by David Nobbs
Good teachers, bad teachers. Happy teachers, sad teachers. Miss Candy’s great hope, who never knew that he was Miss Candy’s great hope, sat through all their lessons in a fog.
He hardly spoke to the other boys. His nerves were exhausted by all the new starts that he had made. He had nothing left to give to this school, and it was harder to readjust than to start from scratch.
Besides, he was busy. As soon as the lessons were over, he hurried out of school, tense, absorbed, tingling, determined that today he would talk to the fair-haired boy. Six times his courage had failed him. Today it mustn’t.
It was a bright, rather hazy autumn afternoon. He walked past the old men’s shelter, the glass restored now between the wrought iron. It was octagonal. An octagonal bench ran round the interior. There was no law to say that only old men might use this shelter, but only old men ever did. It was tradition.
He wandered over to the bird cages. There were five guinea fowl, a macaw, two rather scruffy peahens, three Lady Amhurst pheasants, seven assorted doves and twelve sparrows which had got in through the mesh. In the animal cages there were two marmots, two unidentified small deer and an extremely listless ocelot. All the while, only half of Henry’s mind was occupied by this rich cornucopia of animal life. He was watching out for the fair-haired boy.
Here he came. If only he came over to the animals, Henry would be able to say, ‘Oh, hello, haven’t I seen you at Thurmarsh Grammar,’ and the thing would be started.
Yesterday, Henry had stood by the pond, and the boy had come past the cages. Today he came nowhere near the cages, but lingered by the pond. Tomorrow. He’d definitely try tomorrow.
The following day saw the fog thicken. It cleared slowly outside, but not at all in Henry’s head.
After school, he walked briskly to the park. This time he sat in the bandstand. It had a classical pillar at each corner and a green copper dome. The sun was a yellow plate riding through the mist, and a raw little breeze blew through the bandstand.
Here he came. Henry took deep breaths and his heart raced. This was it. Zero hour. He set off on an expertly timed walk which brought him across the boy’s bows.
Right up till the moment when he said it, he wasn’t sure whether he was going to say it or not. Out it came. ‘Hello. Haven’t I seen you at the grammar school?’
‘Aye. That’s right.’
The accent was broad Thurmarsh. That didn’t make the thing any more probable.
They were heading towards the pond. In the middle there was a small reedy island, with a few stunted trees. A colourful board gave names and pictures of all the ducks which might be found on the pond.
‘There’s a fine collection of ducks,’ said Henry.
‘They haven’t got half what they say on t’ board.’
The boy seemed calm. Had he any idea what Henry was thinking? Did Henry’s voice sound odd? Was the park keeper watching?
‘You what?’
‘They haven’t got pochard. They haven’t got shoveler.’
‘They’ve got tufted duck.’
‘Oh, aye, that’s what they mostly are, tufted duck. But they’re not very exciting, aren’t tufted duck.’
‘They’ve got teal.’
‘They haven’t got marbled teal. They haven’t got falcated teal. It’s only in t’ last week they’ve had mandarin.’
Close to, the boy’s features were not quite as fine as he had thought.
‘They’ve got wigeon,’ said the fair-haired boy.
‘Have they got pintail?’
‘Have they heck?’
‘You like birds, do you?’
‘Not really. I just look to see what it says on t’ board, and what they haven’t got. Then I complain to t’ park keeper.’
The park keeper limped slowly towards them, examining a line of bleak, rectangular rose beds.
‘Hey,’ shouted the fair-haired boy. ‘It says there’s shoveler. There isn’t.’
The park keeper approached them. He addressed himself to Henry.
‘I keep telling him,’ he said. ‘There’s been a war on. Ducks is in short supply, same as owt else.’
‘Shouldn’t be on t’ board if tha hasn’t gorrem,’ said the fair-haired boy stubbornly.
‘I’d better be getting home,’ said Henry.
And that was that. He walked away, as flat as a pancake. That was what his great homosexual passion amounted to, one discussion about the lack of duck on the park pond.
He couldn’t face smiling Liam, winking Tony and complaining Neville Chamberlain. He walked back into Thurmarsh, scuffing his shoes angrily against the pavements. The mist was closing in.
He’d been in love with a dream, a vision culled as much from literature as life. What a dreadful fool he would have made of himself, if anybody had noticed. Perhaps they had noticed.
He hadn’t disliked the fair-haired boy. But he was just a little pre-pubertal grammar-school kid, aggressively determined not to be short-changed by life. He’d have run a mile if Henry’d tried anything. Or he’d have demanded money. Henry shuddered. He imagined himself flinging himself on the boy, the boy resisting and fighting, the awful humiliation of it. He began to shake, a shuddering mixture of the cold and self-revulsion.
‘You’re sick,’ he told himself.
Oh God.
He caught the Rawlaston tram, barely conscious of what he was doing, certainly not responsible for his decisions.
The tram climbed past the end of Link Lane. New slums were being built on one of the bomb sites.
They breasted the rise like an immensely slow big dipper and groaned down into the Rundle Valley. There, on the right, looming like a battleship in the mist, was the fortress of Brunswick Road Primary School. Had he really been there; he, Henry Pratt, the same person as this?
In the Rundle Valley it wasn’t mist. It was fog. The tram went into it so suddenly that Henry expected a collision. It was rank and sulphurous.
He could tell by the flattening out that they had reached the valley floor. They were swinging right. The canal would be on his left.
‘Paradise,’ said the conductor.
He got off. This was what he had come back to do. Visit his roots.
There wasn’t a breath of wind. The factories were pumping filth into the autumn mists. It was almost as dark as night, but yellow instead of black.
He struggled along the pavement to the corner of Paradise Lane. The frail and the elderly walked with handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses, the home-made gas-masks of peace.
Footsteps rang hollow. Cars crawled. A man spat quite close to him. It was ridiculous. What was the point of revisiting old haunts when you couldn’t see them?
It was perfect! The real trip was in his memory, anyway, and he certainly didn’t want to be seen.
He felt his way up to the terraced houses. Visibility was about a foot and a half. He passed the entry to a yard. Number 15. 17. 19. 21, where she’d been on the game. 23. They’d got a new door with curved, patterned, frosted glass. It removed the only architectural merit the row could ever have been said to possess – simplicity.
‘I don’t like that door,’ he said.
‘Give over,’ said Ezra. ‘It’s their one little chance of being individual. Would you deny them that?’
He jumped out of his skin. He looked round. If his father had been there, he wouldn’t have been able to see him.
The sweat came out hot and cold all over him.
He was hearing voices now.
Oh God.
Yes?
What?
I am with you, my son.
He stumbled and fell, gashing his knee. No matter.
He had heard it.
Are you there?
Nothing.
If this was a blinding vision, it was strictly West Riding style. Two short sentences, in thick fog, on the Road to Nowhere instead of the Road to Damascus. He thought of Lampo Davey, who had said, ‘Tosser has absolutely no religious feeling whatsoev
er. He thinks the Road to Damascus is a film with Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour.’ And Lampo Davey in Paradise Lane brought out the guilt – streaming, shuddering, dreadful guilt.
The fog began to swirl about him. It was turning into the faces of the ogglers and tackies, back at Shant. Ogglers was Shant rant for the waiters who served them at dinner. Tackies were maids. The boys never spoke to the ogglers and tackies as if they were human beings. It simply wasn’t done. And now they were all about him, hideous, vaporous caricatures, reminding him, accusing him. And there was his father, a cadaver of fog, pointing an accusing foggy finger. You betrayed me, Paradise Lane, your own past, just to get laughs.
He stepped through the gate. It was a gate onto a canal towpath. It was a door into a world full of capital letters.
Guilt. Shame. The Scylla and Charybdis of Henry’s voyage.
It was a perilous journey, along the towpath in the thick fog. There was a muffled explosion as a train detonated a fog signal.
He almost missed the bridge, where the towpath crossed the canal. He clambered carefully up, and down the other side onto the waste ground. He was shaking. It was the cold. Plus the Guilt. And the Shame.
He had heard Him. God had spoken to him. Of that he had no doubt.
He knelt on the waste ground and closed his eyes. He saw his dad, as he had been in the last days, shrunken, embittered, soon to die in an outside lav. He saw himself, standing in front of seven hundred boys, saying, ‘“Henry,” he said. “I’ve gorra pain in me eye.” I didn’t ask him which one, cos he only had the one. He couldn’t afford two.’
A train whistled. A dog barked. Henry prayed in the fog.
‘Oh, God,’ he said. ‘Forgive me.’
There was no reply. He didn’t expect one. God had told him that He existed. Now, there would be silence until he had Atoned for his Sins.
He knew what he had to do. He understood the nature of symbolic gestures.
He got up, shaking, sweating, even crying, wretched, but happy. He edged his way forward towards the River Rundle, cautiously. It would ruin everything if he fell in.
He sensed the bank rather than saw it. Yes, there the land fell away. He knelt and reached out into the white nothingness with his hand.
No doubt the Ganges was polluted. A river was Sacred because Faith made it so. Otherwise, pilgrims would make only for trout streams, to the fury of angling clubs and water bailiffs.
Henry knew that the River Rundle was Sacred. Therefore, the River Rundle was Sacred. And it was truly an act of Faith, for in the thick fog he couldn’t actually see that it was the river that he was stepping into. It might be the edge if the world.
It was the river. Once again, the foul waters of the Rundle closed over his head, but this time he meant them to. He was Purifying himself in its Holy Waters.
The police brought him home at twenty-five past ten, shaking uncontrollably, dripping wet, with a temperature of a hundred and five. Cousin Hilda had been at her wits’ end, but his appearance was too terrible for her to be angry.
‘Where have you been?’ she said, sniffing only very mildly.
‘Finding God,’ he said.
He was in bed for two weeks. Two weeks in the bed with the sagging springs, which converted into a settee when required. Two weeks with the hiss of the gas fire, in front of which Cousin Hilda placed a saucer of water, in case it should get thirsty. Two weeks staring at the drab wallpaper, its pattern in dark blue and pink so small that from the bed there didn’t seem to be a pattern. Two weeks staring at the massive, carved, slightly orange wardrobe. A signed photograph of Len Hutton stood on the mantelpiece. It was the nearest thing in the room to a personal touch, all the pictures of Patricia Roc having been thrown away, judged too racy for this establishment.
His fever died down, the magic of the fair-haired boy had gone, but the magic of God remained.
Many people never find their true vocation in life. Fortunate indeed is the young man who finds it at the tender age of fifteen.
But Henry has found his vocation before, a sceptic might point out. True, but that was only a vocation. This was the vocation.
He would devote himself to the service of God.
Cousin Hilda was delighted. She had been a little worried at first. His method of coming to God had been rather too unconventional for her nonconformist tastes. Once there, however, he seemed to be quietening down nicely.
At last he was well enough to go downstairs for his tea.
Liam possibly thought that he wasn’t as much fun as he used to be.
Neville Chamberlain hardly noticed him. He was too busy wondering if he’d been over-impulsive in changing his bank that afternoon. Suffering from pains in the arm, worried that he might be on the verge of a heart attack, he had gone to see his bank manager, to make a will. The bank manager had said, ‘I have here a piece of paper,’ and Neville Chamberlain had almost had a heart attack then and there.
Only on Tony Preece did Henry’s discovery of God make any impact. It was all because of a mouse.
When Tony Preece yawned and said, ‘Sorry. Late night last night,’ Henry had toyed with the idea of making some comment about Loose Living, but had decided against it. Now, however, he could not remain silent.
Cousin Hilda had discovered mouse droppings. She had seen tiny tooth marks. She had put down a trap by the door to the scullery.
‘Got a mouse?’ said Tony Preece.
‘I’m afraid so,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘It’s probably come over from the park now the cold weather’s come.’
‘I hope the possibility has occurred to you that it might be Len Arrowsmith,’ said Tony Preece.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ sniffed Cousin Hilda.
‘It’s not at all ridiculous,’ said Tony Preece. ‘Where else would he come but here? He always liked it. And you know how he felt the cold.’
He winked at Henry.
‘It’s wrong to mock a sincerely held belief,’ said Henry.
Tony Preece gawped at him, thunderstruck. He looked from Henry to Cousin Hilda, then back to Henry again.
‘My God, we’ve got two of them now,’ he said, and he pushed his plate into the centre of the table and stormed out of the room, and Liam’s smile froze on his bewildered face.
When Liam and Neville Chamberlain had gone, Cousin Hilda refused to let Henry go into the scullery, in case his fever returned. So while she washed up, he sat by the blue stove, gazing hypnotically at the glowing fire behind the cracked glass.
Cousin Hilda came and sat at the other side of the stove, with her knitting.
‘Please don’t say things like that to Tony Preece,’ she said. ‘You upset him.’
‘You don’t like him poking fun at reincarnation either,’ said Henry.
‘I know,’ said Cousin Hilda, ‘but he’ll accept it from me. He won’t from you, not at your age.’
‘That’s not fair,’ said Henry.
‘It’s not just that,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘I’m his landlady. I’m entitled. I don’t want to lose him, Henry. This is a business, and he’s a good customer, is Tony Preece.’
‘Is he?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I think he has Mucky Habits.’
‘Mucky habits?’
‘When he isn’t in to supper,’ said Henry. ‘When he has late nights, like last night. I think he Indulges in Strong Drink and Consorts with Mucky Women.’
Cousin Hilda stared at him in astonishment.
‘I know what he gets up to,’ she said. ‘He gives performances.’
‘Performances, Cousin Hilda?’
‘Tony Preece is summat of a Jekyll and Hyde,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘By day, insurance salesman. By night, stand-up comedian.’
‘Stand-up comedian?’
‘It’s his hobby. Very regrettable, of course, but…I wouldn’t like to lose Tony Preece.’
Henry didn’t feel that he was in a strong position to criticise people for being stand-up comedians. S
o he kept quiet in Tony Preece’s presence after that.
The following morning, in fact, although embarrassed, and unable to meet Tony Preece’s eye, he forced himself to say, ‘Sorry about last night.’
‘That’s all right,’ said Tony Preece.
When Henry did meet Tony Preece’s eye, Tony nodded in the direction of the scullery door, and winked.
The mouse trap had gone.
Mr Quell was worried about Henry. He didn’t like the look of the boy. He had gone extremely pale and puffy. His face was waxy and lifeless. He was beginning to resemble a fish which has been on the slab too long. Either he was masturbating himself to death, or there were major problems.
Mr Quell believed that schoolmasters could often make matters worse by interfering too soon when they sensed the onset of a crisis. He had been careful to leave Henry to himself while he settled back into the life of the school. But you could also delay too long. He had delayed too long in the case of Oberath.
He invited Henry to tea on Friday. Henry was pleased. It would be a wonderful opportunity for talking to Mr Quell about Him.
They drove in Mr Quell’s car. It was an ancient Hillman Minx with a rattling exhaust. Mr Quell drove at twenty-five miles an hour.
‘It’s a miserable month, November,’ said Mr Quell.
‘I quite like it,’ said Henry.
Bad! No boy should wallow in mist and fog.
Their route took them through the town centre, and out onto the York Road.
‘The United are picking up a bit,’ said Mr Quell.
‘Are they?’ said Henry.
Small talk would prove to be a blind alley, thought Mr Quell.
Mr Quell pulled up at a newly installed set of traffic lights. A light rain was beginning to fall. The swish of the windscreen wipers was sad and comforting at the same time.
‘There are certain practices which, if indulged in to excess, can prove very deleterious to health,’ said Mr Quell.
‘I’ve completely given up self-abuse,’ said Henry, ‘if that’s what you mean.’
The Quells lived in a detached brick house, on Winstanley Road, near the edge of the town. There was a trolley-bus stop outside, and sometimes people waiting for a trolley-bus would drop sweet papers into their garden. This upset Mr Quell, but not his wife.