A Whistling Woman (13 page)

“I stayed out. I stayed overnight.”

He could not remember if he had said, or thought and suppressed, the dreadful sentence, “Mummy said I could stay out.”

“You should have been here,” said the scarecrow on the coalhill.

The man remembered again the boy's vulnerable thighs at this point. They too were now streaked with coal-dust. He did not meet his father's eye. He looked down into the dust, hearing a dodged or deferred death sentence, as he would have heard a dodged or deferred smacking.

Because he could not meet his father's eye, he stared at his red neck, his Adam's apple, above the disorder of the collarless shirt.

“Get on with you,” said the man in the coal. “There may have been a purpose to it.”

He stood, like thick clay, heavy as the smudged ball of dark he had held up at the window.

“Go away,” said the man. “Get the police.”

He couldn't move or speak.

“I told you—” said his father, and wheezed and coughed and spluttered.

The boy turned and clambered up the stairs on all fours. He went out into the street, which looked like a street in which boys walked with satchels to school, and mothers went shopping and posted letters, and little girls dragged at their mothers' hands and lingered by doorsteps or peered down gratings into coal-holes. He took his instruction literally. He walked and walked, along the sooty streets, until he saw, at the High Street crossing, a policeman. He went to this man's side, and tugged at his pocket. The policeman was very tall, and his helmet made him taller. He waved his arms, directing the flow of traffic. The man could not remember the policeman's face.

“My father says you have to come.”

He couldn't remember the policeman's answer.

“My father says you have to come to our house, now.”

Something in his voice, something in his dirty face, must have convinced the man, for he came.
He must have gone back to the house with the policeman, but of this he had no memory. He did not sleep in that house again, but where he had slept, before his Auntie Agnes came for him, he could not remember. He remembered a pervasive surging and sickness of dark in his body, a knowledge that he would only gain consciousness to lose it completely, so must be numb, must not feel or know.

Of the subsequent time, some of his memories were dreams, or fantasies, and some were not. He had known, he was sure, all the time, what would happen, and then what had happened, to his father, though how he had known he was not sure. His Auntie Agnes, in fact a remote cousin of his mother, had taken him away to where she lived in a mining village in County Durham. She treated the boy as though he was in some way dirty and had a bad smell around him. She stood at a distance, and perpetually ordered him to tidy and wash himself. She had a small, round, querulous, frowning face, and iron-grey hair in curled rolls above her ears. He could not remember that she had ever spoken to him about the events that were the cause of his being there.

The days of his father's trial, condemnation and execution had passed, as far as she was able to make them, like all other grim northern school-days. Hitler's tanks had rolled across Poland and Belgium, and were tearing into France. Because of the popular obsession with News, the boy, now known as Lamb, had seen newspapers. He remembered places where he had seen newspapers—a bus shelter, the village store—because he had vomited in both, and had been spanked for dirtiness. His father's face and Adolf Hitler's had been on the same page. “Ramsden Refuses Insanity Plea. ‘The Lord commanded me to do it. A Holocaust is Coming.' ” “I was ordered to take a short cut to Salvation.” And much later, “Ramsden Will Not Appeal. ‘I am prepared to hang.' ” He had remembered his father's neck in the cellar. Neither aunt nor newspaper had made it possible for him to know when the hanging took place. Had he wanted to know? He had flinched from knowing. At times his aunt turned the radio off, quickly, quickly, when she heard him coming, immediately after the War news, and he supposed she was keeping it from him, keeping him from hearing it. He had never spoken to anyone at all of those weeks and months. He had occasionally, as a grown man, wanted to discuss with someone his aunt's iron resolve to preserve the normal, metronomic regularity of his tedious days. For in her limited way she was admirable. She wanted to make him dull, ordinary, unexceptionable. No flicker of expression in her pasty little mask had betrayed to the boy that this day was different, this day was obscene.
Occasionally, in various hospitals and churches, he had believed he remembered visiting his father in the condemned cell. He certainly remembered a dreadful debate in the heavy boy's head as to whether, when the call to make the visit came, he would be able to bring himself to go to that place, or to look at that man, who was alive, and would not be. How could they face each other in that knowledge? How did they? He remembered it all so clearly, the man behind a black table, the stiff, silent, heavy-breathing guards, the cup of nasty tea he was offered, his father's inability to swallow what he had supped from his own cup, the shaking of that larynx. He remembered seeing his father's Bible—his personal Bible, with the soft leather cover and the plain gilt Cross—and being glad his father had something of his own in that place. He remembered a high window, a small source of grey light in black shadow (varied by institutional spinach green) like the round window in the stone above the coal-hole. He thought, when he was thinking clearly, that this confrontation had never taken place, but was merely a product of the poor boy's torment, of his religious desire, bred and inculcated in him, to love, respect and forgive his father, seventy times seven, and to share his fear with him, to
help him somehow
in this extremity. And crossing that like the dark wave rolling back from the stones where it has broken, was the memory of the dead flesh on the bed, the smell, the indignity. Those two were beyond help.

He was inclined to believe that the scene had not taken place. His memories of it nevertheless consistently gave him a powerful sense of defeat, of having failed his father. He could remember no word either had spoken, only the nasty taste of the tea, the grimy cracks in the pottery, the voice of the guard saying “I'm sorry it's time to go now.” He believed he had constructed the memory out of a desire to have done, or tried to do, a good, the right, thing. He had constructed it from scenes in films and scenes in adventure stories. His father had always been against invented stories, and had urged him to read his Bible, which was sufficient, which answered all needs. In a school class reading
Oliver Twist
Josh Lamb had disgraced himself by having a fit during the reading-aloud of the gruesome description of Oliver's terror of Fagin's terror in the condemned cell. Taken to the cinema—by whom, not his aunt, he could not remember?—to see
Kind Hearts and Coronets
he had disgraced himself again, vomiting over the shoulders of the boy in front of him, as Dennis Price sat composed in the condemned cell, writing his confession. He had come to agree with his father. Telling stories, like making graven images, made loopholes for evil and the Father of Lies to enter the world.
That his father had tried to communicate with him, he believed he knew. He had picked up two postcards addressed to himself, on days when he had come down to breakfast before his aunt. He had immediately secreted them amongst his homework. They were greyish, furry cards. The ink had bled into them. They had ruled lines, which his father did not need. One had a biblical reference.
Genesis 22, 6, 7 and 8
. It was not signed. Possibly his father felt that “love from” him would be unacceptable or appalling. The second said “I want you to have my own Bible for your use, and to remember me, if you will take it. I have written a letter, which I hope will be given to you, or kept until you are old enough to read it with understanding, whether or not you can forgive.”

In his imagination, these writings were not brave, or firm, but quavering and slanting, as though every letter had been formed with extreme difficulty, by a trembling hand. No letter was ever given to him.

He kept the cards for some time, moving them from book to book in his small library—
The Boys' Book of Nature, Lives of Heroes, True Tales
of Christian Mission
. He never kept them either in his Bible, or in the prayer book. He did not look at them often. They were like slivers of dead, contaminating matter, but it was his duty to preserve and contemplate them. One day—he was not sure when, it was in his teens, he had been ill—he looked everywhere and could not find them. Over and over again he opened book after book, not exactly wanting to see them, but wanting most desperately to stop searching, to be reunited with the fragments of which he was the keeper. He never found them. He knew his aunt went through his things regularly, looking for dirt, for cigarettes, for naughty notes, for wickedness that was only her imagination. He didn't speak to her about the matter, ever, and she never spoke to him.

Genesis
22
,
6
,
7
,
8
.

And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon
Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went
both of them together.

And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and
he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood:
but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?

And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a
burnt offering: so they went both of them together.

The message had a shocking ambiguity. Was his father telling him that like Abraham, he had unquestioningly obeyed a command to make an offering of his son—and in his case, his wife and daughter also? Or was he saying, that he had not trusted God enough, but that God had saved this son as he had saved Isaac? They went both of them together. They were together. His impotent spirit did try to accompany his father into the horror. Here am I, my son. Where?
Holocaust meant burnt offering, the boy knew, before ever the word became used for the wickedness that had not yet come. His father had been right, even, events proved, that another kind of holocaust was coming. The empty house in which the sacrifice had taken place was reduced to dust and ashes in a German raid on the steelworks and railways. They would have died then, who had died earlier. As for himself, the heavy boy, Joshua Ramsden, Josh Lamb, he was twice plucked from the burning. He was, as he would not have been, evacuated.

The fact of the general evacuation of children from threatened cities at the end of 1939, made it easier for Agnes Lamb to describe her nephew as an “evacuee.” He was not the only boy to appear parentless in those village communities—parentless, and with no personal belongings, moreover. He could be made invisible amongst the other lost souls in the grammar school to which they travelled from several villages in brown buses. Many boys were mocked for strange accents, or teased because of odd habits. Josh Lamb did not stand out. His teachers were all old men, or women, for the young men had been called into the Forces. The man did not remember the boy having spoken to anyone, though he thought he must have done. He remembered some lessons, Latin, which was taught by an old gentleman called Mr. Shepherd, a white-haired hunchback with gold-rimmed spectacles, and Scripture, which was taught by an energetic fiery woman called Sibyl Manson.

He thought of these as his years of “grubbing” and pupation. He had known—it had been made clear to him—that he was singled out, cast out, chosen. These were the years in which, for a long time, he did not see the other, who had spoken to him out of the dark, and given him the weight of darkness to hold in his arms. He moved around in the grey fog of normality and unknowing that his aunt had tried to weave to preserve him, or herself, from the memory and the knowledge of the horror. He did experience himself as being closed in a tight skin, which held him together in the vacancy in which his true self tumbled and fell, a skin like horn, or parchment, in which he was formless, like the yellow-milky liquid that spurts out of cocoons and pupation caskets which are prematurely broken into. Now and then—stumbling on a paving-stone, slapped on the back in a coughing-fit, hanging from a bar in the gym, where he had swarmed up and could not come down, he saw the dark open again, great crevasses where the busy warp and weft flailed and hurtled. Or looking into a shop window in the street he would see his own reflection, and behind it, not the odd car, no ordinary passers-by, no policeman, but the roaring and rushing of the loom of the inordinate. There was no mirror in his bedroom, indeed, there were no mirrors in his aunt's house. She was against Vanity. So he saw himself little. He had ceased to be plump. He wore long trousers.

“Scripture” in the War Years meant Bible-reading. In that sense, it was storytelling. Latin was dry, was the learning and chanting of words. Both Miss Manson and Mr. Shepherd were good teachers, who knew how to make what they taught not only unforgettable, but part of the foundation of the selves that were building in the more or less attentive boys. Miss Manson talked of the love of God the good Father, and told them the tales of the Old Testament, the man and woman in the innocent Garden, the snake, the apple, the fig-leaves, the walls, gates and angel with the flaming sword. She told them about Noah and the Deluge. They painted wooden Arks floating on blue waves, on the lined paper of their exercise-books. Josh Lamb was praised for imagination, when he painted his ark on a stormy night in inky water, with a lantern at the prow, and a sliver of moon in the sky. They also drew Lot's wife, turning into a pillar of salt as she looked back at the conflagration of Sodom and Gomorrah. They drew angels with huge white wings. Miss Manson brought in pictures of angels, by Van Eyck, by Giotto, by Fra Angelico, for them to see the beauty of the other eternal world, as men had glimpsed it. She passed over the drunkenness of Noah, and the precise sins of Sodom. They all painted rainbows, however. God had promised Noah that he would always care for the earth and its inhabitants. On the railways and steelmills, and on town centres, the bombs fell. Men were evil, said Miss Manson, but there would be a reckoning.