Authors: Christopher Priest
Because the yard was prospering my parents could afford to send me to the Pelham
Scholastic Academy, a dame school run by the Misses Pelham in East Bourne Street, next to
the remains of the mediaeval Town Wall and close to the harbour. There, amid the
persistent stench from the rotten fish which littered the beach and all the environs of
the harbour, and against the constant but eloquent braying of the herring gulls, I learnt
the three Rs, as well as a modicum of History, Geography and the fearsome French language.
All of these were to stand me in good stead in later life, but my fruitless struggles to
learn French have an ironic outcome, because in adult life my stage persona is that of a
French professor.
My way to and from school was across the ridge of West Hill, which was built up only in
the immediate neighbourhood of our house. Most of the way led along steep narrow paths
through the scented tamarisk bushes that had colonized so many of Hastings’ open spaces.
Hastings at the time was experiencing a period of development, as numerous new houses and
hotels were being built to accommodate the summer visitors. I saw little of this, because
the school was in the Old Town, while the resort area was being built beyond the White
Rock, a former rocky spur that one day in my childhood was enthrallingly dynamited out of
existence to make way for an extended seafront promenade. Despite all this, life in the
ancient centre of Hastings continued much as it had done for hundreds of years.
I could say much about my father, good and bad, but for the sake of concentrating on my
own story I shall confine myself to the best. I loved him, and learnt from him many of the
cabinet-making techniques which, inadvertently by him, have made my name and fortune. I
can attest that my father was hard-working, honest, sober, intelligent and, in his own
way, generous. He was fair to his employees. Because he was not a God-fearing man, and no
churchgoer, he brought up his family to act within a benign secularism, in which neither
action nor inaction would occur to cause hurt or harm to others. He was a brilliant
cabinet-maker and a good wheelwright. I realized, eventually, that whatever emotional
outbursts our family had to endure (because there were several) his anger must have been
caused by inner frustrations, although at what and of what sort I was never entirely sure.
Although I was never myself a target for his worst moments, I grew up a little scared of
my father but loved him profoundly.
My mother's name was Betsy May Borden (née Robertson), my father's name was Joseph Andrew
Borden. I had a total of seven brothers and sisters, although because of infant deaths I
knew only five of them. I was neither the oldest nor the youngest child, and was not
particularly favoured by either parent. I grew up in reasonable harmony with most, if not
all, of my siblings.
When I was twelve I was taken away from the school and placed to work as a wheelwright's
apprentice in my father's yard. Here my adult life began, both in the sense that from this
time I spent more time with adults than with other children, and that my own real future
started to become clear to me. Two factors were pivotal.
The first was, simply enough, the handling of wood. I had grown up with the sight and
smell of it, so that both were familiar to me. I had little idea how wood
felt
when you picked it up, or cleaved it, or sawed it. From the first moment I handled wood
with purposeful intent I began to respect it, and realize what could be done with it.
Wood, when properly seasoned, and hewed to take advantage of the natural grain, is
beautiful, strong, light and supple. It can be cut to almost any shape; it can be worked
or adhered to almost any other material. You can paint it, stain it, bleach it, flex it.
It is at once outstanding and commonplace, so that when something manufactured of wood is
present it lends a quiet feeling of solid normality, and so is hardly ever noticed.
In short it is the ideal medium for the illusionist.
At the yard I was given no preferential treatment as the proprietor's son. On my first
day, I was sent to begin learning the business by taking on the roughest, hardest job in
the yard — I and another apprentice were put to work in a saw-pit. The twelve-hour days of
that (we started at 6.00 a.m. and finished at 8.00 p.m. every day, with only three short
breaks for meals) hardened my body like no other work I can conceive of, and taught me to
fear as well as respect the heavy cords of timber. After that initiation, which continued
for several months, I was moved to the less physically demanding but more exacting work of
learning to cut, turn and smooth the wood for the spokes and felloes of the wheels. Here I
came into regular contact with the wheelwrights and other men who worked for my father,
and saw less of my fellow apprentices.
One morning, about a year after I had left school, a contract worker named Robert Noonan
came to the yard to carry out some long-needed repair and redecoration work to the rear
wall of the yard, which had been damaged in a storm some years before. With Noonan's
arrival came the second great influence on the direction of my future life.
I, busy about my labours, barely even noticed him, but at 1.00 p.m. when we broke for
lunch, Noonan came and sat with me and the other men at the trestle table where we ate our
food. He produced a pack of playing cards, and asked if any of us would care to “find the
lady”. Some of the older men chaffed him and tried to warn off the others, but a few of us
stayed to watch. Tiny sums of money began to change hands; not mine, for I had none to
spare, but one or two of the workmen were willing to gamble a few pence.
What fascinated me was the smooth, natural way that Noonan manipulated the cards. He was
so fast! So dexterous! He spoke softly and persuasively, showing us the faces of the three
playing cards, placing them down on the small box in front of him with a quick but flowing
motion, then moving them about with his long fingers before pausing to challenge us to
indicate which of the cards was the Queen. The workmen had slower eyes than mine; they
spotted the card rather less often than I did (although I was wrong more often than I was
right).
Afterwards, I said to Noonan, “How do you do that? Will you show me?”
At first he tried to fob me off with talk of idle hands, but I persisted. “I want to know
how you do it!” I cried. “The Queen is placed in the middle of the three, but you move the
cards only twice and she is not where I think she is! What's the secret?”
So one lunchtime, instead of trying to fleece the other men, he took me to a quiet corner
of the shed and showed me how to manipulate the three cards so that the hand deceived the
eye. The Queen and another card were gripped lightly between the thumb and middle finger
of the left hand, one above the other; the third card was held in the right hand. When the
cards were placed he moved his hands crosswise, brushing his fingertips on the surface and
pausing briefly, so suggesting the Queen was being put down first. In fact, it was almost
invariably one of the other cards that slipped quietly down before her. This is the
classic trick whose correct name is Three Card Monte.
When I had grasped the idea of that, Noonan showed me several other techniques. He taught
me how to palm a card in the hand, how to shuffle the deck deceptively so that the order
remained undisturbed, how to cut the pack to bring a certain chosen card to the top or
bottom of the hand, how to offer a fan of cards to someone and force him to choose one
particular card. He went through all this in a casual way, showing off rather than
showing, probably not realizing the rapt attention with which I was taking it in. When he
had finished his demonstration I tried the false dealing technique with the Queen, but the
cards scattered all about. I tried again. Then again. And on and on, long after Noonan
himself had lost interest and wandered away. By the evening of the first day, alone in my
bedroom, I had mastered Three Card Monte, and was setting to work on the other techniques
I had briefly seen.
One day, his painting work completed, Noonan left the yard and went out of my life. I
never saw him again. He left behind him an impressionable adolescent boy with a
compulsion. I intended to rest at nothing until I had mastered the art that I now knew
(from a book I urgently borrowed from the lending library) was called Legerdemain.
Legerdemain, sleight of hand, prestidigitation, became the dominant interest of my life.
The next three years saw parallel developments in my life. For one thing I was an
adolescent growing rapidly into a man. For another, my father was quick to realize that I
had an appreciable skill as a woodworker, and that the comparatively coarse demands of the
wheelwright's work were not making the best use of me. Finally, I was learning how to make
magic with my hands.
These three parts of my life wove around each other like strands in a rope. Both my father
and I needed to make a living, so much of the work I did in the yard continued to be with
the barrels, axles and wheels that made up the main part of the business, but when he was
able to, either he or one of his foremen would instruct me in the finer craft of
cabinet-making. My father planned a future for me in his business. If I proved as adept as
he thought, he would at the end of my apprenticeship set me up with a furniture workshop
of my own, allowing me to develop it as I saw fit. He would eventually join me there when
he retired from the yard. In this, some of his frustrations in life were laid plain before
me. My carpentry skill reawakened memories of his own youthful ambitions.
Meanwhile, my other skill, the one I saw as my real one, was developing apace. Every
possible moment of my spare time was devoted to practising the conjurer's art. In
particular, I learnt and tried to master all the known tricks of playing-card
manipulation. I saw sleight of hand as the foundation of all magic, just as the tonic
scale lies at the foundation of the most complex symphony. It was difficult obtaining
reference works on the subject, but books on magic do exist and the diligent researcher
can find them. Night after night, in my chilly room above the arch, I stood before a
full-length mirror and practised palming and forcing, shuffling cards and spreading them,
passing and fanning them, discovering different ways of cutting and feinting. I learnt the
art of misdirection, in which the magician trades on the audience's everyday experience to
confound their senses — the metal birdcage that looks too rigid to collapse, the ball that
seems too large to be concealed in a sleeve, the sword whose tempered steel blade could
never, surely?, be pliant. I quickly amassed a repertoire of such legerdemain skills,
applying myself to each one of them until I had it right, then re-applying myself until I
had mastered it, then re-applying myself once again until I was perfect at it. I never
ceased practising.
The strength and dexterity of my hands was the key to this.
Now, briefly, I break off from the writing of this to consider my hands. I lay down my pen
to hold them before me again, turning them in the light from the mantle, trying to see
them not in the so familiar way that I see them every day, but as I imagine a stranger
might. Eight long and slender fingers, two sturdy thumbs, nails trimmed to an exact
length, not an artist's hands, nor a labourer’s, nor those of a surgeon, but the hands of
a carpenter turned prestidigitator. When I turn them so that the palms face me, I see
pale, almost transparent skin, with darker roughened patches between the joints of the
fingers. The balls of the thumbs are rounded, but when I tense my muscles hard ridges form
across the palms. Now I reverse them and see the fine skin again, with a dusting of blond
hairs. Women are intrigued by my hands, and a few say they love them.
Every day, even now in my maturity, I exercise my hands. They are strong enough to burst a
sealed rubber tennis ball. I can bend steel nails between my fingers, and if I slam the
heel of my hand against hardwood, the hardwood splinters. Yet the same hand can lightly
suspend a farthing by its edge between my third and fourth fingertips, while the rest of
the hand manipulates apparatus, or writes on a blackboard, or holds the arm of a volunteer
from the audience, and it can retain the coin there through all this before sliding it
dexterously to where it might seem magically to appear.
My left hand bears a small scar, a reminder of the time in my youth when I learnt the true
value of my hands. I already knew, from every time that I practised with a pack of cards,
or a coin, or a fine silk scarf, or with any one of the conjurer's props I was slowly
amassing, that the human hand was a delicate instrument, fine and strong and sensitive.
But carpentry was hard on my hands, an unpleasant fact I discovered one morning in the
yard. A moment's lost attention while shaping a felloe, a careless movement with a chisel,
and I cut a deep slash in my left hand. I remember standing there in disbelief, my fingers
tensed like the talons of a claw, while dark-red blood welled out of the gash and ran
thickly down my wrist and arm. The older men I was working with that day were used to
dealing with such injuries, and knew what to do; a tourniquet was rapidly applied, and a
cart readied for the dash to hospital. For two weeks afterwards my hand was bandaged. It
was not the blood, not the pain, not the inconvenience; it was the dread that when the cut
itself healed my hand would be found to have been
cut through
in some final, devastating way, immobilizing it forever. As events turned out no
permanent damage was done. After a discouraging period when the hand was stiff and awkward
to use, the tendons and muscles gradually eased up, the gash healed and knitted properly,
and within two months I was back to normal.
I took it as a warning, though. My legerdemain was then only a hobby. I had never
performed for anyone, not even, like Robert Noonan, for the entertainment of the men I
worked with. All my magic was practice magic, executed in dumb show before the tall
mirror. But it was a consuming hobby, a passion, even, yes, the beginning of an obsession.
I could not allow an injury to put it in jeopardy!
That gashed hand was therefore another turning point, because it established the
paramountcy of my life. Before it happened I was a trainee wheelwright with an engrossing
pastime, but afterwards I was a young magician who would allow nothing to stand in his
way. It was more important to me that I should be able to palm a hidden card, or deftly
reach for a concealed billiard ball inside a felt-lined bag, or secretly slip a borrowed
five-pound note into a prepared orange, trivial though these matters might seem, than that
I might one day again hurt one of my hands while making a wheel for the cart of a publican.
I said nothing of this to me! What is it? How far is it to be taken? I must write no more
until I know!
So, now we have spoken, it is agreed I may continue? Here it is again, on that
understanding. I may write what I see fit, while I may add to it as I see fit. I planned
nothing to which I would not agree, only to write a great deal more of it before I read
it. I apologize if I think I was deceiving me, and meant no harm.
I have read it through several times, & I think I understand what I am driving at. It was
only the surprise that made me react the way I did. Now I am calmer I find it acceptable
so far.
But much is missing! I think I must write about the meeting with John Henry Anderson next,
because it was through him I gained my introduction to the Maskelynes.
I assume there is no particular reason why I can't go straight to this?
Either I must do this now, or leave a note for me to find. Exchange me this more often!
I must not leave out on any account:
1. The way I discovered what Angier was doing, & what I did about him.
2. Olive Wenscombe (not my fault, NB).
3. What about Sarah? The children?
The Pact extends even to this, does it? That's how I interpret it. If so, either I have to
leave a lot out, or I have to put in a great deal more.
I am surprised to discover how much I have already written.