Listen to the Voice

by Iain Crichton Smith

  ‘Look, I’ll call you,’ said the stage Mark and the bell rang and the finale was postponed. In the noise and chatter in which desks and chairs were replaced Mark was again aware of the movement of life, and he was happy. Absurdly he began to see them as if for the first time, their faces real and interested, and recognized the paradox that only in the drama had he begun to know them, as if only behind such a protection, a screen, were they willing to reveal themselves. And he began to wonder whether he himself had broken through the persona of the teacher and begun to ‘act’ in the real world. Their faces were more individual, sad or happy, private, extrovert, determined, yet vulnerable. It seemed to him that he had failed to see what Shakespeare was really about, he had taken the wrong road to find him.

  ‘A babble of green fields,’ he thought with a smile. So that was what it meant, that Wooden O, that resonator of the transient, of the real, beyond all the marble of their books, the white In Memoriams which they could not read.

  How extraordinarily curious it all was.

  The final part of the play was to take place on the following day.

  ‘Please sir,’ said Lorna to him, as he was about to leave.

  ‘What is it?’

  But she couldn’t put into words what she wanted to say. And it took him a long time to decipher from her broken language what it was she wanted. She and the other actresses wanted an audience. Of course, why had he not thought of that before? How could he not have realized that an audience was essential? And he promised her that he would find one.

  By the next day he had found an audience which was composed of a 3a class which Miss Stewart next door was taking. She grumbled a little about the Interpretation they were missing but eventually agreed. Additional seats were taken into Mark’s room from her room and Miss Stewart sat at the back, her spectacles glittering.

  Tracy pretended to knock on a door which was in fact the blackboard and then a voice invited her in. The manager of the night club pointed to a chair which stood on the ‘stage’.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want to sing, sir.’

  ‘I see. Many girls want to sing. I get girls in here every day. They all want to sing.’

  Mark heard titters of laughter from some of the boys in 3a and fixed a ferocious glare on them. They settled down again.

  ‘But I know I can sing, sir,’ said Tracy. ‘I know I can.’

  ‘They all say that too.’ His voice suddenly rose, ‘They all bloody well say that.’

  Mark saw Miss Stewart sitting straight up in her seat and then glancing at him disapprovingly. Shades of Pygmalion, he thought to himself, smiling. You would expect it from Shaw, inside inverted commas.

  ‘Give it to them, sock it to them,’ he pleaded silently. The virginal Miss Stewart looked sternly on.

  ‘Only five minutes then,’ said the night club manager, glancing at his watch. Actually there was no watch on his hand at all. ‘What song do you want to sing?’

  Mark saw Lorna pushing a desk out to the floor and sitting in it. This was to be the piano, then. The absence of props bothered him and he wondered whether imagination had first begun among the poor, since they had such few material possessions. Lorna waited, her hands poised above the desk. He heard more sniggerings from the boys and this time he looked so angry that he saw one of them turning a dirty white.

  The hands hovered above the desk. Then Tracy began to sing. She chose the song ‘Heartache’.

  My heart, dear, is aching;

  I’m feeling so blue.

  Don’t give me more heartaches,

  I’m pleading with you.

  It seemed to him that at that moment, as she stood there pale and thin, she was putting all her experience and desires into her song. It was a moment he thought such as it is given to few to experience. She was in fact auditioning before a phantom audience, she and the heroine of the play were the same, she was searching for recognition on the streets of London, in a school. She stood up in her vulnerability, in her purity, on a bare stage where there was no furniture of any value, of any price: on just such a stage had actors and actresses acted many years before, before the full flood of Shakespearean drama. Behind her on the blackboard were written notes about the Tragic Hero, a concept which he had been discussing with the Sixth Year.

  ‘The hero has a weakness and the plot of the play attacks this specific weakness.’

  ‘We feel a sense of waste.’

  ‘And yet triumph.’

  Tracy’s voice, youthful and yearning and vulnerable, soared to the cracked ceiling. It was as if her frustrations were released in the song.

  Don’t give me more heartaches,

  I’m pleading with you.

  The voice soared on and then after a long silence the bell rang.

  The boys from 3a began to chatter and he thought, ‘You don’t even try. You wouldn’t have the nerve to sing like that, to be so naked.’ But another voice said to him, ‘You’re wrong. They’re the same. It is we who have made them different.’ But were they in fact the same, those who had been reduced to the nakedness, and those others who were the protected ones. He stood there trembling as if visited by a revelation which was only broken when Miss Stewart said,

  ‘Not quite Old Vic standard.’ And then she was gone with her own superior brood. You stupid bitch, he muttered under his breath, you Observer-Magazine-reading bitch who never liked anything in your life till some critic made it respectable, who wouldn’t recognize a good line of poetry or prose till sanctified by the voice of London, who would never have arrived at Shakespeare on your own till you were given the crutches.

  And he knew as he watched her walking, so seemingly self-sufficient, in her black gown across the hall that she was as he had been and would be no longer. He had taken a journey with his class, a pilgrimage across the wooden boards, the poor abject furnitureless room which was like their vision of life, and from that journey he and they had learned in spite of everything. In spite of everything, he shouted in his mind, we have put a flag out there and it is there even during the plague, even if Miss Stewart visits it. It is there in spite of Miss Stewart, in spite of her shelter and her glasses, in spite of her very vulnerable armour, in spite of her, in spite of everything.

  Survival Without Error

  I DON’T OFTEN think about that period in my life. After all, when one comes down to it, it was pretty wasteful.

  And, in fact, it wasn’t thought that brought it back to me: it was a smell. To be exact, the smell of after-shave lotion. I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror—as I do every morning at about half past eight, for I am a creature of habit—and I don’t know how it was, but that small bottle of Imperial after-shave lotion—yellowish golden stuff it is—brought it all back. Or, to be more exact, it was the scent of the lotion on my cheeks after I had shaved, not the colour. I think I once read something in a Reader’s Digest about an author—a Frenchman or a German—who wrote a whole book after smelling or tasting something. I can’t remember what it was exactly: I don’t read much, especially not fiction, you can’t afford to when you’re a lawyer.

  So there I was in the bathroom on that July morning preparing to go to the office—which is actually only about five hundred yards or so away, so that I don’t even need to take the car—and instead of being in the bathroom waiting to go in to breakfast with Sheila, there I was in England fifteen years ago. Yes, fifteen years ago. Exactly. For it was July then too.

  And all that day, even in court, I was thinking about it. I even missed one or two cues, though the sheriff himself does that, for he’s a bit deaf. I don’t often do court work: there’s no money in it and I don’t particularly care for it anyway. To tell the truth, I’m no orator, no Perry Mason. I prefer dealing with cases I can handle in my office, solicitor’s work mainly. I have a certain head for detail but not for the big work.

  I suppose if I hadn’t put this shaving lotion on I wouldn’t have remembered it again. I don’t eve
n know why I used that lotion today: perhaps it was because it was a beautiful summer morning and I felt rather lighthearted and gay. I don’t use lotions much though I do make use of Vaseline hair tonic as I’m getting a bit bald. I blame that on the caps we had to wear all the time during those two years of National Service in the Army. Navy-blue berets they were. And that’s what the shaving lotion brought back.

  Now I come to think of them, those years were full of things like boots, belts and uniforms. We had two sets of boots—second best boots and (if that makes any sense) first best boots. (Strictly speaking, it seems to be wrong to use the word ‘best’ about two objects, but this is the first time I’ve located the error.) Then again we had best battle dress and second best battle dress. (Again, there were only two lots.)

  We always had to be cleaning our boots. The idea was to burn your boots so that you could get a proper shine, the kind that would glitter back at you brighter than a mirror, that would remove the grain completely from the toes. Many a night I’ve spent with hot liquefied boot polish, burning and rubbing till the dazzling shine finally appeared, till the smoothness conquered the rough grain.

  We really had to be very clean in those days. Our faces too. In those days one had to be clean-shaven, absolutely clean-shaven, and, to get the tart freshness into my cheeks, I used shaving lotion, which is what brought it all back. The rest seems entirely without scent, without taste, all except the lotion.

  I went to the Army straight from university and I can still remember the hot crowded train on which I travelled all through the night and into the noon of the following day. Many of the boys played cards as we hammered our way through the English stations.

  I am trying to remember what I felt when I boarded that train and saw my sister and mother waving their handkerchiefs at the station. To tell the truth, I don’t think I felt anything. I didn’t think of it as an adventure, still less as a patriotic duty. I felt, I think, numbed; my main idea was that I must get it over with as cleanly and as quickly as I could, survive without error.

  About noon, we got off the train and walked up the road to the camp. It was beautiful pastoral countryside with hot flowers growing by the side of the road; I think they were foxgloves. In the distance I could see a man in a red tractor ploughing. I thought to myself: This is the last time I shall see civilian life for a long time.

  After we had been walking for some time, still wearing our bedraggled suits (in which we had slept the previous night) and carrying our cases, we arrived at the big gate which was the entrance to the camp. There was a young soldier standing there—no older than ourselves—and he was standing at ease with a rifle held in front of him, its butt resting on the ground. His hair was close cropped under the navy-blue cap with the yellow badge, and when we smiled at him, he stared right through us. Absolutely right through us, as if he hadn’t seen us at all.

  We checked in at the guardroom and were sent up to the barracks with our cases. As we were walking along—very nervous, at least I was—we passed the square where this terrible voice was shouting at recruits. There were about twenty of them and they looked very minute in the centre of that huge square, all grey and stony.

  In any case—I can’t remember very clearly what the preliminaries were—we ended up in this barrack room and sat down on the beds which had green coverings and one or two blankets below. There must have been twelve of these beds—about six down each side—and a fire-place in the middle of the room with a flue.

  Now, I didn’t know anything about the Army though some of the others did. One or two of them had been in the Cadets (I remember one small, plump-cheeked, innocent-looking youngster of eighteen who had been in the cadet corps in some English public school: he looked like an angel, and he was reading an author called Firbank) but the rest of us didn’t know what to expect. Of course, I’d seen films about the Army (though not many since I was a conscientious student, not patronising the cinema much) and thought that they were exaggerated. In any case, as far as my memory went, these films made the Army out to be an amusing experience with a lot of hard work involved, and though sergeants and corporals appeared terrifying, they really had hearts of gold just the same. There used to be a glint in the sergeant’s eye as he mouthed obscenities at some recruit, and he would always praise his platoon to a fellow sergeant over a pint in the mess that same night. That was the impression I got from the films.

  Well, it’s a funny thing: when we went into the Army it was at first like a film (it became a bit more real later on). We were sitting on our beds when this corporal came in (at least we were told by himself that he was a corporal: I was told off on my second day for calling a sergeant major ‘sir’ though I was only being respectful). The first we knew of this corporal was a hard click of boots along the floor and then this voice shouting, ‘Get on your feet’. I can tell you we got up pretty quickly and stood trembling by our beds.

  He was a small man, this corporal, with a moustache, and he looked very fit and very tense. You could almost feel that his moustache was actually growing and alive. He was wearing shiny black boots, a shiny belt buckle, a yellow belt and a navy-blue cap with a shining badge in it. And when we were all standing at a semblance of attention, he started pacing up and down in front of us, sometimes stopping in front of one man and then in front of another, and coming up and speaking to them with his face right up against theirs. And he said (as they do on the films),

  ‘Now, you men are going to think I’m a bastard. You’re going to want to go home to mother. You’re going to work like slaves and you’re going to curse the day you were born. You’re going to hate me every day and every night, if you have enough strength left to dream. But there’s one thing I’m going to say to you and it’s this: if you play fair by me I’ll play fair by you. Is that understood?’

  There was a long silence during which I could hear a fly buzzing over at the window which was open at the top, and through which I could see the parade ground.

  Then he said,

  ‘Get out there. We’re going to get you kitted out at the quartermaster’s.’

  And that was it. I felt as if I had been hit by a bomb. I had never met anyone like that in my life before. And it was worse when one had come from a university. Not even the worst teacher I had met had that man’s controlled ferocity and energy. You felt that he hated you for existing, that you looked untidy, and that he was there to make you neater than was possible.

  All this came back to me very quickly as a result of a whiff of that shaving lotion and, as I said, even during my time in the court I kept thinking about that period fifteen years before so that the sheriff had to speak to me once or twice.

  The case itself was a very bad one, not the kind we usually get in this town which is small and nice, the kind of town where everyone knows everybody else and the roads are lined with trees. The background to the case was this:

  Two youths were walking along the street late at night when they saw this down-and-out sitting on a bench. He had a bottle of VP and he was drinking from it. The two youths went over and asked him for a swig, but he wouldn’t give them any so, according to the police, they attacked him and, when he was down, they kicked him in the face and nearly killed him. In fact, he is in hospital at this moment and close to death. The youths, of course, deny all this and say that they never saw him before in their lives, and that they don’t know what the police are on about.

  They are a very unprepossessing pair, I must confess, barely literate, long-haired, arrogant and contemptuous. They wear leather jackets, and one has a motor bike. They have a history of violence at dance halls, and one of them has used a knife. I don’t like them. I don’t like them because I don’t understand them. We ourselves are childless (Sheila compensates for that by painting a lot), but that isn’t the reason why I dislike them. They don’t care for me either and call me ‘daddy’. They are more than capable of doing what the police say they did, and there is in fact a witness, a young girl who was coming home f
rom a dance. She says that she heard one of the youths say,

  ‘I wish the b… would stop making that noise.’ They are the type of youths who have never done well in school, who haven’t enough money to get girls for themselves since they are always unemployed, and they take their resentment out on others. I would say they are irreclaimable, and probably in Russia they would be put up against a wall and shot. However, they have to have someone to defend them. One of them had the cheek to say to me,

  ‘You’d better get us off, daddy.’

  They made a bad impression in the court. One of them says,

  ‘What would we need that VP crap for, anyway?’ It’s this language that alienates people from them, but they’re too stupid or too arrogant to see that. As well as this they accuse the police of beating them up with truncheons when they were taken in. But this is a common ploy.

  Anyway, I kept thinking of the Army all the time I was in court, and once I even said ‘sergeant’ to the judge. It was a totally inexplicable error. It’s lucky for me that he’s slightly deaf.

  I was thinking of Lecky all the time.

  Now, I suppose every platoon in the Army has to have the odd one out, the one who can never keep in step, the one who never cleans his rifle properly, the one whose trousers are never properly pressed. And our platoon like all others had one. His name was Lecky. (The platoon in the adjacent hut had one too, though I can’t remember his name. He, unlike Lecky, was a scholarly type with round glasses and he was the son of a bishop. I remember he had this big history book by H. A. L. Fisher and he was always reading it, even in the Naafi, while we were buying our cakes of blanco, and buns and tea. I wonder if he ever finished it.)

  Funny thing, I can’t remember Lecky’s features very well. I was trying to do so all day, but unsuccessfully. I think he was small and black-haired and thin-featured. I’m not even sure what he did in Civvy Street, but I believe I once heard it mentioned that he was a plumber’s mate.