The Summer Isles (20 page)

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.