Waterland (31 page)

‘Sir?’

It’s Price. His pale, questioning face looms up like a haggard moon in the dark.

‘Price, what are you doing still here?’

‘Meeting, sir.’

‘What meeting?’

‘Our society. The Holocaust Club – the Anti-Armageddon League. We haven’t decided on a name yet.’

‘Just as well. Are you supposed to hold these meetings? If Lewis—’

‘It’s all right. We booked a room in the name of the chess club.’

He falls into step beside me.

‘You’ve seen him then, sir?’

‘Seen him?’

Price nods towards that floating square of light.

‘You knew?’

‘Everyone knew.’

‘Yes. I’ve seen him. As a matter of fact, I’ve been drinking his whisky.’

‘So have you got the push?’

‘What do you think, Price?’

‘We could organize a protest, sir. Petition the education authority. Write to that shitty local paper—’

‘I’m flattered. But—’

(But why this sudden solicitude? This solidarity? These extra-respectful ‘sirs’? From you of all—)

‘I just want to say, sir, that we’re all – the whole class – I mean, really sorry about everything.’

‘Well that’s all right, Price. I’m not getting the sack. I’m being retired.’

‘And. And these-new lessons you’ve been giving. Quite something.’

Stories, Price. Fairy-tales.

‘And we’re sorry – about Mrs Crick.’

‘That’s OK too. But she’s heard about you, did you know that? I’ve told her about you. You’re the sort of student a teacher talks to his wife about.’

‘How is she, sir?’

The teacher doesn’t answer.

We reach the school-gates. The teacher stands, on swaying legs.

‘Look, have you got to go straight home? Will they worry where you’ve got to? I’ve just had three cups of Scotch. I think I need more. Come and have a drink with me.’

‘OK.’ (A little warily.) ‘All right. But does he really keep a stock of booze up there?’

‘It’s not a crime. Your headmaster needs protecting. He’d like to be your lord protector, but it’s he who – I shouldn’t be saying this.’

‘Sure … The Duke’s Head, sir? You know I’m under eighteen?’

‘Price, are you really telling me that you’ve never—?’

The Duke’s Head. Garish warmth on a cold night. A background of space-invader gurgles and fruit-machine hiccupings. A corner table. A semi-drunk schoolmaster and a schoolboy with a death-mask face. Drinks: for the former a large Scotch; for the latter (I might have known our Price’s demonstrative tastes) a slowly sipped Bloody Mary.

More shocks from South London’s School for Scandal.
Pupils encouraged in after-school drinking …

‘So what did he say to you?’

‘Lewis? Oh, never mind. Tell me about this – Holocaust Club?’

‘If you like.’ He looks hesitant, as if I’ll think it’s only kids’ stuff. ‘It’s just an idea. It’s not a protest group. We believe – in the power of fear.’

‘Fear, Price?’

Fear?

‘Not every kid in this school would get up and join a protest. But they might be scared. We want to pool people’s fear. Tell them not to hide it. Bring it out in the open. We want to say, it’s OK, show your fear, add it to ours.’ ‘But how do you—?’

‘We thought we’d start a magazine. Get people to write down their fears. You know, how they see the end of the world. The last minutes, last thoughts, the panic, what it’ll be like for those who don’t go straight away …’

He’s excited. He takes a sip of blood.

‘You know where we got the idea from, sir?’

‘No.’

‘No? Not really? That lesson. You remember. When we all told our dreams …’

‘Ah yes.’ (So my classes have taught something: how to be afraid.) ‘That lesson.’

He looks at me.

‘Look, I’m sorry I messed up your classes, sir. I’m sorry I cocked things up for you.’

But that’s what education’s about, Price. (And don’t look so sheepish. What’s happened to the revolutionary fire? Or doesn’t it work any more when the tyrant’s taken a different sort of tumble? When he turns out, after all, to be a bit of a sad case.)

It’s not about empty minds waiting to be filled, nor about flatulent teachers discharging hot air. It’s about the opposition of teacher and student. It’s about what gets rubbed off between the persistence of the one and the resistance of the other. A long, hard struggle against a natural resistance. Needs a lot of phlegm. I don’t believe in quick results, in wand-waving and wonder-working. I don’t believe, as Lewis would have it, in equipping for today’s real world. But I do believe in education.

Sacked school-teacher, husband of baby-snatcher, says: ‘I believe in education …’

Do you know why I became a teacher? OK – because I had this thing about history. My pet hobby-horse. But do you know what prompted me to
teach
? It was when I was in Germany in 1946. All that rubble. Tons of it. You see, it didn’t take much. Just a few flattened cities. No special lessons. No tours of the death-camps. Let’s just say I made the discovery that this thing called civilization, this thing we’ve been working at for three thousand years, so that now and then we get bored with it and even poke fun at it,
like children in school (sometimes it takes the form of a pompous schoolmaster), is precious. An artifice – so easily knocked down – but precious.

That was thirty-four years ago. I don’t know if things are better or worse than they were then. I don’t know if things were better or worse than they were in the year nought. There are myths of progress, myths of decline. And dreams of revolution … I don’t know if my thirty-two years as a teacher have made any difference. But I do know that things looked dark then and they do now. In 1946 I had a vision of the world in ruins. (And my wife-to-be, for all I knew, was having visions too – but let’s not go into that.) And now here you are, Price, in 1980, with your skull-face and your Holocaust Club, saying the world may not have much longer – and you’re not much younger than I was then.

‘But you want to know what Lewis said to me? Let me tell you something I said to him, I said, “Lewis, do you believe in children?” ’

‘Don’t get you, sir. Want another drink?’

‘Nor did Lewis. I said, “We teach them. Do you believe in them? All the things they’re supposed to be. Heirs of the future, vessels of hope. Or do you believe that they’ll grow up pretty quickly to be like their parents, to make the same mistakes as their parents, that the same old things will repeat themselves?” And Lewis said, “Which do you believe?” And I said, “I believe the latter.” And Lewis said, “Is that what you tell your classes?” And I said, “It’s what history tells them: One day you’ll be like your parents. But if in becoming like their parents, they’ve struggled not to be like them, if they’ve tried” (you see, Price, why the student must resist the teacher, the young must suspect the old) “if they’ve tried and so prevented things slipping. If they haven’t let the world get any
worse
—?” ’

‘And do you know what Lewis said?’

‘No.’

‘ “That’s the comment of a tired old cynic who’s been teaching too long.” ’

All right, so it’s all a struggle to preserve an artifice. It’s all a struggle to make things not seem meaningless. All a fight against fear. You’re scared. No need to start a club about it. Saw it in your face. And what do you think I am right now? What do you think all my sounding off is about, and what do you think all these stories are for which I’ve been telling as a finale to my teaching career and which – now you tell me – have not gone unappreciated. It helps to drive out fear. I don’t care what you call it – explaining, evading the facts, making up meanings, taking a larger view, putting things into perspective, dodging the here and now, education, history, fairy-tales – it helps to eliminate fear. And why do you think I’m sitting here with you now, wanting to tell you more? Don’t have to go yet, do you, Price? Mum and Dad won’t worry? Yes, I’ll have another. Yes, I know, I’m drunk. Let me tell you another. Let me tell you—

Price gets up for more drinks. The barman, collecting glasses, stops him. Eyes him suspiciously, then me.

‘Is he over eighteen?’

‘Yes.’ The barman stares, unconvinced. ‘I should know. He’s my son.’

– let me tell you (even behind his corpse make-up, Price goes suddenly pink), let me tell you

32
About Beauty and the Beast

N
OT a saviour of the world. A potato-head. Not a hope for the future. A numbskull with the dull, vacant stare of a fish …

And he can’t be taught. Can’t read, can’t write. Speaks half in baby-prattle, if he speaks at all. Never asks questions, doesn’t want to know. Forgets tomorrow what he’s told today. At fourteen, he still sits in a junior class of the Hockwell village school, his bottom jaw hanging, blank eyes staring, the daily butt of the other kids. ‘Dick Crick!’ they squawk. ‘Dick Crick! Dick Crick!’ Like some name in a nursery rhyme. (Now whatever possessed his unthinking parents to call him Richard?)

Mr Ronald Allsop, village headmaster, a persevering man, confides at length in the father: ‘I’ve done all I can.’ And takes the time-honoured escape route of the defeated teacher: ‘But he’s good with his hands … and a strong pair of shoulders … no shame, to be sure, in honest manual work …’

And the strange thing is that the father seems pleased, is almost relieved by this sorry verdict.

And the even stranger thing is that when the younger brother, Tom – who, by contrast, is a star pupil, who wins a scholarship to Gildsey Grammar School, who will go far and make the father proud – attempts to succeed where the Hockwell village school has failed; when, one summer’s day he gets books, pencil and paper – because he doesn’t want a dummy for a brother, because he minds what his
brother doesn’t, that his brother has no mind, because he wants to save him from this prospect of backwardness (note these early pedagogic symptoms) – and sits down with Dick on the edge of the tow-path, the father promptly breaks up this makeshift tutorial and, with wide-eyed consternation and untypical vehemence, splutters to his second-born: ‘Don’t educate him! Don’t learn ’im to read!’

So Dick grows up, deft-handed, broad-shouldered, strong in body if not in mind, by the banks of the Leem. And in time goes to work on an Ouse dredger, the
Rosa II
, and thus comes to purchase, with his saved-up wages from this same daily labour, a second-hand motor-cycle, a Velocette 350, which some might say was of all things the thing Dick understood most intimately and cherished most dearly, a motor-bike, in its brainless efficiency, in its mechanical animation, bearing a pretty close resemblance to Dick himself.

But even a potato-head must sometimes wonder and think. Even a numbskull must sometimes ponder those big and teasing questions: What’s life? What’s it made of? Where does it come from and what’s it for?

Take, for example, that time his mother disappeared without explaining and never came back again. She used to be always there. She used to produce clean clothes and daily meals. Potato-head though he was, she used to tuck him in bed and kiss him goodnight and lavish on him, indeed – or so it seemed to the curious and envious, yes envious, eyes of little Tom – a special kind of mother’s affection, somehow proportionate to its not being returned. But one day she took suddenly to her own bed and a little while later was seen no more. Now where could she have gone?

But don’t you know, Dick? Didn’t you see? She’s in that wooden box they lowered into the frost-hardened ground
in Hockwell churchyard. We all stood round, don’t you remember? That was her. She’s under the little ridge in the grass where father goes and puts flowers. Haven’t you noticed, Dick, how he’s started to grow flowers amongst all those vegetables? And sometimes, if you watch him, after placing the flowers, he kneels down and presses his head to the ground and cries his eyes out. She’s under the ground, Dick, to stay.

But Dick won’t believe she can have gone where she can’t be retrieved. Perhaps she’s hiding somewhere else. If they took her away in one box, perhaps she’ll return in another. Perhaps she’s curled up inside that old chest in the attic. Didn’t she give him the key – just before she vanished? And if she isn’t in the chest (because she isn’t) then perhaps she’s inside those bottles – because that’s all there is in there, and some old sacking and some meaningless writing. Or perhaps what’s inside the bottles will make her reappear …

For one day, not long after Mother’s sudden and unscheduled departure, Dick takes one of the bottles and goes down to where Stott’s Drain meets the southern bank of the Leem and ceremoniously drinks the contents …

And why Stott’s Drain?

Because it’s here that every evening, after first lowering them in the morning, Dad used to pull in his wicker eel-traps which, almost without fail, came up throbbing and glistening with eels. There must be something special about this murky confluence of drain and river, something special for both eels and for Dad. Because it’s here, in that spring and summer after Mother’s decampment that Dad takes to coming after sunset, changing his eel-fishing routine to a nocturnal vigil lit by the moon or a hurricane lamp, and measured out by cigarettes. We go with him, his sons, and learn about eel-trapping. And sometimes we pass the whole night while Dad racks his brains to tell us more and more tales, more and more wise saws and sayings (though Dick never listened, just stared at where the
traps were submerged), because he doesn’t want to go back to that empty cottage, to that cold bed where Mother isn’t.

And it’s here too, when he’s older and rides a motorcycle, that Dick will come every alternate weekday evening on his return from the
Rosa II
, entrusted now (daytime baiting having been restored) with the privileged task of gathering by himself our crops of eels. Slung across his back as he rides home along the Hockwell road, a dripping, squirming sack. Yes, there’s something special, for Dick as well, about these magical eel-traps, which, lowered empty and barren, can come up again so full of slithery quickness. Perhaps the river can tell where Mother has gone and how she might return. Perhaps the river can tell the secret of life. Perhaps one day, when the traps are hauled in …