‘The first thing you’ll see beyond the blue of manac beans,’ she told her son, her palm outstretched, his hands both tucked and curled beneath her shawl, ‘is how our village seems to have a mind that’s all its own. The river there, it doesn’t run fast and straight, not like the drains and culverts of the city do. The river takes its time. It’s like a snoozer snake. That’s the slowest snake there is. It coils between the fields so slowly that you never see it move. Or else it moves, but only when our backs are turned, at night perhaps, on days when it is raining pips and pods and we are kept indoors. Except your father never stayed indoors. He used to love the rain and stand in it. To get the smell of leather out, he said. He’d wash the leather and the tannin out of him with rain, and let it run off down the gutters of the lane into the snoozer snake, then downriver till the smell and dye on him was swept right out to sea. That’s what he said, “Right out to sea,” though we were nowhere near the sea. I loved it when your father spoke like that. It made the sea seem ours. It smelt like the saddles that your father made.’
Em told Victor what fun they had — would have — in fields, at harvest time, with all the fattest rabbits, the lizards, and the snakes trapped in the last stands of the corn, how captured rabbits could be skinned and salted for the pot, how lizards could be raced or made to shed their tails, how harmless snakes could cause distress when dropped in people’s laps or hidden in a grandma’s drawer. She told him how the packers used to — for a laugh — put a snoozer in the top of apple barrels and send them both to market. ‘To this Soap Market here maybe,’ she said. They’d laugh themselves as wet as cress at what the market men would do when they dipped in their hands to pull out pippins and reinettes and found the fleshy, yellow fruit of snake.
She told Victor, too, some other time when he demanded ‘Village Talk’, how he had come about.
‘We thought you up,’ she said, ‘one Sunday afternoon.’
It was September and the mushrooms on the beech cobs were getting high and tasty. ‘Your Dad and me went out to fill a basket. And then — we’d only been married for two months — we had, you wouldn’t understand, a kiss and cuddle there and then. It had to be that time because I know that when we took the mushrooms back we found a birth-bug in amongst them. That’s a sign, for sure, that you’ll get fat with child. Your Dad hung a key on a string above my tummy. It swung clockwise, that’s how we knew you were a boy. Anticlockwise is for girls. We picked on Victor as your name straight away. You never were an it to us; you were always a he. You always had a name. Though your grandad on your father’s side — he thought he knew a thing or two. He said it had to be a girl, anticlockwise was for boys, we were muddled up. He got a pair of scissors and a knife. He hid them underneath two bits of cloth on two kitchen stools. He put the stools side by side right in the middle of the scullery. He called me in. He said sit down. Your dad was there. Your aunt was? … no, she’d left already for the maiding job in town. Your grandfather said, “Select a stool, the one that seems the best for you, the one that’s calling you by name. Go on, sit down.” I sat down on the scissor stool. “That settles it,” he said. “The baby’s going to be a girl. The knife’s a boy. The scissors are for girls.” They neither of them got to see you born. Both dead. His father first, then yours. When you were born I saw the key was wiser than the stool. I dreamt one night your grandad came back from the dead to see the baby girl. He got a shock. He saw your little dinkle there. I said, “What kind of clockwise girl is that, she’s got a knot between her legs?” I gave your thing a little push. “What’s that then, Pa?” “I wouldn’t know,” he said, and then, “I wouldn’t want it on my eyelid as a wart.” ’
She told these stories to her son. He took them in, eyes shut, laid out across her lap. He did not understand the half of what she said, a quarter of the words. What could it mean, the key was wiser than the stool? That knives are boys and scissors girls? And rain was pips and pods? And sea was saddle? A normal child of four or five would think it all a strange and — finally — a tiresome game, to bend words in a way that was confusing and not funny. Kids of that age would know the shorthand of the street, the beg and tell of play, the arrow accuracy of simple words. They’d know how smell and shape and distance made sense of sound, how words were rounded, focused tools which served the moment, did the job, and left no waste. But as we know, Victor was no normal child. For him the words his mother spoke were two-dimensional, a sheet of sound, a shallow wash of stories from his mother’s village and the past. He had no role to play except to keep his head and body still, and listen hard.
He did not know — despite his age — the trick of speaking sentences or how to make his mark with words. He had not learnt to shout, or tease, or burble rhythmic nonsenses like other children do. On those few times — at night or when his aunt was minding him — when he was spoken to by strangers or Princesses or by the family from whom they hired their room, he could not form replies. He could not speak. He was in that respect, and others, too, a baby still. He was comforted by breast. He did not have the skill to feed himself. His bladder and his bowels had open gates. Anything he chanced upon — an apple core, a pin, a cockroach case — he tested with his mouth. He was not happy on his feet. He never ran. He could not dress himself or tie the laces on his shoes. You would not guess he had a temper, or that he wanted anything beyond the milk, the honey, and the whispers that seemed to keep him calm.
In one respect, Victor, in those years before our city was hustled like so many others into war and weaponry, was more adult than his years. He had, at least, a muscular and exercised imagination; that is to say the tales his mother told confused him, yes, but still they entered him and filled his mind as music enters infants far too young to grasp its geometric principles, its hieroglyphs, its rhythmic cunning. So when Em retold Victor for the third? the thirteenth? time how he had come about — ‘we thought you up amongst the mushrooms’ — he formed a picture in his head concocted from the wooden tubs of mushrooms which he knew in the marketplace and the single mushrooms which dropped and rolled from time to time within Em’s reach at her station on the approaches to the Soap Garden. He saw himself a pink but ragged mushroom, odorous, peaty, one day old. The basket was his crib. It was a frozen fairy tale for him, an illustration from a children’s book. The tighter that he pressed his eyes together the clearer the image was; the larger and the pinker the mushroom; the rounder, the smoother, the waxier the forests and the fields which were the backdrops to his ‘thinking up’. The world of passersby, of market porters, trundling barrowloads of cauliflowers, fruit, which Victor saw when his mother did not talk and he was tempted to turn his head and lift his lids a little, was chaotic and without pattern when compared to that village world he structured from his mother’s words.
The irony was this, the richness of his life was richness second-hand. His mother’s childhood and her adolescence in the village landscape was made shiny and intense by distance and by time. It was Victor’s milk and honey now. He fed on it. It kept him quiet and still and satisfied. He was a country boy. The city was the dream. He opened half an eye to fall asleep. He woke to find the nightmares crowding in. He dozed, caressed by Em’s refurbished better times, and by higher skies and fresher winds and more magical conjunctions than any city could provide. Imagine what an inner world — bright and sanitized — a boy would make of all this country talk, curled up as warmly and as darkly as a sparrow in a wolf’s mouth. It would be nowadays, what? a theme park marketed as Rural Bliss? The film-set for a country musical? The sort of hayseed Kansas encountered on the road to Oz?