Free Fall (2 page)

“What was my dad, Ma?”

Let him never know. I am acquainted with the warm throb myself and think little enough of physical paternity compared with the slow growth that comes after. We do not own children. My father was not a man. He was a speck shaped like a tadpole invisible to the naked eye. He had no head and no heart. He was as specialized and soulless as a guided missile.

Ma was never a professional any more than I am. Like mother, like son. We are amateurs at heart. Ma had not the business ability nor the desire to make a career and a success. Neither was she immoral for that implies some sort of standard from which she could decline. Was Ma above morals or below them or outside them? Today she would be classed as subnormal, and given the protection she did not want. In those days, if she had not clad herself in such impervious indifference she would have been called simple. She staked small but vital sums on horses in the “Sun”, she drank and went to the pictures. For work, she took whatever was available. She charred for chars, she—we—picked hops, she washed and swept and imperfectly polished in such public buildings as were within easy reach of our alley. She did not have sexual connection for that implies an aseptic intercourse, a loveless, joyless refinement of pleasure with the prospect of conception inhibited by the rubber cup from the bathroom. She did not make love, for I take that to be a passionate attempt to confirm that the wall which parted them is down. She did none of these things. If she had, she would have told me in her slurred, rambling monologues, with their
vast pauses, their acceptance that we are inescapably here. No. She was a creature. She shared pleasure round like a wet-nurse’s teat, absorbed, gustily laughing and sighing. Her casual intercourse must have been to her what his works are to a real artist—themselves and nothing more. They had no implication. They were meetings in back streets or fields, on boxes, or gateposts and buttresses. They were like most human sex in history, a natural thing without benefit of psychology, romance or religion.

Ma was enormous. She must have been a buxom girl in the bud but appetite and a baby blew her up into an elephantine woman. I deduce that she was attractive once, for her eyes, sunk into a face bloated like a brown bun, were still large and mild. There was a gloss on them that must have lain all over her when she was young. Some women cannot say no; but my ma was more than those simple creatures, else how can she so fill the backward tunnel? These last few months I have been trying to catch her in two handfuls of clay—not, I mean, her appearance; but more accurately, my sense of her hugeness and reality, her matter-of-fact blocking of the view. Beyond her there is nothing, nothing. She is the warm darkness between me and the cold light. She is the end of the tunnel, she.

And now something happens in my head. Let me catch the picture before the perception vanishes. Ma spreads as I remember her, she blots out the room and the house, her wide belly expands, she is seated in her certainty and indifference more firmly than in a throne. She is the unquestionable, the not good, not bad, not kind, not bitter. She looms down the passage I have made in time.

She terrifies but she does not frighten.

She neglects but she does not warp or exploit.

She is violent without malice or cruelty.

She is adult without patronage or condescension.

She is warm without possessiveness.

But, above all, she is there.

So of course I can remember her only in clay, the common earth, the ground, I cannot stick the slick commercial colours on stretched canvas for her or outline her in words that are ten thousand years younger than her darkness and warmth. How can you describe an age, a world, a dimension? As far as communication goes there are only the things that surrounded her to be pieced together and displayed with the gap that was Ma existing mutely in the middle. I fish up memory of a piece of material which is grey with a tinge of yellow. The one corner is frayed—or as I now think, rotted—into a fringe, a damp fringe. The rest is anchored up there somewhere about my ma and I swing along, fingers clutched up and in, stumbling sometimes, sometimes ungently removed without a word said, by a huge hand falling from above. I seem to remember searching for that corner of her apron and the pleasure of finding it again.

We must have been living in Rotten Row then for certain directions were already as settled as the points of the compass. Our bog was across worn bricks and a runnel, through a wooden door to a long wooden seat. There was an upthereness over our room, though surely not a lodger? Perhaps we were ever so slightly more prosperous then, or perhaps gin was cheaper, like cigarettes. We had a chest of drawers for a dresser and the grate was full of little iron cupboards and doors and things that pulled out. Ma never used these but only the little fire in the middle with the hot metal disc that closed the top. We had a rug,
too, a chair, a small deal table and a bed. My end of the bed was near the door and when Ma got in the other end, I slid down. All but one of the houses in our row were the same, and the brick alley with a central gutter ran along in front of them. There were children of all sizes in that world, boys who stepped on me or gave me sweets, girls who picked me up when I had crawled too far and took me back. We must have been very dirty. I have a good and trained colour sense and my memory of those human faces is not so much in passages of pink and white as of grey and brown. Ma’s face, her neck, her arms—all of Ma that showed was brown and grey. The apron which I visualize so clearly I now see to have been filthily dirty. Myself, I cannot see. There was no mirror within my reach and if Ma ever had one it had vanished by the time I was a conscious boy. What was there in a mirror for Ma to linger over? I remember blown washing on wire lines, soap suds, I remember the erratic patterns that must have been dirt on the wall, but like Ma I am a neutral point of observation, a gap in the middle. I crawled and tumbled in the narrow world of Rotten Row, empty as a soap bubble but with a rainbow of colour and excitement round me. We children were underfed and scantily clothed. I first went to school with my feet bare. We were noisy, screaming, tearful, animal. And yet I remember that time as with the flash and glitter, the warmth of a Christmas party. I have never disliked dirt. To me, the porcelain and chromium, the lotions, the deodorants, the whole complex of cleanness, which is to say, all soap, all hygiene, is inhuman and incomprehensible. Before this free gift of a universe, man is a constant. There is a sense in which when we emerged from our small slum and
were washed, the happiness and security of life was washed away also.

I have two sorts of picture in my mind of our slum. The earlier are the interiors because I can remember a time when for me there was no other world at all. The brick path and gutter down the middle ran between the row of houses and the row of yards with each a bog. At one end and to our left was a wooden gate; at the other, a passage out to the unvisited street. At that end, the “Sun” was an old and complicated building and the back door was inside the alley. Here was the focus of adult life; and here the end house in the row extended across the passage and joined the pub overhead so it was in a position of some eminence and advantage. When I was old enough to notice such things I looked up, together with the rest of our alley, to the good lady who lived there. She had two rooms upstairs, she was mortared to the pub, she did for nice people and she had curtains. If I told you more of our geography and put us in the general scheme of things I should be false to my memories; for I first remember the alley as a world, bounded by the wooden gate at one end and the rectangular but forbidden exit to the main road at the
other
. Rain and sunshine descended on us between the shirts flapping or still. There were poles with cleats on and a variety of simple mechanisms for hoisting away the washing where it would catch the wind. There were cats and what seems to me like crowds of people. I remember Mrs. Donavan next door who was withered and Ma who was not. I remember the loudness of their voices, used straining from the throat with heads thrust forward when the ladies quarrelled. I remember the fag-end of one quarrel, both ladies moving slowly away from each other sideways,
neither in this case victorious, each reduced to single syllables full of vague menace, indignation and resentment.

“Well then!”

“Yes!”

“Yes!”

“Ah——!”

This remains with me because of the puzzle that Ma had not won outright. She did, usually. Withered Mrs. Donavan with her three daughters and many troubles was not Ma’s weight in any sense. There was one occasion of apocalyptic grandeur when Ma not only won but triumphed. Her voice seemed to bounce off the sky in brazen thunder. The scene is worth reconstructing.

Opposite each house across the brick alley with the gutter down the middle was a square of brick walls with an entry. The walls were about three feet high. In each square on the left-hand side was a standpipe and beyond it, at the back of the square, was a sentry-box closed by a wooden door which had a sort of wooden grating. Open the door by lifting the wooden latch and you faced a wooden box running the whole width between the walls and pierced by a round, worn orifice. There would be a scrap of newspaper lying on the box, or a whole sheet crumpled on the damp floor. Some dark, subterranean stream flowed slowly along below the row of boxes. If you closed the door and dropped the latch by means of a piece of string which dangled inside, you could enjoy your private, even in Rotten Row. If someone from your house entered the brick square—for you saw them through your grating—and lifted a hand to the latch, you did not move, but cried out, inarticulately avoiding names
or set words so that the hand dropped again. For we had our standards. We had progressed from Eden—that is, provided the visitor came from your own house. If, on the other hand, they had loitered in the alley and made a mistake you might be as articulate as you pleased, be wildly Rabelaisian, suggest new combinations of our complex living patterns to include the visitor until the doorways were screaming with laughter and all the brats by the gutter screamed, too, and danced.

But there were exceptions. In the twenties progress had caught up with us and added a modern superstition to the rest so that we firmly believed a legend about lavatories. Rotten Row sometimes suffered from more than a cold in the head.

It must have been a day in April. What other month could give me such blue and white, such sun and wind? The clothing on the lines was horizontal and shuddering, the sharp, carved clouds hurried, the sun spattered from the soap suds in the gutter, the worn bricks were bright with a dashing of rain. It was the sort of wind that gives grown-ups headaches and children frantic exultation. It was a day of shouting and wrestling, a day aflame and unbearable without drama and adventure. Something must happen.

I was playing with a matchbox in the gutter. I was so small that to squat was natural but the wind even in the alley would sometimes give me a sidelong push and I was as much in the soapy water as out. A grating was blocked so that the water spread across the bricks and made a convenient ocean. Yet my great, my apocalyptic memory is not of stretched-out time, but an instant. Mrs. Donavan’s Maggie who smelt so sweet and showed round, silk knees
was recoiled from the entrance to our brick square. She had retreated so fast and so far that one high heel was in my ocean. She was caught in act to turn away, her arms were raised to ward off. I cannot remember her face—for it is mesmerized in the other direction. Poor Mrs. Donavan, the dear withered creature, peeps out of her own bog with the air of someone unfairly caught, someone who could explain everything, given time—but knows, in that tremendous instant, that time is not to be given her. And from our bog, our own, private bog, with its warm, personal seat, comes my ma.

She has burst out for the door has banged against the wall and the latch hangs broken. My ma faces Maggie, one foot in front of the other for she has come out of the narrow box sideways. Her knees are bent, she is crouched in a position of dreadful menace. Her skirts are huddled up round her waist and she holds her vast grey bloomers in two purple hands just above her knees. I see her voice, a jagged shape of scarlet and bronze, shatter into the air till it hangs there under the sky, a deed of conquest and terror.

“You bloody whore! Keep your clap for your own bastards!”

I have no memory of majesty to match that one from Rotten Row. Even when the Twins Fred and Joe, who dealt so deviously in scrap at the other end of the alley near the wooden gate, were fetched away by two giraffe-like policemen the drama dwindled down into defeat. We watched one of the coppers walking, rolling up the
alley
and we muttered, I not knowing why. We watched Fred and Joe dash out of their house and bundle themselves through the wooden gate; but of course the second copper
was standing on the other side. They ran right into him‚ small men, easily grabbed in either hand. They were brought down the alley handcuffed between two dark blue pillars surmounted by silver spikes, the van was waiting for them. We shouted and muttered and made the dull tearing sound that was Rotten Row’s equivalent of booing. Fred and Joe were pale but perky. The coppers came, took, went, unstoppable as birth and death, the three cases in which Rotten Row accepted unconditional defeat. Whether the extra mouth was coming, or the policeman’s van, or the long hearse that would draw up at the end of the passage, made no difference. A hand of some sort was thrust through the Row to take what it would and no one could stop it.

We were a world inside a world and I was a man before I achieved the intellectual revolution of thinking of us as a slum. Though we were only forty yards long and the fields lapped against us we were a slum. Most people think of slums as miles of muck in the East End of London or the jerry-built lean-to’s of the Black Country. But we lived right in the heart of the Garden of England and the hop gardens glowed round us. Though on the one side were brick villas, schools, warehouses, shops, churches, on the other were the spiced valleys through which I followed my ma and reached for the sticky buds. Yet that takes me out of our home and I want to stay in it for a while. I will put back the picture postcards of dancing, flame-lit men, and creep back under the lid. True there were bonfires, rivers of beer, singing, gipsies and a pub set secretly among trees, wearing its thatch like a straw hat pulled down over the eyes; but our slum was the point of return. We had a pub, too. We were a huddle. Now I am out in
the cold world away from my crying shame in the face of heaven I am surprised to find what number of people will go to any length just to get themselves into a huddle. Perhaps then I was not deceived and we had something. We were a human proposition, a way of life, an entity.