Playing with Water

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  The receptionist ushered me away and into the presence of the doctor who within minutes told me that I had mould growing in my own left gill and wrote me up for some anti-mould drops. That infection cleared, but the trouble persists. I have never been back, though, to see if the little Queen Trigger has survived. From time to time I think of it in its pitiless exile surrounded by fake gems and living in the poop of a bogus galleon eighty feet above the streets of London.

  *

  From a dream that the sea was dead, poisoned and lifeless I awoke, expecting to smell the stench of carrion from the strand below, the hermit crabs tearing at heaps of putrefaction. Instead the lively ocean rested in its bed, washed by moon and stars, its breathing body fanned by light pulses of air from across the strait. I went and sat outside, watching the cordillera opposite skip from one side of the sky to the other like a graph. Immediately I was caught up in the universe. Off-guard with the remains of sleep I was like some careless factory-worker whose clothing is snagged by the machinery he leans over, wrenched bodily into the mechanism and swallowed up. I became as if melted into the sea. My heart beat in time with the mountains. Stars poured down into my head. Without ears, without tongue I heard myself say the words I must always have used, will always use, whose meaning is Why, you knew all along and It is always here, always now – banalities beyond translation, beyond speech. In that silence alone the universe can be heard talking in pebbles and weed, in glittering plankton and predator’s brain, in the ineffable sound made by the hills as they fold and pleat themselves. How can it ever be forgotten? But I do forget it. I am incredulous. How can I pretend none of this is so and allow myself daily to become dragged down by foolishness?

  If one were to weep for this idiocy the tears which glistened in the starlight would at least be proper tears of regret and not of pity. To forget the only thing there is seems like a crime for which there could be no redemption. The consequence would properly be that it all became dead things: the sea turned to mere water, the mountains to lumps of geology, the wind and rain became more or less inconvenient. But miraculously the cordillera across the strait is still hefting its crags and shrugging its forests. By the standards of the world’s great mountain ranges it is nothing, this cordillera, a comparative South Downs. But tonight it is the loftiest imaginable perhaps because the sea lying at its feet gives no indication of scale as would a valley floor with houses and the thread of roads.

  At once, sadly, angrily, comes into my head my father, who loved mountains. I give a start of surprise at finding him there, but the more I consider it the less surprised I become. It is not just the mountains; it is not even because of my memories of war over landscapes and uneasy oppositions of all kinds. It seems quite specifically because of the dream of poison from which I have just woken, but I cannot quite grasp why.

  My father entered my life when I was four. Quite suddenly, this demobbed stranger came into the house claiming to be my mother’s husband. What intelligent child could believe a tale like that? Husbands and fathers were supposed to be an indispensable part of family life yet my mother and sister and I had seemingly got along very nicely without one. Why then the sudden need? Four years later still I was off among the South Downs for months at a time, months which themselves stretched on for another ten or eleven years. In the holidays my father and I scarcely met. He was overworked and testy, the rushed professional who seemed to spend less and less time in the house. In such ways it is quite possible for someone to grow up never knowing his own father. As with the God one heard about at school, the obligations were always there to love and respect and fear him but the outline was dim and hazy, the features blurred. From the remoteness on the other side there came no answer excepting only that sometimes inexplicable rages played like lightning about one’s head.

  Why then do I any longer think of him? How could this vanished stranger play any part in my present life, still less have anything to do with my being here on this island? I do not quite know. I do know he is not irrelevant, though, and that the reason is slowly becoming clearer. Therefore I will stare at the mountains across the strait and force myself to consider once more this business of poison. It is cyanide; and it takes me straight back to that second school.

  *

  The headmaster met me just before lunch in the corridor outside the dining hall. I stood to attention, held my hands out and turned them over for inspection. Even I could see the wrists were grey above the tide-line but he didn’t so much as glance at them.

  ‘Your father’s coming this afternoon,’ he said. ‘I thought you might be interested.’ He wasn’t smiling. A school myth was that when he was wearing green, particularly a green tweed suit, he was in a mood for blood. He was at this moment in a brownish sports jacket with leather buttons but his tie was green and hairy. I didn’t dare ask him why my father was coming unexpectedly. Obviously my behaviour and schoolwork had sunk below the point where the ordinary measures of fortnightly reports and informal conversations by the tea-tent on Parents’ Day were any longer adequate. He had been called to take me away. No, worse: there was going to be a Parent’s Caning.

  Another myth at this school, more dread than that of the Second Cellars, so awesome nobody even much liked talking about it, was of an event called a Parent’s Caning. This allegedly took place once every twenty years or so when a boy had done something so truly awful that no ordinary punishment could meet the case. It was the prep-school equivalent of being flogged round the Fleet. So brutal was it the boy’s father had to be called in to witness it along with the school doctor who checked the victim’s pulse after each stroke. The entire thing was a pack of lies, of course, mere schoolboy hysteria, but it didn’t stop us believing in it and now in the corridor outside the dining hall I knew I was to be the victim. I was so frightened I didn’t even bother to wonder what I had done to deserve it. And my father was a doctor, too! That clinched it.

  When at the end of lunch the headmaster stood up to make an announcement I was ready to faint, in such a state I would have interpreted anything he might have said as proof of my impending execution. The news that the whole school could have a half-holiday and spend it in the swimming baths would have been utterly plausible. What more natural than that a special site was necessary for a Parent’s Caning, somewhere unusual to impress the gravity of the occasion on everyone present? Actually the man merely said that we should keep clear of the top of the field beyond the junior cricket pitch and walked out. Electricity shot through me. What did that bit of waste space contain but the old oak? Of course. The Hanging Oak, as it was known for its stout horizontal limb with a scar around its bark from the days when the Hall was newly built and it had regularly been used as a gibbet for insubordinate coachmen, cocky servants, mutinous lackeys. The Hanging Oak! The perfect spot for a Parent’s Caning.

  It was a Saturday and so we had the afternoon off in any case. At two o’clock a few informal games of cricket convened in a leisurely manner here and there around the playing fields. Some boys were expecting their parents to arrive and pay them a visit. So was I, now, but how different was to be my father’s role! Many of us stood about, not actually near the forbidden tree but for that matter not very far from it. Speculation ran high about what was going to happen. Somebody suggested they were going to cut the Hanging Oak down and that there would be danger to bystanders from the displaced ghosts of those who had dangled from its limb; we had been reading M. R. James under the bedclothes by torchlight. I kept quiet, not daring to tell them the truth because I knew that once I had said it everybody would recognise it as the only plausible explanation.

  At two-thirty a familiar car emerged from the rhododendrons at the far end of the drive and crunched to a stop in front of the school. My father emerged carrying a clinical-looking bottle. Sal volatile, of course, to restore my vital functions. I didn’t dare run to meet him. Instead the headmaster, who was already chatting to a group of parents, detached himself from them and shook my father’s hand
with, I thought, a smile significantly tinged with graveness and sympathy. Together they began walking up the grounds towards the junior cricket pitch and the tree.

  ‘Do you have a stick?’ I heard my father ask.

  ‘There’ll be one there,’ replied the headmaster.

  Since I could no longer postpone the inevitable I went to meet them, unable to feel my legs walking beneath me.

  ‘Hullo!’ my father greeted me with tasteless cordiality. ‘This is unexpected, isn’t it? How about this for a pretty bottle?’

  The bottle he carried was indeed striking, ribbed and blue, bluer even than those milk of magnesia bottles, round and with a ground glass stopper. On the label was a red skull and crossbones. I nodded miserably.

  ‘Cyanide,’ he said.

  ‘Cyanide?’

  ‘That’s right. Awfully dangerous stuff.’

  ‘It’s extremely good of your father to have come,’ the headmaster said with the hypocritical expansive smile we all knew headmasters reserved for boys whose parents were nearby. ‘It was poor old Pollock last night that finally did it.’

  Pollock was the First XI wicket keeper who had been stung by a wasp the day before and was all swollen up in the san, instead of playing against a school in Kent which was full of wets but which had really good sausage rolls for match teas.

  ‘So,’ the headmaster went on, ‘I got old Bisley to do some sleuthing and when he’d tracked it down I thought immediately of your father, being a doctor and so forth, and he very kindly nipped over to the hospital pharmacy.’

  ‘Yes but what are you going to do?’ I asked miserably.

  ‘Kill a wasps’ nest, what did you think?’ my father asked.

  ‘Well actually,’ the Head said, ‘I quite deliberately didn’t tell them what we were up to. If you announce to a lot of small boys that a large wasps’ nest is going to be attacked at two-thirty with the most deadly poison known to man, and they are on no account to come anywhere near it, there’s not a boy in the school who won’t be there. If, on the other hand, you keep it vague and casual there’s just a chance … Hello! Over here a bit more, I think. Bisley said it was about fifteen yards from the oak and that he’d marked it. Yes, there’s the stick. Good. Now stand back everyone.’

  And the sun which had been vertical, molten and glary slumped several degrees and began to shine benignly in a beautiful June afternoon, on this island surrounded as yet invisibly by creeping suburbia. The trees cast their shade in which Tortoiseshells and Brimstones and Marbled Whites fluttered and in the distance white-clad figures scampered and the pock of ball against bat came flatly on the drowsy air. We boys were waved safely back while I proudly watched my father advance with a pint of the world’s most deadly poison to do battle with what were clearly hornets and not wasps at all, probably the biggest and most dangerous nest ever found in the south of England.

  And when his crouched figure had straightened up, slightly red in the face from holding his breath, the headmaster sent someone for a spade and they covered it all up with a mound of soil leaving nothing but a faint and pleasant smell of almond essence. How far away those days now seem, not because they are in the least bit faint but because they enclosed a way of life which seems unthinkable in a modern England. What more reasonable and straightforward way to deal with a wasps’ nest than to ring up a consultant neurologist and get him to trot down to Pharmacy for a pint of cyanide and come on over in the car and pour it into the school grounds? Then back to the house for a cup of tea and maybe watch the Second XI in the nets and take your coat off and chuck some nasty balls at the slip-catching machine which even Pollock couldn’t have taken. And finally remember to pick up the cyanide bottle which you think you may have left in the pavilion but later, after a worried search, you discover in the boot of the car where you had put it for safety’s sake, and back down the drive in a low-lifting cloud of dust and away through the rhododendrons leaving a small son ecstatic with relief and full of pride.

  It was a way of life which was really a hang-over from a relaxed patrician world which had ended with the General Election of 1945. On Tiwarik the distant cries of cricketers on slumbrous June afternoons might come back as fresh as ever if I let them; but that regular pock of their play would now sound to me like the ticking of the termites in the night which slowly reduce my house’s framework to dust from within.

  It seems incredible now that I should ever have felt myself so terrorised as I did then, at the whim of any figure in authority. But unknown to myself it must have produced an anger in me because after all my father had won in his heroic campaign against the wasps that afternoon: he had punished me with drawn-out terror for once trying to kill him with a wasp. At one level this was only fair; at another it was horribly unfair to blame me for his not being more lovable, better loved. A defiance, a stubbornness grew in me which later resulted in my refusal to think and do as he and his paid deputies, his headmasters, so clearly wished. It had been all of a piece to deny the beauties of the English countryside and to go on failing maths ‘O’ level. Those two incidents were perhaps ten years apart but another twenty-five were to elapse before this simple connection occurred to me, something which to anybody else would appear as trivial as the laboured self-perceptions of others always do.

  *

  The cordillera opposite is still busy; the idea that hills are always motionless is visibly absurd. The moon, meanwhile, has slid to another corner of the sky. Its newly angled light has thrown up different aspects of the slopes and screes and ravines which now seem to be poising themselves to roar down and engulf Sabay, asleep without trace among the black line of coco-palms fringing the coast in either direction. Mountains. How predictable that I should have resisted mountains longest of all.

  Among my father’s books had always been, discreetly laid flat beneath other things, an album of text and photographs done up like a book and titled Those Kingly Days … It was the record of a fortnight’s climbing holiday which he, his younger brother and two friends had spent in Norway in July 1939. My uncle wrote the text, my father took the photographs, some of which are of great beauty and accomplishment. I am sorry now that my father did not write the text as well. My uncle’s style, eminently readable, was still that of a very young man (he was then nineteen) and leaned slightly back towards the world of Three Men in a Boat, poised sometimes on the edge of the facetious without ever quite being so. In fact he adroitly counteracted this tendency by giving detailed accounts and diagrams of climbs the party made each day and in this respect Those Kingly Days … is a short and quite serious climber’s journal. Of course the camaraderie was of its time; it is nearly half a century ago now. Reading between the lines one can see the holiday must have been a miraculously snatched interlude. My father was a newly qualified doctor; probably never again did he and his brother spend so long together. If there was a flavour of old times the new times were obtruding remorselessly: six weeks later Britain was at war and some seven months after that Norway was occupied by Nazi troops. But the reason I wish my father had written the book himself is that he might have given something away. All one really learns about him is that he had to go home a day or two early, to the regret of the others, although the reason is not given. In fact he went to take up his first houseman’s job at UCH.

  Yet this very muteness of my father’s part in the story is itself eloquent. Nobody who did not possess a tender eye could have taken those photographs: they speak for him. From the text I first learned he had been there at least once before, in 1937, so much of the point of this chronicled trip must have been to re-climb peaks he had already climbed, perhaps acting partly as guide and partly as one who longed to pass on some of the pleasure he had already experienced. Fifty years on a poignancy clings to those neatly laid-out pages, those black and white pictures of pale English young men bathing naked in glacier water. For my father, at least, the sense of temporary freedom and adventure must have been overwhelming.

  To understand why, it is
necessary to imagine how it must have been for a child to be packed off from China half the world away to southeast London to live thereafter cut off from his parents as from the magnificent wild terrain which surrounded his birthplace in Kuling – to live out of suitcases in a succession of the suburban homes of devout and elderly relatives for most of his schooldays, like so many other sons of the Raj and the Missions. How those long terraced streets must have mocked him with their ironic and inappropriate names of Scottish scenery: Glenshiel Road, Glenesk Road, Glenlyon Road, Balcaskie Road. How that nonconformist dullness must have oppressed him. (I never remember hearing my father speak once about Christianity: his loyalty to his family was too great. But I am quite certain now he never believed a word of it.) An atmosphere of worthy impoverishment, both financial and spiritual, pervades what few accounts of his youth I ever heard, except for the brief remissions of occasional holidays in the Lake District where he walked and climbed. There he must surely have re-discovered long unstructured days of wild silence and exhilarating exercise, sublime antidote to the cramping admonitions of the Congregationalist zealots of south London whose ugly churches he had dutifully to attend.

  It was sad for him when, as a paterfamilias, he wanted to take the family somewhere which had meant much to him, and my sister and I were little enchanted by the Lake District. I was particularly scornful. To a boy already accustomed to roaming the South Downs in search of cordite, a lot of rain-soaked peaks full of gloom and wet sheep was no antidote to anything except good temper. My mean querulousness ruined several of my father’s holidays and probably did much to contaminate our relationship. It was one more of a short enough list of possible pleasures he was destined not to share with his only son.