The Dear Green Place

by Archie Hind

  It seemed to Mat that he had been handed a very rare and fragile thing to hold, and he began to clutch it in that tight inhibited way that is more conducive to dropping it than holding it in an easy relaxed safety. This feeling didn’t manifest itself in any intimate physical way. By the time Helen had come home from hospital with the baby – they called him John – he weighed nearly ten pounds. He already had a strong little neck that would strain its head up from the pillow and Mat was able to enjoy handling him, bathing him with almost as much confidence as Helen. It was more like that embarrassment which is akin to the feeling working-class people get when they have to offer hospitality to a stranger and they find that their condition makes embarrassing limitations to their offerings. They become conscious and painfully aware of the meagreness of their lives, feeling that although it may be all right for themselves they ought to be able to offer better for others. As the months passed John grew up into what Helen proudly called ‘a great coarse lump’ with his big round head, fat cheeks and creases at the wrists and knees. Without noticing their lives became narrower, more involved in routine. The little house with its two tiny rooms seemed to grow smaller with the baby’s presence and all the objects with which he had to be surrounded. Mat began to find it irksome to have to squeeze past the pram in the narrow lobby, always having to be moving things – chairs, tables, baths, prams. They had not had the long usage of domestic matters to acquire skilful management.

  Mat felt that he had introduced his family, of which he had so often dreamed, into a shoddy and provisional world where every enjoyment was deferred until later, until some physical obstacle had been got over. The innocent enjoyment of everyday commonplace life which Mat so hankered after was prevented by the congestion, the sheer clutter of things which had to be moved around or out of the way. Before bathing John at night they would spread the carpet with a rubber sheet, boil kettles, remove chairs from in front of the bed to get at the baby’s bath which was kept there; then they would have to mop up the water which had splashed all over the place, empty the big bath into the tiny sink, wipe off the windows which had become all steamed up from the boiling kettles, dry the bath, remove the chairs from in front of the bed so that it could be put away. For their meals they had to manœuvre the table out into the middle of the floor and as long as it was there it divided the room into two so that they had either to squeeze between it and the big easy chair in front of the fireplace or climb over the divan if they wanted to move from one side of the room to the other.

  All this came on top of the physical fatigue which the harsh demands of the slaughter-house made on him, the early rising, the hard physical labour. After a few months Mat felt the horror of congestion, conglomeration and clutter always some place near the surface of his mind. They both began to act as if this period was merely to be existed in until something better happened, when they would have a life in which the simple immediate things could be enjoyed, like having a meal or bathing the baby. Of the provisional nature of their life there could be no doubt. The nature of their expectations was more dubious. Yet out of this dubiety Mat tried to maintain a sense of the possibility of a radical change in their circumstances so that he would be able to offer Helen and John something more than this cramped and cluttered way of living. They could no longer afford to go out so often, even if they could get someone to baby sit for them.

  Mat occasionally thought about writing, but aside from the fatigue which he felt in his body his mind had gone numb. He found himself unable to pay attention to other writers, still less write himself. He stopped reading. Slowly they found that the constructive life which they were leading was draining their vitality away, making it harder and harder for them to cope with its menial exhausting demands. They began to accept things as normal which they never would have done before, finding themselves being forced near the edge of squalor and accepting it. The sharp edge of their energy, their youth, was being abraded away. More and more their lives became an arid routine; for Helen a routine of washing, mending, scraping and paring with their finances, washing and cooking and trying to stave off the tide of squalor which threatened them; for Mat, he was lost in a routine of working, eating, sleeping. Friday night, which once had been the peak of existence for them, the great pay-day, was now spent, Helen washing the close or doing the napkins, Mat sitting and dozing. The week-ends when they would dress up in their good clothes became fewer and fewer.

  About this time Mat began to think about how he had left the office with its ticking clock and its regular safe routine to work in the slaughter-house. The reason he had done this with so little qualm was, he realised now, that he had lived all his life until the present with some vague expectation. He had as Scott Fitzgerald put it ‘a heightened sensitivity to the promises of life’. Now he viewed this ‘heightened sensitivity’ somewhat sadly as a not very exclusive possession, in a way a mistake, a fault, a chimera, an illusion, a cruel joke. For, of course, what he had expected didn’t come; he had expected all life to retain the quality of youth, to be always latent with growth, movement, interest, and he had expected too some particular event, some achievement which would mark, signify that the promises of life were to be kept. In some way John’s arrival was significant in that it marked the time when Mat’s expectations, the note which he held, had become due. But it was as if life, the payee, had become bankrupt.

  Mat thought of other people he knew, people with talent like Alec and Andrew. Although he had lost touch with them he knew that they’d both be away somewhere using their talents and abilities, leading rich active lives. Of course that was the whole nub of the question, for they had attached their expectation to something concrete, they had studied or gone to university, learned a trade, while he had followed this illusive ‘idea of art’. He thought at times with horror at how stupid he had been, how stupid and yet how hopeful to have maintained such an illusion. He had not expected anything specific from art. He did not think in terms of earning money by his writing so that he could win his liberty in a physical economic way. It was vaguer than that. He expected that he would get directly from art, be able to take into his being, the quality of lightness and freedom that art had, and that the chain of circumstances would never be able to hold a participant in this morally free world; that the interior freedom, the glamour, the enticements of art would in some necessary way always be reflected in his life. Yet now he found himself chained even with a sense of interior constriction.

  Apart from many outward compulsions, physical, financial, he was obsessed by a myriad of moral obligations, obsessions, guilts. One of these frantic scruples, significant of his morally arid outlook, was his being unable to think of writing in a worldly sense, as an activity, a profession with which he would be able to change his life, earn money, live in a bigger house, open up a world of physical freedoms, excitements, stimulations – the kind of life which he and Helen had dreamed of, full of music, eating, conversations, love, creativeness, drinking, companionship, theatre, writing, work. Because the vitality of that life would be contingent upon his success, and Mat dearly dreamed of another thing, something absolute, of a vitality which would come directly from the nature of the art which he would create, of a compensation which would not be strained through the dirty filter of commerce, the world of circumstance. He wanted to discover a source of vitality which would be contingent only upon his existence as a human being and which could be found in the human being even in the dregs of life, when all hope was gone, in the complete absence of anything but the flat tedium of existence in a world thickened by absurdity, and dense with its own exhausting presence.

  But out of this same scrupulosity of feeling, this neurotic finickiness, Mat was able to see the equivocations which his over-developed sense of responsibility put him to. His attitude, he realised, could be seen as a mere evasion of the risk and responsibility of success, but on the other hand there was the temptation of this act of discovery, the challenge of the sheer over-wearing arduousness of the
task which he might set himself which appealed to the ambitiousness in him, the arrogance. ‘Ambition should be in the work’ was the motto he made for himself. He made the decision that he should choose the level at which he should work, and he chose for himself that level which was at the same time the highest and the lowest, at which the most exhilarating flights of creativeness should occur and at which the most exhausting demands should be made on him. However wryly he might think of himself as ‘just an old Scotch Calvinist’, and wonder at times with detached amusement how he, Mat Craig, a labourer in the slaughter-house, would have the effrontery to think of himself as capable of lifting himself by the bootlaces, he still desired, and in the act of desiring believed himself capable of the accomplishment of that kind of task. It was a task which demanded the overweening arrogance and spiritual toughness of those men who are capable of breaking through into major art. Again and again he would think that he mistook his capacity for admiration of those men – Dostoevsky, Eliot, Sartre, Mann, Keller, Goethe, Coleridge, Joyce, Hopkins – that he mistook this admiration and the exhilaration with which he appreciated them for a capacity in him to emulate them. Then he would shrug, grin wryly, and accuse himself of a ridiculous personal arrogance. Yet again, all this arrogance might have its ground in something quite humble. Mat thought of all the things he had tried to write in his magnum opus, ‘Rutherglen’s wee roon red lums reek briskly’, and of the pathetic source of its inspiration, the shuttle-like existence which he had had as a child and which had so broken the continuity of his life that he had begun to search back into the past for traditions, roots, and experience however vicarious of a solid provided life which could be passed on, in which tradition and attachment had a reality symbolised by a smoking chimney. In attempting the task of creating a bridge between his broken world and this old traditional one, part of the pathos lay in the absurd gap between the difficulties of the task and his own inadequate equipment; another part lay in the franticness with which he pursued this commonplace aim – a reeking lum, that it should stand as a token and symbol of his utmost satisfaction.

  This conservatist desire which he felt for a rooted and stable world was at the back of his strong emotional attachment to socialism and his loyalty to his class. However much he might want to go away from the miseries of the world he lived in, and he thought of this perpetually with disgust and hatred, the sight of the little girl in calipers from next door, the real little girl who’d clutch at his jacket as he’d pass up the close, or throw her ball to him in the street, this sight would make him pause and stay.

  He could easily make his personal quietus – get away from it all – the dull parallel lines of the tenements, the dirty dull closes paved with tilted granite flagstones, the worn and dangerous spiral staircase down which the little girl would clump every day in her calipers. Outside, the backyard was an area of soggy mud when the weather was bad, a dust bowl when it was dry. There was a selvedge of coarse grass round the backyard but the middle of it was a trampled black mess littered with broken bottles, rusty tin cans, mouldering refuse and manured with dog’s dirt and cat’s piss.

  The parents in the street let their children out to play, there being nowhere else except the houses themselves, and they are so small and cramped that parents have been known to strangle or half murder their children for the sake of a few moments of peace or privacy. So the children play in these streets so full of lethal possibilities. Through the day while the fathers are out working the mothers are continually running out of the houses with their hearts fluttering in their throats when some child has had a narrow escape, and they belt their children out of relief that they haven’t been mangled under the wheels of a bus, nor become impaled on the spikes which separate the yards, nor fallen from the stair windows or ripped themselves open on broken glass. Except, of course, when these things do happen. And the other lethal possibilities – running noses, coughs, measles, scarlet fever, whooping cough and all the other ailments of congestion.

  From all this Mat had no doubt he could make his quietus. Yet it was what he had been used to most of his life; it was his background, his tradition, what roots he had. He thought of the exuberance and dreams and poetry which the children sustained and he thought that he owed his loyalty and his being to the hope that was in them. To break with them, to go his own way was to break with what he was. And in the same way he thought that to turn his back on the absolute claims of art, however exorbitant they might be, was to play a false role, to try to become something other than what he was and in the end to betray art itself.

  It was as if the acceptance of his own humble role in life, his not deserving anything other than the arid and empty existence to which he was used, this was the very fact that made him take on the task of the creative artist, obliging him to accept the arrogant task of creating art out of deprivation rather than choose the easy way of leaving deprivation behind him. It was this very humility which obliged him to attempt the difficult, almost impossible task of making art out of his Scottishness rather than turn towards a sophisticated, successful but alien tradition.

  However much Mat felt himself to be a welter of oppositions, of tugging scruples, of fastidiousness and doubt, the fact was that this wrestle with himself, as his state of exhaustion became worse, grew sluggish and finally the warring contestants became locked in a strained quivering effort like a tight grip on his brain until he was unable to think about writing and his whole being seemed to become just an unfeeling blank. He felt a desperate anxiety not to write, but to have some feeling out of which writing would become possible; he was left in that singular emotional state when his one emotion was the desire that some time he should feel – feel anything at all, as if his being was without content. He started to read again, but turning more and more to abstract ideas. All art irritated him, exhausted him, at times terrified him. Now he read Kant, Hume, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marcel, Sartre, Jaspers, anything which he could read which did not refer directly to the stuff of existence – conflict, ruck, drama, strife, feeling; he read anything which was systematic and orderly and in which he could lose himself without involvement. He found his mind curiously sharp and he was capable of reading at great speed, and concentrating for long periods on the most abstruse and difficult of ideas. Yet he did not try to evaluate these ideas, or make any decisions between them.

  The whole winter passed. Later on he was to connect this period with the winter landscape. Travelling in the bus in the mornings the streets were filled with only a few figures standing at bus stops, the big arc lamps filling the vacant streets with purposeless light and the traffic lamps flashing their signals to empty crossings. Once a week he’d seen the same woman scrubbing the steps or the granite facings of a bank. All the familiar faces in the bus would be showing sleep, people talked in undertones and grunted at one another with the democratic familiarity of the early morning regulars.

  There was a heavy fall of snow in late January which quickly turned to slush. Then more snow fell through the first week in February and added to the piles of slush heaped at the side of the roads. The slaughter-house was busy as usual in winter so that Mat normally travelled home in the late afternoons. The windows of the buses were always steamed up and Mat would wipe the pane and expose the winter landscape in the street outside. The late afternoon light diffused its way through zinc coloured clouds and spread itself over the wet city streets. Solid objects, people, lamp posts, heaps of hardened sooty snow, buildings, chimneys, all stood silhouetted against the reflected metallic light. The low bagging clouds were like dirty sheets soaking in a tub except where here and there the discrete edge of a cloud would be etched sharply against a fierce argent light. A lurid greyness hung over the whole city, a shiny silvery grey like the colour of a dirty puddle reflecting light. When Mat got home he would curl himself in front of the fire as if to dry out the damp in which he had been working all day.

  One weekend at the beginning of March, Mat and Helen went out for a walk wi
th the pram. A Sunday afternoon in the park. The Sunday newspapers these days had begun to reflect an excitement, a sense of something new in the air, but Mat only half-read them, putting them aside with a feeling of unease, guilt, envy that he was not taking part in the excitement. Yet he felt too that the excitement he experienced on reading of other men’s good work was turning him away from some vague purpose. On this afternoon as he got himself ready to go out walking the papers lay still unread. They walked up past the little recreation park which they had passed when they had first come to this place to see their house, then further on through a fairly well-kept prosperous district full of good tenement houses, then still further on through some streets where the houses were set back from the road and were fronted with gardens full of bare winter trees like twisted broomsticks. Even in the afternoon there were some windows lit up. As they walked they talked and the breath came from their mouths in clouds. In these back streets the pavements were still made of dirt and Mat took the pram so that he could handle it over the cobbled driveways which led into the gardens. The trees hung from the gardens over the pavements and bare looking privet stuck up over the walls.