Lanark: a life in 4 books (19 page)

CHAPTER 12.

The War Begins

Duncan Thaw drew a blue line along the top of a sheet of paper and a brown line along the bottom. He drew a giant with a captured princess running along the brown line, and since he couldn’t draw the princess lovely enough he showed the giant holding a sack. The princess was in the sack. His father looked over his shoulder and said, “What’s that you’re drawing?”

Thaw said uneasily, “A miller running to the mill with a bag of corn.”

“What’s the blue line supposed to be?”

“The sky.”

“Do you mean the horizon?”

Thaw stared dumbly at his picture.

“The horizon is the line where the sky and land seem to touch. Is it the horizon?”

“It’s the sky.”

“But the sky isnae a straight line, Duncan!”

“It would be if you saw it sideways.”

Mr. Thaw got a golf ball and a table lamp and explained that the earth was like the ball and the sun like the lamp. Thaw was bored and puzzled. He said, “Do people fall off the sides?”

“No. They’re kept on by gravity.”

“What’s ga … gavty?”

“
Grrrrrr
avity is what keeps us on the earth. Without it we would fly up into the air.”

“And then we would reach the sky?”

“No. No. The sky is just the space above our heads. Without gravity we would fly up into it forever.”

“But wouldn’t we come to a … a thing on the other side?”

“There
is
no other side, Duncan. None at all.”

Thaw leaned over his drawing and drew a blue crayon along the line of the sky, pressing hard. He dreamed that night of flying up through empty air till he reached a flat blue cardboard sky. He rested against it like a balloon against a ceiling until worried by the thought of what was on the other side; then he broke a hole and rose through more empty air till he grew afraid of floating forever. Then he came to another cardboard sky and rested there till worried by the thought of the other side. And so on.

Thaw lived in the middle storey of a corporation tenement that was red sandstone in front and brick behind. The tenement backs enclosed a grassy area divided into greens by spiked railings, and each green had a midden. Gangs of midden-rakers from Blackhill crossed the canal to steal from the middens. He was told that Blackhill people were Catholics with beasts in their hair. One day two men came to the back greens with a machine that squirted blue flame and clouds of sparks. They cut the spikes from the railings with the flame, put them in a bag and took them away to use in the war. Mrs. Gilchrist downstairs said angrily, “Now even the youngest of these Blackhill kids will be able to rake our middens.” Other workmen build air-raid shelters in the back greens and a very big one in the school playground, and if Thaw heard the air-raid warning on the way to school he must run to the nearest shelter. Going up to school by the steep back lane one morning he heard the siren wailing in the blue sky. He was almost at school but turned and ran home to where his mother waited in the back-green shelter with the neighbours. At night dark green blinds were pulled down over the windows. Then Mr. Thaw put on an armband and steel hat and went into the street to search for houses showing illegal chinks of light.

Someone told Mrs. Thaw that the former tenants of her flat had killed themselves by putting their heads in the oven and turning the gas on. She wrote at once to the corporation asking that her gas cooker be changed for an electric one, but as Mr. Thaw would still need food when he returned from work she baked him a shepherd’s pie, but with her lips more tightly pursed than usual.

Her son always refused shepherd’s pie or any other food whose appearance disgusted him: spongy white tripe, soft penis-like sausages, stuffed sheep’s hearts with their valves and little arteries. When one of these came before him he poked it uncertainly with his fork and said, “I don’t want it.”

“Why not?”

“It looks queer.”

“But you havnae tasted it! Taste just a wee bit. For my sake.”

“No.”

“Children in China are starving for food like that.”

“Send it to them.”

After more discussion his mother would say in a high-pitched voice, “You’ll sit at this table till you eat every bit” or “Just you wait till I tell your father about this, my dear.” Then he would put a piece of food in his mouth, gulp without tasting and vomit it back onto the plate. After that he would be shut in the back bedroom. Sometimes his mother came to the door and said, “Will you not eat just a wee bit of it? For my sake?” then Thaw, feeling cruel, shouted “No!” and went to the window and looked down into the back green. He would see friends playing there, or the midden-rakers, or neighbours hanging out washing, and feel so lonely and magnificent that he considered opening the window and jumping out. It was a bitter glee to imagine his corpse thudding to the ground among them. At last, with terror, he would hear his father coming
clomp-clomp
upstairs, carrying his bicycle. Usually Thaw ran to meet him. Now he heard his mother open the door, the mutter of voices in conspiracy, then footsteps coming to the bedroom and his mother whispering, “Don’t hurt him too much.”

Mr. Thaw would enter with a grim look and say, “Duncan! You’ve behaved badly to your mother again. She goes to the bother and expense of making a good dinner and ye won’t eat it. Aren’t ye ashamed of yourself?”

Thaw would hang his head.

“I want you to apologize to her.”

“Don’t know what ’polgize means.”

“Tell her you’re sorry and you’ll eat what you’re given.”

Then Thaw would snarl “No, I won’t!” and be thrashed. During the thrashing he screamed a lot and afterward stamped, yelled, tore his hair and banged his head against the wall until his parents grew frightened and Mr. Thaw shouted, “Stop that or I’ll draw my hand off yer jaw!”

Then Thaw beat his own face with his fists, screaming, “Like this like this like
this?
”

It was hard to silence him without undoing the justice of the punishment. On the advice of a neighbour they one day undressed the furiously kicking boy, filled a bath with cold water and plunged him in. The sudden chilling scald destroyed all his protest, and this treatment was used on later occasions with equal success. Shivering slightly he would be dried with soft towels before the living-room fire, then put to bed with his doll. Before sleep came he lay stunned and emotionless while his mother tucked him in. Sometimes he considered withholding the goodnight kiss but could never quite manage it.

When he had been punished for not eating a particular food he was not given that food again but a boiled egg instead. Yet after hearing how the former tenants had misused their oven he looked very thoughtfully at the shepherd’s pie when it was brought to table that evening. At length he pointed and said, “Can I have some?”

Mrs. Thaw looked at her husband then took her spoon and plonked a dollop onto Thaw’s plate. He stared at the mushy potato with particles of carrot, cabbage and mince in it and wondered if brains really looked like that. Fearfully he put some in his mouth and churned it with his tongue. It tasted good so he ate what was on the plate and asked for more. When the meal was over his mother said, “There. You like it. Aren’t ye ashamed of kicking up all that din about nothing?”

“Can I go down to the back green?”

“All right, but come when I call you, it’s getting late.” He hurried through the lobby, banged the front door behind him and ran downstairs, the weight of food in his stomach making him feel excited and powerful. In the warm evening sunlight he put his brow to the grass and somersaulted down a green slope till he fell flat from dizziness and lay with the tenements and blue sky spinning and tilting round and round his head. He keeked between the stems of sorrel and daisies at the midden, a three-sided brick shed where bins were kept. The sound of voices came indistinctly through the grass blades to his ears, and the scratchings of a steel-tipped boot on an iron railing, and the rumble of a bin being shifted. He sat up.

Two boys slightly older than himself were bent over the bins and throwing out worn clothes, empty bottles, some pram wheels and a doormat, while a big boy of ten or eleven put them in a sack. One of the smaller boys found a hat with a bird’s wing on it. Mimicking the strut of a proud woman he put it on and said, “Look at me, Boab, am I no’ the big cheese?

The older boy said, “Stop that. You’ll get the auld wife after us.”

He dumped the sack over the railings into the next green and the three of them climbed over to it. Thaw followed by squeezing between the railings then lay down again on the grass. He heard them whisper together and the big boy said, “Never mind about him.”

He realized he was frightening them and followed more boldly into the next green, though keeping a distance. He was slightly appalled when the big boy turned and said, “What d’ye want, ye wee bugger?”

Thaw said, “I’m coming with you.”

His scalp tightened, his heart knocked on his ribs but this boy had never eaten what he had eaten. The boy with the hat said,“Thump him, Boab!”

Boab said, “Why d’ye want tae come with us?”

“Because.”

“Because of what?”

“Nothing. Just because.”

“Ye’ll have tae carry things if ye come with us. Will ye collect the books?”

“Aye.”

“All right then.”

After this all magazines and comic papers were left to Thaw, who soon learned which were worth picking from the garbage. They visited every back green in the block, leaving some refuse scattered across each, and were chased from the last by a woman who followed them through her close shouting breathless promises to call the police.

A girl of twelve waited in the street outside holding the handle of a pram with three wheels. She pointed at Thaw and said, “Where did ye pick that up?”

Boab said, “Never mind him,” and loaded his sack onto the pram which bulged with rubbish already. The two wee boys harnessed themselves to it with strings tied to the front axle, then with Boab and the girl pushing and Thaw running alongside they went quickly down the street. They passed semi-detached villas with privet hedges, a small power station humming behind aspen trees, allotments with beds of lettuce like green roses and glasshouses glittering in the late sunshine. They went through a gate in a rusty fence and climbed a blue cinder path through a jungle of nettles. The air was thick with vegetable stink, the wee boys groaned with the effort of pulling, a low thundering vibrated the ground under them and at the top they reached the brink of a deep ravine. One end was shut by double doors of huge rotting timber. A glossy arch of water slipped over this, crashed to the bottom, then poured along the ravine and flowed through open doors at the end into a small loch fringed with reeds and paved with lily leaves. Thaw knew this must be the canal, a dangerous forbidden place where children were drowned. He followed his companions uphill among structures where water spilled over ledges, trickled through cracks, or lay in rushy half-stagnant ponds with swans paddling on clear spaces in the middle. They crossed a plank bridge under the shadow of so high a waterfall that the din of it was deafening. They crossed stony ground and then another bridge and heard dimly a distant bugle blown in a caricature of a battle call.

“Peely Wally,” said Boab.

They went quickly down a cinder path, through a gate and into a street.

Thaw found it a foreign kind of street. The tenements were faced with grey stone instead of red, landing windows had broken glass in them, or no glass, or even no window frames, being oblong holes half bricked up to stop children falling out. The men who had taken the spikes away to the war from Riddrie (where Thaw lived) had removed all the railings here, and the spaces between pavement and tenement (neat gardens in Riddrie) were spaces of flattened earth where children too young to walk scratched the ground with bent spoons or floated bits of wood in puddles left from last week’s rain. In the middle of the street a pale lipless smiling young man sat on a donkey cart with a bugle on his knees. His cart held boxes of coloured toys which could be bought with rags, bottles and jam jars, and already a crowd of children surrounded him wearing cardboard sombreros, whooping on whistles or waving bright flags and windmills. When he noticed Boab and the pram he shouted, “Make way! Make way! Let the man through!”

While these two haggled Thaw and the smaller boys stood round the donkey and admired the mildness of its face, the hardness of its forehead and the white hair inside the trumpet-shaped ears. Thaw argued about the donkey’s age with the boy wearing the hat.

“I bet ye a pound he’s older than you onyway,” said the boy.

“And I bet ye a pound he isnae.”

“Why d’ye think he isnae?”

“Why d’ye think he is?”

“Peely!” shouted the boy. “How old is your donkey?”

“A hundred!” shouted Peely.

“There ye are—I wiz right!” said the boy. “Now you’ve tae give me a pound.” He held his hand out, saying, “Come on now. Pay up!”