John Berger - G.

NUMBERS

A blackboard has been installed in the schoolroom. It is no longer a woman’s sitting room or a nursery. There are schoolbooks on the bookcase. A map of the world, a large area of it pink the colour of a hunting coat to denote the Empire. A clock has been fixed to the wall. An era passed with Miss Helen and the boy recognizes that it is irrevocable. As irrevocable as the fact that he has no father. But the latter fact he has been told, the former he has told himself.

If I see you looking at the clock again, we shall continue our arithmetic this afternoon.

This afternoon I’m going to go riding with my uncle.

If necessary I shall speak to your uncle.

It will make no difference whatever you say.

I beg your pardon?

I’m going to go riding with my uncle.

Stand up!

The tutor also rises, and walks slowly across to the piano. It is a ritual walk, quite unnatural in its slowness, so that the boy may recognize it and foresee its meaning. From the wall above the piano he unhooks a cane.

What is the punishment for impertinence?

One stroke across both hands, sir.

He holds out his hands, palms up.

He has learnt how to come to terms with this punishment. After a stroke the tutor always stares intently into the boy’s face — as though searching for a proof. The boy’s determination to control his face must exactly balance the smarting of his hands. If he over-clenches his face, he becomes self-conscious of his expression and position, and, continuing from this, he may become self-pitying and so cry. If he under-clenches it, the sting in his hands may rise for expression to his eyes and throat quicker than he can control them. Thus he must estimate exactly on each occasion how hard the tutor is going to hit him. He gauges this by the tutor’s breathing and by how, beneath his waistcoat, he draws in his stomach. If his estimate proves correct so that he reveals nothing, so that the tutor searches his face in vain, the boy scarcely suffers at all.

The boy receives one stroke on his left hand if he persists in repeating the same mistake as the tutor was forced to correct on the previous day (e.g. until has one ‘l’ not two): for a mistake repeated more than three times on the same day, he receives a stroke across the right hand: for insubordination (as now) a stroke across both hands: for rank disobedience three strokes. At first this systematized tariff of punishment surprised the boy: by now it seems no more arbitrary than the time announced by the hands of the large clock on the wall. One hour can seem interminable: two hours out of doors can pass unnoticed.

Which is the larger, two thirds or three sevenths?

The boy stares out of the window at Basset’s Wood and senses that there is a trick in the question.

The tutor tells himself that he likes his new charge but that the boy’s wilfulness must be checked lest it be his undoing.

In the cook’s sitting room there is a grandfather clock. The ticking of this clock has a hypnotic effect upon the boy, alone in the room. Its promise of a seemingly endless time lulls him; but the way the ticking fills the time, whose passing it records, oppresses him. He has thought of smashing the round window in the clock through which he can see the brass bob of the pendulum, always continuing to swing slowly from side to side after he has abandoned the attempt to count two or three hundred swings.

The cook’s cat settles on his legs and increases the hypnotic effect. It purrs as he rubs its ears. His trance-like state is hung like a hammock between two branches of awareness: the endlessness of time within the house which he can never successfully imagine destroyed (he is seven and a half and he has lived in the house for over five years): and the unconcerned, categorically separate life of the animal on his lap. The warmth of the animal, permeating his breeches, paints the wall of his stomach and the tops of his legs hot.

TWO MEN

Descending to the house at dusk through the wood above the beech trees. An autumn evening. Puddles. A red sky. Smoke rising straight from the chimneys. The wooden noise of a pigeon flying from one copse to another. Cold rising from the ground: now at waist level. Having a dog with him changes his sense of distance. Objects and events impinge less persistently. There is more space around him. The dog, circling him, charges and worries the frontier of the unknown back: the opposite to what a dog does when it herds sheep together. The unknown is persistent. What is it that cannot happen? And the child answers himself: Nothing. What is it that can happen? And the adult answers himself: Nothing. He is a child and he walks through the wood like a child.

Twenty yards ahead of him the dog starts to bark. Poachers poaching? As with much else at this stage of his learning, the idea of poachers has led to a mystery. His uncle speaks of them as of murderous criminals: beings with whom and for whom there is no mercy because they stop at nothing. (Poachers are the equivalent in his uncle’s code of public danger to the city mob in Umberto’s.) Yet listening to the farm-hands talk and being quick to interpret their winks and sign-language laughter, he has learnt that some of their friends are poachers. A man said: If the magistrates had ever gone hungry … The boy asks himself, are all poachers hungry?

But the notion of being hungry, of being so hungry that you poach, is the most mysterious of all. Dogs jerk their heads eating when they are hungry. In the dusk he sees the possibility of men jerking their heads when they eat to satisfy their extreme hunger. He refuses either to run or to slow down. He knows the fear is inside him. He is carrying it like a full jug. Above all it must not be spilt, for then it will be uncontained and will flow over everything.

The dog stops barking and stands quite still, ears pricked, one front paw raised. There is the unmistakable wood-noise of a booted, two-legged walk: twigs, wet leaves, roots record the sound in their own manner. Two men appear. They have sacks draped over their heads and tied round their waists. In places the sackcloth is damp and dark. They are men he has never seen before. One of them has a bottle in his hands. Sonny! one of them shouts, and the other tells the boy there is no need to be frightened.

He stands absolutely still lest the jug spills. They have square heavy faces like the ones carved on the two top front corners of the wardrobe in the room where the dairymaids sleep. They ask him to come with them. We shan’t hurt you, the one with the bottle says. They speak to him as to a child. In this there is a certain kind of security. What is your name? they ask him. He tells them. They walk on. Nothing that has so far happened to him has prepared him for this walk through the wood beside the men in sackcloth: yet he is uncertain about how exceptional it really is. Will it turn out to be an incident that his uncle or his tutor will explain to him? Or is it already beyond their power to explain? Where are we going? he asks. The man with the bottle says: We have something to show you. We want you to see something. It is too dark to distinguish the faces of the two men.

Stop. Wait. One of the men goes off and comes back with an unlit lamp, like a carriage lamp. The man with the bottle pours from it into the lamp. The boy can smell the paraffin. When the lamp is lit and turned up they continue walking. The dog disappears whimpering into the darkness further along the track. Nobody says a word. The light from the moving lamp appears to cast shadows upwards into the sky.

The man in front stops and holds his lamp up above his head. What can you see? Peering into the darkness, the boy makes out three branches lopped from a tree, laid across the track; but the shape of these branches is entirely familiar and it is this which frightens him. He has already recognized them. They are horses’ legs. The man’s arm moves a little and one edge of a horse-shoe catches the light, like a nail in the branch. The legs are entirely still. What do you see? A horse on the ground. Only one? asks the man with the bottle whose voice is always gentler than his companion’s. I don’t know.