My Time in Space (3 page)

From similar causes arise the complexes of feelings we invest in elements of the scaffolding of latitude and longitude: the Poles, the Meridian of Greenwich, the Equator, the Arctic and
Antarctic
Circles; these (always capitalized) intangibles combine
totalitarian
presumption with a due recognition of littleness. I have no experience of the Equator, and wonder at the demeaning
horseplay
associated with the crossing of it; but I have paid my respects to the Arctic Circle, the latitude at which on midsummer’s eve the sun’s apparent course is a circle that just touches the horizon, or would, in a perfectly spherical world of ideal horizons.

It was a Sunday; after many hours standing by the empty road to the deep north of Norway, I was offered a lift by a young would-be playboy in an open sportscar, driving to nowhere in particular because of what he described as ‘the small opportunities’ of the little town he was employed in. He was delighted to take me as far as I wanted to go, and it was an exciting ride, breezing through sunshine and empty moorlands towards that abstract line stretched taut around the curve of the globe, which I could feel ahead of me like the tape at the finish of a footrace. When we saw
pretty blonde girls picnicking we shrieked to a halt, and then, as they ignored us, roared off again. Eventually a small sign announced the Arctic Circle. We stopped where a few cars were parked outside a little souvenir shop, stretched ourselves in the sunshine, jumped across the line drawn on the road, and poked about among dwarf willow and reindeer moss for a while, in a wide barrenness that lifted snowy wings to the blue sky on either side.

My driver turned back from there, and I pressed on,
determined
to see the midnight sun from the best possible vantage point on the upcoming midsummer’s eve. By stages and small adventures I came to a little port, and took a ferry to the Lofoten Islands. The sea was like black glass; the boat drew a lace curtain across it. The land of snowy peaks we were leaving, pale against a pale sky, followed us as wavering columns in the huge fan of the bow-wave. Silently another wall of rock approached, and opened a little to let us into a landlocked bay. A small town there was spread like fingers between immediate crags, and faced east. I determined to cross to the island’s north-Atlantic outlook, and out of a certain obstinacy persisted in doing this by hitchhiking. I remember waiting a long time and with growing alarm to be lifted out of a desolation among needle-sharp peaks, where viciously screeching terns zipped to and fro over the surface of a fjord; I wondered if the fish were aware of these flying knives and forks above their two-way mirror ceiling. It was late in the evening when I was dropped off in a run-down fishing village. The
family
who had brought me on the last stage had evident misgivings about leaving me there.

Nobody was visible in the street, so I began knocking on doors, and after several enquiries learned that none of the houses
kept visitors. The sun was still high and I could have slept out, but a bank of fog moving into the bay like a huge battleship looked ominous, and I was relieved when another door opened and a cheery old salt came out to survey me. We had no common
language
, but my needs were obvious, and without a word he stuck his pipe in his mouth, put me into a car and drove me down to the waterfront, and then beyond it. I already had a fine sense of arrival, of having gone as far as possible to greet the midnight sun from the edge of the inhabited world, but now I was amazed to find myself crossing a long rough causeway to an islet even nearer that ideal horizon. It was scarcely more than a large rock with a couple of gaunt sheds, in one of which was a room perched over the water’s edge and reached by a ladder. The room was quite bare and smelled strongly of fish, but there were bunks, and two little windows looking at the sun. I had no food apart from an apple and a lump of goat’s cheese I had already dined and
breakfasted
off several times because the few shops and restaurants of the region had been closed by the time I reached habitation each evening and were still closed when I left in the mornings, but drinking water was to be had from a hose in the deserted fish
factory
close by. There my benefactor left me. A hippie couple
lurking
in another room of the building told me it was used during the winter by cod-fishermen, who moored their boats below and snatched a few hours’ rest from the waves in it without quite coming ashore. There was no one else on the islet. I was delighted with the extremity of my situation.

Towards midnight I wandered out among a few drifting scarves of fog. The sun, a pale disc, was gliding at a perceptible rate along the perfect skyline of a calm sea. Seabirds shrieked
horribly
. I looked for a memento of this mournful end of the world,
but there was nothing on the rocks apart from a few bits of the sponge called Dead Man’s Fingers. In the middle of the islet stood an enormous skeletal structure of wooden beams, a hundred yards long, shaped like a nave with side-aisles. It was hung with
thousands
of dried codfish, whose brown and twisted corpses gaped downwards. The stench was confounding. I had hoped some
ceremony
would suggest itself for this moment, but could not have foreseen that it would be staged in a temple of death. As the sun rolled along the horizon, I steeled myself to walk, processionally, through the appalling gibbet-cathedral.

The next day – but it was already the next day; I had just seen two days being arc-welded into one – I recrossed the island,
heading
home to my love in London. The ferry to the mainland sailed at 11 p.m.; at first the sun was hidden behind the mountains of the island, but when we drew out it appeared above them in a sea of pink feathers. From a few miles away the island chain was a long wall of peaks as sharp as the beaks and claws of the hungry birds that followed us, and dark blue against the rosy sky and the huge disc of the sun. As the islands shrank back I saw for the first time in my life how large the sun really is. The islands, the whole globe, could have dwindled to a dot, and the sun would still have looked the same size. At midnight it was at the lowest point of the vast slanting circle it makes round the sky, and the circle held the earth like a pebble in the palm of a hand.

Flat in long grass, I watch the bomber coming in low over the palm trees. As its bomb doors gape open I tilt my bren gun up and fire into the dark of its belly…. Battle is the shift and crisscross of death-lines in the hand of space; one is supposed to read them, lurk in their interstices, then run between or under or
magnificently
overleap them, to claim a vantage and reconfigure them. However, I had no bullets in my gun to bring the plane down in flames and whoever was in it had no bomb to smear me around the walls of a crater; the episode was a practice-run, a moment in a military exercise that swept over me in a mind-splitting roar and otherwise left me for long hours to contemplate ants crawling up grass stems. But it was a thrill, even if I had to smile at myself wrestling with my bren gun, which toppled over at the crucial moment; I was invincible, a solo hero, like the man in a war film I saw once who lobbed a stick of dynamite into the path of the fighter diving to strafe him, causing the plane to disintegrate
satisfactorily
in a whirl of black smoke.

Ballistic space, the space imposed by weapons of death-at-
a-distance,
with its fields of fire, possible and actual trajectories, its terrains denied and zones of security and danger, is a playground mankind exults in. Show a male child a gun, the sociobiologists say, and he climbs back up the spiral staircase of the genes to the African savannahs, where a million generations were spent killing animals with throwing-sticks; that was the age of the world in which the qualities of manliness were born, and ours is the age in which they have entered into a suicide pact with technology.

Not so, womankind. During the war my parents were living near a target of the Luftwaffe. When sirens howled in the night and Daddy went out in his bomb-proof ARP hat, my mother used to crouch beneath a great stone slab in the larder with us two children gathered under her (it was the most dangerous place in the house, but how was she to know?) and try to assure us that the forces thundering around us were all protective: ‘Was that one of ours, Mummy?’ we would crow whenever a bang shook the house, and she would wail, ‘Yes! That was one of ours!’

As it happened, no bombs fell in our suburb and we children never saw the ugliness of war. Some mornings we were delighted to find trees and bushes hung with ribbons of aluminium foil, the chaff dropped by German bombers to confuse radar signals. Once when we had stolen away, unknown to our parents, to dig out spent bullets from a sandpit used by the Home Guard for target practice, we stirred up a puddle with some yellowish oily stuff in it, which suddenly exploded into a delightful momentary
fountain
. When Flying Fortresses began to be talked of by the adults, my imagination was fired and I made many drawings of winged castles that rose in battlements rimmed by cannon. The family moved to Ilkley shortly after VJ Day, and in subsequent years one of the ways in which I came to know the Moor was as a network
of routes for crossing it under sniper fire: crawling through stands of bracken, worming along little watercourses, sprinting from the shelter of one boulder to the next. At that age my zest for life required an enemy to enliven the action; the War was in the past and I had missed it.

When I did find myself in a sort of war, as a National
Serviceman
in the RAF towards the end of the Malayan ‘Emergency’, I was inexcusably (so it seems to me now) unconcerned with its moral and political dimensions. The hothouse of adolescence, which had protected me from the tedium of my latter years in school, the savagery of Basic Training and the ice of a nine-month radar course in huts on the Wiltshire Downs, seemed to expand in Malaya to enclose a whole fervent world. The towers of
cumulus
pulsing with lightning all round the evening horizon, the exquisite girls who grouped themselves like bouquets and garlands of flowers in the streets or on the beach, the abyssal silences between gong-strokes in the Buddhist temple I haunted, the lurid backstreet nightlife to which fellow-conscripts less inhibited than I were keen to introduce me, all existed in the same perfumed atmosphere as my own rampant blooms of knowledge, desire, religion and poetry.

The malign aesthetics of weaponry took root in this tropical garden too. After some months spent puzzling into defective radar sets in the quiet of the servicing bay, I was banished to work on aircraft on the dispersal strip, where wing surfaces grew too hot to touch in the afternoons and one’s shoulderblades made dents in the tarmac when one lay under the fuselage of a fighter. This was supposed to be punishment for arguing with the sergeant, who regarded me as lazy and insubordinate (whereas I was merely incompetent and distrait); but in fact I preferred the ferocious
sunlight 
on the strip, the vigorous camaraderie, even the stinging blast from jets manoeuvring on the ground, to the torpid slacking of the bay. My letters home were rhapsodies:

But what was it about, this savage parade? The elusive Chin Peng lurked somewhere in Malaya or over the border in
Thailand
; we were not told why his terrorist bands had to be
exterminated
or what they were fighting for, nor did we ask. Only once did I see the planes taking off in anger, as it were:

In general we knew, or thought we knew, that such sorties did no good and no harm, that these thousands of missiles would fall into the forest and be buried in leafmould. It was said that the rockets the Venoms carried were too crude to hit a target, but that the noise they made in smashing through trees was effective in demoralizing the enemy. Perhaps we accepted such opinions as palliatives to our consciences; certainly we felt no ill-will towards the jungle shades. The reasons for the Emergency, its dark roots forking and reforking down through the Independence
Movement
and the resistance under Japanese occupation, into the long imperial past, were sometimes discussed in the circle of expatriates and local intellectuals I came to frequent, but I never joined in,
aware of my ignorance and obsessed by internal debate as I was. Often I visited the temple of Ayer Itam on the island, heard the gongs, ‘so slow that every stroke seemed the last, a draining of the blood out of the world’, contemplated the house-high nut-brown Teaching Buddha sitting with raised hand behind threads of incense rising from joss-sticks. Once I brought one of those ‘hard angular facts’ learned on the strip to him, but ‘he just sat there and, as always, said nothing’.

In reading through these diary-like letters (carefully dated and preserved in order by my mother and now, after her death,
returned to me as if finally deemed undeliverable) I notice certain tactful omissions and elisions, and I wonder why I worried her with this episode, which I had to follow up with assurances that such accidents happened extremely rarely and that I was in no danger. However, two subjective details of the event did remain unmentioned, and have often resurfaced in my thoughts. First, while all that commotion was taking place – and it was over in a few moments – I was following the rocket’s flight with my eye. Though aware of the sudden vortex of distress off to one side of me, and the death at its still centre, I was fixated on the great leap and distant fall of the inert lump of concrete and metal, as if
testimony
to the perfection of its parabolic arc would be required of me. And secondly, and hardly more than a second later, finding myself face to face with the young pilot officer I was about to salute, who had just stepped out of the cockpit and still wore the gaunt marks of his oxygen mask on his cheeks, I asked him about the wireless, as if it were of prime importance to hold to the
procedures
of normality. He looked at me astonished, then said politely that the wireless was in order. He might even have been grateful; a crevasse in time had opened before us, I had stepped across, he had followed, and it had closed again behind us. In fact we had all got across it in one way or another, except for the lad who died.