idea that we should cut ourselves and rub our blood into the bark.
The ritual half slaked a thirst I hadn’t known I had. I’d never been touched by religion at school, though we’d traced St Paul’s journeys in our scripture books and coloured in donkeys for Palm Sunday. Mum and Nana had only ever referred to the church suspiciously; it was good for children but also a conspiracy of certain social types, thinking themselves superior. I pushed myself, trying to receive intimations of the sacred trees’ living existence; occasionally, alone, I could fall into an ecstasy of belief. At other times I watched myself, sceptical of the authenticity of my transports. Sometimes, after the sessions with Madeleine, I was visited by a kind of Protestant disgust at our excesses; the more we thrilled and overdid it, the more it was only a game. For a couple of days I wouldn’t play, no matter how much Madeleine pouted and sulked. Then – once on a Sunday evening in my bath when late sunlight, reflected off the bathwater, made restless patterns on the ceiling – I’d be visited by the balm of a vision of great trees, at the very moment when I least thought of asking for it.
At the end of the summer, when Madeleine and I went back to our different schools, the cult cooled down but didn’t die. Out of superstitious habit we still left offerings at the stumps for good luck, and carried bits of bark around in our pockets, fingering them out of the teachers’ sight.
Gerry insisted I should sit the entrance exam for the direct-grant secondary schools. I got good marks in class and always had my head stuck in a book. Anyway, not many children in Stoke Bishop went to the local comprehensive. Madeleine was taking the exam, too – though she didn’t have to do so well in it, because her parents could pay. I needed a scholarship place. I sat the exam. I didn’t care how I did, I wasn’t frightened of it: school up to that point had left me unscathed. I didn’t make the connection that Gerry did between the power of what I read in books and the outward husk of learning, perfectly functional but not involving, that went on in the classroom.
Consulting no one, I had promoted myself at our local library to adult books – which meant climbing three steps, covered in yellow lino, into the upper portion of the brick building with its sensuous hush and beamed Arts and Crafts ceiling. I didn’t know where to begin; I was drawn to complete works in uniform bindings because I thought they would be series like the ones I had loved in the children’s section: Anne of Green Gables and The Naughtiest Girl in the School . Often I hardly knew what was happening in the novels I fell upon by chance (Compton Mackenzie, Faulkner, Hugh Walpole, Elizabeth Bowen), but I read absorbedly nonetheless, half disappointed, half revelling in the texture of these worlds jumbling in my ignorance: servants, telegrams, cavalry, race, guilt, dressing for dinner (what time was dinner? and were they still in their pyjamas?) – and elliptical conversations unlike any I’d ever heard, signifying things I could only guess at. I gave up on some, but the books were an initiation. I began piecing their worlds together in my comprehension.
I got a scholarship for the Girls’ High School (and Madeleine got in too, without the scholarship). Mum took me out to buy me a briefcase and we had lunch in British Home Stores. She was proud that I had proved myself at least good for something. Gerry said, — She’ll have a lot more to live up to, now.
I can’t remember how I found out that Gerry was brought up in the Homes – I suppose Mum must have told me. He didn’t speak to me about it until long afterwards. (At the time he only said, — Not everyone has your opportunities.) The Homes was an orphanage, a vast neoclassical grey stone building set back from a main road, its front implacable as a hospital or a prison. We said at junior school that the children who
The ritual half slaked a thirst I hadn’t known I had. I’d never been touched by religion at school, though we’d traced St Paul’s journeys in our scripture books and coloured in donkeys for Palm Sunday. Mum and Nana had only ever referred to the church suspiciously; it was good for children but also a conspiracy of certain social types, thinking themselves superior. I pushed myself, trying to receive intimations of the sacred trees’ living existence; occasionally, alone, I could fall into an ecstasy of belief. At other times I watched myself, sceptical of the authenticity of my transports. Sometimes, after the sessions with Madeleine, I was visited by a kind of Protestant disgust at our excesses; the more we thrilled and overdid it, the more it was only a game. For a couple of days I wouldn’t play, no matter how much Madeleine pouted and sulked. Then – once on a Sunday evening in my bath when late sunlight, reflected off the bathwater, made restless patterns on the ceiling – I’d be visited by the balm of a vision of great trees, at the very moment when I least thought of asking for it.
At the end of the summer, when Madeleine and I went back to our different schools, the cult cooled down but didn’t die. Out of superstitious habit we still left offerings at the stumps for good luck, and carried bits of bark around in our pockets, fingering them out of the teachers’ sight.
Gerry insisted I should sit the entrance exam for the direct-grant secondary schools. I got good marks in class and always had my head stuck in a book. Anyway, not many children in Stoke Bishop went to the local comprehensive. Madeleine was taking the exam, too – though she didn’t have to do so well in it, because her parents could pay. I needed a scholarship place. I sat the exam. I didn’t care how I did, I wasn’t frightened of it: school up to that point had left me unscathed. I didn’t make the connection that Gerry did between the power of what I read in books and the outward husk of learning, perfectly functional but not involving, that went on in the classroom.
Consulting no one, I had promoted myself at our local library to adult books – which meant climbing three steps, covered in yellow lino, into the upper portion of the brick building with its sensuous hush and beamed Arts and Crafts ceiling. I didn’t know where to begin; I was drawn to complete works in uniform bindings because I thought they would be series like the ones I had loved in the children’s section: Anne of Green Gables and The Naughtiest Girl in the School . Often I hardly knew what was happening in the novels I fell upon by chance (Compton Mackenzie, Faulkner, Hugh Walpole, Elizabeth Bowen), but I read absorbedly nonetheless, half disappointed, half revelling in the texture of these worlds jumbling in my ignorance: servants, telegrams, cavalry, race, guilt, dressing for dinner (what time was dinner? and were they still in their pyjamas?) – and elliptical conversations unlike any I’d ever heard, signifying things I could only guess at. I gave up on some, but the books were an initiation. I began piecing their worlds together in my comprehension.
I got a scholarship for the Girls’ High School (and Madeleine got in too, without the scholarship). Mum took me out to buy me a briefcase and we had lunch in British Home Stores. She was proud that I had proved myself at least good for something. Gerry said, — She’ll have a lot more to live up to, now.
I can’t remember how I found out that Gerry was brought up in the Homes – I suppose Mum must have told me. He didn’t speak to me about it until long afterwards. (At the time he only said, — Not everyone has your opportunities.) The Homes was an orphanage, a vast neoclassical grey stone building set back from a main road, its front implacable as a hospital or a prison. We said at junior school that the children who
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