Читать книгу Seeing Things - Oliver Postgate - Страница 12

When they went to Paris Ray and Daisy usually left John and me at home with the housekeeper or, quite often, they would send us with her to a left-wing holiday camp called Treetops. Once or twice we stayed with Grannie, Ray’s mother, sometimes with other relations. Only once did we spend a long time in a completely strange environment.

This happened at the beginning of 1933 when Daisy had arranged to become a film star. No, that’s an exaggeration. What happened was that Rudolph Messel, who was a very rich young man as well as a socialist, had formed an organization called the Socialist Film Council, which was going to make The Road to Hell, a film about the evils of unemployment and the Means Test. Everything was set up for this and shooting was about to start when Amy, our housekeeper and the king-pin of the family’s life, had to go back to her home in Leiston. This was a serious crisis because somebody had to look after John and me.

So, towards the end of March, we were sent to Woodstock School as boarders.

Woodstock School only took about half a dozen boarders at a time but that was quite enough because Mrs de Vries, the headmistress, saw to them herself. We slept in tiny rooms high up under the roof, we had our meals and were left to play in a large, uncomfortable, bare room with a floor of brown linoleum, and each weekday morning at a quarter to nine we simply went to school, but through a green-baize door in the hall, not through the main entrance.

I was lonely and miserable so I was quite glad to be taken over by a slightly older girl whose name was, I think, Laura. She was very shocked to discover that I had not been taught to pray because she knew it was essential to ‘pray for God’, as she put it, every morning and evening. She explained that if I didn’t do this God wouldn’t know I was there and consequently wouldn’t be able to look after me. She showed me how to kneel at the foot of the bed and told me what to say. I remember I felt a bit dubious about the whole procedure but this didn’t interest Laura. Her only purpose was to get me to do what had to be done. What I thought about it was irrelevant.

In fact I didn’t think anything about it. I mean, as far as I know, I had no previous acquaintance with the subject. Ray and Daisy were simply not religious, they didn’t talk about God. Nor, as far as I can remember, did Amy. So Laura had a clear field.

I asked Laura a lot of questions about God and also about Jesus who, she said, was also God but not quite. Her answers weren’t really very clear but I was able to piece together a picture of a white-haired old man, a bit like Grandad, but cross. He was sitting on a white cloud surrounded by glory, which was goldcoloured and shiny. I wondered where He was. Laura said He was everywhere, which didn’t seem very likely, and that He could do anything and see everything, and that He moved in a mysterious way.

I knew about that. I had once seen my parents’ friend, the novelist Naomi Mitchison, ‘move in a mysterious way’. She was playing charades I think, wearing a wide hat and a cloak. It had been very impressive.

I observed the rituals Laura required and also consented to do a ballet dance with her in front of everybody, or, to tell the truth, half a ballet dance, because she had dressed me in a sort of frill, like a vestigial tutu, and after the gramophone ran down in the middle of the dance I refused to go on with it on the grounds that I was making an idiot of myself. After that she gave up her charge of my life and let me be.

But the question of the existence or otherwise of God remained in my mind. As far as I could tell He didn’t seem to be taking a very active part in my life because cause and effect seemed to be proceeding according to what I assumed to be natural laws. However, it was worth while finding out, so, roaming through the empty school one chilly afternoon, I decided to confront my maker and test His mettle.

I looked out of a window and said: ‘All right then, try this. If that bird gets to the telegraph pole before the red bus reaches the pillar-box there is a God. If it doesn’t there isn’t.’

This was a very fair test because the bird and the bus were going at about the same speed and, as far as any human could estimate, were going to pass the pole and the pillar-box at about the same moment; so it would only require a minute twitch of omnipotence to slow the bus down a shade and let the bird win. Nobody else would notice.

In the event the bus and the bird arrived exactly simultaneously. This told me that if God was there He probably wasn’t paying attention. So I repeated the tests a few times. God scored one, Non-existence two, with three draws.

Then it began to snow, which was unusual in April. I watched the big white flakes swing slowly down and melt away on the wet ground. They fell so thickly that I could hardly see the road, let alone the pillar-box. It suddenly occurred to me that God, if He was there, might have decided He’d had more than enough of this carry-on. So I rather quickly turned away and ran back down the empty brown lino corridor to find the others. I was cold and I wanted, more than anything in the world, to go home.