The Voice That Thunders, page 2
There was a forest in the ceiling, with hills and clouds, and a road to the horizon. The way into the ceiling for me was harder at some times than at others. To enter the ceiling, I had to stare at the road and remove detail from the sides of vision by unfocusing my eyes. I had to block sound. I had to switch myself off.
“Switching off” is not a good description, because there was a profound engagement in the activity of making the bed-bound “me” let go of me. The changes in sound and vision were felt by the “me” on the bed. I had to remove myself from that. I would concentrate on the concentration of the “me” concentrating. I thought of the thought of myself thinking. I observed the observer observing; until the observer was not the observed.
Whatever actually took place, the sensation was that of sliding out of phase with the boy in the bed. And the automatic result was to find that I had crossed the neutralised zone from the bed into the ceiling. I did not sleep. There was no relaxing of consciousness. It was the opposite. I had to think harder, relatively, than at any previous time of my life. The thoughts may have been unusual, but the thinking was not.
I could tell the difference between waking and sleeping because of something else that developed. It was the ability to programme myself for dreaming before I slept, rather like choosing from a menu. Generally, the dreams would come in their programmed order, though nightmares were frequent and unsought.
If I found myself in a nightmare, I would first check that I was dreaming, then watch for the approach of the nightmare’s particular horror, and jump headfirst into it to wake myself up. I always knew when I was dreaming, because I could control the dream. The ceiling, however, I could not predict. Once I was on the road in the ceiling, there was no effort needed to keep me there. I entered, and did not look back. I did not see the boy on the bed. I felt that I was awake.
The world of the ceiling was three-dimensional, objects were solid, visual perspectives true. I never ate or drank in the ceiling (as I later found was the rule for the Other World). There was no wind, no climate, no heat, no cold, no time. The light came from no source and was shadowless, as neon; but before I knew neon. And everywhere, everybody, everything was white. It was the genesis of the dead land of Elidor.
Another peculiarity was that I could see in the dark. If I lay in bed, in the black room, the ceiling became fluorescent, or a negative film. And, when I went into the ceiling, the ceiling-world was lit by the same reversed light, and so were the people and so was I. Otherwise, the ceiling was, for me, “natural”. I met people I knew, including my parents, and some who were only of the ceiling. None of the “ceiling people” has turned up in later life, yet, and they had no names. The people I knew in both states of waking had no knowledge of the ceiling when I asked them. I soon stopped asking.
Of course, this is interpretation now. I should not have been able to describe the ceiling in these words at the age when I lived there. I “lived” in the ceiling. But there was a difference between the ceiling and the bed that made the bed, with all its pain and debility, the permanent choice.
Although the way to the ceiling was along the same road in the ceiling, the land beyond the road, from visit to visit, was inconsistent; and this inconsistency made the ceiling not more interesting but less. Each venture was separate rather than a learning, and such variety leads nowhere; it builds nothing; it has nothing to teach. And I wanted to learn. That was the difference. I would enter the ceiling by an act of will, but I left it through tedium. Sooner or later, I would stop whatever I was doing in the ceiling, turn around, and always be facing the same road-forest-cloud-hill picture that I saw from my bed. Then I would pull back as a camera does to the bed and lie looking at the lime-washed plaster.
There was one terror in the ceiling: one motionless dread.
Sometimes I would look up, and see no road, no forest, clouds or hills, but a plump little old woman with a circular face, hair parted down the middle and drawn to a tight bun, lips pursed, and small, pebbled eyes. She sat wrapped in a shawl in a cane wheelchair and watched me. She was a waning moon: her head turned to the side, as if she had broken her neck. When I saw her, I knew that I could die. She must not enter the room, and I must not enter the ceiling. If I let her eyes blink, I should die. There was no night, day, dawn, dusk. The little old woman and I were locked.
The little old woman came only when my life really was threatened. She was a part of the plaster in the ceiling, not of my room but of my parents’ room, and I was taken there when I was too ill to be left alone. She was my death, and I knew it.
One hundred and fifty yards from bed, and behind the house, was my other world. Later knowledge told me that it was an eroded fault-scarp, 600 feet high, of the Keuper and Bunter Triassic sandstones. To me, it was the Edge, that cliff covered with trees, mined for copper and quarried for stone through centuries and then abandoned. When I was not confined to the house, I would spend my days and my nights on the Edge.
Woodland on a crag of coloured stone was just the beginning of that world for me. In the best sense, as a family, we have always known our place. We handled it as miners and stone-cutters. We culled its timber for houses and fuel, and grew food on its soil. At a deeper level, we accepted that there was a Hero King asleep in the ground, behind a rock named the Iron Gates. Our water supply derived from the Holy Well, which granted wishes to tourists at weekends, and an income for the child of our family who, on a Monday morning, cleaned out the small change.
Yet for no money would that child have climbed the yew that stood beside the well. “If I ever so much as see you touch that,” my grandfather said, “I’ll have the hide off you.” And there was a memory that could hardly be restored to words: of how the well was not for wishing, but for the curing of barren women; and the offerings were of bent pins, not of pence. And Grandad spoke of rags tied to trees there. That had been a long time ago, he said.
So it is for a child born to the Edge. We knew our place, and knowledge passed beyond the material, such as where a band of white clay was under the fallen leaves which could be used as soap to clean up with before going home. It passed to the spiritual, too. I was brought up to respect both. They were there. Even the ghosts were those of relatives.
Yet my relationship with that hill was different from that of the rest of my family. As a result of gained knowledge, for me the Edge both stopped, and melted, time.
I knew enough geology to become amazed. I could trace the tidal vortex in the strata: the print of water swirling for a second under the pull of wind and moon and held for two hundred million years. I felt the white pebbles in the rock, and wondered from what mountains they had come, by what river, to what sea.
And, in the fleeting, I found the vision. In knowing the moment of the vortex, and of the pebble, which, if I could have watched for long enough, was not rock but liquid, I lost all sense of “me” upon the hill. As with the ceiling, a barrier was down. But, perhaps because I was not weakened, fevered, paralysed, the result was different. I felt not that I entered a world, but that a world entered me. There were no exploits such as the ceiling gave; no journeys; no people. Of the two landscapes, the ceiling was the more mundane. But the ceiling had showed me that time was not simply a clock; and so I was open to the hill and to the metaphors of time that the hill gave. And the years of bed had developed another freedom.
For most children, I know now, time drags. That is because inertia is uncommon, and days are filled with events. But where a child has only inertia, time must not rule. And I played with time as if it were chewing-gum, making a minute last an hour, and a day compress to a minute. I had to. If I had not kept time pliant, it would have set me as the pebble in the rock.
So I brought to the coloured cliff and my strength the craft of the white ceiling and my weakness. I switched myself off. And the universe opened. I was shown a totality of space and time, a kaleidoscope of images expanding so quickly that they fragmented. There were too many, too fast for individual detail or recall. They dropped below the subliminal boundary, but I felt the rip-tide of their surge, and the rip-tide has remained.
Yet despite the hurly-burly beyond words, when I partook of the hill and the hill partook of me, there was a calm, which childhood could not give. For if the child had been left with only a vision, if the “me” had not been replaced by a truer sense of self, I do not know what would have happened. I do not know that I could have grown. With only a blind vision, I do not know that I could have survived.
I said at the beginning that, as children, we accept “normality” to be whatever is around us; and I have tried to describe three experiences to demonstrate what I mean. Man, though, at every age is also an animal with instincts that need no teaching; and the strongest instinct is for life. Yet in childhood, at three separate times I died.
It was not medical death in the way that it can now be defined. It was the opinion of doctors, humane men, around the bed of an organism under the rough ceiling of a cottage below Alderley Edge. The child was technically alive, but all his systems were collapsing, and there was nothing more to be done for him. In one instance, meningitis, I heard my mother being helped to accept the imminent death by being told that for me to recover would be a cruelty, because the damage to brain and spine would be massive, and I should be a bedridden thing for the rest of my life: not a person, not a son.
What those humane men did not take into account was that I was not yet dead. I could not signal, I was unable to communicate with the outside world, but I was not yet dead. I could hear. And I heard. I heard myself dismissed, written off. It was, to the animal in me, an attempt to kill my life.
I screamed, using no words, making no sound. The body was nearly dead. But fury then was greater than death, and, though nothing showed on the surface of the creature under the sheet, inside was war. I raged against the cosmos. Inside me was a zoo gone mad. Outside was calm, immobile, good-as-dead. And that is why I lived. I was too angry to die.
Mine was a glorious childhood. I would not wish it on anyone, nor on me again. But it happened. And my good fortune was that I was able, as a child, to know my death, to face the ultimate, before experience scrambled my brains.
I am not arguing for life-at-all-costs. I hope I am not so arrogant that I would even begin to tell other people in other circumstances what to do. Indeed, I am at a disadvantage. I have known my death and known its ways, but I have never felt so desperate that I have wanted to die. I have felt so desperate that I have wanted to live. I have pursued life through the Edge and the ceiling and am simply relating a number of connected events that, though personal to me, may by their simplicity be of interest to others.
I speak as a survivor, and have described some techniques of survival, the pursuit of life, through the Edge and the ceiling, through inner and outer space and time, which I used as a child at an historic period when strangers were trying to kill me. The instincts were those of an animal, but they went on to teach me something more. They taught me that we transcend technique and that all experience can be made positive and turned to good. But we can never afford to stop.
If I had stopped, having survived, the technique of the Edge and the ceiling might have dwindled into a sloppy mysticism; but instead I endured the rigours of an education that matched vision with thought, each to feed the other, so that dream and logic both had their place, both made sense, and legend and history could both be true.
In such a way, one mere survival was transcended, and is to this day. Each connection seen brings greater awe. My privileged childhood forced me to choose whether to live or to die; and I saw that inner and outer worlds did not collide. I saw a unity at work outside myself.
I have often been asked by people who know this history whether that childhood made me a writer. If I had not had the encounter with my death and the Damascan road provided by the Edge, would I have been granted the vision needed in order to write? If I had not been born with the stamina of will and the bloody-mindedness required of all writing, should I have meekly accepted the doctors’ diagnosis? All I can say is that many writers have been only children, and have suffered long and life-threatening illness in isolation from human company.
My wife has voiced a theory that may well be of literary import in the context of my experience at that given time. She is a teacher and critic, and we argue endlessly, within a framework of general agreement. So I may put forward these thoughts without much fear of misrepresentation; and you may be sure that she will have checked them before they are spoken, since she says that, if a fiction can improve on the fact, I shall always chose the fiction. She claims to find, in recent children’s literature, little that qualifies as literature. She asked herself why this should be, after a Golden Age that ran from the late Fifties to the late Sixties. And she found that generally the writers of this Golden Age were children during the Second World War: a war waged against civilians.
The atmosphere that these children and young people grew up in was one of a whole community and a whole nation united against pure evil, made manifest in the person of Hitler. Parents were seen to be afraid. Death was a constant possibility. There was no expectation of security. The talk was of an idyllic time in the past, and the propaganda promised a better future.
Therefore, daily life was lived on a mythic plane: of absolute Good against absolute Evil; of the need to endure, to survive whatever had to be overcome, to be tempered in whatever furnace was required. These are spiritual, moral and philosophical issues, and, therefore, bound to have had an effect on the psyche of childhood at that time.
Those children who were born writers, and who would be adolescent when the full horrors became known, would not be able to avoid concerning themselves with the issues; and so their books, however clad, were written on profound themes, and were literature. The generation that has followed is not so fuelled, and its writing is, by comparison, effete and trivial.
Susan Cooper, an exact contemporary of mine at Oxford, has said: “I know that the shape of my imagination, and all its unconscious preoccupations, were moulded by having been a child in the war.”
At a deeper level, and more enigmatically, Kurt Hahn said in 1947: “Education has no nobler task than to provide the moral equivalent of war.”
So far my wife. I can testify to the weight of at least one part of her observations. She is right in saying that we were living on a mythic plane. I remember the frequency with which the Sleeping Hero under the hill behind the village was referred to by adults. They said of him, half (yet only half) in jest, that, since he was waiting to ride out when England should be “in direst peril”, and, “in a battle thrice lost, thrice won, drive the enemy into the sea”, it was about time for him to be doing. It showed me at an early age the enduring power of myth. In 1940 it was something the village turned to seriously.
I would add on my own account that, when I see the materialistic brats who have never had to ask twice to be appeased muling and puling now as adults, I agree with Othello that “the tyrant custom . . . hath made the flinty and steel couch of war my thrice-driven bed of down”. Richard Crawshaw’s, “. . . all wonders in one sight. Eternity shut in a span.” That was what I felt on that bed.
Educationalist and critic may dispute the matter; psychologist and philosopher, biologist and theologian, too. For me, there is no conflict. I am a writer. It is enough that as a child I saw, and came to know, my place.
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1 This lecture was delivered at the National Word Festival, the Australian National University, Canberra, on 21 March 1983.
2
Aback of Beyond
Death’s visitations in the lower stages of society do not generally call forth much, if any, public notice, even in a country district. In the case of Garner, a humble stone-cutter, we find something of an exception to the general rule. He was born, brought up, and he lived until his death at the old cottage at the foot of the Edge, near the Hough Chapel. While following with zeal his humble trade, he associated himself with finer things in leisure hours. He was a lover of music. The old Hough Band owes its existence in no small measure to Garner. In numerous other ways were he and his music noticed and known. He was not only a ringer and a singer, but he and his ophicleide will be missed at sacred gatherings about the district.1
WE ARE ADDRESSING ourselves to “The Development of the Spiritual”, and one cause of my having a claim to your time and attention today has its beginning not in 1996, but in 1893, which is the date of the obituary notice of my great-great-grandfather, Robert, a part of which I have just read to you.
My father kept the fragile cutting in his wallet, and would take it out and declaim it with pride: pride that the family name had got into the local newspaper. For me, aged about nine when I first heard it, there was only an unarticulated sense of imprisonment, of condescension. And no one could tell me what an ophicleide was.
Now I’m going to tell you a story.
If you don’t like, don’t listen, as Russian fairy tales begin: but once upon a time, not near, not far, not high, not low, beyond thrice nine lands, beyond the tenth kingdom, a young man sat on a tree stump. His name was not Jack, but Alan, because the young man was me.
I sat in turmoil. The trouble was that within me were two people. One was the son of a family of rural craftsmen. They had shaped the place in which I had grown; everywhere I turned, their hands showed me their skills; yet my hands had no cunning; with them I could make nothing, and my family despaired of me.
The other me was different. He was not the first of that family to be intelligent, but he was the first to be taught. I had gone to Manchester Grammar School and to Oxford University, to be made adept in Latin, Greek, Ancient History and Philosophy: to be versed in Western Classical Humanism. And in this world I had flourished, and had long had one ambition: the Chair of Greek at Oxford. But something had gone wrong.
