by Michael Gill
One gloomy morning he told me the story of the Mummy. We were on a concrete road that ran straight, mile after mile, between flat waterlogged fields. The new coastal road, as it was then called, was quite deserted. There was no sound except the strange resonant call of a bittern, the scamper of Patch’s feet and Jack’s compelling voice. The Mummy was brought to England and resuscitated. It was sent to hunt down the hero, who, by an unpleasant coincidence, was walking along a straight empty road in winter twilight. When Jack told how he heard behind him a patter like the falling of dry leaves in autumn, I could hardly breathe with fright. There, far down the road, bent almost double, but trotting on remorselessly, the Mummy was on his trail. And there was nowhere to hide or escape; only the straight road and the waterlogged fields on either side. At the end of his tether the hero saw a lone house in the distance. He reached the door as the Mummy turned in the gate. Was anyone in? Would they answer his frantic knocking in time? The steps were puttering right behind him as he threw himself through the opening door and slammed it shut. Something fell against it with a thud like a rolled-up newspaper. Eventually the Mummy was burnt, crackling away like dried tinder, but he haunted my nightmares for a long time.
Was it wise to tell a nine year old, with an imagination presumably inflamed by a constant high temperature, quite so many frightening stories? I always asked for more, accepting the real terror at night as the price of the pleasurable fear in the telling. I suppose they were a sort of drug: I was addicted. I often saw phantoms. They would creep on all fours round my half-open door when I lay sleepless watching by the light of my Osglim lamp. Dim figures with faceless faces, they would even come rustling through the flower beds into the corner of my eye when I was lying outside in the hot summer afternoons. Then Patch would pant out of the bushes, notice me and come bounding over, and I would remember the long-ago days before my illness when he was a puppy and I had hunted him round the garden.
V
We seemed to have a special affinity from the first. My parents had decided to give me a dog when I was seven. We had gone to a house in the country where fox terriers were bred. At the back there was a wirefenced run and the puppies were let out in turn. They were about eight weeks old and most just rushed about, happy for the chance to stretch their legs. Patch came straight across and jumped up at the wire. I knew I wanted him right away. He was a very good-natured dog. It’s hard not to sentimentalise a childhood relationship with a pet. Patch would never have won a prize at Crufts. His nose was too square, his front legs too short, his hair too fluffy, his whole shape too dumpy. But his very defects were part of his appeal. He never really lost his puppy-like look. When we were out together, perfect strangers, old ladies in particular, would rush to embrace him with cries of praise. Even the milkman, a sallow young man with a sardonic tongue, was moved to draw a pastel portrait of him, which he gave me on my ninth birthday. I liked the milkman – he used to tell me funny involved stories, which I did not always understand but was flattered to hear; nevertheless for a member of his trade to look with favour on a dog must be rare.
Patch never bit anybody, but he could have done. When we were walking through the neighbouring village of Herne, a rat ran out of the gutter in front of us. Almost before we had seen it, Patch had it by the back of the neck and threw it in the air with an expert flick which broke its back. He was tremendously pleased with himself over this exploit, and for several days had especially excited dreams, uttering faint barks and twitching his legs.
He could be naughty and so could I. When he was still a puppy, I was told by my mother one afternoon to come inside and get on with my homework. I objected, argued and lost. Approaching the house in anger, I gave a token kick to the French window. To my amazement, the bottom pane dissolved with hardly a tinkle, leaving a single ragged shard of glass in the frame. My mother had gone upstairs and I was too frightened to tell her immediately. Instead I went inside, quietly closed the door and got out my books. Patch came gambolling across the garden and jumped at the door to be let in. Petrified, as in a slowmotion film, I saw his left front leg come through the broken pane and slice open all along its length in a deep gash that revealed the bone. The vet put twenty-two stitches in it. Patch nearly died from the loss of blood. He lay very quiet and dignified in his basket accepting teaspoons of brandy from my father. For three or four weeks he hopped around with his leg neatly taped around a splint. When it was taken off, he was so excited that, rushing round the garden, he split the wound open again. Eventually he recovered completely, though you could always see the scar if you looked beneath his fur and, when he was very tired, he would limp slightly. Sensibly, my parents did not punish me for the broken window.
Though I felt deeply guilty, Patch never bore any grudges. Sometimes I made him play a game I called wolves and bears. To make him more like a wolf, I wrapped him in a couple of old fox furs my mother had once had as a stole. I was the bear and when I approached on all fours, covered in a black fur rug, bellowing hoarsely through the wickerwork wastepaper basket that encased my head, he got terribly excited. He would bark furiously and then rush forward and take a quick sniff to make sure the odd contraption really was me.
Whatever I did, he never got angry or vicious. Occasionally he would grab an unsuitable bone, such as a lamb chop, from the kitchen dustbin and retire under a bed with it, growling and gnawing. No one else could get near him, but I would crawl straight under the bed and seize the bone. He always gave it up immediately and licked my hand. When illness altered my life, he accepted the modification to his own without fuss. He would sit for hours curled up on my bed, listening with apparent interest while I told him interminable stories that could not have had much appeal to a dog. On our country walks he often shared the spinal chair with me. He had that amazing empathy of a close animal companion, the ability to reflect and take part in whatever mood was dominant. Often he seemed able to anticipate them. Once, lying in bed in the early days of my illness, I felt a sudden wave of depression. It was just physical weakness no doubt. I made no move, but at that moment Patch, who had been lying by the fire, got up and licked my hand. Looking in his trustful brown eyes, how could I feel lonely?
VI
Patch was one of the audience of two for the plays, battles and sporting events that I arranged. My paternal grandfather, the skilled carpenter, had made me a bed table, which became the centre of my activities. Sometimes it was a theatre, at other times a war ground or playing field. I had been given some wooden articulated circus animals and performers. They were each about eight inches high and dressed in real clothes that could be taken off. I had a ringmaster, moustached, with a top hat and red coat, white breeches and boots; two clowns, one with a white face and red nose, the other a tramp; a lady rider with frilly skirt; a dappled horse; a mule; a baby elephant; a seal; and a lion. There were also various props – ladders, tubs, boxes and chairs. They were beautiful toys and came, I think, from Germany. I have never seen anything like them since. My plays tended to be violent and derivative, involving magicians and dragons and comic elderly characters. I acted all the voices and liked to do plenty of squeaking and roaring.
Battles involved many more characters and on a much smaller scale. There was a shop in Burlington Arcade, which sold boxes of flat metal soldiers made in France. They were about one inch or so high and painted in exquisite detail and variety. About eighty came in a box, which in those days cost 8s 6d. They were my favourite toys and my father brought back a set every time he went to London. I had Joan of Arc leading a charge of French knights against the English archers; the Crusaders fighting the Saracens in the Third Crusade; a battle in the American Revolution with Indians and French and buckskinned colonials shooting down the Redcoats; Roman legions struggling with horn-helmeted Gauls. Best of all was the Battle of Waterloo with Bonaparte and Wellington surveying the charge of the Scots Greys. Unlike the much larger lead soldiers made by William Britain, almost every figure was different and allowed endless varia
tion of action, ambush, charge, defence. I had a tiny cannon which would fire bits of matchstick just powerful enough to knock them down.
Cricket matches were less realistic. I threw two dice and evolved an elaborate set of rules: double one meant clean bowled, four and three caught, and so on. I usually played for both sides and took a lot of care in choosing my teams. I often opposed real cricketers, such as Bradman and Hammond, to a team of poets. I would open with E. Spenser and W. Wordsworth, whom I’m sorry to say I characterised as safe, but dull batsmen. W. Shakespeare was not only captain, but the best all-rounder and would go in number three. Very sound and capable of long hours of concentrated play, J. Milton was number four. My spirits perked up when they were out and in came my favourite, Lord Byron, a dashingly brilliant attacking batsman, able to rattle up a big score quickly. Less reliable, but with some attractive strokes, P.B. Shelley and J. Keats were numbers six and seven. A safe wicket-keeper, but stodgy bat, M. Arnold was number eight. Then we were into the tail proper. Lord Tennyson, demon fast bowler, might occasionally hit a flashing four, but the googly expert, A. Pope, and the slow left-hander, S.T. Coleridge, rarely hit anything.
I would play cricket for days on end, keeping all the scores and arranging the hazards to favour the better batsmen (unless I had decided it was a rain-affected wicket, in which case I doubled the difficulties for everybody). But for the plays I wanted an audience, and, as well as Patch, I could call on Dorothy, our maid. The daughter of a shepherd, from near Faversham, she had come to us when she was sixteen and stayed until she went into factory work during the war. Even when my parents considered they were not well-off enough to run a motor-car, they always had a living-in maid. These country girls, with big raw-boned hands and shy manners, would wear plain blue or brown uniforms during the morning, cleaning out the fires, pounding the clothes during the weekly wash in the scullery, blacking the oven, polishing the brass and helping with the cooking. In the afternoon they would change into a frilly cap and apron and serve afternoon tea to my mother and her women friends, with the cakes on little lace doilies. They had one afternoon off a week, a back room of their own and a salary of £35 per year. (My father at this time as bank manager was probably earning about £400 per year.) All the neat three-or-four-bedroom houses of my parents’ contemporaries had such maids. Their total disappearance from middle-class homes with the advent of the war was one of the most striking social changes of my lifetime.
Dorothy was a kindly and undemanding audience. Seated beside my bed in the evenings, she never complained about the incoherent plots in which I involved my circus performers, or about the repetitious slapstick with which I sought to enliven them. But she must have preferred the great event of the month – the film show. My parents had bought a film projector and a small silver screen, and on the first weekend of the month it was rigged up in the living-room and, wrapped in blankets, I was carried down and put on the sofa to watch a magic programme of my own choosing.
Kodak ran a library of silent movies and from their catalogue I selected the items for the next showing: a one-reel cartoon, a two-reel comedy (usually Chaplin), and a five-to seven-reel feature. The cartoon was often one of the adventures of Felix the Cat, though it could be the other silent series, Out of the Inkwell; the feature might be a relatively well-known film such as The Lost World, made in 1925 with Bessie Love and William Gargan, or one featuring Rin-Tin-Tin, but generally I chose a Western. Far and away my favourite star was Ken Maynard. His cheerful good-looks, his striking black outfits complete with silver twinholstered gun belt, his beautiful and intelligent palomino horse, Tarzan, capable of feigning dead, attacking an enemy or unpicking his captive master’s bonds with his teeth: all were irresistible. Maynard’s brilliant trick riding, the sheer attack of energy and violence that unfolded on the flickering screen, carried me into a drugged ecstasy.
Ken Maynard was the first tangible object of my hero-worship. I put up photographs of him in my room and would have viewed his films over and over again had I been able to do so. Recently I was gratified to read in an American study of the Western that these late silent films of Maynard’s were considered among the best examples of the genre ever made. Had they been categorised among the worst, it would not have altered my affectionate memory of them one iota. I suppose this cowboy film star (who was to die alcoholic and forgotten in a home for poor people) filled for me the need that, had I been a normally fit child, I would have projected onto a sportsmaster or athletic senior schoolboy. Bed-bound as I was, how much more overwhelming was the impact of his physical daring and masculine energy.
VII
Despite my obsession with Ken Maynard, I spent a lot of time each month selecting the items for the next show. I read the Kodak library catalogue from cover to cover and through it became familiar with the plots of a great many silent films. This led me to start writing my own imaginary screenplays. I had dictated stories, which my father had written down, before I could write. The earliest to survive, probably from the age of six, is called ‘The Blue Wizard’. It begins, predictably enough: ‘Once upon a time there was a Blue Wizard . . .’. Within a couple of years I was writing of buffalo hunters on the Great Plains, and British slaves forced to fight in the Roman arena; all derivative stuff from my reading of the time. My interest in the cinema led to more interesting adaptations: from the novels of Zane Grey (by the age of nine I had over twenty of them in the two-shilling Hodder and Stoughton edition), from P.C. Wren and the Martian stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and, most ambitiously a few years later, Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra. I still think that would make a marvellous movie. I went so far as to cast my version. Michael Redgrave (whom by this time I had seen in The Lady Vanishes) was to play Anthony, and Ralph Richardson (I had seen him in Q Planes) Enobarbus.
Another of my writing experiments was a monthly magazine, the Highfields Gazette (Highfields was the name of our house). My mother was forced to contribute a cookery page, which she hated, not believing that she had any talent with the pen, although, in fact, she was a lively letter-writer. Among her first entries were recipes for steak and kidney pie and roly-poly pudding, two of my favourites. I got my father to write his war memoirs, which I serialised as ‘Memories of a Tank Officer’. (I had been reading Siegfried Sassoon.) Privately, I found them very disappointing. My father could recount in vivid and dreadful detail his experiences, but when he came to write they became very pedestrian and long-winded, despite my ruthless editing. I dunned the more racy of his business friends for funny stories to use as fillers. I myself wrote the fiction serial (more about brave young British chiefs fighting the Romans) and the political leader. One of the first was titled ‘The Decline and Fall of a Great Empire’. I had become acquainted with Gibbon through the serialisation of extracts in John O’London’s Weekly. It was my first contact with serious history, and I found it enthralling. From it I drew the conclusion that the British Empire was also in peril. This must have been in the summer of 1935, and I was eleven years old. I had not much personal experience to go on, but what leader writer has? I knew there was still trouble in India (Gandhi had recently organised the Great Salt March and the Civil Disobedience movement was at its height), and Mussolini was threatening Abyssinia. I predicted that there would be another Big War and that in it the Empire, which was already showing the symptoms of dissolution and decay, would be dismembered. My father thought this was much too alarmist, but said an editor had a right to print whatever opinions he liked so long as they didn’t hurt anybody.
I got my views from reading the Daily Mail; I found our other newspaper, The Times, too indigestible. Much more came from listening to the wireless. I had begun with Toy Town and the Children’s Hour plays of L. du Garde Peach, The Castles of England and The Roads of England. I was hooked on them by the comically pathetic voice of Richard Goolden, who played the little Everyman, continually put down and always bobbing up again like an indestructible penny. He was also a staunch Mole in the radio adaptation
of The Wind in the Willows, for years my favourite book. But, by this time, I was listening to everything: news and plays and talks and documentaries. The wireless provided the variety of conversation and attitudes that my life lacked; friends who joined me at breakfast and often were heard last thing when I was tucked up for the night. One of these late listenings introduced me to an entirely new dimension of experience: this was The March of the ’45 by D.G. Bridson, an evocation of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s rebellion, in words, music, song and trenchant effects. Its sounds still live in my memory.
Slowly my health improved. This year, 1935, I took my first steps across the garden. I had been three years in my spinal chair and even a brief walk, supported on both sides, was very difficult. A big chunky masseuse came down three afternoons a week from Canterbury to pummel a response from my sticklike limbs. Gradually they grew stronger and I emerged upright, a weedy youth, bespectacled as the result of the years of reading in trying circumstances. I did not immediately appreciate my new condition. I had learned the pleasures to be extracted from illness; it took longer to accommodate to the joys of health. And I was still precluded from many of the normal pursuits of my age: school, sports, the rowdy horseplay of other boys, few of whom I knew.
Of course, there were compensations. In May was the old king’s Jubilee. I was driven through the flag-decked streets to the cinema. The film was The Lives of a Bengal Lancer with Gary Cooper. It confirmed my lifelong affection for the movies. My father had bought his first car: a Humber. How sleek and modern it looked compared to the upright old Chrysler. This summer of flags and local jollification, we drove round the many pleasure resorts that crowded the south-east corner of England. I was well enough to play cricket with my father on the sands. Cricket seemed another example of the continuity and stability of the kingdom that reached its principal manifestation in the person of the old king.