The Dear Green Place

by Archie Hind

  While this was being done the head was finally severed, the work of a few seconds, the benefit man bending and gripping a cord in the lower part of the beast’s jaw, pulling the head back and stroking with his knife through the joint between the skull and the first vertebrae. It was at this point that the animal was gutted, the belly slit to reveal the glaucous mass of entrails all neatly dimpled and coiled to the scalloped edge of the mesentery fat. The intestines were draped over the forearm and cut free from the vent, pulled out from the animal, and the various conduits and canals which connected them to the stomach and liver and spleen – and they were ready to be thrown into the shallow wooden trough which stood outside the room. Then the big ballooning bluish-grey paunch, already beginning to drop of its own weight, would be sliding over the diaphragm and stretching the pink oesophagus. A flick of the knife and the mass of stomachs would flop on the floor. The benefit man would separate the stomachs, sling the tight round manyplies out of the room, trim the warm globules of fat from the surface of the paunch, then drag the gagging blue mass to a hole in the floor in the corner of the room. He would slit the bag in a swift curving flash of the knife and release the feculent contents of the stomach down the chute. The spleen and liver were now removed from where they were tucked in their corners of the abdominal cavity, the tissue connecting them to the wall of the beast’s flank being torn away by the fingers and the edible valuable liver being placed on a clean wooden shelf. Two quick semi-circular cuts were made in the diaphragm from the backbone round close to the ribs, the lungs, heart and loose flaps of the diaphragm were cut from the backbone and carried away, and the whole cluster suspended by the gullet was hung on to a hook on the wall.

  The beast was now an empty shell of bone and muscle and fat, except for the kidneys which remained embedded in the thick fat attached to the backbone and ribs. While the beast was being gutted the hide was torn away from the back and now lay suspended from the shoulders, its lower part lying in folds on the wet bloody floor. Now the backbone was split through, the most skilled and difficult part of all the killer’s work. He started slitting with his heavy cleaver from the flat bone at the base of the tail right down to the neck stump, and in spite of the clumsiness and weight of the big cleaver the vertebrae were split neat and clean. It was a delicate and arduous operation which required both strength and skill so as not to leave broken shards of bone which would spoil the roast cuts, or the appearance of the carcase to the butcher. This done the carcase was now two separate sides of beef, opened out like a book and joined together with muscle only at the rump and the shoulder. While the benefit man was drying off the carcase with a cloth the killer would, with soft strokes of his knife, part the fell between the last piece of attached hide and the bluish lump of muscle on the beast’s shoulder. Then he’d drag the mucky sodden hide out of the room.

  The carcase was now ready for the butcher. Only twenty-five minutes ago the animal had walked into the room. The irrevocable transformation never ceased to astonish Mat. Even in foresight he would find it difficult to imagine the placid chewing animal brought into the room transformed so quickly into a carcase.

  Yet after all, the whole process was routine, it never varied, and in the end the result was beef. This could only add to the satisfaction of the work. In the morning, when Mat had worked hard for an hour or two, and he was beginning to work up an appetite for breakfast, he would notice the smell of the meat and the rich bloom of the flesh as he sliced through it with his knife and this would make him salivate. It was simply that a vigorous and healthy appetite resulted in the disappearance, the absence, of fastidiousness. In the same way Mat enjoyed the warmth of blood on his hands, the smooth bland sheets of fat which were trimmed from the paunch, the silken slightly tacky feel of the intestines, the dry flaky texture of the lung, or the slabby firm feeling of a haunch or a shoulder. It was a world of simple and strong sensuousness, with a lot in it which would appeal to anyone starved of bodily activity and sensuous stimulation – the agility and skill needed to watch against flying hoofs or a subtle dig with a horn, to subdue a restive beast, lassooing it and coaxing or fooling it on to the stunning post, the heaving and pulling to get a ton of bull flesh on to a resupine position on the floor, the alertness and skill needed to handle a razor-sharp knife with safety.

  Above all this there was something which Mat counted as important and which he had tried to formulate clearly to himself; it was the need to be intimately involved in a material process. It was one of his favourite ideas, originating from long tedious hours spent adding columns of figures, that it was essential for a man to have a connection with his bodily and economic needs other than in a mere abstract way. Whether this could be elevated into a social idea he was doubtful, somebody had to do the abstract thing. But for Mat there was this newly discovered enjoyment, and he took delight in the unctuousness of the fat, the soft maternity of the udders which he stripped from a flank, or the heaving at a massive bull’s head as he gripped it through the slit nostril.

  In a few months he became completely immersed in this new life. There was the regular cycle of each week, beginning on Monday with fairly hard work, mounting up towards Wednesday which would be hectic, everybody working at full pitch the whole time. Then there was the breathing space towards the end of the week, along with the Friday opulence. Even getting up on the bitterest mornings had its solace. In the cold mornings they would send out for tea and drink pints of the scalding liquid during pauses in the work and smoke cigarette after cigarette or eat fried sausages or eggs between rolls, two bites to each roll, and the body would become warm from activity and full of its own warmth and the enjoyment of itself and its appetites.

  The men in the slaughter-house showed good personal feeling towards one another and there was an atmosphere of camaraderie. As the killers worked for themselves there was never any intervention by bosses and all authority came from the demands of the job. Along with this there was the richness and variety of personalities and opinions, with much teasing and physical fun. On a Thursday or a Friday if the work was slack there would be hilarious ball games with perhaps thirty men sliding and slipping about on the wet tarmac after a tiny rubber ball, or hectic comical fights going on with buckets of water or hoses. There would be tremendous cheering when a hefty swipe at the ball would go amiss and someone would slither down on the wet floor. One time when Mat got unusually excited and was chasing after a ball this happened to him. He hit the ball a terrific kick and scored a goal but on so doing he fell to the floor on the base of his spine and the point of his elbow. He lay there unable to move because of the nauseating shock which jarred through his bones. A wave of pain and sickness began to spread through his body while at the same time his diaphragm was jerking with giggles. He was carried off the ‘field’ with great ceremony, everybody cheering and whistling, and he was unable to suppress the tears of laughter and pain which rolled down his cheeks. As they laid him down on a bench he was letting out genuine groans of pain which under the infection of everybody’s laughter would turn into spasmodic whoops and giggles. It was the kind of fall which might have laid a man up for a day or two, but under the influence of the sheer bounce and vigour of the football game he had thrown off the shock in about ten minutes and was up on his feet chasing after the ball again.

  While the men were actually working all this turned into good-natured yelling and shouting, the telling of jokes, the recounting of tales. Many silly useless arguments would start just for the sake of the noise and the exuberance and ferocity of the language, the whole thing becoming formal, almost stylised.

  The months passed in this way in a regular peaceful routine. Only during rare moments would Mat reflect on how commonplace he had become. Not that he had any contempt for the commonplace. There was too much about it that was valuable and healthy. He often thought, for instance, about the interesting effect which living in a commonplace manner had upon his sense of time. Without any nagging compulsion to strive after some kind o
f achievement, he found himself able to concentrate upon and enjoy the content of his everyday life. Somehow, before, when he had been feeling all the time the obsession to write, everything about the mundane part of his life, taking a tram, eating a meal, visiting, the ordinary duties of life, the day itself, all had to be got past for the sake of the next moment when he would sit under the circle of light and start again on his novel. This had seemed to make his time fly. When every part of the day seemed to be spent waiting, every act was a mere provisional gesture to atone or dismiss what to a normal man would be the content and reality of his life. Now he could enjoy the commonplace for its own sake and without the nagging anxiety of having something waiting which made every moment when he was not writing seem trivial and absurd.

  The content of life, too, the commonplace, was well worth attention. He began to indulge his appetites and senses. At weekends he would go home with a couple of whiskies under his belt and the pleasant sense of looking forward to a weekend of relaxation. He began to buy literary magazines and weekend reviews and pay attention to the current literary scene. He read all the time with a kind of voluptuousness. He bought himself a beautiful book of reproductions of Vermeer’s paintings. His interests were not exactly commonplace, but his attitude was; in distinction to his former excitement about art, which came from his need to use experience, now he merely enjoyed it. Sometimes, when the slaughter-house was busy and he had to work very hard, he would lose himself in the physical cycle of working, sleeping and eating. He would come home and sit the whole evening just waiting to go to bed, enjoying the comfort of his relaxed limbs. His hands would be stiff from holding the knife and he would place them on the arm of the chair and sit back staring at the fire and dozing. At these times he felt no anxiety, not a sense of being flawed, but whole and complete and unable to remember what it was like to be anything else but relaxed and nerveless.

  8

  WITH HIS INTERESTS directed outwards Mat began to make some discoveries. The great idea which he had shelved came to the forefront of his mind in an ironic way. He had been visiting the library, on a legitimate occasion this time, and had been browsing around the shelves. For some reason he had taken a copy of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks from the shelves and had idly started to read it. He had experienced the shock of complete recognition. What he had recognised when he read of the house of Buddenbrooks – the family, the trading house, the magnificent meals, the family heirlooms and records, the traditional life – was his own concern with the Royal Burghers of Rutherglen. Yet there was a difference. It seemed clear to Mat that the author’s love of this traditional, conservative way of life, was the same as his own – yet there was something else there. It was like the thing that happens when, as the expression goes, ‘It rings a bell’ and you are vaguely reminded of something. Mat read the book at home and it prompted him to go back and look over the material which he had collected for his own novel. He felt on re-reading it all that the whole thing was almost comical. It was a kind of antiquarianism. He was reminded of those folk who go about collecting old objects – pieces of bric-a-brac, old swords, pieces of Victorian furniture, wally dugs, wag-at-the-wa’ clocks; it was indeed what he himself had been doing. There were long accounts of the details of the domestic life of his people; he had collected old recipes, maps of the streets, copies of old prints, records of exchanges and purchases of lands and properties, copies of the accounts and minutes of societies and lodges, reports of various acts of charity and social provision; he knew exactly the style of clothes and materials which were worn, where they were woven and made, and the manner in which the women embroidered, crocheted, crimped and ironed their dresses, bonnets, ribbons and inkles, what artefacts the men carried in their pockets and hung from their fobs or collected in drawers and desks and shelves and what-nots; there were long copies of minutes of learned societies, pocket histories of business houses, of theatres, of books published; the doings of Presbyters and congregations; benefactions and municipal acts and provisions. A great conglomeration of material whose sole object seemed to be the social and civil acts of men of a past era. He noted that the word which he used most often and in a characteristic way was the word ‘provision’. It seemed to him strange that he, who outwardly and explicitly paid service to progressive and forward-looking ideas, should have this strong feeling and sympathy for an old capitalistic way of life, and that he should be attracted most strongly not to any individual or personal side, but to that social or workaday side whose concern was totally with provision and conservation in the material world. In Mann’s work there was something else, some energetic attitude towards his material which allowed him to people and manifest his world with individuals and events. This gave Mat a sense of unease, the same which he sometimes felt when he realised that the same tobacco lords whom he admired for their conservatism had shown a radical resilience in helping to create the Industrial Revolution. When Mann inexorably allowed the facts of European history, the crisis of Capitalism, to ride rough shod over the Buddenbrooks and finally extinguish them, he had done something essentially modern and progressive which his love for his characters and their way of life must have made difficult. It was too difficult for Mat, and he put away his big dossier of papers, the richly varied but intractable material which he sensed now he would never shape; he put them away with the reflection which gave him grim satisfaction, that the only difference between himself and this wonderful German was his own inferior talent. He put his failure to shape his material down to a simple intellectual lack, a lack of the novelist’s ability. He didn’t see the lack of ability might consist simply of his refusal to stand in an active and energetic relation to his work. Besides, he was genuinely confused.

  Into this confusion came a sudden clarity when he read Tonio Kröger. The idea of the artist as a bourgeois manqué came to him as laughably and crudely true in his own case. At last he had come to realise the nature of his artistic impulse; a mere need to become vicariously immersed in something from which he had been isolated. A traditional, solid security in life. He began to understand the nature of the attraction which everything solid and substantial had for him in that they would lend gravity and stillness to the flimsy, vibrating amorphousness of his life. The solid burghers had a clear and solid footing beneath them and their floors did not slope towards the street. That history had put the skids under the Buddenbrooks was enough for him to realise, or to pretend to realise, that he could avoid the precariousness of life by drawing in a regular weekly wage, and the other moral precariousness he could hide away from, exhaust his knowledge of it in the rich and banal life of the slaughter-house. He could have realised more than this but it would have meant recasting himself, reassessing himself, and becoming involved with literature again. It was easier to explain his aberration, his flaw, his artistic side, as a mere reflex from his fear-ridden and poverty-stricken childhood. This dismissal of literature was made doubly easy for him by his sense of urgency of the questions of the day. He read further in Mann, in a way repelled by the kind of subject which Mann treated, and which Mat saw as a morbid interest in disease. On reading Death in Venice he took in a straightforward way Mann’s questioning of the nature of art. Furthermore, with the understanding of his own relationship with his work he felt a growing sense of fastidiousness, descending into disgust with the whole business of art. He felt unprepared to take part in the kind of excessiveness which art demanded, a kind of inflammation and heatedness of the mind, a shameful exposure of the self. What his mother and Jake had said to him – ‘High falutin’ nonsense’ and ‘Look after the old corporate body’ – took on the dignity of serious argument. It was easy to go on from there to the moral view that art was essentially too frivolous and irrelevant a matter in a serious and precarious world. The old corporate body was being seriously threatened by this very high falutin’ nonsense – the scientists and their hubris, and here he was playing around with the same dangerous toy. He wondered how he had become entitled to play aroun
d with art, a thing that was an excess, an excrescence upon life, a luxuriant and diseased growth. All the Calvinist beliefs came to the fore here – when people were suffering all over the world – for real!