Hindsight (2 page)

2

I
began to think about using Paddery as the background for a story because of a chance meeting with the biographer Simon Dobbs. It took place at a joint committee held by two writers' organisations to agree on an approach to the Minister of Arts about the distribution of certain foreign royalty payments. Historically there had been a good deal of feuding between the two bodies, and their lot still tended to regard us as stick-in-the-muds and we them as wild boys. But the subject was too technical for much controversy and the meeting went well, despite our efforts to demonstrate our fundamental radicalism and theirs to prove their steadiness and responsibility.

I should, I now see, have realised that Dobbs was a sick man, but I am not very observant about that sort of thing. I looked at him, of course. He belonged to the quite common category of writers who affect a military appearance; short hair, neat moustache, oldish tweedy suit, erect bearing, speech quiet and slightly clipped, big horn-rimmed spectacles. Certainly he looked tired, and the veins on the back of each large pale hand stood out like tree-roots. But he had taken the trouble to go into one specially tiresome technical tangle before the meeting, and now expounded both problem and solution with admirable clarity. I thought him a bit of a stick but, despite that, impressive.

For my part I felt a silly longing to impress him, one of those fantasies which, but for his subsequent request, would soon have been stacked away with all the other junk in my mental toy-cupboard. I don't know whether other writers of my type have this absurd yearning to feel that their work is taken seriously by men like Dobbs, men who produce what I cannot help thinking of as ‘real' books—three years in the writing, six hundred pages (two volumes, even, on Oscar Wilde), index, footnotes, bibliography, nothing invented, page after page of accurately researched facts, all surmises nicely qualified; and then the serialisation of the juicy bits in the major Sunday papers, long reviews by scholars, controversies with other scholars, TV programmes, a film, even, based on the Life, a whole industry. Ah, well.

After the meeting, while we were having biscuits and tea in the half-hour won from the day by our efficiency, Dobbs made his way towards me and said, ‘Weren't you at St Aidan's?'

His voice was even softer than it had been in the committee, but hardly less formal.

‘That's right,' I said.

‘I thought I recognised you,' he said.

I blinked inwardly, though this has happened before. Judging by snapshots I was an ordinary-looking child, with no feature strong enough to suggest that my face would become what I now see in the mirror—still ordinary, but different. Apparently something has persisted that is able to call forth recognition across four decades.

‘Don't tell me you're Dobbs ma,' I said.

‘I was a couple of years ahead of you,' he said, not apparently put out that I was unable to repeat the trick he had performed.

‘What's happened to your minor?' I asked, with that twinge of self-consciousness one feels on using ancient school slang, in this case our normal term for a younger brother.

‘David?' said Dobbs. ‘Dead, I fear. Cancer of the spleen. Three or four years back.'

‘Oh, I'm sorry.'

‘In Bolivia. He was a mining engineer. Lived out there. I hadn't seen him for twenty years. We sent each other Christmas cards.'

Now, here is a strange thing. The perfectly inoffensive Dobbs minor—could there have been something about him that attracted that kind of relationship, or non-relationship? He and I had been Freshers (St Aidan's for ‘new boys') together, and had almost at once fallen into a dumb antipathy, soon ritualised in a convention of never speaking directly to each other; our coevals joined in to the extent of trying to set up situations in which one of us would be forced to break the long silence, but never succeeded. We kept it up for several terms until The Man noticed and simply ordered us to stop. It was by this odd closeness to Dobbs minor that I had been able to recall that a Dobbs major must have existed.

‘Presumably you were among those evacuated to Paddery,' said Dobbs.

‘Yes indeed. Weren't you?'

‘It would by hindsight have been a convenience,' he began, but at this point one of his colleagues, a stout and dynamic woman who specialised in gritty TV scripts about the drug-culture, pushed between us and began to harangue him about some monstrosity perpetrated by the legal department of the BBC. Dobbs of course did quite a bit of work for TV, spin-off from his researches. It was natural that the woman should want somebody of his calibre on her side, and natural that he should regard the matter as of more importance than chat about our prep school. He nodded apologetically to me and bent his long frame to listen.

In my bath that night I thought briefly about Dobbs minor and his spleen. I had had an idea that that was an organ which could be removed without loss to the system. Not in Bolivia, perhaps. Now Dobbs minor had been removed, and I sensed no loss.

Two days later I received a letter from Simon Dobbs.

Dear Rogers,

I was interested to meet you last Tuesday and would have liked to talk longer. You may not be aware that I am at the moment engaged on a biography of Steen. It was intended for the centenary, but such a mass of new material has come my way that I am beginning to doubt whether I shall make it. When I went to see Mary Benison a few months before her death she was barely prepared to admit that she had even known Steen, but not long ago I received from her executors, apparently on her instructions, four large trunks of her papers, absolutely unsorted. I cannot yet tell how long it will take me to work through them or whether it will be worth the effort.

Be that as it may, even now I foresee a need to attempt to encapsulate this extraordinary woman, if only to make sure that she does not ‘run away' with my book. I seem to remember my brother David telling me that the boys at St Aidan's used to call her ‘Mad Molly'. This soubriquet from some of the few dispassionate observers who ever crossed her path might be a nicely ironic way of summing up her career, but before I begin selecting material with that in mind I would prefer to make sure. Would you please confirm or deny?

I cannot imagine that MB would have thought it in her interest to have direct dealings with the type of second-rater old Smith employed to teach the boys, let alone with the boys themselves, but I suppose somebody must have seen her if only to christen her as they did. Did you? If so, would you let me have a three-line pen-portrait? And if you happen to know for sure why the boys called her ‘Mad Molly', that might also be useful.

Yours sincerely,

Simon Dobbs

I guessed that Dobbs had had an instinct to underline the words ‘for sure', but had decided it wouldn't quite do. Of course I knew the answers to his questions, I thought. I would bash something out that evening.

It was only when I settled down to do so that I realised how elusive all my memories were. A picture of Molly as a person was clear enough in my mind, a bright and life-enhancing image, but the actual events of the year in which I knew her were strangely vague, a kind of personal Dark Ages, though I was aware of having been happy enough throughout it. I wanted to impress Dobbs with vivid and significant detail. It was there, I felt, but refused to come out.

After a couple of evenings of this the frustration began to get in the way of the novel I was supposed to be writing. When I settled to work at it next morning I found myself quite unable to concentrate. The obvious thing was to get what I did remember off my chest, put it in an envelope to Dobbs and hope to forget about it. He had asked why we called her Mad Molly, and at least I knew the answer to that. I would start there. No, I'd better explain what the girls were doing in the garden. I …

My finger was poised above the ‘I' key when I experienced a sort of jerk, or convulsion, in my mind, an intuition so strong that it felt like a physical event. ‘I' had been the problem. ‘I' was the person sitting at this desk, so shaped and altered by the years that he was no longer the same entity as the boy who ran down through the chestnut grove to Molly's Sunday teas in the conservatory. The solution was to speak of the boy in the third person, to call him not ‘I' but ‘he'.

It worked. It came with a rush. Before the morning was over I had written nine pages—twice my usual stint—of a novel about a boy who was and was not myself. I was entirely happy—happy to have solved the Dobbs problem, happy to be embarking on new territory—I had never before written anything that could be called autobiographical—happy in the general excitement one feels when the process of creation seems to be going well. I did not ask myself for many weeks why these urgent and important memories should have stayed hidden so long, or why, even now, I seemed only able to cope with them by using the remote-handling device of fiction.

I sent Dobbs my first instalment before the first week was out.

3

E
verybody always knew how the War had started. Carreras had begun it, by accident.

It happened on the first Wednesday after the evacuation of St Aidan's to Paddery. Back in Brighton this would have been a half holiday, but with compulsory cricket for everybody. There was nowhere for anything like that at Paddery, no mown turf and little level ground. So the boys were loosed to do what they felt like all afternoon in the hayfield between the house and the lake. Out-of-bounds was marked by splashes of white paint on the tree trunks down either side and the lake path at the bottom. There was a swimming roster, two forms at a time, beginning with Freshers and 3b.

For a while the boys mooched around, exploring possibilities. The house itself—two brick wings with a stone balustrade along the top, and a grand, bowed centre containing the State Apartments—looked down on their rovings. Rather, it failed to look, being blind. There was permanent black-out in the windows of the State Apartments which produced this effect, a deadness, an indifference, curiously chilly even on a sunlit afternoon. Mr Stock, the duty master, sat in a deck-chair on the gravel, reading.

The War began around Fallen Tree. Being the only object of possible interest in the hayfield it already had a name, with notional capitals. It must have come down some years ago and had lost most of its bark. Two stout limbs below tilted the trunk up at an angle, and above that the bare wood of the upper branches rose antler-like, pale and glittering. To prevent overcrowding only boys in 5, Midway and Schol were allowed to climb the trunk.

Down below, the mess of timber smashed and splintered by the fall had forced the mower to leave an island of grass uncut, which by now contained patches of nettles and acted as a barrier to boys in 4 and below, who tended to cluster around, shrilling to the privileged climbers above. Gradually they threaded pathways and tunnels through the coarse grass and in among the branches. Loose bits of timber began to be dragged free. It was thus that Carreras found his gun.

It was perfect. He never needed to do anything to it beyond tying a length of cord along it for a sling. It had a straight barrel almost three feet long and had broken off with a butt-shaped wedge of its parent branch still attached. At exactly the right place below the barrel the stub of a stout twig stuck out, forming either a trigger or a hand-grip according to whether Carreras was using it as a sniper's rifle or a tommy-gun. There were even two protuberances, not very well aligned, which could be considered backsight and foresight.

At once Carreras—a large and noisy boy who had come late to St Aidan's and somehow never caught up, though he ought by his age to have been at least in 5 by now—was out in the open rat-tat-tatting at the perfect target of the boys on the tree trunk. From this accident the War took its permanent form. The boys on the tree, though of course they shot back with pointed fingers, came late to the source of weapons. By the time they'd realised that it was worth dying spectacularly as a means of getting to ground level without loss of face the juniors had all the best guns, none of them as good as Carreras's and many only suitable for shooting round corners. The seniors took over the cover of the uncut grass and, surrounded by besiegers, fired back. A few poor guns, overlooked by the juniors, were found.

The immediate effect was to establish the balance of power essential for the successful continuance of the War. One side had better equipment and superior numbers; the other had larger, stronger and faster soldiers with greater moral authority, or at least louder voices. None of this happened deliberately but the importance of it was understood by everyone. So, in a different way, was the importance of making the War work. Nobody said, or even consciously realised, that half hols without compulsory cricket were all very well but would turn out pretty boring unless
something
was happening. That in turn meant that everybody who wanted had to be allowed in; even 3b and Freshers, when they arrived slightly mud-smelling from the lake, were recruited as spies and runners.

The first of the hay forts were already taking shape when Paul arrived on the scene. With Dent ma. and Greatrex he had started the afternoon prowling along the perimeter of white-splashed trees in the hope of spotting deer, but then had become absorbed in watching and trying to divert a stream of little red ants they had found travelling up and down the trunk of a sweet-chestnut. They were still doing this when Carreras dashed past, bent low, his gun in his hand. Tyndall and Dent mi. followed him, carrying straightish sticks.

‘Hey! Minor! What does?' said Dent ma.

‘Bang-bang-bang-bang,' yelled his minor, pointing his stick. ‘Got you all! It's War!'

‘Where d'you find the guns?'

‘Under Fallen Tree. Carreras got a whizzer. No use you going—they're all bagged.'

Red-cheeked, panting, he galloped after the suddenly glorious Carreras.

Paul ran out from among the trees and looked across the slope. Mounds of hay, rolled into shape in much the same way that you roll snow into a tubby cylinder to start a snowman, were being gathered here and there, some almost complete, enclosing spaces inside which several boys lay, guns across the ramparts, blazing away. He yearned to be in one of the forts, to belong there, one of the accepted heroes; but experience told him that the worthwhile groups would already have been formed, would already have a sense of exclusion around them. All the other boys in Schol were at least a year older than he was, while those of his own age naturally ganged with their own forms. If he had a decent gun it might be different.

‘Down by the boat-house,' said Dent. ‘Those post things.'

‘Wrong side of lake path,' said Greatrex. ‘'Sides, they're not buckshee—Somebody put them there for something.'

‘Tosh,' said Dent. ‘They've been there for yonks. Anyone can see.'

In fact it was Paul who slipped across the path that snaked along the lake shore. To do so gave him an odd feeling, though the boat-house and its screening trees meant there was very little chance of his being seen. He had always been a rule-conscious child, awed by authority, but there was something different about Paddery, answered by something different inside him. An unconscious conspiracy had been somehow begun between himself and this place; he was going to make it his own, explore every track, bounds or no bounds; and one day he would creep close enough to the deer to be able to touch one.

The stakes, stacked against the side of the boat-house, were not really suitable for guns, too straight, mostly too stout, and pointed at one end. He chose the three slimmest. On the way back to the hayfield they poked the points between two close-growing tree-roots and broke them off.

Most of the hay had now been gathered. The last few swathes, right up by the gravel, were being collected by a group from 4b, but the whistle for their turn to swim went at the crucial moment, allowing Paul, Dent and Greatrex to collar what was left and set up a fort. It was only when they had half built it that they discovered they were on the wrong side. Tranter and Fish took time off from a flanking raid on the depleted junior lines to explain the set-up. Greatrex began to gather an armful of hay to carry across No Man's Land, but Paul could see it was hopeless. It would be like cannibals and missionaries crossing a river. They would lose it all to raiders on one side or the other.

‘Let's be neutrals,' he said.

‘Not a lot of joy there,' said Dent.

‘I mean we can keep swapping sides, join in where we feel like, make out we're allies with people and lead them into ambushes. The Hoofer's always talking about the balance of power. We've got it.'

‘Good notion, Rogue,' said Dent. ‘I'll collar my minor, soon as he's done swimming, tell him we're secret allies. Greaters, you sneak across and say the same to Barnstable or someone. Tell them we're only pretending to be neuts.'

‘Neutrals wouldn't have guns,' said Greatrex.

‘Wigwam,' said Dent.

It worked remarkably well. The three posts, fastened with Paul's left garter at the top, made a tripod against which the hay from the ramparts could be piled. There was just room for Paul and Greatrex to crouch inside while Dent sat cross-legged in the opening saying things like ‘How' and ‘Wampum' to the scampering soldiers. One or two groups of juniors, not for any good reason beyond the blind instinct to imitate their elders, began to build rival wigwams, and the War might have degenerated into cowboys and Indians if the bugle had not blown. (There was a perfectly good bell at Paddery, but it was reserved as a signal that the Germans had invaded. Only The Man and one or two praes were able to get more than a windy gasp from the bugle, so later on a handbell came into use.)

At the long, floating, half-musical note silence fell on the field of battle. Paul squirmed out of the wigwam to look. The Man was standing close by, on the gravel, with the bugle now at his waist and his white speaking-trumpet to his lips.

‘Schol, Midway, Five,' he called.

He placed his clenched right fist on the top of his head. The summoned boys trooped up the slope, those who had them trailing their guns.

‘Your sock's looking pretty dissipated, Rogers,' said Tranter.

(‘Dissipated' was that term's word, just as ‘iffish' had been last.)

‘That's because my garter leads a loose life,' said Paul.

He had been waiting for some weeks for the chance to make this joke, if possible in The Man's hearing. The Man looked up from the list he was studying.

‘Not bad, Rogue,' he said. ‘Spur of the moment?'

‘Not exactly, sir—but first time out.'

‘Where
is
your garter, Rogers?'

‘Holding our wigwam up, sir.'

‘Get it.'

‘There's a spare in my locker, sir. Can't I get that?'

The Man glanced at the wigwam, the list in his hand, and back at Paul. He nodded. Paul ran off, aware that The Man, who had an obsession about socks staying up, wouldn't have let most
of
the boys get away with that, but that it was more for the sake of the joke (which would probably be going into School Mag) than to save the wigwam that he had done so. Aware, too, that he wasn't on the list in The Man's hand, as usual.

When he got back the War had re-started. Greatrex was alone in the wigwam.

‘Where's Dent?'

‘Learning rounders.'

‘Learning?'

‘It's a new sort. There's going to be a match on Sat. Another school got sent down here.'

‘A rounders
match!'

‘It's a girls' school.'

‘War does strange things to a man,' said Paul, employing another of that term's clichés to better effect than usual.

The girls called each other by their Christian names. They were rotten at rounders, though they said they always played it in the summer term. St Aidan's beat them easily on two afternoons' practice. They weren't much impressed by the forts, either, or interested in the War when everybody picnicked after the match in the hayfield (lemonade, scones with cream and strawberry jam, strangely like peacetime at home). But they liked the wigwam so Paul found himself host to half a dozen of them, one of whom, as soon as she had finished her tea, produced a loop of string and started to play cat's cradles. Greatrex, who had sisters at home and so used a bossy voice to the girls, said, ‘That's not the way to do it. You're supposed to pass it to and fro.'

Cat's cradles had been a craze at St Aidan's the term before last. Greatrex took the string from the girl and demonstrated with Dent's help how they used to play it. Paul noticed two of the visitors glancing at each other and exchanging smiles.

‘We play it in the dorms, you see,' said the girl called Perdita. ‘And we're not allowed out of bed so we have to do it solo. Cora's pretty decent. Show them Starfish, Cor.'

Cora was a blonde with a thin face and a brace on her teeth. When she took the string she started by looping one end several times round her left hand, but after that her fingers moved so quickly, clutching and jerking like a spider killing a fly in its web, that Paul couldn't follow what she was up to, apart from making a hopeless tangle. If she hadn't seemed quite calm he would have felt embarrassed for her. At last she unhunched herself, jerked her hands apart with a quick fluttering movement and displayed the pattern she had constructed, intricately symmetrical, far more elaborate than anything possible by the St Aidan's system.

‘Starfish,' she said.

Paul craned to look. During the craze he had found cat's cradles interesting because of the way the patterns built themselves up to greater levels of complexity at each turn, only to falter in the end on the inevitable but concealed asymmetry of the original crossing of strings. Then he had become frustrated by the limited and repetitious patterns available. It had not crossed his mind that by starting from a far greater initial asymmetry it might be possible to leap the logical barriers.

‘Now it eats itself,' said the girl called Diana. ‘Go on, Cor.'

Cora released one loop from a finger and gently strained the web apart. As she did so it unravelled in a mysteriously satisfactory way, the single looseness somehow following the pattern round and, as Diana had said, consuming it.

‘Whiz-zoh!' said Greatrex.

‘It makes up a bit for the rounders,' said Perdita.

The girl called Joan, sitting next to Paul, rather timidly produced her own string-loop.

‘Can you teach me that?' said Paul.

‘Cora's the only one who can do it,' she said. ‘I'm not very good.'

‘Anything will do.'

‘I'll teach you Eskimos Running Away. That's the easiest. Or Tennis Net.'

‘The Eskimo one. Why's it called that?'

‘You'll see.'

He held his hands apart, fingers spread, and she looped the string on to them; but finding it difficult to visualise the movements without performing them herself she twisted round so that she could sit beside him, bare forearms laid against bare forearms and hands moving together like inexpert dancers.