Vital Signs

Home > Other > Vital Signs > Page 2
Vital Signs Page 2

by John Metcalf


  Uncle Fred’s Italians slept in bunks in one of the barns. He called them all Albert. He was fond of them and they of him, and after the war two of them refused repatriation and stayed on with him until he died. Uncle Fred had lent them a twelve-bore shotgun to shoot rabbits and they let me go with them. They shot thrushes and blackbirds, too, and ate them and Uncle Fred said foreigners were different.

  I knew my Uncle was a man of power because he preached to other grown-ups on Sundays and told them what to do but I learned one day that he was so powerful that even Policemen obeyed him.

  We were doing something to the tractor and I was holding a tin can of grease with a stick in it when into the yard cycled the Policeman.

  “It has come to my attention, Mr. Moore,” he said, “that you have given a shotgun to them Eyetalians.”

  “Is that right?” said my Uncle Fred.

  “Them, they’re the Enemy,” said the Policeman.

  “Is that right?” said my Uncle Fred again.

  “You have supplied arms and ammunition,” said the Policeman, “to the enemies of England.”

  “Mr. Moore?” said my Uncle. ‘’Mr. Moore!” he shouted. “I’ve been Fred to you since your arse was wet, George Voules, so you bugger off and play blackouts or I’ll be having a word with your mum.”

  And then the big Policeman got on his bike and my Uncle started to walk away and then he turned and shouted.

  “At least they were fighting before they were taken!”

  And then when the big Policeman was at the yard gate, my Uncle Fred shouted,

  “Flat feet, my arse!”

  Behind the farmhouse is an apple tree in full blossom. Not a simple apple tree—an apple tree explosive in blossom, such an apple tree as Samuel Palmer saw. Beside the tree, a brook runs down behind the house, across the bottom fields, through the bed of wild watercress, to join the River Eden. Its rock-strewn shallowness and sound widens near the apple tree into a silent pool. The sun is bright. It is not hot but Uncle Fred insists it is. He persuades Bobby to unlace his boots and paddle in the pool. He winks at me. The joke, the wink seems to say, is coming soon. Uncle Fred next persuades Bobby to take off all his clothes and play in the water. Bobby struggles awkwardly with buttons and sleeves and the second he is naked Uncle Fred snatches away the clothes and runs off shouting with laughter towards the yard.

  Bobby is making his angry face and shouting angry-sounding things. He is pointing towards the yard and he is crying. I cannot understand a word. I feel guilty and sorry but it is one of Uncle Fred’s jokes and Uncle Fred is grown-up and preaches and shouts at Policemen.

  I am staring at Bobby’s thing. It hangs down from a bush of black hair and it reaches nearly to his knee. It is as fat as my arm. His ballbag is huge like the Hereford in the dark stall.

  I stare and stare.

  * * *

  “When we hear the words penis and vagina, the pictures we have in our minds (known as mental images) tell us a lot about our true feelings,” writes Dr. Ethel Fawce, author of Sex and the Adjusted You. “These mental images,” she goes on, “can be approving or disapproving. Favourable female childhood images of the penis may be of: a banana, an ice cream cone, a mushroom, a musical instrument, or a Tootsie Roll.” But what of me, whose mental image is of Bobby?

  There’s an essential rightness about this image for me, brought up as I was a hardcore Yorkshire Nonconformist. Not for me sly serpents whispering intelligences, the temptations of an Eve, but a subhuman figure in the Garden with a cock like a malignant growth.

  The world of my parents and of most of the adults with whom I came in contact was pious, sour, and thin. They had married better not to burn—a fire soon damped. Gripeguts Wesley was their God.

  I have a very early memory of myself a tiny child, standing in the back garden of that Yorkshire manse gazing upon rows of crucifixes, which were stuck in a special plot of earth near the door of the coal cellar. I made the crosses with kindling. Pinned to each cross was a worm. They wriggled for a long time, but then they just drooped, and then they went flat and brittle.

  Poor Billy Blake, so misunderstood. To those choirs that sang in chapel and tabernacle, those grimy, mean, industrial towns of the north of England with their fortitude under the grey rain were Jerusalem.

  My evacuation was of short duration.

  When I came back I was given a gasmask with a Mickey Mouse face on it.

  Cod-liver oil in huge bottles was supplied free of charge to children; as with all else, my mother equated nastiness with virtue.

  Our way of life was like the enactment of a set of improving proverbs. Early to bed and early to rise, we wasted not, we stitched in time, took care of the pence, made sure our hands were never idle, received the reward of virtue which is its own. “Cleanliness,” as Wesley remarked in one of his sermons, “is indeed next to Godliness”—and ours was carbolic.

  My mother’s conversation was a compendium of homely cliché; our drink was Adam’s ale or “the cup that cheers,” all activities were powered by “elbow grease,” all locomotion by “Shanks’ pony”; if at first we didn’t succeed, we tried and tried and tried again; supper was always Hobson’s choice.

  At some ungodly hour in the morning, my mother daily holystoned the front doorstep and polished the brass doorknocker and the brass flap of the letterbox. If we were to set out on an infrequent journey, she would arise in the morning dark to prepare sandwiches because to eat in a restaurant was to waste money and she would then clean the oven and polish the toilet bowl, because, as she always said, were we to be killed in a car crash or derailment, she wouldn’t like people thinking she hadn’t kept a clean house.

  The war years, with their strawberry jam made of turnips and their powdered eggs, were, for my mother, the happiest years of her life. The suffering was total. There was grim joy in her response to an inadequate diet and perpetual cold, to stretching out meagre scraps into meals and “making do.” Something went out of her when rationing ended.

  People in my world actually used such expressions as “Antichrist,” “The Great Beast,” and “Whore of Babylon.” “Scarlet Woman” was sometimes Rome and “Whore of Babylon” was sometimes Rome and “Scarlet Woman” was sometimes not Rome but Mrs. Henderson who “carried on” with soldiers. The Book of Revelation is the source of much Nonconformist imagery; its threats of apocalyptic destruction appeal to the Nonconformist temperament. I naturally understood it to be an anti-Catholic diatribe. My world of missionary boxes, Sunday School, and sin was violent in its anti-Catholicism. Faith versus Good Works, the Thirty-nine Articles, and the fallacy of Transubstantiation, were as ABC to me. But I soon penetrated this historical obfuscation and grasped that the essence of the wickedness was that Catholicism pretended to forgive. Which was not only wicked but silly. For God alone could forgive and the only person I knew who claimed to have been forgiven was a man who stood up in church and said so during one of my father’s sermons but my father said later the man was drunk.

  In my world, guilt was personal and permanent; atonement, though demanded, was understood to be a hollow gesture.

  The world beyond my world was made up of drunkards, fornicators, lewd people, those who used the King’s English incorrectly, backsliders, vulgar people, sots, adulterers, those who took the Name of the Lord in Vain, who ate things in the streets, were spendthrift, who used foul language, and who carried on.

  I naturally imagined Rome to be the centre of these activities and even then envied the Allied troops who were actually there seeing it all.

  The abstract meanings of “the Flesh” did not have to be explained to me. The antithesis between Spirit and Flesh was in the very air I breathed. The Flesh existed to be subdued; this was accomplished by a wide range of prohibitions: silence, soap, whitened doorsteps at dawn, and whatever other mortifications my mother could invent.

  The lewdest s
tory my mother ever told, and that perhaps when I was fifteen or sixteen, was of standing beside a man in a bus queue during the war and chatting about the previous night’s raid. The man said:

  “I were that frightened, Mrs., you couldn’t have got a needle up me bum.”

  What it was about this story that appealed to her I don’t quite know; it couldn’t have been the humour.

  I retain vivid, pre-evacuation memories of our dog, Sandy, on whom I lavished all my love. My mother disliked dogs because she said they were dirty; my father said dogs were good for children and were not dirty; my mother said he didn’t have to clean up after them or bear their habits; my father regarded her and then retired to the silence of his study. My mother could invest an apparently innocent word like “habits” with such intensity that even if her meaning was not clear to me; her loathing nipped questions in the bud.

  If Sandy, lying on her mat, raised a hind leg to lick what my mother called her “parts,” she was immediately shooed out of doors.

  One morning I noticed spots of blood on the kitchen floor. Sandy was not spanked for this, which made me curious. At the same time, I noticed that her thing was more visible: red, swollen like a tulip.

  I hoped it would heal up.

  “It is her Time,” said my mother mysteriously.

  During her Time she was not allowed to go outside except on the leash but one day I forgot and she escaped to gambol with the next door mongrel. Later, I saw them on the lawn fighting, pumping, heaving, tongues lolling. I ran to find my mother who was vacuuming, somewhere on the third floor. By the time she arrived, Sandy and Rex were no longer fighting but were standing disconsolate in the middle of the lawn with their behinds mysteriously stuck together. Sandy, seeing us, tried to pull towards us but she was stuck to Rex and when she pulled, Rex yowled as if someone had stepped on his paw and Sandy whimpered. I knew they were in pain, there had been fighting, blood, and I didn’t understand why my mother did not do whatever had to be done to help.

  “It’s too late,” she said tonelessly.

  This incident made me very anxious, but I knew better than to ask questions: this, I somehow knew, was the World of the Flesh.

  At exactly this time, it might have been that very week, I found a hedgehog in the garden and put it in a big cardboard box to keep as a pet. My mother would not allow it in the house because she said it was dirty. She shook a box of DDT over it until it was white. Next morning it was dead.

  These events somehow fused in my mind.

  Much later than this, after I’d come back from being evacuated, I became aware of the other meaning of “self,” and managed, in a confused way, to understand the nature of the Holy Ghost.

  Every bath night, my mother washed me and then rinsed off all the soap and then washed my hair and when she’d finished, she’d hand me the cloth and say,

  “Wash yourself.”

  When she returned to the bathroom minutes later, she would brutally towel me until I was bright red and then give me the towel, saying as she left the room,

  “Dry yourself.”

  I understood the Trinity as being three people who were not actually people but parts of one person. I understood “yourself” in the commands to wash and dry as meaning one’s thing, one’s parts. The Holy Ghost was part of God and I felt I now knew which part.

  And it was unfortunate that it was at precisely this time that I heard of something called The Sin Against the Holy Ghost. I was very anxious about this sin, not being able to discover its exact nature. All I could learn was that it was the worst sin of all, a sin too horrendous to even talk about. The one subject never talked about in my house was “that kind of thing,” and it therefore seemed obvious that sex and The Sin Against the Holy Ghost were one and the same thing.

  And I had done it.

  Had miniature erections like the dog, seen Bobby naked and bestial, played with myself, said words, and given a girl called Marie a threepenny bit to let me watch her pee.

  I knew myself to be unforgivable, of the damned, one from whom God’s Face was averted for eternity.

  This burden of guilt and conviction of sin tortured me for years—dirtiness, death, disapproval, impurity—and eventually became the front line of the ravaged battlefield of my adolescence.

  (This will not do. The paragraphs flow too evenly, the sequence of statements rounds off the subject too neatly, leading too comfortably to the next asterisk and the beginning of another sequence of anecdote and reflection.

  To reread these last paragraphs nauseates me. They remind me of cute stories of children mistakenly praying “Harold Be Thy Name,” such anecdotes as grace the pages of Reader’s Digest.

  And what can you understand by my use of the word “tortured”?

  Did you think I mean—“troubled”?

  The fault is mine. I have pictured my mother as a joyless puritan. But this is not the whole truth. The fault lies in my writing, feelings hidden behind humour, pain distanced by genteel irony. The truth is ugly and otherwise. My father was merely eccentric; my mother was mad.

  Her mind festered. It was a pit of unimaginable filth—a contagion I did not escape. I hated her. I am happy she is dead.

  Had I not been stronger, had I not battled her every day of my life, I could well have joined my brothers in institutions the world over, those who mutilated their genitals with shards of glass, or worse, the ones who came in judgement and cut off tits with butchers’ knives, carved cunts with cleavers.)

  As I grew older and sinned more, as my reading revealed to me a larger world than the loveless world of chapel and grey rain, I vowed that my life would be filled with laughter, beautiful women, warm flesh; my life would be lived in the sun.

  It’s a common enough story.

  At eighteen I left home forever.

  At twenty-one I emigrated to Canada.

  * * *

  At about the age of seven I had my first encounter with Art—an event central to this memoir and as dramatic as Paul’s conversion on the Damascus Road.

  Art played no part in the life of my parents or their society. The only occasion vaguely artistic was the annual performance of the Messiah; for this, professional soloists were imported and backed by several choirs combined. The music was supplied by a merging of brass bands. I remember a colliery band and the uniforms of the Fire Brigade.

  The visual arts were not encouraged; even the old masters had too much thigh and breast about them for my mother’s taste. There may have been the occasional Laughing Cavalier but walls were usually decorated with anonymous landscapes and calendars.

  One morning my father had left the newspaper lying on the breakfast table. There was a photograph in it of a painting that had just been cleaned of the dinge and varnish of centuries and which revealed that the naked lady was not merely pointing her breast at the sky but was squirting from it a jet of milk which, as it streamed across the canvas, became stars in the Milky Way.

  I asked my mother what the picture was in the paper for.

  “It’s a picture by an old painter that’s in a museum.”

  “Is it beautiful?”

  “Handsome is as handsome does,” said my mother.

  She took the paper away.

  “Why is the lady. . . ?”

  “If you ask me,” she said, “and I don’t mind who hears me say it, people who painted that sort of thing were no better than they should be.”

  She rattled the dishes in the sink.

  “I wouldn’t give that sort of thing house room.”

  She sniffed.

  “I wouldn’t give you tuppence for the lot of them.”

  But of all the arts, the theatre was the most wicked; the word “actress” carried much the same suggestiveness as the word “model” did a few years ago. Wesley had fulminated against the theatre in the spirit of his puritan forebe
ars and the historical disapproval was still strong in the north. Not only was my family Methodist, the whole area was an ardent Methodist stronghold. The town in which we lived was only a few miles from Haworth Parsonage and the moors. Mrs. Gaskell, in her Life of Charlotte Brontë, described among the books at Haworth “some mad Methodist Magazines full of miracles and apparitions, and preternatural warnings, ominous dreams, and frenzied fanaticism . . .”

  A later biographer, Margaret Lane, wrote: “On the Brontë children the effects of such intimacy with Methodism were various. . . On Anne it laid its most unhappy behest, infecting her with the morbid fear of personal damnation which darkened her youth. . . On Branwell the pressure of so much religious emphasis was to destroy belief”

  And my intimacy with Methodism was more intimate than theirs.

  I was once taken to a pantomime at Christmas in Leeds and I remember being removed tearfully halfway through because my mother said it was vulgar and full of “that sort of thing”; I had liked it very much indeed because one of the Broker’s Men had played a trombone solo and with every note his trousers had fallen lower and lower and he was wearing red underpants with big flowers on them.

  There existed, however, varieties of approved entertainment that were carried on in church halls and basements. Documentary films about wildlife, the postal service, or deep-sea fishing were sometimes shown; professional itinerants such as Grey Owl sometimes appeared; missionaries gave lectures with magic-lantern slides of lepers. These church halls also provided a fourth-rate circuit for professional monologuists, a profession surely now extinct.

 

‹ Prev