You get the picture? I could go on, telling you all about the drears who live here and think that by electing Mr Ponsonby, the ironmonger, to be mayor every year they are helping to preserve all that’s best in Britain. I could tell you about the terrible scandal of Dr Nye, who made the unholy error of patting Miss Spurgeon (age seventy-three) on the knee-cap when she complained of sciatica in her elbow. But I won’t, partly because the whole thing would be tedious beyond words, partly because I don’t believe a word of it anyway, and mostly because I have a much more interesting story to tell you, about Harry Mengel, who isn’t German, as you might think with a name like that, though he isn’t quite altogether English, you know, either, since his great-great-great-God-knows-how-many-times-grandfather was something to do with one of those Moguls who came over with William the Third, who was, if I remember right, the one married to Mary. Anyway, this ancient Mengel married a nice English girl in Cartersfield, and so the family has gone on ever since, though the big-wig from Holland and his lot died out somewhere around the time of the battle of Waterloo. Nobles come, bringing their trains with them, you see, and then they die and the servants stay on. History. Those who’ve read some tell me it’s fascinating, and I’m sure they’re right. From such a minor question as the origin of Harry Mengel’s surname we get a whole picture of social development. Hurrah.
Not that there was much development in the Mengel family, who remained, I imagine, resolutely servile till Harry’s father bought a sweetshop during the depression, managed to keep it going through the ’thirties, the war, rationing (history will keep breaking in, excuse me) and so on, so that when he died a couple of years ago it was from a thoroughly deserved stroke, since his little sweetshop had become the largest grocery store in the town, he had no inhibitions about testing his stock on his stomach, and his belly was the subject of much speculation among the younger members of our community. Harry, in fact, learnt, or so it seems to me, his business skill at an age when he should have been learning his lessons, because kids being kids, bets would be made about the size of old Mr Mengel’s waistline, accurate statistics upon which could be gauged only by a member of the family—i.e. Harry. He took ten per cent for his measurements. In fact, what he did was to measure his father’s trousers (his father having several pairs, as should be obvious), not his old dad at all, but his figures were agreed to be good. Furthermore, his father’s waist went in and out a good deal, since he made spasmodic and quarter-hearted efforts to get off the fat. Thus speculation on his belly was more or less constant, or traditional, rather, among the boys at the school, and Harry did nothing to discourage it, taking his ten per cent without a qualm.
This precociousness was not the only thing which singled out Harry among his contemporaries, I may say. Of course he stole apples, broke windows, played cricket in alleys, booted a football about and so on, like any English kid, but he did all these things, or so it seemed to me, with a certain lack of enthusiasm. I should explain, I suppose, that I am the schoolmaster of Cartersfield. All right, I know, go and talk to the barmaid if you’d rather. Well, when I say the schoolmaster I don’t mean that at all, really, you see there’s a very good little Grammar School in Cartersfield, only it’s very small, and I am only one of seven masters and four mistresses. None the less, my opinion of my colleagues being what it is, I am, in my own eyes at any rate, the schoolmaster here, though the headmaster, who considers himself an almost unbearably fair man, would tell you I’m just a member of his staff. Anyhow, what I’m getting at is this—Harry was brighter than average, not brilliant, no, but decidedly brighter than average, and I, being a sort of damn-fool enthusiast, and pleased with his progress in mathematics, which is what I teach, encouraged him, with the doubtful assistance of his father, to try for a scholarship to Reading University. Now you may say, if you’re a snob, that Reading University is not the sort of university that you’d want your child to go to, and if you are that sort of snob then to you I say, go to hell. Reading is near by, I went there myself, and it is an excellent university. Furthermore Harry had about as much chance of getting to Oxford or Cambridge as I have of being the first man on the moon, someone who is, as it happens, a man I should very much like to be. And from this you will gather why I hold a low opinion of my colleagues—Cartersfield Grammar School has had exactly one pupil at a university in the last ten years. He was sent down from University College, London, for getting a girl with child. (As though that was any reason to deprive him of further education: quite the contrary, in my opinion, but that’s the sort of thing we’re up against.)
Where was I? Oh yes, Harry Mengel. Well, though the headmaster, turning somersaults to be fair to everyone, was against me, and the rest of the staff was against me, doing its damnedest to be unfair to everyone, I was for me, Harry was for me, and between us we taught him enough to get in, if the examiners hadn’t had some prejudice against the school, and possibly against me and Harry as well. I’m prejudiced against the school myself, but I still think Harry was good enough for a scholarship, and if Reading University has the nerve to ask me for money to help them build new buildings again I shall write and tell them exactly what they can do with their new buildings and offer them Cartersfield Grammar School into the bargain. Well, I was exceedingly angry about all this, and Harry was very disappointed, of course, the poor boy, and between us we had a good cry. I hate to see talent chucked away like that. Things are bad enough in this country without wasting perfectly good men like Harry Mengel. But that was that, and I think old Mengel was rather relieved in a way, and Harry went into the store like a good son, and his father got fatter and fatter, though Harry no longer measured him for other people’s bets, and I went on teaching the kids the difference between and parallel lines never meeting, and they still didn’t understand, the dolts.
Now I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in a town like Cartersfield, right out, as I’ve said, of the mainstream of life, but let me try and explain what living there meant to a boy like Harry. As I told you, he was bright, not brilliant, but quite intelligent enough to realize that life of a different and much more exciting variety might very well be going on somewhere else, such as London, or Reading University. After a while he began to brood, just as many young men do, I suppose, about the unfairness of having been born in a place which was dying just as he was beginning to live. Because while he was swotting away for Reading night after night, the by-pass was being built, and by the time he’d been told he wasn’t good enough the thing was finished, and Cartersfield had started on one of its downs. You see, for the last four years it’s been fading away, not altogether, no, but definitely fading, like a tree without water. The road was our water, and they’ve altered its banks to take it away from us. Goodness, a metaphor from a mathematician, but that’s it, really. That’s it, and that’s life, and, anyway, everyone was all for it—though they didn’t know what would happen at the time—and, as I say, I like it, I like living in a quiet little town. Deadly dull, but it gives you a chance to get on with your own life. But not everyone would agree with me about that, and one person who didn’t then was Harry Mengel. ‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ he said to me one day, ‘that there is only one dance hall in Cartersfield, and that is open only one evening a week, and, anyway, no drinks are served?’ Well, of course, it hadn’t. I’m no dancer myself, I never have been, and it certainly hadn’t entered my mind that the inadequacy of the Lord George Brunswick Memorial Hall might be a source of juvenile resentment. But I saw his point. Years of teaching adolescents have taught me a few things, and one of them is that dancing is considered among the half-grown as not merely—inadequate word—‘fun’, but also a social necessity. Ugh. However, I have the interests of my charges at heart, and I could see that he was really on to something. There was nothing to do in Cartersfield whatever. There were pubs, of course, but one could hardly call the pubs of Cartersfield places of sparkling entertainment. There was the Alhambra Cinema, which showed torn copies of films that ceased to
be in vogue about the time D. W. Griffith began to shoot Intolerance (if indeed he did begin to shoot it, and not someone else—I’m not very good on films, though my ex-wife was a cineaste and took me to all the classics. Frankly, I have always preferred horror and science-fiction films. I suppose I should explain that when I say ex-wife I mean that divorce proceedings had been begun by me when she died in childbirth, the child, itself dead, having been fathered by that standby of the newspapers, the other man.) And apart from these two cultural centres there was the Lord George Brunswick Memorial Hall, once a week, eight to twelve, non-alcoholic. I have no idea who Lord George Brunswick was, or why he gave us a hall to remember him by, but judging by the statue which stands outside he was himself a chronic alcoholic, since the veins on his nose are distinctly swollen. However, there are no drinks in his hall, and I have now described to you the whole glittering range of social possibilities.
Now I am not a political man, in any sense. As I’ve said, I prefer living my own life to participating actively in the life of a community. I don’t vote, on principle. But there are various, to me non-political, issues about which I take what must be considered by retired officers in general, and are so considered by Brigadier Hobson in particular (he lives on the edge of the town), extreme views. I am against hanging, for instance, and against the reintroduction of the cat and the housing of prisoners three to a cell. About these and related topics I feel very strongly indeed, and can even be persuaded to sign petitions. I also feel, though more mildly, that it would be a great mistake to start another war, or to have anything to do with one started by anyone else. Oh, I fought myself, I was patriotic and all that rubbish, but I decided soon after the war was over that I had been wrong to do so. I’m not a Christian or anything loony like that, it’s just a decision I came to by what I hope was logical reasoning, and though I don’t hide my opinion, I don’t go around preaching it, either. I don’t try to convert my pupils, or anything subversive like that, in fact I urge them to do their national service, but I do try to get them to realize that there is a problem to be thought about, and then to think about it. And Harry Mengel did think about it, more seriously than most. After he’d been weighing his father’s flour for about six months he went off to the Army, became a corporal, was sent to Cyprus, saw a little bit of the world beyond the by-pass, heard the screams of men being tortured, didn’t like the idea, worried about it—cautiously, of course—wrote to me about it, read my even more cautious answers, did nothing heroic, came home and was demobbed.
Those two years, you know, can have quite an effect on an intelligent young man who’s hardly left his home-town before. And Harry came home distinctly thoughtful, even rather radical. Now I approve of radicalism in the young—I approve of the young altogether, in fact, and I think that any young man with any spunk in him will find something to be radical about, even if it’s only his dear old dad. Well, Harry went farther than most, in fact he cut out the father-hating stage altogether, and I used to find him in the public library reading The New Statesman rather than taking it home to shock the old man, who was, by the way, frankly obese by this time. Harry and I used to have long talks together, during which I would shatter what I considered dangerous leanings towards Teach-Yourself-Marxism, while he tried to undermine my faith in political quietism. And, of course, we became good friends, and we both forgot that I had once been his teacher. He even began to get me worried, to make me wonder if I shouldn’t get out of Cartersfield and go and live a little before I died, but, of course, I didn’t do anything more than wonder.
Well, among the many things which seemed to Harry to be violently wrong with the world, the wrongest of all was the hydrogen bomb. He learnt all about it, he could tell you how many people died at Hiroshima, how many people would die, over what period of time, if an H-bomb were dropped at such and such a height over Marble Arch or the Birmingham Public Library or the main Post Office at Leeds. He knew about geese on American radar screens, and radioactive milk, and babies with two heads, the lucky things. I don’t know how much of his information was correct, and I think he probably took the gloomiest possible view of everything to do with the bomb, but it was quite obvious, even to Brigadier Hobson, that to answer Harry Mengel you had to know your facts. And, of course, in Cartersfield no one knew anything at all; in fact poor Harry had great difficulty in getting anyone to argue with him, even. People said: ‘Is that right, Harry?’ and ‘You don’t say?’ and ‘Well I never’, but they couldn’t, you know, contribute to the conversation. There was Brigadier Hobson, it’s true, but he was hardly fair game, since he seemed to think that the next war would be fought with infantry, like the last, and anyway he was quite nice really, even if he did embody all the positively evil clichés of the public-school system. I was mildly on Harry’s side. No one else gave a damn. Mr Ponsonby, the perennial mayor, couldn’t have told a hawk from a handsaw if he hadn’t been the ironmonger. And the headmaster, that chairman among chairmen, believed in letting things take their course and seeing all the evidence before one made one’s decision; that is to say he never listened to a word anyone else said, then gave his own opinion, which was, briefly, on the one hand this, on the other hand that, and we should wait and see. ‘Then you’d better be wearing dark glasses, that’s all,’ Harry told him one evening, ‘or you’ll never see anything again.’
Now I don’t want to give you the wrong impression about Harry. He had his views, yes, but he was still a grocer, and when his father died at last of sheer adiposity (this was not the official reason, of course, but Dr Nye did have a tendency to be indiscreet) Harry found himself with a pretty good business to run. It’s true that trade in Cartersfield wasn’t as good as it had been, but people still had to eat, and Harry’s father had branched out a bit—there were Mengel’s Groceries in two or three neighbouring towns—and Harry was really rather well-off. I think this annoyed him a little, being a rich radical, but, after all, what about Stafford Cripps, so that was all right. I told him I didn’t see why a rich man shouldn’t be a Socialist if he wanted, and he needn’t give all his money away, either, this isn’t the day of judgment: when he gets the sort of state he’s working for he’ll find it’s taken from him soon enough, and meanwhile he can probably do a lot more good by hanging on to it. That’s what I said, and I think I may even believe it. So not long after the funeral, anti-bomb posters began to appear in the windows of Harry’s shops, and a few people muttered and said he should keep his politics out of his business, but they didn’t stop buying at his store, because it was easily the best one in Cartersfield, and, anyway, a poster didn’t make any difference to the quality of the goods. I think he could have put up a Communist poster and people would still have come. Not that Harry had any leanings towards Communism, far from it; Harry was a petit bourgeois and glad of it once I’d explained to him that it was all right really. Brigadier Hobson did threaten to take his account elsewhere, it’s true, but Harry simply grinned at him and said, loud enough for a few people to hear (and they told everyone else): ‘Thank you, sir, I should be very glad to have a cheque. Your account stands at two hundred and thirty-five pounds, four shillings and fourpence, plus that bunch of grapes you are carrying, and I was going to speak to you about it anyway, sir.’ And Brigadier Hobson went very red in the face, because he had plenty of money, but didn’t like paying bills very much, and he stayed with Mengel’s and his credit remained, too. Nice man, Hobson, under all the bombast. They often are, those harrumphers. He knows when he’s beaten, all right, and accepts defeat better than victory, the old fool.
Anyhow, there was Harry, a young radical with a chain of groceries and a bomb on the brain, and lo and behold, one day it occurs to him that the Aldermaston March would be clumping along the by-pass in a month’s time, and Easter Saturday being Easter Saturday, what was he going to do about it? There’s a dilemma for you, business versus faith, a big selling day against the biggest anti-bomb performance of the year. He pondered and puzzled about it for days. H
e even made tactful inquiries to see if any of his friends would take over for him while the March chugged along the by-pass, but without success. Meanwhile he made his preparations—he was going on the three other days, anyway; it was just the Saturday, when the march would be passing his own town, that he couldn’t be on it. And he wanted very much to be on it on that day in particular, to march, even if it was only along the by-pass, with a great big banner saying: ‘CARTERSFIELD SAYS BAN THE BOMB’. ‘We’ve got to give them a feeling of welcome,’ he said to me one night, when I caught him making it, a huge thing it was, too, blue with the words in gold, and a picture of a mushroom cloud in scarlet. Absolutely hideous. Harry had no colour-sense at all.
‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ I said, though it was quite obvious what he was doing.
‘I’m making a bloody banner,’ he said. ‘Here, grab a hold of that corner, will you? It’s getting wrinkled. We don’t want our lovely message lopsided, do we?’
So I took an end, and I helped him paint it. I even added a few violet puffs to the mushroom cloud.
A Disturbing Influence Page 4