Read Trials of the Monkey Online
Authors: Matthew Chapman
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Retail
Trials of the Monkey (4 page)
The law that brought about the Scopes Trial was proposed by a Tennessee Democratic congressman and lay preacher named
John Butler. It stated ‘that it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals, and all other public schools of the State, which are supported in whole or in any part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animal.’ And the bill had some sting in it too, a real penalty, a fine of between $100 and $500 for anyone convicted of breaking the law.
John Butler. It stated ‘that it shall be unlawful for any teacher in any of the Universities, Normals, and all other public schools of the State, which are supported in whole or in any part by the public school funds of the State, to teach any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animal.’ And the bill had some sting in it too, a real penalty, a fine of between $100 and $500 for anyone convicted of breaking the law.
To the credit of the state, the law didn’t come into existence without debate. Many modernist clerics vigorously opposed it. So did several newspapers. A congressman suggested legislation should be passed to forbid the teaching of ‘the round earth theory.’ But no amount of ridicule could overturn the forces of primitivism. The bill passed in the House, seventy-one to five, and in the Senate, twenty-four to six, and the Governor, a Baptist, signed it into law on March 21, 1925.
The recently formed American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which had been watching developments in the South, heard of the anti-evolutionists’ victory. In early May, it bought space in some Tennessee newspapers, the
Chattanooga Times
among them, and announced ‘We are looking for a Tennessee teacher who is willing to accept our services in testing this law in the courts. Our lawyers think a friendly test can be arranged without costing a teacher his or her job.’
Chattanooga Times
among them, and announced ‘We are looking for a Tennessee teacher who is willing to accept our services in testing this law in the courts. Our lawyers think a friendly test can be arranged without costing a teacher his or her job.’
The ensuing trial could have taken place anywhere in the state, the somewhat liberal Nashville being the more likely venue, had it not been for the vision of a strange and interesting man who had washed up in Dayton. One of those characters in history who provoke a great event and then disappear, his name was George Washington Rappleyea.
On the evening of May 4, he read the
Chattanooga Times
. In the morning he hurried from his home and drove toward Robinson’s Drug Store on Main Street.
Chattanooga Times
. In the morning he hurried from his home and drove toward Robinson’s Drug Store on Main Street.
What Goes On
At the Roanoke bus station, a teenage girl and her father huddle together on a bench. She is in tears and protests continually. He holds and comforts her. Eventually, she boards. I watch him sitting on a barrier. His exhausted eyes are focused on some distant hour beyond this sorrow and awkwardness. The girl sits behind me and continues to cry as the bus pulls away.
The man waves fatalistically to his daughter. I turn in my seat and watch her wave back. Then I look out of the window as the town thins out and eventually releases us into the country.
I wonder what the crying girl is crying about. I imagine paedophile stepfathers, implacable court decisions, cokehead mothers, baby brothers with cancer, shotgun suicides, bankruptcy and other dramas too numerous and depressing to mention; but before I can get up the courage to dredge her for this material and then offer comfort in return, she falls into a deep sleep from which she does not wake for a hundred miles.
I’ve picked up a copy of the
Roanoke Times
and start to read it. Only two marching bands played in the Vinton Dogwood Festival this year. These days, the bands aren’t interested in parades, which are boring and traditional, so much as in the big competitions at Disneyland. ‘Another Small Town to Drop Charter,’ reads another headline. Clover Town Council has voted to accept an agreement with Halifax County to dissolve the town. Clover, which has 200 residents, is basically broke and has eliminated most services except for its twenty-three streetlights. This is depressing stuff. I flip quickly to the obituaries for lighter fare.
Roanoke Times
and start to read it. Only two marching bands played in the Vinton Dogwood Festival this year. These days, the bands aren’t interested in parades, which are boring and traditional, so much as in the big competitions at Disneyland. ‘Another Small Town to Drop Charter,’ reads another headline. Clover Town Council has voted to accept an agreement with Halifax County to dissolve the town. Clover, which has 200 residents, is basically broke and has eliminated most services except for its twenty-three streetlights. This is depressing stuff. I flip quickly to the obituaries for lighter fare.
‘McGee, Frederick. 76. After retirement he was a very important partner with his wife and daughter at their Macbeth Kennels in Troutville. Mr McGee will be greatly missed by his many dog and cat friends and his bird, Buck.’
That’s better.
The bus turns off Route 81, the main highway, and onto U.S. 11, an old, winding road through plump, wooded hills broken by meadows. I assume when this was the only road it forced people through the small and now forgotten town of Pulaski, a sign on the outskirts of which reads: ‘Take Heed. The Lord Is Coming. The End of Time Is Near.’
He’s coming
here
? He’s going to take a detour off Route 81, which leads to all the sinners in Nashville and Memphis (or better still, Atlanta with its huge gay population), just to stop off in
Pulaski?
Even putting aside its no doubt world-class reputation for incest, why would he? But even before we get to the sad centre of the dying town, I have a strange feeling I’ve read the name Pulaski in some interesting context … I flip through my book on the South and quickly locate the reference. A town named Pulaski was the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan in 1865, but that Pulaski was in Tennessee and we’re still in Virginia. We are, however, right on the border. Could the border have moved? How many towns can there be called Pulaski? Could this really be it? And if it is, maybe Jesus
would
consider a detour.
here
? He’s going to take a detour off Route 81, which leads to all the sinners in Nashville and Memphis (or better still, Atlanta with its huge gay population), just to stop off in
Pulaski?
Even putting aside its no doubt world-class reputation for incest, why would he? But even before we get to the sad centre of the dying town, I have a strange feeling I’ve read the name Pulaski in some interesting context … I flip through my book on the South and quickly locate the reference. A town named Pulaski was the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan in 1865, but that Pulaski was in Tennessee and we’re still in Virginia. We are, however, right on the border. Could the border have moved? How many towns can there be called Pulaski? Could this really be it? And if it is, maybe Jesus
would
consider a detour.
As the bus leaves town, and we finally escape the malignant little place, I see a sign which says, ‘Sword of Jesus—Revival Meeting. Preaching the Book, the Blood, and the Blessed Hope.’
The
blood?
My
God
.
blood?
My
God
.
The crying girl wakes up and rubs her eyes. Five minutes later, I’ve got my spoon in her head and I’m scooping out segments of her life to chew on as the journey continues: she’s sixteen years old, her father is a doctor, her mother lives in Las Vegas with her new stepfather, she goes to school in Roanoke and prefers it to Vegas.
‘There’s nothing to do in Las Vegas for a teenager,’ she tells me.
Without tears, she is quite pretty and answers my questions politely but with suspicion. She is going to visit her mother for a month. The trip is going to take almost three days with no stopping in hotels to sleep. She was crying at the bus station because originally she was going to go out to Vegas by plane but her mother insisted she come by bus. It would be good for her. Crying for a plane? After all I’d imagined for her?
‘So, what do you want to be when you grow up?’ I ask.
‘I want to be a teacher,’ she says. ‘I love school, I just love it.’
I turn away, vaguely disappointed.
The first school I went to was Dartington Hall in Devon, where my father was the head of the adult education centre. I was in nursery school and can remember almost nothing of it.
When I was four and my sister, Sarah, five, my father went into business with a man who invented and manufactured scientific instruments just outside Cambridge. As this was where Clare, my mother, was brought up and where her mother still lived, she was happy to move back there.
At first, we all lived with my father’s partner in the Old Vicarage in Grantchester, where the poet Rupert Brooke once lived. Life in the village had not changed much. It was quiet and leafy with punts on the slow river nearby. (Now the Vicarage is lived in by that paragon of Conservative values, Jeffrey Archer.)
In 1954, my parents bought their own house about seven miles from the centre of Cambridge. It was a large mill house, actually two houses crudely stitched together. The back part, a cottage, was built in 1600; the front, a more imposing, red brick Queen Anne building, was added on in 1750 when the miller got rich. The mill next door was a very large off-white brick structure more reminiscent of an eighteenth-century factory than a typically quaint mill, a large cube, four floors tall if you included the one under the sloping roof. The top floor was the most exciting because at the front was a gantry used for hoisting things up from the bridge below. It jutted out dangerously and as children we’d
go up there and scare ourselves by looking down through the cracks in the trapdoor.
go up there and scare ourselves by looking down through the cracks in the trapdoor.
Across the gravel yard was a large thatched barn. To one side was a wooden shed. My father bought it all, along with several acres of land, for £5,750. He and his partner now moved their business into the shed. At first it was just the two of them, then there were three, then four. Eventually, the company would colonise the entire mill and employ a hundred men.
The river ran down toward the back of the house, the cottage, through lush green fields, past the living-room windows, and under the mill, which straddled the river. In the millrace the water was channelled over a weir, rushed past the place where the mill-wheel once was, and finally emerged from under an arched bridge into a large, oval millpond. Here the current slowed, meandering and swirling, until it reached the second broad weir at the end of the pond, where, depending on the season, it either trickled over the thick weeds or sat upon the lip, fat and lethal, before descending into the shallow river below.
Many dramas occurred on the weir. Once a dead cow got stuck on it and had to be hauled out by tractor. Everyone said we should stand back as sometimes a carcass would explode if it had been in the water a long time. A short time later, however, a man upriver lost his pet donkey to the river and it too got stuck. The man came down and tried to pull it out by hand. When that didn’t work, he fetched a large saw and sawed the donkey in half. It did not explode. Another time, some debris got caught here and my father went out to clear it off with a rake. The river was high and dangerous. I watched him balancing in the middle of the weir and when he nearly toppled over I laughed at his panic-struck face and waving arms. He was furious, thinking, I’m sure, that I was being callous, was showing how little I cared for him; but it was not this. It just never occurred to me that he would not survive all accidents. He was my father and invincible.
Sarah and I did not go to the local school because our parents had found another, better one, a state primary school in a village
about five miles away, and somehow managed to persuade someone to let us go there.
about five miles away, and somehow managed to persuade someone to let us go there.
Kingston Village School had only one teacher. The tiny schoolhouse was on the village green behind a white picket fence with a playground to one side. There were usually fewer than twenty children here, most of them the sons and daughters of farmers or farm labourers, ranging in age from four to eleven. Each day began with a hymn or two, ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ and ‘Jerusalem’ come to mind. Then we’d say the Lord’s Prayer and get down to work.
Our teacher, Mrs. Marshall, was a round woman; not fat because that suggests indulgence and this woman was not indulgent, she was simply intended by nature to be spherical. She had shining brown eyes and her long dark hair was done up in a large, lustrous bun. A farmer’s daughter from the Fens, her accent was broad East Anglian and her laugh, which was frequent, was a roiling chuckle flung without censure from her plump throat.
I was her student from the age of four to seven. She was the first and only teacher from whom I learned anything.
When she was a girl, Mrs. Marshall wanted to go to university. She was a good enough student to achieve this, but in her last year of school there was an agricultural slump. Potatoes rotted across the Fens, the expense of shipping them to London being more than the profit that would be returned. Her father, a small farmer, nearly went broke and everyone had to help. To her immense disappointment, she was forced to go to work immediately as an ‘uncertificated’ teacher.
Lacking the government’s seal of approval, she always felt she had more to learn and so, as she was still learning, learning was not something static or complete which she imposed upon you, but a process of discovery which you shared with her. Her curiosity was so obviously genuine it provoked your own. There was nothing patronising about her, nothing complacent, nothing fake. She was so bad at Maths (and so uninterested in it) that to teach my sister, Sarah, who was eighteen months older than I and ten
times brighter, she was forced to bone up on the lessons the night before.
times brighter, she was forced to bone up on the lessons the night before.
What she really loved to teach was art. Each year we would enter the
Daily Mail
Art Contest, a nationwide competition to find the best work produced by any school in the country. In the single classroom with its vaulted ceiling, Mrs. Marshall moved peaceably from group to group, sharpening pencils for the four-year-olds, discussing essays or poems, or helping the older ones to learn italic. But always, a few students would be at work on our entry, and Mrs. Marshall would inevitably drift back to them, to give advice, to praise, to encourage. Usually, our entry into the contest was a mosaic made of coloured squares cut from magazines and pasted on a piece of paper about the size of a single bed-sheet. One year it was a jungle with a vivid tiger prowling among the trees. Although we were up against schools that had hundreds of students and well-financed art departments, we won twice. This made Mrs. Marshall locally famous and eventually she wrote
An Experiment in Education
, a book about the school and teaching art in which can be found my first published work:
Daily Mail
Art Contest, a nationwide competition to find the best work produced by any school in the country. In the single classroom with its vaulted ceiling, Mrs. Marshall moved peaceably from group to group, sharpening pencils for the four-year-olds, discussing essays or poems, or helping the older ones to learn italic. But always, a few students would be at work on our entry, and Mrs. Marshall would inevitably drift back to them, to give advice, to praise, to encourage. Usually, our entry into the contest was a mosaic made of coloured squares cut from magazines and pasted on a piece of paper about the size of a single bed-sheet. One year it was a jungle with a vivid tiger prowling among the trees. Although we were up against schools that had hundreds of students and well-financed art departments, we won twice. This made Mrs. Marshall locally famous and eventually she wrote
An Experiment in Education
, a book about the school and teaching art in which can be found my first published work:
What Goes On
Outdoors On Water:
Ducks bob up and down,
And boats pass by with people chattering.
Indoors On Land:
Telephones ring and mothers rush,
Babies cry, children scream,
Only fathers work.
Ducks bob up and down,
And boats pass by with people chattering.
Indoors On Land:
Telephones ring and mothers rush,
Babies cry, children scream,
Only fathers work.
I was four years old, it was the Fifties, and indeed my mother didn’t work. In the morning she would drive us to school and in the afternoon around three she would pick us up. I remember her most clearly in the summer, leaning against the car, smoking. She was a striking woman, not beautiful but attractive, with dark, melancholy eyes and a proud, almost defiant bearing. Her brown
hair was held back by tortoiseshell combs, and in the summer she wore cotton dresses with large bold designs. These dresses were always cinched tight below her impressive breasts.
hair was held back by tortoiseshell combs, and in the summer she wore cotton dresses with large bold designs. These dresses were always cinched tight below her impressive breasts.
Her drinking, which in later life would shape and deform us all, was, in those days, only wild and sporadic. Around the time my younger brother Francis was born, however, our previously peaceful existence was shaken by a long series of violent arguments. Sarah and I would creep halfway down the stairs and listen as our parents shouted at each other. One night we heard my mother yell ‘Why don’t you go and jump in the river and drown?’ and then my father replying reasonably, but as if deeply depressed, ‘Because I can swim, it wouldn’t work.’
We suspected something catastrophic had happened, and it had, a betrayal which would mark their marriage forever. Sarah and I felt something shift, but were too young to guess why and would not learn what had happened for decades. Thinking we would get a choice, we discussed who we would go with if they divorced. I thought I’d probably go with my mother, Sarah was more inclined toward her father. But after a while, the fighting became less frequent and when they came to the Nativity Play or the Harvest Festival together they were a good-looking couple and we were proud of them. They seemed younger and lighter on their feet than other parents.
I know people who remember a period in their childhood when they had no interest in the opposite sex. I was
always
interested in girls. If I wasn’t in love, which was rare, I was always curious about someone’s body. What would she look like naked? How would she smell? What would she feel like? How would it be to stroke her here … or there … or in between? Would she be warm and soft or would she have goose bumps?
always
interested in girls. If I wasn’t in love, which was rare, I was always curious about someone’s body. What would she look like naked? How would she smell? What would she feel like? How would it be to stroke her here … or there … or in between? Would she be warm and soft or would she have goose bumps?
From infancy to beyond puberty, some part of my body was always experiencing the itch of eczema. There was never a time when an outpost of the disease was not established somewhere, and every month or so, as if creeping from a grating, the disease would emerge and blossom forth. Usually, it would take
possession of my hands first, around the knuckles and between the fingers, and then spread to my elbows, the backs of my knees, and my ankles. The hands were the worst because they could not be hidden. The itch seemed to be only a millimetre below the surface, taunting me, demanding to be extinguished and then, when I tried to reach it, retreating deeper and deeper. More and larger scabs would then erupt, and vanity and curiosity required them to be picked off. Now when they re-formed, there would be dark, bloody gullies in their midst. The itch became so intense on my right ankle once that, using only my nails, I scratched away the flesh until I could see bone. Frequently, I would put my hands under a tap, turn the water on, and let it get hotter and hotter until, as I rubbed the fingers together vigorously, the water scalded the itch away. There was something erotic in this. As the pain of the itch became the pain of burning, there was a moment of intense relief, of delicious self-punishment. But, appropriately, this moment was followed almost immediately by sensations of shame and despair, because, having done this, I would usually bring on septicaemia. When I was twelve, I read Shakespeare’s sonnet about lust. For me, however, the poem did not evoke images of carnal lust, about which I was always shameless, but of this itch and my scrabbling around in my own flesh, abandoned to this futile and costly moment of relief.
possession of my hands first, around the knuckles and between the fingers, and then spread to my elbows, the backs of my knees, and my ankles. The hands were the worst because they could not be hidden. The itch seemed to be only a millimetre below the surface, taunting me, demanding to be extinguished and then, when I tried to reach it, retreating deeper and deeper. More and larger scabs would then erupt, and vanity and curiosity required them to be picked off. Now when they re-formed, there would be dark, bloody gullies in their midst. The itch became so intense on my right ankle once that, using only my nails, I scratched away the flesh until I could see bone. Frequently, I would put my hands under a tap, turn the water on, and let it get hotter and hotter until, as I rubbed the fingers together vigorously, the water scalded the itch away. There was something erotic in this. As the pain of the itch became the pain of burning, there was a moment of intense relief, of delicious self-punishment. But, appropriately, this moment was followed almost immediately by sensations of shame and despair, because, having done this, I would usually bring on septicaemia. When I was twelve, I read Shakespeare’s sonnet about lust. For me, however, the poem did not evoke images of carnal lust, about which I was always shameless, but of this itch and my scrabbling around in my own flesh, abandoned to this futile and costly moment of relief.
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