Theirs Was The Kingdom (19 page)

Six

1

O
NE OF THE UNLOOKED-FOR CONSOLATIONS OF BEING UPROOTED AT THE AGE of twelve and a half, whisked across southeast England, and set down among three hundred Philistines (the fate of Giles Swann, in September 1878) was his casual introduction to lyrical verse by one James Horace Talbot, M.A. Mr. Talbot was a tutor in English in the Junior School according to page two of the Mellingham brochure and called, “Prodder” according to the boys who dozed under him five times a week in the narrow desks of the Second Form.

Nobody minded Prodder’s periods. Prodder was old, frayed, wispy, shuffling, snuffling, defeated, and very round-shouldered, not given to demanding the earnest attention of classes demanded by younger, more ambitious masters. Instead, he was content, as his nickname suggested, to resort to the absentminded prod rather than more defined correctives, so that those unable to share his love of cadences and dreamy communions with Wordsworth, Blake, Goldsmith, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Shelley, Hood, and poor mad Cowper could use his periods any way they chose. They could catch up on neglected prep, perhaps, or read coarse-print sagas of Turpin, Dan Daring, and Robin Hood, or even sit back, close their eyes, and suck durable caramels, so long as they observed the basic conventions and rotated the confection unostentatiously between all but motionless jaws. For Prodder had long since shed any illusions concerning his ability to lure boys into the garden of English prose and poetry. He was satisfied, for the most part, to wander there alone, mouthing familiar couplets and sometimes whole extracts, with a kind of bemused ecstasy that fascinated Giles, sitting immediately below Prodder’s rostrum.

Here, oblivious of the subdued hum of a class at his back, he would sit entranced, staring fixedly upwards while Prodder Talbot paced and intoned back and forth along his platform, only rarely glancing up from his book to point a finger, ask a question, or descend the two steps to floor level to administer one of his gentle, absentminded prods.

In this way, by the end of his second term of banishment from the well-loved woods and pastures of Tryst, Giles Swann unconsciously memorised great chunks of
The Deserted Village, Summer Images, Ode to a Nightingale
, and
Song of the Lotus-Eaters
, together with innumerable fragments from shorter poems, like Wordsworth’s
Daffodils
, Tennyson’s
Brook
, the opening stanzas of Gray’s
Elegy
, and Blake’s heartcry,
London.
He imbibed the stanzas like great draughts of wine, so that he was often half tipsy when the bell clanged from the quad, and Prodder pottered away, trailing his shredded, chalk-dusted gown, to intoxicate others along the corridor.

Giles, loving them all, had his favourites, usually those of Prodder because they were the most overworked, but there were fragments here and there that he had heard only once and later traced in his textbook to learn for himself. These fell into two categories that he thought of as the Pastoral and the Pitiful. The one induced a sensation of infinite peace and transportation back to his beloved woods and meadows, the other a sense of confused indignation sometimes amounting to fury that so many could contrive to make so vast a desert of so much colour, scent, and melody available to all who turned their backs on a town.

He would contemplate this baffling paradox, wondering how it was that— with torchbearers like Blake and Burns and Gray so vocal and so plentiful—a majority elected to immerse themselves in commerce, a religion to his father; military panoply, that had obsessed his brother Alex from childhood; and extravagant practical jokes alternating with competitive games, that regulated everything George did from rising bell to lights out. As for Giles, he had already mastered the art of personal withdrawal, so that his life was now lived on two levels. The one, practised within the limits of his actual being, was concerned with responses to bells, orders, and rituals; whereas his real life, fed and watered by Prodder Talbot’s excerpts, and under-written by remembered images of Tryst, its people, and its surroundings, was private but intensely compelling, presenting him with an ever-expanding world of tremendous diversity, and setting him innumerable problems that he could never hope to solve but offsetting the boredom and predictability of life within a regimented society.

In this way, moving effortlessly between a waking state and a dream state, he adjusted to the two extremes of the human spectrum, each implicit in the moods of the poets that offered alternates of despair and ecstasy. The former mood, Giles thought, was to be found in Blake, who had once written:

I wander thro’ each charter’d street
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear…

And then, for Giles, came the four lines that exactly expressed the poet’s despair, as Blake added:

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning Church appals;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh.
Runs in blood down Palace walls…

The words, as he weighed each of them separately, came to have a frightening relevance for him. For he had often visited his father’s Thameside yard and noted, among the many wayfarers in streets surrounding it, unmistakable “marks of weakness, marks of woe.” The chimney-sweeper’s cry was often heard in that neighbourhood. The blood of soldiers on palace walls could be seen quite clearly in any illustration of his brother Alex’s favourite book,
Deeds That Won the Empire.

Happily, however, Blake’s prophetic gloom was offset by the tranquillity of more sanguine poets, whom Prodder thought of as the arbiters of the Universe. One could always climb with relief on to the alternative plank of the seesaw and join Tennyson’s brook in chattering descent to the plain “through brambly wilderness” and past banks of forget-me-nots that, or so the poet assured him, “grew for happy lovers.” Or one could also dip haphazardly into one’s own experience, identifying John Clare’s rapturous summer images with remembered vistas of Kentish ploughland rising, furrow by furrow, to the crown of elms where Denzil Fawcett, the local farmer’s son, had a hut to shelter him during the lambing season. For whenever he repeated to himself:

… I see the wild flowers in their summer morn
Of beauty, feeding on joy’s luscious hours:
The gay convolvulus, wreathing round the thorn,
Agape for honey showers
And slender kingcup, burnished with the dew
Of morning’s early hours…

Giles rose up from bench or cot, seated himself on his magic carpet, and took the path that followed the circumference of Plover Wood across the river from the islet below Tryst to the rim of the downs that offered a view of half Kent. Here, times enough during his early morning wanderings, he had seen a thousand convolvulus wreathing the thorn, and as many kingcups, along with hundreds of other wild flowers that grew there.

Then, for a time, he would luxuriate in the sense of well-being that accompanied him everywhere he went within a five-mile radius of Tryst, cocking an ear for the sound of Mr. Gray’s “drowsy tinkling” lulling distant folds and congratulating himself, a little smugly perhaps, on his keen perception, on being so splendidly equipped to share Wordsworth’s “inward eye that is the bliss of solitude.”

Yet these periods of serenity were of short duration. He had what his father would have recognised as the split mind of the Celt, capable of taking the keenest pleasure in its own company but prone, at any moment, to tip him headfirst into an abyss of gloomy introspection. It was not so much a matter of where he was, or what he was doing, but what he was not doing and where he would go when, like Alex, he attained the unimaginable age of eighteen and was required to translate hoarded moments of conscious pleasure into positivity of the kind the poets seemed to demand of one of their number. He wondered sometimes if Blake had ever gone out and wrestled with those mind-forged manacles of which he wrote so bitterly, or whether, in fact, Alfred Lord Tennyson, the revered Poet Laureate, ever gave a serious thought to chimney sweeps and soldiers spilling blood on palace walls.

The gap between sermon and action troubled him. One day he made so bold as to buttonhole Prodder in the quad and ask about it, but it was clear that the old chap was at a loss for a satisfactory answer. He promised to think about it, however, and evidently did, for a day or so later he called Giles over and gave him four lines of Shelley written on a sheet torn from an exercise book that was covered, on its reverse side, with geometrical figures, proving that Prodder had salvaged it from the mathematics master’s wastepaper basket. Giles could not make very much of the lines that read:

As I lay asleep in Italy
There came a voice from over the sea
And with great power it forth led me
To walk in the visions of Poesy.

“It’s some kind of answer, boy,” Prodder said, apologetically. “Shelley wrote it as the opening lines of a poem called
The Mask of Anarchy.
How far are you forward in history?”

Giles told him as far as the first Tudor, whereupon Prodder shook his head. “Not far enough to help you make something of the full poem,” he said. “It was written on the occasion of the Peterloo Massacre. Ever hear of the Peterloo Massacre, boy?”

“No, sir, I never did. When was it, sir?”

“In your grandfather’s time, before even I was born and that’s a long time ago. However, as I said, it’s part of an answer. A few poets see it as their duty to go out and actually man the barricades. Byron was one of ’em, and you can’t but admire the man for that alone. But most of ’em see their duty end as a prophet and preacher. They point the path and it’s up to men of power and influence to follow it. They never do, of course.” He blinked down at Giles with mild affection, an expression he did not often use in the classroom. “Glad to know some of it stuck. Who is your favourite?”

“Blake, I think, sir,” and the old man’s eye kindled.

He said, “Ah, Blake! He had a conscience if any of ’em did. You’re Swann, aren’t you? Second term here?” And when Giles confirmed this, “Swann… ‘Swann-on-Wheels’… Your father’s in transport, isn’t he? Never met him. Like to. There now. Introduce me when he’s up here?”

“I will indeed, sir,” Giles replied, though wondering what a busy, bustling man like his father would make of a dry old stick like Prodder, a school joke even among the masters.

From then on, however, Prodder took the keenest interest in him, and sometimes appeared to be addressing him exclusively when quoting a poem, or explaining a piece of prose. The introduction to Swann père was formally carried out about a month later, when Adam appeared to collect George and himself for the Easter break. Against all probability they seemed to get along very well indeed, standing apart for a long time and apparently sharing a succession of jokes.

A day or so later, when his father saw him in the paddock bridling his pony for an early morning ride up to the downs, he emerged from the French windows, asking if he would like company. When Giles said that he would be glad of it, Adam threw a saddle over his mare and they rode out together, taking the path their side of the river and cutting into the woods opposite the islet to pick up the winding track that led to the escarpment overlooking the house under the hill.

They reined in here, kicking their feet free of the stirrups, sniffing the clear, April-scented air, and watching the sun shooing the mists from the valley below.

Adam said, suddenly, “I took to that old geezer Talbot. He seems to think you’ve got more brains than either of your brothers. Went so far as to have a word with him concerning your future. Don’t think I’ve told you George won’t be returning to Mellingham.”

The boy’s crestfallen expression disarmed him so that it occurred to him that, although the brothers were not particularly close, Giles did not relish the notion of returning to school even more vulnerable than he had been during his first two terms. He said, “Your mother seems to think Mellingham may not be the best place for you, but you’ll have to go somewhere. You’re too big for Phoebe to handle and anyway, to judge from the chat I had with Talbot, I daresay you could teach her a thing or two by now. I’ve a smaller place in mind, down in Devon. It’s on the fringe of Exmoor and has the air your mother thinks you need after that cough you had last winter. It’s up to you, however. Wouldn’t want you to start all over again against your will. It’s a newish school, deep in the country, country rather like this. Caters mostly for farmers’ sons, so they tell me. Would you like to see the prospectus my Devon manager sent me and give it a thought during the next day or so?”