A Small Revolution in Germany

by Philip Hensher

  ‘José couldn’t believe it,’ Simon said. ‘Can I have another glass? Thanks. He was left fulminating – “Mrs Macdonald! Mrs Macdonald!” ‒ but Beverley Ibrahim was too quick. She’s going to be hauled over the coals tomorrow. I don’t know what she’s even doing in the sixth form in the first place.’

  ‘Golly,’ I said.

  ‘Didn’t you hear any of that? What did you think I was talking about?’

  ‘I thought you were talking about that question Percy Ogden asked.’

  ‘Oh, Percy Ogden’s question,’ Matthew said. ‘Golly, that went on. He’s such a wazzock, Percy Ogden. No one cares what he thinks.’

  ‘It’s so immature to be rude like that to a guest, just because you’ve read Karl Marx and can’t stop going on about it,’ Simon said. ‘I don’t think he’s going to get into trouble for it. I honestly don’t see much difference, by the way, between Percy Ogden saying that armed forces oppress and murder the innocent proletariat, you blood-soaked collaborator with imperialism, and Beverley Ibrahim saying, “Fuck me now.” They both seem pretty rude and immature.’

  A silence followed. Simon’s last sentence had sounded surprisingly aggressive, considering that Percy Ogden was not in the room. It was unusual, too, for him to use an obscenity in speech, even quoting one. He did not look at me while he said any of this. It was as if my role here was to answer, defending Percy Ogden, so that Simon or Matthew could answer back dismissively. Of course everyone in the school knew who Percy Ogden was. They mostly had the same sort of views about his phalanx of supporters. I certainly knew what those two would say about him. Though I hadn’t defended him in the past beyond saying, ‘He’s not that bad,’ now I had reached the point where I didn’t feel he needed to be defended from the boys who had been my friends. To be blunt: Matthew and Simon were not worth it. It seems astonishing now that I was prepared to lose two friends of years on the chance of stepping into the world of Percy Ogden. I had only heard him speak in public, which is no guide to character, or of anything but how someone wants to be seen, and an hour in a teashop. There might be no friendship there. Even if new ones began, they could exist quite happily with other, more established, friendships.

  ‘What happened to you, then?’ Matthew said. ‘We waited for you for ten minutes after that colonel, but there was no sign of you.’

  He must know perfectly well. ‘I got held up,’ I said. ‘I was talking to Percy Ogden and that lot.’

  ‘That lot,’ Simon said. ‘That Mohammed Ahmed, he’s an idiot. He was in my Greek O-level class. Every week another stupid question that had nothing to do with anything.’

  ‘Everyone failed,’ Matthew said.

  ‘I didn’t fail,’ Simon said. ‘I got a C. I’d have done better if Mohammed Ahmed hadn’t spent all his time flustering Mrs Benton with questions about democracy in Athens. I don’t know how he even got considered for Greek O level.’

  ‘He lives in Markham, down the hill,’ Matthew said. These points – they seem so mysterious years later, and made perfect sense when we were sixteen. ‘They wanted to show you don’t need to be posh to do Greek O level.’

  ‘He’s all right, that Mohammed,’ I said, perfectly calmly. ‘What did he get, anyway?’

  ‘I think he got a C, too,’ Simon said. ‘But that was a fluke. That was definitely a fluke. No one could believe it. He was still having to learn the alphabet the week before the exam.’

  ‘That Percy Ogden, he’s definitely awful, though,’ Matthew said, giving it one last go. ‘Apparently he does the same – spends the whole time in economics arguing with Guy the Gorilla.’ (The A level economics tutor.) ‘Guy told him he’d do better to listen before striking poses out of Marx third hand. Guy thinks he isn’t even going to pass the mock. I’ve heard he’s a queer, too.’

  ‘How far are you going today?’ I said.

  There was some ambiguity in what I had said. I had not given it the aggressive intonation that would have made it a response to Matthew’s absurd and injured comments. Matthew looked at me for the first time before answering.

  ‘I think we’ll get up as far as the hospital tonight,’ he said. ‘I’m feeling quite up for it. Thanks for the pit stop.’

  ‘See you tomorrow,’ Simon said. They filed out of the kitchen. I watched them go in a sarcastic, supervisory frame of mind, as if they were likely to steal something from the hall. Judging by the way they set off, heads down, silently padding up the hill towards the mental hospital, they felt the weight of my gaze and its meaning. But that must have been a delusion.

  *

  They must have been talking about me on the bus home because they were ready with the questions the next morning. They were as focused as a group of matchmakers with a commission to earn. We didn’t have to go out and play in the playground, as the lower half of the school did. The adherence to the infantile terms for the activity and the space represented our judgement on them. Instead we tended to sit in one of the form rooms at the top of the first staircase, whether it was raining or not. Some kids walked down the hill, and that age and that generation was one that was (now astonishingly) committed to smoking. Others might, I suppose, have played football or some other game, but most went between the dour, high-curtained form rooms like dowagers on an evening passeggiata. Things had mended between me and Matthew and Simon that morning. I think they had penitently concluded that if you were angry about a friendship declining, the way to hasten the decline was to behave disagreeably. Matthew caught me up on the way to school. When Simon saw me, he immediately suggested an afternoon of Dungeons and Dragons at his place on Saturday. I was alone in a classroom at lunchtime, reading Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken. I guess at this distance all anyone would have seen was that weird kid reading some book. Tracy Cartwright and Eric Milne slid silently into the desk in front of me, prepared and practised. They pulled the chairs round with a screech.

  ‘So we hear you’re into radical politics,’ Tracy said. Her eyes were running over me like spotlights. ‘What sort of thing? What are you? Have you read Bakunin? What’s that you’re reading? Ibsen? What’s that for?’

  ‘Mass entertainment,’ Eric said. ‘Mass capitalist nineteenth-century entertainment. What are they, plays? That’s the industrial system, buy tickets and sit in order in some kind of class hierarchy, rich there, bourgeoisie there. Agree to sit silently for three hours, yeah?’

  ‘I’m not sitting silently for three hours,’ I said. ‘I’m just reading it.’

  ‘Bakunin would never have gone to the theatre,’ Eric said decisively. ‘Too much order. Too much control. Too much Ibsen.’

  I personally doubted this, but Tracy interrupted.

  ‘I love, love, love Bakunin,’ she said. She got up. She began to dance around the empty room, her arms windmilling. ‘He’s incredible. He tells it like it is. He doesn’t have, like, a new system of control to put in place of the old one. I love him. He’s my god. Me and Eric, we’re anarcho-syndicalists.’ She had reached the whiteboard. She took a black marker pen. She wrote ‘ANARCHO-SYNDICALILISM NOW’ on the board. ‘If you haven’t read Bakunin,’ she said, returning, ‘who have you read?’

  I thought, or looked up at the ceiling to give the performance of thinking. My father’s bookshelves had a few political classics, wedged between the substantial biographies of right-wing presidents and prime ministers, the authorized accounts of Nixon and Kennedy, Wilson and Macmillan. He liked, he said, to keep an eye on what the enemy was up to. On those shelves I had found a good deal to agree with. More than you might have expected. Last night, too, I had wondered whether this question was going to come my way.

  As I thought, Tracy was using the black marker pen to draw on my upper lip. I submitted to it. The sensation I felt was cold and wet. The sharp smell under the nose of a moustache being drawn. Only that. And the helpless look on Eric’s face. I now understand he was watching a woman exploring the limits o
f her sexual power. We fell on either side of those borders, he and I.

  ‘I’ve just read The Nineteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,’ I said. ‘By Marx.’ Just read was right – I’d read it the night before. I had spent about an hour getting the title straight in my head. I’d never heard of it till then.

  They were surprised. Eric Milne, who had been rocking back and forward, tapping his feet with nervous energy, became very still. He turned his attention on me with his richly sincere gaze.

  ‘Cool,’ Tracy Cartwright said, setting her marker pen down, not missing a beat. ‘Cool. What did you think?’

  ‘Amazing,’ I said. ‘History happens twice. The first time as tragedy and the second as farce. So fucking true.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Tracy said. ‘Yeah, that’s the one. That old Nineteenth.’

  ‘She’s never read it,’ Eric said. ‘Never read The Nineteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.’

  Eric was showing off now.

  ‘Where’s the call to action in that, though?’ Eric said. ‘I mean, what do we do when we see history coming back as farce? Sit in the stalls like you and your Ibsen and laugh?’

  I had read it: I could have said that what I had read contained a call to action, but that would have been to make Eric and Tracy stand up and walk away, affixed to their dignity. I did not say that. I went along with the principle that we had all read Marx’s pamphlet, many years ago.

  ‘Sometimes people fail when you laugh at them,’ I said. ‘You make martyrs when you kill them. Nobody ever turned into a martyr after being laughed at. If you’d shot that major on the stage yesterday, twenty kids would have signed up within the year.’

  ‘We weren’t laughing at him,’ Tracy Cartwright said. ‘We were holding him to account. Showing what that stuff means. I’m not planning to laugh at him, yeah?’

  ‘I heard some kids today saying “Trotskyite” to each other. Then they fell about laughing.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Tracy said.

  ‘That’s what the major said. Didn’t you hear him? After Ogden got shut up. That major just goes, “Trotskyite.”’

  ‘No. You’re making it up,’ Eric said. ‘We didn’t hear that. What else have you read?’

  ‘The Communist Manifesto. I read that ages ago. And some Lenin. I read the Penguin Lenin reader. And George Orwell going to Wigan.’ Their eyes were bright with concentration – I couldn’t tell, but it might have been glee. They could have been responding to an imminent game of War in the lower playground. Orwell was not much to offer, I felt. I had read Animal Farm when I was ten, first mistaking it for a book for ten-year-olds. Then, quite quickly, I had realized that the book was not about what it said. I loved these grand historical moments peeping from behind well-made screens, like the moment when a man in Lilliput falls off a tightrope and lands on a fat cushion – I remember reading about Walpole, the Act he was trying to balance, the King’s fat mistress who saved him. It was probably the first footnote I ever read. I was ready for Animal Farm. I was probably not up to The Road to Wigan Pier – my form teacher asked if I was following it. I said yes. But then I asked what socialism was. Perhaps what ‘socialism’ meant. He laughed. And those other books – I could see that they were not quite good enough. The book that everyone read anyway, and an anthology put together by Penguin. The only thing I had been able to offer was The Nineteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

  What tempted me was to do on a grand scale what I had done with the Nineteenth Brumaire – I had started to read that brilliant spurt of a pamphlet. Then I said that I had read it. I said the thing that tempted me. ‘And Das Kapital.’ Marx’s colossal Capital, a copy of which (the first volume) sat like a dire warning on my father’s shelves. I have read Capital now many times, the second and third volumes as well as the first. But I am not, now, the person who was talking to Eric and Tracy in form room 8C on a Thursday lunchtime. And that is the point. When we pretend to have read something, or to have gone somewhere we have never visited, like (a boy I knew at university) Democratic Kampuchea, it strikes those around us as ridiculous, if they discover the imposture. The gap between the person that is, and the experiences he wants to claim, the knowledge he pretends to have – that is contemptible. But should it be? The person who pretends to have read Capital is throwing his mind forward, into the future, into a person who has the same name as him, but really has read that book, really has walked the streets of Phnom Penh. Even when I read these books, I pretended to myself that I was admiring them more than I was. A great painter said of his first encounter with Raphael’s cartoons that I feigned a relish, and the relish came. All thinking people are like that. People who laugh at such false claims have not understood that the human animal is always in a state of becoming, is never merely what it is. Soon I would become the person in the Ogden group who had read Capital. ‘Ask him anything about it,’ Mohammed would say. ‘He’s read it five times.’

  ‘Knows it backwards,’ Ogden would say.

  By stepping in confident deception into the person I wanted to become in the future, I helped them become the persons they wanted to be, too. Since then I have pretended to be many things that, afterwards, I became – loyal Party member, ardent lover, a respecter of the freedom of women, a creative and open thinker, a keen hiker. I don’t suppose they were telling the complete truth either. It’s hard to imagine Bakunin being anyone’s idea of hot stuff; to describe him like that is to protect your own dignity, since it places him entirely out of the realm of what can be discussed. But, then, Tracy and Eric described themselves as anarcho-syndicalists.

  I held my breath. ‘You’re going to have a lot to talk to Ogden about,’ Tracy said. ‘I mean a lot.’ Her tone was menacing, but even I knew that harm comes without menaces. She was impressed.

  ‘We’re meeting up tonight with the others,’ Eric said. ‘You can come if you want. Ogden’s going to pick us up.’

  ‘Ogden passed his test last week,’ Tracy said. ‘He’s driving his mummy’s car. Mummy’s not around and Daddy hasn’t noticed.’

  ‘We’ll enjoy it while it lasts,’ Eric said. ‘If you’re coming, be at James Frinton’s pub – I mean, his parents’ pub. Eight. Do you know where I mean? It’s the Fox and Hounds out on Thomas Lane, at the bottom. Don’t be late. We won’t hang about.’

  There had been nothing exactly friendly about the encounter. In fact, I had twice thought they were going to walk away. They must have heard Major Urch grunt, ‘Trotskyite,’ from the stage, but if they really thought I was making it up, then the motivations they might ascribe to me could easily lead them to end the conversation. But they had not. I watched the two of them slope off with some satisfaction.

  In a moment Guy the Gorilla came in. He started that monologue with interruptions that passed as preparation for the general studies A level. For the rest of the day people kept saying, in a detached sort of way, ‘You’ve got a moustache drawn on your face,’ as if there was nothing I could do about it.

  I knew the Fox and Hounds on Thomas Lane, where James Frinton, I had just learnt, somehow lived. The information bewildered me. Pubs in general were mysterious. Especially city pubs. The Fox and Hounds would never have seemed the sort of place that I or my father would have gone into. It was a 1930s roadhouse, broad in red brick. It was guarded by a wall that had needed mending for years. The car park was only ever a third full, the asphalt cracking and sprouting weeds. The air of unpleasantness, at odds with its picturesque name, was tangible to me at the time. Only now do I pin it down to a remembered sign at the door, the indicator of the failed business everywhere, reading Toilets for Customers’ Use Only.

  I made my way round the side of the building. I came to a door, more domestic in appearance. It even had a bell. I’ve often thought of that doorbell since, an idea of the astonishment that the ordinary can possess. I had never considered that the outer door of a pub might have a bell. I don’t know what I
thought it would have – a klaxon, a test-your-strength hammer, a flamethrower – but things outside our experience usually possess, to our incredulity, properties that could not be more ordinary. This was one of them. In just the same way, people who are quite outside our familiar experience, who initially strike us as unique, prodigious, astounding, often emerge as in the thrall of emotions that anyone can have. They turn out to run along tracks of behaviour long and deeply engraved in our own selves. I did not know what to expect when I rang the bell, but what happened is what happens when doorbells are rung. In just the same way, even the most extraordinary people will react in the most commonplace and distressing style when faced with disappointment, fraudulence, theft, malignity or betrayal. Perhaps nobody is extraordinary all the way through, even boys who turn out to live in pubs. Even pubs have doors with bells. Someone always answers.

  It was a small boy I recognized. He was one of the weediest boys in the school, his skin almost blue with translucence. He looked as if he had been hauled in from the deepest cold. He was still wearing his uniform, although it was now half past seven. I had observed him in the past, but had no idea he had any connection with James Frinton. The idea that Frinton had a brother was a new one. I had certainly never seen them together.

  ‘Is Frinton here?’ I said. It was idiotic. There were a number of Frintons available, including the one I was speaking to, but this one evidently knew the idiotic codes of school life because he only said, ‘Hold on.’ He dashed up the stairs behind him. Waiting there in the shade of the porch, the door open in front of me, a smile fixed and stupid-feeling on my face, I gave way to that sensitivity to smell that causes children such distress. The stench of tar, of a particular obese owner of a hi-fi shop, of the brewery at a particular moment in the brewing cycle that covered the whole city centre with the nauseating warm aroma of rotting tomato soup – these were the things that made me retch at sixteen. I could never understand how adults endured them. People had to work in the brewery even on its worst days. Standing outside Frinton’s open door, I thought with horror that my first consideration, that the smell I was enduring was that of Frinton within the house, was quite wrong. Rather, that soiled-socks smell of peas boiled too long and left to sit was not a personal smell. It was the smell of his home. Frinton brought it with him in the mornings. His flesh was carefully imbued with it overnight and he carried it into the public areas of his life, like a duty.