Alligator Playground

Ron Delph and His Fight with King Arthur

‘WELL, CHILDREN,’ the plummy voiced teacher said, ‘this morning I’m going to tell you a story about King Arthur and his Knights.’

Ron Delph was five at the time — or was it six? — and looking back he supposed it must in any case have been very early on. What nights? he wondered, leering from his favourite place on the back row.

‘His knights,’ she said, and it felt as if her voice was right inside Ron’s head. Nights were dark, even in summer, and he would rather hear about King Arthur’s days, because in daytime everybody could see what they were doing, so their antics were bound to be more interesting.

‘King Arthur had twenty-four knights.’ The teacher walked to the blackboard and wrote the number in blue chalk. ‘Twenty-four stalwart knights.’

Twenty-four nights wasn’t long, just over three weeks, even less than a month, and if each night was stalwart it must have been darker than an ordinary night. In any case what was a king doing, even if his name was Arthur, going round at night? A king should be in his castle at night talking to his queen or courtiers about boiling the oil for when another king attacked the castle. If she wasn’t going to tell us about King Arthur’s days, Ron Delph thought, I’d rather hear the story of Robin Hood and Maid Marian.

‘King Arthur,’ she said, ‘ruled England in the olden days.’

He wanted to groan: not them fucking olden days again. We’re allus getting them rammed down our chops. But he didn’t groan, because teachers with plummy voices could have very sharp knuckles. He didn’t need to have been in school more than a few months to sense that. He was only five or six. He wasn’t born yesterday.

‘And in those days’ — they were almost listening — ‘everybody was happy, because King Arthur was a good king.’ She screamed at somebody. ‘If you fall off your seat again I’ll send you out. Yes, you. You! It’s you I mean, you!’

He realised with a shock that the ‘you’ was him, the most important connection he’d made in his life up to then, though it had become his safeguard ever since to know that you and me were the same person, especially when a policeman decides that’s how it is. If only he had known how quick he was learning he could have kept it and become a millionaire instead of a poet.

‘King Arthur was a just ruler.’ If he was just a ruler why not say straight out he wasn’t bent? Nobody expected a king to be bent. Only old men and old women were bent. They were bent when they walked, so they could never be rulers. That was why the king wasn’t old. He had to be straight to be a ruler.

‘His people loved him. The Romans had left, and the Saxons had not yet arrived, so for a hundred years there was peace and prosperity everywhere.’

He didn’t believe her. If you had a king he lived in a castle, and in a castle the oil was always on the boil to stop people capturing it. You had battles, with lots of killing.

‘He pulled a sword called Excalibur out of a stone.’

There was a picture in the book, and she passed it around for them to look at so that they would believe her. The sword was long, like a cross, and there was this bloke with a helmet on and a skirt round his waist heaving the sword out of a slab of rock. The next picture showed that he’d done it, but how can you pull a piece of steel out of a stone? You can’t. First of all, how can you push it in? You can’t. And if you can’t push it in, then you can’t get it out. So Ron learned something else, that you can’t believe anything you see in a book, even if it is a picture.

He didn’t go back to that school after the second day because he stared too long at the sword and rock when the teacher pushed the picture under his nose. He was unable to stop looking, his fixed eyes trying their best to see how such a thing could be done as pulling a sword out when it was stuck fast in a rock. Staring and staring, his eyes got so hard that he didn’t feel they belonged to him anymore. They became stones. The colours of the picture glistened and swam, and his mouth locked and his legs shook, and he fell to the ground, ripping the book to pieces. The teacher was very clever to notice that he was having a fit, and to send for his mother.

‘It’s nerves,’ the doctor said, ‘that’s all,’ but he screamed it was that bleeding picture the teacher had tried to melt into his brain. She had opened his skull with a sword and poured the book inside and stitched him up again, and the headache made him fall into a fit, because how could a man even though he was a king pull a sword no matter how strong he was out of a piece of rock almost as big as a cliff? They’d told him a lie and he didn’t like it. King Arthur was a tricky bastard just like the rest, though maybe he had never pulled a sword out of a rock at all and people only said he had. People said all sorts of barmy things to kids.

His mother believed him, yet he could tell she didn’t, and only said she did till he was better. Then she found another school for him to go to, so that he would have preferred it if she hadn’t believed him in the first place.

But everybody had to go to school. He learned arithmetic, which wasn’t lies. He learned to read and write as well, and liked it. It was a special school for kids who weren’t quite proper in the head, but he didn’t mind. He opened a book and saw a camel. In history he saw a horse and chariot. Every morning there was free milk and then dinner, and in the afternoon they slept. There was more play than learning, but whenever he turned a page he felt his heart bump and his lips twitch and his legs quake in case he suddenly saw that rock and sword and King Arthur heaving for all his guts were worth to get it out. At that school he never did, because they were all a bit mental already and the teachers knew better than to do anything what would send them outright crackers. King Arthur was for kids who believed every word about it.

The closest to reminding him of that picture was one day when a boy at the chair in front lifted his finger for Ron to look at. The finger had a rusty nail through the middle, which was worse than seeing a sword in a rock. Dirty blood seeped through a bit of hanky, and Ron couldn’t understand why he had only a sombre look on his face and not a squint of agony.

Poor sod, Ron thought, look what’s happened to him. He must have said summat while having his porridge that morning that his father didn’t like, so his father had tried to nail him to the ground, but he had pulled his finger clear and escaped to school, wrapping a bit of old rag round it before getting here.

It was the most horrible thing he’d seen in his life, and what made him do what he did he didn’t know, but he gripped the kid’s wrist and with the other hand took the end of the nail and pulled as hard as dotty Arthur must have tugged to get that sword out of the rock. What had started as a joke, a trick nail hooked around the finger to look like real, became a bitter tug o’ war with Ron pulling one way and his pal (a pal no longer) almost dragged along the floor, howling with rage, and pain from a sprained finger.

No wonder they thought he was insane from a very early age, but he was merely gullible and easy-going, wanting to believe the world was nothing but good, which it was far from and so no laughing matter. The teacher saw his error but was frightened at his intensity. He had only wanted to get the nail out of his mate’s finger and suck the wound better so that he wouldn’t go on suffering.

He stayed six more months at that school, but every morning they expected him to run amok or go berserk, and kept such an eye on him, talking to him only as if he was a baby and giving him everything he asked for (within reason), that he felt himself turning into an eternal puppy dog.

When his parents left to live in another house they couldn’t be bothered to get up early and put him on the bus anymore, so he went to a normal school near where they lived, by which time he was convinced he had left that rock and sword world forever.

Life was normal, and he lived like any other kid and loved it. One Christmas his sister Molly got a present from Aunt Dolly, and when she opened the book there it was as large as life, a story about King Arthur and a whole-page picture of him pulling that shining sword from the green rock. They were sitting on the bed, and he jerked back so quick from the shock he rolled over his brand new fire engine and bent the ladder.

When he tried to snatch the book Molly laughed and said she would make his nose bleed if he didn’t pipe down and leave her alone. ‘It’s my book, but when I’ve read it twenty-seven times I’ll let you have a look,’ she said. ‘Till then you’ve got your own toys, so you’d better not nick any of mine.’

What could he do? That book haunted him for days. He’d never thought to see one in the house. Molly knew he felt something special about it, so read it aloud to torment him, and though he pressed his fingers to his ears he couldn’t help but hear the words she spoke. His mother told Molly to stop tormenting him but she took no notice. Father laughed and egged her on: ‘Now we know what to do when we want to get some life out of him. He looks half-dead most of the time.’

The anguish wore off, fingers at his ears relaxing till, little by little, he got the whole story of King Arthur and his loony knights. Even at school the tale came up too often for him to ignore, or think for a minute he would ever stop hearing it. The trouble was that the others in the class lapped the yarn up. They loved every word. They wanted the story over and over again, and the teacher — a man now — would open the book for the last period on Friday afternoon, and begin to read where he had left off the previous Friday, with such pleasure on his face and tremors in his voice as if he was an actor on the telly that the whole world adored, one adventure rolling into another. And when King Arthur was mortally wounded (he relished that word mortally) and when his sword was slung into the lake, and his body was carried away in a boat, you would have thought the whole class was about to burst into tears the room went so quiet.

But I ask you — chuck a sword into the water, and a hand comes up and makes a grab! It’s as far-fetched as a man pulling it in the first place out of a slab of rock. I reckon a swimmer underwater just happened to be there at that moment and had the gumption to lift his hand up when he knew the sword was going to be thrown in. He caught the handle a treat, yanked the whole fucking lot under, swam to a quiet part of the reeds, and made off with it hidden in his cloak to a town market where he got a good price and was blind drunk on the proceeds for weeks afterwards. What other explanation can there be?

When the teacher got to that place in the book Ron laughed out loud. You’d have thought a firecracker on Guy Fawkes night had burst among them. Everyone jerked their necks and looked around. Teacher stopped reading, and stared.

‘Come out, Delph,’ he shouted.

Well, of course he would say that, wouldn’t he? Ron thought. You can’t have your mam write a note to the teacher telling him I wasn’t to hear anything about King Arthur or I would go off my head. His hands twitched as he stood up.

‘Come out when I tell you,’ the teacher screamed, glasses joggling up and down on his winkle picker nose, as if his long hair was going to fall off. Ron was fixed to the spot, and it would have been as hard to pull himself free as to get that tinpot sword out of the rock. Then the notion came to him, at the worst possible moment, that the rock hadn’t been rock but cardboard, and tricky King Arthur had only made a show of pulling his guts out to get it free. This made him laugh again, a screeching hee-haw as if from a horse whose head was trapped in a door.

The teacher smashed his fist on the desk, because the others were starting to laugh. ‘Come here when I tell you, donkey, oaf, nincompoop, fool,’ or words like that, only worse. All Ron’s troubles sprang from that sword and rock of batty King Arthur, otherwise he would have had a blameless life. He had stopped the teacher dead from reading his favourite story, which was bad, he knew, since that was his only way of keeping them quiet. But Ron didn’t go. He couldn’t move. His feet went right through the floor to the middle of the earth. The teacher came to him, pushed him back into his seat, rattled him over the head, and went back to his desk holding his hand for pain.

From then on Ron stopped hating King Arthur and his Knights, because he thought they were just funny. There was nothing else to do but laugh, and make up his own daft bits to wile away the boring time when the book was being read to them, knowing or at least hoping that on going to another school after he was eleven all that stuff would be a thing of the past.

On opening his book again after making Ron’s head ring the teacher couldn’t get the same shaky tone to his voice that he’d had before. His reading went dull when it wasn’t shaky, which served him right, Ron thought, for feeding us too much of that old King Arthur rammel.

The trouble was that though he considered it funny in his waking time, Ron dreamed about King Arthur and his Knights, and didn’t think that was good for him at all. When Arthur pulled the sword out it was human flesh instead of rock, and when the sword was thrown into the lake a snake’s mouth caught it, the long coiling body locked around Ron who was held in the slime below the surface. Evil Merlin the witch doctor led him in chains through crimson blood-dripping caverns to chop him up and cook him in a cauldron for the Knights’ supper. An eagle pecked his eyes out, and when he wanted to wake up he couldn’t even open the holes that were left.

He was still dreaming when he thought he was awake and blind, and saw the words — even though by now he had no eyes — written in fire in the sky which said: ‘You are having a knightmare.’ His mother and father were shaking with fright when he woke up screaming instead of laughing. The dreams went on for weeks, and his sister had to live with Aunt Dolly till he didn’t have them anymore, and she could stand to be in the same house again without having bad dreams herself even during the day.

Ron soon learned that you can never get away from King Arthur. Everybody in this country thinks he was the greatest king of the olden days, he told himself, when everybody ate apples and honey and drank mead, and the sun shone except when rain poured down to water the crops, and the men had a bit of excitement now and again when they went off singing to have a shindig with the Saxons. In other words, a marvellous time was had by everyone, especially if you were a knight.

He liked his next school, knowing he was no longer an infant, and thinking he had left that King Arthur shit behind. A few weeks into the term the teacher got up in class one day and said: ‘We’re going to put on a play, and I’ll need quite a few actors for the parts.’

‘What play is it, sir?’ a bumcrawler called.

He straightened his Mao jacket. ‘Wait and see.’

Why not? They didn’t mind. All the time it was game or gamble, wait and get a shock or a nice surprise. It made life exciting, especially since they had nothing else to do but learn.

‘I want to know, first, how many budding actors we have in the class.’

His sister Molly had been given a cut-out theatre and they had put on plays, at first making them up as they went along, but then talking it over before starting, which way made the play last longer. They would take turns acting ‘God of the World’, and talk about making things happen that worried the other most. If he being God wanted all the toys in England to come into his room she would act a group of parents telling him it wasn’t right to rob children of their toys. Then she would play a boy or girl who would tell him what they thought of him. Or she would play the owner of a toy factory, saying he didn’t like — and neither did his workmen and women — that all the toys should go only to a greedy little bastard like him even if he was God.

You could imagine how they would go on for hours, but soon they got bored at every new idea even before they had put it on, and for more excitement acted at Punches and Judies till they made each other’s noses bleed. They even got fed up with that, and then their mother caught them one Saturday afternoon up to what she called ‘dirty tricks under the stairs’, saying that was enough of that.

Ron shot his hand up when the teacher asked for actors. Only a couple more did, so half a dozen had to be cajoled into putting their names down. Ron fancied himself on the assembly hall stage dressed as a clown or a sailor, tramp, prophet or pilot. He couldn’t think of what the theme would be but knew it must be something interesting.

‘Now I’ll tell you the text,’ the teacher said. ‘You’ll all be pleased to know — at least I hope so — that it’s one I’ve written myself. It isn’t Shakespeare, or Sheridan, or Shaw or Brecht — so you needn’t groan, Delph — but something based on a time when this island of ours was a happier and more interesting place than it is today. It all happened a long time ago, when men were free and respected and full of dignity…’

He knew already. He wanted to cross his heart and die. He should have known. It was that King Arthur and his Knights turning up again. His veins were bumping, and all he wanted to do was jeer, though didn’t dare, having a good idea where it would lead.

The teacher looked at him while his batty talk went on because he’d been the first to volunteer, so thought he was dead keen to get on that stage. Thank God I’m not tall enough to be King Arthur, who would have to yank a sword out of a stone, because he knew he would never do it. He would push it further and further in or, if he did get it out, would slay the first fucking Knight that clapped him on the back, and called him King of Camelot for doing so. He couldn’t believe he’d been so daft as to get trapped in his own deepest pit.

‘This is the list of characters.’ The teacher read them out and told Ron who he would be. ‘It’s late now, so we’ll go through the play next week.’ They groaned at being left on tenterhooks, but the teacher smiled and said the tale was so good it could easily wait. ‘There are two months to go before the performance, so there’ll be plenty of time for rehearsals to get you into shape.’ He tapped his pack of papers. ‘I’ll have some photocopies made, and give out one between the two of you.’

King Arthur, he kept on saying to himself on the way home, King Arthur again, and when his mother said he was looking glum at teatime he said it was because he was going to be in a play at school. ‘Well,’ she laughed, ‘that’s not so bad. You’ll enjoy it, if I know you.’

Tea slopped in his saucer when the biscuit he was soaking broke and dropped three quarters into the cup. ‘It’s about King Arthur and his Knights.’

‘So what?’ she said. ‘You won’t be him, will you?’

It turned out that he was to be Mordred, his son. So More Dread he was. ‘I hope they’ll invite me and your father to see it,’ his mother said when he told her.

He held his shaking hand: they were bound to.

Merlin the magician brought More Dread up, he learned, and his job was to kill King Arthur. This news cheered him no end, because he’d always wanted to put a stop to that sword waving know-all of the round table. Unfortunately the cast only had wooden swords, and even the biggest stab he could give wouldn’t go in the King’s guts. In any case, Arthur was played by a pal of his, and he had no intention of hurting him.

‘You’ve got to look furtive and sly,’ the teacher shouted at him during a rehearsal, ‘and not have that silly smirk all over your face. You’re King Arthur’s son, and you’re going to kill him, so act as if you might, but not so that he would guess.’

It was hard to do both, but he tried. In fact he tried too well, because he became so furtive and sly that the teacher didn’t know what he had in store. ‘You’ve got to be two people,’ the teacher said, and two people he made up his mind to be because as far as he was concerned one person had never been enough. Two was obviously better than one. Two was double, which meant that you could do twice as much. In fact if you were two people and people only thought you were one you might even get to doing four times as much, which was better still, except that four might be a lot to look after.

Never mind, he said, listening one night in bed to the speech he was to give near the end of the play, a part the teacher liked because when he remembered all the lines and spoke them even he clapped at the end.

He told Ron not to strut as he walked across the stage, but that was what the speech called for, and he couldn’t help himself. ‘Walk,’ the teacher told him. ‘And remember, you don’t mean what you say. It’s not really how you feel. You’re trying to hide the real you who will kill him when the time comes.’

But the other part of him took control, though when the teacher shouted advice he said it as close as he could to the way he wanted:

Ron strutted like a cockerel, and the teacher clapped when he made the words as clear as if he believed in them. In his sleep the black-red dreams came back, and the only way he could fight them off was by making up his own speeches to replace those the teacher had sweated blood to write, thinking they were the best poetry in the world. Because he only wanted to save himself Ron couldn’t help himself, and he altered the speech as easy as pie. He’d never known he could do his own stuff so well, though it only came a few lines at a time, but in the morning he remembered them and wrote them down until the next two came. His dreams were H for Horror films, but with writing they didn’t even get started while working out what he was going to say.

With so much mist in the streets it was a wonder anybody turned up, but the hall was three-quarters full, and their teacher was happy as, behind the stage, he ran from one to another of his actors with his hands full of paper making sure they remembered their lines. Ron knew his, right enough. He could hear people laughing and talking out front through the big curtains, which made some of the lads pale and nervous. He felt as calm and brave as if he really was one of King Arthur’s screwy Knights.

The play seemed to go on forever, and in between walking on and off and remembering his lines Ron told himself that never again in his life was he going to have anything to do with King Arthur and his Crazies. He was only waiting to mouth his speech at the start of the last act, surprised all through at how the people were loving their performance, and in some way sorry he wasn’t one of them who could see the play from the seats they were in, though he knew he would have hated it and maybe even gone into a fit if he had been.

All his life he had been persecuted by King Arthur and, now that the curtain was opening for the last time he was going to have his chance. He puffed out his chest and lifted his sword as if it weighed a ton, and strode to the row of lightbulbs at the front of the stage to chant his lines, not able to see anybody but knowing they could see him. He had been told not to shout, ‘but rather to recite,’ yet called out at the fiercest register of his voice, as if he wanted to be heard all over the city and even the world:

People clapped and laughed, and somebody called out: ‘Good old More Dread,’ and when the commotion had died down Merlin came up to him, looking a bit pale through his beard, Ron thought, and the play went on it its awful end. When the curtain calls came he was sure people clapped him louder than anybody else, but at the back of the stage the teacher looked as if he was going to run him through with the big sword that had been snatched out of the rock. His face was close up to Ron’s, who could tell he’d had more than a couple of big whiskies. ‘What did you think you were doing, eh?’ He would have throttled him if his parents hadn’t been out in front waiting to take their little Lawrence Oliver home — as his father mockingly called him for a few months.

‘I remembered my lines, sir, didn’t I?’ was all Ron could say to the teacher’s flushed and rabid face.

The teacher turned, and stalked off, and Ron knew he wouldn’t get much change out of him anymore, that in fact the school wasn’t big enough for the two of them. The teacher must have realised the same, because he went to some other school not long afterwards.

On the way home Ron’s mother said: ‘I enjoyed that little performance. Everybody did. You were smashing in your part.’

Never again did he put up with anything concerning King Arthur, because if someone began to yak about him he just switched off, or let them know in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t interested in such fairy-tale stuff.

Maybe that was what turned him into a poet, Ron Delph often thought. Or it was the start, anyway, because if you can see how much of a boring sham all that Camelot crap is you’re bound to learn the secrets of the universe, or at least make a start on it. Apart from which he had always known that asking questions about things people think they have the answers to never got you anywhere.