Anna Kavan - Sleep Has His House

MY father thought I ought to be amongst other children, he sent me to a day school not far away. It was autumn. On windy days when I was walking to school each tree at the roadside stood in its own gold shower. I played a game catching the leaves as they fell. Whenever I caught a specially fine one I put it into my pocket. But next time I looked at it the colours had always faded and I was left with only a crumpled dead thing to throw away.

To begin with, I was quite glad to be going to school. I thought it might be something new and exciting. But it was not exciting, and soon it stopped being even new, and became disappointing and dull. There was a play at the end of term and I had a good part in it. I thought it would be a real excitement to act in a play. But when the day came that was somehow disappointing as well.

After that everything that happened at school seemed unreal and a waste of time, a part of the dull day world which was unimportant. Without understanding the reason, I knew that I had to keep the day unimportant. I had to prevent the day world from becoming real. I waited all through the day for the moment of going home to my night world, the reality which I lived in the secret life of the house.

IT’S A BEAUTIFUL spring morning somewhere in the South. This is a country which later in the year will be burnt brown and harsh, but now its first ardent response to the sun has flushed it with tender radiance. Soft sienna villages crown the hills, and in every village the church bells are ringing. The notes of the different bells drift and flutter and mingle as if flocks of pigeons with singing reeds in their wings were wheeling between the hills. From all the villages streams of gaily dressed peasants are setting out for the town. Some ride, some travel in carts pulled by lumbering flower-decked oxen, most of all are on foot. They pass through olive groves where the scarlet tulips wave wild silken flags in the thin grass. Like rim the vines brandish new fistfuls of vivid green. The whole landscape rejoices, the carnival notes of the bells swoop festively through the brilliant air. The peasants are full of holiday gaiety; it is a celebration for them, a great day. They go along laughing and calling to one another and singing to the music of their simple flutes and guitars

towards the town where the great day has also dawned. By contrast with the traditional idyllic country scene everything here has a somewhat ominous look. Views, sliding into each other, of the streets and squares of this town; a medium-sized southern town. Sunshine illuminates it hard as floodlighting. The streets, hung with garlands and bunting and unintelligibly sloganed banners, are all deserted. The main street slopes from a large public building with marble steps and balustrade down to a frontage on a glass lake. The lake frontage is planted with flowering magnolias. The boughs of the trees are black, stiff and shiny as if cut in patent leather, the flowers dangerously white and upspringing. (Do they recall to the dreamer another dream?)

From every doorway people can now be seen pouring into the streets: they come in a steadily advancing spate, filling all available space and still pouring on. There is a confused throbbing, trampling noise while they are on the move which, as the leading ranks consolidate into a dense crowd in front of the public building, becomes shot through with conflicting march tunes, bursts of clapping, singing, cheers; also with boos and shouts; with sharp distant stabs of shots, breaking glass, screams. The latter sounds are barely audible in the centre of the crowd where enthusiasm is solid.

Certainly the princess doesn’t hear them, she hears nothing but cheering voices, as she appears in her crown and state robes at the top of the steps. While she is standing there bowing, a glimpse through a broken window of soldiers entering a room where a man sits reading, paying no attention to what’s happening outside. Brief fragmentary flashes of smashed spectacles falling; arm-banded arms wrenching and grinding together thin shirt-sleeved arms;raised rifle-butt; open book on the floor, pages tom and defaced by huge muddy heel-mark. Then the man hanging slack between arm-grips, heaved through a door, slung into the crowd; shirt tom, tie twisted off, blood pouring down his face under limp lock of hair. The people against whom he falls pay no attention, their faces are not seen, they are just trousered or skirted bodies, some with worker’s hobnailed boots, some with two-toned suède shoes or natty brogues or patents, some with tennis shoes, pumps, sandals or high-heeled slippers, which automatically trample him as he folds up between them.

The princess does not see this episode (indeed, it hardly lasts as long as a flash of lightning), she is looking in another direction. She is watching a group of villagers, late arrivals from the country, who are hurrying along the now empty waterfront towards the streets lined with soldiers where the crowds are collected. In their eagerness not to miss anything the peasants are almost running: yet they can’t help stopping occasionally to admire the wonders of the town with faces of childish and delighted amazement.

Now that the child idea has been introduced it suddenly becomes apparent that they are children, the soldiers are children, the crowds are composed of children, the princess is a schoolgirl in a cardboard crown covered with gold paper.

She stands on the steps, smiling, enjoying to the utmost the acclamation of shrill childish cheers. But only for a moment. Her triumphantly straying eyes are quickly caught by an isolated moving shape, invisible to those facing her, the back view of a familiar dark-wrapped figure walking across the now vacant waterfront and rapidly passing out of sight between the magnolias. Deep in the girl’s brain the conflict at once beginning shows in the swift movements of her eyes, back and forth, from the black-branched distant trees to the close shouting faces.

Almost simultaneously with the start of the struggle it’s over, her crown tumbles off as she runs down the steps, sheers through the crowd of children, some of whom immediately start scuffling over the crown, which is soon tom and trodden to pieces between them.

AT the boarding-school I went to when I was older I felt unhappy, although to begin with I didn’t know this. The place was ugly outside and inside. The rooms were noisy and cold and crowded and I was alone in them. Of course, I always had been alone, but this was different. I was alone now in a bad way, alone in a crowded ugliness without respite. There was always winter framed in the frozen windows. The winter light marched along barren hilltops. The metal trees could never have sprouted leaves.

I began remembering things that were far away and forgotten: the way the sun shone in another country. One day when I combed my hair in front of a mirror, my mother looked out at me with her face of an exiled princess. That was the day I knew I was unhappy.

ONA LARGE bare round table in vacuum a double-page photographic montage is outspread: the same sort of layout as in an illustrated weekly but scaled up to three or four times the size. Detail of plain white clock-face marking seven-thirty. Jigsaw of school buildings angled in light and shade to sharp abstract design. Very chaotic detail of cloakroom with hockey boots scattered in pure disorder: rows of basins patterned with dirty hand marks, odd ends of grimy soap-cakes; a tap left running, forcing a costive passage through half-choked plug-hole; sodden stained towel twisted and pulled to the extreme end of its roller.

Views of classrooms, high-windowed, impersonal: straight plain functional furniture; everything unnecessarily bleak, comfortless, un-aesthetic: battered textbooks, atlases, volumes of standard works — some upside down — overflowing from shelves, upon which such things as broken chalks, paint-boxes, indian clubs, dumb-bells, skipping ropes, are stacked too in hopelessly overcrowded confusion. Very close detail of grey mottled inkwell with viscous slime of congealed ink dregs coating the bottom. Beside it, on a shallowly grooved wooden desktop, two pens, one with glossy new relief nib and tapered blue holder which terminates in a small heart made of lapis lazuli; the other with wooden holder, splintered and much chewed, nib crossed and encrusted with dried ink.