it was ‘wiggling’; it glowed into realization; first darkness, incomprehension; then an incandescence in my reddening cheeks— they knew even before /did. They always did. “Nothing! Nothing!” I would say, “I haven’t done anything!”
Years later I complained of a sore place in my mouth to a most formidable, Christian old woman who asked me if it had not been caused by smoking. Since I did not smoke—my first experience of a cigarette had made me sick—I had no difficulty in saying “No”. Then I saw her eyes were staring fixedly at me and I knew I had done something wrong. “No!” I said, “I haven’t”, becoming red. The glow burned ever more brightly in my cheeks. “Honestly! I haven’t”, feeling angry now as well as frightened. Of course she believed me. She believed me in that quiet, forgiving, Christian kind of way which showed in the bright smile which illuminated her features—and would even have illuminated mine if only I had been a good boy, a nice boy instead of a bad boy, a dirty little wiggling horrid boy. Well, I had not, definitely not put poison in any boy’s food. But there it was; ‘Conscience makes cowards of us all’. No one told me that that did not prove I was guilty, but only that we are all cowards. My mouth hurt; maybe my mind hurt. Gradually I learnt—the realization of the horrible truth about the poison in the food was one milestone on that path of learning—the rules of the game. First, you go and ask for help. Then the adult ripostes “What have you been doing?” Hell’s fires have by this time begun to blaze in one’s cheeks. The next stage depends on the speed of the protagonists; it depends on being able to anticipate the next stage. For the small boy this is the firing off of moral grape-shot, like “I haven’t done anything!”, before there has been time for the adult to formulate a charge. The opponent, on the other hand—especially if an experienced adult—anticipates the repudiation of guilt by firing off an equally polyvalent forgiveness, a general absolution, before the small boy has had a chance to find out, and therefore defend himself against, the crime of which he is charged. I had in fact long since graduated in this war and did not need to consult further. The true armour, without Saint Paul to tell me, was to be innocent—if possible genuinely— and to keep one’s apparatus of dissimulation and lying well oiled and working smoothly.
The general principle was clear enough; its formulation in precise terms for rapid translation into action was a more complex matter. There was the 23rd Psalm with that bit about having oil poured over your head till your cup, if you had such a thing handy, ran over. ‘Unctuous’ was the word; ‘supreme’ unction was not as simple as it seemed. Usually it was safe to bet on being ‘innocent’; not so when others got into top moral or religious gear. I was scared. I resolved to keep as far from wiggling as possible, but since the time Hirst had spoken of the danger of being ‘sent away’ (and I now realized how closely this might resemble being ‘
expelled’) I had no luck at all. / might resolve to have nothing to do with wiggling, but wiggling did not return the compliment. What was more, I felt so much better—even so much morally better—after wiggling, and far more able to withstand temptation. I almost always entered into lavish contracts with the Almighty to leave my ‘widdler’ alone. I sometimes wondered if Saint Paul was speaking metaphorically about his ‘thorn in the flesh’; my ‘widdler’ was permanently stuck into my flesh.
‘Sex’ might have become the focus for equally exaggerated glorification, as I know now from experience of other times and places. Then I did not know what the menance was. The sonorous and impressive phrases of the headmaster, the mobilization of ‘Christian So-ho-ho-holdiers marching on to-hoo war’ was premature, immature grasping for certainty where no certainty was. Had I wanted to erect a primitive phallic, visual im.igc to worship it would have taken a Curzon-like form with leather exo-skeletonous sheath to take the strain imposed by an inadequate spine.
The time was ripe for change. At last I, approaching twelve, could see hope of release into the free air of the Main School; ‘freedom’ was an emanation from the main school which penetrated into and pervaded my last year in the prep. It owed something to the quality of the main school which, even as I think back on it now, was enlightened and advanced for that time. The first symptom of this complex state of enlightenment and relief was peculiar and alarming. It came about in a surprising way.
As I have said, my prevalent impression, though unformulated then, was of undirected menace—it was implicit. The overt manifestation of this was a craze for playing trains, a game which dominated our communal play. It developed voluntarily, spontaneously, the school crystalizing out into a pattern of two groups, reminiscent of ‘A’ and ‘B’, having names of main railway lines—Great Northern, and our local line, Great Eastern. We used the same system of ‘rails’ which were tracks in the playground. Unobserved, but observing us, was Miss Good who, as I found out later, saw us as happily and enthusiastically playing together. From the worm’s eye view—mine—I watched enviously. Impelled by some memory of glorious dust I tentatively joined in. At once it was discovered that I had outstanding gifts as a locomotive. Unwarned by unhappy experience with my shoes I was carried away by being suddenly ‘wanted’ by both teams. The glory, never achieved before or since, went to my head. I was picked for his railway by Morgan the head of one team, the other head being Pickett. Lost to the world I emerged from the hitherto well-preserved anonymity of the Walk game. Before I had realized it I was almost at once recognized by Pickett—who pointed it out to Morgan, who hardly needed to be prompted—to be “swanking” and “showing off”. Gone was my glory. It was as bad as shouting “Orphan” at Willy Bevan. Not wanting to be chased with stumps I returned to my private world; I resumed my insignificant role of doing what I was told. But I had tasted what it was like to be wanted—almost famous and loved. Not so Pickett and Morgan who, both being big and powerfully built, had chosen to be famous and feared. They were stupid and nasty, but these opinions I kept strictly to myself. Consequent to their choice they retained their eminence for months. It surprised them and us when suddenly one day ten or twelve of us attacked the two. Shrieking and yelling we threw ourselves on them. I do not remember myself as in any way prominent although I had now been at the school for three years and could hardly be excused on the grounds of insignificance. Fists were used; the mass of us in an unco-ordinated, yelling horde piled ourselves on top of Morgan. I do not know where Pickett had got to. Then, as suddenly as the riot had started, it stopped. I remember feeling frightened, frightened of what Morgan would do to me—I could not imagine ‘us’ having anything done to us. Then it became clear to me that we were frightened—Morgan too. There was a sudden hush, no shouting, just dusting ourselves down. Perhaps Hirst came in, but I am sure we had stopped before then. Had I been asked what was going on I would have said, “nothing”.
The Long Week-End 1897-1919 Page 5
