The Complete Short Stories (48 page)

It is not a new theory.
Poets and philosophers, as usual, have been there first. But scientific proof
is now ready and to hand. Perhaps the final touches are being put to the new
manifesto in some cell at Harvard University. Any day now it will be given to
the world, and the world will be convinced.

Let me therefore get my
word in first, because I feel pretty sure, now, about the authenticity of my
remembrance of things past. My autobiography, as I very well perceived at the
time, started in the very worst year that the world had ever seen so far. Apart
from being born bedridden and toothless, unable to raise myself on the pillow
or utter anything but farmyard squawks or police-siren wails, my bladder and my
bowels totally out of control, I was further depressed by the curious behaviour
of the two-legged mammals around me. There were those black-dressed people,
females of the species to which I appeared to belong, saying they had lost
their sons. I slept a great deal. Let them go and find their sons. It was like
the special pin for my nappies which my mother or some other hoverer dedicated
to my care was always losing. These careless women in black lost their husbands
and their brothers. Then they came to visit my mother and clucked and crowed
over my cradle. I was not amused.

‘Babies never really
smile till they’re three months old,’ said my mother. ‘They’re not
supposed
to
smile till they’re three months old.’

My brother, aged six,
marched up and down with a toy rifle over his shoulder:

The grand old Duke of York

He had ten thousand men;

He marched them up to the top of the
hill

And he marched them down again.

And when they were up, they were up.

And when they were down, they were down.

And when they were neither down nor up

They were neither up nor down.

‘Just listen to him!’

‘Look at him with his
rifle!’

I was about ten days old
when Russia stopped fighting. I tuned in to the Czar, a prisoner, with the rest
of his family, since evidently the country had put him off his throne and there
had been a revolution not long before I was born. Everyone was talking about
it. I tuned in to the Czar. ‘Nothing would ever induce me to sign the treaty of
Brest-Litovsk,’ he said to his wife. Anyway, nobody had asked him to.

At this point I was
sleeping twenty hours a day to get my strength up. And from what I discerned in
the other four hours of the day I knew I was going to need it. The Western
Front on my frequency was sheer blood, mud, dismembered bodies, blistered
crashes, hectic flashes of light in the night skies, explosions, total terror.
Since it was plain I had been born into a bad moment in the history of the
world, the future bothered me, unable as I was to raise my head from the pillow
and as yet only twenty inches long. ‘I truly wish I were a fox or a bird,’ D.
H. Lawrence was writing to somebody. Dreary old creeping Jesus. I fell asleep.

Red sheets of flame shot
across the sky. It was 21st March, the fiftieth day of my life, and the German
Spring Offensive had started before my morning feed. Infinite slaughter. I
scowled at the scene, and made an effort to kick out. But the attempt was
feeble. Furious, and impatient for some strength, I wailed for my feed. After
which I stopped wailing but continued to scowl.

The grand old Duke of York

He had ten thousand men …

They rocked the cradle. I never heard a
sillier song. Over in Berlin and Vienna the people were starving, freezing,
striking, rioting and yelling in the streets. In London everyone was bustling
to work and muttering that it was time the whole damn business was over.

The big people around me
bared their teeth; that meant a smile, it meant they were pleased or amused.
They spoke of ration cards for meat and sugar and butter.

‘Where will it all end?’

I went to sleep. I woke
and tuned in to Bernard Shaw who was telling someone to shut up. I switched
over to Joseph Conrad who, strangely enough, was saying precisely the same
thing. I still didn’t think it worth a smile, although it was expected of me
any day now. I got on to Turkey. Women draped in black huddled and chattered in
their harems; yak-yak-yak. This was boring, so I came back to home base.

In and out came and went
the women in British black. My mother’s brother, dressed in his uniform, came
coughing. He had been poison-gassed in the trenches.
‘Tout le monde
à
la
bataille!’
declaimed Marshal Foch the old swine. He was now
Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces. My uncle coughed from deep within his
lungs, never to recover but destined to return to the Front. His brass buttons
gleamed in the firelight. I weighed twelve pounds by now; I stretched and
kicked for exercise, seeing that I had a lifetime before me, coping with this
crowd. I took six feeds a day and kept most of them down by the time the
Vindictive
was sunk in Ostend harbour, on which day I kicked with special vigour in my
bath.

In France the
conscripted soldiers leapfrogged over the dead on the advance and littered the
fields with limbs and hands, or drowned in the mud. The strongest men on all
fronts were dead before I was born. Now the sentries used bodies for barricades
and the fighting men were unhealthy from the start. I checked my toes and
fingers, knowing I was going to need them.
The Playboy of the Western World
was
playing at the Court Theatre in London, but occasionally I beamed over to the
House of Commons which made me drop off gently to sleep. Generally, I preferred
the Western Front where one got the true state of affairs. It was essential to
know the worst, blood and explosions and all, for one had to be prepared, as
the boy scouts said. Virginia Woolf yawned and reached for her diary. Really, I
preferred the Western Front.

In the fifth month of my
life I could raise my head from my pillow and hold it up. I could grasp the
objects that were held out to me. Some of these things rattled and squawked. I
gnawed on them to get my teeth started. ‘She hasn’t smiled yet?’ said the dreary
old aunties. My mother, on the defensive, said I was probably one of those late
smilers. On my wavelength Pablo Picasso was getting married and early in that
month of July the Silver Wedding of King George V and Queen Mary was celebrated
in joyous pomp at St Paul’s Cathedral. They drove through the streets of London
with their children. Twenty-five years of domestic happiness. A lot of fuss and
ceremonial handing over of swords went on at the Guildhall where the King and
Queen received a cheque for £53,000 to dispose of for charity as they thought
fit.
Tout le monde à la bataille!
Income tax in England had reached six
shillings in the pound. Everyone was talking about the Silver Wedding;
yak-yak-yak, and ten days later the Czar and his family, now in Siberia, were
invited to descend to a little room in the basement. Crack, crack, went the
guns; screams and blood all over the place, and that was the end of the
Romanoffs. I flexed my muscles. ‘A fine healthy baby,’ said the doctor; which
gave me much satisfaction.

Tout le
monde à la bataille!
That included my gassed uncle. My health had
improved to the point where I was able to crawl in my playpen. Bertrand Russell
was still cheerily in prison for writing something seditious about pacifism.
Tuning in as usual to the Front Lines it looked as if the Germans were winning
all the battles yet losing the war. And so it was. The upper-income people were
upset about the income tax at six shillings to the pound. But all women over
thirty got the vote. ‘It seems a long time to wait,’ said one of my drab old
aunts, aged twenty-two. The speeches in the House of Commons always sent me to
sleep which was why I missed, at the actual time, a certain oration by Mr
Asquith following the armistice on 11th November. Mr Asquith was a greatly
esteemed former prime minister later to be an Earl, and had been ousted by Mr
Lloyd George. I clearly heard Asquith, in private, refer to Lloyd George as ‘that
damned Welsh goat’.

The armistice was signed
and I was awake for that. I pulled myself on to my feet with the aid of the
bars of my cot. My teeth were coming through very nicely in my opinion, and
well worth all the trouble I was put to in bringing them forth. I weighed
twenty pounds. On all the world’s fighting fronts the men killed in action or
dead of wounds numbered 8,538,315 and the warriors wounded and maimed were 21,219,452.
With these figures in mind I sat up in my high chair and banged my spoon on the
table. One of my mother’s black-draped friends recited:

I have a rendezvous with Death

At some disputed barricade,

When spring comes back with rustling
shade

And apple blossoms fill the air —

I have a rendezvous with Death.

Most of the poets, they
said, had been killed. The poetry made them dab their eyes with clean white
handkerchiefs.

Next February on my
first birthday, there was a birthday cake with one candle. Lots of children and
their elders. The war had been over two months and twenty-one days. ‘Why doesn’t
she smile?’ My brother was to blow out the candle. The elders were talking
about the war and the political situation. Lloyd George and Asquith, Asquith
and Lloyd George. I remembered recently having switched on to Mr Asquith at a
private party where he had been drinking a lot. He was playing cards and when
he came to cut the cards he tried to cut a large box of matches by mistake. On
another occasion I had seen him putting his arm around a lady’s shoulder in a
Daimler motor car, and generally behaving towards her in a very friendly
fashion. Strangely enough she said, ‘If you don’t stop this nonsense
immediately I’ll order the chauffeur to stop and I’ll get out. Mr Asquith
replied, ‘And pray, what reason will you give?’ Well anyway it was my feeding
time.

The guests arrived for
my birthday. It was so sad, said one of the black widows, so sad about Wilfred
Owen who was killed so late in the war, and she quoted from a poem of his:

What passing-bells for these who die as
cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

The children were
squealing and toddling around. One was sick and another wet the floor and stood
with his legs apart gaping at the puddle. All was mopped up. I banged my spoon
on the table of my high chair.

But I’ve a rendezvous with Death

At midnight in some flaming town;

When spring trips north again this year,

And I to my pledged word am true,

I shall not fail that rendezvous.

More parents and
children arrived. One stout man who was warming his behind at the fire, said, ‘I
always think those words of Asquith’s after the armistice were so apt …’

They brought the cake
close to my high chair for me to see, with the candle shining and flickering
above the pink icing. ‘A pity she never smiles.’

‘She’ll smile in time,’
my mother said, obviously upset.

‘What Asquith told the
House of Commons just after the war,’ said that stout gentleman with his
backside to the fire, ‘— so apt, what Asquith said. He said that the war has
cleansed and purged the world, by God! I recall his actual words: “All things
have become new. In this great cleansing and purging it has been the privilege
of our country to play her part…”’

That did it. I broke
into a decided smile and everyone noticed it, convinced that it was provoked by
the fact that my brother had blown out the candle on the cake. ‘She smiled!’ my
mother exclaimed. And everyone was clucking away about how I was smiling. For
good measure I crowed like a demented raven. ‘My baby’s smiling!’ said my
mother.

‘It was the candle on
her cake,’ they said.

The cake be damned.
Since that time I have grown to smile quite naturally, like any other healthy
and house-trained person, but when I really mean a smile, deeply felt from the
core, then to all intents and purposes it comes in response to the words
uttered in the House of Commons after the First World War by the distinguished,
the immaculately dressed and the late Mr Asquith.

The Gentile
Jewesses

One day a madman came into my little
grandmother’s shop at Watford. I say my little grandmother but ‘little’ refers
only to her height and to the dimensions of her world by the square foot — the
small shop full of varieties, her parlour behind it, and behind that the stone
kitchen and the two bedrooms over her head.

‘I shall murder you,’
said the madman, standing with legs straddled in the door frame, holding up his
dark big hands as one about to pounce and strangle. His eyes stared from a face
covered with tangled eyebrows and beard.

The street was empty. My
grandmother was alone in the house. For some years, from frequent hearing of
the story, I believed I was standing by her side at the time, but my
grandmother said no, this was long before I was born. The scene is as clear as
a memory to me. The madman —truly escaped from the asylum in a great park
nearby — lifted his hairy hands, cupped as for strangling. Behind him was the
street, empty save for sunshine.

He said, ‘I’m going to
murder you.

She folded her hands
over her white apron which lay over the black apron and looked straight at him.

‘Then you’ll get hung,’
she said.

He turned and shuffled
away.