Daniel Martin (11 page)

And I owe him other poetries, quite literal, though like so many true gifts from parents to children, they took many years to mature. When I was a child he liked, or at any rate regarded it as his duty, to come and read to me at bedtime, if his duties allowed. Sometimes, as I grew older (though not nearly old enough) he would read a simpler passage from one of his seventeenth-century texts I think more for the sound of the English than for the religious content, although he may have hoped for some Couè-like benefit. Occasionally he would try to explain the doctrinal situation behind one of these passages in terms a small boy might understand, as a less abstruse father might have tried to convey the real history of cowboys and Red Indians. I certainly grew up with a vision of some very confused theological gun-slinging, and a distinct sense that the Church had once been a much more exciting place to inhabit.

I can see now he always wished I was older; it was as if he foresaw that when the nine-year-old he read to became the nineteen he secretly dreamt him to be, such conversation would be impossible: I should have escaped him. But I mustn’t make him too austere and unworldly. He very rarely returned from his occasional sorties to Exeter, where he always found time for an hour or two in the antiquarian bookshops, without something for me: it was usually a story by one of the boy’s writers of his own childhood, a Henty or a Talbot Baines Reed, and I would much rather have had the latest Biggies or a Beano Annual, but I still enjoyed them.

Once he handed me, after one of these expeditions, a book of fables. The price he bought it for is still on the flyleaf: one shilling and sixpence. He had obviously glanced at it, decided the English was suitably simple and edifying, and the pictures pretty and harmless. I thought the queer little uncoloured prints terribly dull; at first glance, a really measly present. But in fact it was a Bewick, the 1820 anthology of his work patched together round Gay’s Fables. Though I didn’t realize it then, it was my first contact with a great English original. At the time (I was ten) I thought the book a ludicrous and shameful error on my father’s part, because turning through the pages for the pictures I came on one I knew he couldn’t have noticed in the shop: the famous cut of a doctor of divinity spurning the solicitation of a one-legged beggar, while behind him a dog pisses down his gown—a little moral tale whose concise brilliance I was to remember all through my childhood… and beyond. Then there were other scandalous scenes of ladies with bare breasts. I was shocked particularly and then fascinated by the one that was headed Indolence and Sloth: the sleeping young man with the jordan under his bed and the two women, one naked and the other clothed, beside it, seeming to discuss something as they watched him. I was tempted to show this gross lapse of caution to Aunt Millie, but didn’t, in case my father promptly descended on the book and confiscated it.

Just how great and quintessentially English an artist Bewick is I still have to learn each time I look at him; but at least the small boy came to realize something intense and private in the artist that called to his own nature. He began a little, through the years, to see with Bewick’s eyes, as he was later to see with John Clare’s and Palmer’s and Thoreau’s. That dog-eared copy of the Select Fables is now the last book I would ever sell.

A somewhat similar thing was to happen two or three years later, when I was in the throes of first puberty. One wet day, in despair, I pulled down a dull-looking book from an upper shelf in my father’s study. It was the first volume of Herrick’s Hesperides; by benign chance the page fell open at one of his coarsest epigrams and I saw a word in print, fart, I had hitherto imagined was something one only giggled over, out of reach of adult ears, at school. Up in my room I read on. Much of it I couldn’t understand, but the mingled brutality and eroticism of what I could was a revelation. I was to purloin those two volumes countless times again during the following years. They had a profound influence, the secrecy with which I had to steal them, rearranging the books so that no empty space showed, then hiding them in my room… but, with a healthier secrecy, their lyrical genius, and Herrick’s underlying pagan humanity, also seeped into me. His former ‘lothed’ living at Dean Prior was within cycling distance of us, and I must have been one of the youngest votaries who has ever stood before his epitaph there, though I think it was less out of gratitude than sheer disbelief. How could someone of my father’s calling ever have existed and been allowed to write such wicked verse?

Later, at Oxford, I had one day to produce an essay on Herrick for my tutor. I wasn’t so foolish as to make it quite autobiographical, but it did make an engaging minor poet out to be a pinnacle of human sanity and supreme exponent of love of fife—he was my Rabelais, of course. ‘Very interesting, Mr Martin,’ said my tutor when I had finished reading. ‘And now perhaps next week you would be kind enough to write me an essay on Herrick.’ The snub was deserved; but I was dealing with someone who had only read the man… not lived him.

My father did do some censoring. Another bedtime book he read from was the Jacobean collection, The Shirburn Ballads. It was not until he died and I was going through his library before the great bulk of it was sent for sale that I discovered the Shirburn is not just an anthology of hymn-tunes; the religious ballads were the only ones he ever read to me, to my recollection. I had already been set at literal Latin and Greek at my prep school, and my father read English verse with the emphatic stress of his own classical schooldays. He particularly liked the broadsheets in the rhythm of the amphimacer, which indulged this love of a heavy beat we would even get them at Sunday School occasionally. He would stand there, waving his free hand like a would-be conductor, making me go red as the kids around tried to stifle their giggles… how could he make such an ass of me with his stupid poem-reading? But now, at least in their bedtime renderings, they are among my good memories of him.

All that heart can conceive, ear can hear, eye can see,

All, and more, I possess, sweet JESU CHRIST, by thee.

Heaven and earth, all therein,

Life, limb, thou gavest me.

Have I not cause to sing

Jesu, come thou to me.

Though the world tempt me sore,

though the flesh trouble me,

Though the Devil would devour,

my refuge is in thee.

It was not to be. But I think if it ever had, it might have come more from that private voice; its endless long-short-long, the due pause it gave every caesura, those little rocking boats of primitive faith. He used to send me to sleep with them sometimes; but to the best of sleeps.

Our 1930s were not like the world’s; not shadowed at all to this small boy, but endlessly leafy, sunlit, ancient-walled, secure, spaced by bells; all smell of mown grass and islanded from towns. The only real shadow lay beyond the iron gate that led through into the churchyard. My unknown mother’s grave; but even that seemed mainly protective, quietly watching. Each autumn we planted her two favourite primroses round the border: Quaker’s Delight and the wild oxlip, the true plant from East Anglia, not the primrose-cowslip cross. My father had a clerical friend there who used to send seed especially. By late April the grave was always a quilt of lilac clusters and tall pale-yellow heads; after Sunday matins, people would stroll down the path to admire it.

The war came, and puberty for me, and a much darker chapter; so dark that for years I let the earlier days stay buried. I began having serious religious doubts after a year at public school. It was only partly that I lacked the courage (nothing conforms like a dormitory of small boys) of my mercilessly teased and mocked C. of E. background. The boredom I had felt in secret for years, the endless, endless, endless round of hymns, prayers, collects, psalms, the same faces, the same voices, the same corpus of beliefs and routines that didn’t seem to tie in at all with reality, all that was now translated to a world where to express one’s boredom with chapel was the done thing, not the forbidden. Small boys’ arguments for atheism may not have much logic or cogency; but they came much fresher and (though I knew how to cover up, even then) more attractively to me than to the others. So too did the pleasures of sexuality; I fell into that, from the profoundly sexless and emotion-banning ambience of the Vicarage, like Adam himself. I had agonizing feelings of shame and guilt, of course, and masturbation and blasphemy became inextricably interwoven. Every indulgence in the one threatened the traditional punishment of the other… heavens opening, thunderbolts raining, divine anathema. But nothing happened in fact.

I remember talking about all this with Anthony years afterwards at Oxford, and his smiling and saying that to derive disbelief from a failure to punish was almost as bad as deriving belief from a certainty of grace. I was never in danger of the worse sin. I discovered the unholy pleasures of gossip and malice; they seemed honest after fifteen years of imposed charity in the discussion of other people’s faults. And I became very eager indeed to prove I was no tame victim of my background; swore and blasphemed, swopped filth with the best, after lights out. I discovered new aspects of myself; an inventiveness, even though it most often manifested itself as a skill in lying; a tongue, an extrovert mask. I also wanted to succeed, with a ferocity that might not have been predicted of my earlier years, and I worked hard though that was partly out of guilt for so many betrayals in other matters. We also had the standard English classics at home and I was better read than most of my contemporaries. I continued to read more all through my school career. My discoveries (the shock of Samuel Butler, and the joy) also increasingly sapped my respect for my father and his faith.

The real severance came after an event that must wait to be told. But by the age of seventeen I was a fully-fledged atheist, so convinced that I went dutifully if gracelessly through all the old observances when I was home for the holidays. I went on going to church and even taking communion from my father’s hands right up to his death in 1948, without an iota of belief and a mounting quota of sins. I thought it was adult to deceive the old man so, thought it was mainly condescension… and kindness a little. He had faced up to the fact, before I left school, that I was not going to keep up the family tradition; and at least outwardly, taken it with a resigned equanimity. But I think he secretly hoped I would one day change my mind, and I lacked the heart to destroy that last illusion.

I even managed, dimly, to begin the reconciliation with my rural background. School, other minds and other places, to say nothing of the growing aestheticism of my view of life, at least allowed me to see that it had its charms, even though it still and for many years to come had to be presented to one’s friends as so much unspeakable drag. The lovely rich peace of the countryside, the calm of the Vicarage, its fine garden… even our two churches. I had the ghastly Late Victorian architecture of the chapel at school to put them by now; and began to see them as connoisseurs of Devon churches have always seen them: for as good a pair even without their celebrated roodscreens and splendid fifteenth-century painted rows of Apostles and Elders as any in the county. The one beside the Vicarage had a massive fluted and streamlined tower soaring (the simile comes from later times) like a space rocket without its cone-capsule. It was nobly airy and light inside, thanks to its huge Tudor windows; then the churchyard beyond, the two elms and the yew, and Dartmoor in the distance. It also held my favourite religious pinup, who had somehow managed to gatecrash the more orthodox assembly on the roodscreen, the pagan figure of the Cumaean Sibyl. My father always pointed her out to visitors, to show his broadmindedness—and show off his ability to quote from the Fourth Eclogue.

Our second church was smaller, its tower sitting like a barn-owl in the green dusk of its long-deserted combe. All its old box-pews were still in existence, and it had a womblike peace, a domesticity, a femaleness, and we all secretly preferred it to the grander building nearer home. Curiously, it always attracted good congregations, in spite of its inaccessibility; people would come from far and wide in the area, even during the war. One church was magnificent stone prose, but the other a folk-poem. I shall never rate consecrated ground; yet I know in which churchyard I would. rather lie… and it is not, alas, beside my parents.

And finally there was Aunt Millie.

She was a thin, small woman, in retrospect always with something faintly (and quite misleadingly) of the Radclyffe Hall era of lesbianism about her, perhaps it was just that she always had her straight grey hair cut in a kind of Eton crop, invariably wore ‘sensible’ clothes and brogue-like shoes, had no apparent feminine vanities at all. Nothing, in reality, could have been less butch than her placid composure. Her one small vice was smoking, and that and the severe hair and the glasses could give her face a semblance of intellectuality, as if she were hiding another personality. In fact I realized during my adolescence that she was very nearly simpleminded, quite at sea with any print outside Good Housekeeping and the parish magazine and the local newspaper, of which she read every line, and every week. If I could with some reason curse my father for our way of life he was at least intelligent enough for some sort of choice to be imaginable—it was impossible with Millie. Her one skill was thinking the best of everyone and everything within her domain of knowledge.

If my father had been the commandant of a concentration camp, she would have come to see the necessity of genocide—but not out of evil… out of a total lack of belief in her own ability to judge. Her real religion was not in church, but in her view of other people’s motives, of the import of village scandals and tragedies. She had a phrase she would use to conclude discussion of all but irremediable disaster: Perhaps it’s for the best. Even my father would look gently over his spectacles at her before some such applications of this optimism. Once, when we were alone, and she had said it of something that even Dr Pangloss could have seen was for the worst, I laughed at her. And she said quietly, ‘Hoping is no sin, Daniel.’

I harried her abominably, like any spoilt son his mother. She could share my budding literary enthusiasms if only she’d try, she could move with the times a little more, cider-cup was not the end of the world at a tennis-party.. poor woman, it wasn’t fair at all.

She was much nearer sainthood than anyone else in my life, the kind of sanctity Flaubert defined for all time in Un Coeur Simple.

I didn’t read that masterpiece until she was dead; and recognized her, and my own past arrogance, at once. She was still alive, living with my other aunt, her married sister in Cumberland, when the divorce with Nell took place. She wrote me a long rambling letter that tried to understand what had happened, tried very hard not to blame me, but significantly did not try to pretend that perhaps it was for the best, though she did end, the dear old fool, by pressing me to go out to ‘one of the colonies’ and ‘start a new life’. I had passed several light-years beyond her comprehension by then… but not her forgiveness. That outreached all time and space.

I disowned all this world for so long simply because I saw it as freakishly abnormal. But I see it now as no more than an extreme example of the general case. My contemporaries were all brought up in some degree of the nineteenth century, since the twentieth did not begin till 1945. That is why we are on the rack, forced into one of the longest and most abrupt cultural stretches in the history of mankind. Already what I was before the Second World War seems far more than four decades away; much more like the same number of centuries.

And then what we once were is now severed in a very special way from the present—reduced to an object, an artifice, an antique, a flashback… something discontinuous, and disconnected from present being. My generation wanted to shed unnecessary guilt, irrational respect, emotional dependence; but the process has become altogether too much like sterilization. It may be a remedy for one problem, but it has created another. We are saved from breeding relationships we cannot feed; but we are also prevented from breeding those we need. All pasts shall be coeval, a back-world uniformly not present, relegated to the status of so many family snapshots. The mode of recollection usurps the reality of the recalled.

Under the tyranny of the eye, that glutton for frontiers, this is the prime alienation of the cinema; always inherent in the theatre, yet obscured there because of different performances and productions of the same text. But the final cut allows no choice, no more than the one angle; no creative response, no walking round, no time for one’s own thought. In the very act of creating its own past, the past of the scenario and the past of the shooting, it destroys the past of the mind of each spectator.

Images are inherently fascistic because they over-stamp the truth, however dim and blurred, of the real past experience; as if, faced with ruins, we must turn architects, not archaeologists. The word is the most imprecise of signs. Only a science-obsessed age could fail to comprehend that this is its great virtue, not its defect. What I was trying to tell Jenny in Hollywood was that I would murder my past if I tried to evoke it on camera; and it is precisely because I can’t really evoke it in words, can only hope to awaken some analogous experience in other memories and sensitivities, that it must be written.

I draggle kicking down the back lane to Fishacre, sent out by Aunt Millie to tell Father the carpenter from Totnes has come, he’s forgotten and gone visiting old Major Arbuthnot who has gout and wax in his ears, about the rehanging of the tenor bell. Burning May, the hedges dense with cow-parsley, whose coarse bottom leaves are stained brick-red with the lane dust, whose spoked heads are taller than mine and dense with insects; flies, drones, rustred grenadiers. Late afternoon. I’ve broken off a hollow parsley stalk, made a blowpipe out of it, poisoned Amazonian grass-haulms skittering in the sun, they won’t fly straight, stupid, it’s so hot, and I wanted to play in the garden before prep, lost in my ‘house’ in the copper beech. A woodlark sings over the huge hedge, in the distance somewhere, bell-fluting trisyllable, core of green, core of spring-summer, already one of those sounds that creep into the unconscious and haunt one all one’s life, though all the little boy in the lane thinks is the name and clever—clever knowing it the name, not the bird. Now a plane drones slowly over, high in the azure, very different from the future-hidden Heinkel, and I stop and watch it. A Tiger Moth. Another name. I also know the real (though do not know that in that unconscious ‘real’ my redeemer cometh) tiger moth; the fluttery, zigzag-striped, chocolate-and-cream, black and red-orange Jersey Tiger. We catch some every year in the garden. The aeroplane is more interesting. I’m good at names. I shoot it down with a grass stalk.

My father appears, wheeling his bicycle up the hill, with a little girl beside him. I run down towards them, making like a messenger. The little girl is pudge-faced, her name is Margaret, they call her Squinty Four-eyes in Sunday School. She is cross-eyed and wears spectacles. I give my father the message and he says, ‘Oh dear. Oh yes.’ Then, ‘Thank you, Daniel.’ He hands me his umbrella to carry. Margaret stares at me. I say, ‘Good afternoon.’ She looks up at my father, then squints at me and says ‘‘Lo.’ She is walking up to see her auntie in the village. We trail back up the lane, my father in the middle, me to his left carrying the umbrella, Margaret a little behind, making strange purposeful thrusting strides every so often to keep up. I am eleven, she is ten. I like one girl in Sunday School, but it is not Margaret. I do not like girls, but I like sitting near this other girl and trying to sing louder than she does. Her name is Nancy. Her summer-blue eyes do not squint. They stare at you (she is eleven also) and make you hold your breath. She beats us all at it.

The woodlark sounds again. I tell my father. He stops. ‘Yes, so it is.’ He asks Margaret if she can hear the pretty bird. This time she squints at me before looking up at him. (‘Us ‘urd a birdy, mum, ‘n Mr Martin ‘e tell us ‘ur name!’ Little upward tonal leaps at mum and name.) Now she just nods gravely. Dopy little cottage oick. I am angry with her because she’ll get the ride now, not me. And sure enough, when the lane levels, it is her fat little legs that are lifted over the extra saddle on the crossbar. She wobbles off between my father’s arms. He goes slowly, but I have to trot. And the stupid umbrella. I am furious. We have a car, an ancient Standard Flying, but on some days my stupid father will use his rotten old bicycle like this. His pale beige summer visiting coat, his dark grey trousers in bicycle clips, the straw panama with the black band which can’t blow off, there’s an eyelet in the brim behind attached by a safety-pin to a sort of black bootlace that ends in a watch-chain bar pushed though his buttonhole. (Though at least I am spared the shame of the children of the vicar of Little Hembury five miles away. Their father has been seen cycling in knee-length shorts and a solar topee; and reported to the bishop for it, what’s more.) We cross the main road, then on down the lane to the village. I sulk, I refuse to keep up, they disappear. I dread the thought of meeting anyone. They will laugh at me, carrying the ridiculous gamp. Village boys, worst of all; and worstest of all, since I am a pupil in a preparatory school outside the next village, I am condemned to uniform stupid grey shorts with a pink-and-white canvas belt done up with a snakes-head clasp, stupid long grey stockings also banded pink and white at the top (dear God, how I hate pink, and shall do all my life); stupid black shoes I have to clean myself every day. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I seethe. I let the wretched umbrella flop and trail behind me, ferrule scraping on the patched macadam. I come round a bend, I see my father at the gate of the council-house where Margaret’s auntie the midwife lives. He looks back towards me, talking. Margaret stands half hidden behind her fat aunt. I wish I was anyone’s child but a vicar’s. My father raises his straw hat to the midwife, then turns away and stands in the lane waiting for me. I impersonate heat exhaustion and atrocious exploitation.