necessary for me simply to say, “Nice weather we are having” to hold him, terrified. People are so surprised to find that I am an easygoing, even a gentle, soul that they tend to fall in love with me out of sheer relief. I am the kind of man who is glanced at quickly out of the corners of eyes. Men fear me and women are fascinated by me. “He must have been through hell,” they say, with a thrill of sympathy or with a delicious tremor. “What a ruthless brute he must be!” Perhaps you remember the old heavyweight boxer, the Chopping Block, George Cook of Australia. It was almost impossible to knock him out; consciousness and unconsciousness were all the same to him. He used to be one of the barriers that had to be passed before anyone got to be a runner-up for the British Heavyweight Championship.
His sad, bewildered eyes glittered under heavy banks of scar tissue, and he had ears like a double portion of sweetbreads. Hundreds and hundreds of promising young heavyweights had hit him in the face with all their might. An old sportswriter told me once that George Cook must have taken, in the course of his career, at least fifteen thousand punches on the nose, which was not only flat and boneless but bent east and west in a lazy zigzag. He had the appearance of a man who, by supernatural toughness, has emerged alive from a concrete mixer. I look something like him; and I have never regretted the circumstances that made me so.
It happened in 1915 when I was a child. Airplanes were a novelty in those days, and I was fascinated by the German Gothas over London. They looked like a series of Ts floating in clear sky. For the first, and last, time in my life I was overwhelmed by a desire to fly. So I found a six-foot length of four-inch squaring and nailed to it two planks for wings, and a board for the tail. The propeller I cut out of the lid of a biscuit tin and fastened with one of my mother’s hat pins. For armaments I carried a double-barreled cap pistol and a five-pound dumbbell which I proposed todrop on the gas works. For a helmet I borrowed my father’s bowler hat and for goggles my mother’s pince-nez. But when I straddled the thing, it wouldn’t fly. Something was seriously wrong here. Then I remembered that airplanes had wheels. I took my sister’s perambulator apart and fitted my machine with an undercarriage. It moved, then; but still it would not fly. So I took it to pieces, carried it up to the roof and reassembled it. As I calculated, all I needed was a good start. Shouting “Bang! Bang! Bang! I’m a German!” I took off. It seems that I described half a parabola on account of the steep slope of our roof, and went right over our garden fence into a neighbor’s cucumber frame. I landed flat on my face. The dumbbell, which I was still firmly grasping, hit me on the nose. The wings folded and beat me about the ears, and my jaw was broken. “Never do a thing like that again,” said my father; and I obeyed him. To this day I cannot look at a dumbbell without a sense of frustration, of grievance; and if, sometime, when things get too tough for me and I have a nervous breakdown and am found throwing dumbbells and crying “Bang! Bang! I’m a German,” the psychiatrists will know exactly where to look for the first causes.
However, from the age of seven, after my face healed I looked not unlike that ancient pugilist Buckhorse, who, in his old age, having no face left to spoil, let anybody knock him down for a shilling. Later, when I filled out into a fine figure of a man, I improved and resembled old George Cook. My stature and physique I must have inherited. After the incident of the airplane I was not allowed to touch dumbbells, Indian clubs, hammers, nails, or wood; and I was followed every time I climbed the stairs.
They gave me an abacus to play with; I took a fancy to the red beads and swallowed them, and I felt so bad about the anxiety I had caused my family that I did not dare to say anything
His sad, bewildered eyes glittered under heavy banks of scar tissue, and he had ears like a double portion of sweetbreads. Hundreds and hundreds of promising young heavyweights had hit him in the face with all their might. An old sportswriter told me once that George Cook must have taken, in the course of his career, at least fifteen thousand punches on the nose, which was not only flat and boneless but bent east and west in a lazy zigzag. He had the appearance of a man who, by supernatural toughness, has emerged alive from a concrete mixer. I look something like him; and I have never regretted the circumstances that made me so.
It happened in 1915 when I was a child. Airplanes were a novelty in those days, and I was fascinated by the German Gothas over London. They looked like a series of Ts floating in clear sky. For the first, and last, time in my life I was overwhelmed by a desire to fly. So I found a six-foot length of four-inch squaring and nailed to it two planks for wings, and a board for the tail. The propeller I cut out of the lid of a biscuit tin and fastened with one of my mother’s hat pins. For armaments I carried a double-barreled cap pistol and a five-pound dumbbell which I proposed todrop on the gas works. For a helmet I borrowed my father’s bowler hat and for goggles my mother’s pince-nez. But when I straddled the thing, it wouldn’t fly. Something was seriously wrong here. Then I remembered that airplanes had wheels. I took my sister’s perambulator apart and fitted my machine with an undercarriage. It moved, then; but still it would not fly. So I took it to pieces, carried it up to the roof and reassembled it. As I calculated, all I needed was a good start. Shouting “Bang! Bang! Bang! I’m a German!” I took off. It seems that I described half a parabola on account of the steep slope of our roof, and went right over our garden fence into a neighbor’s cucumber frame. I landed flat on my face. The dumbbell, which I was still firmly grasping, hit me on the nose. The wings folded and beat me about the ears, and my jaw was broken. “Never do a thing like that again,” said my father; and I obeyed him. To this day I cannot look at a dumbbell without a sense of frustration, of grievance; and if, sometime, when things get too tough for me and I have a nervous breakdown and am found throwing dumbbells and crying “Bang! Bang! I’m a German,” the psychiatrists will know exactly where to look for the first causes.
However, from the age of seven, after my face healed I looked not unlike that ancient pugilist Buckhorse, who, in his old age, having no face left to spoil, let anybody knock him down for a shilling. Later, when I filled out into a fine figure of a man, I improved and resembled old George Cook. My stature and physique I must have inherited. After the incident of the airplane I was not allowed to touch dumbbells, Indian clubs, hammers, nails, or wood; and I was followed every time I climbed the stairs.
They gave me an abacus to play with; I took a fancy to the red beads and swallowed them, and I felt so bad about the anxiety I had caused my family that I did not dare to say anything
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