Free Fall (4 page)

I adored Evie. I was grief-stricken and terrified. She nursed this terror as a tribute to the reality of the situation. Next time it happened, she said, she would show me. But that would mean that she would vanish out of my life; for I understood that no boy could possibly take me by the hand and lead me to school. How should I pass the long spoon and her uncle in safety without her? I begged her not to change—knowing all the while that we were powerless in the face of this awful thing yet preserving the faith that Evie of all people could control our world even if no one else could. I watched her closely for symptoms. In the playground, if she vanished into the girls’ lavatory, I stood in anguish, wondering if she had gone to look. I hung about, I pestered her; and at last I bored her. Somehow, in some way that is not clear to me, she detached herself. So there I was, going to school unattended crossing the road to keep away from the long spoon and her uncle, going in the gate to a different world.

This was my first break with Rotten Row, for Evie’s stories had linked it to school and I was unaware of any transition. But now Rotten Row fell into a geographical context and was no longer the whole world. Yet when I see in popular magazines some excavated plan of dwellings and read the dry précis of conjectured life, I wonder
how Rotten Row will fare under the spade, two thousand years after the V2 hit it. The foundations would tell a story of planned building and regimentation. They would be a bigger, if duller liar than Evie. For Rotten Row was roaring and warm, simple and complex, individual and strangely happy and a world unto itself. It gave me two relationships which were good and for which I am still grateful: one, for my mother, blocking out the backward darkness: two, for Evie, for the excitement of knowing her and for my trust in her. My mother was as near a whore as makes no matter and Evie was a congenital liar. Yet if they would only exist there was nothing more I wanted. I remember the quality of this relationship so vividly that I am almost tempted into an aphorism: love selflessly and you cannot come to harm. But then I remember some things that came after.

So I moved out of Evie’s shadow and became the inhabitant of two linked worlds. I liked them both. The infants’ school was a place of play and discovery in which the mistresses leaned down like trees. There were new things to do, a tall jangly box out of which one of the trees beat entrancing music. At the end of prayers while we were still standing in rows, the music changed and became marching music. If I heard a brass band in the street today, I should break step, refusing the shame of so simple a reaction; but in those days I stamped and stuck my chest out. I could keep step.

Minnie could never keep step and no one expected her to. She was lumpy. Her arms and legs were stuck on the corners of her square body and she had a large, rather old face which she carried slightly tilted to one side. She walked with an ungainly movement of the arms and legs.
She shared a table desk with me so that I noticed her more than the others. If Minnie wanted to pick up a crayon she would make perhaps three sideways movements at it with one hand while the other was held up in the air and jerked in sympathy. If she reached the crayon she made hard, crushing movements with her fingers until somehow they fastened round it. Sometimes the sharpened end of the crayon would be uppermost; and then Minnie would make scratches on the paper for a moment or two with the blunt end. Usually, a tree would lean down at this point and reverse the crayon; but then one day the crayons appeared on her side of the desk sharpened at both ends, so life was easier. I neither liked nor disliked Minnie. She was an appearance, to be accepted like everything else. Even her voice, with its few, blunted words, was just the way Minnie spoke and nothing more. Life was permanent and inevitable in this shape. The pictures on the wall of animals and people in strange clothes, the clay, the beads, the books, the jar on the window-sill with its branch of sticky chestnut buds—these and Johnny Spragg and Philip Arnold and Minnie and Mavis, these were an unchanging entity.

There came a time when we sensed that the trees were tossed by a high wind. There was to be an inspection and the trees whispered the news down to us. A taller tree was coming to find out if we were happy and good and learning things. There was much turning out of cupboards and pinning up of especially good drawings. Mine were prominent which is perhaps one reason why I remember the occasion so vividly.

One morning there was a strange lady at prayers and by then we had been wrought to a state of some tension. We
had our prayers and a rather tremulous hymn and waited for the marching music which would take us back to our room. But things were altered. While we stood in our rows the strange lady came along and bent down and asked each of us our names in turn. She was a nice lady and she made jokes so that the trees laughed. She was coming to Minnie. I could see that Minnie was very red.

She bent down to Minnie and asked her name.

No answer.

One of the trees bent down to help.

“My name is Μ——?”

The nice lady guessed. She was helping, too.

“Meggie? Marjorie? Millicent?”

We began to giggle at the idea of Minnie being called anything but Minnie.

“May? Mary?”

“Margaret? Mabel?”

Minnie pissed on the floor and the nice lady’s shoes. She howled and pissed so that the nice lady jumped out of the way and the pool spread. The jangly box struck up, we turned right, marked time, then filed away to our room. But Minnie did not come with us. Neither did the trees for a time. We were impressed and delighted. We had our first scandal. Minnie had revealed herself. All the differences we had accepted as the natural order, drew together and we knew that she was not one of us. We were exalted to an eminence. She was an animal down there, and we were all up here. Later that morning Minnie was taken home by one of the trees for we watched them pass through the gate, hand in hand. We never saw her again.

The general has left his house along the road. The gate house is still there, projecting across the wide pavement from the high wall that surrounded his acres of shrub and garden. The house has been taken over by the health service and I cannot claim much social prestige from living almost next door. The slums are not what they were; or perhaps there are no slums. Rotten Row is a dusty plan outlined among rubble. The people who lived there and in similar huddles live now in an ordered housing estate that crawls up the hill on the other side of the valley. They have money, cars, telly. They still sometimes sleep four in a room but there are clean sheets on the bed. Here and there where the old, filthy cottages are left, either in the town or in the country, beams are blue or red. The sweetshop with its two windows of bottle-glass, is yellow, picked out in duck’s egg blue. There are the usual offices indoors now, and the dreamy couple who live there throw pottery in the shed. The town does not stand on its head for the head is gone. We are an amoeba, perhaps waiting to evolve—and then, perhaps not. Even the airfield that lay on the other hill is silent now. The three inches of soil are ploughed up and planted with wheat that sometimes grows as much as a foot high, reaching for the government grant. In winter you can see the soil smeared away from the chalk by the rain like the skin from a white skull. Is my sickness mine, or do we all suffer?

Once the airfield was a Mecca for children. I and Johnny
Spragg used to climb the escarpment towards the edge, our feet bent sideways by the slope as we tacked up to get our breath again. There was a grassy ditch at the top, one of those sprawling relics that are smoothed into the downs at every few miles from coast to coast. The wire ran along the farther lip and we could lie side by side, among the scabious, the yellow cowslips and purple thistles; we could watch all the tiny crawling and flying things in the tall grass and wait for the planes to buzz out over us. Johnny was a great sage in this. He had that capacity which many small boys have—but not I—of absorbing highly technical knowledge through the pores of his skin. He had no access to the appropriate publications but he knew every plane that came within sight. He knew how to fly almost, I think, before he could read properly. He understood how the planes sat in the air, had an instinctive, a loving grasp of the balanced, invisible forces that kept them where they were. He was dark, chunky, active and cheerful. He was absorbed. If the planes were high up, not just circling and landing, he liked us to lie on our backs to watch them. I think that gave him some sort of sense of being up there with them. I guess now, with my adult sympathy, that he felt he was turning his back on the immobile earth and sharing the lucid chasms, free heights of light and air.

“That’s the old DH. They went all the way to​—somewhere—in one like that.”

“He’s going into a cloud.”

“No. Too low. There’s that Moth again.”

Johnny was an expert. He knew things that still astonish me. We were watching a little plane once that was hanging half a mile over the town in the valley when Johnny shouted.

“Look, he’s going to spin!”

I made jeering noises but Johnny hit out sideways with his fist.

“Watch!”

The plane flicked over, nose down and spun, flick, flick, flick. It stopped turning, the nose came up, it flew sedately over us, the sequences of engine noises following each manœuvre a second or two later.

“That’s an Avro Avian. They can’t spin more than three times.”

“Why?”

“Couldn’t come out.”

But for most of the time we watched the planes taking off and landing. If we followed the ditch and turned the corner at the shoulder of the hill we could see them from the side for the prevailing wind blew to the hill across the town. They were an enchantment to Johnny and the figures that climbed out of them, gods. I caught a little of his enthusiasm and became fairly knowledgeable. I knew that a plane should touch down with both wheels and the skid at the same time. This was fun, because very often the gods would err and the plane land twice in fifty yards. These occasions filled me with excitement but they hurt Johnny. He felt, I think, that each time a plane was strained, or a strut in the landing gear buckled, his chances of learning to fly when he was old enough were lessened. So part of our duty was to identify the planes and note when they were out of the hangars, serviced again, and flying. As far as I can remember, there was always at least one of the half a dozen off the air, being mended. I was not very interested but watched obediently; for in some ways I gave Johnny the devotion that I
had once given Evie. He was very complete. If there was no flying we would be off along the downs, in the rain and wind, Johnny most of the time with his arms held out as wings.

One day it hardly seemed worth climbing the hill for we could only just see the top. But Johnny said to go and we went. That must have been in some Easter holiday. The early afternoon had not been so bad—windy but clear enough—but now the rain and mist were sweeping right through the valley. The wind pushed us up the hill and the rain searched us out. If we turned for a moment our cheeks bulged where the wind got in them. The wind-sock at the top was roaring and shorter than usual for the end was being frayed and torn away. They ought to have taken it down, we agreed, but there the windsock was, stays singing, the mast whipping in the rain. Johnny climbed through the wire.

I hung back.

“We better not.”

“Come on.”

We could not see more than fifty yards of the airfield at a time. I followed Johnny, running over the shuddering grass; for I knew what he wanted. We had argued about the marks that a plane would make on landing and we wanted to see—or at least Johnny did. We kept our eyes open because this was sacred and forbidden ground and children were not encouraged. We were well out from the wire, getting towards the patch where planes landed, when Johnny stopped.

“Down!”

There was a man, just visible in the rain ahead of us. But he was not looking our way. He had a square can at
his feet, a stick in his hand and he had something huddled under his raincoat.

“We better go back, Johnny.”

“I want to see.”

The man shouted something and a voice answered out of the mist upwind of him. The airfield was crowded.

“Let’s go home, Johnny.”

“We’ll get round the other side of him.”

We retreated carefully into the rain and mist and ran downwind. But there was another man waiting by another can. We lay close, wet through, while Johnny bit his fingers.

“There’s a whole row of ’em.”

“Are they after us?”

“No.”

We got round the last man and were between the line and the hangar. I was tired of this game, hungry, wet and rather frightened. But Johnny wanted to wait.

“They can’t see us if we keep away from them.”

A bell clanged and rang by the hangar, a bell familiar to me and yet not to me in these surroundings.

“What’s that?”

Johnny smeared his nose with the back of his hand.

“Nambulance.”

The wind was not so strong but the air was darker now. The low clouds were bringing down the evening.

Johnny tensed.

“Listen!”

The man just visible by his can had heard something too, for we could see him waving. The DH appeared over us, hanging in the air, misted to a ghost, her antique profile slipping away into invisibility. We heard the engine of
the ambulance start up by the hangar and someone shouted. The man was jabbing fiercely at his can. A light flickered upwind of him in the mist and a stream of black smoke swept past him. He had a bundle of cloth on a stick and suddenly it was ablaze. Downwind we could just see another fire. There was a line of them. The DH droned past again.

The mist was driving thick now so that the man and his flare were nothing but a vague patch of light. The DH droned round, now coming near, now receding. Suddenly she was near us in the mist, a dark patch crawling over us and on over the hangar. Her engine snarled, rose to a roar. There was a great sound of rending and tearing wood, then a dull boom like the report of a big gun. The line of flares broke formation and began to hurry past us in the mist.

Johnny whispered to me as if we might have been overheard, whispered with cupped hands.

“We better get out by the hangar and into the lane.”

We ran away in the lee of the hangar, silent and awed. Smoke was drifting past the dark end and there was a smell in the wet air. A big fire was glowing and pulsing on the windward side of the hangar. As we rounded the end and made a bolt for the road a man appeared from nowhere. He was tall and hatless and smeared with black. He shouted:

“You kids shove off! If I catch you here again I’ll put the police on you.”

So then, for a time, Johnny avoided the airfield.

The other hill where I live now had the general’s house on it. He was one of the Planks, he shot big game and his
wife opened bazaars. His family owned the brewery by the canal and you could not tell where the gasworks began and the brewery ended. But this was an entrancing piece of canal, dirty and coloured and enlivened by the pipes of hot water that discharged there continually. Sometimes barges lay up under the greasy wall and once we even got aboard one and hid under the tarpaulin. But we were chased out of there, too, and that was the first time we ever climbed the streets to the other hill. We ran all the way because the bargee was a giant and disliked children. We were excited by the exploit and trapped into another one by our exhilaration. We reached the wall of the general’s garden in the late evening. As soon as we got our breath back Johnny danced on the pavement. No one could catch us. We were too quick for them. Not even the general could catch us.

“You wouldn’t go in!”

Johnny would.

Now this was not so daring a vaunt as it appeared. Nobody could get into the general’s garden because there was a very high wall all round; and this combined with his reputation for shooting lions had started the rumour that wild animals roamed those secluded acres—a rumour which we believed, in order to make life a little more exciting.

Johnny would. What was more—secure in the knowledge of the unclimbable wall—he would look for a way in. So off we padded along the road, excited by our daring, to look for a hole which was not there. We went along by the gate house to the corner, passed down the southeast side and round to the back. Everywhere the brick wall was impenetrable and the trees looked over. But then we stopped, without saying anything. There was really
nothing to say. Thirty yards of the wall was down, fallen inward among the trees, the gap darkling and shaped like a lower lip. Someone knew about the gap. There was a gesture of chicken wire along the lower edge, but nothing that could keep determined climbers out.

Now it was my turn to be excited.

“You said you would, Johnny——”

“And you’re coming, too.”

“I didn’t say I would!”

We could hardly see each other under the trees. I followed him and near the wall, shrubs and creepers grew thick and apparently unvisited.

I smelt lion. I said so to Johnny so that we held our breath and listened to our hearts beating until we heard something else. The something was far worse than a lion. When we looked back we could see him in the gap, his dome-shaped helmet, the top half of his dark uniform as he bent to examine the disarranged netting. Without a word spoken we made our choice. Noiselessly as rabbits in a hedge we stole forward away from the policeman and towards the lions.

That was a jungle and the land inside the walls was a whole country. We came to a part where there were furrows and small glass boxes in rows on the ground and there we saw another man, working in the door of a shed; so we nipped away again into shrubs.

A dog barked.

We peered at each other in the dull light. This was far more than an adventure.

Johnny muttered:

“How we going to get out, Sam?”

In a moment or two we were recriminating and crying
together. Coppers, men, dogs—we were surrounded.

There was a wide lawn in front of us with the back of the house running along the other side. Some of the windows were lighted. There was a terrace below the windows because as we watched we saw a dark figure pace along by them in ritual solemnity, and carrying a tray. Somehow this dignity was even more terrifying than the thought of lions.

“How we going to get out? I want to go home!”

“Keep quiet, Sam, and follow me.”

We crept away round the edge of the lawn. The tall windows let long swathes of light lie across the grass and each time we came to one of these we had to duck into the bushes again. Our nerve began to come back. Neither the lions nor the policeman had spotted us. We found a dark corner by a white statue and lay still.

Slowly the noises of people died down and our tremors died away with them so that the lions were forgotten. The high parapet of the house began to shine, a full moon lugged herself over the top and immediately the gardens were translated. There was a silver wink from a pool nearer the house, cypresses, tall and hugely still, turned one frosted side to her light. I looked at Johnny and his face was visible and bland. Nothing could hurt us or would hurt us. We stood up and began to wander without saying anything. Sometimes we were waist-deep in darkness and then again drowned and then out in full light. Statues meditated against black deepnesses of evergreen and corners of the garden were swept by dashes of flowering trees that at that month were flowering nowhere else. There was a walk with stone railings on our right and a succession of stone jars with stone flowers draped round
them. This was better than the park because forbidden and dangerous; better than the park because of the moon and the silence; better because of the magic house, the lighted windows and the figure pacing by them. This was a sort of home.

There was a burst of laughter from the house and the dog howled. I spoke again mechanically.

“I want to go home.”

What was the secret of the strange peace and security we felt? Now if I invent I can see us from outside, starry-eyed ragamuffins, I with nothing but shirt and trousers, Johnny with not much more, wandering together through the gardens of the great house. But I never saw us from outside. To me, then, we remain these two points of perception, wandering in paradise. I can only guess our innocence, not experience it. If I feel a kindly goodwill towards the ragamuffins, it is towards two unknown people. We went slowly towards the trees where the wall had broken down. I think we had a kind of faith that the policeman would be gone and that nothing would embarrass us. Once, we came to a white path and found too late that it was new, unset concrete where we slid; but we broke nothing else in the whole garden—we took nothing, almost we touched nothing. We were eyes.