I didn’t go straight home. When I changed from the Bakerloo Line at Paddington I went up into the Main Line Station. I felt like being with a lot of people in a big open place. Ordinarily I don’t like pigeons but I like them under the glass roof of Paddington Station. Mingling with the rush of people the pigeons are quite different from the way they are when plodding about in squares and being fed by people who have nothing better to feed. Intolerant of me to think that. Pigeons, turtles, what’s the odds.
So much purposeful movement at Paddington, so many individual directions crossing one another, so many different lines of action! I always think that everyone else has good places to go to, they all seem so eager to get there. I sat on the low flat wooden railing by the Track One buffers and watched the figures passing in front of the light from the news-stand and under the grey glass sky of the roof. So many pretty girls! They were never so pretty when I was twenty. Two men were talking and one of them taking some change from his pocket dropped a ½p. While looking to see what he’d dropped he kicked it without seeing it. I watched it roll along the floor to be kicked in the opposite direction by another man who didn’t see it. By then the man who’d dropped it had moved on and when the ½p stopped rolling I went over and picked it up, put it in my pocket and went home.
24 Neaera H
In this morning’s Times I read that the astronauts on Skylab-2 have got two spiders with them. One of the spiders, named Arabella, has spun something like a normal web. ‘Weightlessness disorientated her at the start,’ says the news item from Houston, ‘and her first attempts produced only a few wisps, mainly in the corners of her cage. But today, on the thirteenth day of the Skylab-2 flight, Dr Owen Garriott was quite pleased with the work done by the spider. “This time the web is essentially, at first glance, like one you would find on the ground,” Dr Garriott said.’
That Arabella should have spun any sort of web, should have made the effort at all, overwhelms me. In her place I should have sulked or been sick I am sure. She didn’t even know which way was up let alone where she was or why and yet she spun a reasonably workable web out there in space. I hope they had the decency to bring some flies for her to catch, I can’t think they’d make her eat tiny frozen dinners squeezed out of tubes or whatever astronauts subsist on. And if they did bring flies those flies must appear somewhere on Skylab-2’s manifest: Flies, 12 doz. If there are flies up there no mention is made of them or how they adapted to weightlessness. Perhaps they’d use dead flies just as they use dead mice to feed the owls at the Zoo. In any case Arabella deserves a plaque on Skylab-2. But of course she doesn’t need one, hasn’t got the sort of mind that thinks about plaques. She needs no recognition, can recognize herself and spin a web wherever she may be. What good things instincts are!
Last night I had a dream thought that I held on to carefully until this morning. It was: Those who know it have forgotten every part of it, those who don’t know it remember it completely. Aggravating. Those who know or don’t know what? I haven’t a clue and what’s most annoying is that something in me knows what was meant.
There was a week of nature films on the South Bank and I went to see one about sharks. The film was made by a man of apparently unlimited wealth who fitted himself out with a large ship and any amount of special underwater gear for shark photography. He and his companions all agreed that diving among sharks was for them the ultimate challenge. They were particularly keen to encounter a great white shark, a rare species and the one most feared as a man-eater. They went from ocean to ocean looking for the great white shark and I couldn’t help wondering all the time how much it was costing. I think the money spent on even one of the special diving cages would keep me in high style for half a year at least.
For a large part of the time they followed whaling ships, photographing sharks feeding on whale carcasses. Sometimes they took their pictures from inside a cage but often they swam fearlessly among the sharks. They swam among blue sharks, dusky sharks, oceanic white-tipped sharks and several other kinds but they were continually frustrated by the absence of great white sharks.
Eventually they found a great white shark which they attracted with whale oil, blood and horsemeat. It was a truly terrifying creature and they very wisely stayed in their cage while the shark took the bars in his teeth and shook it about. The wealthy man said that it had been fantastic, incredible, beyond his expectations. His friends congratulated him on the success of the expedition and the film came to an end.
I found myself resenting that man, however unreasonable it might be of me. All the money in the world does not give him the right to muck about with a direful secret creature and shame the mystery of it with words like ‘fantastic’ and ‘incredible’. The divers were not the ultimate challenge for the shark, I’m certain of that. Socially they were out of their class, the shark would not have swum from ocean to ocean seeking them. It would have gone its mute and deadly way mindlessly being its awful self, innocent and murderous. It was the people who lusted for the fierce attention of the shark, like monkeys they had to make him notice them.
Money can do many things, even the great white shark can be played with by wealthy frotteurs in posh diving gear. But they have not really seen him or touched him because what he is to man is what is he to naked man alone-swimming. They have not found the great white shark, they have acted out some brothel fantasy with black rubber clothing and steel bars. Aluminium they were actually.
When I came out of the Queen Elizabeth Hall with the crowd there was a threadbare man playing a mouth organ. The lamps were lit along the promenade and on the bridges, trains rattled across the Hungerford Bridge, boats apparently powered by music went past with people dancing, lights glittered on the river and in the buildings across the river, there was a full moon, the night was balmy. The mouth organ buzzed its little music fiercely, the man’s eyes looked out fiercely over the mouth organ. I gave him 10p, he thanked me, sent his music after me like bees.
At a party I drank more than I should have done and found myself going on and on about Oedipus and Peter Rabbit, Thebes and Mr McGregor’s garden to Harry Rush of Pryntward Rush & Hope. Two days later there was a letter affirming his strong interest in my forthcoming From Oedipus to Peter Rabbit: The Tragic Heritage in Children’s Literature and offering me a £1,000 advance on signing.
On the morning when the letter came I was thinking that possibly the biggest tragedy in children’s literature is that people won’t stop writing it. It was one of those mornings when there suddenly seemed nothing whatever that could be taken for granted. I felt a stranger in my own head, as if the consciousness looking out through my eyes were some monstrous changeling. Here was the implacable morning light on all the books and litter that were always there but nothing was recognizable as having significance. What in the world was it all about, I found myself wondering.
People write books for children and other people write about the books written for children but I don’t think it’s for the children at all. I think that all the people who worry so much about the children are really worrying about themselves, about keeping their world together and getting the children to help them do it, getting the children to agree that it is indeed a world. Each new generation of children has to be told: ‘This is a world, this is what one does, one lives like this.’ Maybe our constant fear is that a generation of children will come along and say: ‘This is not a world, this is nothing, there’s no way to live at all.’