by John Metcalf
Eventually a small group of us, David, Charles Denton, Penny Player, and Walter Smith lived together in various combinations. Wally had two great enthusiasms—wine and bullfighting. Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon was a Bible in whatever rooms we were occupying. Harvey’s, the famous Bristol wine merchants and purveyor of Harvey’s Bristol Cream, held an annual sale of half bottles of discontinued wines; Wally spurred us on to buy dozens of these. We were, he said, to taste them and make notes about each in an attempt to educate our palates. To Wally’s distress we drank the entire “cellar” over a two-day period, in a fug of cigarette smoke, and shot pigeons from the window with my Belgian .410 shotgun.
One of David’s great enthusiasms was films and we went every week to the university film society. I watched all the classic material, not realizing at the time that I was getting an education in writing. We watched Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky, and Ivan the Terrible, Erich von Stroheim, Luis Buñuel, Vittorio de Sica, Robert Bresson’s harrowing Diary of a Country Priest, all the early Bergman—Summer with Monika, Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician.
I was particularly attracted to the silent comedies, to Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, and Charlie Chaplin. I loved the timing and grace of these performances. But perhaps my favourite films were Jacques Tati’s Jour de fête, Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot, and Mon Oncle. There are scenes in all three films which I’ve treasured for most of my life. Who could be unaffected by the postman in Jour de fête diverging from the Tour de France to cycle full-tilt into a lake? What could be funnier than Monsieur Hulot being catapulted into the sea by the sudden tightening of a tow-rope he is stepping over? It is the delicacy of Tati that enraptures me. I believe profoundly in the Hulot world.
The best was yet to come in the sixties and early seventies. In Montreal I used to go regularly to the Elysée theatre, which showed Bertolucci, Fassbinder, Fellini, Antonioni, and Satyajit Ray. Then suddenly I lost interest in films. The world had changed. Films shrank towards cartoons. The last film I had any relish for was Fellini’s Amarcord in 1973.
David’s death brought me back into contact with Charles and Penny Denton. After university Charles went to work as a freelance television producer. He then became ATV controller of programs. He was head of BBC TV Drama for three years. Governor of the British Film Institute. He is a member of the Arts Council of England and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
I have a memory of coming home one afternoon to hear Charles playing his saxophone. The sound seemed to be coming from the bathroom. He was sitting in a tub of hot water, sax over the side.
I said, “Why have you got your jeans on?”
He said, “It’s solid, man. It’s concrete.”
Who can foresee the future?
One enthusiasm I didn’t share with David or any of the others was rock climbing. I had joined the university club in my first week. I have no idea why. Experienced climbers taught beginners the mysteries of belaying, of feeding rope to the leader of the pitch, and the uses of slings, pitons, and carabiners. We climbed in the Avon Gorge on a cliff face very close to the Clifton Suspension Bridge. The club had a handbook of the various climbs and graded them for difficulty. One nightmare was called Dawn Walk, a traverse pitch which was completely unprotected. A tiny fault perhaps an eighth of an inch wide led upwards across the rock face. The only holds were flakes, cracks, and crimps. It was essential to keep moving as there was nowhere to rest.
After a few months I started going to Wales with some of the other club members. We went to the Llanberis Pass and climbed the gloom of the Idwal slabs. I wonder sometimes why I suffered the terrors of Idwal. The pitches were cruel, the bruising from the ropes after coming off the face was Technicolor. Nowadays, the prospect of mounting a stepladder induces mild hysteria and nausea. Changes with age, someone told me, to the inner ear.
In 1958 Wally Smith was agitating for a visit to Spain. He performed veronicas and naturels with sheets and raincoats; he begged us to charge him; he accepted ears. He practised that arms-wide, defiant thrusting out of chest and loins towards the bull known as an adorno until we reminded him that Hemingway had considered it vulgar. We decided that as true believers in Hemingway we’d go to the fiesta of San Fermín in Pamplona. We planned to hitchhike down through France and cross into Spain at St. Jean de Luz, take a bus to San Sebastian, and a train from there to Pamplona. We planned not to hitchhike in Spain because the word was that the Guardia Civil were erratic.
David and I hitchhiked together and made good time towards Bordeaux. We were dropped off one lunchtime on the outskirts of Angoulême. I was ravenous and we found a small café with outside tables alongside a chicken run. The owner came out and we ordered omelettes and salads.
“It’s not very clean, is it?” said David.
Who’d been tiresome for two days about toilets.
Clean it wasn’t and it stank of chicken shit but it turned out to be the site of a miraculous event.
The omelette was runny inside. The salad was slices of tomato in a vinaigrette dressing with fresh-ground black pepper. This was the first omelette I’d ever eaten. It was superb. I was astonished. I had eaten things before that my mother called omelettes but compared with this delicacy they were like shoe soles.
Food in England in the fifties was as bad as food is now in the Balkans. My mother’s cooking was good but it was narrowly traditional. To this day she cannot envision rice or pasta; they are too deeply foreign. The British are capable of almost any culinary perversion: curry on chips, spaghetti on chips (or toast!), Chip butties. English awfulness about food can undermine the strongest ethnic traditions; in a Chinese restaurant in Soho I was once served sweet-and-sour Brussels sprouts.
My wife, Myrna, remembers the childlike wonder with which the British greeted eggplants. The Sunday colour supplements carried photographs of them, articles explained what they were, recipes suggested what might be done with them. This was in 1965.
Unless one were wealthy or had travelled widely I don’t think many young people in the fifties in England had much idea of what food might be. The war years had been grim. Compulsory cod-liver oil and concentrated orange juice for children, the residue of the tablespoon of oil reacting with the sweetness of the juice to produce daily and instant nausea before school. School dinners. Powdered milk. Powdered eggs. Strawberry jam made of turnips.
The B.C. novelist John Mills grew up in London. He told me that they used to have a version of spotted dick for school dinners. It was made from flour and water and steamed in a cylinder which opened in half lengthways. The resultant grey-white tube of pudding was then cut into rounds. The children called this dessert “dead man’s leg.”
This simple meal in Angoulême was momentous for me; it was the first time I grasped the idea of food.
When I think now of Spain I think always of being in the plaza de toros after the paseo but before the first bull has erupted from the toril. In my mind’s eye I see the first matador’s cuadrilla flaring out the yellow-and-magenta fighting capes and sprinkling them with water to weight them against even a flip of evening breeze.
Workmen preparing to work.
The fiesta in Pamplona is rather frightening if one is sober. The entire town is drunk for days on end. It vibrates with crazed energy. From early morning when the signal rockets go up to announce that the bulls have been released, are coming now, six Miura bulls jostling along the streets with four steers to calm them, the mob of runners glancing back to see the horns swaying behind them, until 5 p.m. when the corrida starts, the entire town drinks.
Sometimes a bull gets separated from the herd and the police yell and scream warnings as a solo bull is dangerous and will kill. Many of the young aficionados are still drunk from the night before when they pile into the plaza de toros ahead of the running bulls. After the bulls are herded in
to the toril a young heifer with padded horns is loosed into the ring. The aficionados perform self-absorbed, exaggerated passes with jackets, shirts, or sheets of newspaper.
A very tall boy from California takes the heifer by the horns and dumps it on its side rodeo-style. The Spanish boys are outraged at this insult to taurine dignity and mob him and beat him rather badly.
Many of the peasants in their traditional white clothes with red neckerchiefs and red cummerbunds and nearly all the hundreds of American and British students carry the traditional wineskins from which they drink all day. The skins are coated inside with pitch which renders the wine even more vile than it naturally is. In the restaurants, the waiters, unasked, put on every table three opened bottles of wine—red, white, rosé. The stacks of saucers rise on the outdoor café tables which are haunted by sellers of lottery tickets and beggars hawking postcard photographs of Franco. Shoeshine boys crawl under tables grabbing at feet until they are heaved away.
In this alcoholic haze things happen. A brass band appears playing a paso doble, a procession of giant puppets meanders past, figures representing Kings and Queens and Moors. Groups of peasants spring suddenly into one of the local dances. A statue of the Virgin Mary is borne about the town seated on a throne; the throne is carried on the shoulders of young men all wearing blue blouses. A large open car drives up and down the streets. In the back sit three young women in white ruffled dresses who throw the heads of fresh flowers into the crowds. No one knows who they are. In the middle of the square a priest in a black soutane, gravely drunk, is conducting a series of verónicas with an American flag.
None of this seems peculiar.
We were lucky that year to see graceful and heart-stopping fighting by Paco Camino. The choreography and rhythm of the passes was thrilling; he was fighting so close to the bulls that their withers bumped him pass after pass smearing him with blood. He was taking his alternativa. We saw fights on the way home in the hills in Huesca, the buildings still pocked with Civil War bullet holes, in Bilbao, in San Sebastian, and then over the border in Pau and Dax, all getting progressively worse.
I went to Pamplona again in 1959 with a girlfriend. It was the year Hemingway was writing The Dangerous Summer for Life magazine. He was following the mano-a-mano fights by Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguin. On one of the days of the fiesta Hemingway was seated at the barrera with his entourage of about seven people. The first matador spread a fighting cape over the barrera in front of Hemingway and dedicated to him the Miura horror that had just trotted out into the sunshine.
Walking back into town from the plaza de toros after the fights were over I saw Hemingway and his group. Two of these were young, beautiful American girls and there was a girl even younger, dark-haired and sounding Irish. I was callow enough to speak to him. I told him I loved his writing. For a famous man accosted in the street by a kid he was civil enough.
Back in Bristol these sunlit days came to an end. We had graduated and David set off to Cambridge to begin a Ph.D. in philosophy. I’ve always remembered his answer attempting to explain to me what philosophy was all about if it wasn’t about what constitutes living a good life. “Well,” he said, with a certain exasperation, “it’s about what we mean when we say ‘I posted a letter.’”
Christ!
Charles and Penny got married and Charles moved into the world of documentary films. He directed one that involved endless travel in the United States and endless nights in isolated motels. I asked him if this wasn’t tedious. “Oh, no,” he said. “I always travel with Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire.” Wally disappeared into the mysteries of the wine trade. I felt lonely and abandoned. I could think of nothing I wanted to do. I was reluctant to give up idleness, curry for breakfast, darts, and beer, and so, adrift, I signed up for the buffooneries of a year in the Bristol University Education Department to acquire a teaching certificate.
University departments of education seem to be universally staffed by dimwits and ninnies. I could barely endure the indignities of that year and attended lectures as rarely as possible. It was intellectually repugnant. One woman lecturer advocated the choral speaking of verse as a way of leading children towards the light. A tall bearded Quaker in Quaker sandals considered Tolkien’s The Hobbit an excellent vehicle of moral instruction; part of his course involved drawing dragons, Orcs, Gandalf, and Bilbo Baggins with coloured pencils on parchment. Others favoured recorder playing and the singing of roundelays. Origami. Aquariums. Calligraphy. Hamsters. The year was like being incarcerated in a twee loony bin.
My first year of teaching was even worse. I disliked the incipient violence which brooded over what I will call Bluebell Secondary Modern School. The headmaster was obsessed with Control and gave a strong impression of being insane. I sketched a portrait of him in my novella “The Lady Who Sold Furniture.”
The bus lumbered down from my flat towards Bristol city centre, through all the commerce, on through the drab streets of terraced houses and small shops—newsagents, fish and chips, turf accountants—towards the decaying prefabs and the rawness of the housing estate served by Bluebell School. The invisible dividing line between the city I lived in and the city I worked in was marked for me each morning by a butcher’s shop whose windows announced in whitewash capitals:
UDDER 9D PER POUND
I pretended an enthusiasm for teaching but could never persuade myself that each day wasn’t futile. Teaching remedial reading and spelling to twelve-year-olds bored me. Reading the adventures of Nigel with a little West Indian girl leaking tears and snuffling.
“They always on at we.”
“Who is?”
“Calling us nigger.”
Staring blankly at her until it dawned that we were dealing here with the word “Nigel.”
Added to such daily jollities as this were the supervision and consumption of school dinners and the recounting by some of the dullest men I’ve ever met of the nature of the previous evening’s television programmes.
I’m what I’d call a Selective Viewer but honesty compels me to admit that last night’s documentary on edible fungus . . .
At the end of this year I got a job in a reform school. In one of my stories I called this degrading establishment the Eastmill Reception Centre. The centre took in convicted boys from London, the Midlands, the West Country, and Wales and evaluated them for permanent placement in Borstals. In this dolorous dump I taught English. I think I reasoned to myself that if I didn’t like teaching at the secondary modern level I’d move much lower academically and become something more akin to a social worker saving souls. I was infected at this time with mildly leftish sentiments and actually voted once for Harold Wilson, an act which now shames me profoundly.
I find that I often catch in fiction the essence of a place better than I do in exposition, probably because exposition is closer to reportage and fiction is a distillation.
What follows is from “The Eastmill Reception Centre,” though it also captures something of Bluebell Secondary Modern.
I soon lost my nervousness of these boys under my charge. As the days passed, I stopped seeing them as exponents of theft, rape, breaking and entering, arson, vandalism, grievous bodily harm, and extortion, and saw them for what they were—working-class boys who were all, without exception, of low average intelligence or mildly retarded.
We laboured on with phonics, handwriting, spelling, reading.
Of all the boys, I was most drawn to Dennis. He was much like all the rest but unfailingly cheerful and co-operative. Dennis could chant the alphabet from A to Z without faltering but he had to start at A. His mind was active, but the connections it made were singular.
If I wrote CAT, he would stare at the word with a troubled frown. When I sounded out C-A-T, he would say indignantly: Well, it’s cat, isn’t it? We had a cat, old tom-cat. Furry knackers, he had, and if you stroked ’em . . .
F-
I-S-H brought to mind the chip shop up his street and his mum who wouldn’t never touch rock salmon because it wasn’t nothing but a fancy name for conger-eel.
C-O-W evoked his Auntie Fran—right old scrubber she was, having it away for the price of a pint . . .
Such remarks would spill over into general debate on the ethics of white women having it off with spades and pakis, they was heathen, wasn’t they? Said their prayers to gods and that, didn’t they? Didn’t they? Well, there you are then. And their houses stank of curry and that. You couldn’t deny it. Not if you knew what you was talking about.
These lunatic discussions were often resolved by Paul, Dennis’s friend, who commanded the respect of all the boys because he was serving a second term and had a tattoo of a dagger on his left wrist and a red and green humming-bird on his right shoulder. He would make pronouncement:
I’m not saying that they are and I’m not saying that they’re not but what I am saying is . . .
Then would follow some statement so bizarre or so richly irrelevant that it imposed stunned silence.
He would then re-comb his hair.
Into the silence, I would say,
“Right. Let’s get back to work, then. Who can tell me what a vowel is?”
Dennis’s hand.
It’s what me dad ’ad.”
“What!”
“It’s your insides.”
“What is?”
“Cancer of the vowel.”
The only good thing about Eastmill was that I met there the school’s psychologist, James Gaite. Jim was my age, not long out of the University of Hull. His job was to interview the intake, administer standardized voodoo tests, and then assign the boys to particular reform schools, all meaningless, of course, since boys were always sent where there happened to be room.