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The man on the bank lowers the lamp. You’d better watch him if he says so, he says to the boy. The man goes to the head of the first horse, bends over and strikes it. The boy can’t see what he strikes with. Perhaps it is the bottle. He does the same to the second head. Not one inch of the horses’ flesh such as the boy can see in the lamplight so much as quivers from either blow. The man stands upright, nothing in his hand. So I killed them, you saw I killed them, didn’t you? The boy knows he must lie: Yes I saw you. The man approaches him, evidently pleased, and pats him on the shoulder. There is blood on his hand which reeks of paraffin. So you saw, he says. Yes I saw, says the boy, you killed two horses. He is aware that it is he who is now talking to the man as to a child. You killed them very well, he hears himself saying again.

We will take you back now, says the man, and if anybody asks you, you tell them what you saw me do. We’ll light you back with the lamp.

Can I go? says the boy.

We’ll take you back, sonny.

I know my way, says the boy, even at night.

No terror on the way can match the disgust he feels for the man in front of him: it is a disgust to the point of nausea. In a moment the smell of paraffin will force him to vomit.

Can I go?

Don’t ever forget what you saw me do.

Away. The lamp invisible. The smell of paraffin present but now imaginary. He feels his way between the trees.

His fear is overcome, both his fear for himself and (for it is different) his fear of the unknown: not overcome by an appeal to will-power or the summoning up of courage—how often can such direct appeals of a purely formal morality ever work?—but overcome by another, stronger, revulsion. It is beyond me to create a name for this revulsion: the ones I can think up all simplify. It has nothing to do with the slaughtering of horses or with the sight of blood. It is a revulsion not uncommonly felt by children and men, but one that quickly disappears never to recur if systematically ignored. With him it was always to remain stronger than his fears, for he never ignored it.

He emerges from the wood at the top of an incline above the farmhouse. The slope, far too steep to plough, has been left uncultivated and is overgrown with bracken. As he comes down it in the dark his foot catches in a skein of bracken and he falls forward. Unhurt, he begins to roll down the slope. It would be simple for him to stop himself; he has only to grasp at some roots. But he has no wish to. He will roll to the bottom. Each time his legs come over his head it is as though for an instant the side of the hill is a flat plain and the lights in the windows of the farmhouse below are mysteriously large lights on the distant horizon. Each time his head comes off the ground it is as though he is falling across the sky. The dog, running behind him, begins to bark excitedly and to nose the ground. Each turn is like a door opening and shutting. Plain shut sky shut plain shut sky and the smell of the wet bracken on either side of the door. Bang, shut, bang, shut. The level. The sound of hosing in the dairy.

After the incident in the wood that autumn night he not infrequently
climbs up to the near edge of the wood and deliberately rolls head over heels down the bracken slope.

The cook sees him one late afternoon.

You’ll break your neck, she says.

My neck won’t break.

He saw the branch as though it were created to sweep him from his pony. All consequential reasoning, all the speculation which pertains to being able to choose among possibilities, was swept away in the same moment that it became clear to him that the branch must inevitably sweep him off the pony.

Time is measured not by numerals on a clock face but by the incidence of our apprehended possibilities. Without these—in face of the branch already above the galloping pony’s ears, time suffers an extraordinary change. The slowness of it cannot be imagined.

The boy lies on a bed in a farm-labourer’s cottage, calm, waiting for the pace of time to revert to normal. When it does, he may moan.

The old man moves about the room. It is like an outhouse with a bed in it. There is a window with very green leaves outside it: on the sill is a candle. The bed on which he is lying is covered with rags and an old horse blanket. It smells of damp foul cloth.

The old man is lighting a fire beneath a blackened kettle. The ceiling of the room is stained brown and in places the plaster has fallen off and the laths are visible. The brown of the ceiling is the colour of tea. The old man moves slowly and with difficulty. The boy believes that he is an old man of whom he has heard his uncle speak. His uncle said that he would die in the Workhouse.

He can feel how swollen his mouth is. With his tongue, cautiously, he feels the holes from which his teeth have been knocked out. (What
will come to be known as his leer has been born.) The pain in his chest breathes in and out like the old man blowing into the fire on his knees.

Who are you? he asks the old man.

The old man comes to the bed and sits on it. In face of the arrested time just ending, the boy may be as old as the man.

What the old man says I do not know.

What the boy says in reply I do not know.

To pretend to know would be to schematize.

Meanwhile development is so retarded, progress and consequence so slow that the determination not to cry out is left inviolate. It can endure for hours.

The branch struck him on the chest and face. It may be like this at the instant of being shot. The violence of the impact is so great that the self withdraws from all further contact. This is not the same phenomenon as unconsciousness. He was conscious, but suddenly his own body, its sensations and acquired memories became a vast estate in which he could wander without concern about his means of locomotion. Far away from where he was in his estate he saw a dark mass, composed of stone surfaces and water. He was approaching it fast. He entered it as his back struck the pony’s haunches. He lay vertical in a fissure of a cloud-like substance as his feet shot up into the air above the pony’s withers. When he hit the ground, curtains of whole fields were drawn back to reveal the blue sky without any land but him beneath it. Then he lost consciousness.

His courage on the bed, when he regains consciousness, derives from his original decision, when he first saw the branch, not to cry out. That was an hour ago and before the old man found him. On the bed he is still deciding. In time as he now experiences it, sustaining his decision is not what demands courage: on the contrary, it is the making of the decision which never ends.

(It is in order to break and destroy the concession of this experience
of time which the body invents to protect itself, that torturers alternate torture with comfort.)

Everything you write is a schema. You are the most schematic of writers. It is like a theorem.

Not beyond a certain point.

What point?

Beyond the point where the curtains are drawn back.

Come back to the boy.

Who says that?

The old man does.

What does the boy feel?

Ask the old man.

Look at him, says the old, man, poor bugger. Not a cry out of him.

The last barrier against consequence is the home. This is why the dying want to die at home.

The boy is not dying.

But he is in a home in bed with the bedclothes that smell of damp foul cloth over him.

In the time which his fall and his pain arrested, he found a home.

The old man was there as the boy emerged from his estate.

They met as equals. No rules governed their encounter. Bone to bone.

But when the boy’s sense of time began to revert to normal, he became young again.

That was a nasty toss you took, sir. Don’t fret yourself. Lie quiet.

Your uncle’s coming to take you home in the buggy.

I don’t want to move.

You can’t stay here can you?

Why not? Whose is it?

Whose what?

Whose bed is this I’m on?

It’s mine, sir. I found you on the edge of Hawk’s Rough, and I carried you back and laid you on the bed.

Whose home is it?

He will look through the windows of other labourers’ cottages and he will climb up to the window of the dairymaid’s room. He will try on her aprons. He will strap on one of Tom’s leather leggings and it will come to the top of his thigh. To be another!

Don’t fret. I’m going to see to the fire. We must keep you warm mustn’t we?

What else did you do?

I cleaned the blood off you and laid you down.

Am I badly hurt?

Nothing that won’t mend itself.

It hurts when I talk.

Don’t fret.

Stay with me.

The sound of the buggy, and his uncle is in the doorway. His uncle makes the old man look almost as small as a dwarf. Jocelyn looks down at the boy and speaks gently to him, smiling. To Jocelyn it is a form of initiation that his ward has undergone. The curtain has gone up on his life.

He confers with the old man and gives him a two shilling piece. The boy sees the money change hands, and the old man continually tapping his forehead to convey gratitude.

His uncle lifts the blanket, lets it fall to the floor, and takes up the
boy in his arms. The pain in his chest is such that he screams and loses consciousness.

Jocelyn
whispers tenderly to soothe, to propitiate.

You’ve the making of a real thruster my boy.

Carrying the boy through the door, he hisses quietly, mollifyingly, as a groom does grooming a horse.

A thruster, my boy, a hard-bitten thruster.

All history is contemporary history: not in the ordinary sense of the word, where contemporary history means the history of the comparatively recent past, but in the strict sense: the consciousness of one’s own activity as one actually performs it. History is thus the self-knowledge of the living mind. For even when the events which the historian studies are events that happened in the distant past, the condition of their being historically known is that they should vibrate in the historian’s mind.

In the Piazza San Michele on the waterfront at Livorno there is a statue of Ferdinand I. At each corner of the pedestal on which the archduke stands, a bronze figure of a naked African slave is chained. For this reason the statue is often referred to as
I Quattro Mori
. There is an inscription on the pedestal, the last part of which reads in Italian as follows:

Why don’t I have a Papa?

Your Papa died.

Dead? Yes.

In the cemetery he’s dead?

If you are good, you go to heaven when you die.

Was Papa good?

I’m sure he was.

Always?

We didn’t know him. I don’t think your uncle or aunt knew him either.

But Maman—

Your mother met him in Italy I think.

What was he doing in Italy?

He had something to do with ships.

Was he English?

I think he was Italian.

What did Maman call him?

Now finish your soup and no more silly questions.

Was he run over by a train?

Who?

Papa when he was dead.

I don’t know.

Couldn’t Maman stop him?

Finish your soup.

I’m dead too! Ha! Ha! Dead! Dead!

Finish—

Why will nobody tell me anything about my father? Whenever I ask about him, you change the subject.

I never saw him. Nor did your uncle. You must ask your mother about him.

You are only pretending not to know. Please who was he?

He was a merchant from Livorno in Italy.

Was he Italian?

Yes, an Italian merchant.

Were they married long before he died?

A very short time.

And did he really die in an accident with a train?

Who told you that?

That’s what Cook used to tell me.

I didn’t know.

Was he very old when he died?

He was much older than your mother.

Am I like him?

I’ve told you I never saw him.

But guess.

Perhaps your dark eyes. You certainly don’t get them from her.