A Word Child (4 page)

Mr Osmand taught French and very occasionally Latin at the modest unambitious filthy little school which I attended. He had been at the school for many years but I did not become his pupil until I was about fourteen, with my loutish reputation well developed. I had, until then, learnt practically nothing. I could (just) read, but although I had attended classes in history and French and mathematics I had imbibed extremely little of these subjects. The realization that people had simply given up trying to teach me anything enlightened me at last, more than the lectures from magistrates, about how utterly ship-wrecked I was; and increased my anger and my sense of injustice. For with the dawning despair came also the tormenting idea that in spite of everything I was clever, I had a mind though I had never wanted to use it. I
could
learn things, only now it was too late and nobody would let me. Mr Osmand looked at me quietly. He had grey eyes. He gave me his full
attention.

I suspect that many children are saved by saints and geniuses of this kind. Why are such people not made rich by a grateful society? How exactly the miracle happened is another thing which I cannot very clearly recall. Suddenly my mind woke up. Floods of light came in. I began to learn. I began to want to excel in new ways. I learnt French. I started on Latin. Mr Osmand promised me Greek. An ability to write fluent correct Latin prose began to offer me an escape from (perhaps literally) the prison house, began in time to show me vistas headier and more glorious than any I had ever before known how to dream of. In the beginning was the word.
Amo, amas, amat
was my open sesame, ‘Learn these verbs by Friday' the essence of my education; perhaps it is
mutatis mutandis
the essence of any education. I also learnt, of course, my own language, hitherto something of a foreign tongue. I learnt from Mr Osmand how to write the best language in the world accurately and clearly and, ultimately, with a hard careful elegance. I discovered words and words were my salvation. I was not, except in some very broken-down sense of that ambiguous term, a love child. I was a word child.

Probably Mr Osmand was not a genius at anything except teaching. He encouraged me to read the classics of English literature; but his own preferences were more narrowly patriotic. I buried Sir John Moore at Corunna, I threw my empty revolver down the slope, I shouldered white men's burdens east of Suez, I played up and played the game. My father, from the terrace below, called me down to ride. My head was stored with images of the East, Newbolt's East, Conrad's East, Kipling's East. What I read in these books thrilled me with a deep mysterious significance which brought tears to my eyes. I who had no mother could claim at least a mother land, and these exotic tales were about England too and, after it all, hearts at peace under an English heaven. There was a sense of family. But most haunting of them all to my young mind was the story of Toomai of the elephants. ‘Kala Nag, Kala Nag, wait for me.' Perhaps this beautiful picture of the elephant turning round to pick up the child symbolized for me my own escape. The elephant would turn and would carry me away, would carry me to goodness and salvation, to the open space at the centre of things, to the dance.

Mr Osmand was a member of the Church of England, but I think that his religion too was largely patriotic, concerned less with God than with the Queen. (Queen Victoria, of course.) I do not recall that we ever talked about God. But I did imbibe from my wonderful teacher a sort of religion or ideology which certainly influenced my life. Mr Osmand believed in competition. It was necessary to excel. He loved and cherished the examination system. (And rightly. It was my road out of the pit.)
Parvenir à tout prix,
was my own conception of the matter. We were both very ambitious for me. But Mr Osmand did not simply want me to win prizes. He wanted me, in his own old-fashioned and austere conception of it, to be good. His message to me was the same as Crystal's. Of course he chided my violence, but more profoundly, and through his very teaching, he inculcated in me a respect for accuracy, a respect, to put it more nobly, for truth. ‘Never leave a passage until you thoroughly understand every word, every case, every detail of the grammar.' A fluffy vague understanding was not good enough for Mr Osmand. Grammar books were my books of prayer. Looking up words in the dictionary was for me an image of goodness. The endless endless task of learning new words was for me an image of life.

Violence is a kind of magic, the sense that the world will always yield. When I understood grammatical structure I understood something which I respected and which did not yield. The exhilaration of this discovery, though it did not ‘cure' me, informed my studies and cast on them a light which was not purely academic. I learnt French and Latin and Greek at school. Mr Osmand taught me German in his spare time. I taught myself Italian. I was not a philological prodigy. I lacked that uncanny gift which some people have for language structure which seems akin to a gift for music or calculation. I never became concerned with the metaphysical aspects of language. (I am not interested in Chomsky. That places me.) And I never thought of myself as a ‘writer' or tried to become one. I was just a brilliant plodder with an aptitude for grammar and an adoration for words. Of course I was a favourite and favoured pupil. I suspect that Mr Osmand regarded me at first simply as a professional challenge, after I had been generally ‘given up'. Later he certainly came to love me. Mr Osmand was unmarried. His shabby sleeve often caressed my wrist, and he liked to lean his arm against mine as we looked at the same text. Nothing else ever happened. But through the glowing electrical pressure of that arm I learnt another lesson about the world.

I went to Oxford. No child from the school had ever been farther afield than a northern polytechnic. In the milieu in which Crystal and Aunt Bill had their being Oxford was a complete mystery: ‘Oxford college', somewhere in the south, like a teacher's training college only somehow ‘posh'. I told Crystal about Oxford when I knew scarcely more about it myself. This was to be the escape route. For of course, as I worked away at irregular verbs and gerundives and sequence of tenses I was working not only for myself but for Crystal. I would rescue her and take her with me. And when I had learnt everything, I would teach her. At fourteen I had been a small though muscular imp. At sixteen I was a six-foot adolescent. With Mr Osmand and my new talents and my new ambition I feared no one. I visited Crystal whenever I pleased, I intimidated Aunt Bill, and Crystal and I made plans to become rich and live together.

At Oxford I studied French and Italian. Mr Osmand wanted me to read ‘Greats' but I preferred a more linguistic course; the idea of philosophy frightened me and I wanted to be sure of excelling. I was extremely diligent but also played games. Intoxicatingly soon after playing cricket for the first time I was grinding my teeth over missing my blue. I learnt Spanish and modern Greek and started Russian. I got rid of my northern vowels. Crystal, at school, then working in the chocolate factory, came down occasionally to marvel at my new Jerusalem. We went into the country on bicycles. Mr Osmand visited me once during my first year. Somehow the visit depressed us both. He reminded me of too many things. And doubtless he felt that he had lost me. I wrote to him for a while, then stopped writing. I soon gave up returning to the north. I spent my vacations in college or on occasional grant-aided trips to France or Italy. I travelled alone; these journeys were not a success. I was an anxious and incurious tourist and my linguistic abilities never made me feel at home. I scarcely even tried to speak the languages I could read so easily. I was always relieved to be back in England. Oxford changed me, but also taught me how hard to change I was. My ignorance was deeply engrained, the grimy misery of my childhood had entered my mode of being. ‘Catching up' was going to be a longer job than I had anticipated when I wrote out my versions for Mr Osmand. I made no real friends. I was touchy and solitary and afraid of making mistakes and well aware that I was a big tough healthy chap devoid of ease and physical charm. I could not get on with girls and scarcely attempted to. I did not mind.
Parvenir à tout prix.
I was working for me and Crystal. Other things could wait. I won ever prize I went in for: the Hertford, the Heath-Harrison, the Gaisford Greek Prose, the Chancellor's Latin prose. I did not attempt the Ireland (for which Gladstone and Asquith strove in vain). I got one of the top firsts of my year and was almost immediately elected to a fellowship at another college. I made plans for Crystal to come and live with me in Oxford. I gave a party in my college rooms, and Crystal came down, wearing a flowery dress and a floppy white hat. She was seventeen. She said to me with tears in her eyes, ‘This is the happiest day of my life!' A year afterwards, as a result of a catastrophe which will be mentioned later in these pages, I resigned my post and left Oxford for ever.

FRIDAY

I
T WAS Friday morning and I was just leaving for the office. Darkness had not yet really given way to day. There might have been some sort of yellow murk outside, but I did not pull back the curtains to look at it. I had swallowed two cups of tea and was my usual hateful early morning self. I emerged from the flat onto the bright electrically lit landing and closed the door behind me. The curious smell was still there. Then I stopped dead.

On the opposite side of the landing, not far from the lift, a girl was standing. I saw at once that she was, wholly or partly, Indian. She had a thin light-brown transparent spiritual face, a long thin fastidious mouth, an aquiline nose: surely the most beautiful race in the world, blending delicate frailty and power into human animal grace. She was not wearing a sari, but an indefinably oriental get-up consisting of a high-necked many-buttoned padded cotton jacket over multi-coloured cotton trousers. She was not tall, but in her gracefulness did not look short. Her black hair in a very long very thick plait was drawn forward over one shoulder. She stood perfectly still, her thin hands hanging down, and her large almost black eyes regarding me intently.

I felt shock, pleasure, surprise, alarm. Then I recalled Christopher's words, completely forgotten since, about a coloured girl looking for me. Fear. For
me
surely no one could search with an amiable motive. I was about to speak to her when the fact of the silence having lasted, as it seemed, so long made speech impossible. How after all could this girl, such a girl, concern me? There were other flats on the corridor behind her, containing shifting populations of which I took care to know nothing. She was doubtless somebody's girl friend going home. Lucky somebody. I unfixed myself from the door handle and walked to the lift and pressed the button, turning my back upon the apparition. As the lift arrived and the automatic doors opened I heard a soft footstep. The Indian girl entered the lift after me. She stood beside me, staring up at me with an unsmiling expression of dazed puzzled interest. I could see and hear and only not quite feel her breathing. She was wearing a black woollen sweater, visible at neck and sleeves, underneath the jacket. I looked at the reflection of her back in the mirror. The long thick unsilky plait, which she had evidently tossed back over her shoulder as she entered, fell straight to the buttocks where it arched out and ended in a fanlike brush like a lion's tail. The slightly frayed sleeve of the jacket moved and came into contact with the sleeve of my mackintosh. I felt my features stiffen as a current of electricity, generated by the contact, passed on into my flesh. The lift had creaked its way to the ground floor and the doors opened. She stepped out first. I went past her to the street door and out into the street. It was a dark morning, a little rain riding upon the wind, the street lamps still on. I reached the corner resolving not to turn round. The electrical connection still held. I turned round. She was standing upon the steps of the flats and staring after me.

I really did once upon a time run round the park every morning. The goal of keeping perfectly fit was
a
goal, the gift of a strong and healthy body was
a
gift. Running was a method of death, of life in death, not the saint's marvel of living in the present, but a desperate man's little version. There was a kind of sleeping or half-sleeping which I sometimes tried to achieve (especially at weekends) when I lay like a floating turtle, just breaking the surface of consciousness, aware and yet not self-aware, not yet tormented by being a particular person. So too with the running. I ran, and was cleansed of myself. I was a heart pumping, a body moving. I had cleaned a piece of the world of the filth of my consciousness. I was not even capable of dreaming. If I could always so have slept and so have waked I would have achieved my own modest beatification. I stopped running not (I think) because of a warning tap from the finger of age, but just out of sinful degenerate laziness of soul: the same laziness and failure of hope which still prevented me from starting to learn Chinese. I would, however, on a good morning when time allowed, walk briskly across the park to Gloucester Road station and proceed to Westminster from there. On bad mornings when I was late I took the Inner Circle from Bayswater. This morning (Friday) was a bad morning.

As I now cram myself into the rush hour train at Bayswater station perhaps I should pause again to describe myself a little more. I have spoken of the cult of my body. I still was very much that body. It had defended me in childhood and I had always identified myself with it as with one of my chief assets. I was (am) just over six feet tall, sturdy, dark, clean-shaven against a fierce beard, with a head of thick greasy crinkly dark hair descending to my collar. A similar mat of thick hair furs my body to the navel. I have hazel eyes not unlike Crystal's, only not so golden and not so big. (Aunt Bill also, I regret to say, had hazel eyes only hers were very small and distinctly greenish.) It is difficult to describe my face. It satisfies no canon of beauty, not even that of a gangster. My wide nose, like Crystal's, turns up a little at the end. If I valued my physique it was certainly not for its charm. Because of my hair I was called ‘Nigger' at school and for a time I did in some curious way think of myself as being black. A boy once told me that I had a black penis, and convinced me of it in spite of the visual evidence. Intended to wound, these taunts did not altogether displease me. I liked (though I expected no one else to) my copious fur, my blackness, my secret being as a black animal. Of other uses of my body, in acts of love, I knew nothing, even when I became a student. I knew that I was unattractive and that I radiated a paralysing awkwardness; moreover a ferocious puritanism, doubtless purveyed to me by my Christian mentors, made me feel that sex was unclean.

I relied upon routine, had done so perhaps ever since I realized that grammatical rules were to be my salvation; and since I had despaired of salvation, even more so. Routine, in my case at least, discouraged thought. Your exercise of free choice is a prodigious stirrer up of your reflection. The patterned sameness of the days of the week gave a comforting sense of absolute subjection to history and time, perhaps a comforting sense of mortality. I could not consider suicide because of Crystal, but I wanted to have my death always beside me. My ‘days' were a routine, and in the office I conceived of myself as far as possible as a man on an assembly line. Weekends and holidays were hells of freedom. I took my leave for fear of comment and simply hid (if possible slept). I used once to attempt holidays with Crystal, but it was too much. She cried all the time. It was true that, as Freddie Impiatt had said to me, I liked to live in other people's worlds and have none of my own.

None of this entirely describes what I ‘lived by'. By what after all does a man live? Art meant little to me, I carried a few odd pieces of literature like lucky charms. Someone once said of me, and it was not entirely unjust, that I read poetry for the grammar. As I have said, I never wanted to be a writer. I loved words, but I was not a word-user, rather a word-watcher, in the way that some people are bird-watchers. I loved languages but I knew by now that I would never speak the languages that I read. I was one for whom the spoken and the written word are themselves different languages. I had no religion and no substitute for it. My ‘days' gave me identity, a sort of ecto-skeleton. Beyond my routine chaos began and without routine my life (perhaps any life?) was a phantasmagoria. Religion, and indeed art too, I conceived of as human activities, but not for me. Art must invent new beauty, not play with what has already been made, religion must invent God and never rest. Only I was not inventive. I did not want to play this play or dance this dance, and apart from the activity of playing or dancing there was nothing at all. I early saw that the nature of words and their relationship to reality made metaphysical systems impossible. History was a slaughterhouse, human life was a slaughterhouse. Mortality itself was my philosophical robe. Even the stars are not ageless and our breaths are numbered.

Let us now get on to the office. Very little of my story actually takes place in the office, but as the office was so much a part of my mind it is necessary to describe it. I existed, as I have explained, near to the bottom of the power structure which rose above the clerical and stenographical level. I dealt with ‘cases' concerning pay, little individual problems, not always unamusing. (Should this man's ‘danger money' affect his pension? Should that man's paid sick-leave be extended in these circumstances? Should another man's pay-rise be backdated in those?) I did not invent rules, I merely applied rules made by others. Sometimes the rules did not quite fit the cases, and there was a tiny occasion for thought. Usually no thought was necessary. I wrote out my view in the form of a ‘minute', which I sent to Duncan, who sent it to Mrs Frederickson, who sent it to Freddie Impiatt, who sent it to Clifford Larr, and after that, or even before that, I did not really know or care what happened to it or whether it survived. Arthur Fisch, who devilled for me, wrote no minutes so there was someone to be superior to.

I worked in a room with two other people. This Room and these people have a certain tiny importance because, as so often, the physical world figured the mental world. The two people who shared my room were Mrs Witcher (Edith) and Reggie Farbottom. Arthur worked in a cupboard (almost literally), a little room partitioned off from the corridor, with a corridor window as its only source of light. I regretted that I had not installed Arthur long ago in the Room, but it was too late now, and Arthur liked his cupboard. Mrs Witcher, it was said, had once been a shorthand typist who had risen to power through being someone's Personal Assistant. When I first knew her she was a self-styled ‘head' of the Registry, the vast complex where the files were stored. This might have been an important job but in her case it was certainly a standing up job and not a sitting down job; and could one actually say that such a one as Mrs Witcher was ‘head' of the Registry? There was in fact another head, a man, who sat down, called Middledale, who really ran the Registry, while Mrs Witcher was just one of the more important of the filing clerks. There was some uncertainty about this even at the time. Later Mrs Witcher received a promotion and a desk, first in the Registry itself, and then in an adjoining room (not Middledale's room, which had by then been converted to another purpose). During a period of office redecoration she moved into my room (the Room) which I then shared with a man called Perry (who afterwards emigrated to Canada). Mrs Witcher came in as a temporary and junior third, but somehow managed to stay, partly because Perry and I were too polite to turn her out, later because it had become a custom. What Mrs Witcher's work was at first supposed to be I never understood, or tried to understand, as I regarded her presence as ephemeral. She had some task concerned with the checking of classifications, doubtless a routine matter of seeing that papers were being filed correctly. Later on however Mrs Witcher set herself up (or was set up by some superior authority) as a sort of watchdog over the classifications themselves, not only checking the files but controlling the divisions and sub-divisions into which they were separated: a task which raised very fundamental questions with which Mrs Witcher was patently not qualified to deal.

That Reggie Farbottom had (as some people said) originally been a messenger was very unlikely. He had probably started life as some sort of trotting boy clerk. How he ceased being a standing man and became a sitting man I do not know. This was perhaps Mrs Witcher's doing: he had long been her creature. The relation between them was mysterious. Mrs Witcher was immemorially divorced. (Of old Witcher nothing was known.) Reggie Farbottom was considerably younger, unmarried, much given to boasting of ‘conquests'. He was foul-mouthed into the bargain. Perhaps Mrs Witcher liked that. At any rate Reggie was soon to be found occupying the desk which Mrs Witcher had invented for herself in the Registry, and later, on Perry's departure occupying Mrs Witcher's desk in the Room, while Mrs Witcher occupied that of Perry. My conception of the matter was that Reggie did what Mrs Witcher ought to have been doing (whatever that was), while Mrs Witcher pretended to do a job which she had invented for herself and in reality did nothing. On Perry's departure, as I realized later, I ought instantly to have installed Arthur in Perry's desk. Only Arthur was sentimental about his cupboard, and the true significance of Farbottom only dawned on me when it was too late.

As office rooms go, the Room was not unattractive, though it was lit by the sort of neon lighting which recreates a lurid winter afternoon. It was quite large and had a sort of bay window from which, through a cleft in an inner courtyard, one could see Big Ben, and above him a slice of sky which could be felt to be hanging over the river. In this bay window, on the far side of the room, I sat. My desk, moreover, rested upon a strip of brown carpet which reached from the door to the window and made my side of the room, which also boasted a print of Whitehall in 1780, quite elegant. The desks of Reggie and Mrs Witcher were both nearer to the door, facing the wall in the uncarpeted half of the room. So certain fundamental distinctions were at least preserved.

I always attempted to arrive at the office before nine, This was not required, but there were advantages in being first. I could get quite a lot of work done in the blessed interval before the others arrived. The old joke about civil servants being like the fountains in Trafalgar Square because they played from ten to five had no application as far as I was concerned, or indeed in the department generally, except for a few freaks such as Edith Witcher. There was always far more to do than I had time for, though on the other hand nothing was urgent. This suited me. If I had
ever
finished
I would have felt in danger of going mad. I sometimes had nightmares in which I had no more cases, my in-tray was empty, and as I had no more work to do I was there under false pretences. On this particular day (we are still on Friday morning) a hold-up in the tube made me later than usual. The irritation of this hold-up (jammed breast to breast and back to back in ominous silence) drove from my mind any further speculation concerning the Indian girl. She probably had nothing whatever to do with me. As I entered the building I met Clifford Larr. I was making for the lift, he for the stairs. He worked on the first floor, what one might call the
piano nobile.
I worked a good deal nearer to the attics. We said good morning. He paused. ‘A pleasant gathering last night, was it not?' ‘Very pleasant,' I replied. He passed on.