Towards Another Summer

by Janet Frame

  At last she came to the small group of shops which made up the village. She could see only the usual dusty exhibits of a village store - giant packets of cigarettes, cardboard butter, rust-edged tins of peaches and pears, reduced; the button-cotton-wool clutter of a draper’s; the shrivelled fruit, ‘morning-fresh’. She might have been in a poorer London suburb. At least, she thought, the sky is clear of London smoke. Its light was distant and grey, and now that she had walked for over a mile the freezing air was giving its reward, pinching, slapping her skin as if its intention, so often misunderstood, were to resurrect the human race rather than entomb it in ice.

  Birds too, Grace thought, remembering that she had been changed; Philomela; Procne; it was an old tradition; we must tend the myths, she thought; only in that way shall we survive. Survive, survive; the word wearied her; here, in the northern hemisphere, survival was as much a part of consciousness as food and sex and shelter, and yet it was no longer the prerogative of the north; even in the warm south it occupied their minds; would the seasons change, then; would people change - to beasts, or to birds, as she had done?

  She unfolded her map of Winchley, located the village, consulted her watch, and chose a street where the last building was marked heavily in black: Industrial School.

  Why did her past life keep erupting and spilling dangerous memories over her weekend?

  Industrial School. She shivered with fear and her heart quickened its beat. I’ll walk past it, she said to herself, I’ll see the kind of place where my father so often threatened to send Isy.

  —You’ll go to the Industrial School in Caversham. It’s the Industrial School for you. We’ll have to send her to the Industrial School.

  It surprised Grace to remember that she had not thought of an Industrial School as a school, and that it had been the word Industrial which used to frighten her; it gave the image of a vast hall (some connection, Grace used to think, with the song Isy sang and which her mother said was a terrible song a place filled with whirling black skeletons (like a sculptor’s ‘mobiles’) of which dust was the flesh, and that being sent to the Industrial School you were caged inside a skeleton and forced to revolve with it in a fury of black dust until eventually your body became indistinguishable from the skeleton, and if people visited the Hall (mother, father, aunts, uncles from up north or down south) they wouldn’t even realise you were imprisoned there; they wouldn’t be able to see you, and if you had any voice and tried to speak to them they would never hear you.

  ‘And when I die

  don’t bury me at all,

  Just pickle my bones

  in Alco Hall’)

  Grace had not associated the word ‘school’ with a place of learning because experience had taught her to be suspicious of the meaning of words. Hadn’t she sung God Save our Gracious Tin, then discovered that the ‘tin’ was not a kerosene tin but an old man with medals and a beard? Hadn’t she been forbidden to go near the magazine at the drill-hall, and then had found her mother reading a book which she described carelessly as ‘The Railway Magazine’? After such experiences Grace knew that you had to take great care with words. Her mother had convinced her of this too. She talked of whales.

  —A family of whales, kiddies, is called a school.

  —A school? That’s silly.

  —Yes, a school of whales.

  —A school of wales?

  —Pronounce your words properly, their father had put in, for he was particular about pronunciation.

  —It is whales.

  So, preferring the unexpected meaning, for she could not bear to be taken by surprise, Grace had never revised her belief that an Industrial School was a group or family of black dusty skeletons revolving in a vast hall. Without question it would have been a terrible place to send Isy.

  Grace remembered her fear when she used to lie in bed at night tucked up with her sleeping sisters and suddenly imagine that Isy would be seized and carried away. They would grab her arm and she would yell, as she so often did in play,—You’re pulling my arm out of its socket! (Saying ‘out of its socket’ was usually enough to make anyone stop pulling because it brought the awe-inspiring image of your standing there holding an arm and not knowing how to return it to its socket, and with parents around and punishment in view that was an embarrassing position to be in.) Grace knew, however, that when ‘they’ came to take Isy to the Industrial School they would not be deterred by anything or anyone, they would keep pulling, and Isy, with her arm in or out of its socket, would be imprisoned and slowly ground into black dust.

  The village was out of sight now. Grace was on the road leading to the Industrial School. She passed an isolated shop where she bought cigarettes and a bar of raisin chocolate. She passed a church, then an old people’s housing estate, groups of small flats with a communal room facing the street. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows Grace could see a group of men and women sitting in armchairs looking from the window at the street, the people, and the occasional traffic. Although the motive in providing the large windows had been to bring the old people in contact with the life of the street, when Grace stared through at them, realising that no part of their sitting room was hidden from the public gaze, she knew a feeling of desolation, and the sordid persistence of truth which, by a thoughtful misdirection of architecture, had given the flat-dwellers the unusual characteristic of seeming to be what, in fact, they were: they had not the appearance of sitting happily in a bright common room, knitting, or reading or staring out of the windows at the interesting view: they seemed more like clients in a travel agency, passengers at a bus station, waiting to be despatched; one could imagine scattered on the low tables which helped to give the ‘contemporary’ look to the room, the bright brochures, the illustrated enticements featuring the unknown tomorrow. At least, Grace thought, there will be an endlessness of time, not the calculated so many days so many guineas, and no Morning Free, Afternoon Sightseeing.

  How dare I? she said to herself. They are happy. They like to see the world outside. They have no wish to be shut within dark brick walls in rooms with small high windows. It is just that when age waits so obviously to book a ticket to the world of the dead it offends my sensibility; perhaps they (they, they, they) are wise enough to enjoy it; travel agencies, bus stations are interesting places; it sharpens the mind, enriches the heart to haunt areas of arrival and departure.

  Grace found that she could always dismiss a disturbing thought by wrapping it in a platitude.

  The Industrial School was near. She felt her heart thudding. She felt afraid. To see an Industrial school after all those years of vulnerable childhood when grownups could threaten and punish and one’s world loomed with frightening images of ‘truant officer’ ‘welfare officer’ ‘health inspector’ ‘Industrial school’ ‘Borstal’! For a moment Grace’s courage failed her. She had a wild idea that as she passed the school she would be seized, dragged inside, kept a prisoner for ever. Had that been where Isy had really gone, in the end, after she died? She had thought about it at times.—She’s with God, their mother had said, and had made a great fuss about what it would be like meeting her again on Resurrection Day, although she had irritatingly refused to acknowledge or explain the difficulties of a Resurrection Day reunion. There had to be room to resurrect, there had to be means of recognition - it was no use carrying their father’s joking symbol of recognition - ‘a white-handled pocketknife in a lefthand waistcoat pocket’. There were discrepancies of age, too . . . Grace had been sure it would not work, it would never work, there would have to be some other arrangement made.

  She had not been so sure, then, about Isy’s whereabouts. It was all very well to be ‘with God’ but it was a vague locality which described nowhere, and Grace had known that when her mother was faced with difficult questions which had frightening answers she was apt to reply vaguely. People going ‘away’ were often revealed to be dead. ‘Holidays’ were prison. ‘Nervous breakdowns’ were madness, thinking you were the King of the
Solomon Islanders. Grace learned so early the deceptions of words that she regarded every statement with suspicion. ‘With God’ indeed! Where else would Isy be when she had been threatened so often with the Industrial School? Where else but at the Industrial School?

  It was almost twelve o’clock. The faint blue light in the sky had disappeared. The world was depressingly grey. An ice-edged wind had sprung from the moor and was shuffling the old brittle leaves along the pavement and so transforming the air that it seemed on the verge of turning to ice. Grace found breathing an effort. She slowed her footsteps to gather courage before she arrived at the Industrial School. Again she consulted the map, compared it with her own position in the street. Yes, the Industrial School should be here, here, she said firmly, turning her eyes bravely to the right. There was no Industrial school. Again she consulted the map, making sure of her position. Again she looked about her; there was no Industrial school.

  It’s an old map, yes, it’s an old map, she said, shivering. The sun had gone. Am I dreaming? she said to herself. She imagined the conversation when she returned to the Thirkettle house,

  —Where did you walk?

  —I walked to the Industrial School.

  They would look at her in bewilderment.—Industrial School?

  But it was here, printed on the map, labelled, with the buildings heavily outlined in black.

  Procne. Philomela. The summer swallow. ‘So perish the old Gods but out of the sea of time-’

  Her father, who was always impatient with Gods, would have shouted at this Northern sky,—It’s a freezing-chamber in here, Can’t you shut the blasted door!

  Grace turned up her coat-collar and walked slowly back towards Holly Road.

  How had she ever become used to living in Great Britain, she wondered. How had she ever been able to exchange the sun, the beach, the shimmering tent of light, the dramatic landscape, mountains, rivers, gullies, glaciers, for the brick bleeding wound that seemed so much a part of this country; for the spindly winter trees, so tired, growing out of the squalor, as if a slovenly god, leaning down to try to clean the wound, had seized a few twigs to probe it, and amused by the sight, had left them sticking out of the wound. Great Britain was so full of waste paper, sooty paper, bus tickets, bus tickets - once when Grace was alighting from a bus and dutifully putting her used ticket in the ‘receptacle provided’ she had been too energetic and before she realised what was happening she had emptied the bin over the steps of the bus and into the road; a snowstorm of tickets with Grace Cleave, apologising as usual, marooned in it. It was a dismal grey wintry land with too many people; it was people who made the squalor; if you must have snow let it be out of sight of the human race; no; for every contamination there is a poem.

  She came to the park. The poverty of the north made her feel near to weeping; it was not material poverty, not lack of money or work, but the drab world and its poor supply of sun and warmth; people in Winchley would never sit drinking wine at little tables under the sky; when rich times came again (and why should they not?) they would banquet in vast northern halls, sipping from goblets of poison, and surviving it.

  She had almost reached the street when a woman emerged from one of the terraced houses facing the park. Her dress was patched in black and white, outlined sharply against the grey day. To Grace’s astonishment the woman suddenly flapped her arms then opening her mouth she screeched three times and then was silent. Then she began screeching again. Grace stared at her black and white patched dress, listened to the screeching, and thought,—She’s a magpie, she’s not a woman, she’s a bird. As she watched the woman more closely she saw the final change taking place in her - she had surprised her in private metamorphosis - she saw the arms mould themselves to wings, the black and white patched dress change to feathers about her body, her nose extend sharply to form a beak. There was no need for her voice to change. She began screeching once more; she was calling someone, her children. She flapped her wings belligerently as Grace passed her, she turned her bright fierce eyes towards her, then she dropped one wing limply at her side and fluttering the other as if clearing an obstacle from the air, she resumed her screeching.

  No, it’s not the call of the magpie, Grace considered. Perhaps she is a marsh bird; a plover, peewit; why should I see her here, now? Does she know that I too have changed to a bird? That it is time for me to fly towards another summer?

  —See anything interesting on your walk?

  —I was walking in the park when I saw a woman changed to a bird-

  Why should she not speak the truth at least once in her life? The need to tell Philip and Anne, to stand in the big untidy kitchen and say, aloud, I saw a woman change to a bird, was so desperate that Grace did not know how she would be able to prevent herself from telling. She knew there would be embarrassing consequences. Hasty Reassurances. The subject switched to one more harmless. Her limited social experience made her feel certain of the response to her news; she did not question the accuracy of her forecast, although she knew she was being unfair to Philip and Anne. Perhaps for the first time in her life she was among people whose imagination was not housed in a small dark room with no windows, whose understanding and sympathy were liberal, adventurous.

  Why not tell them, why not explain? she said to herself. I don’t wish to inhabit the human world under false pretences. I’m relieved to have discovered my identity after being so confused about it for so many years. Why should people be afraid if I confide in them? Yet people will always be afraid and jealous of those who finally establish their identity; it leads them to consider their own, to seclude it, cosset it, for fear it may be borrowed or interfered with, and when they are in the act of protecting it they suffer the shock of realising that their identity is nothing, it is something they dreamed and never knew; and then begins the painstaking search - what shall they choose - beast? another human being? insect? bird?

  If I confide that I have become a bird, others may want to change in the same way; or the shock may be so great that even Philip and Anne, who have qualities of mind to deal with unexpected situations, may not be able to adapt themselves in time, to accept the truth of my identity. The strain of constant adaptation to so many fearful events and discoveries is already too much to bear with sanity; one has to keep pretending to slip successfully into the new mould; a time will come when the tailored and camouflaged mind breaks beneath the burden; the stick insect in our brains no longer cares to resemble a twig on the same habitual human tree in the mere hope that it may survive extinction.

  14

  Walking slowly because she was still too early for lunch and she dreaded the extra half-hour of conversation, Grace at last came to Holly Road and the Thirkettles’ house. She knocked lightly on the back door and went in.

  —Hello. Had a good walk?

  —Yes thank you.

  —I’m just getting the lunch ready.

  Anne’s face was flushed with the heat of the stove and the cooking and with feeding and calming Noel and Sarah who were both claiming attention from Philip. He sat on one chair with his feet on another and Sarah was crouched on his knees, her hands in his, being pulled to and fro.

  Grace laughed unexpectedly and happily.

  —That’s trolley works, she said, and instantly regretted saying it; they would ask her to explain.

  Philip was looking attentively at her, waiting. Anne paused in her serving of the meal to listen. Grace felt trapped.

  —Yes, she said clumsily—that, I mean the way you and Sarah are holding hands like that and pulling . . . that’s trolley works . . .

  Still they waited for an explanation. A deep despair filled Grace’s mind as she watched Philip, Anne, Noel, Sarah, so far away, wanting to understand her language, in this case an ordinary family word - surely they themselves had a family language which they would find difficult to explain to others! What if she were to turn towards Anne and say, smiling,—How like Shelley’s first wife you are!

  Anne would not reali
se the significance. How often Grace and her sisters had exclaimed to one another,—I’m getting to be like Shelley’s wife, you’re like Shelley’s wife! Meaning that the material vain affairs of the world were intruding on their imaginative concerns; remembering, from a shared reading of the life of Shelley, that he had complained of Harriet,—When I’m thinking of poetry she’s thinking of buying hats!

  —Trolley works?

  Grace longed to lean her head on the table and weep and weep; her mouth felt dry.

  —Trolley works, she repeated.—We used to play like that, as if we were trolleys on the railway, you know how the gangers work the trolleys?

  Gangers, trolleys: they did not understand her railway vocabulary.

  —Yes, the gangers were always going up and down in their trolleys. When we were children the area near the railway was our playground - the engine sheds, goods sheds, the piles of sleepers, the old turntables, disused huts . . .

  Philip’s eyes showed a worried expression and when he spoke she was dismayed to realise that he seemed to regard her as a small child who is playing near the railway line and in danger of being killed by the trains,

  —But it’s dangerous for you to play near the railway line, he said sharply.

  There was a note in his voice which said,—You mustn’t do it again, understand? What on earth are your parents thinking of to let you play near the trains?