by Graham Swift
So what should I have done. Drawn my poniard and stabbed his unguarded back? “Now might I do it pat …”
What I actually did was this.…
Sam believed in gifts. He persistently showered them on me, not merely on birthdays and special occasions—gifts that were so transparently aimed at winning my filial allegiance that it was a simple matter to rebuff him with formal gratitude and immediate neglect of the article in question. These gifts tended to have a masculine and practical as well as an American bias. So I received a Walt Disney Super Annual as well as a chemistry set and the inevitable trains (but here he hit a genuine soft spot and nearly weakened my resolve: before there were ballet-dancers, you see, there were trains).
One day I was handed a gift that, even in this tiresome succession of bribes, I appreciated was special. It was a model-aircraft kit. That is, a plastic, scale-model aircraft kit of a type soon to flood the British market. This, however, was a kit of American origin, in a large, spectacular box. Inside the box—somewhat belying its lavish dimensions—were fuselage and wing parts and, attached to thin strips from which they could be snapped off, a host of intricately detailed smaller fixtures: propellor, wing flaps, undercarriage and so on—even, complete with moulded flying-jacket and helmet, a little, rigidly alert pilot.
I wish I could remember the name of the plane. I ought to. It was a rather stocky-looking fighter plane, once in service with the U.S. Navy. But what I remember is the box and the almost CinemaScope vividness of the scene emblazoned on its lid. We are high in the air, amidst a tight attacking formation of the nameless aircraft, one of which is caught in fine close-up—diving angle, guns ablaze—at centre-picture. Below us is the blue sheen of the Pacific, and on it the Japanese fleet taking frantic evasive action: flashing guns, smoke, curving wakes. In the distance, a skirmish between our planes and the defending fighters, one of which, gashed with flame, spirals towards the sea.
The compound symbolism of this offering was not lost on a boy capable of reading and digesting Hamlet.
“You see what you can do with plastic, pal? This is a scale-model. Everything’s an exact replica of the real thing.…” He went on, as if he were talking not about plastic but about some kind of protoplasm.
And I did not have to ask, though I did ask, with an ingenuous and reverent hesitancy, and received from Sam a dry-voiced reply and a melting look, as if we were on the verge of a breakthrough: “Was this the plane that Ed …?”
We spread the pieces on the table. He interpreted the little leaflet of instructions. His face, with its clean, naïve features that would age so well (how did this man ever succeed in business?) hung close to mine. It was obvious that he was having to restrain himself from assembling the model himself.
“Well, kid—all yours. Make a good job of it.”
And make a good job of it I did. How I pleased him by not rejecting this bribe but giving it my devoted attention. What pains I took to assemble each piece in the correct order and not to smear the glue. And this diligence had its strangely revelatory side. Under my hands, something came to life: a piece of history, a fragment of former time viewed down the wrong end of a telescope. When I fitted the little pilot into his cockpit—duly painted in advance: pink for the face, brown for his leather jacket—I felt that I was like the hand of fate itself. I could see very clearly an inexorable truth. The man thought he was in control of the plane, but it was the plane that was in control of the man. This was how things stood. The man didn’t belong to himself. The man was plucked up from his real place and set down in the plane no less ruthlessly than I took his miniature counterpart and glued him down by his backside. The man was a fleshy anomaly, entirely at the mercy of his winged carapace. He might as well have been made of plastic.
When the plane was assembled, fastidiously painted in authentic camouflage and affixed with its markings transfers, I hung it by a length of thread from the ceiling in my bedroom. This seemed both an appropriate aerial perch and to suggest the status of a treasured icon—I would look at it last thing at night and first thing in the morning.
But it didn’t remain there for long.
The following morning, in fact, a warm Sunday morning, I took it down. Below me, on the paved terrace at the rear of the house, overlooked by my bedroom, Sam and my mother were lounging in deck-chairs, a late breakfast over. There was, I remember, a peculiar calm about this Sunday morning—the rustle of papers, the clink of coffee cups—a feeling of probation served, as if we had reached a pitch of domestic equilibrium not achieved before.
I held the lovingly constructed aircraft in one hand and with the other applied a lighted match to the propeller. Plastic, as Sam liked to drive home, does not oxidize or decompose and is resistant to electricity; but it is not uninflammable. It burns with a spluttering, tenacious flame and a thick, black smoke reminiscent of burning oil. Thus a plastic plane can be destroyed as well as built with a good deal of verisimilitude.
The propeller, then the engine cowling, ignited, filling my bedroom with evil fumes, of which Sam and my mother had so far no inkling. Holding the plane with the bold patience of a grenade thrower, I waited till the flames—the propeller already a bubbling goo—began to lick the cockpit and the little trapped pilot. Then, standing before the open window and throwing back my arm, I hurled it up and out, so that it soared first high over the heads of Sam and my mother, then plummeted downwards, with a remarkably realistic smoke-trailing effect, to crash just a few feet in front of them on the lawn, one wing dislodged, but still ablaze.
I went to the window—partly because it was my intention to be brazen, partly in order to gasp for air. I heard my mother’s startled “Good God!”; Sam’s “What the—?!” They both leapt from their seats. My mother tried to beat out the fire with a hastily folded News of the World, while Sam, telling her to get out the way, took the lid from the coffeepot and emptied its contents over the wreckage. Only then did they look up. My mother was a picture of exasperated accusation, as if I had simply spoilt a promising day, but Sam was already making for the house in an unprecedented rage. I sat calmly on my bed. He appeared in the doorway, and checked himself momentarily—either because my composure unnerved him or because of the fog of smoke filling the room. As he paused I had time to see—through the murk—that though his face was twisted with anger, it was also blanched with horror. It was the look of a man whose direct thoughts, whose worst fears, have been exposed.
“You little son of a bitch!” he yelled. “You little goddam son of a bitch!”
Through the open window my mother must have heard. And I wonder now how much Sam supposed he was uttering the truth.
7
But I have not told you yet about complication number three. I have not told you the third reason why my reception here has been such a mixed affair. I am referring now to my pretensions in the field (forget, for a moment, the Pearce manuscripts) which is properly my own. Namely, English Literature.
This is not a simple case, I should make clear, of inadequacy on the one hand and condescension on the other. I am not unequipped. I have read some books in my time, and I was for some ten years, as I may already have hinted, a lecturer in English at the University of London. Even when I abandoned that to become Ruth’s manager—a move which earned me at first as many frowns in the theatrical world as my reappearance now in the world of scholarship has done—I did not lapse. I was—you may have noticed, if you ever looked closely at your theatre programmes—a “literary consultant” (whatever that means) to certain productions of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, and not merely those in which Ruth appeared.
In short, the love which Tubby Baxter fired in me has never faded. There has always been, for me, this other world, this second world to fall back on—a more reliable world in so far as it does not hide that its premise is illusion. Even when I left it to enter—what? the real world? the theatre?—I acted with shrewd and miserly husbandry. I made sure there was a good stock of that other world still stored
in the barn (the little library I set up in our Sussex cottage—while Ruth learnt her parts). Waiting for winter. I paid the real world the solemn respect of supposing it might not be real, and I paid happiness the compliment of supposing it might not last. “Call no man happy …” Isn’t that what literature says?
I did all these things. And, you see, I was right, I was prepared. But none of it helps you. Not one little bit.
So when Sam came up with his little arrangement for me …
I appreciate that from the point of view of these hallowed precincts my claims must seem paltry. I am not proud. I do not seek eminence (does my mother hear me?). All my life I have been—quite literally so in recent times—a man behind the scenes. A one-time academic who never aimed at professorship, a poetry lover who never aspired to poetry. All this, I’m sure, given the Ellison Endowment, would have been tactfully overlooked, even cheerfully indulged. But what has put the learned noses out of joint is the so-deemed simplicity of my actual views on literature. My latter-day return to scholarship has not, it seems, displayed any gathered maturity. Apparently, word has got out that in those tutorials of mine (which now seem to be a thing of the past) I have been doing little more than urging my students to acknowledge that literature is beautiful—yes, the thing about a poem is that it’s beautiful, beautiful!—and other such crude, sentimental and unschooled tosh.
Now, I admit that in my former days I could wrap this around a little more. I still can. I admit that if you stop at such a view you hardly leave the way open for those lengthy critical discussions and erudite commentaries which are the mainstay of the professional study of literature. I admit it is stating the obvious. But why shirk the obvious? Literature doesn’t, after all. A great deal of literature—why not be frank?—only states the obvious. A great deal of literature is only (only!) the obvious transformed into the sublime.
So is it a trick? Is it the case that if we can take it apart and discover that all there is is the crashingly commonplace, we are no better off than we were before? I don’t think so. I think (perhaps I should say now “thought”) there is something really there, something that comes out of the obvious. Something beyond the obvious.
Why should the simplest, tritest words (excuse this extemporary lecture) touch us with pure delight? “My true love hath my heart and I have his.” Why do the most tired and worn (and bitterest) thoughts—the thoughts we all have thought—return to us, in another’s words, like some redeeming balm?
Even such is time, which takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, and all we have,
And pays us but with age and dust;
Who in the dark and silent grave
When we have wandered all our ways
Shuts up the story of our days.
So? We all know this. We have heard this before, and we would rather not dwell, thank you, on the subject. But the words hold us with their poise, their gravity—their beauty. They catch us up and speak for us in their eloquence and equilibrium, and just for a little moment (are you listening, my fine Fellows, my prize pedants?), the obvious is luminous, darkness is matched with light and life is reconciled with death.
I rest my case.
(And, by the way, the words were penned—on the eve of his execution, they even say—by a putative ancestor of mine, Sir Walter Ralegh.)
Where is Tubby Baxter now? I should blame him, or thank him, for setting the whole course of my life. For if I hadn’t succumbed to this lifelong addiction, this lifelong refuge of literature, I would never have become, via my stepfather’s maledictions (“You like books so much, pal—you better learn how to eat them!”), a starveling student, perched in the chilly eyrie of a bed-sit in Camden, living, indeed, only on poetical nourishment and the irregular and surreptitious cheques (“Flesh and blood, darling, flesh and blood”) my mother sent me. And if I had never become a starveling student, I would never have been impelled, despite those maternal subsidies, to seek casual, nocturnal work to support my daytime studies. And so might never have entered, as part-time bar assistant and general dogsbody, a tinselly little temple of illusion, a den of late-night delights, called the Blue Moon Club in Soho.
And so (but aren’t these things meant to be?) would never have met her.
I see him now, that former, unformed self of mine. That spectral, prehistorical being. Hunched in the aura of a reading lamp (but what has changed?) like a creature suspended in amber. Like a creature still in embryo. Neither in nor out of the world. He is free, he is proud. He has Hamletesque pretensions: “You would pluck out the heart of my mystery …” He is studious, he is callow. His head is in the clouds. But the days are coming when the poetry will come alive. When the books will turn inside out. When the sighs and raptures and entreaties of all those love-sick bards will no longer seem like wishful thinking. And all those dubious and apocryphal mistresses, all those impossible and enslaving Cynthias, Julias and Amaryllises, will no longer seem like moonlit phantoms, like paper dreams.
The Blue Moon Club in Soho. What a far cry from this place. Do not imagine anything too wicked. Nor, on the other hand, too demure. This is the year of our Lord 1957: half-way between the age of rationing and the age of permissiveness; half-way between the syrupy ballad and the full frenzy of rock-and-roll.
The Blue Moon was a “night-club,” not a dive, and definitely not a strip joint. There was no disrobing, even if there was scant attire. Its atmosphere was charged with a piquant ambiguity in which it was hard to distinguish failed innocence from failed sophistication. The girls (there were three of them—as many as the tiny stage could hold—along with three musicians and a “resident” singer, a buxom, brassy trouper called “Miss Rita”) were only “passing through” this slightly risqué venue en route (you could gauge their degrees of conviction) for “real” work in the “real” theatre. Hence their fondness for an impoverished student who, like them, was only dabbling in this dubious night-work to serve his aspiration to higher things. He was no more interested, therefore, in their frivolous titillations than they were in teasing his callowness. So when, in the narrow, rear-of-house passage, they scampered past him in single file (Mandy, Diana, Barbara—where are they now?), forcing him to press his back against the wall and smile weakly while he was successively brushed by their frills, plumes, flounces and tassels; or when one of them slipped in or out of their cramped communal dressing-room and he caught a glimpse of fevered undress—this was only accidental. Their winks, tut-tuts and little blown kisses were just their excuse-mes.
He is callow, he is studious. Brought up on ballerinas worshipped from afar and the high jinks of Sam and his mother just across the landing, he has acquired a certain tentativeness in a certain area (in which Hamlet himself did not exactly have plain sailing). He is gauche, he is guarded (believe me, he is no Errol Flynn), but he is Paris-trained. And here he stands again, on his army-exempting flat feet, with his brain in a spin, gawping at dancing-girls.
At a certain point in the “show,” around midnight, when Miss Rita took her solo spot, it was my task—a strangely domestic ritual—to slip out to the kitchen behind the bar and make the girls mugs of hot, sweet tea (they drank nothing stronger while they performed). I would knock on the dressing-room door, while from the stage would come Miss Rita’s husky imprecations—“Got a crush on you, swee-eetie pie …” A polite pause. “Entrez.” And I would enter, bearing the tray on the outspread fingers of one hand, consciously imitating the gestures of a waiter I had once seen in a Left Bank café. An aroma of perfume, talc and cigarettes never quite disguised the smell of sweat. Three pairs of eyes would greet me. And then one night, in June 1957 (it was Barbara, I think, who left with unexplained suddenness), a new pair of (melting-piercing, greenish-brown) eyes.
You could say I saw her in her first performing role. Girl Number Three at the Blue Moon Club. When she had yet to make her name. Though her name was then just as it would be later, and she was surely no less herself. Ruth: a first-year drama student (en rou
te, yes, for the real theatre), who had jumped into the deep end of this haunt of pleasure in order, like me, to make a little needed money, but also to cure—her stage fright.
In a diamanté-plastered leotard, white gloves, tiara and plume. In a little feminine mockery of black tie and tails, with fish-net tights. Wiggle, kick, smile, turn. She couldn’t dance as well as Mandy and Diana. But she had something that made you not realise this. Something which Mandy and Diana didn’t have.
A look of delicately courted danger, a look which, even as she cradled her mug of sweet tea, made you feel as if you were out on an adventure …
“Ruth, this is Bill, our tea boy. Watch him, he’s a tiger.”
Giggles.
One night Miss Rita couldn’t perform—stricken with flu—and Mr Silvester, proprietor of the Blue Moon Club, a self-possessed East-Ender who had a way of suggesting he had steered himself capably through all manner of roughness to reach this haven of (as he liked to call it) “class,” was thrown into untypical panic.
She volunteered. She had to do it. Of such stuff are show-business fables made. She even uttered a plucky “Don’t worry, Mr Silvester.” And she proved, not exactly that she could sing, but that she could disguise impeccably the fact that she couldn’t sing, could act impeccably the part of a singer; and that she had, moreover, that indefinable, spell-casting quality called (but why don’t we all have it, since we are all present?) “presence.”
