Snow White and the Giants (20 page)

However, this incident had very little to do with Gil, not until it was
over, anyway.
It was the morning interval. I was with Gil. Across the playground,
beside the bush which divided the junior boys' section from the girls',
Jota was standing alone, as usual, staring into space, his mind far away.
About a dozen boys were kicking a ball around near him. Inevitably the
bail went near him and one of the boys chasing it came close to Jota.
They didn't come in contact, and across the playground I had no idea
what was said. I was watching only idly, until the group began to gather
round Jota, and I began to have a vague, though fundamentally correct,
idea of what was happening.
No wild animals are as cruel as children. They don't know how.
Jota, by standing alone, had set himself apart as a target, as a victim.
The boys (bigger than us, from a higher class) were taunting him, trying
to outdo each other in the wit and the virulence of their insults.
Automatically Gil and I moved across the playground. Nothing draws boys
more surely and quickly than a fight, and it was obvious there was going
to be a fight.
We weren't the only ones. Everyone in the playground was crowding to
the same spot. Even some of the girls behind the hedge and fence were
beginning to take notice, the bigger girls looking over, the smaller
ones jumping up to take a quick look.
There were three playgrounds at the old Grammar School. Everything was
old, dingy and overcrowded, and the playgrounds were far too small. Round
at the back, completely cut off from us, were the senior boys. But all
the girls, from five to eighteen, were in the same section. The idea was,
presumably, that big boys might bully small boys, but girls didn't do
things like that.
One of the boys baiting Jota began to jump at him and touch him, leaping
back immediately. Two or three others followed suit.
Jota tried to pick one of them and fight him, to turn the affair into a
simple playground brawl. Nineteen times out of twenty this would have
worked and the incident would not have developed further. This time,
however, the boy he picked tore himself away, electing to go on with
the game, and his pals tacitly agreed on the same course. Every time
Jota lunged, he was pushed back, kept at bay.
Now every boy in the playground was crowded round Jota. I caught only
occasional glimpses of him. His face was white and he had gone beyond
anger into sheer terror. Half a dozen boys ganging up on one can swiftly
reduce him to blubbering misery. Jota was alone against the whole junior
school. And it was too late to change the pattern of events.
Bolstering each other up, the tormentors were becoming bolder. At first
they merely touched Jota lightly when they leaped at him. Then they
punched him. Then they started pulling his tie, grabbing his shirt,
clawing at his buttons.
Still a few feet of space was left between Jota and the heaving mass
of boys, tacitly maintained to keep Jota the quarry and everyone else
a hunter.
His nose was bleeding and blood was running down his chin from a cut
at the corner of his mouth. Most of us were howling -- I believe I was
howling with the rest. We were huntsmen, and we had cornered the fox.
We were out for the kill.
When his shirt came out of his pants, we shrieked with laughter. Now
he was not merely an object of derision, he was an object of fun. He
was comic (like a fat, naked old Jew being beaten along a ghetto with
gun barrels). Some quick-witted tormentor grabbed a handful of earth
from under the bushes and managed to get most of it inside the top of
Jota's pants.
It was about then that I ceased enjoying myself. I was as mindlessly
cruel as most boys of seven or eight, I suppose. But even then I knew
there were limits, that even a mob has to retain some grasp on common
humanity, or the human race is done for.
I didn't realize until years and years later that there must have been
scores among us who felt the same way. What did we do? Nothing; of course.
Principally we were afraid that if we did anything we might find ourselves
in Jota's place.
He was near the end of his tether. His shirt, minus all buttons, was now
hanging open under his jacket, and his thin white chest was heaving at
frightening speed.
There was no sign of any let-up. On the contrary, the immediate ring
of boy-baiters, encouraged by those behind, kept searching for further
torments. The time for mere taunts was long since gone -- the noise was
such that only screams could be heard over it.
One boy took out a small pocket-knife, opened it and made passes at Jota
with it. He never went very near him: yet if there had been a roar of
encouragement, he'd have been emboldened to go in with the knife.
Flight had never seemed possible for Jota, since from the beginning he
had been hemmed in against the bush and fence. But in his extremity he
suddenly did something that none of us expected.
He leaped back, seized the top of the fence and somehow drew himself
over. The next moment he was in the girls' playground.
For a moment the shouts died as if we'd all been struck dumb. Then the
whole mass of boys charged the fence, ignoring the bushes, and although
none of us got over as Jota had done, we were all hanging over the fence,
watching, if not chasing, our quarry, hunting him with our eyes and our
shouts.
The little girls all ran away, screaming. Boys were not supposed to be
in the girls' playground. It was a rule, and not one of the hundreds
of rules made to be broken. Nobody had expected Jota even to try to get
into the girls' playground.
One massive woman of seventeen or eighteen caught Jota by the collar
and lifted him. There was a scream of laughter on both sides of the
fence. She did it again . . .
He fell out of his jacket and she was left holding it. He darted for
the gate.
We rushed to our gate. He was on the other side of the road, panting
desperately. Habit was so strong that he wanted to come back (the interval
must be nearly over). But scores of boys were hanging over the gate.
I didn't think. I jumped over the gate and ran across the road. Jota
flinched and turned, evidently thinking that even the school boundary
couldn't stop the chase.
But I caught his arm. "Come on back, Clarence," I said.
Once again the shouting and howling died.
Suddenly sanity was restored. I had done quite a bit to restore it,
but could take little credit for it. By standing with Jota, by allying
myself with him, I had reminded everybody that he was one of us, not an
outlaw to be taken dead or alive, not a fox to be slaughtered as bloodily
as possible, not a mouse to be tortured and broken and perhaps left,
mercilessly, still alive.
I could take very little credit because I should have done this long
before, because instead of doing it when I might have turned the entire
incident I had been howling with the rest.
Anyway, as the shouting died, the whistle to end the break shrilled,
and we all trooped back into school, including Jota and me.
The fun was over.
Gil, Jota and I became friends after that. Curiously, Jota's fifteen-minute
ordeal was ignored and forgotten and canceled as if it had never happened.
The teachers must have known something had happened. Signs of the damage
to bushes and fences were still visible six months later. Jota could
not have looked anything like his usual self in class, although his
nose had stopped bleeding, his face had been washed, and his jacket --
thrown over the fence by one of the girls -- hid the ruin of his shirt.
In any event, nothing was done. And the boys at the school, too, scarcely
remembered the episode. One or two of them, I knew, tried to taunt Jota
later -- but they were unwise enough to do it individually, and in such
circumstances Jota was perfectly capable of looking after himself.
Looking after himself . . .
Two weeks later, there was a special assembly. The Head was very
grave. Two boys, close friends, had died in one day, one of hitherto
unsuspected heart trouble, and the other in a road accident. A special
service was held: all the good things the boys had ever done were
detailed, and everything else quietly forgotten.
I knew, of course, that these two had been the ringleaders in the
humiliation of Jota. But no significance in that fact, beyond the obvious
coincidence, occurred to me. Jota could hardly have any control over
road accidents, especially since at the time it happened he was with Gil
and me and clearly had nothing in his mind beyond our search for birds'
nests. I might, at that age, have believed that God had punished them
for their wickedness. It didn't cross my mind that Jota had.
Miranda didn't make me remember subsequent events in any detail, except
one -- one which introduced an entirely new concept.
There had been the case of Squire Badgeley . . . He wasn't a squire at
all, but he looked like one and he owned an orchard. Probably for every
apple that he got, the boys of Shuteley Grammar School got two. In my
earliest recollections of the squire, he seemed quite philosophical
about this.
But now it was wartime. We were too young to take much note of the war;
the restrictions and shortages we accepted as we accepted the rain and
the wind, and our memories of a time when there was no need to pull
curtains at night and when unlimited good things were obtainable merely
on production of cash were dim and vague.
But Squire Badgeley took note of the war. He had three sons in the RAF,
and his one daughter worked with him, a Land Girl as we called them
then. In addition to apples, he grew raspberries, blackcurrants and
a wide range of vegetables. And we boys not only stole his fruit, but
damaged and destroyed his carrots, turnips, cabbages and lettuces.
He became an ogre (from our angle). He guarded his orchard, chased us,
and reported us to the Head. The Head, whom we dimly remembered being
as philosophical as the squire had once been about our depredations,
now became astonishingly harsh.
Jota was caught once, and the squire beat him.
Two weeks later the squire died. But that wasn't the end of the Badgeley
story.
It was not until long after the war that we broke our vows about girls.
Jota broke his first. One week he obviously didn't know any more than
we did about the birds and the bees, though we were all becoming hotly
interested: the next, he was able to tell us, in remarkable detail,
everything we could possibly want to know.
We didn't really believe his stories at first. But soon it was impossible
not to believe them. Girls of all ages swarmed around Jota. (He was Jota
now, duly having been christened by Mr. Samuel, the science master.) In
juvenile masculine arrogance he used to induce us to deride his chances
with a particular girl, often four or five years older than he was, and
then make the conquest, and prove it.
This was before the days of widespread promiscuity at mixed
schools. Shuteley was an old-fashioned town, too, well behind the
times. Senior girls did not then wear yellow golliwogs to claim loss of
virginity. If Jota had not existed, only one or two of the most forward
senior girls would have had furtive nocturnal adventures, mainly with
boys of the town who had left school. Fewer still of the senior boys
would have had such experiences, and they would have been with willing
farm girls rather than the supposedly pure senior girls.
Jota, on his own, created an unprecedented situation. Every apple ripe
enough to pluck, he plucked. He collected girls like stamps. It made
not the slightest difference what form they were in, from Third to
Sixth. He knew enough, of course, not to leave a trail of illegitimate
babies behind him. I believe that throughout his life, only when he was
too impatient for a particular girl did he ever take chances.
It was not long after Dina was born that Gil, goaded by Jota's fantastic
success and the fact that Gil and I were still virgins, and likely to
remain so for some time, hit on a challenge that was to reduce Jota
to size.
He brought up the name of Anne Badgeley.
All three of Squire Badgeley's sons had been killed in the war. Anne, left
alone, ran the orchard herself, with hired hands to help her. Although she
could hardly be said to be fortunate, money was not one of her problems.
She was certainly the richest girl in Shuteley.
At the time when Gil made his outrageous suggestion, she was probably
one of the most desirable girls in the town, and undoubtedly the most
desired. There wasn't much doubt that the reason why she hadn't married
was tied up with her wealth. Whether the average young man in town wanted
Anne, her orchard or her money most was a matter for conjecture. But he
certainly wanted all three.
She was still in the first half of her twenties, and Jota was not less
than ten years younger. She didn't exactly seem old to us, being younger
than Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth and Lana Turner, whose pin-up photographs
we were beginning to stick up in our bachelor bedrooms. Indeed, with her
habit of working in the summer in her orchard dressed like our pin-up
girls, she was the nearest real thing to the gorgeous creatures of our
adolescent dreams.
She worked in the orchard behind a fence and a high hedge, but peepholes
could always be found, and the summer working clothes of Anne Badgeley
were a daily topic of inflamed speculation among us. When she wore
slacks we lost interest, or some interest, but when she wore shorts
and particularly one day when above her tight shorts she made do with a
flimsy chiffon scarf, carelessly tied, she rocked the male half of the
Grammar School to its foundations.
But she was as much out of reach as Betty, Rita and Lana. The very idea
of Jota and Anne, Anne and Jota, was ridiculous, which was why Gil made
the suggestion.
Jota took the challenge. And a week later, he made us hide in the orchard
to watch.
Late on a hot summer evening, he and Anne came out . . .
Gil and I were part shocked, part disgusted, but mainly wildly envious.
Why had Jota been singled out to be able to do such things? The girl was
head over heels in love with him; he could do anything he liked with her,
even we could see that.