John Berger - G.

You may still insist that effective sexual passion is missing. You may present his naked five-year-old body to prove your argument. (Twice a week in his bath he offers the proof himself to his beloved.) But what little he lacks physically, he makes up for metaphysically. He senses or feels that she — by being all that is opposite and therefore complementary to him — can make the world complete for him. In adults sexual passion reconstitutes this sense. In a five-year-old it does not have to be reconstituted: it is still part of his inheritance.

He begins to sing, regardless of the words, intently watching her fingers on the keys. He takes the opportunity of stepping closer and resting his cheek on her shoulder.

Miss Helen is soon replaced by a tutor.

The boy seeks no explanation and is offered none. He is used to accepting decisions as indisputable facts. He has no sense of any ultimate authority residing in any one person: and consequently the idea of appealing against decisions does not arise.

With his ear to the bark, he listens to the tree. He has never yet dared to listen to a dead tree. There are quite distinct categories in his own mind into which he fits trees. Ones he likes and ones he does not like (without reason). Ones that are too easy to climb. Ones that frighten him a little to climb. Ones with a view at the top and ones without. There are also more complicated categories. Trees are alive but not alive as animals are. What is the difference? First, the tree is more accessible. Second, the tree is more mysterious. Third, the tree is immovable. Fourth, the tree can hide him. If he carves on the bark of a tree, he does not believe that the tree feels pain. If a large branch is lopped off there is neither the sound nor the smell of pain. Nevertheless when he is pressed against the bark of a tree, it feels alive to his own skin to a degree that is more comprehensive than his categorical reasoning. When he touches an animal, the animal’s will intervenes. There is a tree which, when he is as high as he dare climb, he kisses. Always in the same place.

The day, when once it is established, is barely noticed in itself; continuous interests claim us; only if there is a dramatic thunderstorm, a blizzard or a partial eclipse of the sun may we momentarily forget the pursuit of our own life. But at the beginning or end of the day, at dawn or at sunset, when our relationship with all that we can see is in process of rapid transformation, we are inclined to be as aware of the moment as of what we fill it with — and, often, more aware. In face of the dawn, even the supreme egotist is tempted to forget himself. Thus I assume that the experience of day breaking or of night falling is somewhat less subject to historical change than the experience of days themselves.

On certain days he is allowed to breakfast in the kitchen with the farm-hands. He has worked at the limits of this special licence, and slowly, week by week, he has extended them so that Breakfast in the Kitchen now signifies getting up as early as he wishes, going out, wandering where he likes, and making his appearance in the kitchen with the head cowman at 7.30.

On several winter mornings, a few months after Miss Helen’s departure, the boy has left the house when it is still dark and climbed the steep lawn to the copper beeches.

What he feels when he looks down at the lit windows of the house and dairy is the icy complement to the burning mystery of his own body in bed. Every lit window suggests to him the room within. Through each window he pulls out the drawer of the room. In it is warmth, safety and his own familiarity with the life he is living. But he himself is not in it. He is in the darkness by the beech trees. The range of his senses in this darkness and in the cold is so restricted that he has the sensation of standing in a little hut, scarcely larger than his own body, with one side open where he looks out. A question which this time he cannot even formulate in a mixed language resides somewhere between the house and his hut. In the field, higher up the hill, are sheep, slightly lighter than the dark, like breath on a windowpane giving on to total blackness. He is aware that the sheep will always remain exterior to the question he cannot formulate. As soon as there is enough light for him to see his own feet the hut disintegrates and with it the presence of the question he cannot ask.

He goes down to the yard and stands in the doorway of the cowshed where the head cowman and two dairymaids are milking. The boy pats the rump of each cow and calls it by its name.

The tea for Breakfast in the Kitchen is different from tea in the schoolroom. The cups too are different: thick-lipped and almost as large as basins.

The taste of the tea which he drinks as hot as he can bear to is a strong but thin taste. It lines the mouth with its thin covering: the surface of the covering non-absorbent and shiny like that of mica which they use for lantern slides. Within the mouth, so lined with the taste of tea, there is also the extra-strong exaggerated taste of sugar. This is a taste whose effects are not confined to the mouth. Sweetness is like Eurydice’s thread: it leads from the tongue down the throat and then, mysteriously, through the stomach to the sexual centre, to the tiny region (distinct in a male from the sexual organs themselves) where sexual pleasure accumulates before extending outwards in waves. It is sugar that first induces us to love life.

Honey may be either healthy or toxic, just as a woman in her normal condition is ‘a honey’ but secretes a poison when she is indisposed … in native thought, the search for honey represents a sort of return to Nature, in the guise of erotic attraction transposed from the sexual register to that of the sense of taste, which undermines the very foundations of culture if it is indulged in for too long.

The kitchen smells of bacon and labourers’ boots.

The cook, standing by the range, watches the seven men and three maids eating with an expression of apparent surprise on her face. If she is not harried, it is the expression she habitually wears when watching people eat the food she has prepared. The surprise cannot be at the fact that they eat it with such appetite — for this can surely no longer surprise her. Perhaps it is less personal: the elemental surprise provoked by watching anything being devoured and then apparently ceasing to exist.

His aunt strides into the room, ruffles the boy’s hair and then turns abruptly to walk to the low window by the dresser. The maids at the table glance at her timidly. She has gone to the window to see whether she can see her brother. When she is not occupied with the house or some aspect of farm management which her brother has negelected, as soon as she is unoccupied, she becomes anxious and impatient to see him. Like a newly-wed wife she becomes attendant upon him. She has observed that his growing up has disabled him, making him ineffective. What she admires in him is the unwounded boy of twenty years ago. It is to that boy that she has remained faithful.

The other boy, who is drinking his tea, watches her. Her face is close to the window-pane, almost touching it. He knows that she is waiting for his uncle. He has often seen her waiting like this. He slips away from the table and out of the door through the pantry and into the courtyard. Keeping close to the wall of the house, so as not to be seen from inside the kitchen, he creeps round until he is underneath the window at which his aunt is standing. He pauses a moment, a little excited and on the brink of laughter at the thought of the trick he is about to play.

She is waiting for my uncle and bo! it’s me!

He climbs on to a water trough, slowly straightens up and presses his nose against the window-pane. His head comes level with her midriff. For an instant she does not notice him: her eyes are still fixed on the middle distance where she expects her brother to turn into the yard. The boy has time to glimpse from below her face with its fixed gaze. Then he sees her lower her eyes, perceiving him. In changing focus her eyes brighten. As they do so, she smiles and he laughs. Bo!