‘Pretty good,’ he said, when we’d finished. ‘Now we’ll let it dry before we add the poles.’
‘Poles?’ I said. ‘What do you mean, poles?’
‘Two poles. One each side. It’s got to be spread out tight so that people can see it. It’ll be no bloody good if it just droops, will it?’
‘And who’s taking the other pole?’
‘You are,’ he said; he didn’t even bother to look at me, he just stated it as though it was a fact we had both known for a very long time, but I had not known it for a long time, I had no intention of making a fool of myself for him or anyone else, and I told him so, briefly and clearly.
‘Come off it,’ he said. ‘You and I will show these dead and dying men of Cartersfield that we mean business.’
‘Damn it, Harry,’ I said, ‘I’m —— if I will.’ Yes, I swore. Tut, tut, fancy a schoolmaster knowing such horrible words. Well, where do you think schoolboys learn them? ‘I’m —— if I will,’ I said, and I meant it.
‘Well, then, you’re ——, that’s all,’ he said.
And we left it at that, because he knew perfectly well that I could never be induced to march in his march, let alone carry a hideous banner. And so time passed, and Easter came nearer, and Harry’s problem remained unsolved. He was terribly torn between shutting the shop altogether and missing a day of footslogging, and people didn’t help him, either, in fact they even began to be a little unkind, saying: ‘Oh, I won’t take it now, I’ll collect it Saturday; you will be open then, Mr Mengel, won’t you?’ and Harry would smile and say: ‘Yes,’ then go into his office and curse a bit. I may say that by this time, thanks to Harry and his dilemma, people were beginning to get interested in this march thing, though not me, of course. I had no intention of walking even as far as the north-east corner of Chapman’s Wood just to watch a lot of fanatics parading down a main road. But others were saying that perhaps Harry might be right, one never knew, did one, and perhaps these people weren’t all cuckoo, were they? And others said angrily that it shouldn’t be allowed, particularly not at holiday-time, holding up the traffic when everyone wanted to get out for a drive. The pubs got quite quarrelsome. Even one young radical can cause trouble if he tries.
And though of course he was delighted that people were taking an interest, Harry was still going through agonies about Easter Saturday. Ever since he’d taken those commissions on his father’s waistline Harry had hated to let a good thing go by, and holiday-time is no time to close your shop just to go on a crusade (because that’s what he called it now). And then he thought he’d had a brilliant idea. He came and told me, under pain of radiation sickness if I told anyone else, that he’d thought up a compromise. He’d shut the shop for half an hour while the march went by, and give everyone on it an Easter egg.
‘How about that!’ he said.
‘But, Harry,’ I said, ‘there may be a thousand people there.’
‘No, there won’t,’ he said. ‘Second day—five hundred at the most. Anyway, I can afford to give away a thousand Easter eggs.’
Well, how should I know what he could afford, and how many people there’d be on his precious march? I reckoned he knew what he was talking about, and I just hoped his old mother wouldn’t die of a stroke when she heard about it. So I shrugged and said I thought he was quite out of his mind, but that was his business, not mine.
And then things began to get out of control. On Good Friday Harry went off to Aldermaston and he tramped along all day, feeling like Christ going to Calvary, no doubt, with all those students from all over the place who, said the newspapers, gave the whole thing its character. And suddenly, in that procession, which was much bigger than anyone expected, Harry said, he began to feel at home. It must be just like a university, he thought, I suppose, and forgetting he’d given up that sort of thing to be a good steady grocer he got really worked up. He told me afterwards, that night in fact, that he’d never been so excited in his life.
‘It’s bloody marvellous!’ he said, hopping about all over my room in his great big marching boots. ‘Why, there’s thousands of us, David, thousands!’
He’d never called me by my Christian name before, and I hadn’t invited him to, because I prefer not to be called anything. My ex-wife used to call me Dave, and I’ve hated my name ever since. So that annoyed me to start with, and then his dirty great boots all over my carpet.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ I said, ‘sit down or take those boots off, man, I don’t want this place looking as though your whole loony procession has been through.’
But he wasn’t listening to a word I said, he just went on and on about how marvellous everything was.
‘David,’ he said, ‘I want to tell you——’
‘Don’t call me David,’ I said, ‘and take your boots off.’
‘But why shouldn’t I call you David?’ he said. ‘It’s your name, isn’t it? God, you don’t know what today was like. I fell in love with the whole world, it was just fabulous!’
Now when people say things like that to me I’m liable to get very pedantic and sarcastic and boring, and usually I say: ‘Really, are you sure, the whole world, how can that be? Let us examine our terms,’ and other carefully chosen irritants along the same lines. But Harry was different, Harry was a friend of mine, and besides he was clearly out of his mind. I didn’t know what to say, so I said: ‘Oh my God, Harry.’
‘Dave,’ he said, and I winced, ‘Dave,’ and he seized my shoulders and started shaking me, ‘do you realize that the youth of the country is with us? Nothing can stop us now.’
‘Oh my God,’ I said again. What else could I say?
‘We’ll win now. We can’t lose. Everyone will come over. The thing’s a wild successs, don’t you see?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t. And take your boots——’
‘You will tomorrow!’ he shouted, and then he danced round my room a bit more, and then he went away, planning God knows what.
Well, you can imagine how I felt about all this, pretty fed up hardly describes it. I mean, what the hell could have got into the boy? I made myself angry thinking about the effect of mass meetings on impressionable minds, and muttered ‘Nuremberg’ to myself, like a good suspicious radical, and then I went to bed. I was so angry with Harry that I went straight to sleep. (Usually I lie awake for an hour or so working myself up into a rage, otherwise I can’t sleep. Yes, I dare say it is unusual.)
Well, next morning came, and nothing very exciting seemed to be happening that I could see. I hate the Easter holidays, anyway. It usually rains, and with a lot of guff about religion they even shut the cinemas most of the time. And I feel I ought to be doing something, which is nonsense. It’s as bad as Christmas. Anyway, I went along to the store to see what Harry was up to, but he wasn’t there. A lot of other people were there, though, and his poor mother was running round in circles doing his job and hers on one of the busiest mornings of the year. She was far too flustered for me to bother even to ask where Harry was. Anyway, she’s a pretty stupid woman, I think, or she wouldn’t let Harry spend so much time thinking about politics. If she was loyal to her class she wouldn’t stand for it. Well, I came out of the shop ready to be angry at the slightest opportunity, and the first thing I saw was one of my pupils, a particularly dim one at that, so I asked him with perhaps exaggerated care if he’d seen Harry. But of course he hadn’t, and he gave me a look as if to say I must be round the bend. Now if there’s one thing that really makes me angry it’s being treated as loopy by someone whom I know to be less intelligent than myself, so I gave him a gentle cuff over the ear and was about to move on when I saw that he was staring past me at something up the street.
Now our High Street, as well as being narrow, is straight. Jokes have been made about this which I do not intend to repeat. From the crossroads in the middle of the town you can see a full mile in both directions. And coming from what must have been Aldermaston was the march. Right in the distance, turning the bend, was the
front banner itself, a huge black and white and red job, and beyond it a whole lot of other ones in different colours. The road slopes down to the crossroads, and then on and up again, so I had a splendid view, and shattered I was by it, I may say. I’m sure that in all its history Cartersfield never saw anything like it.
‘For God’s sake!’ I said to the dim pupil, whose mouth was hanging open like a letter-box. But he simply looked at me again as though I was mad and ran off, telling his friends, I dare say. So I turned to a perfect stranger beside me, a policeman as it happened, and said: ‘But I thought it was supposed to go along the by-pass?’
‘Special request,’ said the policeman. ‘Coming down here instead. Got the message this morning.’
And then I realized. Harry had really pulled a trick to shatter his home-town. But if he’d fooled us, then so had the march fooled him, because it was much bigger than he’d estimated. I should say his five hundred was exceeded several times, not that I know. I dare say there are statistics somewhere if you want to find out. The marchers came on and on, like a medieval army, flags flying, banners streaming, just like the pictures in fact. I kept thinking of Henry V, though I didn’t notice Laurence Olivier out there leading them into the breach. In fact as the front of the procession came nearer I saw that the leaders, about a dozen of them, included (you’ve guessed, of course) Harry Mengel, and he’d got someone on the other end of his banner, and he was strutting along at the front as though he was the Great Panjandrum himself, his chest swollen up like a balloon and his eyes front as though he was back in the Army. A band somewhere farther back was playing ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’. Very appropriate.
Well, when I saw him it was too much for me, much too much. I wasn’t letting him get away with it that easy. I just jumped straight in and took the other pole of his banner away from whatever nabob of the march had a hold of it, and shouted at him. What I shouted isn’t altogether repeatable, but the gist of it was, what did he think he was doing, how the hell had he managed it, and what about his precious Easter eggs?
‘You’ll see!’ he yelled back, and really he looked so happy I didn’t want to spoil it for him by being narky, so I just marched along beside him at the head of the carnival, that bloody great procession, and whenever I saw anyone I knew, and I know most of the people in Cartersfield, I said: ‘Join the march’ in my most ferocious schoolmaster’s voice, and as most of them had been my pupils at some time or another, quite a lot of them were sufficiently frightened or awed or something that they did join in, so that we had a pretty impressive Cartersfield group banning the bomb by the time we came out the other side of the town. I don’t know what had got into me, but when they came up to us—the big-wigs, I mean—and said: ‘O.K., you’ve had your glory, Cartersfield, back with the boys now,’ I was about to brain them with the banner, but Harry said: ‘That’s right, and thanks a lot.’ So off we went to the back, or rather, since the back was so far away, to the middle or thereabouts, in with a lot of students from (it had to be) Reading University. By this time I was cooling down, and beginning to realize just what a fool I’d made of myself, but then the procession stopped for a moment, and I had a good look at it.
All through the town, and up the hill over the crossroads, the march beetled along, people singing, waving, shuffling, striding, as though there wasn’t a by-pass round Cartersfield at all, and the life had come back to it again, and things mattered—you know what I mean? For a moment I nearly cried, and it takes a lot to make me even think of wanting to do that, Hiroshima or no Hiroshima, but luckily the procession started up again then, and the fools around us started singing ‘Free beer for all the workers’, which made me very angry indeed. If there’s one thing that makes me ache with rage it’s intellectuals pretending to love the proletariat.
Well, after about another twenty minutes of staggering along under this banner of Harry’s which was no light weight, let me tell you, and like a barrage balloon when the wind blew even softly, we stopped for a break. And here Harry really did himself proud. When the procession moved off again he stood at the side of the road with four vast boxes of Easter eggs, giving one to every single man, woman and child on that march. I watched him for a bit, wondering what he was going to do next. Because I’d had enough. I hate physical exercise of any sort, and I’d already walked farther than I’d any intention of doing, and I was going home to face my shame. So, as the end of the procession began to move past him, I went over to Harry and said: ‘Coming home now, boy?’
He was flushed and excited, like a twelve-year-old at Christmas, unwrapping the presents he’s given, because he can’t bear to wait for the happiness with which they will be received. And when he saw what I meant he looked as though he’d just seen his favourite toy smashed in front of his face and said he supposed so.
And then I did something which maddens me still every time I think about it. I go white with rage and practically fall asleep if someone even mentions it casually. Because if there’s one thing—no, I’ve said that before—but, really, this time I mean it—if there’s one thing that I find quite intolerable in my fellow human-beings, it’s the way they step out of character to be heroic and noble, or even unheroic and ignoble, depending on the character. And I am not the sort of person who does this sort of thing even in my dreams, ever, and I have absolutely no intention of ever doing anything of the kind again, and before I tell you about it I want that to be understood quite clearly.
I looked at him suffering pangs of longing, split right down the middle between profit and honour, and I said: ‘Why don’t you go on, Harry? I’ll go and mind your bloody shop for you.’
And he looked at me as though I was Lenin arriving at the Finland Station, or the Archangel Gabriel, or some other figure of religious literature, and he didn’t say a word, he just grabbed his banner and ran off to join the end of the procession. Not so much as a thank-you.
‘You bastard!’ I shouted after him, already shuddering with rage again, but I don’t think he heard, unfortunately.
And that, since you wanted to know, is how I came to serve for the first and last time in my life behind the counter of a shop.
3. The Gilchrist Boy
SO THERE I am, one whole week of holidays gone by, August the fourth now edging up to noon, sixteen and Stirling Moss, with co-driver-sister Jane ‘Madcap’ Gilchrist beside me, biting her lip and knuckles white against the dashboard, and here’s the turn and into it like Fangio, but not out of it like anyone very much, skid and wheel-spin, car aslant and rearing like a horse, impossible to hold, head bang against the roof, and then there we were, rocking slightly, but upright, gravel sounding still in our ears, in the field, and dirty tracks to betray us, but breathing and not a scratch, and Jane, Jane, we didn’t turn over, why are you crying?
‘Damn,’ I said. ‘Oh, damn and hell. If we hadn’t skidded like that we’d have clipped at least five seconds from the record.’
The record, established at four-thirteen the previous day, was forty-seven seconds from the end of the drive to the house.
‘Don’t blubber, Jane, for God’s sake.’ I was trembling myself, my wrists were as weak as rotten tree-stumps, moss-strangled, hollow, the marrow extracted, bone clean as a pea-whistle.
‘We might have turned over,’ said Jane. ‘We might have been killed.’
‘Nonsense.’
The car—a 1937 Ford Ten, with sliding-roof long stuck fast and leaking a little in the rain—started at the first attempt.
‘It still works, anyway,’ I said.
We moved backwards, then forwards, sedately, back on the drive, facing the house and who knew what music? We got out to repair the ravages of the gravel, kicking and scratching the yellow pebbles into the rut we’d made. Rain would help.
‘It doesn’t look too bad.’
‘There’s still the marks in the grass.’
Like tank-tracks, they were, deep, lush, indelible.
‘A harrow would get them out.’
/> ‘A harrow!’ Jane laughed. Shakily, but laughed. ‘And where does Stirling Moss think he’s going to get a harrow?’
‘Shut up. Get back in the car.’
‘It’s sagging, look.’
She was right, too right. It sagged like a ship holed near the stern on the port side.
‘There’s no puncture.’
‘You’ve done something terrible, Teddy.’
‘The car still goes, doesn’t it?’
‘But look at it!’
‘Arthur will know what’s wrong.’
So back into the car, slow and steady, limping home to haven, a collision at sea, a man lost, alas, but under own steam, making harbour.
As I shut the garage doors I said to Jane: ‘If you tell anyone about this I’ll kill you.’
‘Oh, pooh,’ she said. ‘It’s so obvious I won’t have to tell anyone anything. You just have to look.’ She was quite recovered now, colour back, a mocking little-girl smile, and her fourteen. ‘You’ll be in awful trouble, Teddy. I told you not to go so fast.’
Treason, simple straight-forward treason, the co-driver is not to be trusted. But what can you expect from a sister—from any girl—girls understand nothing, nothing whatever, only Molly can understand me, Molly Simpson, and this is August the fourth and I still haven’t seen her this hols. Molly, when shall I see you?
Arthur the gardener said: ‘It’s a broken spring.’
‘Gosh. Is that expensive?’
‘I’d say so. Cost quite a bit.’
‘Oh God.’
And so to lunch, and how to break the news, and there at the pit of my stomach is a pudding, all stodge, as chewy as wet cement, a huge disgusting pudding I can never absorb, which will sit there for ever, growing and growing, a cancerous black pudding swelling and swelling. People will think I am pregnant. But, no, I can’t eat a thing, honestly, Mummy, you know how I hate potatoes, and cold ham I used to like, but today, it’s odd, isn’t it, I’m just not hungry at all.
A Disturbing Influence Page 5