Coasting (2 page)

The navigator, now anxiously busy with his 4B pencil and parallel rules, will know a bit about the reputation of the natives of this place, which is not good. The Roman poet Virgil, one of the earliest foreign observers, wrote that “Britons are wholly sundered from all the world.” They’re famous for their insular arrogance and condescension. They love fine social distinctions and divisions and are snobbishly wedded to an antique system of caste and class. Yet the upper lips of this superior race are so notoriously stiff that they can barely bring themselves to speak, preferring to communicate in monosyllables interleaved with gruff silences. They are aggressively practical and philistine, with a loud contempt for anything that smells abstract or theoretical. They are a nation of moneygrubbers and bargain
hunters, treasuring pennies for treasuring’s sake. When the English reach for a superlative to praise someone for his general moral excellence, they say he has a “sterling character,” meaning that he has some of the same quality as the coins which they like to chink noisily in their pockets.

When it comes to sex, they are furtive and hypocritical—and their erotic tastes are known to be extremely peculiar. Many Englishmen will pay a woman money to take their trousers down and spank them. Others cultivate a neoclassical passion for small boys—preferably boys of a lower caste or another color. For the most part, though, the English, both men and women, are afflicted by such a morbid decay of the libido that it has always puzzled the rest of the world how the English manage to reproduce themselves at all.

They are casually rude—a vice which they claim as a virtue by labeling it forthrightness. They are also violent; feared in all the neighboring countries of Europe for the marauding hooligans who accompany their football teams and sometimes murder spectators who have come to cheer a rival side. In compensation, however, they are softhearted about animals, for which they have an arsenal of sentimental nicknames, like “pooches,” “bunnies,” “pussies” and “feathered friends.” Yet they enjoy dressing up in ceremonial outfits to go round the country on horseback setting packs of dogs on foxes. When the fox has been dismembered, it is the English custom to smear the faces of little girls with its blood. This sport is a favorite subject with the artists who design English Christmas cards. The English are addicted to cheese. But they detest garlic, a vegetable associated with “foreigners,” who are held in more or less universal contempt and are the main butts of the jokes which the English like telling to each other. These jokes are bartered in public places, and they increase in value as they grow older and more familiar. For the English are very famous—at least among themselves—for their sense of humor and pronounce it an essential component of a sterling character.

The pilot books, the folklore and the weather (“Cloud amounts are everywhere high at all seasons; depressions
may occur in long series at any time of the year”) don’t exactly make one’s heart leap at the prospect of England. But all that’s forgotten in the high excitement of making a landfall as the coastline across the water slowly thickens and takes shape. It is a wonderful conjuring trick. The land surfaces lazily out of the sea, first gray and indistinct, then flecked with hazy color, then decorated with a sudden scatter of sharpening details—a broad scoop of chalky cliff, a striped beacon like a stick of seaside candy, a continuous waterfall of slate roofs down the slope of a valley. There is something satisfyingly eerie about a landfall—any landfall. The growing coast ahead, no matter how exhaustively charted it is, or how old and familiar its history and internal topography, looks so imaginary from this sea distance. Watching it come slowly alive, inseparable from its broken reflection in the water, you feel that you’re making it up as you go along. It’s not
real
. On a green hill above the town you see a fine, bran-new medieval castle—turrets, towers, keeps, drawbridges, the lot. Like a novelist toying with an invented landscape on the page, you think,
That won’t wash
; and, obedient to the thought, the handsome castle rubs itself out and in its place there comes up a stolid clump of gas-storage tanks or the cooling towers of a power station.

Downstairs, the engine is talking to itself.
Pease-porridge hot, pease-porridge cold, Pease-porridge in the pot, nine days old
. The floor rolls a little in the swell and the land sinks under the sea again. When it reappears, it rises from the water changed. There are people out there now. A lone wind surfer, clinging to a sail painted in the brilliant acrylic colors of a tropical butterfly, skims and flits through the surviving trelliswork of a burned-out pier and the sunless beach is dotted about with matchstick men. A little espionage with the binoculars and you can catch their swollen images, swimming and jerking in the lenses. Anglers, spaced at wide intervals along the pebbly shore, squat under their golf umbrellas with thermos flasks. A man is throwing a stick for a giant poodle—the only creature in sight which looks properly dressed for the weather. Families huddle in small self-absorbed groups in the shelter of seaweedy groins.
Some people are laid out, entirely alone, on towels, as in the aftermath of an accident. On the wet promenade, a psychedelic ice cream van betrays the improbable fact that this is summer.

As a first glimpse of the natives of the place, the scene will do nicely. “The English take their pleasures sadly after the custom of their country,” said Maximilien de Béthune in 1630, a remark for which the
Admiralty Pilot
might usefully find room, just as it might point out that English bell buoys manage to strike a much lower, clangier and more dismal note than their tinkling French counterparts on the south side of the Channel.

With the soundings getting shallower every minute, this is too close for comfort. Bearing in mind the shoals that lie inshore, you turn the wheel and haul the rudder round, leaving England to sidle slowly past on the beam, a mile and a half, a world, away.

I took to coasting early on in life. To begin with, the word was used to stain my character.

“Raban has coasted through yet another term, and I can hold out little hope for his prospects in the forthcoming Examinations.”

My father was reading my housemaster’s report aloud over the after-breakfast litter in the parsonage dining room. The Easter sunlight was blue with pipe smoke and thick with dust.

“
Coasted?
Through yet
another
term?”

For days I had been dreading the arrival of the brown envelope with the Worcester postmark. Now it had come, there was something soothing in its dreary litany of undistinguished sins. The boy described in it was lazy. He showed no house spirit, no team spirit, no application and precious little intelligence. On the page headed G
EOGRAPHY
, there was just one word—“Slack,” followed by an irritable squiggle of a signature. My father read on, in the same voice that he used to say weekday Evensongs in a church empty except for three devout old ladies. The recitation was making me feel sleepy.

The cassock that my father wore had belonged to my grandfather before him, and before that it had been my Great-uncle Cyril’s. Generations of clerical wear had given its black threads a lizardy sheen. It looked as old as the Church of England.

At thirteen I was easily fooled by clothes, and this aged cassock made my father himself seem like a very old man to me, a tall and shaggy Abraham whose presence in a room was enough to make any child shiver a little in awe at a famous patriarch. He was thirty-six. Sitting now in another dusty room, its air thickened with pipe smoke of the same brand, I find myself staring back, puzzledly, at a man much younger than myself—a man with a pained boy’s face, his own hurt showing, as if it were he and not his son who was being dressed down by the schoolmasters. His hair is black and thick, his skin unlined. His preposterously old clothes only serve to underline his youth as he returns my gaze—astonished to find himself the father to this bulky, balding fellow, in his forties.

It was my father’s uniforms that I saw—never my father in person. When he came home from The War (there was only one war then), he was in battledress, and at three I embarked on a dangerous romantic affair with his rough army khaki. I was a secret transvestite. Finding his tunic, impregnated with manly sweat and St. Bruno Flake, sprawled on a chair back, I pulled it round my own shoulders and felt the tickle of its doormat bristles against my bare arms and neck. It weighed me down; its giant waist and mighty sleeves trailed behind me on the floor. A major’s embroidered crown was sewn onto each epaulette, and the colored strip of campaign ribbons on its left breast was decorated with a miniature bronze oak leaf to show that my father had been mentioned in dispatches.

I was found, and shamed, by indulgent grown-up laughter. Later, though, when the night-light guttered in the draft on the table beside my cot, I lay dreaming furiously of the soldierly imprint of the coarse cloth on my skin. I fell asleep putting Germans to the sword, in a rainbow of ribbons and oak leaves.

It was five years later that I learned to chant
amo, amas,
amat
and parse
pater
and
patria
, father and fatherland. It was one of the few things in Latin that I ever understood, the intimate connection between those two words. For England really was my father’s land, not mine. It was the country where the uniformed warrior-priest, returned hero and man of God, was at home. Blue-chinned, six-foot-two, robed in antique black and puffing smoke like a storybook dragon, my father was a true Englishman—and I knew that I was always going to be far too puny, too weak-spirited, ever to wear his clothes except in make-believe.

“Wouldn’t you say, old boy …” he said, tamping his pipe with his forefinger, “that it was about time that you put a pretty abrupt end to this … coasting?”

Beyond the leaded windowpanes, the uncut lawn was spattered with early dandelions like so many teaspoonfuls of scrambled egg.

“Yes.”

“Yes
what
?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

The truculence on my part was a bold affectation. Every time I looked my father in the eye, I felt the depth of my own failure. He represented all the things that I knew that I was doomed to flunk. In an austere time, when people still carried ration books and everyone’s clothes were darned and patched, my father was Austerity itself. Once a week he bathed in two and a quarter inches of lukewarm water. Carving a Sunday joint, he peeled off the meat in slivers as fine as microscopic slides; you could see shafts of gray daylight through the lean. With razor blades, he performed miracles of honing, wiping, drying, and gave them something close to everlasting life. There was nothing mean in his approach to domestic economy—he was just keeping perfectly in step with the times. His thrift and self-denial, his willingness to tighten his belt when the call came made him a pedigreed specimen of Winston Churchill’s bulldog breed.

What I saw across the breakfast table—and saw with the pitiless egotism of the thwarted child—was not my father, it was England. Towering over the stoved-in shells of the
pullets’ eggs in their floral ceramic cups, there sat the Conservative Party in person, the Army in person, the Church in person, the Public School system in person, the Dunkirk Spirit in person, Manliness, Discipline, Duty, Self-sacrifice and all the rest. His threadbare cassock clothed the whole galaxy of terrible abstractions.

Seeing him now through different eyes, I find myself watching a sorrowful lean and angular young man, hopelessly lost for words. He coughs. He reaches for a brass ashtray made from the base of an old artillery shell and knocks out his dottle in it. He makes a busy show of burying my school report under a bill from the gas company and an overdraft notice from Lloyds Bank. He searches the face of his child for a clue as to how to go on, and finds there only a vacant, resentful, supercilious gaze—a mask more impenetrable than the mask he presents to his son.

The child is blind to all this. He’s putting the finishing touches to his Bored Aristocrat face. His eyeballs are rolled so high that he can’t see anything much except his own eyelashes. He is levitating. Inch by inch he rises Above This World, leaving his father down at the breakfast table with the smashed eggs. He is afloat over England. Airborne.

The young man pretends to study the columns of advertisements on the front page of
The Times
. Eventually he says: “D’you think—old boy—that there’s any way we can do something about this business of—Geography?”

The astral child replies (in a fine and withering phrase that he’s filched from the lips of his housemaster, Major MacTurk): “I don’t know and I couldn’t care less.”

This was very barefaced stuff. I cared. Had I seen any way of worming my way into my father’s exacting version of England, I’d have leaped at it. Give me only the legs for the job and I’d score the winning try in the house match and bring home the family bacon. I’d furnish the parsonage with prizes—the Latin prize, the Greek prize, the Colonel’s Efficiency Shield and the leather-bound set of Macaulay awarded annually for Outstanding Contribution To The Life Of The School.

Every morning in chapel I stood singing manly hymns:

“I bind unto myself today the strong name of the Trin-i-tee—”

Overhead were the richly scrolled and varnished pine boards emblazoned with the names of boys from the school who had attained the ultimate in English citizenship. D
ULCE ET
D
ECORUM
E
ST PRO
P
ATRIA
M
ORI
. There were hundreds of them, every name picked out in scarlet edged with gold, with their houses and the dates at which they’d attended the school. In the 1914–18 war, the Old Boys had done the school proud, dying in whole dormitoryfuls; in 1939–45 there were enough to man a platoon-and-a-bit or put on a Shakespeare play.

For a would-be Englishman, there was clearly some sort of opening here. Some of these certificated heroes had probably been as dim as I was, yet they had still managed to go over the top, buy it, or meet a bullet with their name on it—expressions which, in 1955, didn’t yet sound dated in the least. But did L
AYCOCK
, R. W. P. (S
CHOOL
H
OUSE
1938–1943) have asthma, hay fever and flat feet too? I bet he didn’t. The chances were that the Army wouldn’t want my services at all—and if it did, I’d probably land up as a lance-corporal in the Pioneer Corps, digging latrines in Wales.