Free Fall (5 page)

Before we buried ourselves in undergrowth again, I turned to look back. I can remember this. We were in the upper part of the garden, looking back and down. The moon was flowering. She had a kind of sanctuary of light round her, sapphire. All the garden was black and white. There was one tree between me and the lawns, the stillest tree that ever grew, a tree that grew when no one was looking. The trunk was huge and each branch
splayed up to a given level; and there, the black leaves floated out like a level of oil on water. Level after horizontal level these leaves cut across the splaying branches and there was a crumpled, silver-paper depth, an ivory quiet beyond them. Later, I should have called the tree a cedar and passed on, but then, it was an apocalypse.

“Sammy! He’s gone.”

Johnny had undone the chicken wire and poked out his heroic head. The road was deserted. We became small savages again. We nipped through and dropped down on the pavement. We left the wall to be rebuilt and the tree to grow, unseen of us, in the garden.

I see now what I am looking for and why these pictures are not altogether random. I describe them because they seem to be important. They contributed very little to the straight line of my story. If we had been caught—as later I was indeed caught—and taken by the ear to the general, he might have set in motion some act that changed my whole life or Johnny’s. But they are not important in that way. They are important simply because they emerge. I am the sum of them. I carry round with me this load of memories. Man is not an instantaneous creature, nothing but a physical body and the reaction of the moment. He is an incredible bundle of miscellaneous memories and feelings, of fossils and coral growths. I am not a man who was a boy looking at a tree. I am a man who remembers being a boy looking at a tree. It is the difference between time, the endless row of dead bricks, and time, the retake and coil. And there is something even more simple. I can love the child in the garden, on the airfield, in Rotten Row, the tough little boy at school because he is not I. He is another person. If he had murdered, I should feel no
guilt, not even responsibility. But then what am I looking for? I am looking for the beginning of responsibility, the beginning of darkness, the point where I began.

Philip Arnold was the other side of our masculine triangle. How shall I describe Philip? We had moved on from the infants’ school. We were boys in a boy’s school, elementary school, windy and asphalt. I was tough, sturdy, hard, full of zest. There is a gap between the pictures of Sammy Mountjoy with Evie and Sam Mountjoy with Johnny and Philip. One was a baby and the other a boy; but the steps have vanished. They are two different people. Philip was from outside, from the villas. He was pale, physically an extreme coward and he seemed to us to have a mind like a damp box of matches. Yet neither the general nor the god on the airfield, nor Johnny Spragg, nor Evie nor even Ma, altered my life as Philip altered it.

We thought him wet and violence petrified him. That made him a natural target for if you wanted something to hurt, Philip was always to hand. This was sufficient for the odd kick, or scragging; but anything more elaborate required careful preparation and Philip found a simple way of avoiding this. To begin with, he could run very fast; and when he was frightened he could run faster than anyone else. Sometimes, of course, we cornered him; and he evolved a technique for dealing with this, too. He would cower without fighting back. Perhaps it was an instinct rather than an invention, but a very effective one. If you find no resistance you do not become suddenly one with your victim; but after a time you become bored. Philip crouched like a rabbit under a hawk. He looked like a rabbit. Then, as he said nothing, but jerked about under
the blows that fell on him, the savour went out of the game. The scurrying victim had become a sack, dull and uninteresting. Without knowing that he was a political philosopher, Philip achieved the end to be desired. He turned the other cheek and we wandered away to find a sport with more savour.

I am anxious that you should not make too simple, too sympathetic a figure out of Philip. Perhaps he sounds like the hero of one of those books which kept turning up in the twenties. Those heroes were bad at games, unhappy and misunderstood at school—tragic, in fact, until they reached eighteen or nineteen and published a stunning book of poems or took to interior decoration. Not so. We were the bullies but Philip was not a simple hero. He loved fighting when anyone else was being hurt. If Johnny and I were fighting, Philip would come running and dance about, flapping his hands. When there was a heaving pile in the playground, our pale, timid Philip would be moving round the outside, giggling and kicking the tenderest piece he could reach. He liked to inflict pain and a catastrophe was his orgasm. There was a dangerous corner leading to the high street; and in a freeze-up, Philip would spend all his spare time on the pavement there, hoping to see a crash. When you see two or three young men on a street corner, or at a country cross-road, at least one of them is waiting for just this. We are a sporting nation.

Philip was—is—not a type. He is a most curious and complicated person. We said he was wet and we held him in contempt; but he was far more dangerous than any of us. I was a prince and Johnny was a prince. We had rival gangs and the issue of battle always hung in doubt between
us. I think with rueful amusement of those two barbaric chieftains, so innocent and simple, who dismissed Philip as a wet. Philip is a living example of natural selection. He was as fitted to survive in this modern world as a tapeworm in an intestine. I was a prince and so was Johnny. Philip debated with himself and chose me. I thought he had become my henchman but really he was my Machiavelli. With infinite care and a hysterical providence for his own safety, Philip became my shadow. Living near the toughest of the lot he was protected. Since he was so close, I could not run after him and my hunting reflexes were not triggered off. Timorous, cruel, needing company yet fearing it, weak of flesh yet fleet of fear, clever, complex, never a child—he was my burden, my ape, my flatterer. He was, perhaps, to me, something of what I had been to Evie. He listened and pretended to believe. I was not quite the fantasist that Evie was; my stories were excess of life, not compensation. Secret societies, exploration, detectives, Sexton Blake—“with a roar the huge car leapt forward”—he pretended to believe them all and wove himself nearer and round me. The fists and the glory were mine; but I was his fool, his clay. He might be bad at fighting but he knew something that none of the rest of us knew. He knew about people.

There was the business of the fagcards. We all collected them as a matter of course. I had no dad to pass them on to me and Ma smoked some awful cheap brand that relied on the poverty of its clients rather than advertisement. No one who could have afforded anything better would have been content to smoke them. This is the only feeling of inferiority I can trace right back to the Row but it was strictly limited; not that I had no dad, but just that I had
no fagcards. I should have felt the same if my parents had been married non-smokers. I had to rely on pestering men in the streets.

“Got a fagcard, mister?”

I liked fagcards; and for some reason or other my favourites were a series of the kings of Egypt. The austere and proud faces were what I felt people should be. Or do I elaborate out of my adult hindsight? The most I can be certain of is that I liked the kings of Egypt, they satisfied me. Anything more is surely an adult interpretation. But those fagcards were very precious to me. I begged for them, bargained for them, fought for them—thus combining business with pleasure. But soon no one with any sense would fight me for fagcards because I always won.

Philip commiserated, rubbed in my poverty; pointed out the agony of my choice—never to have any more kings of Egypt or else exchange those I had for others and thus lose the first ones for good. I toughed Philip up mechanically for insolence but knew he was right. The kings of Egypt were out of my reach.

Now Philip took the second step. Some of the smaller boys had fagcards which were wasted on them. What a shame it was to see them crumpling kings of Egypt they were unable to appreciate!

I remember Philip pausing and my sudden sense of privacy and furtive quiet. I cut right through his other steps.

“How we going to get ’em?”

Philip went with me. Immediately I had jumped to the crux, he adapted himself to my position without further comment. He was elastic in such matters. All we—he said we, I remember that clearly—all we had to do was to waylay them in some quiet spot. We should then remove
the more precious cards which were of no use to them. We needed a quiet place. The lavatory before school or after school—not in break time, he explained. Then the place would be crowded. He himself would stand in the middle of the playground and give me warning if the master or mistress on duty came too near. As for the treasure, for now the cards had become treasure, and we, pirates, the treasure should be divided. I could keep all the kings of Egypt and he would take the rest.

This scheme brought me one king of Egypt and Philip about twenty assorted cards. It did not operate long and was never really satisfactory. I waited in the smelly shed, idly looking at the graffiti of our more literate members, graffiti rendered more conspicuous by their careful deletion. I would wait in the creosoted quiet as the cisterns filled automatically and discharged—filled and discharged all day and night, whether they had customers or not. If a small victim appeared, I did not mind twisting his arm, but I disliked taking his fagcards. And Philip had miscalculated, though I am sure he profited by the lesson. The situation was never as simple as we had envisaged. Some of the older boys got to know and wanted to share the loot, which gave me more but unprofitable fights and some of them actually objected to the whole business. Then the supply of small boys dried up and only a day or two went by before I found myself being interviewed by the head teacher. A small boy had been found being excused behind a brick buttress by the boiler-shed. Another had wetted himself handsomely in class, burst into tears and sobbed that he was frightened to be excused because of the big boy. The ordinary course of their instruction was immediately interrupted. Soon there was a file of little
boys outside the head teacher’s room all waiting to give evidence. The fingers pointed straight at Sammy Mountjoy.

This was a humane and enlightened school. Why punish a boy if you can make him conscious of his guilt? The head teacher explained carefully the cruelty and dishonesty of my actions. He did not ask me whether I had done it or no, for he would not give me a chance to lie. He traced the connection between my passion for the kings of Egypt and the size of the temptation that had overcome me. He knew nothing about Philip and found out nothing.

“It’s really because you like pictures, eh, Sammy? Only you mustn’t get them that way. Draw them. You’d better give back as many as you can. And—here. You can have these.”

He gave me three kings of Egypt. I believe he had gone to great trouble over those fagcards. He was a kindly, careful and conscientious man who never came within a mile of understanding his children. He let the cane stay in the corner and my guilt stay on my back.

Is this the point I am looking for?

No.

Not here.

But that was not the profoundest thing that Philip achieved for me. His next was a masterpiece of passion. It was, I suppose, a clumsier exhibition, a botched job from his prentice hand. It reveals Philip to me as a person in three D, as more than a cutout. Like the appearing ice, a point above water, it gives evidence of great depths in Philip. He has always had much in common with an iceberg.
He is still pale, still involved and subtle, still dangerous to shipping. He avoided me for a time after the fagcard case. As for me, I fought more than ever; and I do not think it an adult wisdom to say that now I fought with a more furious desire to compel and hurt. At this time I had my greatest hour with Johnny. Out of an obscure and ungovernable rage against something indefinable, I went for the only thing I knew would not flinch at a battering—Johnny’s face. But when I hit his nose he tripped and cut his head open on the corner of the school building. So then his ma came and saw the head teacher—Johnny was most anxious that I should understand he had asked her not to—and I was in trouble again. I can still sense my feelings of defiance and isolation; a man against society. For the first, but not the last time I was avoided. The head teacher thought a period in Coventry would show me the value of social contact and persuade me to stop using people as a punchball.

During this period Philip slid alongside again. He assured me of his friendship and we quickly became intimate because he was the only friend I had. Johnny always had a great respect for authority. If the head teacher said no talk, then Johnny was mum. Johnny was adventurous but dared an authority he respected. Philip had no respect for authority, but caution rather. So he quickly slid alongside again. Perhaps among the teachers he may even have built up a little credit as a faithful friend. Who knows? Certainly I was grateful.

As I piece together and judge our relationship during those few weeks I am overcome with astonishment. Can it be possible? Was he so clever so early? Was he even then so cowardly, so dangerous, so elaborate?

When he had got me fast to him Philip led the conversation round to religion. This was unbroken ground for me. If I were baptized now the baptism would have to be conditional. I slipped through the net. But Philip was C. of E.; and what was unusual in those days, his parents were strict and devout. I explored the fringes of this incredible situation by report, understanding very little. We had prayers and a hymn at school, but all I remember of them is the march which got us back to our rooms and the occasion when Minnie showed us the difference between a human being and an animal. We were visited once or twice by a parson but nothing happened. True; I liked what we heard of the Bible. I accepted everything within the limits of a lesson. I should have fallen into the hands of any denomination that made the gesture, like a plum.