Rotting Hill (32 page)

    On the appointed day, and, with great precision, at the appointed hour, his knock was heard: loud—firm—short. Upon opening the door I had a surprise, which was apparently reciprocated. In such cases embarrassment is usual on the visitor’s part, whereas the rules prescribe that the grantor of the interview should be bursting with self-importance—or if he is not bursting with it, is weary with the weight of it, or most “graciously” waives it—or perhaps moves circumspectly like a man with something sensational on his person—say a bomb. Mr. Gartsides, though for some reason surprised, was in no way embarrassed.

    My visitor was a raw-boned man of thirty-nine, not to say forty, an age to which I do not think he had in fact attained. He carried a khaki raincoat over his arm, wore no hat, his reddish hair was rough but thinning; he was short, brisk, poker-faced, a man who had never been a great many feet above the gutter. I should expect to see him in a strike-picket, and his hard voice was like one coming out of a picket too.

    Whatever it was had halted my visitor was effective for perhaps the one tick-tock of a clock: then his underdone pink face, rationed as regards expression, admitted what I assume was his party-look, and his harsh voice rasped quietly out my name. He marched straight in without much invitation. “Be seated, Mr. Gartsides,” I said, and was glad the letter had been answered, and I had got something more primitive than I had asked for, and he sat down at once in my best and largest armchair, and gave my room and belongings a resolute look or two. It was not a
stare
for his aggressiveness was quiet and reserved. He sat up red and alert and silent. But his redness was not that he coloured, it was always there, and no one who lives in a class-room keeps such a face.

    “I was not able to read your signature,” I told him.

    “No? I am sorry.”

    “But I am glad my letter reached you. In addressing the envelope as I could not make out the name I imitated the shapes, and put Esquire after them.”

    He smiled—probably he thought I was being superior about his handwriting.

    “What
is
your name however!” I politely laughed. “Your handwriting is beautifully clear, but, like many people, when you write your
name
you become illegible!”

    “Gartsides,” he barked back, making the name sound even harsher than it is.

    “An uncommon name,” I said.

    “Not in Durham where I come from.”

    “Indeed.”

    “Yes, Gartsides is a name you often hear.”

    “I can see how that might be, it sounds as if it could have belonged to a collector of the Danegelt.”

    To put an end to these trivialities Mr. Gartsides announced, “I have read your books, Mr. Lewis, at least some books. I am very glad we could meet. I have haunted parties and shows in the hope of meeting you.”

    I gave him a reproachful look and hastily changed the subject.

    “How do you come to live,” I enquired, “in Bermondsey Mr. Gartsides. You teach, you said in your letter.”

    “Yes, that’s right, in an Elementary School.”

    “You dispense elementary education to those whose parents were insufficiently acquisitive and so had not the cash to send their kids to more classy places.”

    “Yes. I went to one like that myself too. Elementary—that’s all I got.”

    This was given out coldly, as an indifferent fact, but he was laying bare an injury that society had inflicted upon him. It had given him a clown’s equipment, and a clown’s tongue.

    “Token instruction. It’s disgusting!” I protested. “Does it not worry you; to help perpetuate this system?”

    Mr. Gartsides looked politely blank. Sympathy, or “understanding”, was a commodity the bona fides of which he doubted, and for which he had no use anyway.

    “But it is art I teach,” he explained. “Sometimes in
art
the elementary is the best.”

    “
Sometimes!
” I conceded with extreme dryness.

    Tea arrived, and some of the lardless, sugarless, eggless cakes of Great Britain 1949. The tea had suddenly improved about Christmastime, before which it had no taste whatever, having deteriorated during months in the warehouse. As he drank he remarked. “Good tea. Darjeeling and China. I always bought that”: he laughed—“when I could get it.”

    His laughter was the public enjoyment of a private joke, and I was impelled to ask him:

    “Have you always taught art in elementary schools?”

    He gave a short laugh at that. “Oh, no,” he answered. “Only for a year. I was a soldier.”

    “During the war—but before that—”

    “No, I was a regular. I was seventeen years in India.”

    India, with its mosques and temples, its solar topees, polo-ponies—seventeen years of it violently expelled the image of Bermondsey as the background for this little figure. It was with a new eye that I focused him. It was literally as if he had confessed to a prison sentence.

    “What was your rank?” I asked.

    “Sergeant.”

    “Quarter-bloke?” I suggested.

    “No, just sergeant. I trained the boys for jungle-warfare. Blackett’s boys.”

    I digested this.

    “I’m an old man,” he said harshly. “I know I have not much time. I have to be quick.”

    He spoke as a man with a mission. But I had not been prepared for a long-service sergeant—that was one of the half-dozen things for which I was totally unprepared.

    It was not the ranker—my class-bar works in reverse: but this is a Briton who comes out of a mould manufactured at the same period as the footman. On retirement, if personable, old soldiers became Commissionaires, or such up to now has been the case: prison warders, police constables or what not. With domestics they traditionally have shared a necessary obliquity, unshakeable appetite for tips, a philosophy of sloth. Following the mass-training of citizens for the first world-war the type has suffered a change—but in such cases a type is apt to keep the worst of the old while incorporating the worst of the new. Finally, it is not a creative occupation, and cannot but be a servile one, so long as the old disciplines hold.

    In “total war” the first regular sergeants had left no over-all pleasant impression upon me. On the other hand, there was this: I could not imagine any of them, by any stretch of the imagination, becoming art-teachers. So we stared at one another, at this point, blankly and bleakly—for no more than the interval decreed by punctuation by its colon sign—he, reddened by the sun that “never set” on the Empire that is no more, I paled by electricity, under which I labour nightly to distinguish myself and attract ex-sergeants: he who—in his sergeants’ mess in Hindustan—so he was to tell me, would listen to some ex-service minstrel who, for a drink or two, would give the sergeants “The Road to Mandalay” (where the old flotilla lay)—a year or two before the English “hurled themselves”—to use an American columnist’s phrase—“out of” Kipling’s India—and
I
who—(to find a minstrel for myself) once listened to an American minstrel who read a lay of his own, which he had called “The Waste Land”, while the ink was scarcely dry on it. That was after Western civilization had committed suicide in a blood bath. The second decade of this ill-starred century had just banged its way off the stage.

    The sergeant revealed a brand-new set of state teeth—first fruits of the famous Health Act, falsely white and symbolically of a deadly uniformity. His smile advertised polite satisfaction at the effect produced by his words.

    “Well all right, so you’re a soldier,” I began, with ostentatious finality.

    “I
was
a soldier,” he mildly corrected.

    “How does it come about though that you teach art?”

    He seemed surprised at the question. It appeared the most natural thing in the world that he should teach art.

    “Oh, I see,” I said.

    But he proceeded to open my eyes still further—he relished the operation, it was quite plain. Upon leaving the army he had at first no idea what to do with himself. As regards the length of this blank interlude I know nothing, but it cannot have been long. Mentioning the problem one day to a chance-met man, he heard how soldiers were being turned into teachers (not of art—that came later). The idea appealed: he fancied himself as a teacher. Sergeants develop an appetite for the imparting of knowledge.

    Of course in fact he had had a wide choice of callings. Upon demobilization he could have become almost anything from a Harley Street consultant to an Anglican clergyman, by means of a Government grant: to the mind of the politician, who is anti-craft, the notion that it takes a long time to become anything worth the being is repugnant. The politician, like the journalist, is a professional amateur. The only thing there was no grant for was to learn how to be a politician. The laziest of the ex-servicemen naturally chose the fine arts. The nation’s money was drained off on oil-paints, palettes, mahlsticks, six-foot lay-figures, poppy-oil and sable-brushes—and of course studio rents. Sculpture was not so popular, it sounded too much like work.

    Gartsides was sent to an emergency training centre. In one year he would have qualified as a teacher in an elementary school. Shortly, however, he discovered that there was no obstacle to his transferring, if he so desired, and training to be an art teacher. So he changed over (he probably found arithmetic a bit of a sweat): whether remaining in the same training centre or not I forget. On the completion of a brief period of art-training, he blossomed forth as art-teacher, was appointed to a slum-school. The other teachers there, of whatever kind, were “certificated”—which meant they had matriculated and spent some years in procuring their licence to teach. It seems he was not a popular figure, even before he showed what stuff he was made of. But it was no time at all before he did that. He quite literally painted the school red.

    A thigh thrown over a desk, an arm akimbo, his utility shoe dangling, the children were addressed by Gartsides; and their fidgety little eyes popped out of their curly little heads. They were told that what was
spontaneous
was best. Spontaneous meaning what
spurts
up, free and uncontrolled, not fed out by a nasty
tap.
The freest expression—the most
innocent
release—of their personalities was what
he
was there to teach. They would get no
direction
from him, his role was that of a helpful looker-on. Ready to give a hand, that was all. (He conveyed a very vivid impersonation of these transactions I am obliged naturally to abridge). Art was
doing what they liked.
It was not doing what
he
liked. They must pay no attention to him or to anyone else—it did not matter a hoot what
anyone
thought. He waved a rebellious eye over towards the office of the superintendent. He could teach them nothing. What can one person teach another except to be himself, as if he lived on a little island all by himself? They all lived on little islands all by themselves. No, he was simply there in the capacity of a wet-nurse, to assist them to be their little selves, and to bring forth—to create—whatever was inside them!

    The children—typical Giles-like gnomes from the neighbouring sooty alleys and crapulous crescents—were of course alarmed and excited. Then he appeared one morning with a number of tins of house-painters’ colours and a couple of dozen suitable brushes (and he was very proud of introducing house-painters’ colours into the teaching of art). He pointed dramatically to the walls of the class-room crying: “Here’s paints and brushes and there’s the old wall! Atta boy! Paint me some pitchers on it!”

    His petrified class suddenly saw the light. With squeaks of rapture they went to work. Soon the walls, part of the ceiling, as well as the cupboards and doors and even some areas of the floor of the class-room were as rich with crude imagery as the walls of a public lavatory. Some of the children were smeared from head to foot with paint.

    After this his popularity suffered a further decline among the teaching staff. Next the school-inspectors arrived one morning and “nearly threw a fit” when they saw his class-room. He played the simpleton. He grimaced with a wooden jaw, hanging open an idiot lip and goggled with his eyes, to show me how smart he could be. It seems that the inspectors were satisfied that he was practically imbecilic. Of course they recognised that this was the type of man called for to teach art. They bullied the children, however, a little, for obviously
they
should have had more sense.

    After the paint he obtained some plasticine.

    “What do you think they did with it?” he asked me.

    I shook my head, to indicate my inability to guess what might supervene if their personalities were left alone with so malleable a substance as plasticine.

    “Well, they all made the same sort of thing,” he told me.

    “Indeed. How curious.”

    “Yes,” he agreed. “They stood their piece of plasticine up on end like this.” And he stood a safety-match upright on the table. He smiled at me. “I asked them what it was,” he said. “They told me a lighthouse.”

    “Ah, yes. That lighthouse rescue probably. It was in all the papers: I suppose it was that.”

    “No,” he said, obviously disappointed in me. “It was—well a phallus. Phallic.”

    “I beg your pardon,” I said. “I see, of course. How amusing. Their personalities vanished momentarily. They became one—the primeval child.”

    He looked at me with surprise.

    “No,” he objected. “Each did a different lighthouse.”

    I laughed at that. “I wonder,” I asked him, “if you have read Herbert Read’s
Education of the Child?
” For his goofy goings on, without looking any further, might be the response to some such stimulus.