Growing Up In a War (15 page)

A couple of weeks later, at school, when we were all standing during morning assembly, Mr Ogle said he was going to tell us something of unusual interest that he had just been reading, about how the inner ear worked. I listened in a normal frame of mind, and with interest, until he started talking about cones, and then rods floating in fluids, and my thoughts changed to something like ‘Ugh, how horrible, how disgusting!’ and then everything went blurred, and
Crash!
, I fainted. I had been standing behind my chair, and a corner of it caught my cheekbone, or the bone above my eye, as I went down. Mr Hickford, who had been standing to one side, bustled over, swept me up in his arms and carried me out of the classroom, then down the stairs to the open doorway,
where
there was fresh air. I was then grossly sick. He stayed with me. He asked if I had had any breakfast, and when I said I had, he said I must have fainted because of the heat. I knew with certainty that I had fainted because of what the headmaster had been saying about the rods and cones in the inner ear, but for some reason I was not able to say this, so I reacted as if I accepted his explanation. It was the same when I got home at the end of the day. I knew why I had fainted, but was not able to tell anyone. By this time the biggest black eye of my life had puffed up like a purple doughnut which had my eyeball as its hole, so I said I had got this in a fight. It did not occur to anyone to disbelieve me. As the days went by, and the doughnut modulated through all the colours of the rainbow, becoming an object of admiration and wonderment to everyone, I even started to boast about it, as if getting it was an achievement I was cocky about.

Another couple of weeks after that, there was a mass inoculation at school against diphtheria. We queued up at the front of the classroom to get our injections, and then went back to our seats. After I got mine I began to feel peculiar, alarmingly detached from everything. It got so bad that I went up to the front of the class to tell Mr Hickford. While I was talking to him I began to shake all over. He led me to the side of the room, where some wooden benches were set against the wall, and got me to lie down full length on one of them. My whole body and all my limbs were now trembling uncontrollably. It was a terrifying experience. After a while the class carried on with its work, with me lying there to one side shaking violently. No one took any notice of me, and indeed I did not want them to. Eventually I calmed down, and began to feel normal again.

These three incidents, coming close together, were the only ones that were so extreme, but they were a milestone in my life. They brought something into it that has never left, and that I have had to live with ever since. I have phobic reactions to
descriptions
of the internal operations of our bodies, and to injections, and to medical procedures generally. I have found other people uncomprehending about this, and unsympathetic rather than sympathetic. It is not the case, unfortunately, that by exercising self-control I can master these reactions. Their chain of cause and effect does not pass through my conscious mind, and they have happened before I know they have happened. As far as control is concerned, it is like being in the driving seat of a car whose steering wheel comes off – one is simply carried along, unable to make any connection with the causes of what is happening. Most people seem to find this impossible to understand and therefore to believe. They think I ought to take a grip on myself, and they say things like: ‘But an injection is a mere pinprick, it doesn’t hurt’ – as if pain, which is something they understand, were the point. (‘Well if it isn’t the pain, what is it?’) To this day, if someone starts to describe an operation, I feel faint, and this is not something I can prevent from happening. I change the subject, rudely if necessary, or just tell the person to stop, or else I leave the room. If I did not do one or other of these things I would pass out. Before a visit to the dentist, and before any kind of medical test, I take a tranquilliser – the only occasions when I do. To people with this sort of affliction it comes as a godsend that modern pharmacology has given us the means of defence. Phobic reactions have one thing in common with severe seasickness, in that although they are hideous to experience, to the point where you might start to think that even death would be preferable, a couple of hours later you can feel normal again. But while they are going on there is no question of your thinking about anything else.

It is obvious to me when I look back that this sudden onset of serious disturbance was connected with my mother’s crashing into my life. At the time, though, no such connection occurred to me. Just as I had always regarded my nightmares as aberrations
unconnected
with waking life, so I looked on these new terrors as if they were nightmares that happened during the day, bolts out of the blue, not tied to anything. At about the same time, I started doing some peculiar things. I counted the cracks in the pavement as I walked along: some days I would have to step always on a crack, other days never on a crack. I had to count everything twice; and when I closed a door I had to open it again and close it a second time. When I was beckoned up to the front of the class I believed that my body was being turned round in space as I went, and would therefore need to be turned back again on my way back, so on the return journey I did a reverse spin like a ballroom dancer. Ronnie Gentle noticed this and remarked on it, but I pretended to be surprised, and said I didn’t know I was doing it.

Although I did not believe in God, and had never supposed that I did, I started to say prayers in bed at night. There were three or four of these. I made them up myself, and they were interminably long. It was essential that I say the exactly identical words every night, twice. They expressed all my wishes and fears. I remember wanting to pray that I would live for ever, but realising that this was not going to happen, prayer or no prayer, and wondering what the maximum time would be that I could hope for – obviously it would be longer than any individual had so far lived – and settling in the end for two hundred. So every night I prayed, twice, to live to be two hundred. The fact that I would still have to die all the same gave me a feeling of insecurity in the dimension of time, as if I were balanced on a narrow strip of it, and was inevitably going to fall off sooner or later, no matter what happened. There had been no me at all before I was born, and there was going to be no me after I died, so I existed only on this strip in between; and although two hundred years seemed an endlessly long time, I knew it would in fact come to an end, and then I would be dead for ever and ever and ever. Given that I was
in
time right now, I wanted to stay there. But I knew this was impossible.

This started me thinking about time. How had I got into it? Before today there was yesterday, of course, and there had been a day before yesterday, and a day before that, and so on, back to the day I was born. But there was also a day before the day I was born. And a day before that. Before every day there was a day before. And that meant that there could never have been a beginning – which seemed impossible. Going back for
ever
was just somehow meaningless, it disappeared into nothingness. It was impossible to see how its actually happening could be a fact. Anyway, if there had needed to be an infinite time before getting to now, we would never have reached now. So it must have started at some point. On the other hand, if there was a beginning, what had happened before that? If
anything
had happened before that, it wasn’t a beginning. I was stumped. The more I thought about it, the more stumped I became. I didn’t see how there could have been a beginning, and I didn’t see how there could not have been a beginning. One or the other had to be true, and both were impossible. I became obsessed with the problem.

At some point in all this it occurred to me that the same must be as true going forward as backward. There would be a day after tomorrow, and a day after that; and after every day there would be another day. And either time would just stop or else it would go on for ever and ever. It was impossible to imagine it stopping. How could it stop? And what would happen after that? If anything happened after that, time had not stopped, and was still going on. But how could it go on for ever and ever and
ever
, without
ever
stopping? Such a thing could not actually
be
, surely? Not stopping was as unthinkable as stopping.

The place where I spent most time turning these thoughts over was in bed at night. However, it was in the park behind the swimming baths that I made the discovery that the same thing was true
of
space as of time. I was lying on my back in the grass gazing up deep into a fathomless sky and wondering what was up there. What would happen, I thought, if I just went up like a firework rocket and kept on going? Could I keep going for ever and ever? Or would I eventually have to stop somewhere? There stole over me the creepy realisation that I had stumbled across another version of the same problem as with time. It was impossible to imagine going on for ever and ever and
ever
. The endlessness of it meant it could never happen in actuality. But if I came up against something that brought me to a halt, it would have to be something in space, and then what would be on the other side of it? There couldn’t be
nothing
, not if it was in space; there would have to be more space. But if there was more space, then whatever it was wasn’t at the end of space. I was baffled again, and it was the same bafflement.

In the opening pages of my book
Confessions of a Philosopher
I have gone at length into these childhood musings, and their connection with questions that came up later in my life, so I will not repeat it here. In any case, to do so would unbalance the present book, in which they are no more central than other aspects of my life. I know from experience that most people are not interested in them. Those who are can turn to the other book. The perplexities I am talking of – which admittedly I pondered for part of every day – did not dominate my life: all the other things I have been writing about were going on at the same time. The child who every day puzzled over whether or not time had a beginning also loved singing popular songs at the piano, and spending hours playing games like conkers and release.

Another of my favourite places for spending time in metaphysical thinkings was the lavatory. No one had ever taught me to pay my longer visits regularly, or indeed every day, nor did it occur to me to do so. I went when I felt like it. This was usually every two or three days. Without realising it, and without noticing
that
I went less frequently than other people, I may well have lived in a permanent state of slight constipation. This had the consequence that my sessions in the lavatory lasted between twenty minutes and half an hour. But they were never a physical problem for me. Something always happened immediately, and then I knew from the way I felt that I needed to wait for a second instalment. People often grumbled at me for occupying the lavatory for so long, but I thought there was nothing I could do about this, any more than I could sleep faster. That was how long it took. And if they could do it quicker, good luck to them. In any case, I quite enjoyed it: I would sit there undisturbed, in peace and tranquillity, lost in all sorts of thoughts and daydreams. On one such occasion, when I had been there even longer than usual, and two other members of the family had been waiting to go with increasing exasperation, there was an outburst of protest when I got back indoors. ‘What on earth do you
do
in there all this time?’ they chorused; to which I replied, with simple truth: ‘Think.’ They considered this hilarious, and there were great shouts of laughter. It was taken up into the family’s private language, and ‘thinking’ or ‘having a think’ became accepted terms for going to the lavatory.

Because my puzzlement about time so occupied my mind, I found myself talking about it to other people – to Kath and Auntie, to three or four of the boys at school, and on one occasion to Mr Hickford. I suppose I expected some sort of
Gosh, isn’t that interesting
response, followed by animated talk, but that is not what happened. Some said they could not see what I was talking about – which foxed me, because it seemed to me as clear as daylight. Kath said she could see what I meant, but could not think of anything to say. Mr Hickford said I ought not to trouble myself with thoughts of that kind because they might upset me: better not to think about it, he said. He may already have been worried about me because of my fainting and getting the shakes. None
of
them showed any inclination to think about the issue: having disposed of it with me they then, obviously, forgot about it. This puzzled me profoundly. How could they not be interested, I thought, if they had no solution to the problem? Why did they not engage in excited discussion with me? I just could not understand it. But there it was. They didn’t. After a while I came to the conclusion that there was no point in going on trying, so I carried on thinking about these things by myself.

Mr Hickford’s idea that I might find it upsetting proved to be true. That reaction started from a football match that was due to take place the next day. One side or the other was bound to win, I thought, or else there would be a draw. And there was bound to be a particular score, even if it was nil–nil. Whatever the result, that result, and that one result only, was what was going to happen. I had no way of knowing what it was until the following day, but whatever it was, for the rest of time it would be true that that was what it was. And it was true now, already. In fact it had always been true, from the beginning of time, that that was what it was going to be; only I didn’t know yet, that’s all. With the force of a sledgehammer it hit me that this applied to everything. Just as, in the past, there had been one set of events and no others, so in the future there would be one set of events and no others; and it was true already that they were going to be whatever it was they were going to be. But if this was so, I thought, I could not have any freedom. I was trapped in my life, and nothing I could do would change anything. A feeling of nausea swept over me, followed by feelings of panic. It was claustrophobia. I was terrified. I wanted to run away. But of course there was nowhere to run to. I could not run out of my life. Nothing I could do would make any difference.