by Graham Swift
And what did your history-teacher-in-the-making do after taking in these words and receiving that gaze? He looked around at the innocent fields and dykes and saw in them treacherous conspirators. He couldn’t bring himself to face the face which faced him and which seemed to be accusing him of childish stupidity. He threw a (childish) tantrum. He kicked the brick base of the former windmill by the Hockwell Lode. He marched up the bank of the same Lode, savagely tearing up as he went a clump of grass, and stood at the top of the bank, throwing bits of that same torn-up clump, equally savagely, this way and that. So he was still in the same mess, after all – just as he was thinking that a neat phrase had hauled him out. Just as he was succumbing to the illusion that everything was all right, like it was before, and they might even, inside the ruined windmill … And she had to spoil it all.
As if it were all some trick against him.
Another seized-up clump of grass. The future history teacher indulges in histrionics. He struts and fumes like a true male member of the species. Are you watching me, Mary? Can you see how outraged I am? Throws more tufts of futile grass into the air. Stares at the Lode (the sheeny eye of the Lode stares back at him). While Mary stands at the bottom of the bank, arms drawn round herself, not really noticing, not impressed. He’s alone. She’s alone. He’s blustery-raging alone; and she’s rooted, patient alone.
He turns. On this warm July afternoon he suddenly feels cold. He knows for certain that the fear he felt by the river-bank and in his own locked room four days ago can’t be allayed by two official words – nor by seizing up and throwing to the wind each and every tussock along the Hockwell Lode. He descends the Lode bank. He stands before the motionless girl. He would have liked (hated too) this sixteen-year-old, warm-bodied, stern-eyed, ten-weeks-pregnant, no-longer-curious creature in whom he sees suddenly qualities of iron, to hold him. But her arms stay wrapped round her own shoulders. He sits down, weakly, at the foot of the bank. She remains standing. He looks up and asks (he wants someone to come up with some answers): ‘You told him. You told him. So what are we going to do?’
And Mary says firmly: ‘I know what I’m going to do.’
And turns and leaves him sitting beneath the bank and doesn’t move her head or speak when he gets up and shouts: ‘What’s that then, Mary? What are you going to do? Mary—?’
He cycles back to his lock-cottage home, not knowing when he will see Mary again, whether she will ever meet him again by the stump of the old windmill. His father, who has been lifting potatoes (lifting potatoes so as to stop asking why) from the vegetable plot behind the cottage, wipes earthy hands, says, though not in the voice with which he was once apt to tell fireside yarns: ‘Jack Parr – have you heard? Sat down on the railway line …’ Sits down himself, on an upturned barrel beside the chicken coop. Takes out and lights a Lucky Strike (forgetting: courtesy of the US Air Force, via Jack Parr, via Freddie …) Wonders, perhaps, looking at his son’s face – his son’s troubled face which mirrors his own – whether this is the time, this time of universal strife and reckoning, and now that a drowned body … to tell him everything, the whole story, all that his son will learn one day anyway. But says, blowing smoke, paternally, confidingly, solicitously: ‘Is it serious – you and Mary?’
Is it serious?!
Broody chicken sounds. Innocent cluck-clucks. Quiet river. Mocking late-afternoon mellowness. Because life continues. ‘Sat down on the railway lines …’ Because life goes on and July afternoons turn to old gold, despite drowned bodies and inquests, and even despite wars which assert themselves in wireless announcements and evening blackouts. Dad gets up: the six o’clock bulletin. A daily ritual. A daily homage. Stands at the back door, shakes his head (another singeing for the inhabitants of the Ruhr), rubs his mouth, conflating things local and things cosmic. Returns to his vegetable plot. Gets on vigorously with his potato lifting.
And even now, on sunlit airfields, bomber crews are being briefed. And even now, down the Gildsey road comes a sound not unreminiscent of a distant bomber. Dick on his motor-cycle. That familiar sound, every evening, a little after six. Dick’s motor-bike; Dick coming home from the dredger. This joke-truth: life goes on. And is it possible that for Dick this is just another day? Home after six. That he has forgotten—? That for him present eclipses past? That he possesses those amnesiac, those time-erasing qualities so craved by all guilty parties—? No Before; no After. Just another day. Another day on the dredger. Silt-shifting.
Father and son watch the motor-bike approach. Watch the machine-and-man entity buzz towards them down the straight and level Gildsey road, then slow down and reveal its bipartite nature as Dick brakes, sits up in the saddle, and the two observers hear, faintly, through the noise of the engine and a flurry of dust as Dick turns into the track to the cottage, the tuneless wail, the wordless, endless song of love to his motor-cycle that Dick always sings as he rides.
Father leans on his fork. And son picks up a potato (an Ulster Chieftain), starts to tear at it with his bare nails, to flay it, to gouge it, and asks himself (again, yet again): ‘And what am I going to do?’
14
De la Révolution
IT GOES in two directions at once. It goes backwards as it goes forwards. It loops. It takes detours. Do not fall into the illusion that history is a well-disciplined and unflagging column marching unswervingly into the future. Do you remember, I asked you – a riddle – how does a man move? One step forward, one step back (and sometimes one step to the side). Is this absurd? No. Because if he never took that step forward—
Or – another of my classroom maxims: There are no compasses for journeying in time. As far as our sense of direction in this unchartable dimension is concerned, we are like lost travellers in a desert. We believe we are going forward, towards the oasis of Utopia. But how do we know – only some imaginary figure looking down from the sky (let’s call him God) can know – that we are not moving in a great circle?
It cannot be denied, children, that the great so-called forward movements of civilization, whether moral or technological, have invariably brought with them an accompanying regression. That the dissemination of Christian tenets over a supposedly barbarous world has been throughout the history of Europe – to say nothing of missionary zeal elsewhere – one of the prime causes of wars, butcheries, inquisitions and other forms of barbarity. That the discovery of the printing press led, likewise, as well as to the spreading of knowledge, to propaganda, mendacity, contention and strife. That the invention of the steam-engine led to the miseries of industrial exploitation and to ten-year-olds working sixteen hours a day in coal mines. That the invention of the aeroplane led to the widespread destruction of European cities along with their civilian populations during the period 1939 to ’45 (here I can offer you my twofold eyewitness account: the nightly flights of bombers from East Anglian bases from 1941 onwards; the ruins of Cologne, Düsseldorf and Essen).
And as for the splitting of the atom—
And where history does not undermine and set traps for itself in such an openly perverse way, it creates this insidious longing to revert. It begets this bastard but pampered child, Nostalgia. How we yearn – how you may one day yearn – to return to that time before history claimed us, before things went wrong. How we yearn even for the gold of a July evening on which, though things had already gone wrong, things had not gone as wrong as they were going to. How we pine for Paradise. For mother’s milk. To draw back the curtain of events that has fallen between us and the Golden Age.
So how do we know – lost in the desert – that it is to the oasis of the yet-to-come we should be travelling anyway, and not to some other green Elysium that, a long while ago, we left behind? And how do we know that this mountain of baggage called History, which we are obliged to lug with us – which slows our pace to a crawl and makes us stagger off course – is really hindering us from advancing or retreating? Which way does salvation lie?
No wonder we move in circles.
So then. Let us throw down our baggage, let us cast aside all this cumbersome paraphernalia, and see. Every so often, there are these attempts to jettison the impedimenta of history, to do without that ever-frustrating weight. And because history accumulates, because it gets always heavier and the frustration greater, so the attempts to throw it off (in order to go – which way was it?) become more violent and drastic. Which is why history undergoes periodic convulsions, and why, as history becomes inevitably more massive, more pressing and hard to support, man – who even without his loads doesn’t know where he’s heading – finds himself involved in bigger and bigger catastrophes.
What is this thing that takes us back, either via catastrophe and confusion or in our heart’s desire, to where we were?
Let’s call it Natural History.
Do you remember when we did the French Revolution? That great landmark, that great watershed of history. How I explained to you the implications of that word ‘revolution’? A turning round, a completing of a cycle. How I told you that though the popular notion of revolution is that of categorical change, transformation – a leap into the future – yet almost every revolution contains within it an opposite if less obvious tendency: the idea of a return. A redemption; a restoration. A reaffirmation of what is pure and fundamental against what is decadent and false. A return to a new beginning …
The turmoil of great revolutions is the last setting in which one would expect Nostalgia to thrive. But so it does. Reflect for a moment on the wilful and cultivated naïvety of those French revolutionaries. How they demanded not the rights of citizens but the rights of Man. How they took up good old Rousseau’s cry of back to nature and ‘l’homme né libre’. How when in 1790 they thought the revolution was over (naïve in that too) they celebrated by dressing up, in Arcadian simplicity, as swains and shepherdesses and by planting tender young trees of liberty. Consider the growing religiosity – pious feasts to the Supreme Being – of a movement whose initial animus had in part been anti-clerical if not atheistical. And consider the dangers of this naïvety. How this yearning after purity and innocence is only a step from Robespierre’s famous, and infamous, incorruptibility; how liberation turns to Grand Purge; how this revolution, which they thought was over so quickly, is forced, in order to satisfy its insistence on first principles, to renew itself again and again, with ever more ruthless zeal, till exhaustion allows compromise – if not reaction.
And those revolutionary messiahs – Robespierre, Marat, the rest – of whom it can be said, at least, that they were prepared to go to extremes in order to create a new world – did they really have in mind a Society of the Future? Not a bit of it. Their model was an idealized ancient Rome. Laurel wreaths and all. Their prototype the murder of Caesar. Our heroes of the new age – good classicists all – yearned, too, to go back—
‘But Sir!’
It’s corpse-pale Price who interrupts. Provocative hand raised. And the teacher feels, through Price’s rebellious eyes, the anticipation of the whole class.
(Sir! Hang on a moment! We’re not living in the eighteenth century. What about—?)
‘This nostalgia stuff, sir’ – shifting in his desk with an air of ironic puzzlement – ‘how would nostalgia make these hungry workers go on the rampage then?’
Titters and murmurs from the class. (A mob gathering.) Nervous shifting of weight on feet by teacher.
(They’ve all noticed it: something just a bit edgy of late, something just a bit vulnerable about old Cricky.)
‘I’m glad you asked that, Price.’ (How a teacher announces a side-step.) ‘Because it raises the question of how you define a revolution – sociologically speaking. Just as a revolution moves in strange directions, so its social location is elusive. You mention the hungry workers. Do these make a revolution? Or do the overtaxed bourgeoisie? Is a revolution merely a spontaneous external event or somebody’s conscious plan? Surely a revolution cannot be called a revolution unless before it is even an act it is the expression of a will? But whose? Where do we place the revolutionary will? The petit bourgeois? The hungry masses? The political clubs? As you try to define the revolution you imitate precisely the action of the revolution itself – eliminating with a mental guillotine those who do not fit some impossibly absolute notion of revolution. Where is the revolution truly embodied? In Danton? He wanted to call it a day and retire to the country. Robespierre? He, on the other hand, was a ruthless fanatic. Thus one comes to the obligingly vague notion of “the people” – Vox populi, vox Dei. Translate, someone.’
Judy Dobson, front row left (a perky answerer): ‘The voice of the people is the voice of God.’
‘Very good. But true? And who, in this case, were the people? The professional men who flocked to the National Assembly? They for the most part were fired by personal ambition and the prospect of power. The masses? The mob? Are they our true revolutionaries? Study the history of the Paris mob from 1789 to 1795 and the one constant feature you’ll find is inconsistency …’
(Stop this waffle. Price doesn’t want a lecture – and he can see through your smoke-screen.)
‘The mob supports this party, then that, but once its particular grievances are met, once it is no longer hungry, it will follow a Napoleon as readily as a Danton. There can be no revolution, perhaps, without a mob, but the mob are not the revolutionaries …’
Teacher fingers tie-knot, a blustering general before mutinous troops.
‘So where does it lie, this revolution? Is it merely a term of convenience? Does it really lie in some impenetrable mesh of circumstances too complex for definition? It’s a curious thing, Price, but the more you try to dissect events, the more you lose hold of them – the more they seem to have occurred largely in people’s imagination …’
Teacher pauses. Price’s response to all this suddenly seems important.
He hesitates a moment. Then, boldly, almost insolently: ‘Should we be writing this down, sir? The French Revolution never really happened. It only happened in the imagination.’
Laughter.
‘Don’t be literal, Price.’
‘No, but I think it’s true. We don’t know the half, so a good half must be make-believe. And are we really supposed to believe that in 1789 everyone wanted to put the clock back?’
More giggles and outbursts. Price turns, surveys, with a faint grin, the class.
(So is that your game? All it is? Just the old bash-the-teacher stuff? The old schoolroom power-contest: Class-mates beware! Don’t be fooled by our teacher’s attempts to turn a thing into its opposite. To call revolution retrogression. What all this clever-talk amounts to is that our Cricky’s over the hill. Like all old fogies, he can only look backwards. He can’t bear the notion of anything new …)
‘I’m speculating, it’s true, Price. But we’re all free to interpret.’
‘You mean, so we can find whatever meaning we like in history?’
‘Price—’
(But actually I do believe that. I believe it more and more. History: a lucky dip of meanings. Events elude meaning, but we look for meanings. Another definition of Man: the animal who craves meaning – but knows—)
‘Price,’ (side-step again), ‘I draw attention to the backward-tending element of the Revolution to illustrate that even revolutions with their claims to construct a new order are subject to one of the most ingrained historical beliefs. That history is the record of decline. What we wish upon the future is very often the image of some lost, imagined past.’
He frowns. For the first time in this classroom set-to he looks unsure. (Will you have a lost past, Price? When you’re my age—?)
‘I don’t understand that, sir. I mean that’s really weird, isn’t it?’
Open mirth in class. Teacher’s eyes fasten on the view beyond the window.
‘It’s no more weird – no more superstitious than saying that at some magical time in the future paradise will arrive.’
Price bites his pen. He’s not laughing with the others.
But he’ll wait for another lesson for his Big Statement.
‘I never said that, sir. Never said anything about paradise. But – I want a future.’ (The class has gone suddenly quiet.) ‘We all do. And you – you can stuff your past!’
And so, having examined all the evidence, we must ask ourselves some big questions. Why was it that this revolution in the name of liberty and equality ended with an emperor? Why was it that this movement to abolish for good the ancien régime ended with a reincarnation of the old Sun King?
Why was it that this revolution which did indeed achieve lasting reforms could not do so without fear and terror, without the piling up, in the streets of Paris alone, of (at a modest estimate) six thousand corpses, not to mention the thousands of corpses in greater France or the unnumbered corpses of Italians, Austrians, Prussians, Russians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Englishmen – which were to be strewn over the battlegrounds of Europe? Why is it that every so often history demands a bloodbath, a holocaust, an Armageddon? And why is it that every time the time before has taught us nothing?
Follow me, said the little Corsican, and I will give you your Golden Age. And they followed him – these regicides, these tyrant-haters.
How it repeats itself, how it goes back on itself, no matter how we try to straighten it out. How it twists and turns. How it goes in circles and brings us back to the same place.
So if you’re thinking of going somewhere. If you want your Here and Now. If you’re tired of school and lessons, if you want to be out there, in the real world of today, let me tell you
15
About the Ouse
THE Great Ouse. Ouse. Say it. Ouse. Slowly. How else can you say it? A sound which exudes slowness. A sound which suggests the slow, sluggish, forever oozing thing it is. A sound which invokes quiet flux, minimum tempo; cool, impassive, unmoved motion. A sound which will calm even the hot blood racing in your veins. Ouse, Ouse, Oooooouse …