England and Other Stories (17 page)

Mr Wilkinson opened his door. He looked at me and smiled. He was wearing clothes. His strong arms projected from rolled-up sleeves. ‘Oh that’s good of you, Jimmy. And so kind of your mother.’ He studied the Ajax tin, perhaps frowning a little even as he continued to smile. He could hardly reject my offering. ‘Well, perhaps it might do the trick.’

He looked at me again, the frown deepening, and seemed to hesitate. I can see now that he was coming to a significant decision: whether to take the tin, say he’d return it later, and send me away, or whether, since I was there and it was our tin, to make me a party to his drain-clearing operation. Perhaps he thought I was just a small boy and there was no danger—that is, to him. Or perhaps he was just infected with the same impetuous rush towards the hazardous that had overcome me.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘we may as well go straight round the side.’

This disappointed me. I wasn’t going to be allowed to pass through the house. On the other hand, I could see (or could see later with hindsight) that he’d decided, wrongly, to trust me. If trust even came into it.

He liked me, I think. He thought he’d found a friend.

We walked along by the flank wall of the bungalow. There I was on the other side of the fence over which he’d peered at me and over which he could sometimes be seen standing near-naked and ululating.

He’d taken the tin from me and, raising it now like an exhibit or something in a lesson, he said, ‘Isn’t it a sad thing, Jimmy, that one of the great heroes of the Greek myths, one of the most glorious of those who fought in the Trojan War, should be reduced to being a tin of scouring powder?’

I hadn’t the faintest idea what he was talking about, but these words made a great impression on me and have stayed with me ever since. I still hear them being spoken in the eloquent, playful yet lamenting way Mr Wilkinson uttered them.

The fact is that it is to this unintelligible but memorable remark I owe all my later discovery and enthralled exploration of the Greek myths. I owe a whole world of narrative and magic and meaning. I owe a whole education.

When my parents asked me later that year what I wanted for Christmas I said at once (having done some precocious research at my primary school) that I wanted a book that would tell me all the stories of the Greek myths, the Trojan War included. This request rather surprised my parents, but they found me such a book. It was a little beyond me at first, but I grew into it. I have it still.

But more than this. Much more. I owe to Mr Wilkinson’s remark all my lasting fascination not just with how a great Greek hero gets turned into a tin of scouring powder, but with all the strange turns and twists and evolutions this world can take, all the bizarre changes of fortune, for good and bad, it can offer. And I should know about them.

I owe to it an education. And an education.

‘When we say scouring powder, Jimmy, we really mean lavatory cleaner, don’t we? No doubt at your age you have your lavatorial interests. Did you know, Jimmy, that in Elizabethan times a lavatory was called a jakes? A jakes. Ajax. Do you see the connection?’

Again, I hadn’t the foggiest what he was on about, but I found it all beguiling, tantalising.

He took me round to the back of the bungalow where an outflow pipe from his kitchen led into a little gully with a drain hole and a grille. We had something similar beneath our own kitchen. I could see he was now hesitating again, that he wasn’t sure he should be doing this in my company, but I could also sense his mood of wilful risk-taking, that he wanted to let me, even, into his secret. I could see that he’d removed the grille and had been poking about with a stick.

‘Ajax,’ he said. ‘Will it—will he—do the trick?’

Whatever it was that was clogging his drain it was deep down, or else there was some uncooperative bend in the pipe. The hole was abnormally full, almost to overflowing, of dirty water. But it wasn’t just water, it was water with a distinctly reddish colour. It made me think at once of the slop bucket that would be sometimes visible in our local butcher’s, where I’d go with my mother and where there’d be sawdust on the floor and halves of pigs hanging on huge hooks and dripping.

A little bobbing shred of something, a mere gobbet of scum, floated in the water.

Let me say that everything was so much more primitive in those days, even if gentlemen doffed hats. It was so much nearer the Middle Ages. There’d been a war and there’d been rationing. My mother was perfectly capable of skinning and cooking a rabbit, but there came a point when she wouldn’t have liked to admit to this, or even to eat rabbit. When my parents developed their desire for respectability and advancement they really wanted to move into the clean modern age and leave behind them all traces of the ancient gutter. They weren’t squeamish and they weren’t innocent, but they wanted to live tidy lives, and they didn’t like weirdness.

I could see that in theory our street didn’t mind Mr Wilkinson’s being weird, but they minded his being weird in our street. They hoped that somehow something would be done about it. But, short of some superior agent’s stepping in, they believed that by the sheer force of their adverse opinion Mr Wilkinson might be compelled to leave and take his weirdness elsewhere. They wanted him flushed out. In this situation was the whole history of the world.

I could see that the mucky water in Mr Wilkinson’s drain was composed partly of blood and I could see that for some inscrutable and perilous reason Mr Wilkinson wanted me to see it, and not to say anything.

But, yes, I was at heart a conscientious, a truthful boy. I honoured my father and mother. I had a sense of moral responsibility. I’d told my parents about the vegetarianism when I might have said nothing. Now I’d have to tell them about breaking the edict that had followed from that first honesty and—worse—about taking the Ajax tin and going round to Mr Wilkinson’s when I should have stayed within clearly prescribed bounds.

But all this was capped by the greater and more glaring obligation to truth I had: to let it be known that Mr Wilkinson clearly wasn’t a vegetarian—a slander of my own unwitting instigation—and was even, though I hadn’t been able to see into his kitchen, a fairly zealous eater of meat. And, by implication, he was at least in that respect so much less of the weirdo than he’d been unfairly made out to be.

I can never be sure whether it was this action on my part, with all its complexity and for which I was punished by not being allowed out, even into the garden, for most of the next day, which led directly to Mr Wilkinson’s leaving us, which led to his being, as I was to discover later, taken into custody while a search warrant was issued and (discreetly) acted upon for his bungalow.

Having been so roundly punished, I was soon being, confusingly, asked questions by a kindly and patient policeman while my mother tenderly held my hand.

There were things you couldn’t do in those days, the law didn’t allow it, which you can do now. It was all very primitive, and perhaps the changes which have occurred since then are further evidence of the importance of education. For example, Mr Wilkinson lived alone, he might have been a homosexual, but he wouldn’t have been allowed by law to be one in any practical sense.

I say this because I’m a homosexual myself, though I didn’t know it then, I discovered it later. You might say I had to be educated into it. There’s a whole other story I might tell, involving me and my parents, which is even more painful in some ways than the story of Mr Wilkinson. But this is not the time, and perhaps you can imagine it. There are plenty of stories, but this is not the time.

But I think about Mr Wilkinson and about what I did to him.

He disappeared anyway. It was what the whole street wanted, but I missed him, I even felt a little bereft. I wish I’d known his first name. A nice couple, the Fletchers, who soon had their first baby, a little girl called Jilly—I remember
her
name—whom my mother unashamedly adored, moved in. And that was what the whole street wanted too.

There are some people who might say or think of me, now, that I’m a little weird, or at least odd. But then if you’re a professor of Greek you’re allowed to be that, the world even rather expects it of you, especially if your hair has become a snowy fleece and you wear tweed suits and affect white-spotted red bow ties.

I have never, so far, walked across the court here to the senior common room—across the grass on which only a few are permitted to walk—in just my underpants. Or, for extra brio, with my Fellow’s gown on too. But I’m sure if I did this (and frankly I’m tempted) it would be forgiven me, at least once, since I’m the Morley-Edwards Professor of Greek. And I’m sure that far more scandalous acts have occurred in Oxford colleges and yet been permitted, or at least smoothed over—acts that would never be countenanced in suburban streets.

All my life I’ve taken seriously—pursued and furthered—my parents’ creed that education is the most important thing, education that leads us on an ameliorating journey through life. I am their exemplar, their vindication. What could better have answered and glorified their tenet than that I should have become a professor at an Oxford college?

If you want weirdness, real weirdness, the weirdness we’re all made of, if you want the primitive that never goes away, then go to the Greek myths and to what the Greeks made out of them. Though don’t forget your Ajax tin.

Ajax, son of Telamon and mighty warrior, second only to Achilles, but ousted by the brain of Odysseus, went mad in the end, mistaking sheep for people. I know this now.

W
AS SHE THE
only one? Was it all her fault?

Was she the only one not to wash her husband’s shirt? It hung in the wardrobe with all its creases and wrinkles, his best white shirt, his Sunday shirt, the last shirt he’d worn before putting on a uniform. She took it down and pressed it to her nose. When the letters arrived she crushed it to her face and, as she read, breathed deeply. It was the best that could be done. Was she the only one?

In those days a man’s white shirt was quite an item, with its long tails, double cuffs, its round neck with the stud holes. It was more like a sort of starchy nightdress, and it served her as such often enough. So the wrinkles multiplied, so there was her smell mingling with his. But that was only right. They were husband and wife. It became a superstition. If she didn’t wash it, so long as she didn’t wash it. Not until. Was she the only one?

Months went by. The letters came less frequently. She had to be sparing in her use of the shirt, or her smell would take away his. It was getting rather ripe, it’s true. His first leave was cancelled. He couldn’t say why. It was a blow that made her weep, but it wasn’t like a message to say he was dead. And she hadn’t washed the shirt.

This was her short marriage to Albert. Most of it was separation, most of it wasn’t a marriage at all, most of it was marriage to a shirt. He was a railway clerk from Slough, but he had his notions. One day he’d be a station master. He was fussy about his shirts. He only liked to be called Albert, never Bert.

She was Lily Hobbs from Staines. She was eighteen and didn’t mind: either Lily or Lil.

I’m Bert, Bert, I haven’t a shirt . . .

Months went by. Then he came home. Because his previous leave had been cancelled he now had two weeks. Was it true, two whole weeks? And he was untouched—not a scratch, or so he wrote. Was it true? Was he being brave? Still she didn’t wash the shirt. Seeing was believing. She’d heard stories of telegrams arriving before men due home on leave. She had two choices anyway: to wash it, specially, for his arrival, or not to wash it—until. She chose the latter. Her big mistake.

If she’d washed the shirt, would everything have been all right?

I’m Bert . . .

But there he was on the doorstep. So, it had been just as well. There he was. Or there he wasn’t. Albert Tanner. He said, ‘Hello, Lily. Can I come in?’ Which was just like him, but not. She rather wished he’d said ‘Lil’. She rather wished he’d clapped a hand quickly to her behind, but he hadn’t.

He’d never mentioned the shell shock. That was news to her. Did it explain everything, and what was it anyway? Shell shock. Had he invented it? He said that he had it, like something catching, like measles. Was that why he hardly touched her? He said it was why he had the two weeks. He said he’d have to report every other day to a doctor, an MO, in London, who’d assess him to see if he was fit to return. Which was like saying—was he saying this?—that his two weeks, depending, might go on indefinitely.

In which case, God bless shell shock. In which case, Albert, be as shell-shocked as you can.

Was it all lies? Was he preparing for his desertion? Did he really have two weeks? There was something about him, standing there in his uniform. He didn’t look like a soldier, or even a railway clerk. He looked like a crafty door-to-door salesman. He looked like the sort of man women left at home had to watch out for. He looked up to no good. He looked—was this really the word?—like a criminal. Albert? A criminal?

Then he saw the shirt.

He wanted to know, he
demanded
to know why it was hanging there like that, his best white shirt, ‘in that filthy condition’. And before she could explain to him the several reasons (but couldn’t he guess?) he was explaining to her, he was shouting in her face that the reason why it was hanging there in that filthy condition was that she’d lent it to another man, she’d been letting another man wear it. And to prove the point he thrust his nostrils into the fabric, pushing it to his face, then let out a disgusted ‘Pah!’

None of this had she imagined. None of this in her wildest anticipations had she allowed for. He wouldn’t be untouched, he’d have a bit missing. An ear or something.

I’m Bert, Bert, I haven’t a . . .

Now that this was happening the sheer absurdity of it couldn’t smother her terror. Was he going to hit her? Albert? Hit her? For a moment she actually looked at the shirt and saw it, perhaps as he was seeing it, like some other man skulking there in the wardrobe, just as they were supposed to do in naughty stage plays.