Free Fall (7 page)

“Ooh! Aah-ooh!”

The verger tapped on the door and inside someone scrambled to his feet.

“Come in then, come in! What is it?”

We went through into a dark room over limitless carpet. There was a parson standing in the middle. He was so tall that he seemed to me to ascend into the shadows that surrounded and roofed everything. I looked at what I could with a strange lack of fear or interest. The nearest thing to me was a section of the parson’s trousers. They were sharply creased except at the knees just below my face where the cloth was rounded and shone like black glass. Once more two people argued above me and my attention, in terms which meant nothing to me and which I have forgotten. I was more concerned with and puzzled by my tendency to lurch sideways; and I thought I would like to kneel down, not because of the parson but because if I rolled into a ball there might be no need to wonder so absurdly about which way up. All I knew was that the parson was refusing to do something and that the verger was pleading with him.

Then the parson spoke loudly and as I now think, with a kind of despair.

“Very well, Jenner. Very well. If I must be invaded—”

I was alone with him. He moved away, sat down in a mother-shaped chair by the dead fire.

“Come here.”

I moved my feet carefully over the carpet and stood by the arm of the chair. He bent his head, beyond the length of black thigh, looked searchingly into my face, examined me carefully from head to foot. He came back at last to my face.

He spoke slowly, absently.

“You’d be a pretty child if you kept yourself clean.”

He gripped the arms of the chair deep and a goose walked over his grave. I saw that he was straining away
from me and I looked down in sudden shame for the girl’s word “pretty” and for my so obviously distasteful dirt. We fell into a long silence while I saw that his narrow shoes were turned in towards each other. And on the right-hand side the universe was still roaring and full of stars.

“Who told you to do it?”

That was Philip, of course.

“A little boy like you couldn’t have an idea like that without someone suggesting it.”

Poor man. I glanced up and then down again, I inspected the enormous explanation, saw it was beyond me and gave up.

“Now tell me the name of the man who told you to do it and I’ll let you go.”

But there was no man. There was only Philip Arnold and Sammy Mountjoy.

“Why did you do it then?”

Because. Because.

“But you
must
know!”

Of course I knew. I had a picture in my mind of the whole transaction that had led me into this position—I saw it in elaborate detail. I did it because that other parson who talked to Philip had made it seem possible that the church contained more excitement and adventure than the pictures; because I was an outcast and needed something to hurt and break just to show them; because a boy who has hit Johnny Spragg so hard that his mum complained to the head teacher has a position to keep up; because, finally, among the singing stars, I’d been, three times and couldn’t pee any more. I knew so many things. I knew I should be interrogated with terrible, adult
patience. I knew I should never grow up to be as tall and majestic, knew that he had never been a child, knew we were different creations each in our appointed and changeless place. I knew that the questions would be right and pointless and unanswerable because asked out of the wrong world. They would be righteous and kingly and impossible from behind the high wall. Intuitively I knew this, that the questions would be like trying to lift water in a sieve or catch a shadow by the hand: and this intuition is one of the utter sorrows of childhood.

“Now then. Who told you to do it?”

For of course, when the glamour is gone, the phantom enemies, the pirates and highwaymen, robbers, cowboys, good men and bad, we are faced by the brute thing; the adult voice and four real walls. That is where the policemen and probation officers, teachers and parents achieve the breakdown of our integrated simplicity. The hero is overthrown, remains whimpering and defenceless, a nothing.

How long should I have lasted? Should I have lived up to Tinker? He was frequently threatened with some elaborate form of extinction if he refused to tell. But I was saved at that time from any suspicion of my own inadequacy; for suddenly I wanted to go home and lie down; and then even going home seemed an impossible exertion. The universe bored into my head, the milky way swam past, the green lights of the singing stars expanded and were everything that was.

My memories of that time are confused as mountainous country in misty weather. Did I walk home? How could I? But if I was carried, what arms held me? I must have reached Rotten Row somehow. I went to school next day
as usual, I remember that clearly. Perhaps I was not quite as usual. I seem to remember feeling as if I had been drizzled on for a long time and had reached the crisis of whimpering; but there was no rain. There was warmth instead on my right side and a deep throbbing in my right ear. How many days? How many hours? Then, at the end, I was sitting in a classroom and it must have been late afternoon because both the naked lights on their long flexes were switched on. I was tired of the throbbing, tired of school, tired of everything, wanted to lie down. I looked at the paper in front of me and I could not think what I had to write. I heard whispering and knew without understanding, that I was the centre of excitement and awe. A boy in front of me and to the left had his coat pulled and looked round. There was more whispering so that the master moved at his desk. Then Johnny Spragg who was sitting to the right of me got out of his seat and put up his hand.

“Please, sir! Sammy’s crying.”

Ma and Mrs. Donavan knew about earache. There were rituals to be performed. For a while I was an object of interest to all the women in the row. They would gather and nod and look down at me. It comes to me now with faint surprise that we never used our upstairs after the lodger died in it. Perhaps Ma was hoping for another lodger; or perhaps her neglect of the bare room was a symptom of her decline. We had lived and slept downstairs, just as if he were still ticking and fuffing above the whitewashed boards; so I had my earache near the stove which was as comfortable a place as any. Ma kept up a good fire in the centre hole. The lady with the green leathery plant brought in a bucket of coal and some advice.
They gave me bitter white pills to swallow, aspirin perhaps; but the universe kept boring in, bringing the earache with it.
Things
became more than lifesize. I kept trying to get away from the pain but it went with me. Ma and Mrs. Donavan took council with the plant lady and they decided to iron me. Mrs. Donavan brought an iron—perhaps Ma always borrowed?—and it was black, with a piece of brown cloth round the handle. It was really iron too, deeply pitted with rust, and only shiny on the bottom part. The plant lady put a piece of cloth over the side of my head while Ma set the iron on the fire. When she took it off she spat on the shiny side and I saw the little balls of spit dance, dwindle and vanish. She sat by me and ironed the side of my head through the cloth and the plant lady held my hand. Then while I was still accepting the warmth with good faith and hoping the pain would go away, the door opened and the tall parson bowed himself through. Ma took away the cloth and the iron and got up. The pain was worse if anything so that I began to turn on this side and then on that and then lie on my face; and every time I happened to see the tall parson he was still standing in the door with his mouth open. Perhaps they moved and spoke, but I have no memory of it. To my hindsight they seem motionless as a ring of stones. Just then the pain began to knock on the door where I was, my own private, inviolable centre so that I made noises and flung myself about. The parson disappeared and at some remove, over gulfs of fire and oceans of blackness under wild green stars there was a big man in the room who was fighting me, binding me, getting my arms in a hold, fastening me down with terrible strength and saying the same thing over and over again.

“Just the tiniest little prick.”

Behind my right ear there is a new moon of scar and a pucker. They are so old that they feel natural and right. I got them that same day, or at least, before the next morning. There was no penicillin, no wonder-drug to control and reduce infection in those days. If the doctor had any doubt at all he operated for mastoid straight away. I came round in a new place, a new world. I was lying over a bowl, too sick and faint to notice anything else but the bowl, whiteness and a brown, polished floor. The pain was reduced to the same dull throbbing that had made me cry at school; but now even crying was too much effort. I lay, drugged and miserable with a turban of gauze and cotton-wool and bandages round my head. Ma appeared at some time or other in that period. I saw her then for the first and last time, not as the broad figure blotting out the darkness but as a person. There is a wan sanity about the drugged eye sometimes that the healthy one does not have. In my misery I saw her as a stranger might see her, a massive, sagging creature, mottled and dirty. Her hair was in wisps over her brown forehead, her face was a square-ish, drawn-down mass with a minute fag sticking in one corner of her mouth. I see now the sausage hands, brown, with discolorations of red and blue, clutching the string-bag into her lap. She sat as she always sat, in majestic indifference; but the gas was escaping from the balloon. She had little enough to bring me, for what has a woman to spare who even borrows an iron? Yet she had taken thought and found what she could. There was a pedestal by the head of the bed and she had placed there a handful of rather dirty fagcards—my cherished kings of Egypt.

And still I ask myself: “Well. There?” and myself answers: “No. Not there.” He is no more a part of me than any other child. I simply have better access to him. I cannot remember what he looked like. I doubt if I ever knew. He is still this bubble floating, filled with happiness or pain which I can no longer feel. In my mind those feelings are represented by colours; they are as exterior to what I feel, as the child itself. His insufficiency and guilt were not mine. I have my own which sprang out of my life somewhere like weeds. I cannot find the root. However I try I can bring up nothing which is part of me.

The ward was a fine place to be when my head stopped hurting. I got complications, had ups and downs. I was a lifetime in that ward, so that I can switch my mind from the world of Rotten Row to the world of the ward as from planet to planet. I have a sense of timelessness in both places. I cannot remember the doctors or nurses or even the other children at all clearly. Survival in this mode must surely be random or why can I not remember who had the beds to right and left? But there was a little girl who had the bed opposite me. She was tiny and black with tight curls and a round, shining, laughing face. Nobody understood the language she spoke. Now I remember that she had a cot instead of a bed like the older children, because when she stood up at the foot she could hold the top rail and swing up and down. She talked all the time. She laughed and sang, she talked to anyone within
reach in her babbling, meaningless talk, talked to doctors, nurses, visitors, matron, children, happily and irrepressibly. She was entirely without fear or sorrow and everybody who saw her loved her. I deduce from the line of bricks that she came, had her graph of sickness, recovered and went. But to me, if I think of the ward, she is always there, a small figure in a white nightdress with two jet black hands and a black, flashing face, swinging and laughing.

I remember the matron, too, because I had a little more to do with her than most of the patients. She was tall and thin. She must have been handsome, in a severe sort of way. Her uniform was dark blue with wings on her head of blinding white. She had stiff, glossy cuffs, small at the wrist but expanding a little up the forearm. When she came into the ward the world stopped turning. We gave the nurses a terrible time; but not matron. She was surrounded by awe. Perhaps the deference of the nurses had something to do with that but as far as I was concerned awe came from her as naturally as comfort from a mother.

She did a job for me.

One of the nurses told me that Ma had been taken poorly which was why she did not come to see me. I accepted this without thought for I was entirely taken up in the endless world of the ward. Somehow my pedestal was as full as the others and the visitors did not seem to belong too particularly to other children. I shared the visitors and everything. Things were so different, so ample, so ordered. One day matron came and sat on my bed instead of standing by it or in front of it. She told me that Ma had died—gone to heaven and was very happy. And then she produced the thing I had been wanting without ever believing
it could belong to me; a stamp album and some envelopes of assorted stamps. There were transparent windows in each envelope so that you could see the coloured squares inside. There was a packet of transparent hinges, one side dull, the other shiny with gum. She made me open one of the packets and showed me how to put the hinges on and search through the album for the right country. She must have stayed there a long time because I remember putting in a lot of stamps with great concentration. I am unable to report on sorrow. I cannot even see a colour. All I remember is one vast, vertical sniff because it spilt the bitter liquid in a little glass that matron was holding and she had to send a nurse for another one. So at last I dozed off over my album and when I woke up the ward was the same as it had always been only with another fact added to life—and it seems to me now—already accepted out of a limitless well of acceptance.

I was not entirely without visitors either. The tall parson came to see me and stood, looking down at me helplessly. He brought me a cake from his housekeeper and wandered off, gazing at the ceiling and finding the way out of the door with his shambling feet. The verger came to see me too. He sat anxiously by the bed and tried to talk; but it was so long since he had done anything to children but chase them out of the church if they were noisy that he didn’t know how. He was a crumpled little man in daylight, wearing the black clothes of his profession and carrying a black bowler hat. This worried him in the ward and he would put it on the bed and then take it off and try the pedestal and then take the hat back again as if certain that sooner or later he would find the exact spot that was right and proper for a black bowler hat in a hospital. He
was used to ritual, perhaps, to an exact science of symbols. He had a high, bald forehead, no eyebrows, and a moustache very like our lodger’s in everything but colour. You could see the last wisps of his hair smeared black across the top of his baldness. I was shy of him because he was shy of me and worried. He talked to me as if I were another grown-up so his complicated story eluded me. I could not make out what he meant and only picked up odd bits here and there; and most of these were misunderstandings. There had been trouble with a society, he said, and I inferred a secret society at once. They had had people standing up in the back of the church and shouting during the service. That was bad enough; but the society had gone even further. People—he wouldn’t like to name them either, seeing he had no proof and couldn’t swear to a single one in a court of law—people had sneaked in during the dark evenings and spoiled ornaments, torn down curtains all because they thought the church was too high. I remembered the sheaf of rectangles soaring dizzily above the altar and thought I understood. The verger said the rector had always been high but in the last few years he had seemed to be getting higher and higher. Then when Father Anselm came, the curate he was, of course, he was just as high as the rector was or even a bit higher—in fact, said the verger, he wouldn’t be a bit surprised if one of these days——

But there he broke off, leaving me to wonder mildly how high you could get and what happened when you reached the top. If the curate was as high as the rector then he, too, had his head in shadows when he stood in the middle of the carpet. I ceased to listen when the verger went on. His talk of aumbries, chasubles, images, apparels
and thurifers went right over my head. My mind’s eye was occupied with a dim church full of elongated clergymen.

Then I realized that he was talking of the time he had heard Philip and me in the church. He never turned the lights on until the last possible minute; if Lady Crosby was waiting for confession, he never turned the lights on until she left. Father Anselm had told him not to. But most evenings he wouldn’t anyway. It was the only way he could hope to catch the people from the society. When he heard us he made sure. He got his torch and crept out from the vestry and along the choir stalls. He saw it was only a kid and it made him angry.

I was interested. He was kind to tell me exactly how he had done it, creeping along the choir stalls and then tiptoeing out. He had done a nice bit of work and he had caught me nicely.

He took his bowler hat off the bed and put it on the pedestal. He began to talk urgently. Of course the ear must have been giving trouble but he hadn’t known, you see, and they’d had such a time with the society . . .

He paused. He was red. Sallow red. He held out his right hand.

“If I’d known what was going to happen I’d sooner have cut that hand off. I’m sorry, lad, sorrier than I can say.”

Something to forgive is a purer joy than geometry. I’ve found that out since, as a bit of the natural history of living. It is a positive act of healing, a burst of light. It is real and precise as aesthetic enjoyment, not weak or soft but crystalline and strong. It is the sign and seal of adult stature, like that man who reached out both arms and gathered the spears into his own body. But innocence does
not recognize an injury and that is why the terrible sayings are true. An injury to the innocent cannot be forgiven because the innocent cannot forgive what they do not understand as an injury. This, too, I understand as a bit of natural history. I guess the nature of our universe is such that the strong and crystalline adult action heals a wound and takes away a scar not out of today but out of the future. The wound that might have gone on bleeding and suppurating becomes healthy flesh; the act is as if it had never been. But how can the innocent understand that?

What was the verger talking to me about then? Was he sorry about the whole story, starting when I and Philip had concocted our plan? But he did not know that story or so I hoped. Was he sorry that little boys are devils, that their brash and violent world would knock down the high walls of authority if it could? As I saw the truth the adult world had hit me good and proper for a deed that I knew consciously was daring and wrong. Hazily and in pictures more than in thought I saw my punishment to have been nicely graded. I had spat though rather drily and inadequately on the high altar. But I had meant to pee on it. My mind flinched away from the possibilities of what might have happened if I had not been three times before we reached the church. Men were hanged but boys got nothing worse than the birch. I saw with a sane and appreciative eye the exact parallel between the deed and the result. Why should I think of forgiveness? There was nothing to forgive.

The verger’s hand was still held out. I examined it and him and waited.

At last he sighed, took his bowler off the pedestal and stood up. He cleared his throat.

“Well——”

He turned his hat round and round in his hands, sucked his moustache, blinked. Then he was away, walking quickly and silently on his professional creepers down the centre of the ward and through the double door.

Wubb. Wuff.

When did I discover that the tall parson was now my guardian? I cannot dissect his motives because I never understood him. Was it perhaps the opening of the Bible that decided my fate? Was he touched by me more than I can think? Had the verger any hand in it? Was I an expiation, not of the one blow, but of numberless fossilized uneases and inadequacies, old sins and omissions that had hardened into impenetrable black stone? Or was I only a forbidden fruit, made accessible but still not eaten? Whatever it was, the result did not seem to do him much good, bring him much peace. Other people understood him no more than I did. They always laughed at him behind his back—might have laughed in his face if he had had less care to be solitary and hidden. Even his name was ridiculous. He was Father Watts-Watt. His choirboys used to think it very funny to ask each other: “Do you know what’s what?” I wish now I could look back down his story as I can look down my own. He could never have been tough as I was tough. Things must have gone right through him.

So he came fairly often and hung about, trying to talk, trying to find out about me. He would stand, knit his jutting grey eyebrows and swoop a look up under them at the ceiling. All his movements were like that, writhings as though the only source of movement was a sudden pain. There was so much of him, such lengths that you could
see the motion travel outwards, bend his body sideways, stretch an arm out and end in the involuntary gesture of a clenched fist. Did I like school? Yes, I liked school. Good—bend, stretch, clench. It was like a nonsense story; talking with him was like a nightmare ride on a giraffe. Yes, bashfully, I liked drawing. Yes, I could swim a bit. Yes, I should like to go to the grammar school, ultimately, whenever that was. Yes, yes, yes, agreement but still no communication. Did I go to church? No, I didn’t—at least—Wouldn’t I like to go? Yes, I would like to go.

Well—balancing movement, bend stretch clench​—​good-bye, my dear child, for the time being.

And so the world of the ward must have come to an end.

I have searched like all men for a coherent picture of life and the world, but I cannot write the last word on that ward without giving it my adult testimony. The walls were held up by sheer, careful human compassion. I was on the receiving end and I know. When I make my black pictures, when I inspect chaos, I must remember that such places are as real as Belsen. They, too, exist, they are part of this enigma, this living. They are brick walls like any others, people like any others. But remembered, they shine.

That, then, is all the infant Samuel I can remember. He trailed no clouds of glory. He was spirit and beauty-proof. He was hard as nails and gave better than he got. Yet I should deceive myself if I refused to recognize something special about the period up to mastoid, up to the end of the ward-world. Let me think in pictures again. If I imagine heaven metaphorically dazzled into colours, the pure white light spread out in a cascade richer than a peacock’s
tail then I see that one of the colours lay over me. I was innocent of guilt, unconscious of innocence; happy, therefore, and unconscious of happiness. Perhaps the full sheaf of colours is never to be experienced by the human
being
since if he experiences these colours they must lie in the past or on someone else. Perhaps consciousness and the guilt which is unhappiness go together; and heaven is truly the Buddhist Nirvana.

That must be the end of a section. There is no root of infection to be discovered in those pictures. The smell of today, the grey faces that look over my shoulder have nothing to do with the infant Samuel. I acquit him. He is some other person in some other country to whom I have this objective and ghostly access. Why does his violence and wickedness stop there, islanded in pictures? Why should his lies and sensualities, his cruelty and selfishness have been forgiven him? For forgiven him they are. The scar is gone. The smell either inevitable or chosen came later. I am not he. I am a man who goes at will to that show of shadows, sits in judgment as over a strange being. I look for the point where this monstrous world of my present consciousness began and I acquit him in the ward.