Copyright
4th Estate
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020
Copyright © Philip Hensher 2020
Cover photograph © Plainpicture/Carmen Spitznagel
Philip Hensher asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
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Source ISBN: 9780008323073
Ebook edition: February 2020 ISBN: 9780008323080
Version: 2020-01-30
Dedication
For Herbert Grieshop
Epigraphs
History has taught you a lesson, it has shattered this illusion. Yes, the German revolution is growing, but not in the way we should like it.
V. I. LENIN, Political Report of the Central Committee, Extraordinary Seventh Congress of the RCP(B), 6‒8 March 1918
To be jealous of what only appears to exist is a waste of effort. My wisdom secretly tells me that everything only appears to exist, nothing actually exists, we must be satisfied with that. Good night, prophet. Pleasant dreams, comrade.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO, The Stone Raft
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraphs
Part one
Part two
Part three
Also by Philip Hensher
About the Author
About the Publisher
Part one
When I was a boy, I liked to watch men at work. I still do, in fact. What I like is both the confident display of expertise, and moments when disaster intervenes. A workman is there to carve a block of stone into slabs, say. He wears yellow goggles. His stiff gloves are too big for human hands. He might take his circular saw. In retrospect his magisterial confidence is quite funny. (I mean no disrespect to the working man.) Small boys stand around in a circle, fascinated and patient. The saw starts its high electric whine. The worker lowers it to a slab of white marble glistening under a jet of water. His gesture suggests the showman. Wet, the marble slices as easily as soap. The whine of the saw lowers to a growl. There is a sudden sound out of nowhere, like a shriek of despair. Before you know what has happened, it has happened. The blade of the saw lies in five pieces on and around the marble. The centre of the blade is spinning uselessly to a halt. Nobody has been hurt, but the blade is shattered. Somewhere inside the block of marble, apparently as soft as soap underneath the saw, there was a vein of quite different stuff, of hard metal or of granite. The workman expected the blade to cut without effort. But sometimes a blade meets a streak of stuff that won’t be cut through. The blade lies in pieces on the floor. Calm command stands aghast, hands spread in dismay.
The school I went to had been going for years. It’s had a sourly drilled series of centenary celebrations by now. We thought it was a terrible school – the capacity for loyalty was not highly cultivated in us. It was terrible in traditional ways, top down, mortar-boarded. The masters leant over us sarcastically, demanding the subjunctive form of the verb avoir as if it had been stolen from them. They called each of us ‘boy’. Twenty years before, the school had been fundamentally altered by the whims of politicians. For two decades it had been a comprehensive, obliged to take in any child it was told. It was just like every other school in the city, no better, no worse.
But, of course, it is not the fundamental nature of things that matters. It is the superficial things of the world that we notice, and that shape our lives. I would be a different person if I had not gone to a school where the front consisted of a massive Corinthian portico with two pillars too many. The Edwardians thought the task of education deserved a statement of grandeur. Some of us dealt with these pretensions briskly. On Friday nights the kids used to break in and gather under the portico in the dark. Every Monday morning the caretaker would have to scrub the new felt-tip obscenities off the wall, would have to shovel up the day-old mounds of human shit left in corners, cursing the filth that had done this. It was done by a tough girl called Beverley – you didn’t call her Bev unless you were prepared to prove yourself as tough as her. Bev could shit on cue. She was quite well known for her party trick.
One of the elements of the school’s superficial substance, along with the orienteering club, Latin, calling homework prep and the indulged paedophilia in the masters’ common room, was the occasional presence of the armed forces. I don’t understand, now, what the connection between our education and the military was. But twice a year or so an officer from the army or the navy would turn up to talk about duty and discipline and the opportunities awaiting anyone who went in for a career holding, or more likely counting, guns. They came with recruiting films suggesting that much of your duty in the army would be spent on tropical beaches lounging beneath palm trees.
In recent years I often thought of those recruiting films when the news came back from Iraq or Afghanistan. I imagined boys who had died where politicians had decided they would die. I think that now largely because of Percy Ogden. The only kids who went into the army were the poor sods in the remedial classes. I don’t suppose they’re all dead, of course.
I spoke to one of these visiting officers only once. At sixteen, I was obsessed with the poetry of the Sitwells and of Mallarmé; I once spent an entire week with my face wrapped in a gauze scarf, the better to appreciate the world’s colours. (I had been reading Baudelaire, I expect.) The armed forces would bring one major piece of kit to the school, where it sat with morose insistence in the playground. That day the army brought a tank. The officer stood aside with the headmaster. He smiled as the boys clambered over it. I was a boy who had no intention of clambering. I had a horror of motor oil. I found myself next to the major. He looked at me, expectantly. I had no idea what to say. My father’s injunction always to make an effort in conversation rose up in me. I found a question to ask. ‘Do you,’ I said, ‘paint it that lovely shade of dull green yourselves? Or does the manufacturer deliver it up like that?’ He was immensely disappointed. I had looked keen as mustard. But my aestheticism was of the sort that emerges in cropped hair and parodically precise, even exquisite, adherence to the structures of school uniform. ‘They do it,’ he said eventually.
The headmaster rocked back and forth on the balls of his feet, his avuncular smile tested for the moment. ‘You stupid boy,’ he said the next day, passing me in the corridor.
Stupidity was the worst they expected, not open revolt and insult. After the presentation of the tank we were summoned into the assembly hall, a space with a glistening orange parquet floor, smelling strongly of shepherd’s pie from the school kitchens next door, and overlapping that, an inexplicable odour of wet nappies from the huge blackout curtains. The film was shown. The major had the spirit to mutter and grumble at its minor inaccuracies. We listened in silence. At the end, six favourites of the headmaster had been primed with questions. What sports
could you play in your spare time? What were the opportunities to do an engineering qualification? When did the regiment’s uniform start to include – oh, I forget what the uniform included, but could it have been buttresses? – and (an indulgently drafted one) did the regiment have a mascot, and if so, what was it?
A goat.
The headmaster had had experience. He hardly expected an assembly of pubescents to raise a question without being primed. The six questions came to an end. He was about to call the event to a successfully controlled close. The major had not been briefed. ‘There’s another question,’ he said. ‘The boy there, at the back.’
The headmaster demurred. He liked to know what was going to happen and what would be permitted to be said at these events. But there were ten minutes left. ‘Boy at the back,’ he said.
The boy at the back was Percy Ogden. He stood up to ask his question.
I suppose it always begins like this – with a boy standing in an audience, denouncing, jabbing his finger at a figure on stage. His voice raised and cracking with the strain, or the joy of speech. All around him – always, always – a small group of supporters, nodding in their phalanx. Beyond that, varied responses, a mind not made up, amazement, open tutting disapproval, here and there a sycophantic performance of amusement for the sake of the official speaker. But political lives always start like this. A boy rises from his seat. His finger is already pointing in rage.
‘Can I ask a question?
‘How much does it cost to educate someone to the age of sixteen, or eighteen?
‘Take a guess. I would say it costs the state about twelve thousand pounds a year per pupil. So we’re delivering up to you a resource where the investment has been between £144,000 and £170,000, from the point of view of education alone.
‘I’m putting it like that – I’m serious, don’t shake your head – because I guess you understand financial investment and return and amortization and things like that. There are other ways of looking at it.’
‘Can you ask a question?’ the headmaster said. ‘We haven’t got all day.’
He was held back from cutting Percy Ogden off. He must have been thrown by the word amortization – an A-level word. Whether he did not know what it meant himself, or was impressed by the display of intelligence – or, rather, the display of a word not much used by most people, not much understood, which can be the same thing – in either case he let Percy Ogden continue.
‘I’m coming to my point,’ Ogden went on. ‘Is it really a responsible use of public resources? I’m putting it like this because I don’t think you understand anything else, not the human waste and cruelty and sheer wrongness of the whole thing. Are you managing public money sensibly? When you take a unit of public investment into which a quarter of a million or more has gone, once you’ve factored in healthcare and your training programme, and sent him – I’m sorry, I mean it, or do you say him of these units, like you say she about ships – sent him off to some remote imperial war on the other side of the world, I say, some imperialist war over territory, a few islands where this valuable piece of kit, this human being, called Joe or Jim or Steve is going to have a bullet in his head on the third day, be killed in any number of horrible ways – I’m coming to my point – that’s an incredible waste of investment, isn’t it? Are you proud of your responsible stewardship of public money, not to say of the human beings called Joe or Jim or Steve who are now going to have to be shipped back expensively, at public expense, in pieces, in a box—’
The headmaster had been talking over Percy Ogden for some time now in disgust and command. Although he had the advantage of amplification, and Percy Ogden only had his voice and his jabbing finger, it was Ogden’s voice I heard. Ogden’s words: his ideas. The reactions to Ogden in the assembly were quite various. He was surrounded by his usual supporters – Mohammed Ahmed, Tracy Cartwright, James Frinton, Eric Milne, that lot. They were nodding. Eric Milne was pounding demands into the air between his widespread thighs. He had been told by a master that he should take up sprinting, for no other reason than that he was black. Injustice was strong in him. He was a skinny flexible boy, like a model of a boy made out of things, but he only stretched for a book on the top shelf. They had known this was coming, and were enjoying it with fervent assent. More obvious, I guess, was the weary or cynical response in much of the hall – once they realized that Percy Ogden was making some kind of political argument. They turned to each other. They sniggered and tittered. They started their own conversations, they pulled faces, they yawned in a performance of boredom, they cast sympathetic looks towards the platform. I expect they wanted to be noticed. They wanted to gain credit by their attitudes. Percy Ogden was not, in fact, very popular.
Here and there were people to whom Percy Ogden’s long question meant something quite different. Those were the ones who listened to his words. He went on probably too long. But it now seemed to me that I had been wrong in the past in groaning and trying to catch the teacher’s eye whenever dissent surfaced. Now I understand that what Percy Ogden was doing that day was conducting a thought experiment, but I entered into that one, considering what existence would look like if it were weighed against money. I thought about an act of destruction in terms of resources. A warship went up in flames. How much had the ship and all its weaponry cost? How much investment of funds had gone into each of those men, how much trained expertise? I threw myself into the exercise while Ogden was speaking. I felt with revulsion that I was momentarily transforming myself into a quite different person. All the time, the transformation, a permanent one, was taking place in another direction.
It seems to me now, as I have read, that if most people found themselves in a world where every other human had become blind, they would pretend that they were blind too. They might come to believe that they truly were blind. Only a few people would look about them at the halls filled with the blind and place a value on their ability to see.
I looked around me that afternoon.
The questioner was silenced. The headmaster turned to the soldier. ‘I don’t know if you want to say anything in response to that,’ he said. ‘It seemed to me that Ogden was making a point all his own. It wasn’t really a question, was it?’
The soldier had been keeping an upright bearing until this point. His buttons were polished. His stance was vertical. But now he did something unexpected: he giggled.
‘Yes, maybe,’ he said. ‘I know I’m not going to – I mean – that’s always—’
‘I think,’ the headmaster said, ‘we’d all like to thank Major Urch for his valuable time and a fascinating talk. Let’s thank—’
Where this came from, I don’t know and can’t guess, but Major Urch had something else to say. ‘I mean,’ he said, to nobody in particular, ‘I mean, Trotskyites!’
That must have been the moment when I understood what had happened. Sometimes a saw, passing through soft marble, hits a vein of iron, and shatters. It would not have been hard for someone in the major’s position to answer convincingly. But he did not and could not. His purpose had been to demonstrate power. Our role within his purpose was to sit and listen and ask what we were told to ask. That afternoon, I understood that never again would my resistance to the exertion of power be limited to asking insultingly gracious questions about the colour of paint, like the Queen Mother in an abattoir. Most people are good and docile and blind, and the world could not do without the obedient, who are led from place to place. I had never been obedient, but from now on they would know about it. The saw had met a vein of iron within. It lay in pieces all around.
What Ogden had done had not, as I thought, only been done to me and perhaps a very few others. We very few had done that thing that humans hardly ever do, and generally with much pain and shame, or so I thought: we had changed our minds. About a week later, however, I found that I was wrong. The school was summoned to a Monday-morning assembly. The caretaker had s
tarted work that morning to discover, yet again, a mound of human shit beneath the portico of the school. It was Beverley, of course. Everyone knew that. But there was no means of extracting the information from any one of us. The threat Beverley represented, in playground, bus and street, was much more immediate than anything the headmaster could summon. Of course, these days, surveillance cameras would have long put a stop to the nuisance. DNA testing would have identified the culprit. The headmaster, then, worked himself up into a rage, having no alternative. He made a promise.
‘You needn’t think you’re safe,’ he shouted, ‘just because you haven’t been informed on by your fellow pupils. Our investigations start here. And they’re serious. And we never fail. You’ve heard of MI5. And MI6. Well, we’re not MI6. We’re not MI5. We’re MI10. We get ten out of ten every time. Come up against MI10 and see what happens. I promise you …’
But a tremor of doubt had crept into the headmaster’s voice, because an unaccustomed sound was in the hall. All through the room, people were turning to their neighbours and saying, ‘MI10,’ before shaking their heads. They were laughing. The headmaster was ridiculous. We had discovered that. Percy Ogden’s question, a week before, had not been forgotten.
‘I promise you—’ the headmaster said.
‘Trotskyite!’ a boy somewhere in the middle of the hall called. The word had never had any meaning, but in the week since Major Urch’s visit, it had been taken up in the yard. You heard it everywhere.
‘Who was that?’ the headmaster said. ‘Who shouted out? Mrs Macdonald, did you see who called out?’
‘I did not, Headmaster,’ Mrs Macdonald said, from the side of the hall where she sat. She was an English teacher, deep in Keats and Yeats. I think now she must have seen, as I did, the importance that investigative powers attach to insubordination. Trotskyite. The headmaster’s powers were gone.
A Small Revolution in Germany Page 1
