Mischief Acts, page 18
When are you going to Sydenham Hill?
Willow, hornbeam, rowan and lime;
Remind one there I’m waiting still,
To know he’ll be a true love of mine.
Tell him to steal me a palace of glass,
Willow, hornbeam, rowan and lime;
And on the hill’s brow to make it fast,
Then he’ll be a true love of mine.
Tell him to fill it with wonders unseen,
Willow, hornbeam, rowan and lime;
With jewels that sing and music that dreams,
Then he’ll be a true love of mine.
Tell him to bring all of London to stare,
Willow, hornbeam, rowan and lime;
At sparks of flame that fly in the air,
Then he’ll be a true love of mine.
Collected by A. L. Lloyd
10
OBEDIENT MAGIC
1936
Charm: No hall may blaze so bright that this song will not put it out.
‘Watch this,’ the man said to me, and he positioned himself against the wall so that, with the shadows cast by the streetlamp and the trees, he looked as if he had antlers sprouting from his head.
Then he offered me a cigarette. The flame from his lighter came at once and swept the horns away.
‘Tell me, Crystal,’ he said, as he went to loll against the tree. ‘What is it like, to have a name that twinkles?’
I was proud of my name at that time. ‘I’m named for the palace,’ I said.
He seemed to hate this. He had never visited it, he told me. He had never actually been inside.
I didn’t try to be cool. He brought out something childish in me, some kind of mischief. ‘Let me take you on a tour,’ I said. ‘Or my father. He’s the new general manager, you can look behind the scenes.’ The man drew closer to me and blew a smoke ring that encircled my head. ‘People call it fairyland,’ I said. ‘You’ll be enchanted.’
I felt quite bold, working on him like that, gazing at him as if I couldn’t care less whether he liked me, or whether he liked the palace.
We walked in the dark from streetlamp to streetlamp, and it began to rain, but I didn’t hurry. We couldn’t see the palace from there, the trees overhung the wall on that part of the hill. The man took my hand and I didn’t mind, I liked the rough warmth of it and the thick pad below his thumb. I went on talking, in the rain. ‘You won’t have seen anything like it,’ I said. ‘Inside is like an endless garden, like a paradise. You can see anything, learn anything.’
‘You don’t remember what was here before,’ the man said, not asking but stating. We were stepping around puddles now, little pools of lamplit gold, like molten glass.
‘It’s always been the palace, for me. Will you come and take a tour?’
‘Watch this,’ the man said. He reached up and swung himself on a low branch, until his legs flipped right over and he was sitting on the high wall, looking down at me. He was like an acrobat.
‘We could go for a cup of tea,’ I said. ‘I’m quite wet.’ I wouldn’t show him I was impressed, he was like a boy showing off, and that would end in humiliation.
He grinned and then threw himself backwards. I heard the thump when he landed on the other side of the wall.
‘You could come and meet us on Friday,’ I called. ‘At the low-level station.’
I don’t know why I wanted to show him the palace, except that he didn’t seem to care and that made the feeling sharper. It prickled me, but the sensation was one I wanted to keep. And I did keep it, all that evening while Daddy tried again to teach me to play chess and teased me for muddling knights and rooks, but I was distracted because Bunny would not stop barking at the rain.
‘You’ll have it by Christmas,’ Daddy kept saying. ‘You’ll have it by Christmas, and we’ll play all evening. I’ll let you beat me.’ He was so jolly, thinking of it all only a month away, and in the year he had made such improvements to his darling palace – had really saved it, he said.
I knew that after all this rain, the palace would be sparkling on Friday.
‘You must be the only man in Norwood who hasn’t been inside,’ said Daddy as he shook the man’s hand outside the station. The sun shone, and the palace shone, as if still sleek with rainwater, so it was hard to look at as we walked up through the sodden gardens. The man’s name was Herne, he said, and I pretended I had known that. It took a long time to reach the palace while Daddy explained all the repairs he was making, how the fountains would shoot up hundreds of feet again one day soon and all the glory of his darling would be restored. It would be fairyland again.
‘You are named for glory restored,’ the man said to me, and I was pleased that he winked at me when Daddy’s back was turned. The air was sweet for November, everything freshened, the few leaves on the trees and the wet ground giving a soaked scent, a distilled essence of water, earth, air.
Bunny raced, one moment elated, the next morose, her white fur browning and her little paws damp. The palace dazzled as if new, polished by the low sun, the great wonder and Daddy’s pride, his joy. It looked bigger than ever.
Something I always loved to do, at the point halfway to the palace from the low-level station, was to turn my gaze back and forth, first to the palace rising up, the crystal mountain on the breast of the hill, and then away at the spreading plains, wooded here and rolling there, the wide and mysterious green and brown beyond. I made Daddy stop. ‘Do this,’ I said, turning my head, back and forth, so that Herne did the same and we swapped worlds, over and over. It gave me the same dizzy, lurching feeling it always had, and it made me nostalgic for the magic of everything when I was young, how even to turn my head back and forth, back and forth, was to cast a spell, and I could make reality dance. Palace; woods; palace; woods. It was like travelling through time on the spot.
It delighted me that Herne played this game too, but I wanted him to take Daddy seriously. Nothing made him so happy as seeing a person speechless with wonder at his palace. So I hung back, and played with Bunny, who liked to bark at the fish in the ponds and pretend she was a great monster to them.
I have heard Daddy’s speeches so many times I could recite along with him. How the whole palace travelled from Hyde Park to Sydenham Hill in 1854, after the Great Exhibition, and still they enlarged it further and filled it with yet more wonders. How her glory had waned of late, but Daddy had taken the job to turn her fortunes around, and just look what a fine sight awaited us! We traipsed through it all: the Pompeian Court, the Egyptian Court, the Alhambra Court, the Assyrian and Nineveh Court, the Byzantine and Romanesque Court, the Mediaeval Courts. All still swelled my heart, and the old breathlessness came upon me, listening as Daddy pointed out each sculpture, structure and specimen. But Herne lingered longest in the Industrial Courts, and in particular the one where all was formed of cast iron. It was the only one I found a little dismal, but I never said so.
Herne fingered the cool surfaces, and I watched the condensation prints of his fingertips spread and then fade away. I could not say why this filled me with melancholy, while Daddy went on with his explanations of Birmingham cast iron and Sheffield steel.
‘Nearly one thousand tons of iron,’ he said, ‘and twenty-five acres of glass, make up this palace. And the original in Hyde Park – though lesser – was conceived by a gardener. Did you know that?’
I could tell that Herne did not like to hear this. He was stiffening, he did not stop any longer to catch my eye but followed Daddy in a trance. I suppose I forgot, how the soul might be overwhelmed by so many statues, by fountains and the living drapery of exotic plants, and by cabinets containing every splendid thing the world has made.
*
‘Funny fellow,’ Daddy sniffed, afterwards, while we waited for Herne to take one last look at the south transept. ‘Funny friend for you to make, my dear.’ But Bunny was straining at her leash, desperate to go dancing out on to the wet lawns again, and Daddy had to go to the offices then, and he didn’t seem to mind that when we had said goodbye, Herne set off beside me.
The sun was very low, and the sky behind the palace a smudgy pink, and a little green above that, so that the glass looked like opal, my favourite stone after crystal. I didn’t say this to Herne. I let him look at me, looking up at all that heavenly light. He could think what he liked, about me and all of it.
‘Didn’t you love it?’ I asked him, as we wandered down towards the low-level station. But he seemed intent on the trees, which are just like any other trees except better kept. ‘Didn’t you?’ I said.
He was eyeing me, that mischief look again, as if he would like to play a trick. Then he went bounding after Bunny who, free of the leash, kept dashing and barking, in love with the game and with being chased, and I had to follow them.
They were both much faster than me, though I ran with abandon, and let the waterlogged grass flick up at me and the bushes I pushed through catch at me. I ran all the way to the furthest lake before I found them. Bunny was leaping up, delirious, and there was Herne, sitting high on the shoulders of the tallest of the cement dinosaurs that wade and lounge all around the lake.
I laughed and called to him, and when he saw me he stood up, balancing, and stepped on to the dinosaur’s head. He should have looked ridiculous, riding that great, inert monster, but somehow he looked grand, and so serious, as if all the trees and the spiky palms and the strange prehistoric ferns that grow there had thronged about the lake to hear him speak. Even Bunny stopped jumping in the air and settled, staring up at him.
‘A thousand tons of steel!’ he declared, spreading his arms. ‘Twenty-five acres of glass.’ He was looking, not at me, but down at the lake’s surface. ‘Every marvel of man’s achievement! Fairyland.’ I could see him too, down there, glaring up at the world from beneath the water. ‘Spectacle! Glamour! Obedient magic! Come to the Crystal Palace, and be enchanted. For what could be more enthralling than things that men have made.’ Then he lit a cigarette, and let the lighter flame burn, tall and trembling, for a very long time.
I picked up a stone and threw it, high, so that it fell into the lake with a long gulp. As the ripples obliterated that glaring Herne under the water, I threw another, and another, as if I could smash a window that would always mend itself. I didn’t wait for the surface to settle again, and I didn’t wait to hear what more Herne might say. I took Bunny and we snuck down a path that led away from the lake, not to the low-level station but out on to the comforting familiarity of Anerley Hill.
For a week, I sulked. I would call it that now. I walked round and round the garden at home, Bunny whining at my heels, suffused with a kind of dull anger that I thought I could excise by grinding my heels into dead leaves, and refusing to look at the sky.
A dull anger is a strange sort, it is a feeling like wearing a coat soaked through and heavy with water, but refusing to take it off. What is pride? I wondered as I stomped. Herne had too much of it. I believed I had just the perfect amount, for I was Crystal Buckman, named for the palace, for my darling father’s ambitions, and I was doing all right, wasn’t I? It should not matter that a curious man who was probably up to no good at all had made me feel like a ghost in a wet overcoat, and made the palace, my own fairyland, seem for a moment, a lonely moment by a rippling lake, like a bloated folly.
But it was not only the puzzle of pride and its consequences that weighed on me all that melancholic week. I had refused, upon meeting Herne, to even try to figure him out. The world had not demanded that I do so, and while it still did not, some stubborn part of me was now infuriated by the very slipperiness of him, and by my admiration for that. He truly seemed to be a free spirit, and to acknowledge this, to respect it, had felt noble. Pride, no doubt, had crept in there, too. I had been proud to act the unbothered free spirit myself, but I had made myself ludicrous.
Now, damp and angry in the garden, I wanted to feel free to laugh at him, and at myself, to turn heel and head inside and learn how to move a rook, or a knight, so that come Christmas, Daddy would not have to let me win at chess. Bunny huddled by the French doors. The glow from within was so soft and bright, so generous, I was screwed up by my inability to love it and all that it stood for. Daddy would be sitting by the fire, the newspaper in his lap and everything scented with woodsmoke and the comfort of evening, while I drooped out here in the gloom.
I decided I would walk it off, once and for all. Mondays were for beginning afresh, and there were a few hours left of this day. All the December festivities would fly into life tomorrow at the palace, and I could ready my heart to receive them with the love I had felt each year of my life so far.
I could not shake Daddy off when he insisted he accompany me and Bunny through the dark streets. I was not in a mood to talk to him, nor to hear about the pantomime rehearsals and the Welsh choir and the new skating-rink design that had filled his own day with happy chaos. He might have sensed this, for we walked quietly, even Bunny was quiet, and took our habitual route up the road to stroll the long side of the palace.
There were few people about, and the way felt dreary. I glanced at faces here and there as we passed under streetlamps. I watched the shadows of bare branches that crept along the wall. I was not looking for him.
We turned into the palace grounds. I heard Daddy’s small sigh, a breath of happiness, and I envied him. So, I tugged Bunny along and I took a deep breath and I began my small, humiliating struggle to love it all once more. ‘Tell me what there will be for Christmas Eve,’ I said.
I let him talk without really listening, so that I heard only the merry calm in his voice, the restrained excitement, his own imagining of the crowds and their delight, the wonder that would seize so many and that he would organise and oversee, the modest conductor of Christmas. He slowed, gesturing down towards the lake where, frost obliging, people would skate.
‘A tree, the tallest in Norway,’ I heard him say. ‘Carriages inlaid with furs. Lights in the shapes of fruits and flowers.’ His voice petered out, and I pictured these things, as I knew he was doing, and I did manage to feel a small springing up of joy, to think of those electric flowers and shining fruits.
‘Crystal,’ Daddy said. ‘Crystal.’ He had stopped and was staring into the palace. There was a glow within the central transept.
We hurried inside, where smoke swirled, and we heard the sound that echoed around us, men calling and the hiss of water, and behind that, the faint flow of music from the rehearsal room, serene and strange. Bunny was struggling for the door, but I picked her up and followed Daddy.
Just as we saw the fire, and the sprays of water from the firemen’s hose lit like scattering jewels above it, there was a great explosion of flame. Bunny howled and squirmed.
‘The orchestra,’ Daddy said, quite gently. ‘Tell them now, and meet me outside,’ and he walked towards the firemen.
I knew the music that rose as I ran to the rehearsal room. It was A Tale of Old Japan, I had heard it the year before, the night after my birthday, and then it had given me the sense that I sat and listened in an enchanted palace that floated somewhere above the earth, a cloud castle, detached and drifting away until Sydenham Hill was a distant dream. I had the same feeling, that I would push the rehearsal-room door and enter an unreal realm, that my voice would not sound, that I would be the ghost I had felt myself to be all that miserable week. But I heard myself shout, as the door banged shut behind me and the music dismantled itself note by note, ‘The palace is on fire. The palace is blazing!’
*
It was said afterwards that a hundred thousand people came to Sydenham Hill that night. That even Winston Churchill joined the crowd, and shook his head, and pronounced the end of an era. That molten glass flowed down Anerley Hill, and that people poked it from the gutter and rolled it into balls. They said that the palace moaned as it burned, first as hot smoke rushed through the gigantic organ pipes, and then as her girders twisted and curled and fell. They called her Screaming Alice.
A thousand tons of iron. Twenty-five acres of glass. All the world’s wonders of industry and art, moaning and screaming, lighting up the clouds. So you, Reader, will never be able to see what it was my father adored and Herne disdained. And if I was working on you now, if I cared at all whether you liked me or not, I would say that all of this, from that encounter beneath a streetlamp to the sound of each orchestra player ceasing to pour out their regulated notes, somehow damaged me. That would be the excuse I think you would like to hear; an explanation that would be, not nice, but credible, and pitiable. I would let you believe that I had gone mad, since even if you were horrified, the explanation would make it all safe.
But the mischief look in my eye is not madness, and I do not care at all if you like me. It is only out of pity for my poor old father that I have not told the rest of this story. For while the Crystal Palace melted and flowed away, and South London stood spellbound in its vitreous haze, I ran all the way down past the terraces and the fountains and the maze, and I pushed through the bushes and went on running, to the lake where the cement dinosaurs loomed in the dark.
I knew Herne by the orange glow of his lit cigarette, and the smoke he exhaled that encircled my head as I kissed him, and kissed him, until I had no breath. And there amidst the prehistoric ferns and spiky palms, I stripped off my clothes and stood before him until he did the same. Aeroplanes burred overhead, all sweeping towards the palace. Every person for miles around looked, and exclaimed, and hurried towards Sydenham Hill, so that there were only trees to bear witness when we fell together, on to the grass, and fell yet further into a kind of frenzy, in which I was not my old self, but neither was I something new.
We swapped worlds, in the undergrowth, where neither the vanishing palace above us nor the invisible woods below us could press themselves into our consciousness, but instead we incanted one another only. I was not under a spell. I felt that some spell had been broken. I was not feral. I would say now that I was honest, and that I had not known honesty before, and that it is not always sweet.
