A Word Child (3 page)

I sat down at the table in the third chair. They sat down. The table was an ancient kitchen table of straw-coloured deal with a pleasant ridgy grainy surface out of which Crystal vigorously scrubbed the bread crumbs. It never wore a cloth, except when I came to supper with Crystal on Saturday evenings. We sat there under the naked central light like three conspirators. Crystal had cleared the dishes. Arthur poured me out a glass of wine.

‘What did you have for supper?'

‘Shepherd's pie and beans and apricot tart and custard,' said Crystal. She shared my taste in food. She still had her northern accent. I had got rid of mine.

‘What did you have at the Impiatts?' Arthur asked. We always asked each other this.

‘
Quenelles de brochet. Caneton à l'orange. Profiteroles.
'

‘Oh.'

‘You did better,' I said.

‘I'm sure we did!' said Crystal, smiling her utterly innocent uncomplicit smile at Arthur, who grinned.

Let me try to describe Crystal. She cannot be said to be beautiful. She was short and dumpy, she had no perceptible waist. She had pretty small well-worn capable hands which moved a lot, like a pair of little birds. She was round-faced and rather pallid or even pasty. She rarely took any exercise. Her hair was orange-brown and fuzzy and fell in a thick heavy mat almost to her shoulders. She had a large mouth with a prominent moist lower lip, very mobile. Rather bad teeth. A wide and distinctly upturned nose. Her eyes were hazel, of the kind which are pure golden without a hint of green, but they were usually hidden behind thick round spectacles which made them look like gleaming stones. None of this really describes Crystal however. How is it possible to describe someone to whom you are oned in love? Crystal often appeared stupid. She was like a sweet gentle patient good animal.

Arthur was a little taller than Crystal, considerably shorter than me. He had a tentative humorous face of a rather dated sort. (Not that he was ever witty, he was far too timid.) He had soupy brown eyes and an apologetic much-chewed mouth and a well-grown but not quite drooping brown moustache. His hair was rather greasy, not long, hanging in lank brown waves. He looked like some unidentified person in a nineteenth-century photograph. He wore oval steel-rimmed glasses. This sounds like a prejudiced description. Let me try to amend it. He was an honest man devoid of malice. His soupy eyes could express feeling. (I do not wear glasses. My eyes are hazel like Crystal's. Crystal and I had different fathers.)

I never lingered long on Thursday evenings. I liked to condition those about me, and Arthur was conditioned to reach for his coat as soon as I arrived. He had in fact already reached for it. I took Crystal's little busy hand. I did not mind Arthur's presence any more than that of a dog. ‘All right, my darling?'

‘All right, dear. Are you all right?' We always asked each other this.

‘Yes, yes. But are you really all right?'

‘Of course. I've got a new lady. She wants a cocktail costume. Such lovely stuff. Shall I show you?'

‘No. Show me on Saturday.' I kissed her wrist. Arthur rose. A minute later we were outside in the wind.

I felt that emotion again, the emotion in Arthur from whatever had happened during the evening, something more than usual. I wondered if I should question him, decided not to. We walked up the North End Road. Arthur lived in Blythe Road. The wind was suddenly very cold, a winter wind. I felt something out of darkness grab at me, an old old thing.

‘Freddie was on about your junkies again,' I said.

‘I can't stop them from coming to the office.'

‘You could stop collecting them.'

Arthur was silent. The wind blew bitterly. Arthur was wearing a sensible absurd woollen cap. My head was uncovered. I usually wore a flat cloth cap when it got really cold. Time to dig it out. I had forgotten to tell Crystal about the telephone. I must remember to do so on Saturday.

‘Has Freddie decided about the panto?' Arthur asked.

‘Yes.
Peter Pan.
'

‘Oh goodie!'

We reached the corner of Hammersmith Road, where we parted.

‘Good night.'

‘Good night.'

‘Hilary — '

‘Good night.'

I walked abruptly away. It was after midnight when I got to Bayswater. There was silence in the flat. I glanced quickly through Tommy's letter. The usual rigmarole! I went to bed in my underclothes. (This shocked Christopher.) I had never had any sleep problems since the orphanage. A talent for oblivion is a talent for survival. I laid my head down and merciful pain-killing sleep covered me fathoms deep. Not to have been bom is undoubtedly best, but sound sleep is second best.

B
EFORE describing the events of Friday I must (while, as it were, I am asleep) talk at more length about myself. I have mentioned my work, my age (forty-one), my sister, the colour of my eyes. I was bom in a town in the north of England which I will not name since for me its memory is accursed. Let it for whom it may be holy ground. I do not know who my father was, nor who Crystal's father was. Presumably, indeed certainly, they were different men. I was informed, before I knew what the word meant, that my mother was a ‘tart'. It is strange to think that my father probably never knew I existed. My mother died when I was nearly seven and Crystal was an infant. I have no memory of my mother, except as a sort of state, a kind of Platonic remembrance. I think it is a memory of a state of being loved, a sense certainly of some lost brightness, an era of light before the darkness started. Immense tracts of my childhood are inaccessible to memory, and I cannot remember any incident from those first years. Crystal used to possess a photograph allegedly of our mother, but I tore it up, not of course out of resentment.

After our mother's death we were taken over by Aunt Bill, my mother's sister. I suppose her name was Wilhelmina. (I never knew my mother's first name, and later it was impossible to ask. Aunt Bill always referred to her, in an indescribably offensive tone, as ‘your ma'.) Aunt Bill lived in the same town, in a caravan. I cannot to this day see a caravan without shuddering. Aunt Bill kept Crystal with her in the caravan, but me she fairly soon (I do not know exactly how soon) despatched to an orphanage. I had, with my first self-consciousness, an awareness of myself as ‘bad', a bad boy, one who had to be sent away.

It is impossible for me to ‘try to be fair' to Aunt Bill. There are some things which are so difficult that one does not even know how to try to do them. Because of an incident concerning a pet mouse, which I can scarcely bring myself to think of let alone to relate, I detested Aunt Bill forever with a hatred which can still make me tremble. The particular way Aunt Bill had of stepping on insects provided my earliest picture of human wickedness. I am not sure that I have ever bettered it. In any case, Aunt Bill and I were instant enemies, not least because she deliberately separated me from Crystal. Aunt Bill was an uneducated ill-tempered spiteful woman full of malice and resentment. I will not use the word ‘sadistic' of her; this suggests a classification and thereby a sort of extenuation. When, many years later, I heard of her death, I intended to go out and celebrate but found myself simply sitting at home shedding tears of joy. Aunt Bill was, of course, a tough egg. (‘Brave' carries the wrong implications.) She carried on her war against the world in her own personal way exerting her own personal power, and in this she might even be said to have had some kind of distinction. She was my first conception of a human individual. (Crystal was part of me.) Let what can be said for her. She got rid of me. She might have got rid of Crystal too. Crystal was small enough to be adopted. (I was of course too old for adoption, even apart from my precocious reputation for being thoroughly disturbed and ‘bad'.) But she kept Crystal and looked after her; and though she got an allowance for doing so I doubt if she did it for the money. Aunt Bill never worked that I can remember. She and Crystal lived on National Assistance in the caravan.

I shall not talk about the orphanage: again, fairness is probably impossible. It was not that I was beaten (though I was) or starved (though I was always hungry); it was just that nobody loved me. In fact I early took in that I was unlovable. Nobody singled me out, nobody gave me their
attention.
I have no doubt that some of the people there were good well-intentioned folk who tried to approach me, and that I rejected them. I have a shadowy idea that this may have been so. I can hardly remember the early years at the orphanage. When the light of memory falls I was already as it were old, old and scarred and settled in a posture of anger and resentment, a sense of having been incurably maimed by injustice.

The most profound and maiming piece of injustice was the separation from Crystal. I cannot remember anything about the event of Crystal's birth, but I can recall her in infancy and trying to carry her in my arms. I felt none of the jealousy the earlier child is supposed to experience. I loved Crystal at once in a sort of prophetic way, as if I were God and already knew all about her. Or as if she were God. Or as if I knew that she was my only hope. My younger sister had to be my mother, and I had to be her father. No wonder we both became a little odd. The orphanage was not too far away from the caravan site, and I must have seen quite a lot of Crystal in the earlier time after my mother's death. I have memory pictures of Crystal aged two, three, four, and the sense that we played together. But as I developed more and more into a ‘bad' boy I was allowed to see less and less of my sister. It was supposed that I would be ‘bad for her'. And by the time I was eleven we were almost completely separated. I saw her on occasional holiday outings and at Christmas. The anguish of these occasions did nothing to lighten my reputation for being ‘disturbed'. One Christmas time I arrived at the caravan to find Aunt Bill slapping Crystal's face. I attacked Aunt Bill's legs, which was all I could get at. She kicked me and I spent Christmas Day in hospital.

My reputation for ‘badness' was not unmerited. I was a strong child and soon given to violence. I was not bullied by other children. I did the bullying. (These are disagreeable memories. Am I still a monster in the dreams of those I injured then?) I was good at games and excelled at wrestling. These activities gave me my first conception of ‘excellence', inextricably mixed up with the idea of defeating someone, preferably by physical force. Many years later a social worker (little knowing that I was myself something of an expert on the matter) told me that criminals who not only rob but quite gratuitously injure their victims as well, do so out of
anger.
This seems to me very plausible. I was brimming with anger and hatred. I hated, not society, puny sociologists' abstraction, I hated the universe. I wanted to cause it pain in return for the pain it caused me. I hated it on my behalf, on Crystal's, on my mother's. I hated the men who had exploited my mother and ill-treated her and despised her. I had a cosmic furious permanent sense of myself as victimized. It is particularly hard to overcome resentment caused by injustice. And I was so lonely. The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child's despair. However I was better off than some. I had Crystal, and I lived in and for the hope of Crystal as men live in and for the hope of God. When we parted from each other, mingling our tears, she used always to say to me, ‘Oh be
good
!' This her having so often heard what a rascal I was. Not that her love wavered. Perhaps she felt that somehow if I became better we would meet more often. But for me Crystal's little cry was and is the apotheosis of that word.

Religion, of a low evangelical variety, was everywhere at the orphanage. I detested that too. Crystal's ‘Be good' (which had little or no effect on my conduct) meant more to me than Jesus Christ. Christ was always purveyed to me by people who clearly regarded me not only as a delinquent but as an object of pity. There is an attitude of complacent do-gooding condescension which even decent people cannot conceal and even a small child can recognize. Their religion seemed to me over-lit, over-simple, covertly threatening. There was nowhere in it to hide. We roared out ‘choruses' about sin and redemption which reduced the hugest theological dogmas to the size of a parlour trick. I rejected the theology but was defenceless against the guilt which was so fruitlessly beaten into me. The mood was brisk and impatient. Either you were saved by the blood of the Lamb or else you were for it, a black and white matter of breath-taking rewards or whipping. The efficacious Saviour almost figured to me as a sort of
agent provocateur.
Again and again the trick failed to work, the briskness turned to severity and the jollity ended in tears. In so far as there were mysteries and depths in my life I kept them secret from Christ and his soldiery. I was more moved by animals than I was by Jesus. One of the porters had a dog, and this dog once, as I sat beside him on the ground, touched my arm with his paw. This gentle gesture has stayed with me forever. And I remember stroking a guinea pig at school and feeling such a piercing strange pain, the realization that happiness existed, but was denied to me. I hardly ever visited ‘the country'. I pictured it as a paradise where ‘the animals' lived.

Those who regarded me as a thoroughly bad lot were in no way unreasonable. One of my earliest memories is of kicking the tulips to pieces in the public park. I progressed to grander acts of destruction. I liked hitting people, I liked breaking things. Once I tried to set fire to the orphanage. I was in a juvenile court before I was twelve. After that I was regularly in trouble with the police. I was sent to a psychiatrist. A Christmas came when I was not allowed to see Crystal. I was just coming to full awareness of myself as an outcast, a person totally and absolutely done for, when I began very gradually to discover a quite novel source of hope, to grow the hope in myself like a growing seed. I was saved by two people, neither of whom could have done it alone. One of course was Crystal. The other was a wonderful schoolmaster. His name was Mr Osmand. I did not discover his first name.