John Berger - G.

Who says that?

The old man does.

What does the boy feel?

Ask the old man.

Look at him, says the old, man, poor bugger. Not a cry out of him.

The last barrier against consequence is the home. This is why the dying want to die at home.

The boy is not dying.

But he is in a home in bed with the bedclothes that smell of damp foul cloth over him.

In the time which his fall and his pain arrested, he found a home.

The old man was there as the boy emerged from his estate.

They met as equals. No rules governed their encounter. Bone to bone.

But when the boy’s sense of time began to revert to normal, he became young again.

That was a nasty toss you took, sir. Don’t fret yourself. Lie quiet.

Your uncle’s coming to take you home in the buggy.

I don’t want to move.

You can’t stay here can you?

Why not? Whose is it?

Whose what?

Whose bed is this I’m on?

It’s mine, sir. I found you on the edge of Hawk’s Rough, and I carried you back and laid you on the bed.

Whose home is it?

He will look through the windows of other labourers’ cottages and he will climb up to the window of the dairymaid’s room. He will try on her aprons. He will strap on one of Tom’s leather leggings and it will come to the top of his thigh. To be another!

Don’t fret. I’m going to see to the fire. We must keep you warm mustn’t we?

What else did you do?

I cleaned the blood off you and laid you down.

Am I badly hurt?

Nothing that won’t mend itself.

It hurts when I talk.

Don’t fret.

Stay with me.

The sound of the buggy, and his uncle is in the doorway. His uncle makes the old man look almost as small as a dwarf. Jocelyn looks down at the boy and speaks gently to him, smiling. To Jocelyn it is a form of initiation that his ward has undergone. The curtain has gone up on his life.

He confers with the old man and gives him a two shilling piece. The boy sees the money change hands, and the old man continually tapping his forehead to convey gratitude.

His uncle lifts the blanket, lets it fall to the floor, and takes up the boy in his arms. The pain in his chest is such that he screams and loses consciousness.

Jocelyn whispers tenderly to soothe, to propitiate.

You’ve the making of a real thruster my boy.

Carrying the boy through the door, he hisses quietly, mollifyingly, as a groom does grooming a horse.

A thruster, my boy, a hard-bitten thruster.

All history is contemporary history: not in the ordinary sense of the word, where contemporary history means the history of the comparatively recent past, but in the strict sense: the consciousness of one’s own activity as one actually performs it. History is thus the self-knowledge of the living mind. For even when the events which the historian studies are events that happened in the distant past, the condition of their being historically known is that they should vibrate in the historian’s mind.

In the Piazza San Michele on the waterfront at Livorno there is a statue of Ferdinand I. At each corner of the pedestal on which the archduke stands, a bronze figure of a naked African slave is chained. For this reason the statue is often referred to as I Quattro Mori . There is an inscription on the pedestal, the last part of which reads in Italian as follows:

‘… made in 1617 after the death of Ferdinand. Later (between 1623 and 1626) Pietro Tucca added his admirable slaves, the models for which he chose from the local prison.’

THREE CONVERSATIONS OVER THE YEARS ABOUT HIS FATHER

Why don’t I have a Papa?

Your Papa died.

Dead? Yes.

In the cemetery he’s dead?

If you are good, you go to heaven when you die.

Was Papa good?

I’m sure he was.

Always?

We didn’t know him. I don’t think your uncle or aunt knew him either.

But Maman—

Your mother met him in Italy I think.

What was he doing in Italy?

He had something to do with ships.

Was he English?

I think he was Italian.

What did Maman call him?

Now finish your soup and no more silly questions.

Was he run over by a train?

Who?

Papa when he was dead.

I don’t know.

Couldn’t Maman stop him?

Finish your soup.

I’m dead too! Ha! Ha! Dead! Dead!

Finish—

Why will nobody tell me anything about my father? Whenever I ask about him, you change the subject.

I never saw him. Nor did your uncle. You must ask your mother about him.

You are only pretending not to know. Please who was he?

He was a merchant from Livorno in Italy.

Was he Italian?

Yes, an Italian merchant.

Were they married long before he died?

A very short time.

And did he really die in an accident with a train?

Who told you that?

That’s what Cook used to tell me.

I didn’t know.

Was he very old when he died?

He was much older than your mother.

Am I like him?

I’ve told you I never saw him.

But guess.

Perhaps your dark eyes. You certainly don’t get them from her.

Would you like to go to Italy?

When?

Next week — to Milan.

Is Milan near Livorno?

It’s quite a long way.

I should like to visit Father’s grave in Livorno.

Who told you he had a grave?

Nobody told me. All dead people have graves.

I meant why did you think it was in Livorno?

Because that’s where he lived.

What would you say if your father was alive?

He can’t be.

And supposing I told you he was?

You told me he was dead.

It was a terrible mistake. We thought he was dead.

But why didn’t you hope he was alive?

It was all a terrible mistake.

You mean he’s alive.

Yes.

The train didn’t kill him.

Would you like to visit him? The two of us together.

Us? If he’s alive, I’d say the question is whether you want to see him.

There’s no need for impertinence.

The train journey to Paris, two days spent there with friends and then the journey on to Milan comprise the longest period that the boy has spent with his mother since infancy. She is unlike anybody else he knows: yet he has known about her ever since he can remember. She is both strange and familiar. With her he has the sensation of playing a part in a story which concerns a life he might have led. Everything about her suggests an alternative.

She talks a lot to him, but not as one talks to a child. (From the moment she abandoned him to her cousins she has wanted to think of him as grown up, as formed: then pride in him could supersede her guilt. Now that he is eleven she thinks of him proudly as a man: a man to whom she can refer for support and justification: a man who, in many respects, is like a father to her.) She talks to him about Socialism, the importance of Education, the future of women, about art — they will see Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper in Milan — about her friend Bertha Newcombe who is in love with Bernard Shaw, about the different nations of Europe and their characteristics.

Some of what she says he does not fully understand. But all of it seems to pass by like the views seen through the train window: distant, continuous, almost disembodied. It is the same with her voice which is unlike any other he has heard (she still talks incessantly), but which does not seem to belong to her. When he returns to their compartment having walked along the train corridor, the fact that his mother is still there in the same place half surprises him. He had half expected her to disappear. When she falls asleep he presses her arm, presses it hard until he can feel how solid it is. He is mystified by this solidity as he might be by an image in a mirror moving of its own accord.