Occasionally, in various hospitals and churches, he had believed he remembered visiting his father in the condemned cell. He certainly remembered a dreadful debate in the heavy boy’s head as to whether, when the call to make the visit came, he would be able to bring himself to go to that place, or to look at that man, who was alive, and would not be. How could they face each other in that knowledge? How did they? He remembered it all so clearly, the man behind a black table, the stiff, silent, heavy-breathing guards, the cup of nasty tea he was offered, his father’s inability to swallow what he had supped from his own cup, the shaking of that larynx. He remembered seeing his father’s Bible—his personal Bible, with the soft leather cover and the plain gilt Cross—and being glad his father had something of his own in that place. He remembered a high window, a small source of grey light in black shadow (varied by institutional spinach green) like the round window in the stone above the coal-hole. He thought, when he was thinking clearly, that this confrontation had never taken place, but was merely a product of the poor boy’s torment, of his religious desire, bred and inculcated in him, to love, respect and forgive his father, seventy times seven, and to share his fear with him, to help him somehow in this extremity. And crossing that like the dark wave rolling back from the stones where it has broken, was the memory of the dead flesh on the bed, the smell, the indignity. Those two were beyond help.
He was inclined to believe that the scene had not taken place. His memories of it nevertheless consistently gave him a powerful sense of defeat, of having failed his father. He could remember no word either had spoken, only the nasty taste of the tea, the grimy cracks in the pottery, the voice of the guard saying “I’m sorry it’s time to go now.” He believed he had constructed the memory out of a desire to have done, or tried to do, a good, the right, thing. He had constructed it from scenes in films and scenes in adventure stories. His father had always been against invented stories, and had urged him to read his Bible, which was sufficient, which answered all needs. In a school class reading Oliver Twist Josh Lamb had disgraced himself by having a fit during the reading-aloud of the gruesome description of Oliver’s terror of Fagin’s terror in the condemned cell. Taken to the cinema—by whom, not his aunt, he could not remember?—to see Kind Hearts and Coronets he had disgraced himself again, vomiting over the shoulders of the boy in front of him, as Dennis Price sat composed in the condemned cell, writing his confession. He had come to agree with his father. Telling stories, like making graven images, made loopholes for evil and the Father of Lies to enter the world.
That his father had tried to communicate with him, he believed he knew. He had picked up two postcards addressed to himself, on days when he had come down to breakfast before his aunt. He had immediately secreted them amongst his homework. They were greyish, furry cards. The ink had bled into them. They had ruled lines, which his father did not need. One had a biblical reference. Genesis 22, 6, 7 and 8. It was not signed. Possibly his father felt that “love from” him would be unacceptable or appalling. The second said “I want you to have my own Bible for your use, and to remember me, if you will take it. I have written a letter, which I hope will be given to you, or kept until you are old enough to read it with understanding, whether or not you can forgive.”
In his imagination, these writings were not brave, or firm, but quavering and slanting, as though every letter had been formed with extreme difficulty, by a trembling hand. No letter was ever given to him.
He kept the cards for some time, moving them from book to book in his small library—The Boys’ Book of Nature, Lives of Heroes, True Tales of Christian Mission. He never kept them either in his Bible, or in the prayer book. He did not look at them often. They were like slivers of dead, contaminating matter, but it was his duty to preserve and contemplate them. One day—he was not sure when, it was in his teens, he had been ill—he looked everywhere and could not find them. Over and over again he opened book after book, not exactly wanting to see them, but wanting most desperately to stop searching, to be reunited with the fragments of which he was the keeper. He never found them. He knew his aunt went through his things regularly, looking for dirt, for cigarettes, for naughty notes, for wickedness that was only her imagination. He didn’t speak to her about the matter, ever, and she never spoke to him.
Genesis 22, 6, 7, 8.
And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together.
And Isaac spake unto Abraham his father, and said, My father: and he said, Here am I, my son. And he said, Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?
And Abraham said, My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering: so they went both of them together.
The message had a shocking ambiguity. Was his father telling him that like Abraham, he had unquestioningly obeyed a command to make an offering of his son—and in his case, his wife and daughter also? Or was he saying, that he had not trusted God enough, but that God had saved this son as he had saved Isaac? They went both of them together. They were together. His impotent spirit did try to accompany his father into the horror. Here am I, my son. Where?
Holocaust meant burnt offering, the boy knew, before ever the word became used for the wickedness that had not yet come. His father had been right, even, events proved, that another kind of holocaust was coming. The empty house in which the sacrifice had taken place was reduced to dust and ashes in a German raid on the steelworks and railways. They would have died then, who had died earlier. As for himself, the heavy boy, Joshua Ramsden, Josh Lamb, he was twice plucked from the burning. He was, as he would not have been, evacuated.
The fact of the general evacuation of children from threatened cities at the end of 1939, made it easier for Agnes Lamb to describe her nephew as an “evacuee.” He was not the only boy to appear parentless in those village communities—parentless, and with no personal belongings, moreover. He could be made invisible amongst the other lost souls in the grammar school to which they travelled from several villages in brown buses. Many boys were mocked for strange accents, or teased because of odd habits. Josh Lamb did not stand out. His teachers were all old men, or women, for the young men had been called into the Forces. The man did not remember the boy having spoken to anyone, though he thought he must have done. He remembered some lessons, Latin, which was taught by an old gentleman called Mr. Shepherd, a white-haired hunchback with gold-rimmed spectacles, and Scripture, which was taught by an energetic fiery woman called Sibyl Manson.
He thought of these as his years of “grubbing” and pupation. He had known—it had been made clear to him—that he was singled out, cast out, chosen. These were the years in which, for a long time, he did not see the other, who had spoken to him out of the dark, and given him the weight of darkness to hold in his arms. He moved around in the grey fog of normality and unknowing that his aunt had tried to weave to preserve him, or herself, from the memory and the knowledge of the horror. He did experience himself as being closed in a tight skin, which held him together in the vacancy in which his true self tumbled and fell, a skin like horn, or parchment, in which he was formless, like the yellow-milky liquid that spurts out of cocoons and pupation caskets which are prematurely broken into. Now and then—stumbling on a paving-stone, slapped on the back in a coughing-fit, hanging from a bar in the gym, where he had swarmed up and could not come down, he saw the dark open again, great crevasses where the busy warp and weft flailed and hurtled. Or looking into a shop window in the street he would see his own reflection, and behind it, not the odd car, no ordinary passers-by, no policeman, but the roaring and rushing of the loom of the inordinate. There was no mirror in his bedroom, indeed, there were no mirrors in his aunt’s house. She was against Vanity. So he saw himself little. He had ceased to be plump. He wore long trousers.
“Scripture” in the War Years meant Bible-reading. In that sense, it was storytelling. Latin was
dry, was the learning and chanting of words. Both Miss Manson and Mr. Shepherd were good teachers, who knew how to make what they taught not only unforgettable, but part of the foundation of the selves that were building in the more or less attentive boys. Miss Manson talked of the love of God the good Father, and told them the tales of the Old Testament, the man and woman in the innocent Garden, the snake, the apple, the fig-leaves, the walls, gates and angel with the flaming sword. She told them about Noah and the Deluge. They painted wooden Arks floating on blue waves, on the lined paper of their exercise-books. Josh Lamb was praised for imagination, when he painted his ark on a stormy night in inky water, with a lantern at the prow, and a sliver of moon in the sky. They also drew Lot’s wife, turning into a pillar of salt as she looked back at the conflagration of Sodom and Gomorrah. They drew angels with huge white wings. Miss Manson brought in pictures of angels, by Van Eyck, by Giotto, by Fra Angelico, for them to see the beauty of the other eternal world, as men had glimpsed it. She passed over the drunkenness of Noah, and the precise sins of Sodom. They all painted rainbows, however. God had promised Noah that he would always care for the earth and its inhabitants. On the railways and steelmills, and on town centres, the bombs fell. Men were evil, said Miss Manson, but there would be a reckoning.
She came, as she had to, to the story of Abraham and Isaac. They all drew Hagar in the wilderness, and yet another Angel, making the mother turn back to her baby, whom she had abandoned because she loved him too much to watch him die. You must trust the Lord, said Miss Manson. Hagar’s faith was weak. Abraham’s ninety-year-old wife bore him a son, Isaac, when he was an old man. They may have counted differently in those days. They came, as they had to, to the tale of the sacrifice of Isaac.
And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, Abraham: and he said, Behold, here I am.
And he said, Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.
Here was another picture to paint, the boy with the wood on his back, the man with the knife, the angel, the ram caught in a thicket by his horns.
The man was to wonder about the need for a natural explanation of the presence of the ram, when all the story was full of supernatural will and arbitrary power. The boy was compelled, for the first time, to argue. He never argued. The man believed he remembered that the boy never spoke. But he sat without drawing wood or angel-feathers. Miss Manson stepped between the desks, and saw his empty book. She bent over him. She had blazing red hair sleeked into a page-boy, lifted into almost-horns on her brow with tortoiseshell-spotted slides. She had a funny tweed suit, flecked rust and green, and smelled of mothballs. She wore glasses with tortoiseshell rims.
“No inspiration, Lamb? Usually so diligent.”
“I don’t like the story, Miss.”
“It is the Word of God, Lamb. It isn’t up to you to like or dislike it. You must understand, interpret, and learn from it. What worries you?”
“Why did the Lord tempt Abraham, Miss? I thought the Devil was the tempter, like in the Garden of Eden. Why did he order ... why did he ask ... how could Abraham ... kill ...”
“His son whom he loved? The Scripture takes very good care to say that Abraham loved his son, at the moment when the supreme sacrifice is asked of him. We are all asked to make sacrifices, Lamb. It isn’t a sacrifice, if it isn’t something you love. Abraham was asked to make the greatest sacrifice possible, his son, whom he loved. It is happening all round us, young men are going off to fight for our freedom, and their wives and mothers must be cheerful, because it is needful.”
“But—”
“Still ‘but,’ Lamb?”
She was a good teacher. She did want to know what troubled his mind. She carried, he later thought, a small lantern of charisma, as Mr. Shepherd also did. But its light fell bleakly into his dark.
“But, I think, the word ‘tempting’ is right. You tempt people to do what they shouldn’t. He shouldn’t have.”
“The Lord’s Prayer teaches us to ask the Lord, ‘Lead us not into temptation.’ Temptation here means ‘trial.’ ”
“It still means not doing—things. We have to ask Him to stop us going into temptation. Not to tempt us.”
“We are not all as good, or as strong, or as holy as Abraham. We do not have the purity to dare to submit ourselves to God’s Will.”
“I think—” the boy said slowly.
“Go on, Lamb.”
“I think the Devil had got into God, and was winning. I think—I think it was evil to ask him to do that—”
“No, no, it is wickedness and weakness ever to think God can do evil. God is goodness itself. He made all well for Abraham. The sacrifice was provided, the Angel stayed his hand, Isaac survived.”
“Isaac hated him forever, perhaps.”
“No, no, because he too was chosen, was a holy man, who was able to trust, both his earthly and his Heavenly Fathers. There is no merit in obedience if obedience is easy and pleasant.”
Black boiled inside and outside him. He smelt mothballs and wool. She showed him, then, the art postcard she had brought to help them see the scene, and understand.
Later, he knew that it was Rembrandt’s version of the Sacrifice of Isaac. The angel leans out of black thunderclouds. Its right hand grasps Abraham’s strong wrist. The curved knife, sharpened horribly clean, hangs forever in free fall across the landscape. Abraham’s bearded face, intent on what he has set out to do, startled in his nerves by the apparition, is turned up to the angel, away from the boy. The boy, naked except for a loincloth, lies back on the firewood. He has no face. Abraham’s left hand, brown skin on white, is clamped like a sucker, over the whole upper head of the boy. The head is forced back, smothered, so that the man cannot see the boy’s face and the boy cannot see the knife. What can be seen is the stretched white throat. Murder and pity. The boy, Josh Lamb, seeing this picture, was filled with that overwhelming and appalling pity with which the man now regarded the distant boy. He stared, and then all his muscles clamped into spasm, he vomited, he foamed, his bowels gave way, he went into the dark, which was busy and roaring, which was not peace. God was bad, bad was God, his voice squeaked as he went, whether into the air or only into the cavern of his head he never knew and could not ask. For no one spoke to him again of the episode. That he remembered, at least.
In later years this episode became part of the rigorous and rigid account he made for himself of his ineluctable destiny. All human beings tell their life-stories to themselves, selecting and reinforcing certain memories, casting others into oblivion. All human beings are interested in causation. “Because I had a good Latin teacher, who caught my mind with incantatory grammar, I became a theologian, and because I chose Latin, I put aside the sciences of earth, flesh and space.” All human beings are interested in pure coincidence, which can act in a life as surely as causation, and appear to resemble that, as though both were equally the effects of a divine putting-on. Most of us know the flutter of the heart which comes when, out of a whole library, we put a random hand on the one necessary book, and—unerringly we should say, but what does that mean?—open it, at the one necessary page. In the Arabian Nights, it has been said, a man has his Destiny written on his forehead, and his character, his nature, is that Destiny and nothing else. A boy, a man, like Josh Lamb, Joshua Ramsden, who has found himself tumbling in the dark sea outside the terrible transparent mirror of the fragile window-pane, persists perhaps by linking moments of conscious survival into a fine suspension-bridge of a personal destiny, a narrow path of constructed light, arching out over the bulging and boiling.
During Josh Lamb’s school-days the battle flamed in the air and descended screaming and incandescent from the sky to earth. Everyone was quick with a small sense of destiny, everyone had their “luck” which had saved their house, or their doom, which had seen their daily life ba
ttered to dust and rubble. Little boys ran, arms spread like dark wings, humming and burring, Spitfires, Hurricanes, Beaufighters. All life had a glaring “reality” which was unreal, and different from the normal (ordinary).
He found old storybooks in which serpents strangled the shores and the impotent gods were defeated. He read them as the bombers growled and churned over his bedroom roof, close, close. He knew that they described the truth of things. The little children in Hamelin Square in 1968 listened to tales of dark fate and world battle, sitting on safe sofas by the fireside, eating toast and honey. They inhabited the darkness briefly, with a thrill and a shiver, like swimmers advancing into the cold water, drenched by the roaring breakers, scuttling back to sand and sunlight, sleeking their wet hair and skins. Leo and Saskia, Thano and Clement, were not without their own wounds and destinies. But they could believe in cushions, fireside, bread, milk, and honey. The boy Josh Lamb took comfort from the old myth because it was an adequate description of the world he inhabited, by necessity.
He linked his father’s lost postcard, with the Genesis reference, to the Rembrandt painting and his classroom fit. He was ambivalently chosen for sacrifice and saved from the burning. Much later, in one of his asylum incarcerations, he was encouraged to do “Art Therapy.” He took pleasure in painting wild skies with a full moon covered by a fivefingered cloud, like a hand clutching it to quench it. He knew by then what it represented, what it was a Sign of. The Smudge. But as a boy he had not understood that.
He began to hear voices, so his tale of his destiny told him, shortly after the fit in the Scripture lesson. They were not “in” his head, they were somewhere out there, like Hagar’s Angel, and Abraham’s. Sometimes it was as if he “overheard” them. They quarrelled with each other, as his father and mother (rarely) had quarrelled. He got into trouble with his aunt, and with teachers, for cocking his head to catch what they said. He learned to listen without moving a muscle. When the voices were talking, he didn’t hear the ordinary world. There was one particular voice that he called the tempter. It gave orders, in a clear, incontrovertible, no-nonsense tone. It told him to step into the road in front of the school bus. It told him to open the window and step out on to the darkness. He had seen that the other could stand up in it. What had he to lose? said the voice. There was a very strangled voice, which spoke in fragments only, which said “No, don’t,” and “Get on bus,” and “Remember,” though it didn’t say what he should remember. Sometimes they all shrieked and whistled together, and he put his hands to his ears. He might, in some other world, have told his aunt about the voices, but the voices themselves reminded him that his aunt already thought he was nasty.