Modern Nature: February 25
Saturday 25
The storm blew itself out by two - before returning at four with a sudden blast, illuminated by one brilliant lightning flash, and no thunder.
The foghorn sounded for half an hour and then all went quiet.
Buffeted in my sleep like a boat in a high sea, I never cross the night without waking. I can’t quite remember when it was different. I slept quite soundly for forty years; then something changed. Perhaps I wake myself in case I die, unconscious, at the low ebb of the night. Bergman’s hour of the wolf.
The next day I can’t remember what passed through my mind. Nothing, perhaps, except a vague unease.
It’s cold tonight; but suddenly I’m up and pissing in the dark. Back in bed the pillows have been pummelled into uncomfortable hillocks, the sheets have parted company with the mattress - I doze off.
In the morning the storm has torn up a mountain of kelp which floats back and forth in the foam at the sea’s edge. The wind is up again, seagulls float ever closer as if I gave off some imperceptible warmth in the cold. I beat the tide which is racing in, and find three stones for the new flower bed. I draw the circle to plant them but retire inside as the rain blows in; settle down at my desk for a cold wet day.
~
It’s a log time since I whiled away a wet winter Saturday, quite alone, knowing the sun wouldn’t appear from a chink in the sky. Wet afternoons in the town are filled in by the general hubbub. I find mself reliving my childhood feeling of trapped unease - as the rain streams down the windows, muffling the sound of cars with their headlights on too early, even for a gloomy February afternoon.
~
As a child it was wonderful to be allowed to spend afternoons like this cutting out paper fish and floating them in the bath. Or to be given grandma Mimosa’s Mah Jong set, to build ivory fortifications. Or create a crystal garden with my two shilling chemistry set.
~
Wet days. Stare out the window, stare out the window…Endless suburban afternoons spent in the colourless houses of friends - glazed cotton cabbage roses and hard shiny French polish - practising good-mannered conversation. Or at home with some enthusiasm labelled a hobby - we all had them: empty streets of Watford, till the shops closed. I found nothing there, knew I wouldn’t. Before walking back in the gathering dusk, past the grey castellations of the gas works, through the arches of Bushey rail viaduct, past the solemn empty red brick church - always too big for its congregation; past wartime camouflage; back to my attic and my paints, magazines, scissors and the surprise collisions of a collage.
Pandemonium
St. Juliana’s convent ran a day school for children, whither I was sent at the age of five to be roasted with threats of hellfire by a group of tough nuns armed with sticky stars and saints to plaster at the end of twelve tables successfully conjugated - each table assigned to an apostle. God’s iron maidens, armed with clamps and shackles of Catholicism, invaded my innocent garden with sugary promises - icy orange juice lollipops; but for the recalcitrant, a ruler on the back of the hand.
Sweet soap-scrubbed faces peeping through wimples hid personalities as bizarre as anything later dreamt up on the closed set of The Devils. These intimidating automata, brides of a celibate God, hacked my paradise to pieces like the despoilers of the Amazon - carving paths of good and evil to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory.
These serpents brought no wisdom, only a profound distrust of arithmetic that leaves me, years later, at the mercy of the VAT inspector.
~
When I was seven, at my first boarding school at Milford, a Saturday afternoon brought two ounces of rationed sweets, for which we played marbles on the polished floor of the assembly room - a pursuit with its own terminology: blockies, spirals, cat's-eyes, hairstreaks. Someone would switch off the lights and we’d start a ghostly game of touch flee in the dark, a scrimmage of bedraggled little boys in formless grey suits; there might be ballroom dancing, fights over who should lead, treading on each other’s toes - until, scooped up by one of the three towering matrons, we were forced to move in quick step.
Saturday walks in the rain to the overgrown park called ‘the jungle’, with its monkey puzzle trees and prehistoric weeds; or to the wreck of the Lamorna, grounded one stormy night at the foot of the cliffs at Barton on its way to the South Seas. ‘Not too near to the cliff.’
Eyes fixed on the ground, pink sea thrift at your feet. Wet Saturdays, the timeless sadness of childhood, horizons clamped down like the drizzle; standing at the window wishing for something to happen, anything, as the rain rattled across the panes. Everyone at home. Deserted streets and those lights on the cars, on much too early.
H-bombs and Sputnik, long playing records, Elvis and droning wimpish Buddy Holly, I Love Lucy, Bilko and other tedious American serials week after week. The rain fell, and my father’s temper deteriorated.
~
A personal mythology recurs in my writing, much the same way poppy wreaths have crept into my films. For me this archeology as become obsessive, for the ‘experts’ my sexuality is a confusion. All received information should make us inverts sad. But before I finish I intend to celebrate our corner of Paradise, the part of the garden the Lord forgot to mention.
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