The Dear Green Place

by Archie Hind

  In those days everything was always in a state of suspense when Doug dressed himself. At any time he was likely to go off into a violent tantrum if the dinner didn’t please him or if there wasn’t a clean hanky. Sometimes, too, when he’d look into the chest of drawers in his own private drawer where he kept his handkerchiefs, his lighter, tie pin, cuff-links, nail clips, cigarette case, he would imagine that something was missing. At the very least he would grumble away all during the meal, ‘You can find nothing in this house.’ Then sometimes Jetta would leave a towel hanging over the back of a chair and Doug would yell, with soap in his eyes, clutching around the hook at the door of the press cupboard, ‘Where’s the bloody towel?’ Doug lived then amidst the squalor, on an island of his own neatness and order, defending himself against Jetta’s disorder and carelessness with bouts of desperate anger.

  Mat sat up late again at night chewing the end of his ball-point pen, dreaming, musing, recalling with his arm curled round the sixpenny jotter, trying to make some pattern out of the conflict of order and mess which had been the background of his young life. He drew out of that fund of common remembrance in the family, from talk, from old photographs, from his own memories.

  First he wrote the story of Doug – as a young man, when he came home from work to the Craig household. Everyone had their own hook in the lobby to hang up their working clothes. Doug wasn’t allowed to sit down in the house with his working clothes on but had to wash and change right away, as soon as he came in. Even washing was routine. First, soaping and scrubbing the fingers and nails to get rid of the coal dust which was liable to work its way into the skin of the palms and round the cuticle of the nails. There was always a piece of pumice stone lying beside the soap dish for this, and a big hard nail brush. Then soaping and scrubbing at the arms and chest with the loofah, then the face, neck and hair. He had to be sure to rinse himself properly with a big sponge so that there wouldn’t be a bit of soap froth to go on the towel. He wouldn’t have to look for the sponge either, even with soap in his eyes. He would only have to reach out and find the sponge lying in its wire rack above the soap dish. Everyone in his family, brothers and sisters, had good complexions, bright and ruddy. They all cleaned the insides of their ears with a corner of the towel and washed their teeth with kitchen salt.

  When Doug came back from the Great War he had his toes crumpled up with frost bite and a slight deafness which came from an infection or an injury to the eardrums. It made him seem morose. With his big chest and the way he’d speak out of his guts when he turned round to one of his family, saying, ‘Eh?’ they’d think he was annoyed or irritated instead of just wanting to know what people said. Often he’d get morose and sulky at other people’s touchiness not knowing about his own apparently offensive mannerism. But when he had met Jetta she spoke in the distinct musical Devlin voice so different from the nasal pulpit whine of the Craig sisters, so that he didn’t have to say ‘Eh?’ to her.

  However much Jetta was drawn to the Craigs by their circumspect respectability she was never able to emulate it. She was a Devlin, from a big family, wild and careless, plebeian, generous and happy. She lived in a house where there was always cooking, cups of tea and spilled milk. Everything prodigal, shampoos and curlers, broken egg shells and porridge sticking to the cooker. At first everything had been fine. Doug had come home from work to hang his dungarees still on his own hook, to have everything ready for him – loofah, sponge, towel. He still had the good underwear, the poplin shirts, the serge suits which he had inherited from his single life. He would sit reading the paper at night, sitting up stiffly in the armchair in his good clothes but without the studs or collar in his shirt and flicking the ash of his cigarette carefully into the fireplace.

  When Jetta became pregnant she grew plump and was often too tired to do the housework properly. She started to go round to the neighbours’ houses, gossiping and drinking cups of tea. Often when Doug came home from work his dinner wouldn’t be quite ready or else Jetta would be out. He hated coming into the empty house: What was worse, Jetta left dishes lying in the sink, maybe lying in the basin with tea leaves blocking up the plug hole. Doug would have to lift the basin on to the cluttered draining board and clear the sink of tea leaves. Sometimes the dishes would be washed but the face towel would be left soggy and Doug would wash himself, then with dripping arms and chest and wet hair, his face screwed up with soap in his eyes, he’d be forced to look for a clean towel in the chest of drawers. He used an open razor and it made him tired shaving at the mirror in front of the dirty sink, so tired that he’d cut himself and get into a bad mood.

  The initial pleasure of building up a home had begun to fade for them. In the first year of their marriage they had gone every third week, when Doug was on day shift, to the London Road and along to the ‘barrows’, where they picked up things. It was in this famous street market that they picked up the last to mend the shoes, screwdrivers, a plane, chisels, pliers for odd jobs round the house, huge earthenware plates that were still in use, the egg cups of turned wood that had all disappeared, the same miniature grandfather clock that had ticked in accompaniment to Mat’s thoughts as he sat up years later reading and writing. They had picked up so many things – with the strange omission of that bread-knife.

  Mat had heard the story of the missing bread-knife perhaps a dozen times in his life, the story which had marked the bitter separation of Doug and Jetta in all the middle years of their marriage. Jetta had told it with a flush on her cheeks, her eyes seemingly focused inside herself as she re-enacted the memory. The thing had wounded her so deeply, had so impressed itself on her memory that she told it as if fresh from the moment. It had happened as the first bloom of their marriage had begun to fade.

  ‘Your father had a bone-handled knife.’ She used to start telling the story briskly and unemotionally until she had laid out the details. ‘He kept it very sharp. You know your father, how fussy he can be. Very sharp. And it was a good wee knife. I could use it for anything – vegetables, meat, chopping. I mean it was a real wee handy kitchen knife. Well, I used it for cutting bread too . . .’ At this point she would look directly at her listener, her voice becoming confident, so that Mat, when he heard her tell the story would remember with her, through her weariness, an old aptitude and energy. ‘I was only a young lassie and there was a lot of things I couldn’t do. But I could cut a loaf.’ Here she would rest her elbows on the table, shaking her head to and fro. ‘I could cut a loaf. As thin as you like. I’ve still got it in the cutlery drawer. Though I don’t use it.’ She was always silent for a minute at this point. Then she’d continue. ‘Well, anyway. Rob and Susan. Your uncle Rob. They came. They used to come quite often then and I’d try to get everything nice. A nice tea and everything. This time I was cutting the bread with this wee knife and Susan says, you know her creeping bloody voice. She says, “Jetta, how long have you been married now, Jetta?” A year, says I, and she says, “And you haven’t got a bread-knife yet?”’

  Jetta could take off the ‘creeping’ sanctimoniousness of the female Craig voice to perfection. ‘As if it was any of her business. Oh, she was aye that perfect. “How long have you been married, Jetta?” The bitch. The vicious bitch. The bloody disturber of the peace. Her man washing every dish for her. Her being aye that unwell. “And you haven’t got a bread-knife yet?” Oh, she knew. She just knew. And him. Doug. A man should support his wife. But naw. Naw. He loses his rag wi’ me. And supports her. But it was her. She knew how to rub him the wrong way. Thinking she was God’s anointed just because she had some fancy china. Just the same. He could have said something to support me. He could have said something like, “Oh, Jetta can dae anything wi’ that handy wee knife.” But naw. Naw. Blood’s thicker than water. He couldnae support me.’

  These memories were something of Mat’s ‘entelechy’; this his material which he teased out and tried to shape under the lamp. Yet it all became strangely resistant to shape. In spite of the idea, the theme of the bonny
wean which had seemed to Mat when it came to him to carry a clear lucid line of narrative, his story became too crowded, too eventful. Too often the pleasure of evoking to himself the childish timelessness, of writing of that world which had been given to him at one time, had tempted him and he had felt a strange reluctance to recount the bitterness and the conflict, to lay out the tensions which were later to tear him in two. Instead he’d write slowly with indulgent pleasure of that single time in his life before these family tensions, history and the world became apparent to him. Then he felt the old trouble again.

  For week after week the mornings were lovely. Soft mild mornings when Mat would get up and in a half doze get ready to catch the first morning tram. The slaughter-house was slack again and Mat would travel home in the early afternoon in the hot tramcar through the busy Glasgow streets to the little back street which was full of dust and quivering with light from rows of window-panes. In the tiny kitchen Helen would open up the windows as far as they’d go but the air in the backyard would be lifeless, without a stir, and in the kitchen it would always be too hot. Young John was now big enough to sit in the little go-car and they’d dress him up and go out into the streets, or to the park and sit, letting the baby crawl in the grass. Sometimes Mat would fall asleep in the sunlight and wake up feeling as if he’d only just come into the world. They’d go home reluctantly to the tiny rooms.

  In the evenings, after John had been bathed and put to bed, often long after Helen had gone to bed and fallen asleep, Mat would sit up. Often he’d smoke cigarette after cigarette then drink cold tea to ease the burning in his throat and tongue. And often his wilful attempt to relax would break down and he’d find himself alternately worrying and flogging at his theme or drifting off into a loose kind of thinking. He’d find himself sitting there without a drop of juice in him, drained, desiccated of feeling. He would sit there squeezing at himself, wringing his imagination to gather some drop when he would suddenly become aware in himself of something, first a generalised hunger which would later specify itself into a hot lust for sex, money, power, freedom, space. A ravenous appetite for experience, feeling, irresponsibility, refreshment, and he would lose himself in dreams of an unrestricted life of ease and enjoyment and leisure and free choice, of meals and women and drink and music and money. But above all he’d dream of two things – sex and money. Of sex and money unrelated to any responsibility of love or earning. Then he’d look round at the tiny cramped room, he’d listen to the breathing of Helen and the baby, he’d look at the sixpenny jotter held within the circle of his left arm and he’d feel arise in him the nausea, the revulsion, the disgust, the flatness, the staleness of the world and he’d gather the papers together, careless of any order, and throw them into the cardboard box. Afterwards, lying in bed smoking with his tongue still burning, he’d find these generalised lusts still raging in him and he’d fall off to sleep exhausted with wild coloured fancies of lust and violence, of power and self-destruction racketing in his head.

  He had thought once that he should be able to tackle the job of writing out of nothing but his own moral energy when all other sources had dried up, but now he was becoming aware of the creative process in himself. It was a thing that would only respond to gentling. Somehow, his body, his appetites, his simple worldly needs were pushing themselves between him and the paper. His imagination refused to respond to flogging. He felt he would have to do something to make himself relax. Instead of making that constant wilful effort he would have to do something to make his outward life suitable for writing. It was Helen who proposed the answer.

  It was on a Sunday morning that she made the suggestion. They had got up early before the day got hot, so as to enjoy the cool of the morning. After a good breakfast Mat had been sitting smoking and thinking of another Sunday morning many years ago. Sitting happy and relaxed with the first cigarette of the day, replete with food and sipping hot black coffee, he realised that he was working out in his head a passage of his new novel and he felt the delicious feeling of satisfaction, of having a taste for work. As he idly picked up a pen and got his bits and pieces together and opened up a new sixpenny jotter he felt this robust appetite for working without any interfering desires or hungers, with no other emptiness to fill. It was like a mental tumescence and his only desire was the act of writing. Nor when he had finished the act, when he had written out the passage in his head, did he feel any detumescent sadness, only a sense of relaxation and refreshment. It was the Sunday morning feeling, and when Mat had finished writing he sat back with the bits and pieces in front of him and talked to Helen. He was thinking about the word the poet had used – complacencies.

  ‘If only every morning was a Sunday morning. If it was, I’d finish this book in no time.’

  The morning was the best time for working. Somehow at night, writing was either an indulgence or a task, but in the mornings Mat felt moved by a lucid shaping mood. His theme came uppermost in his mind, so that his material was distanced, for his conception of the theme was bound up with his own separation of himself as he wrote and the self which he remembered. At night this separation he found impossible through the indulgent uxoriousness of his own self-regard.

  But Helen proposed the idea of stopping work altogether and concentrating entirely on finishing his new novel. They had the money from his stories, he could draw his holiday pay and a week’s lying time when he stopped work. In the meantime he could take up what material he had for more stories of the same kind, have them typed out and sent away. They would maybe get some money for that. Work in the slaughter-house was slack anyway. They worked it out – one week’s wages, one week’s lying time, a fortnight’s holiday pay – that was enough money to last for a month. Then there was the money from the two stories – thirty pounds – which would be enough for another month. They had some other money put by which would extend the two months into three. If in the meantime, say for the next four weeks, they were to put as much past as possible they could extend the time Mat would have to three months at the least. He had now got well into the novel. Surely in three months’ full time work at it he could finish it, or at least get so far that the task of completion would be less heavy even if he had to start work again. The only thing which made Mat unwilling to agree to the idea right away was that it was so tempting. In a kind of euphoria he agreed. They decided to do it.

  At first everything was all right. Every morning Mat got up eagerly. He adopted a kind of routine, going round in the morning to the dairy to buy the rolls and milk, then after breakfast bringing out his bits and pieces from the cardboard box and starting work over the first sweet cigarette of the day. Mat had finished the job in his slaughter-house on a Friday and both he and Helen spent the week-end with a kind of holiday feeling, full of a feeling of safety which the money gave them – the three months or more which they had calculated the money to last seemed to stretch out before them as if it had no end. The sun still shone from early morning till late at night, without the obscurity of a single cloud. On the Saturday they wandered about shopping, Mat pushing the pram and standing waiting on Helen outside the grocery stores and fruit shops while she went inside and did the shopping. They bought supplies of black coffee and cigarettes and paper and cheap ball-point pens, with different coloured inks, and rye bread in the Jewish shops and apfelstrudel. On the Sunday they stayed all day in the park just lying on the grass reading, eating lettuce sandwiches or holding wee John by his reins as he took his first tottering steps on his tiny feet on the grass.

  On the Monday morning as Mat had gone round to the dairy for the rolls and milk it had rained. It was the first rain for weeks, large heavy drops in a quick shower which seemed to cool the air with its own gentle draught in falling. The shower hardly wet the streets but left dark spots on the summer dust of the pavements. In the time it took Mat to go into the dairy, buy his milk and rolls and come out, the sun was shining brightly again, but the shower gave Mat that same refreshed feeling we get at the first definite si
gn of seasonal change. While sitting at breakfast Mat felt confident. It was his first day ever which he would spend writing without thought of any omission or compulsion or necessity. He was free and entitled to write fluently and without strain while Helen did her chores about him and John chortled and cried and ate and slept. He worked the whole day until teatime, concentrating not through any wilful effort but through a simple interest in what he was doing.

  It was not every day that he was able to write so well. He would have black spots as well. But they were fruitful in drawing his attention to his theme. Often as the weeks went by he would find himself pausing and thinking about the nature of his theme as it had first come to him and he would try to render down in his mind a clear myth out of the opaque mass of experience which he was trying to recall.

  When George Duncan had once suggested themes which Mat ought to have used from contemporary life it had made Mat think that his own imaginative conception of a theme was solid. When he had first felt the thrill of recognition, that time when his aunt had spoken to Jetta saying ‘Your Mat was aye the bonniest wean’, Mat had seen the novel which he was to write, for a flash, as a complete whole, utterly distinct and almost written. It had come to him completely shaped, with a definite line of events, associations, feelings, meanings which had simply to be written along. But in the process of composing it, working it out, when he first began his teasing at it, the idea had become a little blurred, a little vague; and now as he worked, still with confidence, he found himself wandering a little from that clear line, losing track, finding at one time that the line had become unclear, at another that the material he was using became refractory or overweight. Eventually he found it necessary to specify to himself what the meaning of his myth was. At first he was tempted into working out the specifications of his theme in a discursive form, but he had an intuitive reluctance to take this course. In the end he thought that there was something glimmering vaguely, an elusive significance, he didn’t know quite what, which caused him to feel this irritating nag at the back of his mind. But the significance which he wanted to catch would only be weakened by being open or specific. Mat thought that he would let the thing emerge. If he worked at the flesh of his story eventually there would be implicit in it this elusive idea. He had an almost self-approving sense of his own patience, his own understanding of the creative process in leaving his idea on the edge of formulation. To relax, to refuse to strain, to balance, to let the thing come.