Mister Timeless Blyth, page 4
After that first time I took what were known as precautions, purchased prophylactics from the barber’s shop. Will that be all, sir? Something for the weekend, sir?
And if things had been otherwise, if Annie had become pregnant, what then? How would that responsibility have changed our lives, the road, or roads, we would travel? We would certainly have married, we were agreed on that, and having agreed on it we went ahead anyway, were married within the year.
We loved each other, that was clear. There was no need for any great romantic declaration. I don’t even think I formally proposed. Annie was nothing if not pragmatic. We weighed it up, pro and con.
We could do a lot worse, she said, and I laughed. Yes, indeed we could.
The ceremony was a simple one, not to say perfunctory, at the local registry office.
When I try to recall the day, the memories are like snapshots in black and white, the ones I used to keep in a big old photo album, held in place with little paper mounts at each corner, dates and captions handwritten underneath. That album travelled with me to Japan, must have been destroyed with much else in the Summer of ’44, but I can still bring the images to mind.
Myself in a three-piece tweed suit, a dark tie, my thick hair slicked down with water but springing back, unruly as ever. I stood, upright and serious, the pose formal, fixing my gaze on the camera with focussed intensity, unwavering, unsmiling, but perhaps with a glint in the eyes. A confident uncertainty. My parents must have paid the photographer whose sole admonition to us was to freeze and not to move. So we froze and did not move.
Annie beside me, half a head shorter, leaning into me, her arm linked in mine, her head to one side. She wore a high-buttoned coat, a soft bonnet with a cloth flower on the brim, a little posy of real flowers in her free hand. She too maintained a seriousness, but there was something in the set of the mouth, the bright eyes, suggesting a barely restrained mirth.
There were photos of both of us individually, separate. There was a group shot, set up and posed as if in a studio. My parents standing to attention, my grandmother between them. On the other side a wistfully smiling Dora next to Annie’s mother who looked small and lost in an old too-heavy overcoat. Slightly behind, standing back, self-deprecating as ever, Mr Watson peering through his glasses, for all the world like a character from Dickens, hands clutching his lapels.
That time. That place. These people.
How it was, how we were. So very long ago.
We moved into a rented ground floor two-room coldwater flat, the privy outside the back door in a tiny scrap of garden where nothing much grew. The back room was the kitchen with an old table and a couple of wooden chairs. Propped on its end in the corner was a big tin bath we dragged out every Friday night to the middle of the floor where we filled it with pans of water boiled on the gas stove. We prided ourselves on that luxury, a bath once a week, whether-we-needed-it-or-not!
Like Annie’s previous accommodation, the flat was close to the railway line, and in some strange way I found I liked the noise of the trains, took a kind of comfort in it. I realise now I found it almost mantric, the regularity and repetition of it, the clatter and grumble, percussive.
In the front room was a heavy-framed bed with noisy springs. Along one wall I built a bookcase to hold all the books we already owned and the many more I was sure we would acquire.
The kitchen table was where we would work of an evening, spreading out our books and papers, sometimes looking up at each other, grinning at the ridiculous miracle of our being there. It was good, and we were content.
The way time and chance conspire to change our lives. A visitor from Japan was to address graduating students about the possibility of teaching English out East, not in Japan itself but in Korea. A Bach cello recital scheduled for that evening had been cancelled, so we went instead to the talk, Annie complaining that she had no interest whatsoever in going to Korea.
We had discussed going abroad – we were young, and England could feel cramped and stifling. That sense of constraint had come upon me again, a dread at the thought of being limited, trapped. The scholarly life held an appeal, but the academic world seemed sterile. Nor could I imagine settling for a dull suburban existence, never travelling beyond these shores.
There was something else too, a sense that we were both, in certain circles, regarded as outsiders, beyond the pale, Annie for her Jewishness, I for my adherence to pacifism – the white feather factor. Often it didn’t amount to much, a look, a dismissive smirk, a turning away so we felt cold-shouldered. But the idea of moving on and out, getting away from an England still riven by divisions of hierarchy and class, had been in our minds.
Annie’s preference was for America. She liked the idea of the life we could make there, freedom and open spaces, a sense of endless possibility. I had always been drawn to the East, by temperament and inclination. India was an option, but I wanted no part of the Raj and all its works, the brutality and arrogance of Empire. So I was intrigued by the subject of this talk, the promise it offered.
If, if, if, if, if, if…
If that concert hadn’t been cancelled, if we hadn’t gone to the talk. That singular occasion, and all that followed from it.
The speaker, Akio Fujii, was a young man of about my own age. (I later discovered we were indeed born in the same year). I was immediately taken with his manner, his bearing. He sat, straight-backed but relaxed, not rigid. He was handsome and dapper, elegant in a dark suit and tie. His English was accented, but confident, measured, and I could understand every word without difficulty. He spoke of Korea, its beauty, something of its history. But when he spoke of his homeland, something else entered into the telling. There was an intensity, a quiet pride. He mentioned Shinto, the national religion, its essential animism, a kind of democracy of all things, which he said was not at all in conflict with Buddhism. He used the word Zen, and I heard it spoken for the first time. Zen. It was a small stone dropped in a still pool, its ripples spreading out.
We spoke to him after his presentation, were charmed by his attentiveness, his quiet grace.
So, he said at last. Would you be interested in going to Korea to teach?
I looked at Annie. She smiled, gave a little shrug.
Yes, I said. Yes.
While I was still in London, still teaching, I had another of those chance encounters that occur from time to time which seem somehow fated, like scenes from a carefully-plotted novel. My bicycle had a flat tyre so I hadn’t ridden it to work. I was delayed leaving the school and missed the bus I would have caught. I decided to walk the two miles home. Halfway there I heard a voice behind me, a Glasgow voice I recognised.
Reg? Reggie Blyth!
I turned and it was Davie Robertson, my fellow conshie from the Scrubs. Older, harder, more gaunt, more embattled.
As I live and breathe! I said.
There was a young fellow named Reg…
Who was frequently heard to allege…
Still philosophising? he asked.
Afraid so, I said. Still agitating?
Always have, always will.
We were passing a pub and he suggested stopping for a pint. I said I would settle for a ginger beer. Since the white feather incident, I had lost my taste for cider, forsworn even this slight indulgence. I told Robertson I was teetotal (a wonderful word) and he shook his head, said, Ach Reg!
We talked for a bit, he swigging his pint, I sipping my fiery but innocuous brew, and he asked if I’d ever had news of the others in our little group.
Not a word, I said.
I met Archie Bishop, he said. By chance. Like us meeting today. He’s back at his old job, wielding a meat cleaver.
Needs must, I said.
He told me something really…distressing, said Robertson. About what happened to young Dickson.
Paul.
I don’t know, maybe Bishop met somebody in the boy’s family. Anyway he heard the story and he says it’s the God’s honest.
He took a swig from his pint. You’ll remember they let the boy out after he’d served his first three months? Well that wasn’t the end of it. They said now he was out, he’d have to join his regiment, the one they’d assigned him to. He refused and was re-arrested as a deserter.
You thought that might happen.
Aye. Only this time they didn’t bring him back to the Scrubs. They actually took him to France with the regiment. He wouldn’t fight – he couldn’t fight. Suffered what they call shellshock. They court-martialled him for disobeying a military order, and they shot him.
Dear God, I said.
Not much in evidence, said Robertson. No sign of a dear God in any of this.
No, I told him, I had to agree.
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They kill us for their sport.
That other young man, decades later, to all intents and purposes my own son.
Lee.
If only, if only.
I never ran into Robertson again after that chance meeting. The fates did not conspire. The moving finger wrote, moved on. But once, again by chance, by the unlikeliest of coincidences, I was rummaging one rainy afternoon in a secondhand bookshop in Shinjuku. Tucked away in a corner was an old wooden crate stuffed with books in English, mostly tattered and musty, the pages curled with damp. There was little of interest – religious tracts, pre-war travel guides, a bundle of bus timetables from the Midlands. But in amongst them was a little book of verse, written by one David Robertson and published by a workers’ press in Glasgow. The title was Prison Poems, the title printed in red against a black-and-white drawing of a brick wall with a high, barred window.
Did ye hear about the lonely prisoner? He was in his cell!
The poems were doggerel, setting new words, anti-war propaganda, to popular songs and verses. But as I read I could hear Davie’s voice belting them out, and I found myself unexpectedly moved.
I showed the book to the shopkeeper, pointing at the cover, laughing as I tried to explain the author was a friend of mine. Perhaps he wanted to humour this crazy gaijin jabbering at him, or thought I had written the book myself and was what the Americans call a jailbird. Or, more likely, as a simple gesture of kindness he insisted I take the book and refused to accept payment.
That book must have been destroyed in ’45, along with so much else.
But once again I get ahead of myself in the telling.
I have been writing this after the fashion of some of the modern novelists, in the first person, meandering here and there as the fancy takes me, as memory dictates. And if I cannot remember exactly, I shall make it up to the nearest approximation.
Was it like that?
Yes, it was exactly like that. More or less.
2
LAND OF
MORNING CALM
I cannot recall in exact detail our preparations for the move to Korea. Annie had been swayed by my enthusiasm, decided to give it a go. What did we have to lose? We waited till after we had graduated, then made our plans, booked our passage, packed our worldly goods – a box of books, a few clothes – to be shipped on ahead. What life awaited us we had no idea.
To be young!
I thought we were to travel by train, get to Moscow then on across Asia by the Trans-Siberian Railway. With all the enthusiasm of that small boy whose father had worked for the Great Eastern, I threw myself into planning the journey, imagining it. I traced the route on a map, spread out on the kitchen table. I pored over timetables. Moscow to Kurgan, Omsk, Irkutsk, Lake Baikal, Manchuria and on to Vladivostok. The very names were thrilling and I intoned them in a gravelly voice in my best Russian accent, arms folded like a Cossack dancer, all for Annie’s sake, to make her laugh.
Idiot! she said, in her own best Russian accent. Ee-dyot!
To make her laugh. There were times when I thought that was my main goal in life.
But the journey for her was no joke. For various complicated reasons I could never quite fathom, the long haul was not overland but by boat. Annie was a creature of fire, not water, and she did not travel well. (Nor did she travel hopefully, but rather in desperation to arrive). By the time we made landfall in India, docking at Bombay, she was wretched and close to despair. The seasickness had left her washed-out and weak, unable to keep down food which in any case was unpalatable. My iron constitution enabled me to survive more or less unscathed. My years in the Scrubs had taught me to survive on next to nothing, and on the voyage I supplemented the miserable fare on offer with a supply of chocolate I had stashed away in my suitcase. Annie found even that hard to stomach, the smell of it too sickly-sweet. She subsisted on black tea without milk or sugar, charred slices of dry toast. For my part I was helpless to ease her suffering (apart from fetching the tea and toast from the galley). I quite literally soothed-her-fevered-brow, cooling her forehead with a damp cloth.
At Bombay, we disembarked and had a few days to rest and recover before the next stage of the journey. Annie felt a little better for being on dry land, but was still not strong enough to go outside and walk around. So I headed out alone, followed my nose and my instincts.
The place was quite simply overwhelming, a cacophony of noise, kaleidoscope of colour, an olfactory assault, rancid and stagnant, intoxicating and fragrant. I had never known anything like it, was completely unprepared.
It was only a few short years since the Amritsar massacre, Jallianwala Bagh – hundreds of unarmed demonstrators, among them women and children, herded into a walled garden from which there was no escape and gunned down by British troops. Reading the accounts of it had made me feel physically sick. Man’s inhumanity.
I had always been uncomfortable with the whole idea of colonialism, nations subjugated, plundered for their resources in the name of democracy, or civilisation, or God help us, Christianity. It was an abomination, especially when imposed by brute force on a culture as ancient, as sophisticated, as India.
I had with me a little pocket edition of the Bhagavad Gita, the Song of the Lord, published in the series Wisdom of the East. (I have it still, its cover faded, pages yellowed and dog-eared). I had read it on the voyage and could quote passages by heart.
It slays not, nor is it slain. It is born not, nor does it die.
Weapons cannot cleave it, fire cannot burn it, water cannot drench it, wind cannot dry it.
For him that is born, death is certain, and certain is birth for him that is dead. Therefore when a thing is unavoidable, grieve not.
Grieve not.
I wondered how many of those slaughtered at Amritsar had faced death sustained by that teaching.
Thinking of me when he goes forth leaving the body, he attains the highest way.
How many had invoked the Lord as they ran in panic and the English bullets tore their flesh?
Even by me they are already slain.
And these words were spoken by Krishna to Arjuna on the battlefield at Kurukshetra.
I happened on a little statue of Krishna at a wayside shrine and I stopped in front of it. The figure was graceful, depicted the god with his flute raised to his lips.
Unheard melodies.
Someone had garlanded the statue with a string of yellow flowers, placed a few more blossoms at his feet. Unbidden, I folded my hands and bowed.
Namaste.
As I turned away I saw a portly Englishman, a caricature in khaki shorts, glaring across at me with a look of utter disdain as if he had just detected a particularly fetid smell right under his nose. I couldn’t help myself. I folded my hands again and bowed to him, just as I had bowed to Krishna.
He took a step forward and for a moment I thought he might actually strike me. Instead he spat out, Damn fool! and strode off in high dudgeon.
He was the epitome of a certain kind of pigheaded John Bull Englishness, imbued with an innate and unfounded certainty of its own superiority. God was in his heaven and all was right with the Empire on which the sun never set. I imagined there were many of his type in India. He also reminded me forcibly and uncomfortably of the members of the panel who had interviewed me, long ago and in another world, that cold committee room in Leytonstone, before I was consigned to Wormwood Scrubs.
Are you a religious man, Mr Blyth, Yes or No?
I continued, away from the main roads, down side streets and narrow lanes, past hawkers and street vendors, beggars in rags, some crippled or maimed, and worst of all children, scrawny and malnourished, hands held out, eyes beseeching.
I was not prepared, had no money to speak of. Hands tugged at my sleeve, and I felt if I stopped I would be swamped. And which one to choose, to bless with my feeble largesse, my few miserable pennies?
I bowed to them all, said Sorry, kept my head down and pushed on, took refuge in a small temple, stepped into its coolness and found myself in front of a statue of Ganesh, the elephant-headed Remover of Obstacles, and once again I bowed.
Namaste.
Of all the Hindu gods, pot-bellied Ganesh was the most benign, the most warmly human. There was strength here, that elephant strength, solid, indomitable. But there was kindliness and compassion, a twinkle in the eyes. I looked at him long, smiled back at him, filled with an immense and unexpected sense of wellbeing. There was a rich fragrance of incense in the air, heady and sweet, perhaps sandalwood. A sadhu in yellow robes appeared beside me, folded his hands and began to chant in what I took to be Sanskrit, a rapid singsong incantation, a mantra that sounded like Aum Ganeshaya Nama.
