The Flame of Life

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Richard waited in the front garden for the children to come from school.

His parents had been shouting at each other in the studio, but calm had now settled on the house. Handley needed such bust-ups to crumble the clogged energy that kept him from painting, and it was plain that his mother also thrived on arguments, for he noted how carefree she became afterwards. Such quarrels made his life a misery.

A warm humidity rose from the fields, almost as sweet in its smell as on the hillside in Lincolnshire. The road outside the gate was quiet, and the field behind the paddock lush and snug, safe and untouchable, eternally green, enticing alike for cattle and children — the land on the other side of the fence, beyond the realm of this incestuous bailiwick in which he was beginning to loose faith.

He wished Uncle John were alive, for he had radiated not only spiritual authority, but shown actual example on how you should accept it, as if he were living under some form of divine guidance. It was different now that he had gone, and committee meetings had taken the heart out of any satisfying life. The richness had left it, and he continually asked himself if it could ever be brought back.

Engrossed in revolutionary tactics and all manner of civil discord he compared the matrimonial antagonism of the family that had bred him to the social and political animosity of people in general; wondered, as he leaned on the gate, whether Handley would have been so obsessed with revolutionary strife if he hadn’t been an artist with a wife and seven kids. Children provided him with resentment — against society which made his life so hard because he wanted to live as an artist.

Richard didn’t think his father was eaten up by class conflict, at least not more than was healthy in such a country. He was too well off to justify such rancour, and too absorbed in his painting to be bothered. It channelled his spleen from the warping prison of the family in which he lived, yet he could not exist without his wife and children, and loved them so much he felt desperately fettered by their need of him and his of them. Combined with the occasional black frustrations of his art, this made it necessary for him to indulge to an infinite degree in the passionate pastime of revolution.

Richard had worked this out, and it worried him. Encouraged all his life to study revolution and rebellion it was natural that it should one day turn him against this indoctrination. Nothing stood still. You either learned, or you died. It was an ever-fascinating theme, and he had the sort of mind which led him to see the end of it. What better weapon had been put into his hands than the long training already received?

Paul, Rachel, Janet and Simon got off the bus. Simon Dawley was fuming and kicking. His short white bristle-hair seemed about to turn the same beetroot pink as his face because Janet had taken his marbles and would not give them back, held her lips tight as if the sky were about to fall down on her. A cool wind scattered them towards the gate.

Paul Handley put his arms round Simon. ‘Don’t cry. She’ll give ’em up.’

‘Finding’s keeping.’ Janet was rigid with possession.

‘It’s not, you know,’ said Paul, with his fifteen-year-old gravity.

‘They’re mine,’ she maintained.

‘No, they’re not,’ said Simon, who did not know how to right an injustice except by bursting into tears, or punching somebody. And when he saw that hitting out would not be tolerated it looked as if he were willing his head to burst. Paul turned to Rachel: ‘Get the marbles, and give ’em to him.’

Dark-haired Rachel walked up to cringing Janet, thumped her soundly on the back, and prised opened her hand. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

‘He’s my brother,’ Janet cried in her rage, as if that gave her a right to be mean to him.

‘They were his marbles,’ said Paul. ‘He got them with his spending money.’

‘He’s still my brother, you rotten Handleys,’ said Janet Dawley.

‘Well, you ought to treat him like a brother,’ said Paul quietly.

‘We’re not rotten,’ said Rachel Handley, ‘so don’t say it. It’s not right.’ They sorted out their differences in a reasonably short time, considering they were human beings. Paul opened the gate and they filed, with a ravening afternoon hunger, into the kitchen for bread-and-butter and milk.

Richard played his part in the system that Handley had created, and carried on working even when he no longer felt that satisfying ray of faith from Uncle John’s time. He had spent weeks with Adam listening out on VHF radios to the county police patrol frequencies, noting all call-signs, deducing the number of cars, and drawing a coloured map to show the operations area of each group. In this way he could tell at any hour where the various cars were, and get news even before it reached the newspapers or police courts.

He wondered whether Handley wasn’t trying to mould him into a new Uncle John, for any change of role in the household never came about by decree, but always by a slow unwitting half-conscious acceptance of something only fate could have turned you on to. Though feeling this strongly, he had enough moral fibre not to be put off by it, but what really made him uneasy was that Handley seemed to be welding them into one single generation, denying them the differences in age and outlook due to some need for safety and security in himself.

The idea alarmed him, not so much for his father, as for himself and the others. It was the most basic threat to the young community so far — and also a danger to the existence of the family, to which the normal troubles of the community discussed at meetings were nothing. These suspicions occurred to him while watching the children quarrelling their way from the bus. It came while the cool wind blew downhill from the opposite field, and brought the smell of damp herbage into his senses, making him momentarily a child, and lighting his brain as if he’d been smoking pot. He knew then what his father was up to, not by reason, but by an almost religious instinct that, five minutes later, he felt ashamed of.

They came out with their bread and butter — Paul, Rachel, Janet and Simon: the Handleys and the Dawleys, fair and dark, young and growing-up. Paul leaned against the Rambler, hands in jean pockets, the last bread fast in his mouth. Fair thin hair came evenly over his forehead and his grey eyes stared in front. At thirteen he had been set to govern the younger children, a responsibility which in no way put him out, for he had a gift of tact and strength that no other Handley had.

He grinned, as if his job were finished for the day, whistling a secret and tuneless tune to himself as he led them into the garage for the after-school talk which it was Richard’s daily duty to give.

They placed a bench by a wall marked with map-like stains from the fumes of exhaust pipes. The cars were outside, and they sat away from the wind and any stray noise that might interfere with the anti-lesson.

‘Stop whistling, Paul, and listen to me.’

‘Has Cuthbert come back with that Spanish woman yet?’ he wanted to know.

Richard smiled. ‘Why are you so interested in it?’

‘We just are. We can’t wait to get a peep at somebody new.’

He wondered why the children were so bored, with such a variable set of people perpetually around. The atmosphere of the community was usually one of flux and impending change, of activity and rumour, yet when this heady atmosphere relaxed, and life threatened to subside into calm orderliness, everyone grew restless and moody. The children got it sooner than the others. ‘They’ll be here this evening.’

‘Before we go to bed?’ asked Rachel, with such curiosity in her voice that he almost caught it himself.

‘Depends on the trains. But forget it for the next half hour. When you got to school this morning what hymns did you sing?’

‘Horrid,’ Janet said. ‘I hate hymns.’

‘I hate her as well,’ giggled Simon Dawley.

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ wailed Rachel.

‘Tell me which ones you sang, Janet.’ Hating things did not look good, when you considered that hatred made an even deeper impression than what you liked. It was positively bad that she was so virulent. Indifference was safer to work on.

‘I just sing other words to them,’ Paul said. ‘It’s fun.’

‘I used to do that,’ said Richard, ‘but the teacher could lip-read, so I got caught out. It’s safer to mouth the words but make no sound.’

‘That’s what I do,’ said Janet.

‘I like hymns,’ said Simon. ‘I can sing loud. And if I mek a mistake, nobody knows.’

‘What number hymn was it?’ Richard persisted.

Nobody could remember. Maybe they wouldn’t say which one it was in case they’d noticed more than was necessary. Simon Dawley spoke up. ‘All things bright and beautiful …’

Richard reached into a tool box and took out a hymn-book, flipping quickly to the right page. He read the hymn as a piece of verse.

‘It’s nice, though,’ said Rachel.

‘That’s because it rhymes and has a strong rhythm,’ he explained. ‘But you have to look through, to what the words mean. Take the bit about the rich man in his castle and the poor man at his gate. The God who made that up was invented by the people who live in the castle. It was written to keep the man at the gate from getting inside.’

‘They chuck boiling oil on ’em when they scramble up the walls,’ said Simon.

‘It don’t stop ’em, though,’ Paul said. ‘When they get in they kill the barons and set fire to the castle. They don’t have to pay rent for the fields then.’

‘While things are bright and beautiful for some,’ said Richard, when the talk rambled on, ‘they are not so cheery for others. I don’t expect the Smith children who go to your school without overcoats and with only plimsolls on their feet in winter feel it’s like that.’

‘That’s because their dad’s idle,’ said Janet. ‘He’s no good.

‘He’s allus in the pub,’ Rachel giggled.

‘But we have to ask ourselves why he drinks,’ Richard said quietly.

‘He likes it,’ Simon suggested.

Richard tried again, when they stopped laughing. ‘Why does he like it, do you think?’

‘It’s lovely,’ said Simon. ‘Dad gen me some beer once, and I liked it. So he don’t gi’ me any no more now.’

‘You was sick,’ said Janet.

‘It’s all right to sing hymns,’ Richard went on. ‘You might even enjoy letting yourselves go. But I want you to know what the words signify.’

‘They mean what they say,’ said Simon, scraping his boot along the concrete.

‘They do,’ said Richard, ‘but people don’t even know that much. They think they mean something else.’

Simon grunted. ‘I know what they mean, though.’

He was the most promising child of the group, in spite of being a Dawley. Or maybe it was because of that. He hoped not, but there was no point of going into it. Simon was an entity on his own. He doubted few things at the moment, so one couldn’t press the anti-lessons too far, but let his schoolteachers do it, so that when he turned from their indoctrination he would do it with a useful sort of finality. Handled carefully, it would certainly not be a kindness to let him loose on the world.

At the same time it hurt Richard to regard him like this. For all his knowing remarks he seemed an unprotected bundle, lively but vulnerable, a child to be looked after even more than the others — not something regarded with favour by this egalitarian community. He followed its rules nevertheless, but made the anti-lessons easy and humorous half-hours for the children.

The idea of them had started after Handley looked through Paul’s notebook one day, and read from his Scripture jottings that: ‘The Jews fought the Romans because they were forced to pay taxes.’ The words rankled, and later he read in Rachel’s history book that ‘the Jews in medieval England were all money-lenders.’ In the first case Handley was rabid because the statement was untrue, since the conflict between the Romans and the Jews, as far as he understood it, was one between paganism and monotheism. In the second place nothing seemed to have been told to the children about why many of the Jews in England, before their expulsion, became money-lenders.

When he wrote to the headmaster politely pointing out these anti-Semitic tendencies in his educational system, he received an irate reply telling him in effect to mind his own business. They had children of every race in his school, and it was nonsense to accuse him of racialism.

Handley went back to his pen and informed the headmaster that his own opinion was different, and that he knew racial prejudice when he saw it, and that furthermore he would take care to see that his children weren’t poisoned by it. He’d give them a talk every day on the lies they were told at school, and thought all parents ought to do the same if they valued their children’s minds.

There was no reply to this, but certainly Handley hadn’t since then seen anything similiarly offensive in his children’s notebooks — though the talks had been kept up just the same to deal with what other lies and false information English schools still disseminated.

‘We’ll leave the hymns for the moment,’ Richard said, ‘and get back to where we left off yesterday. If you remember you told me about a film at school on life in Spain. I’ll tell you something about the history of this place, and how it’s governed at the present day.’