Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  “It may be different,” Gog says. “This time.”

  “Take your fascinating Mr. Bevan, the white hope of the social revolution. Your Nye, I bet you, will end with a pig farm and a Rolls Royce. Ebbw Vale, he’ll shake the coal-dust off his feet all right. Even though the present government wasn’t born to rule and can’t rule properly, it’ll pick up a few of the tricks quick enough. Governments are like monkeys, they all look alike and they do just what the others have always done.”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” Gog admits. “Perhaps Magog has always ruled and always in the same old way. Till now. But he’s been toppled for the first time. There’s never been a Labour majority like that. At least, give them a chance.”

  “They don’t intend to give me one,” Miniver says, “so why shouldn’t I return the compliment? One thing, though, even if they shift me out of my country house, they won’t shift me out of here. Here I’ll stick, teaching their children that the old ways are best. Which they obviously are. So perhaps the new genera­tion, my dear Gog, will not follow you. After every revolution there’s a reaction. And, anyway, you’re pretty inconsistent your­self. You’ve always wanted to preserve every stick and stone from the past. You hate change in old things. You loathe new buildings. You’re the true reactionary, far more than me. The revolution you want is to turn the whole clock back to the golden age when all men were free and equal. Which was never. And never will be.”

  “If it never was,” Gog says, “you can’t say it never will be.”

  “Visionary,” Miniver says. “Incurable.” He goes over to a filing cabinet, opens a drawer, looks through the files, and comes out with four sheets of typed paper clipped together. “You asked me to comment on this just before you left your job. I forgot to return it. I’ve kept it for you over the years, though it’s pretty average trash and I’ve smothered it with red ink. Still, if you haven’t changed, perhaps you’ll like all that sheer propaganda and romance you used to come out with, pretending it was history.” He hands the sheets over to Gog and goes over to the door. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to visit the bursar briefly. All these damned forms. You’ll have time to peruse your past productions. Then you’ll see that your present folly has deep roots.”

  Miniver goes out of the door, closing it gently behind him, while Gog reads the papers in his hand.

  THE CONCENTRATION OF POWERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES

  by Dr. G. Griffin

  Perhaps the concentration of powers in one hand has never been better illustrated than by the case of Henry Despenser, Bishop of Norwich, during the Peasants’ Revolt. The rising was, naturally, justified, even if its success was unlikely. The feudal system pressed intolerably on the rights of Englishmen and their liberty; the position of the serfs after the Black Death was an insult to humanity.

  (Here Miniver has added in red ink: NONSENSE – LIBERTY IS FREEDOM TO STAY IN ONE’S PROPER PLACE, WHERE MOST OF HUMANITY SHOULD STAY.) The English rural labourer – and that was the mass of the English people – lived in poverty, insecurity and degradation. In the late fourteenth century, rebellion was his only way out.

  (Miniver here added – WHAT ABOUT PRAYER? SUICIDE?)

  Near Norwich, Geoffrey Lidster was the leader of the peasants. When John Ball rang the bell of the revolt, Lidster raised forces in East Anglia. Among them was his lieutenant, a peasant named Griffin, who may be some ancestor of mine.

  (LIKE ADAM IS OF MINE! WHAT’S YOUR SOURCE ON GRIFFIN? HE’S NOT MENTIONED IN THE USUAL DOCUMENTS ON THE PERIOD.)

  Lidster took Norwich and had the Mayor killed, the local symbol of authority, since the Bishop, Henry Despenser, had fled to raise forces for the King. Despenser gathered together eight horsemen and a company of archers. These were sufficient to rout a group of rebels near Newmarket and to set up their leaders’ heads on spears. The country gentry now plucked up courage and rallied round Despenser, who marched on Lidster and his men. Lidster retired with his rebels to North Walsham. There, Despenser charged and routed the rebels, who could hardly stand up to armoured knights with mere scythes. Lidster and Griffin were captured.

  The first strange role of Despenser, Bishop of Norwich, was as a military officer. Actually, he had been given the bishopric as a cheap method of paying him off for armed services rendered to the Papacy in the Italian Wars of the time. This is not to say that Despenser was ungodly. Between slaughtering peasants, he per­formed daily the religious rites in the cathedral. The gauntlet was, and is, the pillar of the Church.

  (Miniver’s comment: AND REBELLION WAS, AND IS, THE DRY ROT IN THE ALTAR.)

  The second role of Despenser was as a judge in the King’s Court. Despenser took off his armour, put on a wig, and con­demned Lidster and Griffin to death for taking arms against the King’s Peace. As traitors, they were ordered to be drawn, hanged, and quartered. I should point out here that a skilful executioner could draw out a man’s guts and show the man his own tripes while he was still alive, could cut him down choking from the noose in the middle of his dance on air, and could thus sever the limbs from a man who was still breathing.

  (SHEER EMOTIVE PROPAGANDA! SO, PUNISHMENT WAS BARBARIC AT THE TIME. BUT WHO WERE THE GREATER BARBARIANS GENERALLY, THE PEASANTS OR THE KING’S MEN?)

  The third role of Despenser was as the Bishop of Norwich. He took Lidster and Griffin in chains to the church, confessed them, and gave them absolution. One record here states that, while Lidster accepted absolution, Griffin spat into the Bishop’s face, thus incurring the punishment reserved for heretics, to be burned alive. The same record states that Griffin was quoted as saying, “Whatever happens to my soul, even if it may rot in Hell, it will surely meet thine there, Master Despenser, yet thou canst but kill my body once.”

  (SOURCE!! WHO IS THIS GRIFFIN? YOUR INVENTION?)

  Thus Despenser had played the role of military officer, of judge, and of priest. Now he had a fourth role to play in the affair, that of a humble Christian man. Mercy is, of course, the prerogative of Majesty. Only power can afford to forgive. The people, normally powerless, cannot in their brief moments of power afford to spare, which is why they are often cruel during rebellions.

  (SPECIOUS AND FALSE REASONING. THE BETTER MAN ALWAYS SHOWS MORE COMPASSION THAN THE WORSE, BY NATURE AND TRAINING.)

  When Lidster and Griffin were being dragged behind the cart’s tail to the place of execution, Despenser walked the whole way over the rough road at the back of the cart, holding up the head of Lidster to prevent it from being bruised and broken against the tailboard as it jolted up and down on the potholes. Griffin, it is said, refused Despenser’s helping hand. “Master Despenser,” he declared, “when thou livest with both thine hands in the wallets of the poor, how shall I accept one finger of thy charity?”

  Despenser probably would have liked to have filled the role of executioner as well:

  (UNFOUNDED ASSERTION – PROFOUNDLY UNHISTORICAL!)

  but as the calling was shameful, he contented himself with watch­ing the executions, until Lidster’s quarters were stuck on the spikes of the gates of Norwich, and Griffin’s ashes had been collected and scattered on the dungheap. Griffin’s last words seem to have been a rhyming addition to the famous lines of the Peasants’ Revolt:

  When Adam delved and Eve span.

  Who was then the gentleman?

  Griffin’s reputed gloss ran as follows:

  When Gog and Magog brothers were,

  They lived in peace and not at war.

  Now Gog doth toil and Magog rule,

  Who is the knave and who the fool?

  (SHEER INVENTION ON YOUR PART. GIVE SOURCE, FOR GOD’S SAKE!!!)

  The Middle Ages saw the great peasant revolts, not only because the life of the peasant was hard, but also because the various powers of government were all concentrated in the person of one local magnate. I have shown how Henry Despenser repre­sented military might, the King’s Justice, priestly pardon direct from the Pope, and the human mercy of the great; but he also had the
local money power through feudal inheritance and church dues; and he even had sexual authority, through sitting in judgement on cases of adultery, not to mention his feudal right of the jus primae noctis.

  (REALLY! DO YOU HONESTLY THINK THAT A BISHOP INSISTED ON PERSONALLY DEFLOWERING LOCAL VIRGINS ON THEIR MARRIAGE NIGHT? A GROSS OBSESSION, GOG! OR MORE LIKELY, AN OBSESSION WITH GROSSNESS!!!)

  Each power that is now scattered in the many branches of government, the Houses of Parliament, the Courts, the police, the army, the Church, the local councils, the income tax authori­ties, etcetera, ad nauseam, bureaucracy without end, all these powers Despenser exercised spasmodically in his own person.

  Thus Despenser incarnated for the people of Norwich that mythical figure of supreme authority, whom I will refer to as Magog in my projected work, after the original giant of Albion described by Geoffrey of Monmouth. The serfs could certainly be called one “class” in the strict Marxist sense at this period, bound as they were to the land by a similar social system of oppression; therefore, they also can be referred to generically as Gog, Magog’s original brother and final foe.

  (A POET MIGHT REFER TO THE SERFS AS GOG: BUT A HISTORIAN CERTAINLY SHOULD NOT!)

  Thus, to me, the struggle of Lidster and Griffin and the pea­sants against Henry Despenser, the Bishop of Norwich, is once again the reworking of the old struggle of Gog against Magog within the framework of the Peasants’ Revolt. And with this struggle of the people against the powerful, of the country­side against the city, the history of England began and is ending with the total triumph of London.

  (Miniver’s final comment reads: I DISAGREE PROFOUNDLY. ALL PEOPLE HAVE ALWAYS HAD A GOVERNMENT AND ALWAYS WILL. GOVERNMENTS ARE MADE FOR PEOPLE. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO THINK OF A PEOPLE WITHOUT A GOVERNMENT. THE GOVERNMENT IS NOT YOUR ENEMY, BUT YOUR NECESSARY FATHER, AND YOU OUGHT NOT TO BE TRYING TO WRITE HISTORY, BUT POETRY OR FICTION, AND I WOULD HARDLY RECOMMEND THAT! MINIVER.)

  When Gog has finished reading the piece he wrote before the war, he understands many of the obsessions and visions which have been plaguing him on the road from Edinburgh. A breeze blows through the open window of the room, as if to promise coolness in future for his hot head. A cupboard door, left half ajar, begins to bang intermittently. Gog rises to close the door. As he opens it before slamming it shut, he notices something red hanging on a hook inside the cupboard. He takes it out into the light. He finds that he is holding Cluckitt’s red tam o’shanter, still moist from the ducking in Hermitage Water, with the brass capbadge green from decay.

  Miniver comes into the room again and immediately begins to back out, as he sees Gog advancing towards him with the red tam o’shanter held out in a great fist.

  “Liar,” Gog shouts. “Here’s evidence. Cluckitt’s red cap. So you say you didn’t try to have me drowned at Hermitage under orders from Maire? Liar!”

  “It’s my gardening hat,” Miniver alias Cluckitt protests.

  “Liar,” Gog shouts and rushes at Miniver, who runs into the corridor, slamming the door in Gog’s face. By the time that Gog has wrenched the door open, Miniver is safely in the shadows of a pair of large beadles, dressed in faded uniforms of red and gold. He is pointing to Gog in the doorway of his room, then pointing at his own head and shaking it sadly. As the beadles begin to advance on Gog, he turns and lumbers off down the stairs into the quadrangle and out through the stone gateway of the university, which was once a fortress. He slows down to catch his breath, glancing over his shoulder all the while. But there is no one pursuing him.

  So Gog walks on the bridge over the Wear and turns south through the streets of Durham, to leave the hard smack of tarmac on the soles of his boots and to feel again the suck and spring of the moors. He still holds in his hand the red tam o’shanter and he puzzles over it as he leaves the suburbs of Durham behind him. The bonnet is evidence, all right. But evidence of what? A lying Miniver? Or merely that Miniver had impersonated Cluckitt before the war and has kept a gardening hat for several years?

  XV

  Gog would have had a long walk to reach the Yorkshire moors; but he does not have to trudge. To his surprise, the large black car draws up beside him on the outskirts of Durham with­out trying to run him down. The back door opens and Maire coos in her deepest voice, “Gog darling, as we’re both heading south, do let me give you a lift, at least part of the way.”

  Gog suspects a trap, but he is intrigued by the change of approach. So he answers, “As far as the moors, I’d be delighted.” And he climbs into the car, which indeed starts towards the south.

  Maire is wearing a black turban over her hair with a large white pearl pin stuck through its folds. The effect of the turban is to make her face from the front seem like that of an oriental despot of some beauty and indeterminate sex. The darkness of her shadowed blue eyes above the pallor of her full cheeks makes her seem somewhat Balkan, Slavic with a dash of Mongol from the time of Genghis the great Khan; her hawk nose is foreshortened to a snub one. Her suit is square-cut at the shoulder. Pearl buttons gleam on a check as bold as a chess­board. The suit actually has a skirt, a concession to femininity which surprises Gog; but below the skirt, he sees that Maire is wearing black stockings and high white lace-up boots, more suitable for skating than walking.

  “I owe you an apology, Gog,” Maire says. “I’ve been a bit cruel to you. So has Jules.” She looks forward through the glass partition between her and the cropped nape of the chauffeur. “I should have told you who I was right at the beginning. Your wife, Gog. Your own Maire.”

  She leans towards Gog, puts a palm on each of his cheeks as if to pat butter into place, and gives him a full kiss, passion­less and expert, on the mouth. Then she drops her hands and lolls back in her seat.

  “But it was such fun, such a marvellous game, to see how much I could hint at without actually telling you. It really was remarkable. You didn’t even recognize your own wife. I couldn’t believe it, but there it was. They’d told me it might be like that at the hospital. So I decided to give you some home shock treatment, to see if I could jolt you back to your senses. But it didn’t work. I’m so glad you’re remembering things now.”

  “How many times have you seen me since Edinburgh?” Gog says, looking at Maire’s bland face intently.

  “Once,” Maire says. “You know that. In those hills just after Edinburgh. We had a talk and I slammed the door on your hand. I admit you had irritated me. But also I thought it might make you better. Jules and I have been looking for you ever since. We’ve been up and down every track in the North of England. We’ve spent the past two days in Durham, waiting for you to turn up. We thought you might be coming through here, back to where you were working when we met. The murderer returning to the scene of the crime.”

  “Talking of that,” Gog says, “you haven’t been trying to kill me lately, I suppose?”

  “I?” Maire says, with genuine astonishment in her voice. “Are you crazy?”

  “Yes,” Gog says, “I am a little crazy. Have you got a cat?”

  “Not with me. I left Mishkin at home. I’m glad you remember him. He’ll purr for pleasure.”

  “Is he black and hairy like a soft porcupine?”

  “There, you do remember. That’s what Miniver told me, when we visited him in desperation and he told us we’d just missed you at the university. So we followed you out of Durham, Jules and I. And here we are. Alone at last, if you don’t count Jules. And chauffeurs aren’t really human, are they?”

  The car passes on like a great otter in the stream that is the road, cleaving its way forward without a jolt, seemingly buoyed up by water rather than springs and tyres.

  “I’ve been dreaming you were trying to kill me, Maire. You and Jules. I suppose my memories of you are all mixed up with the war and old films.”

  “I’ve seen so many films on the war,” Maire says, “I can never remember what I actually did or what Greer Garson pretended she did. Poor Gog! There, I’ll get your head better soon. You’ll s
ee.”

  Maire pulls Gog’s head down onto her lap, so that Gog is lying sideways on the seat of the car. He feels Maire’s fingers stroking his forehead. They are cool and fluttering like the wings of a live plucked bird. His wariness of Maire grows numb and dissolves away.

  He is half-asleep, when he feels Maire lay him out on his back on the seat. She kneels beside him on the floor of the car and begins to unlace his boots. When she has removed the boots, she puts his feet on the seat and pulls down the black blinds that are rolled up above each window of the car. When the interior is in partial darkness and hidden from outside watchers, she begins to undo Gog’s trousers and to bare his belly. She strokes him softly, so that he can feel the lust rising in his groin. Then Maire hitches up her skirt and lies on top of Gog and begins kissing his face a hundred times over.

  “Gog, Gog, Gog, Gog . . . I love you, you know. No, you don’t know. But I do. I love you. Enormous you. Vulnerable you. Forgetful husband of mine.”

  Gog begins kissing the white face of the woman above him and pulling her body closer to his own. She licks his cheeks all over as though she were a cat showing affection, yet her tongue is not rough, but as smooth as a hot twist of wet silk. Then she begins to finger his belly and thighs. Soon she rises astride of Gog on her knees, slowly working her body onto his with each sway of the car, so that he can feel himself penetrate her deeply, deeply, oh warm and plucking, to the very knuckle of her womb, and he can see her face riding above him, wincing with lips apart, breathing quickly, nostrils flaring, below the black curve of the turban with its pearl navel.

  With her palms, Maire presses on Gog’s belly and chest, moving her body in little circles round its fixed hub. Then as the car lurches, she pulls at Gog’s haunches with both her hands, digging in with her nails and crying out aloud. And Gog feels himself come with a jerking that makes him clutch at Maire’s shoulders and draw her down on top of him.