Gog

by Andrew Sinclair

  The firemen now run by Gog with their hoses towards the flaming Council Chamber, their leader at the brass nozzle uniformed and helmeted exactly as his string of mates behind him, who hold up the coils of the jerking white canvas snake spouting out its clear venom at the furnace. And another fireman taps Gog on the shoulder and says, not unkindly, “Out of here, cock. Ta for the help, but you’ll only get in the way.” So Gog rises and walks out of the fallen west wall, bearing the last remnant of the wooden Gog, the weapon from the end of the giant’s spear now charred to a round orb no more dangerous than the planet Earth itself, when it once spun through the universe with its crust cooling into soil and the first living things crawled out of the slimy sea to inhabit the land and form the first link of the chain of the living and the dead, until the fire and the hammer should come from heaven and destroy them utterly and the chain should be forged all over again. And Magog is dead, ground into cinders by the boots of the advancing firemen. And Gog is dead. And only the scorched globe and all that therein survives is left, and the survivors are equal under the fire and the hammer that fall to chasten them and purge them and temper their eyes into seeing that men are men and no more than men, not set over each other, but condemned with each other to trial by survival in their in­escapable flesh.

  Gog bears the burned morningstar of the dead giant in his cupped hands all the way up the hill to Hampstead, an offering and a pledge that, as New Troy once rose on London marsh when Gog and Magog were first chained to the gate at Aldermanbury, so now Jerusalem shall rise for a second time on the clinker of London, and Albion shall lie on the waters in green harmony as the ark of his people, whole and one and indivisible in peace as in war.

  The fields from Islington to Marybone

  To Primrose Hill and St. John’s Wood,

  Were builded over with pillars of gold

  And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood . . .

  Gog wakes from the doze of memory to find himself on the grass under the apple-tree with the shadow of Maire upon his eyes. The small breeze plays at the black flaps of her kimono, baring the sockets of her thighs as far as the edge of her belly. In her hand, she holds several coloured and divided squares of paper.

  “I rang up Downforth,” Maire says. “There is an Arthur George Griffin Junior there. But the records say he’s adopted by you. His father died in the pit and his mother of t.b. It’s not a likely story, but it may be true. Just like it’s not a likely story I didn’t have to sleep with anyone to get these ration cards, and it may be true I’m not pregnant.”

  “Don’t sound so tough,” Gog says, “even if you are. We’ll have to work something out. I’m sure we will. We’ve a lot of sins to forget we did during the war, but it’s nearly over. If we didn’t forget the sins of the war, there’d never be any peace. We’d always be fighting.”

  Gog rises and goes back towards the house with Maire, yawning in the backwash of the fatigue that will not ebb from him.

  “We’ll try,” Maire says. “We got on all right before the war, when you loved me. I was pretty comfortable with you. I admit, I wouldn’t like to go. Though I could, mind you. There’s many who’d take me in. And they’ve got enough coupons to feed a regiment.”

  “I believe you,” Gog says, laughing. “But you’d get fat if you ate enough to feed a whole regiment. Besides, we’re all out of our minds, not only me. As if coupons really mattered. Clipping out our life by coupons.”

  “We do,” Maire says, “we do. It’s no use sneering. Oh God, was there ever a time when we didn’t have to live by cutting out coloured­ squares of paper like children who never grow up?”

  As Gog comes into the house, he sees in a small glass case hung on the wall a charred wooden orb that can only be the morningstar of the giant Gog which he carried home the night the City burned. And the black globe is so split and calcined that even a child would laugh, if it were called a world in play.

  XXXV

  The three days of summer after the destruction of Hiroshima and before the destruction of Nagasaki by brimstone and fire from a bomber, Gog spends trying to orientate himself in the new found land of his old self. All is familiar and yet strange, all is known and yet alien.

  With the return of much of his memory, Gog finds that he has also recovered his powers of analysis. Until now, he has allowed everything to happen to him, whether dream or action. He has been merely a man in a landscape of fantasy or fact, part of the whole scene and its events, undifferentiated. He has had to choose nothing, for he has thought of no experience on which to base a choice. He has had to initiate nothing, except when driven by instinctive needs for food and drink and warmth and sometimes sex. He has merely reacted to the events and people which he has met, reacted unconsciously and blamelessly as a savage or a child. But now that some of the knowledge and some of the drives in him are explicable, now that he begins to understand his family and his researches and his old way of doing and living, Gog can judge his present feelings and actions on the basis of some past ones. His spontaneity has gone, his knowledge of causes and consequences come. He is no longer an Adam innocent and wild in the garden of Albion. He has eaten of the fruit of the tree of good and evil and he is George Griffin Esquire in London.

  This power of analysis over himself and his surroundings leads to Gog’s alienation from his world. On his journey, he did not even have to accept. He merely was. He had one simple purpose, to get to London. Now he has got there, he is like the millions of soldiers thrown out of the set rules of the army into an aimless civilian society where they must make their own rules and put down roots again, if they can. And Gog cannot. Hampstead seems to him no more than another temporary resting-place on his journey. For long as he has travelled, he still knows too little of himself or his life or his country. He has just set foot on the road, and already he seems to have arrived.

  In the place which he apparently owns by deed and purchase, he is both a native and a visitor. He recognizes only to feel apart. Mishkin, the porcupine cat, lies in wait on the tops of doors or on the branches of trees, in order to leap on Gog’s back with all twenty claws extended, yowling with simultaneous welcome and enmity. When Gog pulls Mishkin off his back and strokes its fur, the cat first purrs in ecstasy at its friend’s love, then bites him for being a stranger. When the coast is clear of cats, Gog walks down a path through a rose garden, sure without looking that the tenth trellis will be set a little out of line with the rest; yet the white and red and orange and pink roses spreading out their shavings of lips stir him as if he had never before seen a rose. Before he turns the corner of the road outside the front gate, he is certain that he will see the Dick Turpin set back, black-beamed and white-­plastered in its pub yard with the highwayman astride his black horse riding the painted sign on its gibbet and chain; yet he creeps into the dark public bar as if he were a foreigner and had never set eyes before on the curious and loved segregations of the English class system, public bar and private bar and ladies’ bar and saloon bar, divided off from each other by leaded glass and wooden partitions, linked together by the vast mahogany horseshoe of the counter itself. He skulks by the walls of streets with names he can rattle off without reading the name-plate. He shies from the greetings of neighbours, avoids their houses as though these were enemy strongpoints, ducks welcomes like grenades, and feels solitary in a gathering of locals. When they ask him as they all do, “Glad to be home?” he shrugs as if the question had no mark.

  Even in his own property, Gog cannot believe that anything is his. The overgrown lawn, the gardens for vegetables and flowers, the apple orchard, the tennis court, the greenhouse built like a miniature Crystal Palace, surely nature is taking them back from him, pushing up her long grasses and weeds to bind and garrotte these hopeless efforts of gardeners to contain her, gardeners all gone away to war, some to die and be buried and rejoin nature herself. The house, rambling in red brick and green with ivy, has too many rooms for one man. How Maire has managed to keep such a barracks fro
m being requisitioned and packed with refugees, Gog does not know. But empty the whole place is, except for the suite that Jules-Julia occupies to the west, and Gog cannot even recognize the furniture in the empty rooms because of the dust-covers that cocoon them like six-pounders shrouded against the rain.

  Maire has to be discovered again. Gog finds her contradictory and unpredictable, sometimes a termagant and sometimes a child, full of guile but given to sudden asides of trust, menacing only to provoke declarations of love, determined on her own way except when she feels like clinging, able to do anything as long as her concentration lasts, needing society and smart friends yet sacrificing them all to silence with Gog, ready to start for Timbuctoo now as long as she can turn back tomorrow, lying all the time except when the truth is funnier, teasing continually yet butter-soft if there is retaliation, sensual to the point of folly but disengaged from the consequences of any passing act. In bed with Maire, Gog becomes her sexual slave again, his fingers itching for the nap of her skin, his belly crawling at the touch of her breasts. Yet outside the bedroom, Gog can treat her in an amused and tolerant way, making her angry by his patronage and detachment. “You were never like this before the war,” she storms, and Gog can believe her. Five years of worrying about little more than his own survival have given him an absorption with himself that does not allow for the total concentration upon another, which passes under the name of passion.

  The new Gog’s almost excessive awareness of his every thought and every action leads to a form of paralysis of will, in which he is so passive that his acceptance of the plans of others seems almost a form of unselfishness. Yet it is an indifference, an unwillingness to engage himself in anything that he has chosen. If this is really his home, if the old roots no longer hold him so that he blows hither and thither on others’ whims like a dandelion puff on the winds, then there is no reason why he should stay in Hampstead rather than go elsewhere. He notices Maire artfully talking to him about projects for the future, about moving the rose garden to where the shrubbery is and the shrubbery to the rose garden, about selling some of his investments to buy others; she is trying to make him a servant to his own property in order that the management of what he owns can give him enough of a purpose to get through the days and stay where he is; but as he feels that he can barely hang onto his own body and consciousness, he cannot feel for mere things outside his own skin, which his wife and his society label artificially as his.

  He supposes that he must work; but Maire tells him that he is too rich to have to do so. And what is he qualified to do? He was a teacher once, but he has forgotten nearly all he knew. The great research project, the History of Gog and Magog from the Beginning of Albion to the End of England, why, there is no trace of that. His study is more like a cell, bare of books, its shelves empty as the gums of old men. When he asks Maire about what happened to his library and his papers, she says, “Surely you remember? Your last leave, you burned them all. I tried to stop you, but you wouldn’t listen. You said, What’s the use of all this crap about the past? What we need to do when this bloody mess is over is to build a better future. And you burned them. In the bonfire. It took you days. Burning your books, just like the Nazis.” Only now that the shelves are bare and the bloody mess of the war is over for Gog, he can only sit in a listless present and cannot imagine a future. The Labour Government, the government of the people, must be planning for that. And what room is there in the bright new England for a middle-aged rich man, who has burned his books so that he cannot even teach, who has forgotten nearly all he knows and is too old to learn new tricks, and who is too tired and disengaged to care about a future that is nothing to him but the repetitions of the aimless moments? When the Army sent Gog home from Hamburg, it seems to have demobilized his senses along with his body, to have taken his identity away with the disc round his neck, to have removed his personality so thoroughly that he can concentrate on himself twenty-four hours a day and find no one very much.

  So Gog sits, pulling out the empty drawers of his desk, so suspiciously empty that Gog is pretty certain Maire has assisted in the incineration of his past and his papers, jealous of the time and the passion which Gog once spent away from her on his obsessive grubbings after the ancient and the forgotten and the lost. Yet two reminders survive. Gog finds slipped down the back of the top drawer a chapter of his research, and a curious coloured print of a man riding a sea-monster, entitled Gog’s Map or A Caricature of Albion. Gog sees that the print is actually a map of England and Wales. The north of England is the head of a countryman under a blue bonnet, the midlands are his brown belly, Wales is his blue cloak blowing behind him. But the southland, the greedy southland, is a green scaly fish with a huge mouth and fangs that are the Thames estuary, swallowing all into the red maw of London. Red also is the bobble on rural Albion’s boot astride the fish, red the folds of his cloak in South Wales, red his arm holding a beermug with shoulder on Mersey and hand on Humber, and red the tassel on his bonnet by Tyne. Red London has set Portsmouth and Cardiff and Liverpool and Manchester and Birmingham and Sheffield and Newcastle to work in the red factories for the red money that is swallowed up again by the red mouth of the Thames. And all the brain of the north and the guts of the midlands and the freedom of Wales must be carried willy-nilly on the stickleback of the greedy fish that devours the sea and all that therein is.

  Gog amuses himself by tracing the route of his journey in the Caricature of Albion; by foot from the tassel tip at Edinburgh to the bonnet’s rim at Durham; by car down the edge of Albion’s face to the corner of his mouth; by foot again over the moors of his beard into the mug at York; then by ambulance all the way down to the monster fish’s arse-hole at Totnes; and then the final trudge along the body of the fish from Glastonbury to Brighton by way of Albion’s ankle, until Gog also is swallowed up in the red gullet of London.

  The second reminder of Gog’s pre-war work is the last surviving fragment of his research. He would not know that he had composed the sentences, but that the written corrections on the typescript appear to come from his hand. He reads the piece as if it were by some strange author picked up in a second-hand store, a collection of paragraphs that hazard has brought to the reader and that can hardly be relevant to him in any way.

  The typescript is headed, Translation from a Local Chronicle, Which Tells of the Old Use of Hampstead Heath.

  It reads as follows:

  For two days and two nights, the Romans link their shields between the columns of the temple to the false god-emperor, Claudius, those massy columns of stone that British slaves have hauled from the holds of ships in the harbour, and we come on them out of the town in flames, for the Druid Myrddin has made Boudicca swear the oath by the oak to burn all. At the end of the second night, the Romans have cast all their javelins with the soft iron shanks that drag down our shields and leave us at the mercy of their short swords. They are croaking with thirst, when I lead the last charge of my brothers of the British tribes. I smite them with my bronze ball big as man’s head, studded with spikes on the end of an oaken pole, and I break through the wall of shields between the columns and crush their helmets as if they are clay pots and flail my way within the temple and the Britons pour after me and we put them all, each man and each woman and each child and each beast, yea, even to the mouse at the bottom of the jar of corn, we put them all to the slaughter and spread them with pitch, except those three score captives whom Myrddin reserves for the sacrifice. And we topple those pillars that still stand after the temple is burned, so that there shall be no mark that the Romans ever were, once the grass shall grow again over the ashes.

  Outside the ruins, Myrddin orders the building of the Wicker Man. And he is built of osiers fifty feet tall; the pointed branches are plaited and stretch out from his wrists in long fingers of wood. And the captives are herded inside the Wicker Man, standing upon one another and moaning pitifully. And for his head, Boudicca, the widowed Queen, orders that a likeness of my own face shall be pa
inted in blue wood upon the hides of calves; she calls me Gog, the Slayer of the Romans, and bids me mount her chariot at her left hand.

  Myrddin has faggots piled about the Wicker Man bearing my image on his face and holding the captives within his body, and Myrddin faces the place where the sun will rise and lights a torch of pine and chants the due prayers with the host drawn up in a circle about him and, as the first edge of the sun shows on the rim of the world, Myrddin puts the torch into the faggots and the flames leap up the osiers and the captives, crying pitifully, are burned in the fire, falling out of the fiery Wicker Man onto the faggots. And when the last cry is mute and the hides that bear my image are consumed, the sun rises in a bronze ball big as a man’s fist, studded with the spikes that are its rays. And Myrddin eats of the flesh of the captives, as do the few of the tribe of the Silures who are with us. But I stand beside Boudicca and will not eat of the flesh of men.

  Boudicca prepares to climb upon her chariot to address the host of her warriors. First, she praises the gods for the victory, particularly Andrasta, Goddess of death and birth, sacred to women. Then Myrddin whispers in her ear and gives her a moving pouch, which she hides between her breasts beneath her cloak, clasped by the great cairngorm of the royal house of the Iceni. When she mounts the chariot, her two daughters sit on the shaft at her feet, their heads bowed beneath their red hair, as their mother points with her spear at them and tells of the Roman tax-gatherers who beat the Queen with rods and outraged her daughters so that the tribes have chosen her to lead them and avenge their wrongs. And she brings up Myrddin beside her to speak, Myrddin who also calls for rebellion because Suetonius is gone with the legions to destroy the holy island of Mona and to slay the Druids and burn the sacred groves. And Myrddin counsels that now is the time to march on London and burn the cursed city, from where the Roman roads stretch out like bands to tether the earth of England and split tribe from tribe so that the Romans may enslave them one by one.