by David Storey
‘Yes,’ she says in a tone which suggests that, no matter how convenient to Charlie and herself, something as controversial as this will not be allowed.
‘I used to bath all four of you,’ I tell her.
‘I remember,’ Etty says while, to my astonishment, Lottie says, ‘Do hush, Grandpa. We’ll never hear.’
Maidstone, when the intensity of my illness began to abate, suggested I went on lithium. ‘It won’t suppress depression,’ he said, ‘but once you come out of it it will make its re-occurrence less severe.’
‘How long do I have to take it?’ I enquired.
‘A lifetime,’ he said. ‘You don’t, after all, want to go on living like this. I don’t think anyone could stand it.’
When I said, ‘I like my life the way it is,’ he immediately responded, ‘There’s more than you, of course, involved.’
I liked him: a prematurely greying, portly figure with uniquely mobile features which he could flex at will into all manner of expressions: grim, kind, despairing and – most frequently – fatigued.
‘Being on anti-depressants is bad enough. As for tranquillisers,’ I said, ‘I’ve given them up.’
The fact was, I was taking nothing: ‘No human being can survive what you are going through. Everyone,’ he told me, ‘has to take something. In the old days it was Shepherd’s Balm, but whether it was opiates, alcohol or, later still, barbiturates, this kind of illness demanded treatment by something.’
I was unhappier than I’d ever been: lying to those who wanted to help (‘You are taking them, I take it?’ – the drugs prescribed: ‘Of course I am,’ I told him), which intensified, in turn, the desolation I felt each morning (noon and night): when I had taken the drugs I had merely lain on the bed and cried, ‘Help!’ no other formulation of thought or expression of feeling coming to mind.
‘The fact is, without lithium, once this spell is ended, I don’t think you could carry on.’ His eyes examined mine.
‘With what?’ I said.
‘Living,’ he said, ‘an adequate life.’
‘What, by your definition, is adequate?’ I said.
He smiled. ‘Doing the things you’ve done before. Like you,’ he went on, ‘many of my patients are creative people. As a group, they are, like you, more susceptible to this illness than any other, and though they might, temporarily, come off lithium, under supervision – while, for instance, they complete a book, or perform in a concert, or mount an exhibition, they would be in no shape to do any of these things if they hadn’t been on it in the first place. It’s preferable to analysis, which is inclined to formalise your instinctual life. It’s a disability, after all, like any other – an arthritic hip, an impediment of speech, a diabetic condition.’
‘I’d describe none of those as an experiential illness,’ I replied.
‘In that case,’ he said, ‘you’re mistaken. Over ninety per cent of the people in this hospital are here for what I would describe as psychological reasons. All illnesses are injuries to the body, and all injuries to the body are injuries incurred in the mind. Who’s to know why a woman broke her leg, or a man has cancer, or a youth gonorrhoea? Yet when each patient comes in it’s not for a “psychological” cure. All I’m offering you,’ he went on, ‘is practical support. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t have something unsatisfactory in their background, but the problem, as I see it, isn’t “when?” and “how?” but “what?” and “which?” If, for instance, you had a broken hip, the remedy I’d apply would have nothing to do with when and how you came to do it. “When?” and “how?” are what the analysts go in for, with a clear-up rate consistent with not having intruded on the patient at all.’
‘I don’t think, if I had a broken hip, I’d think about the nature of God and have visions of hell that defy description,’ I said.
‘The effect of the anaesthetic, if the break had been severe, or the discomfort of the break itself, might induce you to think of any number of things, amongst which presentiments of hell would not be the least to be considered. Chemical activity synonymous with depression is not all that different from the effects, let’s say, of acid in the stomach. Both can give you a disagreeable night and, despite the current mythologising of mental illness, the principle is much the same. The mind hallucinates, for instance, during fever. When we are over the worst, however, we don’t look at the wallpaper and say, “Those roses are human faces. I saw them during my illness and I know them now to be real.”’
‘You discount,’ I said, ‘the experiences I’m having?’
‘I examine them,’ he said, ‘to see how far you are past the worst.’
‘I’ve tried to save you from working on your belly eight hours of the day or night, with two hundred yards of rock above your head, smelling like an animal, looking like an animal, thinking like an animal.’
My father’s eyes are incandescent, like the fire behind his back.
‘All you have done for me,’ I tell him, ‘I am putting to better use.’ (‘A use which,’ I might have gone on, ‘if all goes well, might well transcend our lives’).
‘What on earth is he talking about?’ He turns to my mother, a half-startled, half-apprehensive figure, standing by his side, round-cheeked, round-faced, pale-eyed behind her reflecting glasses.
‘Ask him,’ she says, ‘how he’s going to get the money.’
‘To do what?’ I ask.
‘To paint your pictures,’ she says, ‘and write your poems. Your father can’t go on providing for you. He’s provided long enough.’
That night I write, “I wonder, with the objectivity that separation from this place must give you (even if it is the Riviera), what, if you were here, you would advise me to do …”
‘A story, Grandpa!’ Having left her father’s knee, Glenda, clutching at my leg, waits to be lifted – like, for the better part of twelve years, I hoisted up her mother (even at the age of thirteen, Etty would say, ‘Tell me a story! Oh, do!’ sitting in my lap).
‘Tell us a story, Grandpa.’ Her sister sidles up (the television, the programme at an end, turned off).
‘About?’
‘Scouts.’
‘Scouts?’
‘The one you told us the other night.’
‘We used to camp,’ I tell her, ‘at Broughton Woods, not many miles from here. It stood, the camp-site, at the edge of a wood, and was approached from the foot of a steep embankment. (You know what a steep embankment is?)’
‘A steep rise in the ground,’ says Lottie, who has heard the description before.
‘We had to carry everything up in bits and pieces but, at the top, we came onto an area of grass in the shape of a horseshoe on which we pitched our tents, built our kitchen, erected our marquee and our flagpole. At the back of the camp-site was a dry stone wall, to one side of which stood a ruined gamekeeper’s stone-built cottage in which we made use of the old earth closet, a lavatory,’ I add to Glenda, ‘where you don’t have to pull the chain.’
‘Oh,’ she says and, grimacing, adds, ‘Go on.’
‘Across a meadow at the foot of the embankment ran a stream. Beyond it rose an area of spoil-heaps where the monks in the old days dug for coal. The whole area was overgrown, with only a herd of cows sent, from time to time, across it. The stream, in places, was very deep and, in one of the deepest pools, below a weir, where a line of stepping-stones led over to the farm where we got our milk, the newcomers to the camp, which, on the first occasion, of course, included me, were tossed in, in a ceremony known as “duffing”. Two of the older scouts got hold of your arms and legs and, chanting, threw you in. Whereupon you scrambled out the other side and joined the other “duffers” who, after that, had to sing a song.’
‘What song, Grandpa?’ Lottie asks.
‘The Scout Song, written by the first vicar of St Michael’s Church at Onasett, which was built from the stone of a nearby mill, beam on beam and stone on stone, and which to this day looks not unlike a mill – thrust out on the slope ab
ove the valley but where, through its mullioned, clear-glass windows, I got my first glimpse of – do you know what a glimpse is, Glen?’ I am about to add, ‘Of God,’ but, without waiting for an answer, add, ‘“The Peewit Song” which, because I was a peewit, went, as Lottie knows, as follows:
I used to be a Peewit,
A jolly Peewit, too,
But now I’ve given up Pee-witting
I don’t know what to do:
I’m growing old and weary
And I can Peewit no more,
So I’m going to work my passage if I can:
Back to Ona-sett,
Happy Land!
I’m going to work my passage if I can!
Of course, if you were a Swift, or an Owl, or a Cuckoo …’
‘A cuckoo!’ Lottie and Glenda laugh.
‘You sang the appropriate word.’
‘Back to Ona-sett!’ sings Lottie.
‘Happy Land!’ we sing together.
‘I’m going to work my passage if I can,’ sings Glenda.
‘Now we’re all peewits,’ I tell them. ‘And when you’re as old as I am you, too, will know what you have to do.’
‘Work our passage,’ Lottie says.
‘Back to Onasett!’ I cry.
‘Don’t get Grandpa upset,’ says Etty, while Charlie says, ‘Bedtime, I think; for one of these.’
‘What happened then?’ asks Lottie.
‘Then we went about our usual duties.’ I dry my eyes. ‘Those who were the cooks, cooked, those who were responsible for fuel went into the wood and brought back branches, which we then chopped up, and those who had to fetch the water took dixies downstream to Broughton Springs. Finally, when we had had our competitions – to do with making implements, keeping the camp tidy and learning how to track and to read the weather and to tie knots and to do first-aid – we played our games.’
‘What sort of games?’ Glenda, with the threat of bed, snuggles closer to my chest.
‘The ones I liked were where half the camp had to go to a rendezvous and retrieve a message hidden earlier in the day by one of the scouters and bring it back to camp, which the other half were obliged to defend. We each wore a coloured ribbon on our arm or around our chest which, if someone succeeded in removing it, made you their prisoner or, in some of the games, meant you were dead. Those were fights! Especially when we played at night, somebody dropping from a tree or rising from the ferns. And the stars and the moon, and the owls and the doves, and the shouts and the cries. Or,’ I go on, ‘we rode the woodcutters’ trolley, a truck which ran on a rail and which, if you pushed it to the top of the wood, took you back, rattling, to the cutting-shed at the foot of the slope where the trees were sawn into planks. The smell of the dust and the wood and the oil from the cutter! For the place was deserted most of the time. There we’d be, hurtling down, the branches clipping by on either side, cowboys or brigands trying to stop us …’
‘Go on,’ says Glenda, her dark eyes shut against my chest, her thumb in her mouth.
‘At night, when the last of the attackers had come into the camp, and we’d counted up the tally of coloured ribbons, we’d make a dixie of cocoa and sing.’
‘Your Peewit Song?’ says Lottie, her eyes shut, too, against my chest.
‘Like “Goodnight, Ladies”! and “Old MacDonald”! and “Michael Finnegan”!, and then we’d have a prayer and go back to our tents and get into our blankets and start telling stories all over again, like “The Ghost with the Golden Arm” while, outside, the moon shone, the dew dropped on the grass, the owls fluttered in the trees, the firelight glowed, lighting up the circle of tents in each of which six sleeping heads finally fell back against their make-shift pillows. Like Glenda’s and Lottie’s, you see, are falling now …’
“Dear Bea, I’ve been thinking of that incident I told you about some time ago. Do you recall? I was fourteen and twenty or thirty of us were coming home one sunny afternoon from our summer camp on the North Yorkshire Moors, singing songs on the back of a lorry. Ahead I heard a sound which, by its persistency and harshness, I judged to be that of a rusty machine. One corroded flange of metal rasped against another until, as if arrested by the sound itself, the lorry stopped.
The traffic on the opposite side of the road had disappeared – until that moment a steady stream of cars and coaches heading for the North Sea coast – and one of the three scouters who, in the absence of our scoutmaster-vicar, had been in charge of the camp, climbed onto our equipment and, leaning forward, looked over the cab. He was there for only a moment, climbing back down, pale beneath his tan and the reflected light of his glasses (a clerk in a local bank). ‘No one look forward,’ he said, at which, the troop’s principal rabble-rouser, I immediately climbed over the equipment and looked.
Directly in front of the lorry lay the figure of a boy not much younger than myself: in particular I noticed the neatness of his woollen stockings folded beneath his knees, the cleanness of his brown-strap sandals, and the way his grey, short-legged trousers were matched by a light grey shirt. A tie, with an alternately red and blue diagonal stripe was fastened around his collar. Over his shirt he wore a checkered jumper with a similarly diagonal pattern, pale blue and grey. Where his head should have been was a pool of matter, light-grey, in which were scattered fragments of bone. The word ‘matter’ came to me as a way of explaining what, in those first few moments, my senses refused to acknowledge. A man, standing astride this figure, was endeavouring, unsuccessfully, to direct the traffic which, I now noticed, on both sides of the road, had come to a halt.
In the centre of the road, kneeling, was a second man. With a peculiarly rhythmical gesture he was beating his forehead against the tarmac: it, and the rest of his face, was covered in blood, a mask of blood from within which his tortured eyes gazed out.
Across the road, on the pavement, stood a woman, the source of the screeching sound I had earlier heard: retching, she produced the sound each time she exhaled, stooping, bent forward from the waist, keeping bizarrely in time to the similar movements of the man beating his head against the tarmac.
At the doors of several houses which overlooked the scene – large, detached, with driveways running down to the road – a man was enquiring, ineffectually, for something to cover the body. Finally, having watched his efforts, the man astride the body took off his jacket and covered the upper half with that. Beneath its lower edge its neatly-sandalled legs stretched out.
From a bystander we discovered that the woman screeching on the pavement was the victim’s mother, and the man beating his head against the road her husband. They had, we discovered later, been driving in a car to the coast, the boy in the back, despite warnings, fiddling with the door catch. He fell out a bus, full of holidaymakers, travelling immediately behind, despite swerving, ran over his head.
What I recall most vividly afterwards was the sense of outrage which, amongst other things, inclined me to the view that all vehicles should be destroyed, a feeling which was followed, when our lorry finally moved off, by one of relief – growing, when our speed increased, into something little short of exhilaration. I hadn’t, after all, been run over by a bus; and although I could vividly imagine those terrible last seconds – the fall, the cry, the approaching tyre – and share in the mother’s grief and the father’s anguish, I hadn’t been – perhaps never would be – the one to suffer: war and famine, disease and disaster, madness and death had, with a peculiar consistency, passed me by. I hadn’t, metaphorically, been obliged to step down from the lorry. Life – destiny – had sanctioned my existence in a way that nothing else quite could.
As I talked to the children tonight, in words though not with feelings far above their heads (and Etty has given me instructions never to get in touch with you again without seeking your permission – something of a contradiction), I couldn’t help sitting down in this room where I have sat on so many previous occasions, a reading-lamp lit on the table beside me, the window looking through the trees to t
he lights of the village, and set down what might be described as a postscript to all the letters I have sent before, a declaration which, at this first effort, reads, ‘I am kneeling in the road, beating my head against the tarmac, looking at all we have left of our life together in the hope (not terror but anticipation) that, at the end of another day, despite your marriage to a man whom you knew, when you chose him, I would only despise (the antithesis of all we ever fought for), you might (despite all that has happened to us, Bea) come home to me again …’
5
‘Thy’ll take some stick,’ Chamberlain said. ‘Riding with me, tha knows, i’ the cab.’
‘Why?’ I said, squashed up beside him, with two other workmen, squashed slightly less, on my other side.
‘Dalton usually rides in here. He’s up on top o’ the load at present. When tha gets out thy’d better stay dear.’ He swung the lorry’s wheel beneath his hand. ‘He’s a reet good puncher, is Dolly.’
He laughed: the two men beside him – ‘Dolly’s pals, are these two,’ – laughed as well.
‘I’ll go on the back, in that case,’ I said.
‘Nay, thy’ll bloody well get blown off, thy’s far too light. I asked you in,’ he paused at a traffic light, then, with the ramming of the gear beside my leg, set the vehicle once more in motion, adding, ‘for an intellectual conversation.’
The men beside me laughed again.
‘Thick as planks, these two,’ Chamberlain said.
‘That’s right, Mr Chamberlain,’ the two men said.
‘Do Latin, do you?’ Chamberlain said.
‘That’s right,’ I said.
‘Amo, amas, amat. These two won’t know what that adds up to.’
‘Love,’ I said.
‘Does Battersby hit you with his stick?’
‘That’s right.’
The two men laughed again.
‘How long were you there?’ I asked.
‘Not long.’ Chamberlain’s arm was raised from the wheel. ‘My faither yanked me out. “Thy’ll learn more about ought i’ Chamberlains,” he said, “than you’ll learn i’ theer,” and though the old lady put up a fight he had me in the yard at sixteen wi’ this bloody lot. Isn’t that right, you lads?’ he added.