The Children's Book (99 page)
Read The Children's Book Online
Authors: A.S. Byatt
He came to a spacious hole which was lined with gilt-framed mirrors and full of heaps of the thick grey overcoats whose stuffy smell was part of the pervasive smell of these trenches. The mirrors must be booty from the now-crumbled château. There were, in this room, books, stacked in upright crates as a bookcase. Julian took a copy of the Grimms’
Märchen
, for Griselda, who would like to hear that he found it in an underground hall of mirrors. He caught sight of someone else, standing quietly in a corner, a thin, grim-looking, middle-aged man with a scarred face and weary eyes. He raised his hand to greet him, and
saw, as the other raised his hand, also, that he had failed to recognise himself. He found another way out, opened the door, and found that it was largely blocked by the bundled body of a very dead and decomposing German. He retreated, and found his way up to the air.
A few days later, he was sent out at night, with a patrol to attack a German strongpoint. As they lay in a crater under a steady thumping of bombs, he felt his leg crack. When he stood up, he could not. His men dragged him, limping and falling, back to another crater, and eventually to their own dugout.
This time he had a “Blighty one.” He was invalided back to England, among the walking wounded. The bones in his feet were crushed, which he had not immediately felt, because of the cracking of his tibia. In the end, the British surgeons could not save his foot, and took it off. Months later, he limped into the house in Chelsea, where the two little girls were running to the door, and nearly brought him down. He was rather upset when both Imogen and Florence began to weep wildly. There were delicious smells—toast, roasting coffee, a bowl of lilies, lavender and, as he bent awkwardly to kiss his half-sister and niece, the smell of clean flesh, and washed hair.
He dreamed he was being buried alive in a dugout, and could not free himself from the weight of earth, steadily increasing. He dreamed of things he had packed away and forbidden himself to remember. Florence made him hot apricot tarts and Chinese tea, with jasmine and its own pale, mysterious, clean smell, in Chinese porcelain cups. They sat him in a chair with a footstool to rest his leg, and their eyes were always just brimming over.
Alone of Todefright’s bright boys, Florian returned from the fighting. Phyllis prepared his favourite food, herb sausages and mashed potatoes, and a Queen of Puddings. Olive told herself that she must love him, steadily and well, because he was alive, and her sons were not. She faced, she thought, the fact that she might resent the survival of this one who was not her own, and put the idea resolutely away. She had a small glass of whisky before the fly came in from the station.
Florian was walking. His appearance was shocking. He was gaunt, and limped heavily, and his skin was puckered and stained and scarred all over. One of his eyelids drooped. His golden curls, which had been shaved off for the draft, were growing back only sparsely and in tufts, and what there was of them looked ersatz, artificial. Worst of all, he emitted a heavy, painful, wheezing sound, having briefly breathed in blown-back English gas.
Phyllis and Olive made themselves kiss him. He recoiled very slightly. Humphry put a hand on his shoulder, and said “Come in, old chap, you’re home.”
He had really nothing to say to them. He sat for hours in the window seat, staring out at the garden. Phyllis tried very hard to love him. They were Violet’s children, and shared an unspoken anger that Violet’s death had been so little marked, had been swallowed up in grief for Tom, as her life had been swallowed up in Olive’s. Neither of them was comfortable discussing this. Neither of them had ever discussed feelings. When Phyllis tried—falling awkwardly over whether to say “Violet” or “our mother”—Florian did show signs of feeling. It was an impatient, sullen rage. She made him little presents of cakes and sweet things, which he ate greedily.
In the day he sat and sat. At night he walked. He could be heard, his limping leg thumping, his wheezing a steady, sinister sound, on stairs and in corridors.
Olive woke one night as he passed the door and felt pure hatred. It was like living with a monster, a changeling, a demon. Then she hated herself, worse than she hated him. Then she went to find the whisky, avoiding the returned soldier because it was so easy to hear where he was wandering.
They noticed he was cutting advertisements out of the newspaper. One day he said he had accepted a post as a teaching assistant at Bedales school. He was, he said, with a sad, grim little smile, good at making camps and things like that.
They said they would see him in the holidays, and he said, “Yes, probably.”
Phyllis wondered why she didn’t go too. She thought, perhaps she would. Perhaps.
From
ROLL CAN AND OTHER POEMS
,
by Julian Cain
THE WOODS
When Alice stepped through liquid glass
The world before her was deployed
In ordered squares of summer grass
And beasts, and flowers, and gnats enjoyed
The power of speech and argument.
Logic is fine-chopped, roses and eggs
Insult each other; legs of lamb resent
Imputed insults. Peppers and salts have legs.
Clouds scud above, and flying queens
Like startled birds, and sleeping kings
Snore unperturbed in serious dreams
Of knights and dinners—serious things
That come and go amongst the roots
Of little lines of sportive wood
Run wild, where no one ever shoots
To kill or maim, and beasts are good.
Alice skips serious from square to square
Hedges and ditches hold their form
And make a chequered order there.
No creature comes to serious harm.
Our English Alice, always calm
Interrogates both gnats and knights,
Reasons away her mild alarm
At bellicose infants and their fights.
The foolish armies do not die
They fall upon their stubborn heads
And struggle up and fall again
And when night comes, rest in their beds.
Reds clash with whites in the great game.
Their fights are dusty but have rules
And always end with cakes and jam
And Providence is kind to fools.
The woods are dangerous. You lose your way.
The sky may darken and the Crow
Make black the treetops, dim the day
Shatter the branches, blow by blow.
Crump of a tea tray, rat tat tat
Of nice new rattle on tin hat
Saucepan and scuttle flat in mud
As fire flings past and black smokes scud
And no shapes hold. I watched a wood
Mix the four elements so air was flame
And earth was liquid: nothing stood
Trees were wild matchsticks, wild fire came and came
Bursting your ears and eyes. And men were mud.
Were severed fingers, bleeding stumps between
The leafless prongs that had been trees. And blood
Seeped up where feet sank. Helplessly we trod
On dying faces, aimlessly we fell
On men atop of men ground into clods
Of flesh and wood and metal. Nothing held.
There was no light, no skyline, up and down
Were all the same. Our lifeblood welled
Out of our mouths and nostrils.
In another wood
Alice walked with a fawn. They had no name.
Nor girl, nor beast, nor growing things. Plants stood
Things flew and rustled. They were all the same.
Quiet was there, indifferent, good,
Stupidly good, like that disguised Snake
In the First Garden, where the First Man named
The creatures, and knew Sin, and was ashamed.
In Thiepval, for a time, and in a space
Extreme of noise made silence. Too much pain
Took pain away. I too was given grace
To know unknowing. I knew not my name
No name of any thing in that dark place.
I stared indifferent at the stumps of wood
And stumps of flesh and metal. All was one.
The man beside me rattled in his blood.
He coughed and died. And I knew I was done.
CALLING NAMES
Little scrubbed boys stand stiff. Their names
Are called. Archer and Bates. Castle and Church.
Adsum they pipe. Adsum. Adsunt. Young Field
Stands next to Devon Minor, Green, and Hill,
Meadows and Nuttall. They smell clean,
Soapy and damp, through ink and chalk and dust,
And polish. Outside English sun
Muffled in English cloud, rests on the panes
Of mud-smeared English windows. So to the end.
Waterstone. Wellwood. Scrape of chairs. They sit.
Scratch with their pens the tale of Agincourt.
The leering lords who promulgate the laws
Of arcane study secrets, call names too.
Answer, what are you? Boy, get your names right
Or you’ll be beaten. Say, what are you, boy?
If you don’t answer you’ll be beaten worse.
A worm, a maggot? Those were last week, boy.
A smell, a scapegoat, a smashed snail, a toad
A broken teacup? Now I’ll beat you, boy.
You still know nothing, get it wrong, you cur
You bumboy. Drop your trousers, bend
Over this chair, and whilst I slash the rod,
Say after me I’m null. I’m nothing. I’m
Zilch, nichts, don’t wince, but bear it like a man.
And now, in a French field, the bugle sounds.
Shaven and scrubbed and polished, they salute
The First Eleven and the First Fifteen.
Lined neatly up for battle, hear their names,
Answer the roll call. All these were my men.
Smiling gold Fletcher, eager Billy Gunn,
Knight with long shanks and curly-headed Smith
Shone, full of purpose, and marched out to fight.
What are they now? Names on a marble slab
In a school chapel. Names on double disks,
*
One red for bleeding flesh, one green for earth
In which the flesh is scattered, smeared and mixed
With other flesh, and lost. Names written out
On telegrams and letters, which strike at
The hearts of waiting women, hearing fists
Knock on the door they daren’t unlock but must.
I learned them all with gladness, at the start.
I knew them all, the fearful and the bright
Impulsive boys and canny men I knew
And named and named. My head is packed with names.
Names of dead men. I cannot learn the live
Names that come late, boys to replace the boys
Who marched away.
They come, they go, they smile, they frown. I guard
My mind’s door. Today they stand and smile
Numbered and nameless. And they march away.
And I count up more boys and send them on.
TRENCH NAMES
The column, like a snake, winds through the fields,
Scoring the grass with wheels, with heavy wheels
And hooves, and boots. The grass smiles in the sun
Quite helpless. Orchard and copse are Paradise
Where flowers and fruits grow leisurely, and birds
Rise in the blue, and sing, and sink again
And rest. The woods are ancient. They have names
Thiepval, deep vale, La Boisselle, Aubépines,
Named long ago by dead men. And their sons
Know trees and creatures, earth and sky, the same.
We gouge out tunnels in the sleeping fields.
We turn the clay and slice the turf, and make
A scheme of cross-roads, orderly and mad
Under and through, like moles, like monstrous worms.
Dig out our dens, like cicatrices scored
Into the face of earth. And we give names
To our vast network in the roots, imposed
Imperious, desperate to hide, to hurt.
The sunken roads were numbered at the start.
A chequer board. But men are poets, and names
Are Adam’s heritage, and English men
Imposed a ghostly English map on French,
Crushed ruined harvests and polluted streams.
So here run Piccadilly, Regent Street
Oxford Street, Bond Street, Tothill Fields, Tower Bridge
And Kentish places, Dover, Tunbridge Wells
Entering wider hauntings, resonant,
The Boggart Hole, Bleak House, Deep Doom and Gloom.
Remembering boyhood, soldier poets recall
The desperate deeds of Lost Boys, Peter Pan,
Hook Copse, and Wendy Cottage. Horrors lurk
In Jekyll Copse and Hyde Copse. Nonsense smiles
As shells and flares disorder tidy lines
In Walrus, Gimble, Mimsy, Borogrove
Which lead to Dum and Dee and to that Wood
Where fury lurked, and blackness, and that Crow.
There’s Dead Man’s Dump, Bone Trench and Carrion Trench
Cemetery Alley, Skull Farm, Suicide Road
Abuse Trench and Abyss Trench, Cesspool, Sticky Trench,
Slither Trench, Slimy Trench, Slum Trench, Bloody Farm.
Worm Trench, Louse Post, Bug Alley, Old Boot Street.
Gas Alley, Gangrene Alley, Gory Trench.
Dreary, Dredge, Dregs, Drench, Drizzle, Drivel, Bog.
Some frame the names of runs for frames of mind.
Tremble Copse, Wrath Copse, Anxious Crossroads, Howl
Doleful and Crazy Trenches, Folly Lane,
Ominous Alley, Worry Trench, Mad Point
Lunatic Sap, and then Unbearable
Trench, next to Fun Trench, Dismal Trench, Hope Trench
And Happy Alley.
How they swarm, the rats.
Fat beasts and frisking, yellow teeth and tails
Twitching and slippery. Here they are at home
As gaunt and haunted men are not. For rats
Grow plump in rat-holes and are not afraid,
Resourceful little beggars, said Tom Thinn,
The day they ate his dinner, as he died.
Their names are legion. Rathole,
Rat Farm, Rat Pit, Rat Post, Fat Rat, Rats’ Alley, Dead Rats’ Drain,
Rat Heap, Flat Rat, the Better ’Ole, King Rat.
They will outlast us. This is their domain.
And when I die, my spirit will pass by
Through Sulphur Avenue and Devil’s Wood
To Jacob’s Ladder along Pilgrim’s Way
To Eden Trench, through Orchard, through the gate
To Nameless Trench and Nameless Wood, and rest.
*
These coloured identity disks are worn by the Australian soldiers who fought at Thiepval.
Basil and Katharina Wellwood had an unhappy war. There was a huge upsurge of anti-German hatred. Katharina’s friends and acquaintances ceased to call on her or to invite her to gatherings to roll bandages or knit for the British soldiers. The fact—insofar as it was known—that their son was a conscientious objector also cast suspicion on them. Their country neighbours were as venomous as their city ones. They were anxious both for Charles/Karl and for Griselda. Basil was also concerned for Geraint Fludd, who was his substitute son in the City. Geraint was somewhere with the big guns. He wrote occasionally—reasonably cheerfully from the Somme, more grimly as his guns crawled through the mud in Flanders. General Ludendorff ordered the German army to retreat to the Siegfried Line in February 1917. Word came back to Britain of his “Operation Alberich,” named for the Nibelung who had abjured Love as he clasped the stolen
Rheingold
. Operation Alberich scorched the earth, hacking, burning, poisoning wells, slaughtering cattle and poultry, leaving nothing that could be used by an advancing army, French or British. A woman spat at Katharina in the street. Servants gave in their notice. Katharina, already thin, grew thinner.
