Читать книгу The Willow Pond - Mervyn Linford - Страница 10
ОглавлениеSummers don’t last forever. Even the seemingly longest, hottest and most idyllic of them must - it appears - come to their inevitable soggy end. I come from a family that used to be known - a mite irreverently, I might add - as one of mixed origin. That is to say that one half of the parental duo - ipso facto, my mother - was Catholic, and that the other half - not so ipso facto, guess who? - was Protestant. It seems that my father had tried his best to follow the course of conversion but had failed at the last ecumenical hurdle. Nevertheless, in accordance with Papal-edict, he had agreed that my schooling - both moral and intellectual - should be handed over to the Roman Catholic Church and its allied system of religious education. The first problem to overcome was one of omission. Despite the supposedly omnipotent presence of God, the communion of saints and the apostolic order, there seemed to have been something of a heavenly oversight. Pitsea - land of the heathen that it was - was without a Catholic school to call its own.
Thus it was that on a wet and windy September morning I found myself running along - somewhat unenthusiastically - behind my mother, en route to the school-bus pick-up point. Even on the worst of days there is joy to be had by the adventurous of spirit. What kind of joy would this be, you might say, on such a torrential, windswept, school-looming slop of a day? Puddles, I answer, unhesitatingly! Puddles, scourge of the adult, manna to the young and the young at heart! “ ‘urry up, we’re goin’ ter miss the bus! Git out o’ that warta, I’ve jus’ polished them shoes! What the dickens d’you fink yer up ter?” Ah, joy to the ears it is, even now. What child - one conjectures - has never experienced the pleasures of teeming rain? Not least - one suspects - because of the growing awareness that the very same natural phenomenon is the one most despised by their elders and betters. What adults even, when propelled down the conduits of memory by the flashfloods of recollection, cannot remember - albeit with a sigh - the Pooh-stick escapades of their former lives? There by the raging gutters - oblivious to the screeching of my mother and the imminent inclemency of spilt ink and arithmetic - I followed my lolly-stick canoe down the Zambezi-like water courses of my imagination until it was lost forever over the precipitous edge of a gully-sucking drain. Onward I splashed under the dripping trees. Out into the cats and dogs, lashing at a slant, full pelt of the earlier than expected equinoctial blast. I crossed the main London Road without a care. Was scolded and ear-clipped for my thoughtless trouble and told to shut-up and shelter in the louring doorway of a nearby shop. I wiped the rain off the window and peered inside. That was a real shop. Not in a million years would it have qualified for a hygiene-certificate. There, everything was dusted with flour, and floured with dust. Produce and packaging were in enmity in those days. Barrels and bins were full to overflowing with all kinds of powdery and granular substances. Sugar and flour - webbed and foot-printed by mice and spiders and speckled with unspeakable black excrescences - vied for my attention with the rolled down sacks of split peas and pigeon-mixture. Butter was in slabs, cheese was mouldy, and bacon sliced wafer-thin and salt-cured wispy before one’s very eyes. The proprietary brands come flooding back: Brasso, at its knick-knack polishing best, Cherry-Blossom, for boots black or brown and for the smudged unsightly thumbprint on a stiff, studded and detachable collar, Blue-Bags for white washing, and Sunlight Soap for the dreaded duck-bobbing, ear, nose and throat clinical scrubbing on a Friday night. Next door to that shop was the shoe-repairers, known locally as the ‘snobs.’ There it was that a grey-haired, wizened, little old man, wearing a leather apron and with gold-rimmed spectacles perched on the end of his nose, hammered away at his last. He was then - and still is to my retarded mind - the template for every idea I’ve ever had about elves beavering away for Father Christmas in the frigid but frolicsome workshops at the North Pole. What a lovely, leathery smell exuded from that place. What a tick, tacks in the mouth, tock of a rhythmical music came from the swing of his arm’s precision. Here was the world of William Morris, writ large, the life-enhancing qualities of craftsmanship. Here, and by these methods, the workingman would overcome the tyrannical predations off his capitalist overlords and reform the social system to one of equality and justice for all. Work and workers would become as one. Opposites would be united. The last and all-redeeming higher synthesis would be finally and irrevocably achieved. Thus spake the personifications of hope gathered collectively in the precincts of that pivotal decade. Thus speak they still from the precincts and shopping malls of the nihilistic nineties. Here in this no hope, hole in the pocket, terminal brink of Giro-mania.
The bus drew up and to my dismay another small severance of the umbilical cord was about to take place. Not only was I going to a new school, but this time I was going to a new school on my own. Apart from the driver, we had our minders. A couple of old-time Catholic women well versed in the arts of scruffing the neck and dusting the seat of the pants. The bus was a green, crash-geared, vintage Eastern National double-decker. Inside it was a wondrous mix of wood, leather and metal, and the windows had either windy-handles or popup slit-eyed louvres. I believe that the collective noun for a busload of demented children is a riff-raff. Riff-raff we were. On that bus there were more decibels per/cubic inch than would eventually emanate from the ill-fated expansion-chambers of the TR2. Upstairs, our test-bedded feet clattered across the gridded metal floors and beat out an interminable mind-numbing tattoo. Pigtails were pulled and screams were issued in reply. The sounds of slapped legs and insolence drifted from the ever-changing directions of our patrolling warders. Between bouts of tears and giggling, blood-curdling cries and hoots of uncontrollable laughter, I managed to see something of the countryside out of the rain-washed, steamed-up windows of that omnibus from hell.
Early wet September was still more part of summer than it was of the approaching autumn. All was green fields, green hedgerows and green trees. A sopping, many-toned, paradoxical kaleidoscope of greenness was all there was of the world to be seen between Pitsea and that other marshland settlement, Stanford-le-Hope. The Five-Bells, Springfield and the Homesteads, were all places hardly noticed on that particular journey, that have since become the stock-in-trade of my earliest memories. The Five-Bells, an inn at the foot of a line of low hills facing southwards to Fobbing marshes and beyond to the Thames-Haven oil-refineries, was in those days a sleepy little corner of the world meandering around the lazy curve of a slow S bend. There under a group of the once ubiquitous elms, stood the blacksmiths with its forge. It was there that the protean character of metal was first perceived by my inquiring mind. What Prometheus had stolen, the blacksmith tamed, and by Jove he knew it. There it was that I saw the lifted feathery hooves of giant shires and the enormous muscular bulk of the Suffolk-punch. It was there that I heard the resounding, resonant ring of hammer on anvil. Where white-hot metals yielded to the blacksmith’s awesome power. Where bellows puffed and wheezed and blasted. Where smoke and sparks and coal-dust erupted from the molten core of the forge, like the fiery-breath of some infernal creature. Where tongues of glimmering iron were thrust into vats of water. Where the scolded air was tempered in a cloud of steam, and the ears’ involving labyrinths rang and recoiled from the hiss of imagined serpents.
Springfield, a tiny hamlet straddling the crossroads between the Five-Bells and the Homesteads, was the birthplace of my earliest agricultural experiences, peas and potatoes being the favoured crops in the area. As one who has been gainfully employed in harvesting both of these commonplace comestibles, I would say - pod for pod - that peas are by far the easiest proposition in terms of energy expended. Although, as is the way with all economies - the rural one being no exception - the harder, bent-double, back-breaking work of potato-picking offered the better financial returns. However, my back and the potato harvest never really came to terms with one and other. Radox, White-Horse oil, and bread-poultices were no substitute for the pleasures of a vertical existence. Say what you will. Quote Darwin or Desmond Morris if you must. But as far as I’m concerned walking along at ninety degrees to the perpendicular is not my idea of homo sapiens in their most sophisticated mode. Just the memory of it is enough to start a dull, unremitting ache in the depths of my lumbar region. I gave it my best shot - as they say in more progressive, go-for-it parts of the world. - but I’m afraid that my best shot was nothing less than a blank. Potatoes need a more heroic, how-the-west-was-won, sort of spirit than I could ever muster. No, for me it was peas. Petits pois, mange-tout, marrowfat, or any other variety you’d care to mention. I could sit down on the job with just a pile of sacks and a sunny day to keep me company. What more could you ask? I can’t remember just how much I got paid for a sack-full now, pennies, shillings, groats? It’s all far too long ago. What I do remember is being bored stiff with the time it took to fill a sack with peas. They were no ordinary sacks. Oh no! They were sacks designed by a committee of niggardly Essex farmers. To fill them up, one of my diminutive stature needed to stand on tiptoe with arms at full stretch. Needless to say, in order to lessen the effort involved a number of nefarious ploys were attempted. Padding out with vines was a favourite. Though most employers were up to that one. Seeing as they weighed the sacks as well, it was quite easy for them to sort out the wheat from the chaff - metaphorically speaking. The more conniving amongst us supplemented the vines with clods of clay or flint nodules. Even then, a good shake and a kick to the bottom of the sack exposed the deception - if somewhat painfully! All in all the farmers were on to most of the wrinkles. If there were other more successful scams, then I didn’t know about them. For me it was always the hard slog of honest physical labour. Good for the soul, but lousy for the piggybank!
The Homesteads - next stop Stanford-le-Hope - lived up to its name. This was the bungalow-belt in earnest. Slightly more up-market than the plotlands proper. Although still surrounded by farms and woodland, to my young self it had something of the air of prosperity about it. For a start we had travelled through it on a bus. Which in itself presupposes a road of sorts. Mind you, prosperity had yet to deal a blow to the highway’s equivalent of crop-circles - namely potholes. These mysterious entities - if a hole can be rightly called an entity - appeared out of nowhere. It was a Bermuda-Triangle for the local authorities. Council workmen sent out to do battle with these alien invasions had been known to disappear for days on end. Only to be found at last huddled together over black, steaming kettles in sundry sheds half-hidden at the ends of cul-de-sacs. Brave men that they were - despite the perils of the British climate and the far greater evil of the time-and-motion-study man - they kept the arteries of commerce - and in my case, education - open. So, like it or not, Stanford-le-Hope came shuddering into view. The church and the portals of an educational establishment little changed since the relief of Mafeking were about to extend - in the form of priests and nuns - a disciplinarian’s welcome to the approaching rabble.
This was the archetypical school of every conceivable scholastic nightmare. It was the epitome of traditional values. Its very structure seemed designed to instill the maximum amount of fear possible. The redbrick, towering Victorian edifice glared back at the sun-shot clearing of the storm, from its monumental high sash- windows. It had all the drama of a biblical epic. A vision of Elijah controlling the tempest at will. I could hear the implications, rain or drought, don’t ask the meteorologists just study the biblical texts, its fundamental to your spiritual development. I was on my knees already. I’d seen the light, but the light in conjunction with a star, a lone expending brilliant, powerless in the face of the second law of thermodynamics. Islanded and oppressed by the surrounding aeons of eternal darkness. “Form yourselves into five straight - I said straight! - lines,” came the strident command from the oft-times vesper whispering lips of a Whirling Dervish of a nun. It had begun. My infantile version of the Enlightenment, countered by bouts of Torquemada-like inquisition, had moved into its catechismal phase. Question and answer was to be our modus operandi. We were to be told what the questions were then given the appropriate answers to be learnt by rote. This was education in the strictest sense of the word. Seated at our sloping wooden desks - pens at the ready - we would be expected to respond to any doctrinal whim of our peripatetic, desk-slapping mentors. On that particular day, prison itself, the very dungeons of the most dismal of medieval castles, would have seemed preferable to what I was about to endure. My newfound surroundings will no doubt be familiar to many amongst you. The parquet flooring - buffed to a pernicious brilliance - waited like sheet-ice for the unwary speedster. The fifteen-foot high ceilings added greatly to one’s sense of inferiority and the blackboard and easel dominated the unfathomable foreground of each unintelligible classroom. The desks - as already noted - were of the wooden sloping variety, and unless my memory deceives me, seats were hard, attached and uncomfortable to live with. Along the top of the desks ran a groove. There we kept our pens and pencils. At the far end of the groove was the inkwell. Into this was inserted a small, cylindrical, porcelain pot, filled at intervals with what I’ve since come to know as octopus-oil. If you’d seen some of my earliest attempts at writing, the significance of the metaphor would become immediately apparent. Even now, whilst penning longhand this humble little autobiography, my fear of the handwriting class and my continually thwarted efforts to master the art of penmanship, haunt the very margins of the page. Things became so bad, that along with other graphical degenerates, I was relegated to the boiler-room for extra reading and writing lessons. Down there, deep in the bowels of that ship of knowledge, we were coached - not to say terrorized - individually. We sat on hard, slatted, wooden benches ranged either side of a white-scrubbed trestle table. There, with a scratchy overloaded pen and wads of blotting paper that didn’t blot, I wrote out the individual letters of the alphabet a million miserable times. There too, the repeat after me, spelling exercises helped to formulate a neurotic lexicographical disposition that plagues me to this very day.
Back upstairs in class on that first day I began to look about me at some of my fellow inmates. There was a plump little red-faced boy with the unusual - seeing as it was a Catholic school – Jewish sounding name of Finglestein. Still, being well and truly in the land of original sin he wouldn’t have to bear the full weight of the cross entirely on his own. Hearne, another remembered only by his surname, had white speckles and blotches behind all of his fingernails, which seem to suggest some sort of calcium deficiency. Whatever, the nickname of Mr. Pastry was inevitable. One whose name I can remember in full - can never forget in fact - was Jethro Buckley. He was reputed to have come from one of the large Essex gipsy families. Whether this was so - he certainly had something of a wayward and recalcitrant spirit - I couldn’t rightly say. What I do know is, he was about to become a good and loyal friend, although, the word friend could just as easily be translated - accomplice - for all intents and purposes. Most of my early troubles were either influenced or instigated by this devil-may-care apotheosis of a fallen angel. Strangely, I remember next to nothing in the way of girls at that particular time. Girls on the bus I recall, but they could have been destined for elsewhere. Sandals, white-socks and gingham dresses come to mind but the faces are vague and I couldn’t put a name to any of them. I was at that stage in my life when girls were considered to be surplus to requirements. Mothers-and-fathers and doctors-and-nurses were pleasures as yet to be refined. For now, apart from my female kith and kin and the unmerciful sisters of infinite wisdom, it was to be a predominantly masculine world.
Boys one instinctively understood. What to other eyes was seen as mischievous, sullen, or even as downright obstreperous, was to the stripling mind as natural as the clash of conkers or the sidelong, vituperative, mumbling of curses. Autumn was our arena. That postage-stamp of a playground appeared to us to be of inordinate dimensions. Running along the edge of the road, around the front of the school and up to the entrance of the church itself, our limits were defined by the spiky green spears of the statutory cast-iron railings. To the south, a low, grey, stonewall separated us from the convent and its thin-lipped and beady-eyed sorority. Between them and us grew temptation in the form of raspberries, gooseberries and blackcurrants. At the sunset end of the playground were sited the ‘offices of ablution,’ more commonly known as the ‘bogs.’ There sinks and urinals were open to the elements and even the cubicles themselves - owing to the dilapidated state of their corrugated iron roofs - could be considered more of an en plein air experience than other more delicate descriptions could confer. Over and above that high-stench, putrefying cesspit of an excuse for a toilet, spread out the leaves and branches of two tall and partially entwining walnut trees. Once again God had intervened. He, in His high-minded beneficence had decided to create something close to paradise here on earth. Boys and trees are inseparable, although, say that to an operative in the fracture-clinic and the shortest of shrift will become your true and just deserts. However, there in the mellowest of seasons, the green-splitting globes of the crop in question gave us a glimpse of their cerebral centres. Continuing with the mental metaphor, one has to ponder on the origin of the word ‘nutty’ itself. This - almost literally - cortex of a shell certainly inspired behaviour from both myself and others that could definitely be termed, as my mother might have said, “free pence short of a shillin’.” What possible vestige of sanity is to be found in the vision of a group of vociferous louts hurling great knobbly cudgels up into the trees immediately above their young and barely protected craniums? No good could come of it, you might say. And you wouldn’t be far wrong. Cudgels and heads not infrequently came into contact with one and other. Lumps the size of eggs at a first holy- communion breakfast sprouted from the skulls of black, blond and ginger-haired urchins with equal vigour. Those more akin to monkeys than to the be-cudgelled Neanderthals below, leapt about in the trees with all the agility of arthritic squirrels. If you’ve ever seen a wildlife film of monkeys in full swing - or more appropriately heard the sound of them in full cry on the approach of a predator - then you will have some idea of the shrill-throated, high-flung, pandemonium that I’m talking about. Walnuts in great showering cascades tumbled, split, burst out and rolled off in all directions. A veritable Gatling gun of ricocheting shots reverberated off the corrugated iron roof, to where the resultant downfall of scattering prizes had yet to run the gauntlet of the ear-ripped, legs-bitten, rugby-tackling maniacs of St Joseph’s seminary for the mentally insane.
One of the unsolved mysteries of primary school education is that of that excruciating sub-occult phenomenon - the verruca - or more commonly, the wart. From time immemorial the esoteric significance of warts has been paramount. Why else would such a plethora of folklore have been built up around them? Rubbing one’s hands under the waning moon is supposed to be effective in their removal. Whether or not it does anything for those growing under the feet is a matter for the clairvoyant amongst you. Tales of touching the dead or their accoutrements as being methods equally efficacious when it comes to the magical removal of these mysterious tumescences - also abound. As a last example - sufficient I feel to satisfy the hermetic temperament of the most supernatural of minds - I shall relate the following: Take a length of string. Tie in it as many knots as you have warts. Touch each wart with each knot, and then throw the whole caboodle over the back of your left hand shoulder into a stagnant pond. As the strings decays your warts will disappear. But of course, you must not tell anybody. Who would! I beg to ask? This brings me to the most painful and embarrassing point of the story thus far. I may have lacked the mental capacity for the full acquisition and weight of religious and secular knowledge, but I certainly didn’t lack the physical wherewithal when it came to the accumulation of warts. Warts and I had something of a newly acquired affinity. That school was a wart-mine. The richest seam of warts in Christendom was to be found in those unhallowed catacombs. Everyone had warts. Even the nuns and priests had warts. But they it seemed only had venial warts. Warts of the mortal variety were reserved for us of the prepubescent sinning persuasion. I had them on my feet, knees and hands. Fortunately my blond, blue-eyed, cherubic face was spared the ravages of those pestilent blemishes. Placed - as they were in my case - strategically, the more spiritually adept amongst my contemporaries may have been inclined to think of them not as warts, but as stigmata. But for me alas, they were just warts. Being in the cloistered halls of Catholic learning, recourse to the more superstitious means of eradicating the affliction were of course unthinkable. Even prayer it seemed was not enough. Once again - as so often happened in my life - fate intervened. St Josephs and the clinic were mercifully separated by half a mile of blossoming suburbia. As if of divine providence my suffering was compensated for by the twice-weekly journeys through that oasis of health and freedom. Lessons could be forgotten. Knowledge was to be no more than the white puffs of amorphous clouds as they traversed and dusted the infinite spaces of the sky’s blue slate. All was trees and birds and gardens. It was the acme of didacticism. All I wanted to know; all I needed to know was there. The clinic was a different kettle of conundrums. There after booking in and waiting the statutory aeon whilst pretending to read magazines you wouldn’t even if you could, you were finally ushered into the surgery. There it was that prodding and poking became a way of life. Why one should be made to strip, cough, poke your tongue out and be weighed, all in the name of a cure for warts, passeth all understanding. But then, such is the innocence of youth. There, warts were regarded at clinical distance with no more than a tong-like nod towards the arts of diagnosis. In the dispensary - the twentieth century’s answer to the coven - a ritualistic violet-coloured potion was being concocted on my behalf. This was to become my indelible trademark, more conspicuous even than the cross of ashes thumbed into the forehead at the beginning of Lent. I, the blue-spotted one, would be known henceforth, from afar.
Part of the school - in every sense of the word - the church of St Josephs lifted its bell-ringing, mass-summoning tower into the grey-skied, low church, heaven of that town on the edge of the Essex marshes. It was from there that the full and chastening power of Catholic ritual was to be daily performed for the betterment of my eternal soul. Whether from behind a mesh in a dark and dingy cubicle or kneeling in front of the priest - enthroned in his full regalia - confession and its subsequent absolution were to become my raison d’etre. I was undoubtedly a sinner. It was common knowledge. My mother knew it, my father knew it, and the nuns knew it. Even the priest - oblivious to any attempt at mitigation on my part - sided with the rest of them. One soon learnt that the sin of inventing a sin was far easier to live with than trying to explain one’s innocence to a disbelieving confessor. “Fergiv’ me farver for I ‘ave sinned, it’s bin seven days since me last confession.” “And what have you to confess my son,” came the intoned reply.
“I stole a penny from me muvver’s purse farver,” I lied, “You know that’s very wrong of you, don’t you,” reprimanded the priest. “Yes farver I do,” I continued contritely. “I won’t do it agin, honest.” I knew that this relatively minor infringement of celestial law would be treated as venial only. Both parties would be satisfied. A sin had been admitted and absolution administered. Tacit agreement as to one’s place in the hierarchy of goodness was all that was required. Only the penance remained. “Two Hail-Marys and three Our-Fathers, kneeling outside on the gravel,” came the theological command. This may seem somewhat harsh to the uninitiated, but for someone who has prostrated himself and prayed fervently at all fourteen guilt-inducing stations of the cross, this was a real - if somewhat knee-cratering - cinch.
On occasions, sins of a more mortal magnitude - such as the obvious sacrilege of wearing a hat in the inner sanctum, or giggling while crossing oneself with holy water - were reported to the Mother Superior. She was superior by name and superior by nature. That red-faced, black-cloaked, banshee of a woman, drilled into the world and its unsuspecting occupants through a pair of all-seeing, all-knowing, laser-focused eyes. The whole terrifying effect enhanced and magnified by horn-rimmed, pebble-glazed spectacles. When summoned to her office, previous threats of purgatory and hellfire were relegated to the rightful significance of their lower order. There she would stand, stiff as a crucifix and far less forgiving. An assortment of canes of varying lengths and diameters were removed slowly, one at a time, from a long leather tube and then tested for curve and swishability. Throughout this unnerving process the rising pitch of verbal chastisement always preceded the inevitable caning. “Hold out your hand! ” Thwack! “The other one!” Thwack! The pattern of my religious life had evolved. Flagellation in one form or another was to be the scourge of my tender years. The evidence of the accumulated effect of those beatings exhibited itself in the manner of raised, hard, calloused skin that remained on the palms of my hands until well beyond the demise of puberty.
