Nicholas Mosley - Hopeful Monsters

We had begun to walk round the outside wall of the castle towards the village. We stopped underneath a wall at the side of the castle: we were somewhere beside, or at the back of, the restored fagade where there were the actors besieged by the crowd; where there was the noise of banging and shouting. I thought — Oh it is the noise of people besieged in their own heads! I leaned with my back against a wall and you began kissing me. I thought — We will not stay with each other; we will not be apart; we will balance the world on its tightrope. There was an opening slightly above us in the wall of the castle; it was some sort of window; figures had appeared at it; they were leaning out. I thought — They are going to throw down confetti? rose-leaves? bags of flour? A voice said 'I wonder if you two could possibly be of some assistance?' We looked up. There was a man and woman leaning out of the window: they were wearing dressing-gowns. I thought — They are actors? Not-actors? They are gods looking down? You or I said 'What?' The man said 'There is someone in here who has been injured by a brick; also there is a child who has to catch a train.' I thought — There is

someone who has been injured and — . Then — This is ridiculous. The woman said 'I wonder if you could possibly take the child, and call for a doctor in the village.' I said 'I am a medical student, perhaps I can help.' The woman said 'Perhaps you can.' You said 'And as a matter of fact I am going to the station so I can take the child.' Then — 'I know this sounds ridiculous.' The man said 'That would be very kind.' I thought — Oh well, if the world is on a tightrope, things might be likely to have to turn up. I said 'How can I get in?' The man said 'We can pull you up.' The woman said 'And we can lower the child.' You said 'Abracadabra.' I thought — Oh but one day we will be used to it. Then — But didn't we think we wouldn't have a child? The man and woman had turned from the window: they reappeared with a girl of about eight or nine. The woman said 'Can you catch her?' You said 'Yes.' The girl wore a tartan skirt and long white socks. I said 'And where is the person who has been wounded?' The man said 'He is inside.' I thought — But hurry, we must hurry: it is everything making sense that is not bearable! The child was being lowered into your arms. The woman said 'She's got her fare and she knows which train to go on.' I thought — Oh of course. I raised my arms for the man and the woman to lift me up to the window. You said 'Goodbye.' I said 'Goodbye then.' You said 'Goodbye.' Then — 'This is quite like an opera.' I said 'It is not like an opera.' You said 'Oh no, it is not like an opera.' The man and the woman were pulling me so that I could get in at the window. I said 'I'll see you then.' You said 'I'll see you.' When I looked in at the window there was a dark vaulted room with a body lying on a bed: when I looked down at you, you were standing on the pathway holding the hand of the good-looking child. I thought — We have known each other a day, we have not even been to bed, and we seem to have a child.

You are right that at Cambridge we had not previously paid much attention to politics, though I remember the General Strike of 1926, which occurred during my last year at day-school. We boys were lined up and marched off in military fashion to a train which took us to help unload ships in the docks at Harwich. We took this incursion into politics as a holiday away from school: I think most middle- and upper-class people took the General Strike as the chance for a holiday away from school — what fun to be a docker or an engine-driver for a few days away from the ghastly restraints imposed on the middle and upper classes! At Harwich there were cranes and trolleys like huge toys; we larked about; we thought — So this is the grown-up world! At the far end of the quay a group of dockers came to watch us.

I did wonder — But this is politics?

In Germany, I suppose, there were people learning to sing sad songs and carry torches to bonfires.

In the autumn of 1930 I went to my father's college in Cambridge. There were the old men like bees or wasps moving in front of the fagades of ancient buildings: somewhere inside were the distillations of honey or of poison from flowers. In going to the university at Cambridge I was, of course, hardly getting away from my family: I was in some sense even coming back to it, since I had been away for four years at boarding-school. I do not remember much about this time at school: it was to do with the distillations, I suppose, by which upper-middle-class Englishmen enable large parts of themselves to remain as schoolboys.

But no one gets away from their schooldays, or indeed from their families, except by what grows in the mind; and this goes on for the most part in the dark.

There is a Freudian theory that any young man who in childhood has been the undisputed favourite of his mother goes through life with the feelings of a conqueror. Well, I did not consciously want to be anything so vulgar as a conqueror: but I did imagine, yes, that I had got away from my upbringing and my family.

I felt I had been helped in this by the strange dark girl who had risen sword in hand, as it were, from the mists of that lake in the Black Forest: whom I loved; but whom I did not feel ready to take on on a mundane level.

I remember that we talked about politics, you and I: were you not closer to Communism at that time than you remember? (You imagined you had got away from your mother?) You certainly

showed your antipathy to those Nazi boys: I suspected at first that you did not go down to the performance of the play in the evening because your friends had joined up with them — or was I even then being too modest? You showed some antipathy to me when I suggested that in the cannibal-race of the Western world these Nazis might play the part of scavengers, garbage-collectors, to clean the mess up. But then was not this the sort of thing that was being said by the Communist friends of your mother's?

In Cambridge before 1930, it is true, we did not know much of either Communism or Fascism. It was the fashion, I suppose, to say about Russia 'Of course, the experiment might go either this way or that.' And about Italy 'At least Mussolini makes the trains run on time.' Reactions amongst students were influenced by the contempt we had for what we saw and read of politicians at home. These seemed to be like dinosaurs already half fossilised in rock: we thought — Hurry on, ice-cap, come down from the pole.

I would say to my mother 'Freud doesn't seem too optimistic about the chances of social improvement.'

My mother would say 'Truth after all does not depend upon the chances of improvement.'

I said to my father 'But if there is no guiding principle in evolution, then why should one form of behaviour be any better than another?'

My father said 'Science and ethics belong to different worlds.'

I would think — But might not this attitude be like that of the dinosaurs just before they were caught by the cold?

But then I would think of you, my beautiful German girl: whose legs as they moved within your skirt were like the clappers of a bell; the memory of whose mouth still sometimes took me by the throat so that it was as if I could not breathe. I thought — There are connections here beyond the reach of the scientific world; sailors are lured to rocks by sirens; rocks are where fishes and humans crawl out on to a new land.

In Cambridge, young men put their heads into the sand of scrums on football fields. Old men stood and watched them as if they themselves would leap in and be blind.

Oh yes, I felt as if I were an agent in occupied territory. But what was the agency? What was it for? Who were the other agents? (Of course, you.)

Indeed one should not stay too long in the company of someone whom one feels is a fellow agent: there is such work to be done!