Out of the Blackout

by Robert Barnard

  Not that everything was sunlight. There had been one drawback to Dot’s happiness in those first few weeks, one troubling incident, one fright. This, of course, she had told no one, and neither had Tom. The first nights after he had arrived, Simon had slept well—almost too well. The sleep of exhaustion, Dot had called it; she had been a nursery maid up at Sir Henry’s, and she knew exhausted children when she saw them. ‘All them raids, night after night,’ she said, ‘tiring him out. Poor little soul.’

  But as Simon settled down, she made sure he paced himself better: active enough, but not too active. Then his nights were sometimes more restless. Downstairs, listening to a wireless turned very low, Dot heard him cry out—a whimper, like a dreaming puppy’s. She soon realized that his sleep was filled with dreams, not all of them pleasant. In some of them, to judge by his movements and his exclamations, he seemed positively afraid. And then in one of them he cried out—as he was to cry out perhaps once every two or three months for the first year or more after his coming to Yeasdon. The first time she heard it, Dot Cutheridge was standing at the stairhead, listening by the open door, and Tom was shifting uneasily from foot to foot at the bottom of the stairs. The boy had cried out earlier, and now the words that came from him were far from clear—were stifled, it seemed, by terror. But Dot over the early weeks had got used to Simon’s speech—some childish habits, some Londonisms. She swore she understood him now, as he cried out in his sleep, and Tom believed her:

  ‘Don’t!’ the boy called Simon had shouted. ‘Don’t do that! Stop it—please stop it! Don’t hit her! Don’t kill her! DON’T!’

  CHAPTER 2

  Simon Thorn never set foot in London again until the Autumn of nineteen-fifty-six.

  By then he was known to everyone as Simon Cutheridge. For a time his friends at school and people in the village had called him Thorn or Cutheridge indiscriminately; gradually, as he became so evidently a part of the family, they all settled down to the latter. But the Cutheridges did not, in those early years, make any attempt to adopt him legally, thinking that to do so would be to tempt fortune, to invite inquiries, perhaps to incur publicity that would bring down Nemesis upon them. In spite of their fears, there was never a challenge, in all the years of Simon’s boyhood. When he was eighteen, a small notice was put in the local paper making his assumption of their name legal.

  For a reason less logical, more superstitious, Dot and Tom Cutheridge would never take him to London. For most of the inhabitants of Yeasdon and the surrounding villages a trip to London was an occasional treat. What danger the Cutheridges could have anticipated from the programme of these coach trips—the Ideal Home Exhibition, a visit to St Paul’s Cathedral, seats for The Winslow Boy or the revival of An Inspector Calls—can hardly be imagined by anyone for whom the Metropolis does not, of itself, spell danger. And Tom Cutheridge was now head stockman to Sir Henry, who was a good boss. But the Cutheridges never did go on any of these excursions, nor did Simon ever ask to go. Instead, in their little pre-war Austin Seven, they went to Bristol, to Bath or to Exeter.

  Simon had been accounted bright from the beginning, and before long he was accredited with something more tangible than brightness. ‘The boy’s got a brain,’ said Mr Thurston, who, for all his prosiness, was an excellent headmaster. He added: ‘And he’s got the character to use it sensibly.’ Mr Thurston never had any doubt that Simon would pass the eleven-plus, and he did it effortlessly. Eight years later it was one of the proudest moments of the headmaster’s retirement, only a few months before he died, when he heard that one of ‘his’ children had won a scholarship to Oxford.

  A slight lung defect made the medics declare Simon Grade 3 for National Service, and he was never called up. He went up to Wadham in the autumn of 1956 to study Zoology.

  Those who went up to university in 1956 were predestined to be political. In later life Simon Cutheridge quite often did not bother to vote at all, or voted Liberal, but at Oxford he was catapulted into commitment. Not many weeks after he had gone up, while he was still settling in, getting used to having a scout, wondering whether to lose his West Country accent or not, the British, French and Israeli governments invaded Suez. For months Jimmy Porter had been bellowing from the stage of the Royal Court that there were no brave causes to die for any more. Here, suddenly was one. Within days the Russians had moved their tanks into Budapest, and the passionate fury of the undergraduates boiled over. Simon shouted, waved banners, fought in the streets. He stood on platforms haranguing crowds of townspeople and undergraduates through megaphones; he had water poured over him from the windows of St John’s. He sat in a little room in the Union watching Hugh Gaitskell’s broadcast, and he came close to crying. ‘What can we do?’ he said to himself, over and over again.

  ‘What can we do?’ he asked of a friend, as they left the Union building and he flung a scarf around his throat to keep out the dank November night air.

  ‘We’re going to Westminster to lobby our MPs,’ said his friend. ‘A whole gang of us. Why don’t you come?’

  ‘Count me in,’ said Simon.

  Cocooned in that gang—banner-brandishing, bescarfed fellow students—Simon was carried through Paddington Station almost without his noticing it. They all charged down into the Underground, and within the hour they were with hundreds more, demonstrating outside the Houses of Parliament. Stolid policemen, part of a good, dying tradition, placed themselves immovably between surge and countersurge of protest and support. Simon and several of the others got into the Palace to lobby their MPs. The member for Simon’s constituency was an inarticulate Tory backwoods baronet, who could nevertheless summon up some sort of vocabulary when his passions were roused. He told Simon to his face that he was a conchie, a traitor, and the scum of the earth. Simon was delighted—exhilarated with his success. He repeated the words over and over, to anyone who would listen, and felt cheated when he came across someone whose MP had told him he should be horsewhipped.

  The action shifted, as the action always does on these occasions. Before long they were up in Trafalgar Square, and in the thick of demonstrations and counterdemonstrations. A Labour shadow spokesman was speaking from the rostrum, and Simon roared in his support—though the mild-mannered politician seemed more bewildered than gratified by the passion and the fury he aroused. Simon was on the edge of the crowd, and here scuffles and open brawls developed. Mosley’s men were enjoying a resurgence, and there were members of the League of Empire Loyalists with loud-hailers. Simon got into a scuffle with a Mosleyite with a National Service haircut and army-style shirt. They were separated by their friends, but not before Simon had managed to get in two or three winding punches. The fight elated him, releasing all the pent-up aggressions that banner-waving and slogan-shouting had merely stimulated. The meeting was now breaking up, and somehow he got separated from his friends. But there was a group from London University congregated around the Edith Cavell statue, and somehow he joined up with them, and they all went to a narrow, dark little pub up St Martin’s Lane, where Simon downed three beers. Then they went to another in Cambridge Circus, where he downed two more.

  It was when he left there that he was rolled. Walking blearily in the direction, he hoped, of the Leicester Square tube station, he passed into an arcade and ran straight into four or five of the Mosleyites he had tangled with earlier. They were quicker, and soberer, than he was. He felt the kick in his groin, and lunged out confusedly; then he felt fists in his eye, blows to the head, and then very little for the rest of the two or three minutes they used to do him over. When he came to, five minutes later, he was set up like a Guy Fawkes dummy against the doorway of a second-hand bookseller’s. His nose was bleeding, his shirt and jacket were torn, and his wallet was gone.

  Simon felt terrible, but—oddly—he also felt sober. He groped around him, groggily tried his feet. Soon he would be able to stand. He patted the inside pocket of his jacket. No wallet. He put his hand gingerly round to the back pocket of his flannels. A threepe
nny bit. Merely opening his eyes was painful. He groped blindly around the paved floor of the arcade again. No wallet. No money. He felt in the top pocket of his sports jacket: thank God, his return ticket was still there. Simon had no idea, such was his inexperience, what he would have done without the stub of his train ticket. Now all he had to do was to get to Paddington.

  It was the countryman’s way to walk, and Simon walked. His eye was horribly swollen, but his legs held him up well. When he got into Leicester Square he found a young policeman and asked him the general direction of Paddington, braving his disapproving stare.

  ‘Been in the wars, have you?’ he was asked.

  ‘It was the bloody Fascists,’ said Simon.

  ‘Yes, well, if you ask me you’re two of a kind,’ said the policeman. But he pointed out the way.

  Set on the right course, Simon soon began noticing signs, and before long he was walking with more confidence, and in no great pain. He stopped at a public lavatory and cleaned himself up. With the buoyancy of youth, he suddenly felt full of life again. There was plenty of time before the last train to Oxford. He walked on and on, noticing everything with fresh curiosity. The pavements got harder and harder, but still, the distance presented no problems: he had often walked further with his adoptive father round the estate of Sir Henry Beesley. It was around ten o’clock when he came to the area called Paddington.

  The feeling came to him slowly: first it was a faint sense of unease, a hollowness in the belly, and he attributed it to the beating-up he had suffered, to the pitch of excitement he had been screwed up to all day, to a lack of food and a surfeit of beer. To anything except the real thing. For this feeling, he realized, was not only hollow: it was eerie. Here was a succession of houses—grimy, early nineteenth-century houses—small hotels and lower middle-class homes. He had known areas like this before, if not around Yeasdon, then in Bristol and in Oxford: grimy, depressing areas that cling around railway stations are all very like each other. Mean, protective of privacy, without dignity, they seem to stretch endlessly forward, to create their own dingy infinity, even though you know that five minutes away there are streets, and lights, and shops. At the corners you turn, and see more of the same, and you feel enmeshed, caught in a maze.

  And yet here, in these streets, among these houses, Simon seemed to have a clue to the maze. Here at this corner, for example . . . if he were to turn here, to go down this street . . .

  Without so much as a glance at his watch, with the unwilled certainty of a sleepwalker, he turned and went down that street.

  Broughton Street it said on the first house in the first terraced row. Simon knew the name, had heard it. And he knew that at the next corner he must cross the road, and then turn again. Into Farrow Street. That was it, Farrow Street. And Farrow Street would be more of the same: some narrow, late-Georgian houses, some low, mean dwellings built in the early days of the railway age. They would be the same, but they would be different, because they would be still more familiar: they would be known. And he would come to No. 17, on the right, and he would know the tiny patch of garden between the pavement and the house, know the two off-white steps up to the front door, know the knocker . . . What was that knocker like? Yes—a grinning gnome in brass, set low down in the door, where a child could grasp its fearful leer, his heart thumping the while, preferring it to the more fearful alternative of remaining out on the street.

  He crossed the road, turned again, and walked up Farrow Street. He felt he knew every crack in the paving stones, every railing and doorway. He recognized at once the squat form of the house, his old home; knew again the pale yellow roses in the scrap of garden—not very flourishing, and coated with grime. Here were the steps, much dirtier than when he’d climbed them, here was the knocker, which now he had to bend down to touch. But the door was wrong. It was now dark green. What had it been then? Brown. Dark brown. But it was the same door. There was a crack down the lower left-hand panel.

  Simon took a few steps backward into the street, and surveyed the house. Suddenly his arm had to lunge out and clutch on to a lamp-post for support. He was possessed by two contrary impulses—to go up and knock at the door, and to run away and put the house behind him. ‘Who am I?’ asked one voice. ‘You are Simon Cutheridge,’ answered a second. There was no one in the street. Blinds were down, curtains drawn, and behind them—mere shadows—figures moved around in the dimly lit rooms. It was an atmosphere neither attractive nor cosy, but it was not sinister, not threatening. ‘What could you say, if you knocked at the door?’ asked his second voice. ‘I could say I am . . . I could say I once lived here,’ came back the first. ‘Once lived here, and . . .’

  The voices stopped, and a sort of blankness seemed to enter Simon’s mind, penetrate its every corner.

  And suddenly he was walking. Like a bolt from a bow he was walking away, and then, though he was breathing heavily, he broke into a run. He went not the way he came, but forward, on to the Station. He was getting away from there, getting out of the area. He knew the way to the Station. It would be over there. He turned—left, then left again, then right. Suddenly the lights were in front of him; he was leaving the insidious, mean streets, and was back on a highway, on a road of shops and cafés and pubs, back in the warm world, with everyday human traffic.

  A corner pub had a piano playing inside, a Greek café sent warm smells wafting over the pavement, a prostitute smiled at him hopefully. He blinked, as if he had known this scene, but never like this. Had known it, but darker. He looked left, and there was Paddington Station, there was the station hotel. He had only to walk a hundred yards and cross the street and he would be there. He leaned for a moment against the wall of a shop, a poky little newsagent’s. He had come through. He had got out. He had . . . he had failed. He had flunked it.

  But his legs would not allow him to turn back again. He swallowed, took a breath, then walked down to the traffic lights and across the road. Within minutes the subdued late-night bustle of Paddington Station closed in on him. He looked at the placard with train departures on it, then ran to his platform. Outside the ticket gate there was a knot of his fellow protestors. Immediately he was in the middle of them, getting high again on indignation, feeling the exhilaration of political action, or what seemed very like it. They all had experiences to swap, things that had happened to them since they split up. Simon told of the London University students, the pubs he had drunk in, the beating up. He told them more sketchily about his walk to the Station. About his experience in Farrow Street he kept silent. How could it mean anything to anyone but him? And besides . . . that part of his life was secret.

  As the train pulled out, and only then, he felt safe. Yet how could he account for that sour taste in his mouth, of failure and of guilt?

  CHAPTER 3

  Once Simon was back in Oxford, it was easy for him to let Farrow Street hide itself in a corner of his mind. The rest of his first term passed in a frenzy of activity. Political impulses still bore him on at a hectic rate, a senior member of his college was trying hard to seduce him, he had met a girl who interested him. He drank a lot of beer, went to the odd dance, even landed a small part in the college play. There were lectures and lab classes, and quite a bit of football in the afternoons. It wasn’t necessary—it wasn’t even easy—to think.

  When he went back home to Yeasdon in December it was much more difficult to put the thought to one side. In fact the mere act of sitting on a little train without corridor that drew slowly into Yeasdon Station pricked the thought into tormenting life: as his heart knocked against his ribs, he knew it had knocked thus in nineteen forty-one. He was the same person, only now he was going home, and then he had been going into the unknown. Was that why his heart had knocked on that May day?

  Outside the station the first person he saw—stretched out under a car, as he seemed to have been stretched since he was fourteen or fifteen years old—was his best friend in Yeasdon, Micky Malone.

  ‘Hey, Oxford boy! Yer loo
k as if yer’d seen a ghost!’

  ‘Micky!’

  Simon put his case down on the forecourt, and Micky scrambled out from under the car.

  ‘What are you so bloody pale for? Don’t they feed you there?’

  ‘I suppose I have seen a ghost, like you said. I was just remembering in the train, how we all came down here for the first time.’

  ‘Is that all? Can’t remember a thing about it meself.’

  ‘I do. Or at least I tell myself I do.’

  ‘ “The boy from nowhere”,’ said Micky, quoting a name the evacuee kids had given Simon at the time. ‘Well, what’s it like being at Oxford, then, boy?’

  And they’d gone on to talk of other things.

  Of course his mother (as he called her, without a trace of self-consciousness) realized quite early on in the vacation that Simon was unusually preoccupied, and she guessed that it wasn’t the new experience of university that was making him so.

  ‘Something’s happened, hasn’t it?’ she asked him, on his second evening home.

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Simon. ‘I was in London, and I saw the house where I used to live.’

  Dot thought for a bit.

  ‘And did you knock on the door?’

  ‘No. I—I found I didn’t want to.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right, then.’

  She knew, of course, that it was not. Dot Cutheridge was in her way a clever woman. She made no attempt to tell him that past things were better not mulled over in that way. He would come out of it in his own time. There was a sort of serene confidence about Dot these days. When you have reared a child to the age of twenty, seen him launched into adult life, your task is in a sense done, your life has had its fulfilment. So, at any rate, Dot Cutheridge and many like her thought, then.