The rector of St Biscop's was a sandy-haired man called Peter Reece who strode about his parish without a jacket and with what looked like bicycle clips on his shirt-sleeves, so that with these and his dog-collar and his way of walking - leaning forwards with his arms held close to his sides - it was as if he were in harness and pulling a great weight. Sometimes he would stop and look back as if the weight had slipped from him and gone rolling down a hill. He seemed to be wondering - It is my fault if people have to suffer? to die?
His parish was High Anglican; his church had a ceiling which was painted blue with golden stars; beneath it there were niches from which dapper saints looked down. Peter Reece lived on his own in the large rectory; some of the young men who came to work for him looked somewhat like the dapper saints. He lived in an attic at the top of the house and on the first floor were dormitories where the young men slept and on the ground floor were rooms where unemployed men and schoolchildren could be given free meals. Between the rectory and the church there was a piece of waste ground where there had previously been the parish hut and a tennis court; it was here that there was being built the new Recreational Hall. In this there were to be games - table tennis and snooker and whist and ludo - classes in woodwork and pottery, and lectures on current affairs in the evenings.
Peter Reece had got help from local builders to provide him with
materials and there was a rich widow in the town who gave him money for expenses. But he did not get much help in this work from the unemployed themselves: they seemed to feel that they might undermine their case for what they were entitled to. So Peter Reece had asked for volunteers from Cambridge where he had recently served as an assistant priest. He then worried that his volunteers might be seen as dispensers of charity: there was a certain amount in the Bible about the virtue in the dispensing of charity, but who benefited from this virtue seemed to remain obscure.
Groups of men in cloth caps and mufflers would stand at some distance from the half-built Recreational Hall and watch us working. We thus became somewhat self-conscious in our work. I would think - Perhaps virtue resides in the embarrassment of those who are charitable? Then - What would be really charitable, of course, for the people who are watching us working, would be if we could arrange for the building to fall down.
It was difficult to make much contact with the men in cloth caps. We would try: but the more we tried, of course, the more unacceptable we became as people who were seen as doling out charity.
My first job was to transport by wheelbarrow loads of bricks to the building site from where they had been dumped by a lorry. Children would watch me: I would sometimes manage to give them a ride in the wheelbarrow. Then I got the job of manhandling bricks up to the level where two men were constructing a wall standing on planks between trestles. I thought - So here, again, might it not cheer up the watching children and the men standing on street corners if we embarked on one of those slapstick routines that play such a part in pantomimes: clowns knocking each other over with planks swinging on shoulders; builders toppling off ladders and falling head first into buckets. And after a time we might have managed to provide better recreation than that which could be provided by a hall.
Then I got the job myself of laying bricks on the top level of the wall. I had not done such work before. I thought - Ah I will not think now that the wall should fall down!
I stood on a plank on the scaffolding and took some cement on my trowel from the bucket that had been handed up to me and I flicked the cement on to the bricks that were already there and the cement seemed to go everywhere; it was like birdshit, like pollen: I thought - I am doing something that could be called building a
wall? Bits, however, here and there seemed to stay in place; indeed like seeds, like pollen. I shaped the cement that had stayed on the wall and placed the new brick on top; I dropped a dab of cement in the crack and tapped at the new brick: I thought - Of course it is when you stop thinking, that something like building a wall just happens. Then there was the business of the plumbline: you dangled a piece of string with a lump of lead on the end; it went down into the depth to get the wall upright - so this was gravity! After a time the wall did seem to be building itself. I thought - Well most things living, growing, happen by themselves: you do not notice gravity?
- Gravity is people doing what they are supposed to do?
After a time, when the walls did not fall down, the groups of men who had been watching us drifted away.
I sometimes talked with Peter Reece in the evenings. We would sit in the church, which was the place where we were most likely to be alone. We would say together the service of Compline with its strange, beautiful words - 'Brethren be sober, be vigilant, for your adversary the Devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about seeking whom he may devour' - and we would talk beneath the images of dapper saints looking down.
I said 'But what is this resentment that stops people helping not just those who would help them but even themselves? It is the sort of death-wish that is talked about by Freudians such as my mother?'
Peter Reece said 'Have you thought about the parable of the Good Samaritan?'
I said'No.'
Peter Reece said 'People think that the parable of the Good Samaritan is about the obligation for us to help our neighbours who are in trouble, but it is not only that!'
I said 'What is it then?'
Peter Reece said 'Just before Christ told this parable he had been saying that people should love their neighbours and someone had asked him "Who is my neighbour?" It was in answer to this question that Christ told the parable. And at the end he asked the questioner "So who was a neighbour to him who was in trouble?" And the answer was of course "The Good Samaritan." So the point of the parable is that we should love people who help us, not that we should love people who are in trouble. People have not seen this because they have thought - Surely it is easy to love people who help us! But it is not! It is not! It is very difficult to love people who are good to us: it is easier to imagine we are loving people we can
condescend to. Perhaps it is easier still to feel at home with people who do us harm: at least they are not condescending! A burden is put on people we help: of course they feel envy and resentment! But perhaps easiest of all, yes, would be for the whole human race to be packed up.'
I said 'You mean, people choose to depend on people whose interest it is to harm them?'
Peter Reece said 'Oh I am not saying that one should not go on trying to help!'
I said 'You think that the Recreational Hall might miraculously fall down?'
Peter Reece laughed and said 'Oh I don't think they'll try to do away with us!'
There was a new radical political party that had sprung up in 1931, a local branch of which had established itself in the town. Its spokesman came to hold meetings on an open space in front of the half-built Recreational Hall. He would carry a portable platform like a prayer-desk on his back and set it up: I thought - But, of course, people pay attention to politicians because they are like clowns: they are always chucking about, and getting stuck in, buckets of cement.
This was at the time when the Labour Government of 1929-31 found itself sinking in the swamps of capitalist society: a bank in Austria had 'failed'; there was what was called a run on the pound. It was felt that the Gold Standard was something that had desperately to be clung to, like a banner floating in the waves. These events, words, were like dragons in children's fairy stories: but there, in fact, were the groups of men on street corners. I thought -We are all under the spell of dragons in the mind? The speaker from the new political party would set up his portable platform like that of a conjurer on the open space in front of the Recreational Hall.
Sometimes on a fine evening we, the people who were building the hall, would eat our supper out of doors on a trestle table; there would be food for anyone who came to ask for it - soup with meat and potatoes and bread and cheese and fruit. Children would come with cans and we would fill their cans for th
em to take away; not many people sat down with us to eat. I would think - But what is the terrible unattractiveness of the Good Samaritan? Is it that he is clean, he has no smell: does not love have something to do with the prevalence of smell?
The man who was making a political speech would move his
right hand up and down as if he were working a pump: words seemed to be something sloshing around inside him; he had to get them out. I wondered - Or is he working the handle of a lavatory? People are drawn to him, perhaps, like dogs to a smell.
He was saying, how could there be a world in which everyone made a profit? In a world of limited resources, one person's profit was another's deprivation. So what was necessary was for everyone to be in some sort of army; to see that in an army everyone's interests were the same.
I would think - But the interests of everyone in an army are to maim, to kill.
The speaker told of a company called National Shipbuilders Security Limited that was buying up local shipyards and then closing them down and selling them for scrap: this was an organisation formed by local capitalists to ensure that the few shipyards left in their hands would be protected and make a profit when trade improved. It was not just that shipyards were being closed temporarily during the slump; they were being dismantled so that it would be unlikely that there would ever be shipbuilding in the area again. There were tens of thousands of workers out of work now and the capitalists were making sure that there would never be such work again: all this was in order that the capitalist system should be safeguarded. The speaker reached his peroration 'My friends, are we going to stand for the behaviour of these clowns? Are we going to let ourselves be trampled on?' His audience listened to him silently. I thought - But people like watching clowns trampling on each other.
The speaker once came to join us for supper at our outdoor table after he had spoken. He was a young man with short fair hair: there seemed to be little back to his head: the skin of his face had a consistency like that of cloth. He sat with the blood-red sky of a sunset behind him. I thought - The blood has spilled on to the sky from his face, from the back of his head.
Peter Reece said 'So you are in favour of some sort of revolution.'
He said 'Oh no, we are on the side of the law, it is our opponents who are in favour of revolution.'
Peter Reece said 'But your opponents, surely, are the directors of National Shipbuilders Security.'
The man said 'Oh no, our real enemies are the Communists.'
Peter Reece said 'But the Communists seem to be saying exactly
the same as you - at least with regard to the activities of National Shipbuilders Security.'
The man said 'Perhaps that is why we are enemies!' He laughed.
Peter Reece said 'Why?'
'Because we are diametrically opposed.'
4 But what is the difference between you?'
'We are aiming at the highest and they at the lowest.'
'But they would say the same about you.'
'Yes.' He looked pleased.
Peter Reece said 'So it is matter of what is relative - '
The man said 'Ah, we don't hold with the Theory of Relativity!'
I said 'But you need enemies.'
He said 'Oh we have enemies all right!'
I thought - Oh yes, like the harlequin in the pantomime, with a ladder and a plank of wood and a bucket of cement.
One evening the man was attacked on his way back to his lodgings after a speech: he was left bruised and bleeding by the roadside. Peter Reece visited him in his lodgings. I went with him. I thought - But at what point does the Good Samaritan become the enemy you need?
Peter Reece said 'But who attacked you? You think it was the Communists?'
The man said 'Oh it was the Communists all right!'
Peter Reece said 'Might it not have been people hired by National Shipbuilders Security?'
He said 'Oh I don't think they would be up to anything like that!'
He was sitting up in bed with his head and hands bandaged: his face, out of which the blood seemed to have run, seemed pleased.
Afterwards I said to Peter Reece 'I suppose that if people feel they have enemies then everything remains a game.'
Peter Reece said 'I don't want to live in a world in which people think everything is a game.'
I said 'What sort of world do you want?'
He said 'It is true, you know, that there would be no unemployment if there was a war.'
One day I took time off from the building of the Recreational Hall and went for a long walk along the line of the estuary. I started off through the area where I had seen the children playing the first day I had arrived; I hoped I might see them again. I did not know what I would do if I did; perhaps just wave; make a fluttering movement to the girl as if releasing a bird from my hands. It was a
bright windy day; clouds moved like sailing ships in the sky. I had asked Peter Reece if he knew of a family whose child or children were deaf and dumb: he suggested that there might be such a family in an encampment of gypsies that had set themselves up some distance along the estuary. This encampment was near an ancient church and the ruins of a monastery that had been founded in the seventh century: this, I had learned, was when Christianity had first come to this part of the country; it had been carried by men in small boats that blew across the sea like seeds; monks had settled and had built walls and within them had produced prayer, learning, corn, bread, fruit; they had illustrated what they were doing in exquisitely coloured manuscripts. From here further seeds had drifted across the land. I had said to Peter Reece 'Why can't you do something here like those monks of the Dark Ages?'
He had said 'Like what?'
'Pray, grow corn, illuminate manuscripts.'
'While people around starve?'
I thought I might say - What did those monks do for people who were hungry?
I did not see any signs of the children who had been rolling tyres down a hill. I had not really expected to. I thought - You do not see angels, do you, if you look for them.
I was moving past the area where there were huge cranes like the skeletons of birds; the few hulks of ships as if picked clean by vultures. I thought I might say to Peter Reece - You mean ships are needed, because they are sunk, in a war?
- And men are killed, and so men are needed, in a war?
I was moving out into an area of desolate mud-flats. I could see the squat shapes of the ancient church in the distance. It was like some resting animal. I thought - But what the monks produced in their fortress-monastery, how did it survive? Will what is produced in the banks and municipal buildings of the town survive?
- It is that which is beautiful that survives?
There was a dyke going across the mudflats towards the church; there was an embankment running alongside the dyke on which I could walk. I thought - But what was the message in the seeds that blew across the sea in small ships: there was news of- what? - the birth and then the death-no-not-death of a child?
- When those monks painted their manuscripts, they would have known that there was a message: they would properly not have quite known what the message was?
I had crossed the mudflats on the embankment of the dyke to where I could see the mounds and trees of the walls of what once must have been the monastery. And here there were, yes, children playing. There was no sign of the gypsy encampment that Peter Reece had talked about: the children did not seem to be children I had seen before. I thought - But still, is not what I am looking for whatever will turn up. The wind had dropped so that the clouds were motionless in the sky: they were like seats, yes, from which some old gods might look down. I reached the end of the dyke and stepped over a wire fence into the area of what had once been the monastery. I thought - the monks received a messsage: it was with their hands, their eyes, that they imagined what the message was. It was difficult to see exactly what the children were doing: they were crouched in a circle, quite still, as if over something on the ground. One chil
d seemed to have an object in its hand which it held carefully; there seemed to be a connection between this object and whatever was on the ground. The other children were watching: they all had their backs to the sky. Then as I got closer it seemed -But I know what they are doing! That child is holding a magnifying-glass in its hand: they are using it to concentrate the rays of the sun and to burn whatever it is on the ground. This was a game we had played at school - you found an ants' nest, perhaps; you chased the ants and shrivelled them up with the rays of the sun. And so you were like gods, looking so omnipotently down! I sat down on what seemed to be a fallen tombstone at some distance from the children; I watched, as I had watched the other children. I thought - But if it is children, of course, that come from seeds that are blown across the sea, still what do we learn? I stood up. The children noticed me: they turned and ran away. I thought - Oh but if I were a god I would not have minded your burning ants, would I, my children.
When I got to the place around which the children had been squatting I could still not at first see just what it was on the ground: they had been burning something, yes; there were the marks of scorching; there were things moving; they were not ants; they were not dead twigs; they were like the petals of a flower, growing. Then I realised that they were maggots. And what they were teeming on was some dead body on the ground. I thought at first that it was the body of some animal; a rat or a rabbit, perhaps. Then I saw that it was that of a child. Or rather of a foetus, at the most a newly-born child, perhaps from someone who had given birth here and had got rid of this child like a seed; and it had died, and so the
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