Safwan Dahoul
Monday, March 30, 2009
Thursday, March 26, 2009
Kittens Inspired by Kittens
I know this has been online for a while - but its hilarious - and it just made my morning.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Friday, March 20, 2009
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Nabokov: Personal Past
PERSONAL PAST
Pure Time, Perceptual Time, Tangible Time, Time free of content and context, this, then, is the kind of Time described by my creature under my sympathetic direction.
The Past is also part of the tissue, part of the present, but it looks somewhat out of focus. The Past is a constant accumulation of images, but our brain is not an ideal organ for constant retrospection and the best we can do is to pick out and try to retain those patches of rainbow light flitting through memory. The act of retention is the act of art, artistic selection, artistic blending, artistic re-combination of actual events. The bad memoirist re-touches his past, and the result is a blue-tinted or pink-shaded photograph taken by a stranger to console sentimental bereavement. The good memoirist, on the other hand, does his best! to preserve the utmost truth of the detail. One of the ways he achieves his intent is to find the right spot on his canvas for placing the right patch of remembered color.
Pure Time, Perceptual Time, Tangible Time, Time free of content and context, this, then, is the kind of Time described by my creature under my sympathetic direction.
The Past is also part of the tissue, part of the present, but it looks somewhat out of focus. The Past is a constant accumulation of images, but our brain is not an ideal organ for constant retrospection and the best we can do is to pick out and try to retain those patches of rainbow light flitting through memory. The act of retention is the act of art, artistic selection, artistic blending, artistic re-combination of actual events. The bad memoirist re-touches his past, and the result is a blue-tinted or pink-shaded photograph taken by a stranger to console sentimental bereavement. The good memoirist, on the other hand, does his best! to preserve the utmost truth of the detail. One of the ways he achieves his intent is to find the right spot on his canvas for placing the right patch of remembered color.
Nabokov: On Time and Its Texture
In October, 1971, Kurt Hoffman visited me in Montreux tofilm an interview for the Bayeriscber Rundfunk. Of itsmany topics and themes I have selected a few for reproductionin this volume. The bit about my West European ancestors comesfrom a carefully executed and beautifully boundAhnentafel, given me on my seventieth birthday by myGerman publisher Heinrich Maria Ledig-RowohIt.
-Vladimir Nabokov
ON TIME AND ITS TEXTURE
We can imagine all kinds of time, such as for example "applied time"-- time applied to events, which we measure by means of clocks and calendars; but those types of time are inevitably tainted by our notion of space, spatial succession, stretches and sections of space. Then we speak of the "passage of time", we visualize an abstract river flowing through a generalized landscape. Applied time, measurable illusions of time, are useful for the purposes of historians or physicists, they do not interest me, and they did not interest my creature Van Veen in Part Four of my Ada. He and I in that book attempt to examine the essence of Time, not its lapse. Van mentions the possibility of being "an amateur of Time, an epicure of duration", of being able to delight sensually in the texture of time, "in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum". He also is aware that "Time is a fluid medium for the culture of metaphors". Time, though akin to rhythm, is not simply rhythm, which would imply motion -- and Time does not move. Van's greatest discovery is his perception of Time as the dim hollow between two rhythmic beats, the narrow and bottomless silence between the beats, not the beats themselves, which only embar Time. In this sense human life is not a pulsating heart but the missed heartbeat.
-Vladimir Nabokov
ON TIME AND ITS TEXTURE
We can imagine all kinds of time, such as for example "applied time"-- time applied to events, which we measure by means of clocks and calendars; but those types of time are inevitably tainted by our notion of space, spatial succession, stretches and sections of space. Then we speak of the "passage of time", we visualize an abstract river flowing through a generalized landscape. Applied time, measurable illusions of time, are useful for the purposes of historians or physicists, they do not interest me, and they did not interest my creature Van Veen in Part Four of my Ada. He and I in that book attempt to examine the essence of Time, not its lapse. Van mentions the possibility of being "an amateur of Time, an epicure of duration", of being able to delight sensually in the texture of time, "in its stuff and spread, in the fall of its folds, in the very impalpability of its grayish gauze, in the coolness of its continuum". He also is aware that "Time is a fluid medium for the culture of metaphors". Time, though akin to rhythm, is not simply rhythm, which would imply motion -- and Time does not move. Van's greatest discovery is his perception of Time as the dim hollow between two rhythmic beats, the narrow and bottomless silence between the beats, not the beats themselves, which only embar Time. In this sense human life is not a pulsating heart but the missed heartbeat.
The Marion Morgan Dancers
The Marion Morgan Dancers, which was formed in 1915, was originally comprised of six young women who had studied with Marion Morgan in California. The troupe specialized in ballets adapted from classical legends, such as Helen of Troy, and usually danced in togas and bare feet.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Monday, March 16, 2009
How Nobody Came to the Graveyard
There was a hand in the darkness, and it held a knife.
The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.
The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.
The street door was still open, just a little, where the knife and the man who held it had slipped in, and wisps of nighttime mist slithered and twined into the house through the open door.
The man Jack paused on the landing. With his left hand he pulled a large white handkerchief from the pocket of his black coat, and with it he wiped off the knife and his gloved right hand which had been holding it; then he put the handkerchief away. The hunt was almost over. He had left the woman in her bed, the man on the bedroom floor, the older child in her brightly colored bedroom, surrounded by toys and half-finished models. That only left the little one, a baby barely a toddler, to take care of. One more and his task would be done.
He flexed his fingers. The man Jack was, above all things, a professional, or so he told himself, and he would not allow himself to smile until the job was completed.
His hair was dark and his eyes were dark and he wore black leather gloves of the thinnest lambskin.
The toddler's room was at the very top of the house. The man Jack walked up the stairs, his feet silent on the carpeting. Then he pushed open the attic door, and he walked in. His shoes were black leather, and they were polished to such a shine that they looked like dark mirrors: you could see the moon reflected in them, tiny and half full.
The real moon shone through the casement window. Its light was not bright, and it was diffused by the mist, but the man Jack would not need much light. The moonlight was enough. It would do.
He could make out the shape of the child in the crib, head and limbs and torso.
The crib had high, slatted sides to prevent the child from getting out. Jack leaned over, raised his right hand, the one holding the knife, and he aimed for the chest . . .
. . . and then he lowered his hand. The shape in the crib was a teddy bear. There was no child.
The man Jack's eyes were accustomed to the dim moonlight, so he had no desire to turn on an electric light. And light was not that important, after all. He had other skills.
The man Jack sniffed the air. He ignored the scents that had come into the room with him, dismissed the scents that he could safely ignore, honed in on the smell of the thing he had come to find. He could smell the child: a milky smell, like chocolate chip cookies, and the sour tang of a wet, disposable, nighttime diaper. He could smell the baby shampoo in its hair, and something small and rubbery—a toy, he thought, and then, no, something to suck—that the child had been carrying.
The child had been here. It was here no longer. The man Jack followed his nose down the stairs through the middle of the tall, thin house. He inspected the bathroom, the kitchen, the airing cupboard, and, finally, the downstairs hall, in which there was nothing to be seen but the family's bicycles, a pile of empty shopping bags, a fallen diaper, and the stray tendrils of fog that had insinuated themselves into the hall from the open door to the street.
The man Jack made a small noise then, a grunt that contained in it both frustration and also satisfaction. He slipped the knife into its sheath in the inside pocket of his long coat, and he stepped out into the street. There was moonlight, and there were streetlights, but the fog stifled everything, muted light and muffled sound and made the night shadowy and treacherous. He looked down the hill towards the light of the closed shops, then up the street, where the last high houses wound up the hill on their way to the darkness of the old graveyard.
The man Jack sniffed the air. Then, without hurrying, he began to walk up the hill.
Ever since the child had learned to walk he had been his mother's and father's despair and delight, for there never was such a boy for wandering, for climbing up things, for getting into and out of things. That night, he had been woken by the sound of something on the floor beneath him falling with a crash. Awake, he soon became bored, and had begun looking for a way out of his crib. It had high sides, like the walls of his playpen downstairs, but he was convinced that he could scale it. All he needed was a step . . .
He pulled his large, golden teddy bear into the corner of the crib, then, holding the railing in his tiny hands, he put his foot onto the bear's lap, the other foot up on the bear's head, and he pulled himself up into a standing position, and then he half-climbed, half-toppled over the railing and out of the crib.
He landed with a muffled thump on a small mound of furry, fuzzy toys, some of them presents from relations from his first birthday, not six months gone, some of them inherited from his older sister. He was surprised when he hit the floor, but he did not cry out: if you cried they came and put you back in your crib.
He crawled out of the room.
The knife had a handle of polished black bone, and a blade finer and sharper than any razor. If it sliced you, you might not even know you had been cut, not immediately.
The knife had done almost everything it was brought to that house to do, and both the blade and the handle were wet.
The street door was still open, just a little, where the knife and the man who held it had slipped in, and wisps of nighttime mist slithered and twined into the house through the open door.
The man Jack paused on the landing. With his left hand he pulled a large white handkerchief from the pocket of his black coat, and with it he wiped off the knife and his gloved right hand which had been holding it; then he put the handkerchief away. The hunt was almost over. He had left the woman in her bed, the man on the bedroom floor, the older child in her brightly colored bedroom, surrounded by toys and half-finished models. That only left the little one, a baby barely a toddler, to take care of. One more and his task would be done.
He flexed his fingers. The man Jack was, above all things, a professional, or so he told himself, and he would not allow himself to smile until the job was completed.
His hair was dark and his eyes were dark and he wore black leather gloves of the thinnest lambskin.
The toddler's room was at the very top of the house. The man Jack walked up the stairs, his feet silent on the carpeting. Then he pushed open the attic door, and he walked in. His shoes were black leather, and they were polished to such a shine that they looked like dark mirrors: you could see the moon reflected in them, tiny and half full.
The real moon shone through the casement window. Its light was not bright, and it was diffused by the mist, but the man Jack would not need much light. The moonlight was enough. It would do.
He could make out the shape of the child in the crib, head and limbs and torso.
The crib had high, slatted sides to prevent the child from getting out. Jack leaned over, raised his right hand, the one holding the knife, and he aimed for the chest . . .
. . . and then he lowered his hand. The shape in the crib was a teddy bear. There was no child.
The man Jack's eyes were accustomed to the dim moonlight, so he had no desire to turn on an electric light. And light was not that important, after all. He had other skills.
The man Jack sniffed the air. He ignored the scents that had come into the room with him, dismissed the scents that he could safely ignore, honed in on the smell of the thing he had come to find. He could smell the child: a milky smell, like chocolate chip cookies, and the sour tang of a wet, disposable, nighttime diaper. He could smell the baby shampoo in its hair, and something small and rubbery—a toy, he thought, and then, no, something to suck—that the child had been carrying.
The child had been here. It was here no longer. The man Jack followed his nose down the stairs through the middle of the tall, thin house. He inspected the bathroom, the kitchen, the airing cupboard, and, finally, the downstairs hall, in which there was nothing to be seen but the family's bicycles, a pile of empty shopping bags, a fallen diaper, and the stray tendrils of fog that had insinuated themselves into the hall from the open door to the street.
The man Jack made a small noise then, a grunt that contained in it both frustration and also satisfaction. He slipped the knife into its sheath in the inside pocket of his long coat, and he stepped out into the street. There was moonlight, and there were streetlights, but the fog stifled everything, muted light and muffled sound and made the night shadowy and treacherous. He looked down the hill towards the light of the closed shops, then up the street, where the last high houses wound up the hill on their way to the darkness of the old graveyard.
The man Jack sniffed the air. Then, without hurrying, he began to walk up the hill.
Ever since the child had learned to walk he had been his mother's and father's despair and delight, for there never was such a boy for wandering, for climbing up things, for getting into and out of things. That night, he had been woken by the sound of something on the floor beneath him falling with a crash. Awake, he soon became bored, and had begun looking for a way out of his crib. It had high sides, like the walls of his playpen downstairs, but he was convinced that he could scale it. All he needed was a step . . .
He pulled his large, golden teddy bear into the corner of the crib, then, holding the railing in his tiny hands, he put his foot onto the bear's lap, the other foot up on the bear's head, and he pulled himself up into a standing position, and then he half-climbed, half-toppled over the railing and out of the crib.
He landed with a muffled thump on a small mound of furry, fuzzy toys, some of them presents from relations from his first birthday, not six months gone, some of them inherited from his older sister. He was surprised when he hit the floor, but he did not cry out: if you cried they came and put you back in your crib.
He crawled out of the room.
The Graveyard Book
The Graveyard Book is a young adult fantasy novel by Neil Gaiman. The story is about a boy named Nobody Owens, whose family is killed by a mysterious man named Jack, and who is subsequently adopted and raised by the occupants of an old graveyard. Gaiman's first full-length children's novel since the bestselling and widely acclaimed Coraline, The Graveyard Book won the 2009 Newbery Award.
Gaiman first had the idea for the story in 1985 after seeing his then two year-old son Mike "pedaling his tricycle around a graveyard". Recalling how at home his son looked there, Gaiman thought he "could write something a lot like The Jungle Book and set it in a graveyard".
Each chapter takes the form of a short story, and each is set a year or two apart as the protagonist grows up. Some of the chapters have direct analogs to Rudyard Kipling's 1894 work (from which The Graveyard Book also takes its title), for example, the chapter "The Hounds of God" parallels the story "Kaa's Hunting".
Each chapter takes the form of a short story, and each is set a year or two apart as the protagonist grows up. Some of the chapters have direct analogs to Rudyard Kipling's 1894 work (from which The Graveyard Book also takes its title), for example, the chapter "The Hounds of God" parallels the story "Kaa's Hunting".
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Martha's Joey
Klee Wyck, is a work of autobiographical non-fiction by Emily Carr.
The original edition of Klee Wyck was 21 chapters long, but the commonly available copy of the book has a chapter excised. That chapter is Martha's Joey.
Martha's Joey
One day our father and his three girls were going over James Bay
Bridge in Victoria. We met a jolly-faced old Indian woman with a
little fair-haired white boy about as old as I was.
Father said, "Hello, Joey!", and to the woman he said: "How are
you getting on, Martha?"
Father had given each of us a big flat chocolate in silver paper
done up like a dollar piece. We were saving them to eat when we
got home.
Father said, "Who will give her chocolate to Joey?"
We were all willing. Father took mine because I was the smallest
and the greediest of his little girls.
The boy took it from my hand shyly, but Martha beamed so wide all
over me that I felt very generous.
After we had passed on I said, "Father, who is Joey?"
"Joey," said my father, "was left when he was a tiny baby at Indian
Martha's house. One very dark stormy night a man and woman knocked
at her door. They asked if she would take the child in out of the
wet, while they went on an errand. They would soon be back, they
said, but they never came again, though Martha went on expecting
them and caring for the child. She washed the fine clothes he had
been dressed in and took them to the priest; but nobody could find
out anything about the couple who had forsaken the baby."
"Martha had no children and she got to love the boy very much. She
dressed him in Indian clothes and took him for her own. She called
him Joey."
I often thought about what Father had told us about Joey.
One day Mother said I could go with her, and we went to a little
hut in a green field where somebody's cows grazed. That was where
Martha lived.
We knocked at the door but there was no answer. As we stood there
we could hear someone inside the house crying and crying. Mother
opened the door and we went in.
Martha was sitting on the floor. Her hair was sticking out wildly,
and her face was all swollen with crying. Things were thrown about
the floor as if she did not care about anything any more. She could
only sit swaying back and forth crying out, "Joey--my Joey--my
Joey--"
Mother put some nice things on the floor beside her, but she did
not look at them. She just went on crying and moaning.
Mother bent over Martha and stroked her shoulder; but it was no
good saying anything, she was sobbing too hard to hear. I don't
think she even knew we were there. The cat came and cried and begged
for food. The house was cold.
Mother was crying a little when we came away.
"Is Joey dead, Mother?"
"No, the priests have taken him from Martha and sent him away to
school."
"Why couldn't he stay with Martha and go to school like other Indian
boys?"
"Joey is not an Indian; he is a white boy. Martha is not his mother."
"But Joey's mother did not want him; she gave him away to Martha
and that made him her boy. He's hers. It's beastly of the priest
to steal him from Martha."
Martha cried till she had no more tears and then she died.
The original edition of Klee Wyck was 21 chapters long, but the commonly available copy of the book has a chapter excised. That chapter is Martha's Joey.
Martha's Joey
One day our father and his three girls were going over James Bay
Bridge in Victoria. We met a jolly-faced old Indian woman with a
little fair-haired white boy about as old as I was.
Father said, "Hello, Joey!", and to the woman he said: "How are
you getting on, Martha?"
Father had given each of us a big flat chocolate in silver paper
done up like a dollar piece. We were saving them to eat when we
got home.
Father said, "Who will give her chocolate to Joey?"
We were all willing. Father took mine because I was the smallest
and the greediest of his little girls.
The boy took it from my hand shyly, but Martha beamed so wide all
over me that I felt very generous.
After we had passed on I said, "Father, who is Joey?"
"Joey," said my father, "was left when he was a tiny baby at Indian
Martha's house. One very dark stormy night a man and woman knocked
at her door. They asked if she would take the child in out of the
wet, while they went on an errand. They would soon be back, they
said, but they never came again, though Martha went on expecting
them and caring for the child. She washed the fine clothes he had
been dressed in and took them to the priest; but nobody could find
out anything about the couple who had forsaken the baby."
"Martha had no children and she got to love the boy very much. She
dressed him in Indian clothes and took him for her own. She called
him Joey."
I often thought about what Father had told us about Joey.
One day Mother said I could go with her, and we went to a little
hut in a green field where somebody's cows grazed. That was where
Martha lived.
We knocked at the door but there was no answer. As we stood there
we could hear someone inside the house crying and crying. Mother
opened the door and we went in.
Martha was sitting on the floor. Her hair was sticking out wildly,
and her face was all swollen with crying. Things were thrown about
the floor as if she did not care about anything any more. She could
only sit swaying back and forth crying out, "Joey--my Joey--my
Joey--"
Mother put some nice things on the floor beside her, but she did
not look at them. She just went on crying and moaning.
Mother bent over Martha and stroked her shoulder; but it was no
good saying anything, she was sobbing too hard to hear. I don't
think she even knew we were there. The cat came and cried and begged
for food. The house was cold.
Mother was crying a little when we came away.
"Is Joey dead, Mother?"
"No, the priests have taken him from Martha and sent him away to
school."
"Why couldn't he stay with Martha and go to school like other Indian
boys?"
"Joey is not an Indian; he is a white boy. Martha is not his mother."
"But Joey's mother did not want him; she gave him away to Martha
and that made him her boy. He's hers. It's beastly of the priest
to steal him from Martha."
Martha cried till she had no more tears and then she died.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Candy
I bought a 1964 version of Candy from MacLeod`s Books almost two years ago. Terry Southern was a highly influential American author, essayist, screenwriter and university lecturer, noted for a distinctive satirical style. He was part of the Paris postwar literary movement in the 1950s and a companion to Beat writers in Greenwich Village; he was at the center of Swinging London in the sixties and helped to change the style and substance of American films in the 1970s. In the 1980s he wrote for Saturday Night Live and lectured on screenwriting at several universities in New York.
Southern's dark and often absurdist style of broad yet biting satire helped to define the sensibilities of several generations of intelligent writers, readers, directors and film goers. He is credited by journalist Tom Wolfe as having invented New Journalism with the publication of "Twirling at Ole Miss" in Esquire in 1962, and his gift for writing memorable film dialogue was evident in Dr. Strangelove, The Loved One, The Cincinnati Kid and Easy Rider. His work on Easy Rider helped create the independent film movement of the 1970s, in opposition to mainstream Hollywood.
Candy Christian is an innocent young girl when she first hears McPhito, an alcoholic Welsh poet, talk of love and self-sacrifice. Candy narrowly escapes McPhisto's attempt to rape her, only to succumb to her father's Mexican gardener, Emmanuel. When her father catches her with the gardener, he banishes her to a trip with his twin brother, Uncle Jack, and Jack's wife Aunt Livia, who are headed for New York City. As Candy makes her way to the airport, Emmanuel's three sisters attack her because she has corrupted their brother. Because of Candy, Emmanuel has now forsaken the priesthood. During the scuffle, Candy's father takes a blow to the head, resulting in a serious head injury. Candy nearly gives in to a General Smight on the plane in exchange for a blood transfusion for her father. In New York, an ego-maniacal brain surgeon Dr. Krankeit operates on her father, while Uncle Jack pursues his own operation on Candy. When Candy bashes him with a bedpan, Uncle Jack is put in her father's hospital bed, while her father wanders away without notice. Candy is now free to visit Greenwich Village where she takes part in a film by an underground movie director Jonathan J. John. It's a pornographic film, shot in a public restroom. Next, Candy becomes the pet of a benevolent hunchback in Central Park, but she escapes from his arch criminal into the truck trailer of Guru Grindl. During the drive to California, Grindl initiates her into the mysteries of the Seventh Stage and other secrets of life. In California, Candy seeks the Great Buddah, who will reveal to her the ultimate stage. In her search, she encounter a filthy hermit who leads her to a temple. There Candy and the hermit have sex. When a deluge destroys the temple and washes the hermit clean. Candy recognizes that the hermit is really her wandering father. Again Candy runs away to more trouble. The final time, however, she finds herself in a hippie orgy, reunited with her past sexual partners.
Southern's dark and often absurdist style of broad yet biting satire helped to define the sensibilities of several generations of intelligent writers, readers, directors and film goers. He is credited by journalist Tom Wolfe as having invented New Journalism with the publication of "Twirling at Ole Miss" in Esquire in 1962, and his gift for writing memorable film dialogue was evident in Dr. Strangelove, The Loved One, The Cincinnati Kid and Easy Rider. His work on Easy Rider helped create the independent film movement of the 1970s, in opposition to mainstream Hollywood.
Candy Christian is an innocent young girl when she first hears McPhito, an alcoholic Welsh poet, talk of love and self-sacrifice. Candy narrowly escapes McPhisto's attempt to rape her, only to succumb to her father's Mexican gardener, Emmanuel. When her father catches her with the gardener, he banishes her to a trip with his twin brother, Uncle Jack, and Jack's wife Aunt Livia, who are headed for New York City. As Candy makes her way to the airport, Emmanuel's three sisters attack her because she has corrupted their brother. Because of Candy, Emmanuel has now forsaken the priesthood. During the scuffle, Candy's father takes a blow to the head, resulting in a serious head injury. Candy nearly gives in to a General Smight on the plane in exchange for a blood transfusion for her father. In New York, an ego-maniacal brain surgeon Dr. Krankeit operates on her father, while Uncle Jack pursues his own operation on Candy. When Candy bashes him with a bedpan, Uncle Jack is put in her father's hospital bed, while her father wanders away without notice. Candy is now free to visit Greenwich Village where she takes part in a film by an underground movie director Jonathan J. John. It's a pornographic film, shot in a public restroom. Next, Candy becomes the pet of a benevolent hunchback in Central Park, but she escapes from his arch criminal into the truck trailer of Guru Grindl. During the drive to California, Grindl initiates her into the mysteries of the Seventh Stage and other secrets of life. In California, Candy seeks the Great Buddah, who will reveal to her the ultimate stage. In her search, she encounter a filthy hermit who leads her to a temple. There Candy and the hermit have sex. When a deluge destroys the temple and washes the hermit clean. Candy recognizes that the hermit is really her wandering father. Again Candy runs away to more trouble. The final time, however, she finds herself in a hippie orgy, reunited with her past sexual partners.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Sunday, March 8, 2009
My Oedipus Complex
Father was in the army all through the war – the first war, I mean – so, up to the age of five, I never saw much of him, and what I saw did not worry me. Sometimes I woke and there was a big figure in khaki peering down at me in the candlelight. Sometimes in the early morning I heard the slamming of the front door and the clatter of nailed boots down the cobbles of the lane. These were Father’s entrances and exits. Like Santa Claus he came and went mysteriously.
In fact, I rather liked his visits, though it was an uncomfortable squeeze between Mother and him when I got into the big bed in the early morning. He smoked, which gave him a pleasant musty smell, and shaved, an operation of astounding interest. Each time he left a trail of souvenirs – model tanks and Gurkha knives with handles made of bullet cases, and German helmets and cap badges and button sticks, and all sorts of military equipment – carefully stowed away in a long box on top of the wardrobe, in case they ever came in handy. There was a bit of the magpie about Father; he expected everything to come in handy. When his back was turned, Mother let me get a chair and rummage through his treasures. She didn’t seem to think so highly of them as he did.
The war was the most peaceful period of my life. The window of my attic faced southeast. My mother had curtained it, but that had small effect. I always woke with the first light and, with all the responsibilities of the previous day melted, feeling myself rather like the sun, ready to illumine and rejoice. Life never seemed so simple and clear and full of possibilities as then. I put my feet out from under the clothes – I called them Mrs. Left and Mrs. Right – and invented dramatic situations for them in which they discussed the problems of the day. At least Mrs. Right did; she was very demonstrative, but I hadn’t the same control of Mrs. Left, so she mostly contented herself with nodding agreement.
They discussed what Mother and I should do during the day, what Santa Claus should give a fellow for Christmas, and what steps should be taken to brighten the home. There was that little matter of the baby, for instance. Mother and I could never agree about that. Ours was the only house in the terrace without a new baby, and Mother said we couldn’t afford one till Father came back from the war because they cost seventeen and six.
That showed how simple she was. The Geneys up the road had a baby, and everyone knew they couldn’t afford seventeen and six. It was probably a cheap baby, and Mother wanted something really good, but I felt she was too exclusive. The Geneys’ baby would have done us fine.
Having settled my plans for the day, I got up, put a chair under the attic window, and lifted the frame high enough to stick out my head. The window overlooked the front gardens of the terrace behind ours, and beyond these it looked over a deep valley to the tall, red brick houses terraced up the opposite hillside, which were all still in shadow, while those at our side of the valley were all lit up, though with long strange shadows that made them seem unfamiliar; rigid and painted.
After that I went into Mother’s room and climbed into the big bed. She woke and I began to tell her of my schemes. By this time, though I never seemed to have noticed it, I was petrified in my nightshirt, and I thawed as I talked until, the last frost melted, I fell asleep beside her and woke again only when I heard her below in the kitchen, making the breakfast.
Having settled my plans for the day, I got up, put a chair under the attic window, and lifted the frame high enough to stick out my head. The window overlooked the front gardens of the terrace behind ours, and beyond these it looked over a deep valley to the tall, red brick houses terraced up the opposite hillside, which were all still in shadow, while those at our side of the valley were all lit up, though with long strange shadows that made them seem unfamiliar; rigid and painted.
After that I went into Mother’s room and climbed into the big bed. She woke and I began to tell her of my schemes. By this time, though I never seemed to have noticed it, I was petrified in my nightshirt, and I thawed as I talked until, the last frost melted, I fell asleep beside her and woke again only when I heard her below in the kitchen, making the breakfast.
After breakfast we went into town; heard Mass at St. Augustine’s and said a prayer for Father, and did the shopping. If the afternoon was fine we either went for a walk in the country or a visit to Mother’s great friend in the convent, Mother Saint Dominic. Mother had them all praying for Father, and every night, going to bed, I asked God to send him back safe from the war to us. Little, indeed, did I know what I was praying for!
One morning, I got into the big bed, and there, sure enough, was Father in his usual Santa Claus manner, but later, instead of uniform, he put on his best blue suit, and Mother was as pleased as anything. I saw nothing to be pleased about, because, out of uniform, Father was altogether less interesting, but she only beamed, and explained that our prayers had been answered, and off we went to Mass to thank God for having brought Father safely home.
The irony of it! That very day when he came in to dinner he took off his boots and put on his slippers, donned the dirty old cap he wore about the house to save him from colds, crossed his legs, and began to talk gravely to Mother, who looked anxious. Naturally, I disliked her looking anxious, because it destroyed her good looks, so I interrupted him.
"Just a moment, Larry!" she said gently. This was only what she said when we had boring visitors, so I attached no importance to it and went on talking. "Do be quiet, Larry!" she said impatiently. "Don’t you hear me talking to Daddy?" This was the first time I had heard those ominous words, "talking to Daddy," and I couldn’t help feeling that if this was how God answered prayers, he couldn’t listen to them very attentively."Why are you talking to Daddy?" I asked with as great a show of indifference as I could muster. "Because Daddy and I have business to discuss. Now, don’t interrupt again!"
In the afternoon, at Mother’s request, Father took me for a walk. This time we went into town instead of out in the country, and I thought at first, in my usual optimistic way, that it might be an improvement. It was nothing of the sort. Father and I had quite different notions of a walk in town. He had no proper interest in trams, ships, and horses, and the only thing that seemed to divert him was talking to fellows as old as himself. When I wanted to stop he simply went on, dragging me behind him by the hand; when he wanted to stop I had no alternative but to do the same. I noticed that it seemed to be a sign that he wanted to stop for a long time whenever he leaned against a wall. The second time I saw him do it I got wild. He seemed to be settling himself forever. I pulled him by the coat and trousers, but, unlike Mother who, if you were too persistent, got into a wax and said: "Larry, if you don’t behave yourself, I’ll give you a good slap," Father had an extraordinary capacity for amiable inattention. I sized him up and wondered would I cry, but he seemed to be too remote to be annoyed even by that. Really, it was like going for a walk with a mountain! He either ignored the wrenching and pummeling entirely, or else glanced down with a grin of amusement from his peak. I had never met anyone so absorbed in himself as he seemed.
At teatime, "talking to Daddy" began again, complicated this time by the fact that he had an evening paper, and every few minutes he put it down and told Mother something new out of it. I felt this was foul play. Man for man, I was prepared to compete with him any time for Mother’s attention, but when he had it all made up for him by other people it left me no chance. Several times I tried to change the subject without success. "You must be quiet while Daddy is reading, Larry," Mother said impatiently. It was clear that she either genuinely liked talking to Father better than talking to me, or else that he had some terrible hold on her which made her afraid to admit the truth. "Mummy," I said that night when she was tucking me up, "do you think if I prayed hard God would send Daddy back to the war?" She seemed to think about that for a moment. "No, dear," she said with a smile. "I don’t think He would." "Why wouldn’t He, Mummy?" "Because there isn’t a war any longer, dear." "But, Mummy, couldn’t God make another war, if He liked?" "He wouldn’t like to, dear. It’s not God who makes wars, but bad people." "Oh!" I said. I was disappointed about that. I began to think that God wasn’t quite what
He was cracked up to be.
Next morning I woke at my usual hour, feeling like a bottle of champagne. I put out my feet and invented a long conversation in which Mrs. Right talked of the trouble she had with her own father till she put him in the Home. I didn’t quite know what the Home was but it sounded the right place for Father. Then I got my chair and stuck my head out of the attic window. Dawn was just breaking, with a guilty air that made me feel I had caught it in the act. My head bursting with stories and schemes, I stumbled in next door, and in the half-darkness scrambled into the big bed. There was no room at Mother’s side so I had to get between her and Father. For the time being I had forgotten about him, and for several minutes I sat bolt upright, racking my brains to know what I could do with him. He was taking up more than his fair share of the bed, and I couldn’t get comfortable, so I gave him several kicks that made him grunt and stretch. He made room all right, though. Mother waked and felt for me. I settled back comfortably in the warmth of the bed with my thumb in my mouth.
"Mummy!" I hummed, loudly and contentedly. "Sssh! dear," she whispered. "Don’t wake Daddy!"This was a new development, which threatened to be even more serious than "talking to Daddy." Life without my early-morning conferences was unthinkable."Why?" I asked severely. "Because poor Daddy is tired." This seemed to me a quite inadequate reason, and I was sickened by the sentimentality of her "poor Daddy." I never liked that sort of gush; it always struck me as insincere. "Oh!" I said lightly. Then in my most winning tone: "Do you know where I want to go with you today, Mummy?""No, dear," she sighed. "I want to go down the Glen and fish for thornybacks with my new net, and then I want to go out to the Fox and Hounds, and –""Don’t-wake-Daddy!" she hissed angrily, clapping her hand across my mouth.But it was too late. He was awake, or nearly so. He grunted and reached for the matches. Then he stared incredulously at his watch."Like a cup of tea, dear?" asked Mother in a meek, hushed voice I had never heard her use before. It sounded almost as though she were afraid."Tea?" he exclaimed indignantly. "Do you know what the time is?""And after that I want to go up the Rathcooney Road," I said loudly, afraid I’d forget something in all those interruptions."Go to sleep at once, Larry!" she said sharply.
I began to snivel. I couldn’t concentrate, the way that pair went on, and smothering my early-morning schemes was like burying a family from the cradle. Father said nothing, but lit his pipe and sucked it, looking out into the shadows without minding Mother or me. I knew he was mad. Every time I made a remark Mother hushed me irritably. I was mortified. I felt it wasn’t fair; there was even something sinister in it. Every time I had pointed out to her the waste of making two beds when we could both sleep in one, she had told me it was healthier like that, and now here was this man, this stranger, sleeping with her without the least regard for her health! He got up early and made tea, but though he brought Mother a cup he brought none for me.
"Mummy," I shouted, "I want a cup of tea, too." "Yes, dear," she said patiently. "You can drink from Mummy’s saucer." That settled it. Either Father or I would have to leave the house. I didn’t want to drink from Mother’s saucer; I wanted to be treated as an equal in my own home, so, just to spite her, I drank it all and left none for her. She took that quietly, too. But that night when she was putting me to bed she said gently: "Larry, I want you to promise me something.""What is it?" I asked. "Not to come in and disturb poor Daddy in the morning. Promise?" "Poor Daddy" again! I was becoming suspicious of everything involving that quite impossible man. "Why?" I asked."Because poor Daddy is worried and tired and he doesn’t sleep well." "Why doesn’t he, Mummy?" "Well, you know, don’t you, that while he was at the war Mummy got the pennies from the post office?" "From Miss MacCarthy?" "That’s right. But now, you see, Miss MacCarthy hasn’t any more pennies, so Daddy must go out and find us some. You know what would happen if he couldn’t?" "No," I said, "tell us." "Well, I think we might have to go out and beg for them like the poor old woman on Fridays. We wouldn’t like that, would we?" "No," I agreed. "We wouldn’t." "So you’ll promise not to come in and wake him?" "Promise."
Mind you, I meant that. I knew pennies were a serious matter, and I was all against having to go out and beg like the old woman on Fridays. Mother laid out all my toys in a complete ring round the bed so that, whatever way I got out, I was bound to fall over one of them. When I woke I remembered my promise all right. I got up and sat on the floor and played – for hours, it seemed to me. Then I got my chair and looked out the attic window for more hours. I wished it was time for Father to wake; I wished someone would make me a cup of tea. I didn’t feel in the least like the sun; instead, I was bored and so very, very cold! I simply longed for the warmth and depth of the big feather bed. At last I could stand it no longer. I went into the next room. As there was still no room at Mother’s side I climbed over her and she woke with a start. "Larry," she whispered, gripping my arm very tightly, "what did you promise?" "But I did, Mummy," I wailed, caught in the very act. "I was quiet for ever so long." "Oh, dear, and you’re perished!" she said sadly, feeling me all over. "Now, if I let you stay will you promise not to talk?" "But I want to talk, Mummy," I wailed. "That has nothing to do with it," she said with a firmness that was new to me. "Daddy wants to sleep. Now, do you understand that?"
"Mummy," I shouted, "I want a cup of tea, too." "Yes, dear," she said patiently. "You can drink from Mummy’s saucer." That settled it. Either Father or I would have to leave the house. I didn’t want to drink from Mother’s saucer; I wanted to be treated as an equal in my own home, so, just to spite her, I drank it all and left none for her. She took that quietly, too. But that night when she was putting me to bed she said gently: "Larry, I want you to promise me something.""What is it?" I asked. "Not to come in and disturb poor Daddy in the morning. Promise?" "Poor Daddy" again! I was becoming suspicious of everything involving that quite impossible man. "Why?" I asked."Because poor Daddy is worried and tired and he doesn’t sleep well." "Why doesn’t he, Mummy?" "Well, you know, don’t you, that while he was at the war Mummy got the pennies from the post office?" "From Miss MacCarthy?" "That’s right. But now, you see, Miss MacCarthy hasn’t any more pennies, so Daddy must go out and find us some. You know what would happen if he couldn’t?" "No," I said, "tell us." "Well, I think we might have to go out and beg for them like the poor old woman on Fridays. We wouldn’t like that, would we?" "No," I agreed. "We wouldn’t." "So you’ll promise not to come in and wake him?" "Promise."
Mind you, I meant that. I knew pennies were a serious matter, and I was all against having to go out and beg like the old woman on Fridays. Mother laid out all my toys in a complete ring round the bed so that, whatever way I got out, I was bound to fall over one of them. When I woke I remembered my promise all right. I got up and sat on the floor and played – for hours, it seemed to me. Then I got my chair and looked out the attic window for more hours. I wished it was time for Father to wake; I wished someone would make me a cup of tea. I didn’t feel in the least like the sun; instead, I was bored and so very, very cold! I simply longed for the warmth and depth of the big feather bed. At last I could stand it no longer. I went into the next room. As there was still no room at Mother’s side I climbed over her and she woke with a start. "Larry," she whispered, gripping my arm very tightly, "what did you promise?" "But I did, Mummy," I wailed, caught in the very act. "I was quiet for ever so long." "Oh, dear, and you’re perished!" she said sadly, feeling me all over. "Now, if I let you stay will you promise not to talk?" "But I want to talk, Mummy," I wailed. "That has nothing to do with it," she said with a firmness that was new to me. "Daddy wants to sleep. Now, do you understand that?"
I understood it only too well. I wanted to talk, he wanted to sleep – whose house was it, anyway?"Mummy," I said with equal firmness, "I think it would be healthier for Daddy to sleep in his own bed." That seemed to stagger her, because she said nothing for a while. "Now, once for all," she went on, "you’re to be perfectly quiet or go back to your own bed. Which is it to be?"
The injustice of it got me down. I had convicted her out of her own mouth of inconsistency and unreasonableness, and she hadn’t even attempted to reply. Full of spite, I gave Father a kick, which she didn’t notice but which made him grunt and open his eyes in alarm. "What time is it?" he asked in a panic-stricken voice, not looking at Mother but at the door, as if he saw someone there. "It’s early yet," she replied soothingly. "It’s only the child. Go to sleep again.... Now, Larry," she added, getting out of bed, "you’ve wakened Daddy and you must go back." This time, for all her quiet air, I knew she meant it, and knew that my principal rights and privileges were as good as lost unless I asserted them at once. As she lifted me, I gave a screech, enough to wake the dead, not to mind Father. He groaned. "That damn child! Doesn’t he ever sleep?" "It’s only a habit, dear," she said quietly, though I could see she was vexed. "Well, it’s time he got out of it," shouted Father, beginning to heave in the bed. He suddenly gathered all the bedclothes about him, turned to the wall, and then looked back over his shoulder with nothing showing only two small, spiteful, dark eyes. The man looked very wicked. To open the bedroom door, Mother had to let me down, and I broke free and dashed for the farthest corner, screeching. Father sat bolt upright in bed. "Shut up, you little puppy," he said in a choking voice.
The injustice of it got me down. I had convicted her out of her own mouth of inconsistency and unreasonableness, and she hadn’t even attempted to reply. Full of spite, I gave Father a kick, which she didn’t notice but which made him grunt and open his eyes in alarm. "What time is it?" he asked in a panic-stricken voice, not looking at Mother but at the door, as if he saw someone there. "It’s early yet," she replied soothingly. "It’s only the child. Go to sleep again.... Now, Larry," she added, getting out of bed, "you’ve wakened Daddy and you must go back." This time, for all her quiet air, I knew she meant it, and knew that my principal rights and privileges were as good as lost unless I asserted them at once. As she lifted me, I gave a screech, enough to wake the dead, not to mind Father. He groaned. "That damn child! Doesn’t he ever sleep?" "It’s only a habit, dear," she said quietly, though I could see she was vexed. "Well, it’s time he got out of it," shouted Father, beginning to heave in the bed. He suddenly gathered all the bedclothes about him, turned to the wall, and then looked back over his shoulder with nothing showing only two small, spiteful, dark eyes. The man looked very wicked. To open the bedroom door, Mother had to let me down, and I broke free and dashed for the farthest corner, screeching. Father sat bolt upright in bed. "Shut up, you little puppy," he said in a choking voice.
I was so astonished that I stopped screeching. Never, never had anyone spoken to me in that tone before. I looked at him incredulously and saw his face convulsed with rage. It was only then that I fully realized how God had codded me, listening to my prayers for the safe return of this monster. "Shut up, you!" I bawled, beside myself. "What’s that you said?" shouted Father, making a wild leap out of the bed. "Mick, Mick!" cried Mother. "Don’t you see the child isn’t used to you?" "I see he’s better fed than taught," snarled Father, waving his arms wildly. "He wants his bottom smacked." All his previous shouting was as nothing to these obscene words referring to my person. They really made my blood boil. "Smack your own!" I screamed hysterically. "Smack your own! Shut up! Shut up!"
At this he lost his patience and let fly at me. He did it with the lack of conviction you’d expect of a man under Mother’s horrified eyes, and it ended up as a mere tap, but the sheer indignity of being struck at all by a stranger, a total stranger who had cajoled his way back from the war into our big bed as a result of my innocent intercession, made me completely dotty. I shrieked and shrieked, and danced in my bare feet, and Father, looking awkward and hairy in nothing but a short gray army shirt, glared down at me like a mountain out for murder. I think it must have been then that I realized he was jealous too. And there stood Mother in her nightdress, looking as if her heart was broken between us. I hoped she felt as she looked. It seemed to me that she deserved it all.
From that morning out my life was a hell. Father and I were enemies, open and avowed. We conducted a series of skirmishes against one another, he trying to steal my time with Mother and I his. When she was sitting on my bed, telling me a story, he took to looking for some pair of old boots which he alleged he had left behind him at the beginning of the war. While he talked to Mother I played loudly with my toys to show my total lack of concern.
He created a terrible scene one evening when he came in from work and found me at his box, playing with his regimental badges, Gurkha knives and button sticks. Mother got up and took the box from me. "You mustn’t play with Daddy’s toys unless he lets you, Larry," she said severely. "Daddy doesn’t play with yours." For some reason Father looked at her as if she had struck him and then turned away with a scowl. "Those are not toys," he growled, taking down the box again to see had I lifted anything. "Some of those curios are very rare and valuable."
But as time went on I saw more and more how he managed to alienate Mother and me. What made it worse was that I couldn’t grasp his method or see what attraction he had for Mother. In every possible way he was less winning than I. He had a common accent and made noises at his tea. I thought for a while that it might be the newspapers she was interested in, so I made up bits of news of my own to read to her. Then I thought it might be the smoking, which I personally thought attractive, and took his pipes and went round the house dribbling into them till he caught me. I even made noises at my tea, but Mother only told me I was disgusting. It all seemed to hinge round that unhealthy habit of sleeping together, so I made a point of dropping into their bedroom and nosing round, talking to myself, so that they wouldn’t know I was watching them, but they were never up to anything that I could see. In the end it beat me. It seemed to depend on being grown-up and giving people rings, and I realized I’d have to wait. But at the same time I wanted him to see that I was only waiting, not giving up the fight.
One evening when he was being particularly obnoxious, chattering away well above my head, I let him have it. "Mummy," I said, "do you know what I’m going to do when I grow up?" "No, dear," she replied. "What?" "I’m going to marry you," I said quietly. Father gave a great guffaw out of him, but he didn’t take me in. I knew it must only be pretence. And Mother, in spite of everything, was pleased. I felt she was probably relieved to know that one day Father’s hold on her would be broken. "Won’t that be nice?" she said with a smile. "It’ll be very nice," I said confidently. "Because we’re going to have lots and lots of babies.""That’s right, dear," she said placidly. "I think we’ll have one soon, and then you’ll have plenty of company."
But as time went on I saw more and more how he managed to alienate Mother and me. What made it worse was that I couldn’t grasp his method or see what attraction he had for Mother. In every possible way he was less winning than I. He had a common accent and made noises at his tea. I thought for a while that it might be the newspapers she was interested in, so I made up bits of news of my own to read to her. Then I thought it might be the smoking, which I personally thought attractive, and took his pipes and went round the house dribbling into them till he caught me. I even made noises at my tea, but Mother only told me I was disgusting. It all seemed to hinge round that unhealthy habit of sleeping together, so I made a point of dropping into their bedroom and nosing round, talking to myself, so that they wouldn’t know I was watching them, but they were never up to anything that I could see. In the end it beat me. It seemed to depend on being grown-up and giving people rings, and I realized I’d have to wait. But at the same time I wanted him to see that I was only waiting, not giving up the fight.
One evening when he was being particularly obnoxious, chattering away well above my head, I let him have it. "Mummy," I said, "do you know what I’m going to do when I grow up?" "No, dear," she replied. "What?" "I’m going to marry you," I said quietly. Father gave a great guffaw out of him, but he didn’t take me in. I knew it must only be pretence. And Mother, in spite of everything, was pleased. I felt she was probably relieved to know that one day Father’s hold on her would be broken. "Won’t that be nice?" she said with a smile. "It’ll be very nice," I said confidently. "Because we’re going to have lots and lots of babies.""That’s right, dear," she said placidly. "I think we’ll have one soon, and then you’ll have plenty of company."
I was no end pleased about that because it showed that in spite of the way she gave in to Father she still considered my wishes. Besides, it would put the Geneys in their place. It didn’t turn out like that, though. To begin with, she was very preoccupied – I supposed about where she would get the seventeen and six – and though Father took to staying out late in the evenings it did me no particular good. She stopped taking me for walks, became as touchy as blazes, and smacked me for nothing at all. Sometimes I wished I’d never mentioned the confounded baby – I seemed to have a genius for bringing calamity on myself.
And calamity it was! Sonny arrived in the most appalling hulla-baloo – even that much he couldn’t do without a fuss – and from the first moment I disliked him. He was a difficult child – so far as I was concerned he was always difficult – and demanded far too much attention. Mother was simply silly about him, and couldn’t see when he was only showing off. As company he was worse than useless. He slept all day, and I had to go round the house on tiptoe to avoid waking him. It wasn’t any longer a question of not waking Father. The slogan now was "Don’t-wake-Sonny!" I couldn’t understand why the child wouldn’t sleep at the proper time, so whenever Mother’s back was turned I woke him. Sometimes to keep him awake I pinched him as well. Mother caught me at it one day and gave me a most unmerciful flaking.
One evening, when Father was coming in from work, I was playing trains in the front garden. I let on not to notice him; instead, I pretended to be talking to myself, and said in a loud voice: "If another bloody baby comes into this house, I’m going out." Father stopped dead and looked at me over his shoulder. "What’s that you said?" he asked sternly.""I was only talking to myself," I replied, trying to conceal my panic. "It’s private." He turned and went in without a word.
Mind you, I intended it as a solemn warning, but its effect was quite different. Father started being quite nice to me. I could understand that, of course. Mother was quite sickening about Sonny. Even at mealtimes she’d get up and gawk at him in the cradle with an idiotic smile, and tell Father to do the same. He was always polite about it, but he looked so puzzled you could see he didn’t know what she was talking about. He complained of the way Sonny cried at night, but she only got cross and said that Sonny never cried except when there was something up with him – which was a flaming lie, because Sonny never had anything up with him, and only cried for attention. It was really painful to see how simpleminded she was.
One evening, when Father was coming in from work, I was playing trains in the front garden. I let on not to notice him; instead, I pretended to be talking to myself, and said in a loud voice: "If another bloody baby comes into this house, I’m going out." Father stopped dead and looked at me over his shoulder. "What’s that you said?" he asked sternly.""I was only talking to myself," I replied, trying to conceal my panic. "It’s private." He turned and went in without a word.
Mind you, I intended it as a solemn warning, but its effect was quite different. Father started being quite nice to me. I could understand that, of course. Mother was quite sickening about Sonny. Even at mealtimes she’d get up and gawk at him in the cradle with an idiotic smile, and tell Father to do the same. He was always polite about it, but he looked so puzzled you could see he didn’t know what she was talking about. He complained of the way Sonny cried at night, but she only got cross and said that Sonny never cried except when there was something up with him – which was a flaming lie, because Sonny never had anything up with him, and only cried for attention. It was really painful to see how simpleminded she was.
Father wasn’t attractive, but he had a fine intelligence. He saw through Sonny, and now he knew that I saw through him as well. One night I woke with a start. There was someone beside me in the bed. For one wild moment I felt sure it must be Mother, having come to her senses and left Father for good, but then I heard Sonny in convulsions in the next room, and Mother saying: "There! There! There!" and I knew it wasn’t she. It was Father. He was lying beside me, wide-awake, breathing hard and apparently as mad as hell. After a while it came to me what he was mad about. It was his turn now. After turning me out of the big bed, he had been turned out himself. Mother had no consideration now for anyone but that poisonous pup, Sonny.
I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Father. I had been through it all myself, and even at that age I was magnanimous. I began to stroke him down and say: "There! There!" He wasn’t exactly responsive. "Aren’t you asleep either?" he snarled. "Ah, come on and put your arm around us, can’t you?" I said, and he did, in a sort of way. Gingerly, I suppose, is how you’d describe it. He was very bony but better than nothing.
I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Father. I had been through it all myself, and even at that age I was magnanimous. I began to stroke him down and say: "There! There!" He wasn’t exactly responsive. "Aren’t you asleep either?" he snarled. "Ah, come on and put your arm around us, can’t you?" I said, and he did, in a sort of way. Gingerly, I suppose, is how you’d describe it. He was very bony but better than nothing.
At Christmas he went out of his way to buy me a really nice model railway.
-By Frank O'Connor
Friday, March 6, 2009
Jodi Cobb
Jodi Cobb is a photographer for National Geographic.
One in 8 Million
New York City is a city of characters. On the subway and in the streets, from the intensity of Midtown to the intimacy of neighbourhood blocks, is a 305-square mile parade of people with something to say. One in 8 Million is a collection of some of their passions and problems, relationships and routines, vocations and obsessions. A new story is added weekly.
It is truly amazing. Go check it out.
It is truly amazing. Go check it out.
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Camden Town
When Alana and I were in London, we went our separate ways out of an internet cafe - literally the second she left my side I walked up on this street for the first time.
I fell in love with Camden Town immediately. My the time I reached the market I knew I had fallen into the rabbit hole.
I fell in love with Camden Town immediately. My the time I reached the market I knew I had fallen into the rabbit hole.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
The Spike
It was late-afternoon. Forty-nine of us, forty-eight men and one woman, lay on the green waiting for the spike to open. We were too tired to talk much. We just sprawled about exhaustedly, with home-made cigarettes sticking out of our scrubby faces. Overhead the chestnut branches were covered with blossom and beyond that great woolly clouds floated almost motionless in a clear sky. Littered on the grass, we seemed dingy, urban riff-raff. We defiled the scene, like sardine-tins and paper bags on the seashore.
What talk there was ran on the Tramp Major of this spike. He was a devil, everyone agreed, a tartar, a tyrant, a bawling, blasphemous, uncharitable dog. You couldn't call your soul your own when he was about, and many a tramp had he kicked out in the middle of the night for giving a back answer. When You, came to be searched, he fair held you upside down and shook you. If you were caught with tobacco there was bell to. Pay, and if you went in with money (which is against the law) God help you.
I had eightpence on me. ‘For the love of Christ, mate,’ the old hands advised me, ‘don't you take it in. You'd get seven days for going into the spike with eightpence!’
So I buried my money in a hole under the hedge, marking the spot with a lump of flint. Then we set about smuggling our matches and tobacco, for it is forbidden to take these into nearly all spikes and one is supposed to surrender them at the gate. We hid them in our socks, except for the twenty or so per cent who had no socks, and had to carry the tobacco in their boots, even under their very toes. We stuffed our ankles with contraband until anyone seeing us might have imagined an outbreak of elephantiasis. But is an unwritten law that even the sternest Tramp Majors do not search below the knee, and in the end only one man was caught. This was Scotty, a little hairy tramp with a bastard accent sired by cockney out of Glasgow. His tin of cigarette ends fell out of his sock at the wrong moment, and was impounded.
At six, the sates swung open and we shuffled in. An official at the gate entered our names and other particulars in the register and took our bundles away from us. The woman was sent off to the workhouse, and we others into the spike. It was a gloomy, chilly, limewashed place, consisting only of a bathroom and dining-room and about a hundred narrow stone cells. The terrible Tramp Major met us at the door and herded us into the bathroom to be stripped and searched. He was a gruff, soldierly man of forty who gave the tramps no more ceremony than sheep at the dipping-pond, shoving them this way and that and shouting oaths in their faces. But when he came to myself, he looked hard at me, and said:
‘You are a gentleman?’
‘I suppose so,’ I said.
He gave me another long look. ‘Well, that's bloody bad luck, guv'nor,’ he said, ‘that's bloody bad luck, that is.’ And thereafter he took it into his head to treat me with compassion, even with a kind of respect.
It was a disgusting sight, that bathroom. All the indecent secrets of our underwear were exposed; the grime, the rents and patches, the bits of string doing duty for buttons, the layers upon layers of fragmentary garments, some of them mere collections of holes, held together by dirt. The room became a press m of steaming nudity, the sweaty odours of the tramps competing with the sickly, sub-faecal stench native to the spike. Some of the men refused the bath, and washed only their ‘toe-rags’, the horrid, greasy little clouts which tramps bind round their feet. Each of us had three minutes in which to bathe himself. Six greasy, slippery roller towels had to serve for the lot of us.
When we had bathed our own clothes were taken away from us, and we were dressed in the workhouse shirts, grey cotton things like nightshirts, reaching to the middle of the thigh. Then we were sent into the diningroom, where supper was set out on the deal tables. It was the invariable spike meal, always the same, whether breakfast, dinner or supper — half a pound of bread, a bit of margarine, and a pint of so-called tea. It took us five minutes to gulp down the cheap, noxious food. Then the Tramp Major served us with three cotton blankets each, and drove us off to our cells for the night. The doors were locked on the outside a little before seven in the evening, and would stay locked for the next twelve hours.
The cells measured eight feet by five, and, had no lighting apparatus except a tiny. barred window high up in the wall, and a spyhole in the door. There were no bugs, and we had bedsteads and straw palliasses, rare luxuries both. In many spikes one sleeps on a wooden shelf, and in some on the bare floor, with a rolled-up coat for pillow. With a cell to myself, and a bed, I was hoping for a sound night's rest. But I did not get it, for there is always something wrong in the spike, and the peculiar shortcoming here, as I discovered immediately, was the cold. May had begun, and in honour of the season — a little sacrifice to the gods of spring, perhaps — the authorities had cut off the steam from the hot pipes. The cotton blankets were almost useless. One spent the night in turning from side to side, falling asleep for ten minutes and waking half frozen, and watching for dawn.
As always happens in the spike, I had at last managed to fan comfortably asleep when it was time to get up. The Tramp. Major came marching down the passage with his heavy tread, unlocking the doors and yelling to us to show a leg. Promptly the passage was full of squalid shirt-clad figures rushing for the bathroom, for there was Only One tub full of water between us all in the morning, and it was first come first served. When I arrived twenty tramps had already washed their faces. I gave one glance at the black scum on top of the water, and decided to go dirty for the day.
We hurried into our clothes, and then went to the diningroom to bolt our breakfast. The bread was much worse than usual, because the military-minded idiot of a Tramp Major had cut it into slices overnight, so that it was as hard as ship's bisciut. But we were glad of our tea after the cold, restless night. I do not know what tramps would do without tea, or rather the stuff they miscall tea. It is their food, their medicine, their panacea for all evils. Without the half goon or so of it that they suck down a day, I truly believe they could not face their existence.
After breakfast we had to undress again for the medical inspection, which is a precaution against smallpox. It was three quarters of an hour before the doctor arrived, and one had time now to look about him and see what manner of men we were. It was an instructive sight. We stood shivering naked to the waist in two long ranks in the passage. The filtered light, bluish and cold, lighted us up with unmerciful clarity. No one can imagine, unless he has seen such a thing, what pot-bellied, degenerate curs we looked. Shock heads, hairy, crumpled faces, hollow chests, flat feet, sagging muscles — every kind of malformation and physical rottenness were there. All were flabby and discoloured, as all tramps are under their deceptive sunburn. Two or three figures wen there stay ineradicably in my mind. Old ‘Daddy’, aged seventy-four, with his truss, and his red, watering eyes, a herring-gutted starveling with sparse beard and sunken cheeks, looking like the corpse of Lazarus in some primitive picture: an imbecile, wandering hither and thither with vague giggles, coyly pleased because his trousers constantly slipped down and left him nude. But few of us were greatly better than these; there were not ten decently built men among us, and half, I believe, should have been in hospital.
This being Sunday, we were to be kept in the spike over the week-end. As soon as the doctor had gone we were herded back to the dining-room, and its door shut upon us. It was a lime-washed, stone-floored room, unspeakably dreary with its furniture of deal boards and benches, and its prison smell. The windows were so high up that one could not look outside, and the sole ornament was a set of Rules threatening dire penalties to any casual who misconducted himself. We packed the room so tight that one could not move an elbow without jostling somebody. Already, at eight o'clock in the morning, we were bored with our captivity. There was nothing to talk about except the petty gossip of the road, the good and bad spikes, the charitable and uncharitable counties, the iniquities of the police and the Salvation Army. Tramps hardly ever get away from these subjects; they talk, as it were, nothing but shop. They have nothing worthy to be called conversation, bemuse emptiness of belly leaves no speculation in their souls. The world is too much with them. Their next meal is never quite secure, and so they cannot think of anything except the next meal.
Two hours dragged by. Old Daddy, witless with age, sat silent, his back bent like a bow and his inflamed eyes dripping slowly on to the floor. George, a dirty old tramp notorious for the queer habit of sleeping in his hat, grumbled about a parcel of tommy that he had lost on the toad. Bill the moocher, the best built man of us all, a Herculean sturdy beggar who smelt of beer even after twelve hours in the spike, told tales of mooching, of pints stood him in the boozers, and of a parson who had peached to the police and got him seven days. William and, Fred, two young ex-fishermen from Norfolk, sang a sad song about Unhappy Bella, who was betrayed and died in the snow. The imbecile drivelled, about an imaginary toff, who had once given him two hundred and fifty-seven golden sovereigns. So the time passed, with dun talk and dull obscenities. Everyone was smoking, except Scotty, whose tobacco had been seized, and he was so miserable in his smokeless state that I stood him the makings of a cigarette. We smoked furtively, hiding our cigarettes like schoolboys when we heard the Tramp Major's step, for smoking though connived at, was officially forbidden.
Most of the tramps spent ten consecutive hours in this dreary room. It is hard to imagine how they put up with 11. I have come to think that boredom is the worst of all a tramp's evils, worse than hunger and discomfort, worse even than the constant feeling of being socially disgraced. It is a silly piece of cruelty to confine an ignorant man all day with nothing to do; it is like chaining a dog in a barrel. Only an educated man, who has consolations within himself, can endure confinement. Tramps, unlettered types as nearly all of them are, face their poverty with blank, resourceless minds. Fixed for ten hours on a comfortless bench, they know no way of occupying themselves, and if they think at all it is to whimper about hard luck and pine for work. They have not the stuff in them to endure the horrors of idleness. And so, since so much of their lives is spent in doing nothing, they suffer agonies from boredom.
I was much luckier than the others, because at ten o'clock the Tramp Major picked me out for the most coveted of all jobs in the spike, the job of helping in the workhouse kitchen. There was not really any work to be done there, and I was able to make off and hide in a shed used for storing potatoes, together with some workhouse paupers who were skulking to avoid the Sunday-morning service. There was a stove burning there, and comfortable packing cases to sit on, and back numbers of the Family Herald, and even a copy of Raffles from the workhouse library. It was paradise after the spike.
Also, I had my dinner from the workhouse table, and it was one of the biggest meals I have ever eaten. A tramp does not see such a meal twice in the year, in the spike or out of it. The paupers told me that they always gorged to the bursting point on Sundays, and went hungry six days of the week. When the meal was over the cook set me to do the washing-up, and told me to throw away the food that remained. The wastage was astonishing; great dishes of beef, and bucketfuls of broad and vegetables, were pitched away like rubbish, and then defiled with tea-leaves. I filled five dustbins to overflowing with good food. And while I did so my follow tramps were sitting two hundred yards away in the spike, their bellies half filled with the spike dinner of the everlasting bread and tea, and perhaps two cold boiled potatoes each in honour of Sunday. It appeared that the food was thrown away from deliberate policy, rather than that it should be given to the tramps.
At three I left the workhouse kitchen and went back to the spike. The, boredom in that crowded, comfortless room was now unbearable. Even smoking had ceased, for a tramp's only tobacco is picked-up cigarette ends, and, like a browsing beast, he starves if he is long away from the pavement-pasture. To occupy the time I talked with a rather superior tramp, a young carpenter who wore a collar and tie, and was on the road, he said, for lack of a set of tools. He kept a little aloof from the other tramps, and held himself more like a free man than a casual. He had literary tastes, too, and carried one of Scott's novels on all his wanderings. He told me he never entered a spike unless driven there by hunger, sleeping under hedges and behind ricks in preference. Along the south coast he had begged by day and slept in bathing-machines for weeks at a time.
We talked of life on the road. He criticized the system which makes a tramp spend fourteen hours a day in the spike, and the other ten in walking and dodging the police. He spoke of his own case — six months at the public charge for want of three pounds’ worth of tools. It was idiotic, he said.
Then I told him about the wastage of food in the workhouse kitchen, and what I thought of it. And at that he changed his tune immediately. I saw that I had awakened the pew-renter who sleeps in every English workman. Though he had been famished along with the rest, he at once saw reasons why the food should have been thrown away rather than given to the tramps. He admonished me quite severely.
‘They have to do it,’ he said. ‘If they made these places too pleasant you'd have all the scum of the country flocking into them. It's only the bad food as keeps all that scum away. These tramps are too lazy to work, that's all that's wrong with them. You don't want to go encouraging of them. They're scum.’
I produced arguments to prove him wrong, but he would not listen. He kept repeating:
‘You don't want to have any pity on these tramps — scum, they are. You don't want to judge them by the same standards as men like you and me. They're scum, just scum.’
It was interesting to see how subtly he disassociated himself from his fellow tramps. He has been on the road six months but in the sight of God, he seemed to imply, he was not a tramp. His body might be in the spike, but his spirit soared far away, in the pure aether of the middle classes.
The clock's hands crept round with excruciating slowness. We were too bored even to talk now, the only sound was of oaths and reverberating yawns. One would force his eyes away from the clock for what seemed an age, and then look back again to see that the hands had advanced three minutes. Ennui clogged our souls like cold mutton fat. Our bones ached because of it. The clock's hands stood at four, and supper was not till six, and there was nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.
At last six o'clock did come, and the Tramp Major and his assistant arrived with supper. The yawning tramps brisked up like lions at feeding-time. But the meal was a dismal disappointment. The bread, bad enough in the morning, was now positively uneatable; it was so hard that even the strongest jaws could make little impression on it. The older men went almost supperless, and not a man could finish his portion, hungry though most of us were. When we had finished, the blankets were served out immediately, and we were hustled off once more to the bare, chilly cells.
Thirteen hours went by. At seven we were awakened, and rushed forth to squabble over the water in the bathroom, and bolt our ration of bread and tea. Our time in the spike was up, but we could riot go until the doctor had examined us again, for the authorities have a terror of smallpox and its distribution by tramps. The doctor kept us waiting two hours this time, and it was ten o'clock before we finally escaped.
At last it was time to go, and we were let out into the yard. How bright everything looked, and how sweet the winds did blow, after the gloomy, reeking spike! The Tramp Major handed each man his bundle of confiscated possessions, and a hunk of bread and cheese for midday dinner, and then we took the road, hastening to get out of sight of the spike and its discipline, This was our interim of freedom. After a day and two nights of wasted time we had eight hours or so to take our recreation, to scour the roads for cigarette ends, to beg, and to look for work. Also, we had to make our ten, fifteen, or it might be twenty miles to the next spike, where the game would begin anew.
I disinterred my eightpence and took the road with Nobby, a respectable, downhearted tramp who carried a spare pair of boots and visited all the Labour Exchanges. Our late companions were scattering north, south, cast and west, like bugs into a mattress. Only the imbecile loitered at the spike gates, until the Tramp Major had to chase him away.
Nobby and I set out for Croydon. It was a quiet road, there were no cars passing, the blossom covered the chestnut trees like great wax candles. Everything was so quiet and smelt so clean, it was hard to realize that only a few minutes ago we had been packed with that band of prisoners in a stench of drains and soft soap. The others had all disappeared; we two seemed to be the only tramps on the road.
Then I heard a hurried step behind me, and felt a tap on my arm. It was little Scotty, who had run panting after us. He pulled a rusty tin box from his pocket. He wore a friendly smile, like a man who is repaying an obligation.
‘Here y'are, mate,’ he said cordially. ‘I owe you some fag ends. You stood me a smoke yesterday. The Tramp Major give me back my box of fag ends when we come out this morning. One good turn deserves another — here y'are.’
And he put four sodden, debauched. loathly cigarette ends into my hand.
-"The Spike" by George Orwell was first published by Adelphi — GB, London. — April 1931.
What talk there was ran on the Tramp Major of this spike. He was a devil, everyone agreed, a tartar, a tyrant, a bawling, blasphemous, uncharitable dog. You couldn't call your soul your own when he was about, and many a tramp had he kicked out in the middle of the night for giving a back answer. When You, came to be searched, he fair held you upside down and shook you. If you were caught with tobacco there was bell to. Pay, and if you went in with money (which is against the law) God help you.
I had eightpence on me. ‘For the love of Christ, mate,’ the old hands advised me, ‘don't you take it in. You'd get seven days for going into the spike with eightpence!’
So I buried my money in a hole under the hedge, marking the spot with a lump of flint. Then we set about smuggling our matches and tobacco, for it is forbidden to take these into nearly all spikes and one is supposed to surrender them at the gate. We hid them in our socks, except for the twenty or so per cent who had no socks, and had to carry the tobacco in their boots, even under their very toes. We stuffed our ankles with contraband until anyone seeing us might have imagined an outbreak of elephantiasis. But is an unwritten law that even the sternest Tramp Majors do not search below the knee, and in the end only one man was caught. This was Scotty, a little hairy tramp with a bastard accent sired by cockney out of Glasgow. His tin of cigarette ends fell out of his sock at the wrong moment, and was impounded.
At six, the sates swung open and we shuffled in. An official at the gate entered our names and other particulars in the register and took our bundles away from us. The woman was sent off to the workhouse, and we others into the spike. It was a gloomy, chilly, limewashed place, consisting only of a bathroom and dining-room and about a hundred narrow stone cells. The terrible Tramp Major met us at the door and herded us into the bathroom to be stripped and searched. He was a gruff, soldierly man of forty who gave the tramps no more ceremony than sheep at the dipping-pond, shoving them this way and that and shouting oaths in their faces. But when he came to myself, he looked hard at me, and said:
‘You are a gentleman?’
‘I suppose so,’ I said.
He gave me another long look. ‘Well, that's bloody bad luck, guv'nor,’ he said, ‘that's bloody bad luck, that is.’ And thereafter he took it into his head to treat me with compassion, even with a kind of respect.
It was a disgusting sight, that bathroom. All the indecent secrets of our underwear were exposed; the grime, the rents and patches, the bits of string doing duty for buttons, the layers upon layers of fragmentary garments, some of them mere collections of holes, held together by dirt. The room became a press m of steaming nudity, the sweaty odours of the tramps competing with the sickly, sub-faecal stench native to the spike. Some of the men refused the bath, and washed only their ‘toe-rags’, the horrid, greasy little clouts which tramps bind round their feet. Each of us had three minutes in which to bathe himself. Six greasy, slippery roller towels had to serve for the lot of us.
When we had bathed our own clothes were taken away from us, and we were dressed in the workhouse shirts, grey cotton things like nightshirts, reaching to the middle of the thigh. Then we were sent into the diningroom, where supper was set out on the deal tables. It was the invariable spike meal, always the same, whether breakfast, dinner or supper — half a pound of bread, a bit of margarine, and a pint of so-called tea. It took us five minutes to gulp down the cheap, noxious food. Then the Tramp Major served us with three cotton blankets each, and drove us off to our cells for the night. The doors were locked on the outside a little before seven in the evening, and would stay locked for the next twelve hours.
The cells measured eight feet by five, and, had no lighting apparatus except a tiny. barred window high up in the wall, and a spyhole in the door. There were no bugs, and we had bedsteads and straw palliasses, rare luxuries both. In many spikes one sleeps on a wooden shelf, and in some on the bare floor, with a rolled-up coat for pillow. With a cell to myself, and a bed, I was hoping for a sound night's rest. But I did not get it, for there is always something wrong in the spike, and the peculiar shortcoming here, as I discovered immediately, was the cold. May had begun, and in honour of the season — a little sacrifice to the gods of spring, perhaps — the authorities had cut off the steam from the hot pipes. The cotton blankets were almost useless. One spent the night in turning from side to side, falling asleep for ten minutes and waking half frozen, and watching for dawn.
As always happens in the spike, I had at last managed to fan comfortably asleep when it was time to get up. The Tramp. Major came marching down the passage with his heavy tread, unlocking the doors and yelling to us to show a leg. Promptly the passage was full of squalid shirt-clad figures rushing for the bathroom, for there was Only One tub full of water between us all in the morning, and it was first come first served. When I arrived twenty tramps had already washed their faces. I gave one glance at the black scum on top of the water, and decided to go dirty for the day.
We hurried into our clothes, and then went to the diningroom to bolt our breakfast. The bread was much worse than usual, because the military-minded idiot of a Tramp Major had cut it into slices overnight, so that it was as hard as ship's bisciut. But we were glad of our tea after the cold, restless night. I do not know what tramps would do without tea, or rather the stuff they miscall tea. It is their food, their medicine, their panacea for all evils. Without the half goon or so of it that they suck down a day, I truly believe they could not face their existence.
After breakfast we had to undress again for the medical inspection, which is a precaution against smallpox. It was three quarters of an hour before the doctor arrived, and one had time now to look about him and see what manner of men we were. It was an instructive sight. We stood shivering naked to the waist in two long ranks in the passage. The filtered light, bluish and cold, lighted us up with unmerciful clarity. No one can imagine, unless he has seen such a thing, what pot-bellied, degenerate curs we looked. Shock heads, hairy, crumpled faces, hollow chests, flat feet, sagging muscles — every kind of malformation and physical rottenness were there. All were flabby and discoloured, as all tramps are under their deceptive sunburn. Two or three figures wen there stay ineradicably in my mind. Old ‘Daddy’, aged seventy-four, with his truss, and his red, watering eyes, a herring-gutted starveling with sparse beard and sunken cheeks, looking like the corpse of Lazarus in some primitive picture: an imbecile, wandering hither and thither with vague giggles, coyly pleased because his trousers constantly slipped down and left him nude. But few of us were greatly better than these; there were not ten decently built men among us, and half, I believe, should have been in hospital.
This being Sunday, we were to be kept in the spike over the week-end. As soon as the doctor had gone we were herded back to the dining-room, and its door shut upon us. It was a lime-washed, stone-floored room, unspeakably dreary with its furniture of deal boards and benches, and its prison smell. The windows were so high up that one could not look outside, and the sole ornament was a set of Rules threatening dire penalties to any casual who misconducted himself. We packed the room so tight that one could not move an elbow without jostling somebody. Already, at eight o'clock in the morning, we were bored with our captivity. There was nothing to talk about except the petty gossip of the road, the good and bad spikes, the charitable and uncharitable counties, the iniquities of the police and the Salvation Army. Tramps hardly ever get away from these subjects; they talk, as it were, nothing but shop. They have nothing worthy to be called conversation, bemuse emptiness of belly leaves no speculation in their souls. The world is too much with them. Their next meal is never quite secure, and so they cannot think of anything except the next meal.
Two hours dragged by. Old Daddy, witless with age, sat silent, his back bent like a bow and his inflamed eyes dripping slowly on to the floor. George, a dirty old tramp notorious for the queer habit of sleeping in his hat, grumbled about a parcel of tommy that he had lost on the toad. Bill the moocher, the best built man of us all, a Herculean sturdy beggar who smelt of beer even after twelve hours in the spike, told tales of mooching, of pints stood him in the boozers, and of a parson who had peached to the police and got him seven days. William and, Fred, two young ex-fishermen from Norfolk, sang a sad song about Unhappy Bella, who was betrayed and died in the snow. The imbecile drivelled, about an imaginary toff, who had once given him two hundred and fifty-seven golden sovereigns. So the time passed, with dun talk and dull obscenities. Everyone was smoking, except Scotty, whose tobacco had been seized, and he was so miserable in his smokeless state that I stood him the makings of a cigarette. We smoked furtively, hiding our cigarettes like schoolboys when we heard the Tramp Major's step, for smoking though connived at, was officially forbidden.
Most of the tramps spent ten consecutive hours in this dreary room. It is hard to imagine how they put up with 11. I have come to think that boredom is the worst of all a tramp's evils, worse than hunger and discomfort, worse even than the constant feeling of being socially disgraced. It is a silly piece of cruelty to confine an ignorant man all day with nothing to do; it is like chaining a dog in a barrel. Only an educated man, who has consolations within himself, can endure confinement. Tramps, unlettered types as nearly all of them are, face their poverty with blank, resourceless minds. Fixed for ten hours on a comfortless bench, they know no way of occupying themselves, and if they think at all it is to whimper about hard luck and pine for work. They have not the stuff in them to endure the horrors of idleness. And so, since so much of their lives is spent in doing nothing, they suffer agonies from boredom.
I was much luckier than the others, because at ten o'clock the Tramp Major picked me out for the most coveted of all jobs in the spike, the job of helping in the workhouse kitchen. There was not really any work to be done there, and I was able to make off and hide in a shed used for storing potatoes, together with some workhouse paupers who were skulking to avoid the Sunday-morning service. There was a stove burning there, and comfortable packing cases to sit on, and back numbers of the Family Herald, and even a copy of Raffles from the workhouse library. It was paradise after the spike.
Also, I had my dinner from the workhouse table, and it was one of the biggest meals I have ever eaten. A tramp does not see such a meal twice in the year, in the spike or out of it. The paupers told me that they always gorged to the bursting point on Sundays, and went hungry six days of the week. When the meal was over the cook set me to do the washing-up, and told me to throw away the food that remained. The wastage was astonishing; great dishes of beef, and bucketfuls of broad and vegetables, were pitched away like rubbish, and then defiled with tea-leaves. I filled five dustbins to overflowing with good food. And while I did so my follow tramps were sitting two hundred yards away in the spike, their bellies half filled with the spike dinner of the everlasting bread and tea, and perhaps two cold boiled potatoes each in honour of Sunday. It appeared that the food was thrown away from deliberate policy, rather than that it should be given to the tramps.
At three I left the workhouse kitchen and went back to the spike. The, boredom in that crowded, comfortless room was now unbearable. Even smoking had ceased, for a tramp's only tobacco is picked-up cigarette ends, and, like a browsing beast, he starves if he is long away from the pavement-pasture. To occupy the time I talked with a rather superior tramp, a young carpenter who wore a collar and tie, and was on the road, he said, for lack of a set of tools. He kept a little aloof from the other tramps, and held himself more like a free man than a casual. He had literary tastes, too, and carried one of Scott's novels on all his wanderings. He told me he never entered a spike unless driven there by hunger, sleeping under hedges and behind ricks in preference. Along the south coast he had begged by day and slept in bathing-machines for weeks at a time.
We talked of life on the road. He criticized the system which makes a tramp spend fourteen hours a day in the spike, and the other ten in walking and dodging the police. He spoke of his own case — six months at the public charge for want of three pounds’ worth of tools. It was idiotic, he said.
Then I told him about the wastage of food in the workhouse kitchen, and what I thought of it. And at that he changed his tune immediately. I saw that I had awakened the pew-renter who sleeps in every English workman. Though he had been famished along with the rest, he at once saw reasons why the food should have been thrown away rather than given to the tramps. He admonished me quite severely.
‘They have to do it,’ he said. ‘If they made these places too pleasant you'd have all the scum of the country flocking into them. It's only the bad food as keeps all that scum away. These tramps are too lazy to work, that's all that's wrong with them. You don't want to go encouraging of them. They're scum.’
I produced arguments to prove him wrong, but he would not listen. He kept repeating:
‘You don't want to have any pity on these tramps — scum, they are. You don't want to judge them by the same standards as men like you and me. They're scum, just scum.’
It was interesting to see how subtly he disassociated himself from his fellow tramps. He has been on the road six months but in the sight of God, he seemed to imply, he was not a tramp. His body might be in the spike, but his spirit soared far away, in the pure aether of the middle classes.
The clock's hands crept round with excruciating slowness. We were too bored even to talk now, the only sound was of oaths and reverberating yawns. One would force his eyes away from the clock for what seemed an age, and then look back again to see that the hands had advanced three minutes. Ennui clogged our souls like cold mutton fat. Our bones ached because of it. The clock's hands stood at four, and supper was not till six, and there was nothing left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.
At last six o'clock did come, and the Tramp Major and his assistant arrived with supper. The yawning tramps brisked up like lions at feeding-time. But the meal was a dismal disappointment. The bread, bad enough in the morning, was now positively uneatable; it was so hard that even the strongest jaws could make little impression on it. The older men went almost supperless, and not a man could finish his portion, hungry though most of us were. When we had finished, the blankets were served out immediately, and we were hustled off once more to the bare, chilly cells.
Thirteen hours went by. At seven we were awakened, and rushed forth to squabble over the water in the bathroom, and bolt our ration of bread and tea. Our time in the spike was up, but we could riot go until the doctor had examined us again, for the authorities have a terror of smallpox and its distribution by tramps. The doctor kept us waiting two hours this time, and it was ten o'clock before we finally escaped.
At last it was time to go, and we were let out into the yard. How bright everything looked, and how sweet the winds did blow, after the gloomy, reeking spike! The Tramp Major handed each man his bundle of confiscated possessions, and a hunk of bread and cheese for midday dinner, and then we took the road, hastening to get out of sight of the spike and its discipline, This was our interim of freedom. After a day and two nights of wasted time we had eight hours or so to take our recreation, to scour the roads for cigarette ends, to beg, and to look for work. Also, we had to make our ten, fifteen, or it might be twenty miles to the next spike, where the game would begin anew.
I disinterred my eightpence and took the road with Nobby, a respectable, downhearted tramp who carried a spare pair of boots and visited all the Labour Exchanges. Our late companions were scattering north, south, cast and west, like bugs into a mattress. Only the imbecile loitered at the spike gates, until the Tramp Major had to chase him away.
Nobby and I set out for Croydon. It was a quiet road, there were no cars passing, the blossom covered the chestnut trees like great wax candles. Everything was so quiet and smelt so clean, it was hard to realize that only a few minutes ago we had been packed with that band of prisoners in a stench of drains and soft soap. The others had all disappeared; we two seemed to be the only tramps on the road.
Then I heard a hurried step behind me, and felt a tap on my arm. It was little Scotty, who had run panting after us. He pulled a rusty tin box from his pocket. He wore a friendly smile, like a man who is repaying an obligation.
‘Here y'are, mate,’ he said cordially. ‘I owe you some fag ends. You stood me a smoke yesterday. The Tramp Major give me back my box of fag ends when we come out this morning. One good turn deserves another — here y'are.’
And he put four sodden, debauched. loathly cigarette ends into my hand.
-"The Spike" by George Orwell was first published by Adelphi — GB, London. — April 1931.
Oscar Wilde - La Mer
La Mer
by Oscar Wilde
A white mist drifts across the shrouds,
A wild moon in this wintry sky
Gleams like an angry lion's eye
Out of a mane of tawny clouds.
The muffled steersman at the wheel
Is but a shadow in the gloom;
-And in the throbbing engine-room
Leap the long rods of polished steel.
The shattered storm has left its trace
Upon this huge and heaving dome,
For the thin threads of yellow foam
Float on the waves like ravelled lace.
by Oscar Wilde
A white mist drifts across the shrouds,
A wild moon in this wintry sky
Gleams like an angry lion's eye
Out of a mane of tawny clouds.
The muffled steersman at the wheel
Is but a shadow in the gloom;
-And in the throbbing engine-room
Leap the long rods of polished steel.
The shattered storm has left its trace
Upon this huge and heaving dome,
For the thin threads of yellow foam
Float on the waves like ravelled lace.
Oscar Wilde - Les Silhouettes
Les Silhouettes
by Oscar Wilde
The sea is flecked with bars of grey,
The dull dead wind is out of tune,
And like a withered leaf the moon
Is blown across the stormy bay.
Etched clear upon the pallid sand
Lies the black boat: a sailor boy
Clambers aboard in careless joy
With laughing face and gleaming hand.
And overhead the curlews cry,
Where through the dusky upland grass
The young brown-throated reapers pass,
Like silhouettes against the sky.
by Oscar Wilde
The sea is flecked with bars of grey,
The dull dead wind is out of tune,
And like a withered leaf the moon
Is blown across the stormy bay.
Etched clear upon the pallid sand
Lies the black boat: a sailor boy
Clambers aboard in careless joy
With laughing face and gleaming hand.
And overhead the curlews cry,
Where through the dusky upland grass
The young brown-throated reapers pass,
Like silhouettes against the sky.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Monday, March 2, 2009
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Mitar Tarabic
Mitar Tarabic (1829-1899), an illiterate peasant from a small Serbian village called Kremna, had experienced prophetic visions. Being a religious person and having a local Serbian orthodox priest for a godfather, he told this priest about his episodes of seeing into the future. The priest, Zaharije Zaharic (1836-1918), wrote down everything in a small notebook, which was damaged by fire in 1943 when his family house was destroyed by the occupying Bulgarian army. This text is now in the possession of the family of Zaharic's great-grandson, Mr. Dejan Malenkovic.
All of his prophecies were correct in detail. There are many yet to unfold.
Predictions:
In the beginning Russia will not wage war, but when attacked by the evil army, they will fight back. There is a red Czar on the Russian throne.
Here, men with stars on their foreheads will appear. They will rule Uzice and this region for exactly 73 days, and then fleeing their enemies, they will go over the river Drina.
These are times of hunger and great evil... Serbs will fight and butcher each other. The invading enemy looks upon Serbian evil hatred and laughs at us.
A man with blue eyes on a white horse appears among our people. A star shines on his forehead. The evil enemy will hunt him all over our country, in the woods, over rivers and upon the sea, but in vain. The man will gather a mighty army and free occupied Belgrade. He will chase away the enemy from our country, and our kingdom will be bigger than ever.
Russia will make an alliance with other great kingdoms over the seas, and they will burn down the crooked anti-cross and free all the enslaved people of Europe.
Historical facts:
1941 - After being attacked by Nazi Germany, Russia enters the war. They are led by their Communist "red Czar", Stalin.
In Yugoslavia the communist party led by Josip Broz Tito, the man with blue eyes on a white horse, starts the resistance against the Germans and Italians, as well as against the Serbian and Croat national extremists who are butchering each other.
The symbol of Tito's partisans is a red star, which they proudly wear on their hats (exactly on the forehead).
The first territory liberated by the partisans is the region around the city of Uzice. They hold it against a superior force for exactly 73 days.
The partisans are forced to flee over the river Drina to Bosnia. The guerilla war was fought all over Yugoslavia for 4 long years... in the woods, over rivers and upon the sea.
1945 - Yugoslavia is liberated. Tito enters Belgrade on a white horse and makes the Royal Palace his life-long residence.
Communist Yugoslavia is formed, and gains more territory from the neighbouring state of Italy.
The Allies free Europe. The Nazi swastika is crushed, and the the Second World War is over.
About Me
- Name: Tulip Press
Senka Kovacevic lives in Vancouver, British Columbia and currently works as an Art and Antique Conservator. Born in Novi Sad, Serbia, she moved to Canada in 1988. She pursued a 10 year career in Rhythmic Gymnastics, representing Canada as Canadian Champion, competing at the 1999 World Championships and many other international competitions. She performed with Cirque du Soliel for the APEC Presidential Gala, is a 3-time recipient of the Premier’s Award for Excellence in Sport, and was nominated for YWCA’s Woman of Distinction Award in 2001. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Anatomy and Physiology from the University of British Columbia, and in 2006 wrote and directed her first feature length film. Where The Sun Reposes is her first book of poetry. Send Senka an Email
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