AT the boarding-school I went to when I was older I felt unhappy, although to begin with I didn’t know this. The place was ugly outside and inside. The rooms were noisy and cold and crowded and I was alone in them. Of course, I always had been alone, but this was different. I was alone now in a bad way, alone in a crowded ugliness without respite. There was always winter framed in the frozen windows. The winter light marched along barren hilltops. The metal trees could never have sprouted leaves.
I began remembering things that were far away and forgotten: the way the sun shone in another country. One day when I combed my hair in front of a mirror, my mother looked out at me with her face of an exiled princess. That was the day I knew I was unhappy.
ONA LARGE bare round table in vacuum a double-page photographic montage is outspread: the same sort of layout as in an illustrated weekly but scaled up to three or four times the size. Detail of plain white clock-face marking seven-thirty. Jigsaw of school buildings angled in light and shade to sharp abstract design. Very chaotic detail of cloakroom with hockey boots scattered in pure disorder: rows of basins patterned with dirty hand marks, odd ends of grimy soap-cakes; a tap left running, forcing a costive passage through half-choked plug-hole; sodden stained towel twisted and pulled to the extreme end of its roller.
Views of classrooms, high-windowed, impersonaclass="underline" straight plain functional furniture; everything unnecessarily bleak, comfortless, un-aesthetic: battered textbooks, atlases, volumes of standard works — some upside down — overflowing from shelves, upon which such things as broken chalks, paint-boxes, indian clubs, dumb-bells, skipping ropes, are stacked too in hopelessly overcrowded confusion. Very close detail of grey mottled inkwell with viscous slime of congealed ink dregs coating the bottom. Beside it, on a shallowly grooved wooden desktop, two pens, one with glossy new relief nib and tapered blue holder which terminates in a small heart made of lapis lazuli; the other with wooden holder, splintered and much chewed, nib crossed and encrusted with dried ink.
A funereal black overmantel supporting two bronze rearing horses stiffly tugged at by muscular half-nudes.
Long dining-tables, spotted white cloths; bone, plated, wooden rings clenching unfresh table napkins; huge hacked joint of mutton with gravy congealing; dish of stone-white potatoes; round glass dish cross-glittered with highlights showing glazed fruit-halves like visceral segments.
Detail of a tall highly polished silver cup on its black stand, and of other shapes and sizes of trophies in various positions. Crossed and tangled in a spillikin pile, skates, hockey sticks, tennis rackets (with and without presses), cricket bats. A football-sized ball is shown just about to drop through a circular piece of netting projecting from a goal-post against a sky across which birds are flying. An expanse of grass, very short, flat and arid, girls in tunics and white blouses caught by their shadows in arrested momentum. Girls’ arms, legs, torsos, in gymnastic poses with ropes, rings, clubs, parallel bars. Girls grouped formally on a stage. Girls’ hands warming on the coils of radiators.
An isolated radiator, too narrow for its height and by suggestion inadequate, under a curtained window at night; the parsimonious curtains leave a four-inch gap through which a small moon quizzes coldly. Other curtains in dormitories hanging like corrugated fences white in strong moonlight or clumsily bunched behind iron bedrails. Cupboards crowded with identical garments, in drawers, on shelves, on hooks and hangers. Repetitive framed photos of parents on shared dressing-tables. Close-ups of some of these. They are all photographs of the same two people taken in different poses; a stereotyped rather sweet insipid woman’s face, slightly faded, with much fluffy hair; a typical pukka could-be-military Britisher vacuously and complacently staring. Beds, or maybe it’s one single bed with white honeycomb spread, reflected in mirrors ad infinitum.
A rough-grained worker’s hand with black broken thumbnail grasping a rope; complementing it, under a glum sky, a bell swung at a steep angle, clapper outlined on sky. A small brass handbell on top of a pile of books, horn-rimmed spectacles and a fountain-pen alongside. The clock-face again. The hands are now rigidly rectangled at nine o’clock. A solitary electric bulb, very isolated and frangible, dangling from white ceiling under a cheap white saucer shade at the end of a dark cord on which two flies have settled.
B looks carefully and seriously at these pictures for quite a long time, leaning her elbows on the round table. She seems to be trying to make up her mind whether she likes what she sees. In the end she apparently makes a negative decision because she turns away from the pages and her eyes slowly defocus.
The uncompromising black-and-white of the dream reproduction now blurs and comes to a minimal pictorial distinctness. The whole quality of apperception is emotional rather than visual from now on. Everything appears slightly out of focus, as if seen through half-closed eyes: not exactly distorted, but sufficiently out of focus to produce a feeling of great remoteness and unreality.
First a series of calm sensuous impressions; all of a sort to link up with the ideas of warmth, sunshine, security, love; in the background a tranquil rocking, a lullaby, without any threat of discontinuance. The right feeling could be represented here by a deep-South crooning of the “Do you want the moon to play with and the stars to run away with” variety, provided that the actual black mammy association could be kept out of it.
Gradually materializing pointillist stipple of sunlight sifted through green leaves. Transparencies of huge criss-crossed emerald-green leaves of the sort used by natives as wrappings: frayed fringes of such leaves. Very idealized mild round male oriental face smiling its benign smile; his arms, hands, yellow fingers; his clever fingers drawing birds, flowers, fishes, leaves, on thin rice paper under moving shadows of leaves. Smiling, he lets the pictures drift away on the breeze; one by one they drift off and become real; the birds open their red beaks to chirp as they flutter away; the leaves attach themselves to a bush, the flowers distribute among them their purple and orange wings; the fish float for a moment on the stream’s surface before they swerve into the water and disappear. The sun, the sure fountain of warmth and comfort, the man. The smiling yellow face of the sun-man, yellow fingers benevolently juggling the world.
Again the generalized sense-impression of friendly security with its background of peaceful rocking, wordless crooning, augmented this time by the reinforcement of some exclusive and unique support.
A woman with chrysanthemum-curly hair — it is A, of course — approaches from a distance and comes nearer and nearer; slowly and steadily approaches until she stands so close that everything else is shut out. Quietly bending her face neither mournful nor gay, she takes B’s hand and walks away with her down a narrow path; receding with her along the private, blind, quiet, inviolate path), the backward-reaching, down-reaching tunnel, as if into the crater of an extinct volcano.
AT school the spell I had learnt in my parents’ house was no longer sufficient: I had to discover another and stronger magic. At school there was only the day world which I refused to accept and which would not accept me either. I had to find some private place where I could be at home.
ABIG COUNTRY estate in the finest old-world tradition. Undulating parkland with plantations of great trees here and there. The trees are all perfect specimens, scientifically nourished and trimmed, there isn’t a dead twig or a superfluous branch to be seen. It’s the same wherever you look. Everything has been planned, protected and cared for down to the last detail. And you can see at a glance that this has been so for hundreds of years. The lawns which surround the mansion on the hill have been shaved by skilful scythes to the smoothest velvety pile. Huge clusters of grapes hang in the vinery, peaches and nectarines ripen on sunny walls. The flower gardens are awash with colour and scent. In the walled kitchen garden the fat earth overflows like a vegetable cornucopia. Strutting pigeons display their fans on the roofs of stables where splendid blood horses are housed. Sleek hounds drowse at their kennel doors. In sun-speckled shady groves deer daintily roam the preserves they share with the handsome gamebirds. As if suspended in amber, fish hang in the clear streams. Swans steer their stately and immaculate courses upon a lake that with no less exactitude mirrors the passing clouds. Here are no savage rocks, no jungles, no glaciers, no treacherous tropical lagoons, no fantastics of the animal, vegetable or mineral world to startle or cause amazement Here all is temperate and harmonious; enclosed, perfect, prearranged, controlled and known.