Hopeful Monsters (24 page)

- Or the town hall, the department store, the bank, the museum, has burned like a volcano and the lava has pushed human beings down towards the sea -

- But it is these images in my mind that go tumbling, jostling, like a crowd running down towards a river!

I had come to the edge of an area of wasteland that lay between the houses like stitching and the delta of railway lines on their wooden pillars. Beyond the railway lines were the cranes and the river: there were no ships on the river; there were some hulks on the mud that seemed part of the land, rotting. There was a group of children playing on the wasteland: they were on top of a small hill of slag and rubble. The children were playing a game of rolling old rubber tyres down this hill; the tyres rolled and bounced and span towards the railway lines at the bottom. There was a small embankment with a wire fence on top in front of the railway lines and when the tyres reached this they leapt and whirled in the air and then flopped down like dead fishes. There was one small opening in the embankment which consisted of an archway which gave access to the area under the railway lines beyond. The children did not seeem to be aiming the tyres particularly for this opening; the game seemed to be just to watch the tyres bounce and leap.

I thought - The children on that mound are like Napoleon and his marshals surveying a battlefield: they watched soldiers and cannon balls bounce and leap, flopping down like dead fishes.

- Or these children are rolling their tyres down the inner surface of the four-dimensional continuum of the universe to see what, at the end, will be the effects of light, of gravity.

There was one child who was smaller than the others who was pushing a large tyre up the hill. This child wore a cap and a coat down to its ankles. It was like a small Sisyphus just emerged from an egg, pushing its own shell up a hill.

I thought - Or this is like one of those experiments in which you bombard with particles a small aperture in a screen and it is according either to chance or to how you have set up the experiment what, if anything, gets through.

When the small child who was pushing the tyre up the hill reached the top the other children gathered round. I had sat down on my haversack at the edge of the wasteland at some distance from the hill. I thought - I will stay here and observe not only the customs of this strange tribe but myself observing -

- Out of the confusion of images, might something of myself get through?

The small child was climbing into the large tyre which the other children held for him: I mean he was getting himself wedged inside the tyre as if he were the centrepiece of a wheel. He had his head down, his knees against his chin, his arms around his knees. It was also, I suppose, as if he were within the casing of some seed; his small face peering out. Or was not this like an illustration to some sacred text - the microcosm and the macrocosm, the human within the circle, the part that is the whole. These images went spinning in my mind. Then I thought - But surely the child within the tyre cannot be rolled down the slope; those tyres went bounding, leaping, so violently: the child will die! The other children held the tyre while the small child settled himself in; then they gave the tyre a push and the tyre went off whirling, bouncing, down the slope. I thought - But the child's neck will be broken: you see why this is not possible! I stood up. I wanted to stretch out my hand against -what? - gravity? The tyre hit a projection, took off, landed, took off again. I thought - There is something so soft inside, like water bouncing against stone. This also is in my head. I picked up my haversack and began to move down the hill. The other children had turned and were running away down the far side. I thought - They

know, of course, that the child in the tyre may be killed. The tyre was heading for the low embankment with the wire fence on top; there was just the one small opening through to the area beneath the railway lines beyond. I thought - So now, come on, what is it in that experiment that makes the one particle get through: the condition set by the experimenter. The tyre with the child inside made a long low leap and then disappeared, yes, through the opening in the embankment: it went out of sight in the area beneath the railway lines. I had been running; I stopped; I said - Thank you. I thought - You mean, what if that particle were a seed, with a child inside? Then - This is ridiculous. I went on. There were puddles of oily water on the wasteland in which light was reflected like rainbows. I reached the archway in the embankment and went through; there was a maze of posts carrying the railway lines above my head. I thought - So, now, what am I learning about an anthropology of the mind! The maze of posts was like some dead forest; the ruins of an ancient temple; what had the temple been used for, the sacrifice of a child? But this child had got through! And was now back in the ruined temple. And so on. I was picking my way between the posts that were like the trunks of rotting trees. I thought - It is as if they, and these images, have been a long time under water. I could not see the tyre: it had found its way, presumably, some distance into the maze. Or had it gone right over the rim of the land, and back to its origins in water. There was a small clearing within the maze; the railway lines made a loop so that there was a patch of open sky above; within this clearing there was a half-collapsed hut and two small grey-and-green bushes. I thought - This is the home of some old hermit, perhaps; or that Garden, where now these bushes are the remains of those two trees. The tyre had come to rest half propped against one of the pillars at the edge of the clearing; there was a shaft of sunlight coming down towards the hut. I thought - This clearing itself is in the shape of an egg: the tyre with the child inside is like a seed that has come in by chance, by design, from outside to that old garden, that hut like a rotting tomb. Then - Stop thinking! There was an arm hanging out from the inside of the tyre; it was a small white arm which was, yes, like some shoot not so much from a seed as into it. I said to myself again - Stop thinking! I had been thinking that if the child were dead, then people might imagine I had murdered it. I went on into the clearing. Well there it was, this strange self-risking, self-sacrificing, self-immolation of a child. I went up to the tyre and

knelt down beside it. The child was still wedged inside. Its head was at an angle which made it seem that its neck might indeed be broken: its knee and elbows were scraped and slightly raw. The child's eyes were closed; it was holding its cap down by its knee; it had dark curly hair; it was smiling. One of its cheeks was brown and pink with dirt and blood: I wondered ifl might lick it. I thought

- The child is alive! Then I realized that the child, whom I had taken to be a boy, was in fact a girl: she was a small bright girl of eight or nine. She had opened one eye and was smiling. I thought I might say - Are you all right? None of this seemed, at the time, all that extraordinary. It seemed that I should put out a hand and see if any bones were broken; but I did not want to touch the child; I remained squatting in front of her with my forearms on my knees. I smiled at her. The girl moved her neck, her arms, tentatively, as if preparing to climb out of the tyre; she was looking towards something beyond me. I thought - Well, now, what am I going to see if I turn: some old monster emerge from that hut that has been sleeping for a thousand years? When I turned my head there was, yes, someone standing by the hut; it was another child, a boy; smaller even than the child within the tyre: this child seemed to have come out of the hut and was standing by the two grey-and-green bushes. I thought

- Well, you mean, this is what we have been waiting for all these centuries, these children? Then - This is ridiculous. The girl was climbing out of the tyre; her coat was torn; she had thin arms and legs like bones which have been picked clean. She remained crouching. Then with her hands she made flashing, darting movements towards the child who was by the hut: it was as if she were flicking bits of light at him; as if the bits of light might come down on him like golden rain. Then this child came up to her and held out his hand. He was wearing a rough brown smock to just below his knees. I thought - Oh I see, the child who has been in the tyre is deaf or dumb; or this other child is deaf and dumb; perhaps they both are; that's why she makes these flashing movements with her hands. Then - Or this silence, this scattering of light, is like the speech, or milk, of angels. The child who had been in the tyre stood and took the hand of the smaller child who was standing gravely by her. She did not in fact appear to be injured. Neither child up to this time had paid much attention to me. I thought - But that is all right, I am an observer in this clearing in the jungle. Then the girl who had been in the tyre did turn to me and made one or two flicking movements towards me with a hand. I smiled; I nodded; I

shook my head. I thought - But what does it matter if I do not understand? I understand. Then the girl, laughing, held her hand in front of her hips and made one or two movements forwards and back with her finger and thumb in a circle which might have been taken, if they had not been done so laughingly, to refer to something that could be called obscene. I laughed too; I raised my hand; I shook my head. Then the girl turned away. I thought - But thank you for the offer! It was kind. The two children set off beneath the railway lines hand-in-hand. The girl stopped once more and looked back at me; she made no more flicking movements with her hands. She looked first at me, then at the hut, then at the boy; then she remained for a time looking back at me. I watched her. I thought -She is trying to make some further message. I tried to say to her -It is all right! Then I watched them go. I had sat down on my haversack in the clearing by the hut. I was thinking - Well what might indeed grow, in the mind, if there is silence: something that has been dormant for a thousand years?

The rector of St Biscop's was a sandy-haired man called Peter Reece who strode about his parish without a jacket and with what looked like bicycle clips on his shirt-sleeves, so that with these and his dog-collar and his way of walking - leaning forwards with his arms held close to his sides - it was as if he were in harness and pulling a great weight. Sometimes he would stop and look back as if the weight had slipped from him and gone rolling down a hill. He seemed to be wondering - It is my fault if people have to suffer? to die?

His parish was High Anglican; his church had a ceiling which was painted blue with golden stars; beneath it there were niches from which dapper saints looked down. Peter Reece lived on his own in the large rectory; some of the young men who came to work for him looked somewhat like the dapper saints. He lived in an attic at the top of the house and on the first floor were dormitories where the young men slept and on the ground floor were rooms where unemployed men and schoolchildren could be given free meals. Between the rectory and the church there was a piece of waste ground where there had previously been the parish hut and a tennis court; it was here that there was being built the new Recreational Hall. In this there were to be games - table tennis and snooker and whist and ludo - classes in woodwork and pottery, and lectures on current affairs in the evenings.

Peter Reece had got help from local builders to provide him with

materials and there was a rich widow in the town who gave him money for expenses. But he did not get much help in this work from the unemployed themselves: they seemed to feel that they might undermine their case for what they were entitled to. So Peter Reece had asked for volunteers from Cambridge where he had recently served as an assistant priest. He then worried that his volunteers might be seen as dispensers of charity: there was a certain amount in the Bible about the virtue in the dispensing of charity, but who benefited from this virtue seemed to remain obscure.

Groups of men in cloth caps and mufflers would stand at some distance from the half-built Recreational Hall and watch us working. We thus became somewhat self-conscious in our work. I would think - Perhaps virtue resides in the embarrassment of those who are charitable? Then - What would be really charitable, of course, for the people who are watching us working, would be if we could arrange for the building to fall down.

It was difficult to make much contact with the men in cloth caps. We would try: but the more we tried, of course, the more unacceptable we became as people who were seen as doling out charity.

My first job was to transport by wheelbarrow loads of bricks to the building site from where they had been dumped by a lorry. Children would watch me: I would sometimes manage to give them a ride in the wheelbarrow. Then I got the job of manhandling bricks up to the level where two men were constructing a wall standing on planks between trestles. I thought - So here, again, might it not cheer up the watching children and the men standing on street corners if we embarked on one of those slapstick routines that play such a part in pantomimes: clowns knocking each other over with planks swinging on shoulders; builders toppling off ladders and falling head first into buckets. And after a time we might have managed to provide better recreation than that which could be provided by a hall.

Then I got the job myself of laying bricks on the top level of the wall. I had not done such work before. I thought - Ah I will not think now that the wall should fall down!

I stood on a plank on the scaffolding and took some cement on my trowel from the bucket that had been handed up to me and I flicked the cement on to the bricks that were already there and the cement seemed to go everywhere; it was like birdshit, like pollen: I thought - I am doing something that could be called building a

wall? Bits, however, here and there seemed to stay in place; indeed like seeds, like pollen. I shaped the cement that had stayed on the wall and placed the new brick on top; I dropped a dab of cement in the crack and tapped at the new brick: I thought - Of course it is when you stop thinking, that something like building a wall just happens. Then there was the business of the plumbline: you dangled a piece of string with a lump of lead on the end; it went down into the depth to get the wall upright - so this was gravity! After a time the wall did seem to be building itself. I thought - Well most things living, growing, happen by themselves: you do not notice gravity?