Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  The small road towards the South Downs and the sea is patched and full of holes from lack of labour in wartime. A fierce brief sun makes the tarmac smoke with drying dampness as if the holes have really been made by exploding shells. Yet fighting cannot have been here. For Hampshire is not the refuse-dump of no man’s land. It is ordered and kempt, the fields tidy, even the grasses lying in place under the rakes of the breeze. It is country­side on its best behaviour as it approaches the towns and the cities, it is a vast back garden which hopes to keep the houses away by making itself so pretty and appealing that it will be left to grow crops rather than prefabs.

  The afternoon is a time of relapse. The mild heat of the southland, the puffs of wind, the drugging smells drawn from grass and flower by the drying rain, all induce a feeling of fatigue in Gog that is very different from his guilt of the early morning. In some strange way, the Pardoner does seem to have eased Gog’s soul, but less by his words than by his final disaster. Gog is so satisfied at the Pardoner’s deserved fate that he is too smug to feel guilty about his own sins. His spirit is not weary now, but his toughened body. For some reason, his feet begin to swell like hot buns within his boots and the many days of bad diet tell on his will. He sits on the verge of the lane, then lies, then is carried away by a sudden tidal suck of oblivion.

  He wakes. How long has he slept? He does not know. A minute, a year, a lifetime? He rises and trudges off automatically up the hill, his mind shocked into emptiness by the depth of his slumber, his thoughts wiped free of all memory of past and hope of future, his brain the clean slate handed to the infant in his first class at his first school.

  While Gog walks stunned up Old Winchester Hill, sense gradually returns to his skull and he finds himself saying, “Old fortress, ramparts and ditch, defence against the enemy,” as he sees the green wrinkles in the earth on the flat top of the hill. Slumber can only return Gog briefly to the mindless state of the beginning of his walk from Edinburgh. He retains now what he has learned and remembered on the road, except in the few minutes after waking. So he can consult his map and see that all the hilltops of Wessex are covered with the earthworks and tumuli and barrows and ditches and hidey-holes of antiquity. He can see the sickness of his mind, which fears an enemy in every tree and fold, translated to actual history on the ground. Does not the chalk soil over there bear the dark yew trees, springing with scores of hidden longbows in their branches? Gog does not have to imagine war and persecution any more. Its traces lie hidden beneath the grass about him in every long barrow and battlefield where the old heroes and giants lie sleeping.

  Gog sits on the crest of Old Winchester Hill with the turf a cushion to his rump and thought. He looks about him at all of man’s grubbed defences gone to green. And he feels himself smile as if his sickness had lifted off the top of his skull and flown it away like a kite in the soft wind that comes soughing up from the south-west. War, perhaps, shall be no more – at least for Gog – if grass conquers all. The sword may not become a ploughshare, but it shall certainly become buried rust. And time shall pass until generation after generation has succeeded each other in peace, no longer caring nor knowing that in this hollow the Beaker people slew the Neolithic tribes and on that hill the last of the Romans slid to earth before the Saxon rush. For who now can tell which man in the south is Jute or Dane or Saxon or Norman? Where they mingled their blood in battle, their heirs now mingle their blood in children. Miscegenation settles all.

  Gog hears a far sound of tally-ho and rises to see what beast the countryfolk are chasing to its death. Only he sees no beast, but a swollen envelope of silver-grey with a blunt point and three fat fins on its tail, floating some fifty yards above the ground and trailing long wires beneath its underside. Midges seem to be clinging to the wires and running in their hundreds after the floating envelope; but Gog soon recognizes that the midges are distant people and the envelope is a barrage balloon. As he watches, he sees two pin-points of smoke and hears the tiny double pop of a shotgun. The balloon drifts nearer and nearer to the ground, eventually disappearing behind the trees to Gog’s left. The yelling grows to a howl at the kill. Gog runs between the trees to find a crowd of labourers and countrywomen and children jabbing the bulging mass of the balloon with pitchforks and kitchen knives. They leap onto its undulating flanks, they roll about its wallowing hide, they slash it and rip it and scream with laughter as if they are intoxicated on its oozing gas. The balloon first becomes a sagging marquee and then a struck big top, a vast area of grey material beneath the boots of the country people. One solitary fin still rears up its monstrous sausage; but that, too, pops and deflates at the slash of a scythe. The cheer that greets the final death of the barrage balloon would raise a cirrus sky of white doves in the air, all bearing sprigs of laurel in their beaks, if white doves and laurel were local, which they are not.

  Gog leaves the crowd to stomp the balloon into the soil and walks slowly, slowly, on through the afternoon. He is lucky to find a pub, which will sell him illicit ham sandwiches, in the last valley before the South Downs. So he fuels the fire of his burning feet with a little warmth of good food and beer in his belly. A windmill heralds the coming of these last downs before the sea; it looks into the eye of the south wind from the Channel. Gog’s way up to the heights would be as hard as the other tracks of chalk and flint; but nature seems to be relenting and a soft tongue of turf allows him to walk easily up the hill on his aching feet.

  Half-way up the hill to Huckswood, a chalk pit waits for Gog. Its bleached scoop, more curdy and solid than a snow crevasse, makes him wander wondering into its hollow. In front of him, one sifted breast of white rises thirty feet from the ground and one black iron finger tracks up the breast to push down its nipple. Up the finger, the tips must climb like hairs to tickle the breast into a slow rising of chalk.

  As Gog watches, the surface of the chalk splits open to reveal two thrones of smoothed flint. One throne is empty; on the other Magog sits in the guise of a frail, petulant, crowned boy, who plays with a cup and ball, the cup painted with waves as the sea, and the ball as white as the cliffs of Albion.

  “Why fight me?” Magog says with a pout. “Come. Let’s be friends. I haven’t anyone to play with. Sit beside me. See, your place is empty. It’ll just fit you. We’ll play catch.” And he reaches under his throne to pull out a blown-up pig’s bladder crudely painted as a peasant’s face. “It doesn’t matter if it pops. I’ve got hundreds of thousands of these. Just come up and play.”

  And Gog comes up and smites Magog with his fist so that his skull smashes like rotten pumpkin into a mash. And the mash smokes and becomes a heavy vapour, and the vapour freezes in the shape of a dignified old man with thin lips, who smiles.

  “Now, my child, where will all this violence get you? Where would we be, if we all raised our fists against each other? Surely you can see that you’ve been a little hasty. Sit beside me and watch how I do things. And little by little, you shall take my place. I am an old man and old men do not live for ever. Here.” He takes from his pocket a lead skull cap shaped as the dome of St. Paul’s. “Wear this and begin your lessons. Whatever you do, you cannot make me your enemy. I merely want to guide you to be my friend.”

  And Gog opens his fly and pisses on the leg of the dignified old man, who immediately dissolves into a yellow cloud that settles down as an imposing, but cheerful, matriarch.

  “Whatever you do, my dear, you can’t shock me. Nobody who’s the breed we need can shock us. I mean, what can you do that I haven’t seen a hundred times worse before? It’s the boring people who shock us, and that’s most people. But if you’re interesting, why, we’ll be amused at you. Go on, fart in my tiara, and I’ll say, It’s good for the diamonds.” She holds out towards Gog an old English chamberpot with an eye painted on its bottom and the inscription, Thou Seest Me. “It’s bawdier at the top than the bottom, believe you me. So why not come and join us, and have a really good dirty laugh?”

  And Gog wrings her nec
k like an old rag until all the dirty water runs out and becomes a hearty bloke in a cloth cap.

  “That’s right, sir. ’Ave your bit of fun wringin’ me neck. Them what’s born to it are born to ’ave a bit of a lark with them what ain’t born to it.” Gog drops his hands from the red neck of the speaker. “Me, I’m a union man. You can get to the top there, too. There’s union blokes what’ve been lords an’ ladies an’ all, by the time they ended. Know your place, don’t envy, work your way up, and who knows that you won’t be able to ’ave a lark with the best when you’re sixty. There’s union men what’ve shaken ’ands with ’Is Majesty, God save ’Im. Us workin’ blokes are just like the rest of you. We just want a chance to join you, get on. Fair’s fair. So don’t muck things up, Gog. Leave things be, ’cos it’s what workin’ blokes want.”

  And Gog kicks the Tory union man to a pulp, which becomes a milk-white mannikin with bright-red hair.

  “I love them rough. Do, do it again. Thank God they’ve never abolished the birch at Eton. What else can the plebs inflict on us, when we’ve endured far worse at school – and loved it? Come up and punish me some time. Call me any names, and I’ll revel in them. The filthier the better. Beat me and I’ll kiss your boot. Tell me I’m rotten, bent, corrupt, slim-gilt, pansy, and I’ll shriek, Yes, I am, I am, I am, your Algernon. I love insults. So come up and stand by me and tell me how vile you find your equals – that language doesn’t do coming from inferiors.” He hands Gog a spray of birch twigs. “Be my master and I’ll be your fag.

  “Birch, birch, is my favourite tree,

  The more I’m beaten, the better I’ll be.”

  So Gog is forced to kiss in kindness the mannikin on both cheeks to make him vanish in a faugh and a fie of disgust. But as he vanishes, Gog hears Magog’s voice cluck, “I’ve won, I’ve won, he kissed me.” And lo, Magog squats on Gog as if Gog were but a white egg beneath a vast broody hen, an egg that the warmth of the feathery welcome of Magog will hatch into just such another universal mother and mistress. And fight as Gog will, he cannot break out of the warm walls of his eggshell, let alone the pressing downy underbelly of the maternal Magog.

  Yet as Gog is yielding into a yellow yolk of submission beneath the total incubation of the vast hen, he finds that the eggshell cracks as his eyes suddenly open and the hen rises into the night until her wings are the whole darkness of the sky. He is lying on the chalk, looking upwards by the white breast in the pit, with no more than the heavens above him. And the air does not heat him and soften him and include him, it chills him and hardens him and makes him alone. So Gog huddles within himself in the roots of an old tree and dozes a few uncomfortable hours until first light sends him on his way, sad and solitary in the rain.

  XXXI

  So Gog survives the last and worst temptation of Magog, the temptation of inclusion. Those that are not for us are against us – true. But how shall we be against those that are for us? Gog knows that England is a country of joiners, of clubs, of old schools, of teams, of matches, of locals, of sides, of unions, of mates, of muckers, of chaps. How can a man, in all common decency, resist the friendly hand or the kind smile or the invitation to share? Magog in Albion is powerful and enduring because Magog in Albion has always known how to win his enemies from the ranks of the mass. O, Magog, Magog, how clever you are, when you make nearly all people believe that freedom is anti-social, solitude is misanthropic, refusal is hating, pride is improper, and passion certifiable. Yet one thing you cannot take from the people, for they take it from the example of the island. You cannot call each man’s lonely suffering a mere form of masochism, when the whole body of Albion is only an island suffering alone in the north sea, when a national pride in being each a good loser makes the nation usually win by each man losing so often and indifferently that the winners give up and go down before such a callous virtue of lasting.

  It is also Gog’s last and worst day of walking. The rain wipes dawn and morning and midday into one. Sometimes it lovingly washes the South Downs, sometimes it scrubs them, sometimes it bathes them, sometimes slaps, sometimes pats, sometimes frets in a fine spray scarcely distinguishable from sea air. Gog walks along, sodden and uncaring, as much a creature of the storm as any sheep in the open. Though his belly is empty, his head is full of the beauty of English names and the singing rhythm of the places he passes. From Hooksway through Phillis Wood past the string of mounds called the Devil’s Jumps, on to Didling Hill and beyond and between Linchball and Venus Wood and Cocking Down. The track descends at Hacking Copse and rises past The Butts towards Forest Hangar and Graffham Down, Lamb Lea and Teaglaze and Woolavington and dips again to Bishop’s Ring and Dogkennel Cottages. Who would not chuckle to rattle out those names?

  As Gog strides over the rainy downs, mile after mile in wet and driving mist down the grass track that leads straight into more wet and mist, he finds himself in court before invisible judges, their woolsacks the wet hems of the clouds, their voices the wind and their words the inescapable rain.

  “Guilty or not guilty?” ask the wind and the rain.

  “What is my crime?” Gog shouts back into his inner ear.

  “You were Gog,” say the wind and the rain. “Guilty or not guilty?”

  “What else have you got?”

  “One or the other,” says the wind.

  “Neither.”

  “You must choose,” says the rain.

  “I choose not to choose.”

  “Then you plead not guilty?” says the wind.

  “I am a man.”

  “Then you plead guilty?” says the rain.

  “I am not God.”

  “Do you think God is guilty?” says the wind.

  And the near copse echoes, branch after branch after branch, “He thinks God is guilty, guilty, guilty . . .”

  “Of making us, God’s guilty,” Gog says. “But aren’t we guilty, too, of making God?”

  “Give us a proper answer,” says the rain.

  “Give me a proper question,” Gog says.

  “Give yourself a proper question,” says the wind.

  And the near cornfield echoes, stalk after stalk after stalk, “And we shall judge your answer, answer, answer . . .”

  “Am I innocent?” Gog asks his inner soul. “Yes, I am innocent.”

  “He says he’s innocent,” mock the wind and the rain.

  And the near grasses echo, blade after blade after blade, “Of what is he innocent, innocent, innocent . . . ?”

  “I am innocent of living,” Gog says. “I did not choose it.”

  “But you did commit the crime,” say the wind and the rain. “You were Gog.”

  “I was alive,” Gog says.

  And the wind and the rain and the trees and the corn and the grasses all give the judgement. “You must die for it, must die for it, die for it, for it, it . . .”

  “Then,” Gog says, “I must have lived.”

  So Gog is judged by the wind and the rain and the downs, and he sits in judgement upon himself. And he wakes from his inner monologue to find the mist lifting and fields of grain and stubble stretching out hundreds of yards to where the clouds have pitched the corners of their tents. And Gog knows he is in the set of a Russian propaganda film of the thirties. At any moment, the Fat Girl will come driving up on her tractor and pull off her huge goggles and give a great grin as broad as the steppe, the grin of the lady Stakhanovite tractor driver who has ploughed a thousand versts before sunset, fulfilling her norm by ten quotas and a half. And she’ll say, “Comrade Gog, I’m joost simple Rooshian maiden what all capitalist world takes in.”

  Only the Fat Girl and the tractor don’t turn up and Gog has to plough through the original dinosaurus’ wallow outside a farmyard in a cleft between downs before he can rise again onto the high places under the driving clouds that shred more every minute, as the wind freshens from out of the invisible sea. And walking in his clammy clothes, Gog begins to feel the peace that passeth all repose, which comes only when judg
ement is received and accepted. And then he begins to notice that a grace is touching him. It is a grace towards living things. He finds himself striding a long pace to avoid a chalk-smeared worm or a slug, he steps around beetles, he shoos away flies without swatting them, he replaces ants on the ground with his little finger when he finds them crawling on his trousers. Gog’s new-found care extends even to plants and flowers so that he weaves through the long soaking grass trying not crush it despite a further wetting; he jinks about the tall cowparsley to spare its spindly sprays. He cannot avoid treading the short-bladed turf between the ruts to pass by the puddles and flints in the hollows; but he minds his boots enough to pass round the larger living things.

  Yet Gog’s care about the placing of his feet makes him lose the way ahead. The track over the downs swings low into a forest and then splits and splits and splits again, sometimes offering five different routes at once in wide fire clearings between the trees. Yet, however wide the clearings, Gog knows that a blaze will surely come that will reduce all man’s little precautions against fire to cinders. The forest is misleading and mazy, but Gog keeps on taking the way that leads towards higher ground until he breaks out of the trees onto Waltham Down. There he opens a wattle gate before a herd of sheep and lambs, and he is immediately bitten in the thigh by a collie dog. Alas, Gog’s thigh is too toughened now for the dog’s teeth to penetrate and it falls back with blunted bite and sharpened bark. The shepherd runs up to restrain the collie and tells Gog the way towards the main road. Gog follows the route to a cornfield just below the swell of the down. And, on the sudden, over the dark and rotting ears of grain, over the dun ridges of the hillocks in the middle distance, over the last grey ledge of land, he looks at the sea.