But it throbs; bang, bang, bang it goes. Why does my heart beat like that in my thumb? “Shsh”, my mother is saying, “it’s only a dream. Go to sleep my darling.” The scar on my thumb is clear now, seventy years later. I don’t suppose it made much scar on my mind because I do not remember a time when I wasn’t a sissy. Even Outram and Havelock, and the girl who heard the bagpipes in Lucknow, and Nicholson with his beard and stern eyes scared me stiff. Your King and Country Need You, thundered Kitchener from the hoardings—but that was years and years later.
6
I WAS now very conscious of my self, but the self of which I was conscious—timid, morose—was not worthy of myself. I cherished a photo in which I was running fast, laughing rapturously, probably being chased by my father or mother. That, I liked to think, was what I looked like—not the glum depressing object that I saw for so many years. I never again saw anything else. Yet there was that snapshot; I must have looked like it only for those one or two moments of my life. My character, when I glimpsed it, was horrible—in contrast with my wishes.
My sister and I played to, but not with, each other. Each was an obstruction to the other, a sentient piece of furniture. Even when I discovered the pleasure of masturbation by lying on my stomach on the floor and wriggling, she could make nothing of it. She tried, but had to report failure. I think I attempted to persuade my mother of the importance of my discovery; she must have sneaked to my father, for to my acute embarrassment, and theirs, they came silently into the room and found me at it. They thus actually discovered me doing what I had tried to share with my sister. Indeed, they not so much discovered me doing it as caught me at it. I felt horribly guilty. I had an impulse to look at what they had found but I could not find it quickly enough, for the guilty sense of imminent danger was overwhelmed by the fear that they were looking at me. Yet I knew that this could not be true. I was picked up and kissed, so clearly it was not me they had seen when… well, when what? Their expressions had frozen into a form I had never before seen; nor horror or dismay, but silent, undramatic.
The experience had a peculiar, adhesive quality like fluff on clothes. There were bits of the Bible—the last place where you would expect it—where there were ‘things’ which had this same quality. ‘Giggling’ too; that was mixed up with it. The grown-ups didn’t giggle; they laughed in a peculiar way. My parents didn’t giggle; they were solemn.
One day we were all together, singing a hymn, ‘Sometimes a light surprises the Christian when he prays’. My mother said to my father, laying aside her hymn book, “I don’t think I have ever heard of anyone who had that experience, have you Fred?” She seemed sad. After thinking for a moment my father replied, ill at ease, “Yes I think so, but / have not had it.”
I was watching, listening intently. Why were they so sad? I put my hand on my mother’s to comfort her. They had not till that moment noticed my presence. The spell was broken; my mother stroked my hair and the subject was not resumed. Queer. I often wondered what it was about.
“Why are you sad Mummy?” I asked her later; she laughed the suggestion aside. “Yes,” I insisted, “you know—the light surprises”, I reminded her.
“Some day you will understand—when you’re grown up”, she said.
“But”, I persisted, “you are grown up and you didn’t say you understood.” She coloured slightly and laughed. That uneasy laugh! Not arf, arf, arf, like the men in the club when I asked one of them for an ice-cream. That had made my father angry. People got angry very quickly and suddenly especially about nice things like ice-cream and lying on your tummy and ‘wiggling’. I thought I had better keep clear of light surprises’ too.
But I did like asking questions. This made people go arf, arf, arf. Once they thought it so funny it made me frightened and angry. I felt hot all over and made up my mind to keep my questions to myself.
“You must learn to keep your mouth shut”, said my father harshly.
I was astonished. “But, Daddy, I always keep my mouth shut! Why must I keep it shut?”
“There you go again! Just when I have told you not to!”
This defeated me. I was about to ask him another question when I found myself crying instead. I thought it time to run away; he did not like it when I was a silly little cry-baby.
Very soon after my father and mother caught me wiggling on my tummy another dreadful thing happened; they got out my bath tub—which was peculiar because it was not bed time. Remembering about keeping my mouth shut—just in time—I nearly burst with curiosity. Why were they mixing hot and cold water? What was that queer thing they put in the water? Why did they feel it with their fingers? It was fascinating—like the time I was playing trains in church during the sermon, forgot I wasn’t to make a noise and let out a terrific scream because my railway engine was going to bump into another railway engine and had to whistle at once, as loud as possible, to save all the passengers. This time I remembered not to be such a fool. To my growing surprise I was seized, stripped by my mother and dumped in the tub! I tried to scrambled out. “Mm…”, I yelled, carefully keeping my mouth shut. They subdued me and I had to sit there for three minutes by my father’s watch. Then my mother lifted me out and dried me.
What had she wet me for, since I was dry to start with? This was repeated on two subsequent days—but I was forewarned by previous experience. I kept my mouth shut but otherwise put all into resisting this queer and somehow repulsive battle. They too began to feel it was idiotic; it never happened again. I, they, we, was, were cured. Sometimes a bath surprises a Christian while he plays.
7
ON the whole my experience of being read to by my parents was not a success. Alice in Wonderland was spoiled by my habit of asking questions and my intolerance of frustration. The mouse’s tail made me feel, well, like the animals. Why was it dry? Who was Fury? Why? What was he furious about? Why did the tail get smaller? Yes, but why do mice’s tails…? My father was torn between the desire to be patient and the wish to get on with the book. “It gets better later”, he said, but it did not. I didn’t like the Dodo. I wished those animals would sit still and not go scurrying off whenever Dinah was mentioned. Why was Alice so daft as to keep on mentioning—well, you know who. Why couldn’t she keep her mouth shut7
Then, when the story cheered up and it looked as if it was getting exciting, my father would shut the book because it was bed-time. Even when Alice did get into the garden it was terribly boring, made worse by my father who kept on seeing some joke which he said was funny.
But awful as it was to hear about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland it was not half as bad as a book about a girl called Little Meg. At the start her mummy and daddy died. Then she had to look after her little brothers and sisters. Of all the stupid things—she tried to sell a box of matches ‘at a street corner’. The street corner was not like being in the jungle; there seemed to be lots of houses. So you would think there would be lots of people about. But there weren’t so she couldn’t sell any matches. Then a very rich man came and… my sister, for reasons best known to herself, began to bawl the house down. I was not so foolish as to try comforting her; it seemed best to keep clear of her. As I didn’t want to have to sit in a tub again I just stared at her as she had taken to staring at me. After a bit I began to bawl too because Little Meg seemed unlikely to get anywhere especially as my sister was trying to fight her way off my father’s lap and had settled into a scream which fetched my mother into the room. As my father rightly remarked, it was “bed-time anyhow”.
The next night was worse still. The rich man, or a policeman whom he summoned, wanted to take Little Meg and her children to gaol! For once my sister and I were unanimous; we started to wail together. The more she yelled the more frightened I became. A terrible Arf Arfish feeling rose in my throat. “Whatever is the…?” my mother began as she came into the room to find out what on earth I had been up to. Mercifully she realized I was innocent this time.
The next night my sister and
I started to yell the moment we saw my father coming with that awful book under his arm. That put a stop to that. I have sometimes wondered about Little Meg. Did she marry Eric or Little by Little? That book I did not come to till I was at school; sufficient for the day were little Meg’s children—and my mother and father’s two ‘beauties’.
Two beauties we were. My sister had a wooden parrot of which she must have been very fond. It was a brightly painted grotesque with large goggle-eyes. In the heat and intense boredom of Indian mid-day I was inspired to introduce some leavening into the siesta during which we were supposed to retreat to our bedroom and sleep. “Goggle-eyes”, I said. There was no response. Had I the resources of religion at my disposal I might have described the experience as “the devil entering into me”. “Goggle-eyes”, I said, pointing to the parrot. “Goggle, goggle, goggle, goggle-eyes”. My sister looked at me; she looked at the parrot; she got the idea. She was a woman of few words, but swift action. In a twinkling the adorable child of three had turned into a raging ball of fury.
My father once explained to me why the bear was such a dangerous animal despite its cuddly appearance. “He doesn’t bother about stealthy movement; he will lumber around a hill-side forest with about as much discretion as a lorry-load of tin cans. You have to stay uphill of him because without any warning he will roll into a ball and launch himself at you—and heaven help you if you cannot get out of the path of that cannon ball of furry fury.” I saw what he meant; I saw what my sister meant. But I was not wise. “Goggle, goggle—”, I was about to remark into that raging inferno of screams, which a moment before had been my sister, when I became aware of a spectator; my father had been watching at the door.
There was not time to say “Nothing!” for my father did not even bother to ask me what I was doing. He proceeded to ‘faire la sagesse entrer par le cul’. My reactions had been slow, but not so slow that I was unable to end up with a guilt transformed into a sense of hardened grievance, resentment and impenetrable innocence. ‘Put on the whole armour of righteousness’, said Saint Paul; it was a text which brought me much comfort—until I felt the inadequacy of moral armour. It is wonderful what can be done with ‘nothing’, but it takes a deal of doffing once put on.
After much painful experience I learned how to curl myself into a tight ball of snowy innocence and launch myself, with a small sharp piece of ice in the middle, at my foe. ‘O the great days in the distance enchanted’, days of hot air in the stifling Indian sun.
We quarrelled; the gleam of joy, even co-operation, which had flashed out when I discovered the pleasures of wiggling on my tummy had been extinguished. I learned to keep away; she in turn learned to demand imperiously that I should play with her. In this she discovered a valuable ally in my father’s ambition to have two children, brother and sister, who loved each other with a tender, loyal and lasting affection. My mother’s attitude was certainly more loving—genuinely loving—than my father’s; hers was not an ‘attitude’ at all; his was. She loved us; he loved his image of us. She knew she had two nasty brats and could tolerate that fact; my father bitterly resented the menace of any reality which imperilled his fiction. To strangers (in so far as we met any who allowed themselves to be aware of our existence) a short and superficial contact would reveal nothing to disturb an agreeable impression. We were aided by being a good-looking pair; retrospectively I can see that we had grown in experience to become an accomplished and unpleasant pair of liars, smooth and quick to see what our betters expected of us and to provide accordingly. The awareness of something better was responsible for an unspoken and unspeakable misery which added its quota to our general nastiness. To this day I retain a certain confidence that no matter how dangerous or how unpleasant my contemporaries may be, I myself am even nastier. I cannot feel confident that I am more dangerous because my malice is tempered by cowardice. The resultant cunning is not without its value; I probably owe more to this quality than I have ever admitted.
8
THE approach of night and its sense of the foreboding presence of Arf Arfer penetrated my whole but fragile armour of daylight. Very rarely my parents were near a city and friends would come to dine. The men would sooner or later laugh—arf, arf, arf—and I would wake in terror. Arf Arfer had come! With his great goggle eyes and painted visage, bright, bright as… ‘“and, ‘and”, I would wail. My father would clasp my hand in his great strong one and I could sleep. Not when there was company though; on those occasions even my mother was different. If she came she was dressed in strange clothes, cold, like the place where saints in glory stand, bright, bright as day. That was no happy land for me, but more, had I known it, like the Ypres Salient, glistening, cold, cold. ‘Quo fas et gloria ducunt’.
“Hush dear, shsh, what’s the matter?”
Nickel Sehn was the matter, Hodson’s Horse was the matter; the whole damned lot were the matter. “Go away!” I would say through my sobs. “Go away!”
None the less I loved India. The blazing, intolerable sun—how wonderful it was I The mid-day silence, the great trees with leaves hanging motionless in the breathless air, the brain-fever bird with its rising reiterated call, “Brain-fever, brain-fever, brain-fever…”, then silence again.
I discovered it was a marvellous place to play trains. The intense heat conspired to produce masses of fine white dust. Nonchalantly I kicked it up and was rewarded by a great cloud that rose into the air. I did it again. Before I had time to think I was racing around, kicking up huge clouds of… steam… in front of me like a huge ‘Ee Ay Ah’ locomotive. The Devil entered into me: The Devil, unlike Arf Arfer, was a great friend of mine. “Go on! Do it again”, he said. “Lead us not into temptation”, I learned to pray, but only rather half-heartedly. Temptation, unlike heaven, was such fun. The immense speed at which I was travelling, the intoxicating sulphurous fumes of smoke which belched out from the pistons in front of me—glorious! And much superior to electric city with its old slug of buttered locomotive.
“What have you been doing7” my mother asked. “Just look at you! White… from top to toe!”
I couldn’t ‘look at me’ but I saw what she meant. I was a bit dusty. She, poor woman, thought I had come in for a drink, but in fact it was the great E.I.R. express locomotive come to have its tank filled in its record-making run across India and there was not a moment to lose. I tried to make her understand that I had to go at once. It took her some time to make me understand—even now I can hardly believe it—that I was never to do it again. Never!
“The idea! And you have been racing around in that hot sun.”
“What sun?” I was impelled to ask dully. I hadn’t noticed any sun.
I did do it again. The Devil got into me, but I suspect that Arf Arfer had got in too. I was just cornering at speed, leaning over to counter the drag of centrifugal force and the lack of camber, when I was impelled to ‘look at me’. I was a bit dusty already. I couldn’t get it off so I went in to find my ayah before my mother could see. Like my sister, who couldn’t understand about wiggling, she had her blind spots and I never succeeded in making her understand she was wrong about what she called “racing around like a mad thing in the hot sun”. Later, when the monsoon came, I found she was curiously blind about that.
“What rain?” I asked, not hopefully, as I stood before her “soaked to the skin” as she called it. It made it worse that I felt she was laughing—inside.
“You’re laughing”, I said. “No”, she said looking very stern. So she wasn’t sad; and she wasn’t laughing either.
9
I WAS not sad and I was not laughing either. Nor was Melvin. Who was Melvin?
Melvin and Cyril were two brothers, known to my father because they reminded him of two characters in a book for children, as Budge and Tod. Cyril was Budge, big, clumsy, with a raucous frightening laugh like a goat bleating. Melvin, or Tod, was my hero. He was mischievous and likeable—unlike Budge or their sister Beryl who was a sneak, always telling tales about t
he boys—any boys—to her father and mother, my Uncle Walter and Aunt Helen.
We were all very fond of pancakes; so my mother told the cook to make pancakes as a treat for our lunch—two each, she said, which made ten for the five of us children and two more to make a generous dozen. Melvin, who had a nose that did not mislead him in gastronomic affairs, had sought out the kitmagar. He was a nice man, fond of children. The nine year old Melvin had natural charm; he also had the skill to enhance his assets. Accordingly, when lunch was served, my mother found herself confronted with a pile of forty pancakes to serve. The kitmagar, asked to explain this extraordinary miscalculation, uneasily admitted that the chota sahib had amended his mistress’s estimate of adequate supplies. Melvin, who was unabashed, augmented his meal by tearing off and eating a piece of pancake which I was about to put in my own mouth. My mother laughed, but I was not amused. My father told us to try to behave ourselves when we were at the table.
Melvin had made a garden, as had my sister and I; he had greatly improved on our efforts by fencing his with a piece of rabbit wire. This I greatly coveted. So when the day came for Budge, Tod and Beryl to leave for England I asked if I could have his fence to put round my garden. “You can put it round your head for all I care!” was his disconcerting reply. He did not want to go to England; as it was only two years before I myself would be going I feared and wondered about this place that upset even Melvin.
The Long Week-End 1897-1919 Page 3