Graham Swift - Learning to Swim - And Other Stories

I read from the book Clancy had bought me — Lovelace, Suckling, the Earl of Rochester — but my attention wandered. I became irritable and sullen. I had to sit with my hands inside a plastic carrier-bag because otherwise flies would come buzzing round settling on my cracked and blistered skin. Every time I wanted to turn a page I had to take out my hands, wave away the flies and use just my finger tips on the book. If I wanted to shift my position I had to do so without using my hands. Simple things became complicated feats. I would sit pondering the absurdity of my position: stuck on a bed with my hands in a polythene bag, reading Lovelace to the sound of bulldozers, half surrounded by the painting (there was still a lot of wall to go) which I was incapable of continuing. And from this I’d leap to wider absurdities. What were we doing in a condemned tenement in Bermondsey? What would become of us in the future?

“You’ve let the cover curl up in the sun.”

Clancy had come in. She had her tired, waitress face.

“I know,” I said. “Sorry.”

I used to watch the school across the road; the kids coming and going in the morning and afternoon and streaming into the playground at breaks. It was getting near the time they broke up for the summer; then the school would close for good and the demolition men would move in. Through one of the tall windows, opposite but a little below our room, I could see the teacher standing before the blackboard, but because of the level of the window I couldn’t see his seated class. It looked as if he was speaking and gesticulating to no one. I watched him struggling to communicate with his invisible audience, waving his arms and raising his voice, and I felt sorry for him. He made me think of Mr. Boyle, who even now would be offering Sidney and Spenser to the fifth year, who were more interested in Rod Stewart and Charlton Athletic. It seemed ages since I left school, though it was only a year. I thought of all my old school friends and what they were doing, whether they had jobs or not. I thought of Eddy. He’d somehow disowned me as soon as I got interested in poetry. I wondered if there were units of the Royal Artillery in Northern Ireland. I wondered if Eddy was sitting in an armoured car in the Falls Road thinking of Mr. Boyle.

In the third week of July the school closed and the din from the playground ceased. Almost immediately several council vans turned up and took away the interior furnishings. Some of the equipment in the kitchen was dismantled and some old fold-up desks were stacked in the playground. Then the vans drove away, leaving the school like a forlorn fort amidst the besieging demolition sites. I asked myself if the kids who had gone to the school cared that it was going to be flattened. I saw some of them sometimes, playing games over the demolition sites, rooting about amongst the rubbish heaps, setting fire to things and being chased off by the site workers.

Then one day, only about a fortnight after the school closed, there were two boys in the school playground. They were walking around, looking at the heap of desks and peering through the wired ground-floor windows. I was puzzled as to how they’d got there. Then I saw the head of a third boy — and a fourth — appear over the playground wall in the far left corner where it joined the school building. There seemed to be a loose section of the wire netting above the wall, which could be lifted back and squeezed under, and although the wall was a good ten feet, the pile of desks in the corner made it possible, even for a boy of eleven or so, to lower himself down. In a short while there were five boys in the playground, mooching about in grubby jeans and T-shirts.

Their first impulse was to ransack everything. I watched them try to force their way into the school building through the big door from the playground. When this failed, they picked up some old lengths of piping left by the council workers and, poking them through the metal grilles over the windows, began smashing the panes. They used the same bits of piping to hack up lumps of asphalt from the playground, which they hurled at the upper windows. The noise they made was lost in the general noise of demolition. One of them climbed up onto the roof of one of the two small lavatory buildings abutting the school wall and, with the aid of a drain pipe, tried to reach the second-floor windows — but climbed down when he realised he would be visible from street level. Then they started to dismantle the lavatories themselves — crude little temporary buildings made from flimsy prefabricated materials, with corrugated asbestos roofs.

I wondered whether these were the same kids who broke into the tenement and set fire to the litter on the stairs. They came the next day, and the day after that, and the next day again. It seemed odd that they should return at all to the school — like released prisoners going voluntarily back to prison. They stripped the lavatories bare so that the cisterns, bowls and rusty urinals were exposed, and these became the subjects of scatological frenzies. They started to break up some of the desks from the pile in the corner. One day I noticed them throwing about something soft and dark which they had discovered on the asphalt. They were hurling it at each other’s faces and laughing. I realised it was a pigeon, a sooty-feathered London pigeon that must have fluttered very recently into the playground to die. They kept tossing it at each other; until one of them picked it up by the wing, raised it high and jerked his arm hard so that the wing came off in his hand. They all laughed. He did the same with the second wing. Then they began a mad, yelling, directionless game of football, kicking the pigeon’s body across the asphalt and against the playground walls. The grey lumps of bird turned a dark, purply red. The game ended when one of the boys kicked the bird unintentionally over the playground wall. Nobody seemed interested in retrieving it.

This was on the third afternoon. After the game with the pigeon they grew listless and lethargic. They sat and sprawled about on the broken-up asphalt, now and then gouging up lumps of it and throwing them aimlessly. The sun blazed down. They looked like real prisoners now, idle and demoralized inside the high walls. I thought: They’ve had enough; they’ll go now — their old playground holds nothing for them.

But they didn’t go. They re-appeared the next morning. It was as if there had been some over-night resolution. Between them, they had a pick-axe, a shovel and a long-handled fork. Perhaps they had been stolen from one of the building sites. They began to discuss something in the near right-hand corner of the playground, looking at the ground and marking out imaginary lines with their feet. Then one of them lifted the pick-axe and, rather clumsily at first, began hacking at the asphalt. It was difficult to see all this. Even with my high vantage point, the near wall partially obscured them. But it was obvious they were digging a hole. When one had wielded the pick-axe for a few minutes another would take over, and at intervals one of them would scrape away the dislodged asphalt and earth with the shovel. The unoccupied ones sat around, looking on silently and intently.

I wondered what all this meant. By mid-day they had dug a hole deep enough to come up to their shoulders and there was a substantial heap of earth on the asphalt. Two of them went off and returned later with other tools — trowels, garden forks, a bucket. All of a sudden, I understood. They were digging a tunnel. The hole was perhaps seven or eight feet from the right hand wall. If they dug towards it and for about the same distance beyond it they would emerge in the little triangle of grass — now almost worn away or dried up by the sun — with the solitary bench on it.