EGGS AND BACON, EGGS and Bacon, Apple and Custard, Apple and Custard, Cheese and Biscuits, Cheese and Biscuits, Fish and Chips, Fish and Chips…
Making piston-movements with their elbows, going faster and faster, Cumbernald’s two daughters are pretending the car’s a train as we bowl along the A40 towards Wales and Gloucester. I’m seated between them, in the middle of the back seat so that they can both get most of the fresh air that’s pouring in through the side windows. “They do both tend to get a bit travel-sick,” Eileen Cumbernald warned me when we set out. “Just give me a shout if you see either of them turning green…”
We stop for lunch at one of the big new roadhouse inns. Cumbernald buys us all steak and chips, and the children’s portions come with free ice cream. Christine’s their eldest at eleven; a plump pre-adolescent with dental braces who is designated clever and reads a lot. Barbara’s seven, thinner, more self-assured and “sporty”. Back in the afternoon heat of the car, we head on amid the lorries and late-August holiday makers. Cumbernald drives a Daimler 25/40, a shining but old-fashioned-looking vehicle that came as a surprise when I saw it until climbed inside and breathed in all the waxed wood, the Axminster and the leather. Much like their tall white house on elm-lined Raglan Street—although there’s also a modern-looking Jowett Jupiter parked in the drive; what Eileen Cumbernald calls “Mummy’s taxi”—it’s a statement about the timelessness of class.
Most of the A40 has been improved to dual-carriageway and looking out across the rolling heat-hazed concrete, the scenery beyond seems distant and arid, framed by white gravel and spindly new trees. Cumbernald clicks on the radio, then he and Eileen argue about whether they want to listen to the Light or the Third Programme. Brief but jumbled snatches of Vera Lynn, static and Tchaikovsky roar out from the loudspeakers—it’s like the avant-garde European music they’d be so quick to condemn—whilst Christine and Barbara grow listless and bored. Studying them carefully for traces of green, I decide to distract them by describing what their lives would have been like at other times in history.
“If you two little girls lived in Roman times, you might have had lots of slaves and servants and central heating.”
“We do have central heating.”
“And lots of slaves and servants.”
“They’re just people who come to help Mummy, stupid.”
“Anyway, we’re not little girls.”
But they soak it up with surprising interest.
“And what happened to people when they died?” Barbara asks me sweetly. “Did they eat them?”
It’s really quite fun. When we finally turn off at a sign that points north towards Leominster and Hereford onto winding, prettier roads, Barbara leans close to me, dragging my head down with her hot arms to whisper that she likes me because I remind her of her dead Uncle Freddie when she saw him in the coffin.
The place to which the Cumbernalds have invited me lies deep within the Forest of Dean. Deciding to try a new route amid the seemingly few roads, we end up having to reverse for miles to give way to a tree-hauling tractor, and it seems later than it really is in the shade of these pines when we finally arrive at the entrance, which is contradictorily signed, in green and gold, PENRHOS PARK—TOURERS WELCOME—BY APPOINTMENT ONLY, and sports the crowns and stars of various tourist classifications like campaign medals.
The Daimler whispers past the laurel hedges to a glassed hut where a uniformed man waves us on without bothering to check our passes. Cumbernald raises a gracious hand. In the back, Christine and Barbara stick out their tongues and pull faces.
“Now we can relax,” Cumbernald says as he crooks his arm on the open window and starts humming.
The lodge, clad with logs like some fairy tale woodsman’s cottage, is set in a grassy clearing. The evening air smells like nectar even to my dim senses as I claw my limbs out of the Daimler.
“This is home, isn’t it?” Cumbernald says, puffing his chest. “Greater Britain! Better than Italy any day…”
My room at the back of the lodge smells of new wood. The bed is undented—has probably never been slept on—and the sliding doors of the fitted wardrobes still have the builder’s instructions stuck on the back. Eileen Cumbernald comes in before I’ve even had time to open my suitcase, changed already from her sleeveless summer dress into shorts and a halter top from which the fatty sides of her breasts look ready to fall out.
“I do hope the girls were alright with you there at the back,” she says as she reaches to open the window. Evening birdsong floods in.
“I quite enjoyed it actually.”
“That’s the spirit…” She smiles, thinking about saying more. I smile back.
“You must love it here.”
“Oh, we do! But, ah…” She pushes back her blond hair, the roots of which are darker. “I know it’s a bit late to say this, but I hope you don’t feel you have to come just because Eric’s your boss.”
“It’ll do me good.”
She frowns, pursing her lips. “What I’m trying to say is that you’re free to do what you like. Shall I help you with your case?”
“It’s alright, I—”
She lifts it up onto the bed anyway. “This is heavy. One of those lovely old ones that last forever. Not like the cheap modern things. But what have you got in here? Books, I suppose—I know you academics…”
That evening, Cumbernald—or Eric, as I may now have to start thinking of him—prepares the dinner for us out-of-doors using a crude iron device filled with charcoal. It’s an American idea, he tells me as I duck the spiralling smoke. One of their few good ones. There’s white wine from the fridge and salad tossed in a Pyrex bowl and rolls and the new ready-salted Smiths’ Crisps that come without the little blue bag inside the packet.
Christine and Barbara pedal off along the paths between the trees on the bicycles they keep here, half-blackened sausages gripped like cigars between their teeth. Looking over the forest crown, I see the smoke of other cooking fires rising like Indian signals. As it gets darker, Eileen sets a lantern on the outdoor table where we’ve eaten, and we watch the moths flutter into oblivion on its hot glass. Away from Oxford and his suit, Cumbernald looks pleasingly ridiculous in sandals, baggy shorts, a Fred Perry top, a charcoal smudge across his forehead.
The children finally return out of the night, flushed and bright. When I look at my watch, I see that it’s already nearly eleven. After the commotion of their late bath has diminished to a few odd shrieks indoors, I decide it’s time that I also went to bed.
“You look a better man already,” Cumbernald says, wine glass in his lap. “Eileen tells me you’ve brought lots of books—so just do what you like tomorrow. This is some place, though, isn’t it, eh? A real breath of England.”
He gestures around. It’s suddenly night-quiet, with the faint stirring of the pines, the distant hoot of an owl. It wouldn’t take much imagination to hear the growl of a bear, the rooting chuff of a wild boar, the howl of wolves—the return of all the beasts of old to the vast Wood of Albion.
I’m about to say that—or something like it—when I hear a thin shriek. The sound is so strange here, yet so familiar as it grows louder, that it takes me a moment to realise that all I’m hearing is the passing of a train.
“It’s just a goods line,” Cumbernald explains as it goes by unseen, not far behind the lodge. “Never quite worked out where it’s from or to. But I shouldn’t worry, old chap. That’s the latest I’ve ever heard one go by. They won’t disturb your sleep.”
In the morning, the girls career down on their bikes to buy breakfast from the site shop. Eggs and Bacon, Eggs and Bacon… The sound of sizzling mingles in my head with the clack and roar of the trains that fractured my night as Eileen, back in her traditional role now the cooking’s indoors, prepares our fry-up.
Sitting blinking in the yellow and pine kitchen, I’m complimented on looking better, and it’s obvious from their faces, their voices, from the way they’re swallowing gallons of orange juice and coffee, that the Cumbernalds slept like logs.
“I was thinking we could go down to the Sun Area this morning,” Cumbernald says, flapping out a copy of the Times. There’s a photograph above the page-fold of John Arthur shaking hands with Roosevelt. My Modernist books tell me that even lesser dignities are never searched before they come face to face with the great man.
“The Sun Area today. That okay with you, Brook?”
“Oh? Yes. Fine…”
The girls, for some reason, both start to giggle until orange juice dribbles out of their noses.
Penrhos Park is much bigger than I imagined. Not only is there a shop, but a whole central complex where the children can play table tennis and outdoor chess, watch television in a big dark room, slide around on the parquet of the dance hall, or splash and scream at each other within the giant fishbowl of the indoor pool.
The atmosphere is cosmopolitan. I detect a surprising number of American accents. Not long ago, Greater Britain was regarded as unstable, racist, a powder-keg, an international pariah. But these things never last. Now that Soviet Russia has been revealed as the grey and uninspiring place it always was, Britain has become the greatest object of international fascination. What Modernist Britain does today, so the saying goes, the rest of the world will do tomorrow. Look at our cars, our roads, our televisions, our politics—look at places like this! Everybody wants to come so that they can tell their friends back in Philadelphia or Baden-Baden, even if they still feel a little afraid.
The Sun Area is lavishly signposted, yet still requires a long trek down through the tents and the trees. Eileen Cumbernald struggles with a canvas bag whilst the girls skip ahead and husband Eric manfully carries his Times. I limp behind on my walking stick in an open-neck shirt and hot woollen trousers.
“Don’t mind the sun, do you, ah, Geoffrey?” he asks me from beneath his Panama. “You’re not sensitive?”
“No… Not at all…”
The Sun Area is shielded by high hedges and long walls which we must walk around, then queue at a turnstile. The swing doors beyond lead to a hot wooden tunnel lined with benches: some kind of changing area. Eileen Cumbernald removes the same halter top she wore yesterday evening and hangs it on a numbered peg. She isn’t wearing a bra. Cumbernald, contrarily, removes his shorts and his baggy y-fonts before taking off his sandals. The children, by some instantaneous process, are already naked. They scamper off down the smooth wooden floor towards the bright square of light at the far end, fading into thin outlines, then skeletons, then nothing at all. It’s as if they’ve been swallowed by the sun.
Cumbernald really is brown. He must do this sort of thing all the time. Eileen is too; although I can see now that she’s not as blond as she pretends to be.
“You okay, Brook? You can take your walking stick with you if you like. Or just leave it behind. Nothing ever gets stolen.”
I undo a few token buttons of my shirt, wondering how easy it would be to wake up if I pinched myself. The most amazing dream. I was with the college principal and his wife. They took all their clothes off, then asked me to do the same…
“I’ll get you a sun-vest,” Eileen says, and strides off into the sunlight herself, dimpled buttocks jiggling.
“Can’t beat this for an experience,” Cumbernald says, slapping bits of himself. “They say John Arthur does it. Of course, Jim Toller—fascinating article by him in last month’s H&E…”
I nod. I’d slump down on the bench, but for the unfortunate level that it would bring my gaze to. Cumbernald’s saggy in the way that all middle-aged men are, although in good enough shape. No surplus fat. I think of Bracken’s blue pigs. Blam, blam. People are such big beasts. The light from the frosted window shines on the sloughs of skin beneath his ribs.
“There we are,” says Eileen, returning with an off-white ball of cotton scrunched up in her hands. She’s still wearing her earrings, I notice. And her wedding ring. The puckered scar from some abdominal operation smiles lopsidedly back at me. “A sun vest. On a hot day like this, it’ll help to stop you burning. Come on, Eric—don’t need our help, do you, Geoffrey? No. We’ll just be outside at the cafe. Shall I get you an ice cream…?”
A truly hot day at the honeyed edge of August, here on this Summer Isle. The people stroll about, shining with oil. They play sports and eat simple food and dispose considerately of their litter. Different ages and shapes, lumpy or skinny, effortlessly young and effortlessly beautiful, breathtakingly ugly, shrivelled and brown, or white, stooped and cadaverous like me—amputees, even—they all talk, walk, smile, shade their eyes to look up at the hot bright dot of the sun as they wonder once again at the goodness of this feeling, the goodness of this weather, the goodness of this place where we happen to find ourselves.
Having promised to keep an eye on the children, I sit by the lake with a copy of something called Future Past whilst Cumbernald and Eileen go off to rustle up a team for the volleyball. No one seems to mind my wearing a sun vest, and I’m as naked as the rest of them underneath. The white sand along this lakeside looks natural, but must have been carted in by the lorry-load. The water is impossibly dark, impossibly bright. Bodies crash in and out, sleek as otters. A woman breastfeeds her child on the towel next-door to mine, engaging me in snatches of conversation. Out in the distance, white sails are turning.
Occasionally, I glimpse Christine and Barbara. There’s a lido that juts into the lake beside the trees. At this moment, Barbara is hanging onto the bottom of the low diving board there whilst Christine jumps up and down on top of it. A young Adonis strides by at the water’s edge. There’s barely any hair on his body. Amid all this display, his genitals are disappointing—a small afterthought, but then sex seems a remote abstraction here. It really is true what they say; people in the nude are impossibly decent. We should all go around like this. It would probably be the answer to all this world’s troubles. I can see it now—Naturism—A New Theory Of World History… The only trouble is, I have a feeling that it was one of the titles I drew the line at when I was stocking up for my researches in Blackwells.
Christine and Barbara have vanished again. I squint at the pages of my book and wiggle my toes into the hot sand. Chapter Five. The Greatness of the British Heritage—Truth or Myth? I can feel my sweat prickling beneath my sun vest. Looking around to see if anyone’s -watching me—unlikely possibility—I drag it off and the moist shock of the air passes over all of me. It’s strangely exhilarating, and my skin feels closer to the sun as I lay back on the towel and let the pages of Future Past splay unread in the sand. I’m part of the water, the air, the shouts and the cries…
I wake up to the odd sensation of being naked, and a cool shock of water. Christine gives a gap-toothed grin as she uncups the rest of her dripping hands over me. Barbara’s giggling. Cumbernald and Eileen are standing a little way back on the beach, towels draped over their shoulders.
“You look a little red if you don’t mind me saying so, Brook. Better have some of this sun oil…” says my college principal, stooping down and whistling faintly through his teeth as he proceeds to oil my back.
Noon comes and goes. The afternoon glides by. I go for a swim, leaving a rainbowed slick of sun oil in my wake like a leaky trawler. I eat ice cream and a Melton Mowbray pork pie. I drink gallons of Vimto. I let Christine and Barbara bury me in the sand. I take another swim. Eileen helps me with more of the sun oil, and I reflect on the way that women’s breasts hang down like udders when they’re on all fours. I suppose they are udders really when you come to think about it. And they have this clever knack of keeping their genitalia well out of sight even when they’re naked. Men are such show-offs… By evening, when cooler air comes rippling the lake, my skin is itchy as we grab our few belongings and head back up the slope to the changing rooms. The hot water burns like molten lava on my shoulders as I splash around in the white-tiled communal showers, and my prick, I can’t help noticing, looks a bit like one of Cumbernald’s barbecued sausages; cooked on just the one side. My clothes feel like sandpaper.
That night, as, glazed in minty unguents, I shiver and roast beneath the one sheet I can bare to have covering me, the trains are busy again, clanking chains and couplings, hissing brakes as they trundle back and forth. Then a creak of springs comes through the lodge’s thin walls as the Cumbernalds indulge in their own bit of coupling. And there are children’s cries, too; the clatter of the showers from which they emerge like drowned figures with their hair lank, thinly naked as they walk on to be swallowed in the bright blaze of light…
At three o-clock, feeling stiff and nauseous, I wrap myself in the sticky sheet and hobble to the toilet. Once I’ve relieved myself and decided that I’m not going to vomit after all, I pad through the dim parlour to the French doors. Silvery night lies over the trees outside in the clearing, and the air as the doors break open silently smells of pine and pollen and dew. The stars are out in amazing profusion. And I can hear the breath, like a great animal sighing, of the train that must be waiting almost directly behind the lodge. Barefoot, wrapped in my crumpled shroud, stung by nettles, I wander towards it.
A bank and then a line of trees separate the lodge from the railway line. Once you’re close, it’s funny that you can’t see more of it, but then the final chain-link fence is engulfed in ivy. I don’t know what I’d expected to find, but it’s just some goods train as Cumbernald predicted. The huge engine sighs in impatience as it waits for a signal to change. The fireman’s face is lined red as he leans from the footplate, whilst the driver waits at the track side, smoking a cigarette and kicking at the gravel. The engine is high and vast; black, nameless, numberless.
Finally, the driver checks his two watches and climbs back up. The tracks wheeze as the great piston elbows of the engine begin to slide. The wheels slip as they take up the tension, then squeal and grip and begin to move, hauling at the vast burden that stretches behind into the night. The goods wagons are endless, open-backed, covered in mottled camouflage. Here and there the tarpaulin has slipped back or been roped down less thoughtfully, and it’s easy as they clack past to make out the huge outlined bodies of bombers, their wings plucked from them as if by some cruel boy. Eggs and Bacon, Eggs and Bacon, Apple and Custard, Apple and Custard, Cheese and Biscuits, Cheese and Biscuits, Fish and Chips, Fish and Chips… I watch them jolt and rumble. It seems like fully a mile of wagons go by before the red light of the guard’s van finally disappears south.
I pick my way back through the wet undergrowth, then across the grass. The lodge is quiet as I click on the light in my room and sit down at the dressing table. Balancing my weight on the least-burnt of my buttocks, hearing nothing now but the quiet of the night and the faint sound of my hosts snoring, I open my books and set to work.
I have a theory that the decision to enter politics tells you far more about someone’s nature than their choice of party. Politicians as a race have much in common—as shown by the bonhomie with which John Arthur can greet figures as diverse as Franco, Stalin, and now even Roosevelt.
As an ex-boxer, an ex-corporal, a leader of small groups of men used to the harsh decisions and horrors of war, John Arthur would have been well equipped to make his mark in the strange and violent world of 1920s fringe politics. It’s on record that he moved to London in 1922 and lived in a cheap boarding house in Balham (now another museum). There, jobless and without food, he almost died of pneumonia. I see him emerging from the chrysalis of fever with boxing and the War and the rest of his life put firmly behind him. At last he truly is John Arthur.
Everyone in Britain knew we’d been treated harshly after the War. There was a sense after the Treaty of Versailles that the French and the Germans, although recent enemies, had plotted to destroy our Empire. Why, otherwise, were Syria, Iraq, Palestine, the Sudan, Rhodesia, Nigeria, Cyprus—admittedly places that most Britons were only aware of as part of the reassuring pinkness on the maps they’d seen on school walls—made into protectorates of Wilson’s new League of Nations, to be policed by virtually anyone but the British until they were deemed ready for self determination?
This hurt was the one thing that united Britain. True, we still had South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and India, even the Falkland Isles. But with the exception of India, these were white nations, and all had suffered at least as badly as Britain in the War.
In Italy, Il Duce was already in power, building Romanesque temples and thumping his chest from balconies, whilst John Arthur was still trying to make his voice heard in the corners of East End bars. For Britain, as South Africa plunged into civil war and the Russians expanded across Afghanistan towards the Indian border, there were only other losses to face, and then one final crushing humiliation. In 1923, with the open support of many United States congressmen, the Irish Republicans defeated the British forces street by street in Dublin, then savaged them again as they withdrew north. The notorious terrorist De Valera became head of a new Irish Government.
Nothing seemed to have much value then. Britain’s economy was wrecked by the War and the reparations payments. Demoralised, we were drawn into the terrible spiral of hyper-inflation. Fresh coinage was issued: one new pound for every hundred old. Within weeks, everyone was saying it should have been a thousand. I too went hungry; I queued outside the grocers for £10 then £50 and then £100 worth of rotten cabbage as General Election followed General Election and MacDonald succeeded Baldwin and then Baldwin took over again. Bevin gained ascendancy in the Labour Party, but was never able to control the anger of the workers he supposedly represented, and the succession of General Strikes in the early twenties finally brought about the dissolution of the liberal left. India was in famine. There were street-battles and demonstrations. One man in three was said to have a job.
The fringe parties, not just the extreme right and left, but religious fundamentalists, eurhythmic dancers, gurus and back-to-naturists, were loud, colourful and often very violent, although most people had little time for them: there was simply too much disillusionment. When Churchill took power during the Third General Strike of 1924–5 and succeeded in defeating the miners and the train drivers, then issued a Guaranteed Pound that people somehow actually believed in, it seemed as though the worst of Britain’s post-War nightmare might soon be over.
But money was still short. There was still high unemployment. The Communists and the Fascists didn’t go away. Neither did the reparations payments, the feeling of defeat, the whole sense of national crisis which Churchill was often so good at exploiting. We were weak. In this new world order, Britain was a third-rate nation; a little island off a big continent, like Tierra del Fuego, Ceylon, Madagascar.
I saw John Arthur once at that time—a privilege so many people claim nowadays that a meeting of them would fill Wembley Stadium. I was still working as a teacher at Lichfield Grammar, although often there weren’t enough books, enough children, enough coal for the boiler in winter—enough chalk, even—and we had to subsist on credits and half pay. Still, I was lucky to have a job, and to own a house.
I was aware by then of the various bus stops and bushes which the lonely men of Lichfield would sometimes frequent. But I also knew about police entrapment, the shaming articles in the Lichfield Mercury that were so often followed by the suicide of those named, the long prison terms, and the beating and truncheon-buggerings that generally accompanied a night in the cells. I feared the loss of my life and my job, but I was also possessed by a deep erotic longing. Of course, I could have tried to honour Francis’s memory by seeking someone I cared about and might eventually have learned to love. Instead, as the twenties progressed from the time of the £500 haddock and wheelbarrow money into Churchill’s empty pontificating, I became a regular weekend visitor to London.
There, under the County Fire Office arches at Piccadilly, in the urinals at Victoria and South Kensington Stations, in small side streets like Falconbury Mews, and sometimes beneath the summer skies on Hampstead Heath, I would consent to suck off some merchant sailor—or, if there happened to be a gang of them, more likely be repeatedly and painfully buggered. But the bruises and the indignities seemed a necessary part of the process. From Francis, I had taken the turn that many inverts take once love has failed them, which is to remove the holy power from sex by making it a means of humiliation, parody, loss of self, comedy, degradation.
Thus I spent my middle years. Once, wandering near midnight in an area of East End dockland houses that the police had long given up policing, I crossed the scattered cobbles towards the gaslit clamour of an end-of-terrace pub. The place stank of men and sweat, of cheap beer and piss. Immediately, I felt at home. Just half an hour before, I had been on all fours on a fire-blackened wasteground, half-choking as a fist twisted the back of my collar and a voice hissed fucking queer Jesus God you fucking queer bastards you make me fucking fucking sick whilst, unlubricated, he forced himself into me. It was called the Cottage Spring, and was one of those pubs where people who barely knew each other could congregate and yell. Dry-throated, I made my way towards the bar, but then had to give up as I was pushed and shouldered. There was a sense, I realised, that something was about to happen. A general clearing of throats, a falling of relative silence. It seemed likely to me that some local housewife was about to step onto a couple of pushed-together tables, remove her clothing and do whatever else was expected of her in return for cash in a pint pot. I still hadn’t realised then that there were political pubs, and that the Cottage Spring was a Fascist one.
Those were restless, anxious nights in the East End. By then, the Poles, White Russians and Lithuanian Jews who’d come to settle here in the War’s aftermath had fled their burnt-out houses. Yet, so obsessed was I with my own sexual pursuits that I hadn’t realised the many other kinds of risk I was taking by wandering these areas. And I was slow to detect, in this humming crowded pub, the palpable air of violence. One man stood up on a table, raised his hands and attempted to speak, then was dragged down and buried in a rain of blows. Someone with a smashed and bleeding nose pushed past me.
I had stumbled into the vortex of something very dangerous. No one had noticed me when I came in—I was already ragged enough to look the part—but I was sure that they would notice me now if I tried to leave. There was a stir at the pub’s far corner at the end of some oddly light and careless snatch of song: a perceptible shifting of mood. I glanced at the man nearest me and saw that his lips were moving along with those of many others. A whispered name, barely audible at first, but slowly shaping, becoming clearer, was filling the air. He clambered up on the bar, then, did this man they were all calling for. He stood above all the grubby crudely shaved necks in a frayed shirt that was too big for him, a leather waistcoat that was losing its stitching, a pair of moleskin trousers and a thick miner’s belt. His face looked pale and his hands were stained with mud or blood, yet he managed to keep an easy dignity as he balanced there with the dusty rows of glasses stacked behind him. He raised his arms and smiled as he looked down, stilling us. Although he had changed much in the fifteen years since I had last seen him, it was that smile that finally made me certain. I was sure that this man—this John Arthur they were calling for—was in fact Francis Eveleigh.
But this wasn’t my Francis, I knew that about him straight away, too. He’d changed in all the ways that men do as they get older (although he still looked achingly young). There were fine lines around his eyes. His mouth was thinner. Grey was already frosting his hair. But he’d also changed more fundamentally—it was as if something about him had been lost, or perhaps added or replaced. To this day, I’m still not sure what it is.
I didn’t wave my arms and cry out, Here, Francis, it’s me, Griff. Your long-lost lover! I didn’t even try to meet his eyes. Instead, I backed slowly towards a large pillar at the far end of the bar as others pushed forward to get nearer him. I hid myself from his gaze.
They called themselves Saint George’s Men then. Earlier that night they had clearly been involved in some kind of street battle, hence the nail-studded clubs and the spiked banners that leaned by the door. But the whole thing, whilst not perhaps a defeat, had clearly been unsatisfactory. They were still revved up, full of blood and passion.
When Francis—when John Arthur—climbed up onto that bar and smiled and raised his hands and began to speak in that changed soft Yorkshire accent of his, I already sensed many of the feelings that this whole nation was to become familiar with in the years to come. A kind of open-mouthed yearning, an almost sexual need for reassurance, love, comfort that you sensed only this one man could ever bring. After the confusions and disappointments of their lives, these poor and jobless men were desperate to be told that, yes, it was all quite simple. Alone, without compromise, as nothing more than what they already were, they could seize power. They could change history.
He’s refined his technique in all the years since, has John Arthur, and I was in no state on that particular night to absorb much of what he said. Nevertheless, his performance was essentially the same as those he’s done since outside 10 Downing Street, from the steps of New Buckingham Palace and on the nation’s television screens. That initial pause. The sharing, self-mocking smile that tells us that he still doesn’t understand why it has to be him. Then a mild joke and a few more gentle comments. At this point, the crowd is relaxing, smiling back at him; at the Cottage Spring, there even began a background murmuring, so that he had to lift his hands again to still them. By then, you’re expecting the whole speech to be nothing more than a calming chat, but suddenly, one of the anecdotes will twist around to some moment of national humiliation. Perhaps the forced scuttling of the fleet at Scarpa Flow in 1919, the refusal of MacDonald’s petition to join the League of Nations, or Ireland. There was always Ireland. John Arthur, more clearly in control now, will gaze sadly at his audience. Truly, his eyes say, if only we could only laugh and play like innocent children… If history could go on without us… But there is work to be done…
He speaks more in sorrow than in anger, leaving the abuse and the moronic philosophy to his underlings. When his voice rises, it is imperceptible because it always lies in the wake of the passion of his audience. He seems so calm, in fact, so reluctant, that you find yourself filled with a kind of longing, pleading from your heart for him to take this burden from you, to save you and make you whole. You are urging him on.
Exactly what was said on that night matters anyway as little as his recent speeches at the Olympics, or when he bade farewell to Fordingham’s gloriously ill-fated Everest Expedition. All I know is that, despite my shock and fear, I was moved in the way that good popular music sometimes moves me. And that, when John Arthur had finished speaking and had stepped down from the bar with that characteristic head-movement of his, the mood inside the Cottage Spring had changed. Instead of wanting to burn down the local Shamrock Club or Synagogue—if there were any left in the East End by then—or literally beat the shit out of some poor sodomite, the men had had their violence exorcised. They were happy to drift into the darkness towards whatever passed for their homes. For many years, I suppose, I have clung to that image of John Arthur as the queller rather than the creator of violence. It’s part of what has kept me sane.
I found myself momentarily rooted behind my pillar in this sudden thinning of the crowd. Francis was laughing and at ease beside the bar on which he’d been standing, his hand resting on the shoulder of a plumper, slightly older man who is now our Deputy Prime Minister, George Arkwright, and talking also to his then second-in-command Peter Harrison, who was executed for treason in 1938. He fixed them with that ever-shifting grey gaze of his, and I was surprised, as he stood there, to see just how thin he still was, and to realise how much I still longed to hold him. For some reason, with that extra unnamed sense of being watched that some people have, he suddenly cast his eyes across the fallen tables and chairs in my direction.
There was nothing for me to do. I just stood there beside that pillar with my hands in the pockets of my grubby coat, looking like the aging mess I knew I was. For a fractional moment, without even time enough for the expression to travel down to the mouth of his lovely, ever-animated face, John Arthur’s eyes bore the trace of a smile, a shade of what could only be recognition. Then he looked away.
I pass my days in Penrhos Park, floating through sun and history, dizzy with heatstroke and gallons of sweetly-deceptive Kentish wine, circled by the drone of insects, bicycling children, Cumbernald’s whirring cine camera, the roaring, lion-hearted sun. We drive out once to take a picnic amid the ruins of Chepstow Castle, and wandering the town’s streets in search of some present to give the Cumbernalds in place of the money for my upkeep that they keep insisting on refusing, it’s a surprise to see the people going about clothed here. But they’re really not wearing very much after this long summer. Skirts are getting shorter. Slips are showing. The men are redly bare-chested and intriguingly tattooed like Indian braves. The young children look happiest of all as they scatter past the many bookshops, smeared with chocolate, gleefully naked.
Each night, I read Enid Blyton to Christine and Barbara as they thrash about in their hot beds. We pretend we’re The Famous Five, and argue about who wants to be George and Tim the dog and where the secret passage might be. On Sunday morning, everyone goes down to the on-site church, which turns out to be the lovingly-restored remnant of a now-vanished village with tubby pillars, crusaders in the crypt, herringbone Norman arches and a deliciously obscene Grinning Jenny amid the gargoyles. Voices and the odours of damp stone and lilies fill the air as the people come casually, the women without hats, the men in shorts, and giggling children scamper along the aisles. The woman I saw on the beach by the lake is still breastfeeding her baby. It’s all so timeless, so cherishably ordinary.
I’m counting the few days of my stay here like a child at Christmas, wishing them longer, wishing away all that must come after. On the last evening, after the bats had replaced the swallows in the deep air and we’d drunk more than ever of the cloudy wine, Eric Cumbernald tries to prod me into saying more about my relationship with John Arthur. Eileen watches on, picking at the ball of her foot. Conscious that I’m getting a chance to earn my keep, I do my best to re-embroider the story that I must have told him before into something believable and attractive. The school. The pit wheels. The quiet lad at the back of the class with his arm raised… For once, I find the tale oddly moving. I wish it were true. Then, perhaps, everything else would be different.
“Why do you think he’s chosen now, Geoffrey,” Cumbernald wonders, “to see you again?”
“It’s his fiftieth birthday,” I say. In reality—if there was such a reality—Francis Eveleigh would only be forty six. And his birthday was on the 8th of September, not conveniently on Trafalgar Day. I can remember buying him an embarrassingly over-generous pen and pencil set when he was 19. “Fifty’s about the age when people start to look back at their life. It’s probably the same even for him…”
Cumbernald nods. Eileen scratches her calf. The trees rustle. I knew John Arthur, and they seem a little bit in awe of me.
“But it’s not as if…”
I pause, wondering. For the life of me, I can’t understand why Francis has chosen this particular day when so much else—fireworks displays, street parties, hilltop bonfires and marches up the Mall—will be going on. One of his famous impromptu visits, a gentle knock on the door of my college rooms, would have been so much more in keeping with the myth of John Arthur.
“It’s not as if I’ll be seeing him for long…”
I’m there on the itinerary his senior civil servants have sent me amid a list of fifteen other names. Six o-clock, the Gardens, 10 Downing Street, PM meets and greets… Minor dignitaries, unsung party workers. Despite everything else, despite what I’m planning to do, I can’t pretend that it didn’t hurt to be lumped in with all those nobodies.
“Well…” Cumbernald lights a cigarette, then offers one to Eileen and me with the little coals already glowing. In the thickening darkness, we look like three animated glow worms. “All of us will be with you, Brook. That moment when you and John Arthur shake hands…”
Eggs and Bacon, Eggs and Bacon…
Back from Penrhos Park, to Oxford. This time, both Christine and Barbara manage to be copiously sick in the back of the Daimler. Soggy-sleeved, not far off vomiting myself, I leave the Cumbernalds outside the college arch as they mop up their car and their children.
The days flash by. Golden Week nears. The stones and the fields glow with anticipation. The use of garden hosepipes is banned as rivers and reservoirs sink to levels that, as with floods, storms and snowfalls here in Britain, always seem to be the worst since records began. The fountains are turned off in Trafalgar Square, and the British papers froth and lather about all this ghastly sun, this dreadful good weather. At Oxford, the freshers start to gather. They are pale-faced, blinking with shirt-tails out and their collars itchy from name-tags that mothers and aunts have sewn for them. Hard to believe that in a year or two’s time these same people will be eating breakfast at George’s Cafe in lipstick-smeared evening clothes, were I to live to see them.
The older University hands, us fellows and dons, doctors and vicars, MAs in abstruse subjects, best-selling authors, sexual molesters, busybodies, surreptitious alcoholics, honourary secretaries, athletes and aesthetes, caw and flap at each other from our roosts in our black gowns. The sun still blazes. The dry trees hold resolutely to their leaves. The punts still move and slow, move and slow beneath Magdalene Bridge before getting stuck in the brown mud and dead reeds of the Cherwell’s thinning current.
A message comes through the Varsity post from Bracken. His handwriting is appalling, but it’s something about us both tying up science and history before he leaves. His mad idea that you can research something so well that no one else will ever look at it quite appeals to me. After all, that’s exactly what J. D. Beazley did for Greek vases when he wasn’t buggering A. E. Houseman. I also receive a J. Arthur Dixon postcard of York Minster from his sister Ursula, although the Censor’s approval stamp half-obscures the tiny writing.
I resume my occasional traipses to the Radcliffe. New X-rays reveal that the vast cancerous network that runs through my body, whilst not actually shrinking, has stopped growing. It’s still there, still almost certainly lethal. But, to all intents and purposes, the thing’s biding its time. Waiting, just as I am, whilst the days slip by into the maw of history.
“Couldn’t help noticing, sir,” Christlow says, preparatory to spitting on his cloth and wiping the small mirror above my bookshelves one morning, “that you’ve had an Invitation.” He actually says, Han Hinvitation on the traditional working class assumption that anything posh has an extra h in it.
“That’s right.” I turn from the A-Z Map of Central London I’ve been studying and glance through the doorway at the lock on my suitcase. My calendar reads Monday September 30th. Which leaves just twenty-four days. “I suppose you noticed the letters up there.”
“It was in the college magazine,” he corrects me, in case I should get the idea that he pokes around in my belongings. “Our President’s Michaelmas letter. Doctor Cumbernald says, quite rightly, that we’ll all be very proud of you on that day, sir. And he adds how much he treasures your close friendship with his family.”
“That’s nice to hear.”
“Matter of fact,” Christlow continues, still rubbing the glass as if trying to erase his reflection. “I’ll be off down in London myself for the period of the celebrations. In my own minor small capacity. So we may bump into each other…”
“I’ll certainly keep an eye out,” I say. But London’s a big place.
“Convenient, really, that you won’t be needing me anyway when I’m not here. Although cover’s all sorted out with Wisbeach.”
“Of course.”
He finally puts down his rag. We find ourselves gazing at each other. I’d never realised before how much Christlow looks like Mussolini: Modernism was probably always his destiny. He clears his throat. He’s probably about to ask me why I’m always hanging around now when he’s cleaning my rooms.
“Sad,” he says, “wasn’t it? I mean that fellow from that new science college. I always like to think we have so much going for ourselves here in this life. So it’s a double shame if you get my meaning.”
“What fellow?”
“The one that shot himself. I’m sorry sir. You mayn’t have heard. But it was in yesterday’s Evening News, and I’m sure I brought you up your usual copy…”