Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered!
Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.
At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.
We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.
About Bello:
www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello
About the author:
www.panmacmillan.com/author/gilliantindall
Contents
Gillian Tindall
After
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part Six
Note by Lewis Greenfield
Gillian Tindall
Give Them All My Love
Gillian Tindall
Gillian Tindall began her career as a prize-winning novelist. She has continued to publish fiction but has also staked out an impressive territory in idiosyncratic non-fiction that is brilliantly evocative of place.
Her The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village which first appeared thirty years ago, has rarely been out of print; nor has Celestine: Voices from a French Village, published in the mid 1990s and translated into several languages, for which she was decorated by the French government.
Well known for the quality of her writing and the meticulous nature of her research, Gillian is a master of miniaturist history. She lives with her husband in London.
After
So I lie here alone. At last.
But not lonely. Even without the face appearing at irregular intervals at the small grille in the door, I feel that I am accompanied, looked after. People who are stronger than I (though I never really believed in them till now) are taking charge of me, perhaps for ever. In my present state I am almost glad of that. It is like being a boy again. Freedom, of a sort.
No, I know it is not really like that. And tomorrow, perhaps, I shall feel differently. Tomorrow, perhaps, I shall feel again. And hate again. And fear again. But here, now, as I lie on this thin mattress, on this flat shelf, seeing only the yellowish walls near at hand, the white bulb high up out of reach in its wire-mesh cage, I do not believe, much, in tomorrow. It is as if, in the early morning brightness of today, I disposed of tomorrow. All the tomorrows. What a deliverance.
It is as if I myself had died. Or, no – for my body is still docilely functioning, heart beating, lungs inflating; I sweated a lot, first thing, in spite of the frost, and now I feel cooler, almost cold; I emptied my bladder a little while ago in the dank, disinfectant-smelling recess provided, I even ate some of the thick soup and bread I was given at the end of the day – no, it is, rather, as if my death had not yet happened but were a foregone conclusion, something so certain that I exist in a tranquil place beyond hope, the calm man under sentence of certain execution.
With part of my mind I know that this is a day-dream – another one. It is the night-before-the-end fantasy, an old friend familiar from adolescence. When I was young and full of hope, I nevertheless used to find it pleasant at times to picture how valiantly I would face a firing squad. If the war would last till I was eighteen, and by some fluke my schoolboy French became so good that I would be picked by the Intelligence service for a dangerous and secret mission in occupied Europe …
The same dream was surely lodged in the mind of the boy that Jacquou knew, the boy that Jacquou … On his unremarkable face I saw, and see in my mind now, the very expression I would wish to have worn at his age: noble, courageous, unregenerate. The fact that he was not actually a hero dying a hero’s death no longer seems of any significance. He thought he was.
It occurs to me only now, when I am alone at last, that my schoolboy fantasy of the dangerous, secret mission did not fade, as I had assumed, into adult common sense, but has remained concealed with me all the years in between. Why else do I now feel so calm, so much myself, in a word so happy? I did what I had to do, having arrived at the point at which I seemed to have no choice. A moral imperative, of a kind. But perhaps I have achieved more even than I thought I was achieving: the realization of a lifelong dream.
The further dream, of the execution squad, will not be achieved. I know that really. It is forty years since the war, and neither in France nor in England do men any longer kill other men in the name of the Law. No, I shall not enact that ultimate teenage fantasy, in either its British or its French version. I think I rather prefer the latter, perhaps because of the general prejudice in favour of France that has run through my life – or perhaps, more simply, because the element of uncertainty in it seems to fit best with my present situation. In Britain, the practice used to be to tell the condemned man his date of death well in advance, so that he could count off the days on a calendar and have the satisfaction of knowing that he was pitied and admired by his warders as The Day, the only day that would ever count, the one he would barely see, came steadily nearer. A crowd would even assemble on The Day before the prison gate: his anticipation was shared, social. In France, however, the tradition was to spare the prisoner both conceit and horror by keeping him in decent ignorance – as all other men and women are ignorant – of the exact date of his death. For the condemned French murderer every night on which he lay down to sleep on his narrow shelf might be his last. He never knew, till it happened, on which morning he would be called out of sleep in the dark by a hand on his shoulder, other human presences abruptly in his cell: ‘Maintenant, X, il faut que tu aies du courage –’
I imagine that the continual possibility of such a waking, postponed every morning upon natural waking but renewed every night as he closed his eyes, and every night statistically a little more likely, made the condemned man dream obsessionally that that very thing was occurring. So that when the morning came when at last it really did happen, he, mazed from sleep and from echoing tunnels of dreams, was no longer quite certain any more if he was waking or sleeping, as he was hurried through the last few yards of his life, out into the prison compound before dawn.
To know. To understand with absolute certainty that a particular event is going to occur. To feel, whether or not you do it or have it done to you, that it will take place. And yet to have taken the final steps towards it so often both in clear fantasy and in confused dream that, when at last it happens – you are not even totally sure that it has happened after all.
Has it happened? Did I do it?
I lie here and ask myself. And tell myself that the very fact that I lie here … ? But I ask the question, all the same.
When I was, I suppose, in my early forties, the sort of age at which a man is conscious for the first time of not being ‘young’ any more, I began to have a dream which has re-occurred at intervals over the years since. In essence, it is this: I am no longer young, various disasters have happened, and I look back with yearning nostalgia and regret to the unattainable past. Then the dream appears to break up; I ‘wake’ and realize with relief and gratitude that it has been ‘only a dream’: I am still a young man, full of vigour, with all my life before me.
It is then that I wake up in reality.
It is a bitter dream. I have not, I think, had it for several years now, perhaps because in the recent time my dreaming self has not been so easily fooled and has instead been busy with other obsessional projects. But it does just occur to me now to wonder if I might be stuck in some newer version of this same dream?
I don’t think so. Really, not. Yes, I know that, in spite of the way I feel now, tomorrow
will still come. And then, or the next day, or next week, there will be another cell, other corridors: other faces outside this grille or a similar one, other and even known strangers standing in the heavy, swung-open door, hesitant, concerned or disapproving greeting on their faces. What, you here, Tom? You, Mr Ferrier? You? But none of that matters. Just so long as I do not wake up into yesterday.
Meanwhile I lie here, my arms behind my head, conscious of the shelf against my back, my head at rest. I’ve gone, it’s over: what a good feeling. A great weight lifted. Give them all my love. For years, constricted with sorrow, I could not say that, could hardly feel it. But now that my mission has been accomplished, my responsibility discharged, I am freed. Give my love to all of them, alive and dead. And all of my love. That’s so easily said, now.
Part One
I remember a time, perhaps five years after it happened. Long enough to have got over it. In any sense in which you can get over it.
I was sitting in Court. I should explain that this does not just describe my physical situation but an occupation, a status if you like. I am a magistrate, a Justice of the Peace, and have been for many years. I was first appointed when I was a headmaster, the kind of person who traditionally sits on the Bench, and I went on doing it, as and when time permitted, after I became an HMI.
Occasionally people have asked me ‘why’ I do it. Sometimes there is an edge of aggression in their voices, a hint of ‘judge not that ye be not judged’ (not that people like that know the Bible these days, but the dissenting impulse remains). More often, the question seems to be humble, faintly admiring, as if the questioner is ready to hear that I have some overall moral mission to Society.
Usually I respond to either approach by saying that if the Bench were to be occupied only by people utterly convinced of their own rightness, then the quality of justice would be pretty odd. Having thus avoided answering and created a general impression of down-to-earth responsibility, I can usually move on to another subject. What I don’t say – what in fact I did not notice myself till I had been a JP for a number of years – is that there is a wonderful irresponsibility in the administration of the Law. A procession of people – or rather, a permutation of about a dozen prototypes – appears in sequence in the dock. Across the space between, you gaze at this successive variation on the usual man or woman in the usual place, take some sort of decision, often a partial or temporizing one, and away the glum face goes, to be replaced by another, and then another, till the day draws to its close, and you have a vague, comfortable sense of having once more imposed some order on life or at least done what you were asked to do. In a busy London Court you will rarely see any of these particular defendants again: more crucially, it will not be your job to lock them up or to pursue them for the fine or bully and wheedle them into keeping Probation Orders. The long-term responsibilities of real life will not be yours as you cheerfully clatter down the stairs to the retiring room. For judges, indeed, there is rarely tomorrow.
Which is just as well. For I have come to see that, for most of the persistent offenders who make up the staple of the Courts’ work, there is simply no appropriate, fair or useful means of disposal. Fines are hardly significant to those congenitally on the dole. As a last resort you can always send them to prison, but if a recent prison sentence has obviously had no redeeming or intimidating effect it is hard to justify another except as retribution, and that is a taboo word in polite Court circles. A pity, I have come to think. We might at least discuss the idea openly.
The defendant I am recalling now was hardly distinctive. There are any number of him. And quite a few of her. This one was called Amanda, which is why her name on the charge sheet evoked a fleeting echo of something very far in the past, an echo that then became a chain of memory. And then far more.
She was a persistent shop-lifter, which is the only crime for which women regularly appear, but I think there were other charges on her record too, including some sort of assault and also a history of drugs. There was, as far as I remember, the usual saga of ineffective or broken Probation Orders; and there was also a suspended sentence knocking around. A Bench on another day had found her guilty of the latest offences of theft and had managed, in the traditional way, to put off deciding what was to be done this time by ordering up-to-date Social Enquiry reports. We happened to be the Bench on which those reports landed, as in Pass the Parcel, and we would now have to be seen to act on them.
Amanda was twenty-one. (I remember this with precision, because her name, combined with another circumstance, made me pause a moment to work something out.) The reports, when we settled down in the Court’s uneasy quiet to read them, sketched a background that was not entirely typical of such cases. Many Amandas (who are not, by the way, usually called Amanda) have reports which tell a long tale of ineffective families, of spells in and out of care, of criminal and drunken fathers or stepfathers, of hints of incest or battery, thereby opening at least a decent loophole for the merciful belief that they are as much victims as offenders. But this Amanda came from a middle-class home. Not wealthy, it would seem (so no opening here for those other folk-figures dear to social workers, the worldly and heartless parents with more money than time for the children). She came from what sounded like a pleasant suburban environment. Father a civil servant. Mother a part-time teacher. One elder sister. Stealing from a grandmother at twelve. A history of school truancy. Left at sixteen halfway through the O-level year. And then the progression of offences, the ‘bad company’, the flight from home, the ‘efforts to help her’. ‘Her mother feels …’, ‘her father is very concerned that …’ Her Psychiatric Social Worker. Her Probation Officer. The doctor in charge at the Drugs Dependency Unit. The full supporting cast.
All right, after all my years in schools, I know that such a simple description of an apparently satisfactory home background may conceal depths of family neurosis and collusion. But the fact is that even this particular Probation Officer (whose name I knew and whose over-optimistic reporting style I recognized) had not been able to point to anything in the family environment that might be the ‘key’ to her client’s persistent criminality. Oh, there was one thing there, but the PO did not make anything of it. Brushed it aside at the beginning, indeed, and did not refer to it again, as if it had no possible relevance to the present. Amanda was not her parents’ born child, but was adopted by them soon after she was born.
This was the point that, because of the coincidence of name, made me pause, remember something that had, till then, dropped clear out of my mind. I did a small sum. But of course at any time of life one tends to telescope the years: this Amanda was far too young, about ten years too young, to be the baby whom I had once, briefly, with a young man’s awkwardness, held in my arms. She had no name then, that baby, but she was dispatched to another country, to an unknown but reportedly eager adoptive family, and the one thing I did ever hear of her was that they had called her Amanda. ‘Deserving of love’. Clearly, a most suitable family.
So, as I sat in Court waiting in assumed impassivity for my two colleagues to finish reading their copies of the report, my mind went back to that other Amanda, so long obliterated from memory, and I hoped that the character traits she had inherited from her own natural parents had equipped her for a better life than this Amanda was leading. Probation Officers and their kind barely seem to have heard of inherited characteristics. A rather sizeable blind spot, in my view, but perhaps, given the discouraging nature of their calling, they cannot allow themselves to believe in anything further that smacks of fate and hopelessness.
I looked across at this Amanda, sitting sullenly in the place where she had so often been before. All Courts are the same Court, and crime a narrow life, on the whole. Pale-skinned, dark-haired, a little plump and pasty. Tight jeans, boots, a bright jacket, earrings, bitten nails. Twenty-one. Much the age that the mother of that other baby Amanda had been when I knew her, and could from her looks have been her sister. Anyone’s sister, anyone’s
daughter. Twenty-one. Like mine. But mine would have been older now.
I had been getting on better, I had thought, the last year or two. Whatever ‘better’ means. But at that moment, waiting in the enclosed Court, with a winter afternoon darkening across the ancient glass in the roof, my colleagues rustling paper and an usher coughing in a suppressed way, the old bitterness returned to me in a secret, acrid rush, like an unpleasant taste in the mouth: the unassimilable core of feeling, the weight within – Why does this one live, stealing and lying, taking drugs, turning her back on everyone who tries to help her, on care and love and life itself, while mine, who loved life so, lies dead? Dead today, tomorrow and for ever and ever, just as dead as she was on that first day, the first day of the rest of my life.
The papers were laid down. The young legal-aid lawyer rose to speak, as he was bound to, exhaustion lying like a fine skin over his boy’s face. ‘You may well feel … Cannot pretend … far be it from me … Would however make the point … relatively small amount … hardly the most dangerous criminal … given her age … her age … Wishes to make a fresh start … Her Probation Officer … help … problems … Hospital unit ready to accept her … problems … needs … problems … can only be exacerbated by a custodial sentence … Would ask you to consider one final chance … will not take up any more of your time … A new life?’
As if he had disconcerted even himself by this last suggestion, he sat down abruptly. ‘The Bench will retire,’ I said. We bundled out, in the usual genteel muddle of papers, ‘after you’ gestures and – Mrs Levy – tripping high heels. I suppose the public in the Court envisage us retiring to leather chairs in the proper secluded chamber, but actually at that Court we usually sit on the stairs, because it is more convenient and saves time.
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