Tollesbury Time Forever (14 page)

I nodded. Well what else could I do?

“Love, big man, you think that has nothing to do with imagination? Let me tell you that is all it is. The life that you are led to believe is real is nothing but sticks and straw. It has no depth and can go up in a blaze with the slightest spark, whether that be a spark of hatred or a spark of joy. A spark is a spark and no more. I AM LIFE. I give form to your thoughts and your dreams and your desires. I am the next step from what you are thinking right now. Without me there is no future so don’t you ever deny me. The dreamer is king for it is only he who truly appreciates my majesty. The cynic and the pragmatist are but rats upon this dire earth, scrabbling for one plus one in the hope that it will equal two and they can go to bed with a sigh of relief and a restful disposition. But you and I both know that numbers are mere fiction, just a tool to bind together all the other superficial inventions of man. The days of the week, the months of the year? All artifice and no more! “

I shook. My mouth was dry as stone. Each word may as well have been an iron bar crashing down upon my flaccid body, so powerful were they. And I didn’t want him to stop.

“Imagination is me and I am life and I am you! When you are awake I give you hope and when you sleep I give you dreams. I am the fuel that services the furnace of your soul.
Without light the sky is not blue, nor is the sea green. Nonsense - it is all my doing! I burn, burn, burn so that your very essence may strike out into the firmament and be consumed by the stars that are surely just the bright smiles of all our heavens.”

I began to cry for I knew this boy was right. I had always been castigated for being a dreamer, for believing in things other people derided. I had in my life spoken honestly of what I felt and what I heard and what I saw and, in return, I had been shunned by society. And scrawled upon the ragged wooden cross of my despair had been the word ‘schizophrenic’. Not only had I been told I was wrong in all that I perceived - I had been diagnosed with a severe and enduring mental illness.

So bring on imagination, boy, bring it on home to me-e-e.

Whoosh! The boy upturned his bale of hay! Boom! He leapt upon it! The letter ‘I’ was struck through the face of the bale as if it were dividing the whole world in half, between those who believe and those who dare not.

“I,” said The Walrus in a sombre tone. “Imagination is life.”

Wow!

Wow indeed!

I sensed this show was coming to an end in the same way that I had always been able to predict two doctors and a social worker coming to my house. There is an inevitability to the end of wonder just as the turning of the sun from yellow to orange doth foretell the coming of the black night.

“As you can see, we have two children left. We are nearing the conclusion of our performance. It has been momentous. You will stay with us for a while after we have finished?”

“How do you mean?” I replied.

“Stay with us. Stay here. For as long as you need.”

I remembered the gock, pause, thwack and knew I could not leave until I had seen that serving boy again. Not only seen him, but confirmed to myself that he was the very reason I was
here at all. For that was my suspicion. I nodded to The Walrus that I would indeed be staying.

“Good, good,” he said. “Continue my lovelies!”

And continue the next little girl did. She was sweetly spoken and her voice had a certain husky quality that soothed me with every syllable.

“There were once three men who lived in the same small village. One fine night each was called by an angel to gather at the edge of a cliff. They were, at heart, good men and they spoke freely amongst one another whilst they awaited the arrival of the angel. The moon was hidden by the clouds thus there was a darkness upon the earth. Yet the men were more curious than afraid, for when an angel calls you, surely good things do portend.

Now waiting for an angel is a little bit like waiting for dinner. You look forward to it because you know it is going to be great but then once it is in front of you, you want it to last forever. Just as some have a hunger for food, so others have a hunger for angels and the like. I, myself, being a little girl who is often hungry, would humbly suggest that food is better; you can’t eat an angel, and to be honest, you shouldn’t really try.

Anyway, it was as the night was at its darkest and the air at its most still that the angel arrived and stood before the three men, his heels almost overhanging the cliff edge. He must have been a brave angel, but then I suppose he had wings, so perhaps it was a little less scary for him than it would be for anyone else.

‘Welcome,' said the angel in a voice indescribable. ‘I thank you for meeting me here this night. It is good of you to come.’

The men did not speak, but listened with the wonder of us all.

‘I have a simple request for each of you.’

There was a pause as the earth itself stopped to listen.

‘I want you to step forward and jump over the edge of this cliff.’

The men were aghast. They made as if to protest but their astonishment at what had been asked of them stifled the words in their gaping mouths.

‘If you are not to jump, I request only that you tell me why; and then may you be on your way.’

One of the men spoke almost immediately.

‘I can tell you forthwith that I shall not be jumping, angel or no angel.’

‘And your reason?’

‘I trust nobody. We are born alone and we die alone. In between we strive to be the best and overcome our fellow man. It is in this way that we achieve earthly reward. What may come after, I care not. So that is it. I trust nobody, not even an angel. So I shall not be jumping.’

‘Very well,’ replied the angel. ‘You may go back to your home. Just remember that I love you.’

And the man did leave.

So that left two men and an angel in the quiet of the dark night. Nobody spoke, not the angel, nor the men for each was thinking his own deep thoughts.

Finally, the second man sighed and spoke.

‘I trust some people and I mistrust others. We are born with choices, be that to lead the life of a good man or to lead the life of a bad man. It is by having faith in the good and dismissing the bad that we can lead a life of harmony and peace. And that knowledge comes only with time and with experience. I know you not angel. You do not make sense to me. There is no logic to your being or to what you ask - therefore I am sorry but I cannot trust you. So I shall not be jumping.’

‘Very well,’ replied the angel. ‘You may go back to your home. Just remember that I love you.’

So that left the last man. And had you held a candle to his face, you would have seen bright eyes and a smile as he stepped forward to stand at the edge of the cliff, staring into the blackness of it all. As he spoke, he did not direct his words to the angel but to you and to me.

‘I trust everybody, ‘ he said. ‘We are all born good and we all die good. In between, we will make mistakes for which we should be forgiven. If I am wrong, then so be it. But I don’t believe I am.’

And then he jumped into the night.

As the man leapt so the stars exploded and the moon shone great upon this earth. The angel returned to the firmament and the man who had jumped lives now forever. He is the smile upon your lips, he is that missed beat of your heart when you fall in love and he is the hope that will ever endure.”

The boy upturned his bale of hay to display the letter ‘T’.

“T,” said The Walrus, sounding weary now. “Trust everybody for, at heart, people are good.”

Then the smallest child of all, grinning so wide, clambered onto the last bale of hay. He then got a nudge from the boy beside him and he realised he hadn’t turned it over to reveal a letter. He giggled, stepped off and tipped the bale to show the letter ‘Y’. He then counted in a gorgeously delicious voice.

“One, two, three!”

And all the children pointed at me before yelling with joyous abandon the words,

“YOU ARE WONDERFUL!!!!”

As their voices danced across the fields, the smallest boy winked at me before closing the whole bizarre production by shouting:

“And don’t you ever forget it!”

“Y”, said The Walrus, reverently, “You are wonderful.”

And I don’t mind admitting that I wept for a long old time.

FRUGALITY.

FRUGALITY.

I closed my eyes and thought of corner-shop sweets, steaming hot chocolate and Airfix models. I thought of cowboy wallpaper and digging holes in the garden, of books about bees and a misshapen teddy bear. And when I opened my eyes, the children were gone. The Walrus was gone too. The barn was before me looking as deserted and ragged as my own poor soul. It was neither day nor night. The sun was red, the sky was blue. And the earth could have been made of marshmallow, so unreal did all this feel. For what had I just sat through if not the unravelling of my very mind?

The show was over and the bales of hay with their red lettering were the only sign that anything had occurred at all. If they were real, I reasoned, then I was not completely mad. I sat on the last bale in the line, the ‘Y’ bale, I guess you could call it. I did not fall straight through it and that was good enough for me at that point. It was all moment, by moment by moment.

And there it was again - gock-pause-thwack - echoing from around the back of the barn, calling me on, drawing me in. I stood up and with a sigh, ventured up the hill and leaned against the right hand side of the barn, leaning against it like Cool Hand Luke himself. A bird crossed the sun, turning from white to black and then white again, bringing life to this desperate watercolour vista. It was all so scripted, so planned and so inevitable.

Row, row, row the boat gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream…

So on bended knees like an old plastic toy soldier, I peered around the corner.

And there was the source of my curiosity, the aural author of the gock-pause-thwack. It was the serving boy, standing some ten yards from the rear of the barn, a flat piece
of wood gripped in his hands, his eyes upon an object that hurtled towards him. Then he swung the piece of wood at the small blur before him - gock - silence as it travelled fast through the air - pause - and then - thwack - as it crashed against the wooden structure only to return, bounce and then be hit again by this startling boy. And on and on without relent. Gock-pause-thwack…

Mesmerise me, mesmerise me. I was mesmerised. That sound of summer, the sound of my youth, the sound of my dreams - oh leather on willow in the gorgeous English field of my wonder so perfect, so sonorous; swing low, sweet chariot across this green and pleasant land into which I was so preciously born.

The boy did not notice me at first. His concentration was magnificent. I had read how the old cricketers used to practice with a stick and a home-made ball against a fence, how they used to just go at it over and over again. And here it was before my very eyes. I was in awe of this boy who had served us our meal with such sullen distraction. I would soon learn that the cause of his sadness and anger was much more complicated than merely being deprived of a spot of rudimentary batting practice.

Gock-pause-thwack.

Pause…

Stop.

The boy laid his crude bat upon the ground and turned to look at me. Had I not been leaning against the barn, I’m sure I would have fallen, for as he raised his head and stared at me I was reminded instantly of my son. It was Robbie - kind of.

Robbie had always been vulnerable in the eyes of my wife, a baby swaddled, entombed in the desperate arms of his mother, hidden, protected and defended from the world of man. Not only was this boy in front of me now ten or twelve years old, he had none of the characteristics of Downs Syndrome with which my Robbie was burdened. I use the word ‘burdened’ for that is how I saw my son, a burden to his mother, and himself burdened with an affliction about which
he could do nothing; but for which the world would judge him nonetheless.

And if using the word ’burden’ wasn’t bad enough,
 
I find myself using the word ‘affliction’.

Shame on me.

“You’re not my dad,” said the boy. “And my name’s not Robbie,” he added, before I could even say a word.

Before I could even say a word.

“What is your name?” I asked glibly.

“People call me W.G.”

“What does the ‘W’ and the ‘G’ stand for?”

“Just W.G. is all.”

W.G. walked over and picked up the ball which I saw now was constructed of what seemed to be rags wrapped around some sort of wooden block. The wood was visible in places where the rags had begun to tear. The boy stood there and tightened the pieces of material that had come loose, tucking them into the folds, doing his best to make a sphere out of what was ostensibly a cube. He worked on the ball for some five minutes, appearing to forget that I was even there. When he was satisfied with the shape of the ball, he placed it on the ground and stood before me, his hands on his hips, waiting for something to happen. I waited too. Nothing happened.