by David Nobbs
‘Yes. Why?’
‘It tastes nicer.’
Soon, Tommy Marsden said he must be off. ‘Mr Linacre says self-indulgence has nipped many a promising career in t’ bud, and he’s right,’ he added.
‘I haven’t bought a drink yet,’ said Henry. ‘Must buy a drink for Tommy.’
He borrowed three and eight off Tommy, and bought a round.
‘I’m right glad you lot are pleased,’ said Tommy. ‘I thought tha might be too snotty-nosed.’
‘Snotty-nosed? Are we buggery?’ said Henry, and he forgot to apologise to God.
Their laughter grew boisterous. Cecil E. Jenkinson, licensed to be a crashing bore and have a son who was as thick as pig shit, approached them, and informed them that they had had enough.
‘Banning me like you did me old dad, are you?’ said Henry.
‘Listen, young lad,’ said Cecil E. Jenkinson, licensed to refuse to serve people for no reason whatever. ‘Listen. I liked your dad. Don’t get me wrong. One of t’ finest human beings as ever supped a pint. There was only one thing wrong wi’ him. He used to give the customers the screaming abdads.’
‘You bloody bastard,’ said Henry.
‘Get your drunken friend out of here,’ said Cecil E. Jenkinson. ‘That’s the last time I allow under-age drinking in here.’
He was right, too.
As Henry walked through the little gardens in front of the Town Hall, on his way home from the tram, the enormity of what he had done struck him and he burst into tears, and knelt to pray to God.
‘And what do you think you’re doing?’ said the policeman.
Henry stood up, somewhat unsteadily.
‘Praying,’ he said.
‘Oh aye? And I’m the Archbishop of Canterbury,’ said the policeman.
‘No, I was praying,’ said Henry. ‘I was praying for forgiveness.’
‘Why? What have you done?’
‘Tonight,’ said Henry, desperately trying to focus. ‘Tonight I have got drunk and used foul language.’
‘How old are you?’ said the policeman.
‘Sixteen.’
‘Where have you been drinking?’
This was his big chance to avenge his father for the wrongs that had been done to him by Cecil E. Jenkinson.
‘The Navigation Inn,’ he said.
It was several days before Cousin Hilda could forgive him for arriving home drunk.
Cecil E. Jenkinson never forgave him.
Henry wasn’t sure whether God forgave him. He prayed for forgiveness, but received no reply.
He was beginning to have doubts about whether God existed.
He went through all the arguments over and over again. Cosmological. Teleological. Ontological. There must be a God because there is no other explanation of why the world began, or indeed of how it began. But what is the explanation of why there is a God and how there is a God and how God began? There are so many signs of order and purpose in Nature that it is inconceivable that there is not an overall creative Mind controlling it. There are so many signs of disorder and chaos in Nature that it is inconceivable that there is an overall creative Mind controlling it. There must be a God, otherwise how would we be able to have the idea of God? Well, there must be nuclear bombs because how else would we be able to have the idea of them? By inventing them. Have we not invented God? Does that make God any less God? Supposing every single person in the world believed in God? It would prove nothing. It’s conceivable that everybody could suffer from the same delusion at the same time. Everything that is said is conceivable. Everything that is conceivable is said, many times. In the end either you plump for a God out of need or temperamental inclination, and that is grotesque, or God is Revealed to you.
In the end, every time, the question was, as he knew all along that it would be, did God speak to him in the fog in Paradise Lane? Of course it was possible that He did and of course it was possible that He didn’t. He had been feverish. He could have had hallucinations. After all, he also heard his father. Of course it was possible that he had really heard God and imagined he’d heard his father. Or vice versa. Unlikely, but possible. He had also seen the fog swirl-pooling into the faces of the ogglers and tackies at Dalton, and that had definitely been an illusion (well, almost definitely), but then he had been impressed that God had not found it necessary to pull some physical trick. He had spoken, and that was enough.
Why had God said so little? Because He had said, ‘I am with you, my son.’ What else could He possibly add?
Why had God not spoken to him again? Because he did not exist, or because He did not make it so easy for you that you had no need of Faith? Christians were very clever at turning even the absence of proof and even the absence of the revelation of God into positive arguments for his existence. Was this speciousness, or the truth?
Three times he went to pubs and drank beer. He smoked five cigarettes. He resumed his self-abuse. Each time he did one of these things, he looked for a sign from God, perhaps even a thunderbolt. He wasn’t sure whether he hoped for a sign, or feared it. Perhaps, if one came, he would know whether he was glad or sorry that it had come. But none came.
He told Mr Quell of these things, after Mrs Quell had left the room, on the occasion of his next visit for tea, a meal whose star attractions had been Battenburg cake and ginger cake.
‘I don’t think I’m cut out for the service of God,’ he said. ‘I’ve got all my work cut out trying to keep on believing in Him.’
‘He gives us doubts,’ said Mr Quell, ‘so that we can test our Faith.’
‘I doubt whether the doubts I’m getting are sent by Him,’ said Henry.
‘That doubt is part of the doubt that He has sent you,’ said Mr Quell.
Henry’s belief in God, which had come upon him so suddenly, dripped away like a leaking tap. He passed through a stage in which he believed that there was a God, but that he was incapable of believing in Him. He became convinced that the entire universe was part of God’s grand design, except him. One day, during Religious Instruction, as it happened, he saw everything around him as divine, except himself. He sat in God’s divine desk, dipping God’s divine pen in His Holy Inkwell, and he was a stranger in the midst of all this revelation. A feeling of revulsion for himself shook him violently, and yet when he looked at his hands they weren’t shaking.
Mr Seaton, the Scripture master, rebuked him for not concentrating. ‘What’s the point of my trying to drum some spiritual feeling into you if you’re just going to sit there like a pudding?’ he said.
The tap dripped on, and he came to see this stage as a form of temporary madness.
‘You don’t have to believe in everything in Christianity literally,’ said Mr Quell. ‘You don’t have to take God absolutely literally.’
‘You have to believe that He exists,’ said Henry. ‘You have to believe that He can be described.’
‘I can’t describe Him,’ said Mr Quell. ‘I can’t say that He’s an old man with a white beard. I certainly don’t believe that He’s an Englishman. Or even an Irishman, though that is slightly more likely.’
‘You don’t have to be able to describe Him,’ said Henry. ‘You can’t, because you haven’t seen Him. But you have to believe that He exists, somewhere, in some actual form, which we could describe if we ever saw it. Otherwise God is just a concept which we call a being, and that would be a con.’
A trolley-bus slid sibilantly to a halt outside. (‘Outside! Amazing. I thought it would be in the room’ – Droopy L.)
‘I would disagree that God has to be physically describable,’ said Mr Quell, ‘but I would agree that we have to believe that His existence has a reality independent of ourselves. He clearly must be more than a symbol that we have created to satisfy our urge for Him. Wasn’t that a particularly odious Battenburg cake that we tucked into this afternoon?’
‘Appalling,’ said Henry. ‘If there was a God, He wouldn’t allow us to eat such appalling cake.’
; How long can a tap drip? Until the end of time, or a strike by water workers, whichever is the sooner, if it’s attached to the mains. Until the container is empty, if it’s attached to a container of finite capacity.
Henry’s tap ceased to drip on the morning of March 13th, 1952. That it was his seventeenth birthday was of no account. It was the day they buried Chalky White.
Eight men were buried alive when there was a collapse at the face of the old seam at Drobwell Main Colliery. In three weeks’ time that seam was to have been abandoned.
The rescuers fought their way through for twenty-seven hours. They could hear the weakening cries of the trapped men, but had to go slowly, excruciatingly, unbearably slowly, for fear of causing further collapse.
Four of the men were dead when the rescuers reached them. Chalky White died in hospital. Three men survived.
It was a joint funeral, and the little church was packed. All the miners had scrubbed their faces. Only the faces of Chalky White’s relatives and friends remained black.
All the Paradise Lane Gang were there, except Billy Erpingham. Nobody could remember his address.
The vicar praised the courage of the rescue services, and of the great body of miners, who knew the risks of their jobs, and lived, and occasionally died, with those risks. There was quite a bit of coughing during the vicar’s address, and Henry was transported back to the chapel at Dalton, Tubman-Edwards opposite him, Mr Tenderfoot striding out to witness the great storm. Then he returned to the present, bitterly ashamed of having been away.
The coughing at Dalton College had been the result of boredom. The coughing at Drobwell was the product of pneumoconiosis.
They filed out into the churchyard. A pale sun came out, just as the five coffins were lowered into the ground.
In the end it was nothing to do with arguments. It was simply that, as he stood there, beside Ian Lowson, who was a stranger, Henry knew that he believed that he knew that that was the end of Chalky White, that he was not going to a good place, or a bad place, but was going to rot in Drobwell churchyard.
Sales of Battenburg cake in south Yorkshire continued to boom.
‘I still believe that it’s better to be generous than mean, to be kind rather than cruel, to be tolerant rather than intolerant, to strive to bring order to society rather than chaos, to seek peace not war, and to try to have faith in man’s capacity to overcome the evil in his own nature,’ said Henry.
Mr Quell carefully selected a piece of coal, and placed it on the neat pyramid of his fire. The precision and delicacy of his movements never ceased to seem surprising in such a big-framed man.
‘You’re a humanist,’ he said, ‘and a refreshingly modest one.’
‘Are you mocking me?’ said Henry.
‘Not at all,’ said Mr Quell. ‘Humanism is the religion of the coming times. It’s a religion without services, without a Bible, and for that reason it might be assumed that it has no dogma. That would be incorrect.’
Henry hadn’t heard the trolley-bus draw up, but now he heard the whoosh as it set off towards town. They were to be phased out soon, but they would live on in his memory, every time he thought about the great problems of existence. Sometimes it seemed to him that it was only in the trivia of life that individuality held any sway. The arguments about God had been made banal by repetition all over the world, but in Henry’s case alone was God mingled inextricably with Battenburg cake and trolley-buses.
‘Its dogma is that man can control the planet,’ said Mr Quell. ‘Its dogma is that by means of planning, and science, and technology, man will be able to restructure and improve Mother Nature. You believe that he will have a full-time job controlling his own nature, never mind Mother Nature. That is modest. I approve of that.’
The summer term dragged by, and they waited for something to happen. Being a humanist was something that went on all the time, and it didn’t fill your Sunday like organised religion did. Henry no longer went to the church youth club. The trinity of God, table tennis and Mabel Billington had all lost their hold over him. There was no humanist youth club. The pleasures of reading, cinema-going and listening to the wireless were still all right, but they weren’t the real thing. Self-abuse was all right, but it wasn’t the real thing. Mock ‘A’ levels weren’t till the winter and they weren’t the real thing. If you did badly, it was ominous, and, if you did well, it was wasted. Henry’s cricket continued to improve. His average this term was 1.75, which compared well with Martin’s 4.55 but badly with Stefan’s 84.41. But his development was too slow. Even if the graph of his improvement continued, he would be too old to play for Yorkshire by the time he was good enough. In fact, he would be 128 before he even got a trial. But even cricket wasn’t the real thing.
The real thing was girls. Sex. Ceasing to be a virgin.
‘I’m a humanist,’ said Henry one endless Sunday in the Alderman Chandler Memorial Park, where clusters of teenagers were waiting to listen to the Top Twenty on their wirelesses.
‘Has it got owt to do with girls?’ said Stefan Prziborski, the best left-handed batsman ever to come out of Poland.
‘It could have,’ said Henry.
‘How?’ said Martin.
‘Well, we could found a humanist society. Joint, with the girls’ school.’
‘Now you’re talking,’ said Martin Hammond.
There were still no marble or falcated teal on the pond. The ocelot had died. Henry saw the fair-haired boy occasionally, and nodded to him.
He went to see Mr E. F. Crowther in his study.
The study still said, ‘Things get done here. We are plain, practical men, concerned with achievements, not pretensions,’ but Henry was old enough now to realise that this was itself a pretension.
Mr E. F. Crowther refused to agree to the formation of a joint humanist society with the Thurmarsh Grammar School for Girls.
‘Why not, sir?’ said Henry.
‘It might set a precedent,’ said Mr E. F. Crowther.
‘That way you’d never change anything, sir,’ said Henry.
‘I’ve made my decision,’ said Mr E. F. Crowther.
Yes, and I know why, thought Henry. Because I once said ‘The bread van’ in morning assembly.
Pillock.
If they didn’t meet in the park, they would meet in the Paw Paw Coffee Bar and Grill, in Bargate.
The Paw Paw Coffee Bar and Grill smelt of wet coats and steam when it rained and sweat and steam when it didn’t. It never smelt of coffee, which wasn’t surprising, since its coffee didn’t taste of coffee. Its tea, on the other hand, tasted vaguely of coffee. There were glass-topped tables, and the tea and coffee came in glass cups, with glass saucers. Due to a design fault, the handles of the cups grew almost too hot to hold. It was self-service for coffee but waitress service for grills. They were never able to afford the delights of the grill. Few people ever did. Perhaps the sight of the very fat chef, standing in the kitchen, all stained white apron and tangled hairy armpits, put people off. If you asked the waitresses for sugar, they said, ‘On the tables, luv,’ without looking at you. When you got to the table, the sugar wasn’t there, just the brown and tomato sauce bottles, with congealed sauce around their tops. The Paw Paw Coffee Bar and Grill was the only place in Thurmarsh where you could linger for hours over one cup of coffee, and chat up girls, and cheek the waitresses, and laugh sheepishly, and watch your youth waste away.
The Paw Paw Coffee Bar and Grill throbbed to the distant possibility of picking up a girl one day, and by the time you realised that you hadn’t, it was too late.
When they made remarks to the waitresses, there would be blushing and giggling and the occasional shriek of good-natured outrage. Once, Stefan Prziborski pinched Rita’s bum and she dropped a tray of dirty cups with an almighty clatter. But you couldn’t be cross with Stefan. He was different. He had foreign blood.
Once Henry plucked up courage and asked the girl who worked at Macfisheries out. She told him to come back when he was three y
ears older.
His virginity was written on his face. He was Henry ‘Ee by gum, I’ve never had it’ Pratt. Martin and Stefan had quite wide experience, in fact Henry was surprised that two such experienced Don Juans should still spend so much time hanging around the Paw Paw Coffee Bar and Grill.
The windows of the Paw Paw Coffee Bar and Grill were always steamed up.
That was how it was, so far as social excitement and gracious living were concerned, in the summer term of 1952.
Letters were exchanged. Auntie Doris wrote to him from Rangoon. She purported to be glad that he had found God. She made no reference to Strong Drink. They had been to see Hay Fever, performed by the Rangoon Amateur Dramatic Association. There was a dreadful shortage of English women in Rangoon, but Geoffrey Porringer had made a very brave stab at the role of Judith Bliss.
Henry sent a chatty letter back, explaining that he had lost God, and hoped they hadn’t taken his strictures about strong drink to heart.
He wrote to Paul Hargreaves explaining that he was no longer religious, and wanted to found a joint humanist society with the girls’ school, but couldn’t, because the headmaster was a pillock.
He wrote to Simon Eckington, giving him all his news, including the finding and losing of God, and suggesting that he visit Rowth Bridge in the summer.
Simon Eckington replied briefly that he would be very welcome. He was working for the new people at Low Farm. They were all right. Billy, the half-wit, was dead.
Paul Hargreaves replied that all headmasters were pillocks, and invited Henry to come to Brittany with them for three weeks that summer. Diana sent her love.
This news gave Henry an erection at the breakfast table. As ill luck would have it, Cousin Hilda chose that moment to ask him to fetch more marge. She had been hard on him since he’d lost God. He was all right going to the scullery, but on his way back he felt that the obstinate bulge was obvious to all. It certainly was to Tony Preece, who winked and asked him who the letter was from. When he replied, ‘My friend Paul,’ Tony Preece raised his eyebrows. Cousin Hilda sniffed. Norman Pettifer, the manager of the cheese counter at Cullens, said, ‘Oh well, time for all good men to come to the aid of the party,’ and left. He said that every morning. He was only staying there till he found a house. He didn’t fit in. Everybody missed Neville Chamberlain now that his firm had sent him to Kenya. Henry’s erection died down slowly.