The emperor was beloved by all.
At night, when the thin dogs slept, and the music lulled all but the most watchful to sleep, the mighty palace lay closed and barred against the foul Isosceles, sworn enemy to the graceful Tetrahedron.
But in the day, the guards pulled back the great doors, flooding the plain with light, so that gifts could be brought to the emperor.
Many brought gifts; stretches of material so fine that a change of the temperature would dissolve it; stretches of material so strong that whole cities could be built from it.
And stories of love and folly.
One day, a lovely woman brought the emperor a revolving circus operated by midgets.
The midgets acted all of the tragedies and many of the comedies. They acted them all at once, and it was fortunate that Tetrahedron had so many faces, otherwise he might have died of fatigue.
They acted them all at once, and the emperor, walking round his theatre, could see them all at once, if he wished.
Round and round he walked, and so learned a very valuable thing:
that no emotion is the final one.
LEVITICUS
THE HEATHEN WERE a daily household preoccupation. My mother found them everywhere, particularly Next Door. They tormented her as only the godless can, but she had her methods.
They hated hymns, and she liked to play the piano, an old upright with pitted candelabra and yellow keys. We each had a copy of the Redemption Hymnal (boards and cloth 3 shillings). My mother sang the tune, and I put in the harmonies. The first hymn I ever learned was a magnificent Victorian composition called Ask the Saviour to Help You.
One Sunday morning, just as we got in from Communion, we heard strange noises, like cries for help, coming from Next Door. I took no notice, but my mother froze behind the radiogram, and started to change colour. Mrs White, who had come home with us to listen to the World Service, immediately crushed her ear against the wall.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said in loud whisper, ‘but whatever it is, it’s not holy.’
Still my mother didn’t move.
‘Have you got a wine glass?’ urged Mrs White.
My mother looked horrified.
‘For medicinal purposes, I mean,’ added Mrs White hurriedly.
My mother went into a high cupboard, and reached down a box from the top shelf. This was her War Cupboard, and every week she bought a new tin to put in it, in case of the Holocaust. Mostly it was full of black cherries in syrup and special offer sardines.
‘I never use these,’ she said meaningfully.
‘Neither do I,’ said Mrs White defensively, clamping herself back against the wall. While my mother was covering up the television, Mrs White slithered up and down the skirting board.
‘We’ve just had that wall decorated,’ my mother pointed out.
‘It’s stopped anyway,’ panted Mrs White.
At that moment another burst of wailing began from Next Door.
Very clear this time.
‘They’re fornicating,’ cried my mother, rushing to put her hands over my ears.
‘Get off,’ I yelled.
The dog started barking, and my dad, who had been on nights the Saturday just gone, came down in his pyjama bottoms.
‘Put some clothes on,’ shrieked my mother, ‘Next Door’s at it again.’
I bit my mother’s hand. ‘Let go of my ears, I can hear it too.’
‘On a Sunday,’ exclaimed Mrs White.
Outside, suddenly, the ice-cream van.
‘Go and get two cornets, and a wafer for Mrs White,’ ordered my mother, stuffing 10 shillings into my hand.
I ran off. I didn’t know quite what fornicating was, but I had read about it in Deuteronomy, and I knew it was a sin. But why was it so noisy? Most sins you did quietly so as not to get caught. I bought the ice-creams and decided to take my time. When I got back my mother had opened the piano, and she and Mrs White were looking through the Redemption Hymnal.
I passed round the ice-creams.
It’s stopped,’ I said brightly.
‘For the moment,’ said my mother grimly.
As soon as we had finished, my mother wiped her hands on her apron.
‘Ask the Saviour to Help You, we’ll sing that. Mrs White, you be the baritone.’
The first verse was very fine I thought:
‘Yield not to Temptation, for yielding is sin,
Each Victory will help you some other to win.
Fight manfully onwards, Dark Passions subdue,
Look ever to Jesus, He will carry you through.’
The hymn had a rousing chorus that moved my mother to such an extent that she departed entirely from the notation of the Redemption Hymnal, and instead wrought her own huge chords that sounded the length of the piano. No note was exempt. By the time we got to verse 3, Next Door had started to bang on the wall.
‘Listen to the Heathen,’ my mother shouted jubilantly, her foot furious on the hard pedal.
‘Sing it again.’
And we did, while the Heathen, driven mad by the Word, rushed away to find what blunt instruments they could to pound the wall from the other side.
Some of them ran into the back yard and yelled over the wall, ‘Stop that bloody racket.’
‘On a Sunday too,’ tutted Mrs White, aghast.
My mother leapt from the keys and rushed into our back yard to quote the scripture. She found herself staring at the eldest son who had a lot of spots.
‘The Lord help me,’ she prayed, and a piece of Deuteronomy flashed into her mind:
‘The Lord will smite you with the boils of Egypt, and with the ulcers and the scurvey and the itch of which you cannot be cured.’ (Revised Standard Version.)
Then she ran back inside and slammed the back door.
‘Now then,’ she smiled, ‘who’s for a bit of dinner?’
My mother called herself a missionary on the home front. She said that the Lord hadn’t called her to the hot places, like Pastor Spratt and his Glory Crusade, but to the streets and by-ways of Lancashire.
‘I have always been guided by the Lord,’ she told me. ‘Look at my Wigan Work.’
A long time ago, very soon after her conversion, my mother had received a strange envelope, post marked Wigan. She had been suspicious, knowing how the Devil tempts the newly saved. The only person she knew in Wigan was an old flame, who had threatened to kill himself when she married another.
‘That’s up to you,’ she had said, refusing to correspond.
Eventually curiosity got the upper hand, and she tore open the envelope. It wasn’t from Pierre at all, but from one Eli Bone (Rev.) of the Society for the Lost.
The crest on the paper was a number of souls gathered round a mountain, with a little arch of a text underneath. ‘Fastened to the Rock’, it said.
My mother read on . . .
Pastor Spratt, leaving Wigan on his way to Africa, had recommended my mother to the Society. They were looking for a new treasurer. The last, Mrs Maude Butler (nee Richards), had just got married, and was moving to Morecambe. She would be opening a guest house for the bereaved, with special rates for all those who worked for the Society.
‘A very attractive offer in itself,’ reminded the Rev.
My mother was very flattered, and decided to accept the Rev.’s invitation to go and stay in Wigan for a few days, to find out more about the Society. My father was at work at the time, so she left him the address and a note which said: ‘I am busy with the Lord in Wigan.’
She didn’t come back for three weeks, and after that went regularly to the Rev. Bone’s to audit the accounts and campaign for new members. She was a good business woman, and under her direction the Society for the Lost almost doubled in membership.
Every subscription form carried with it a number of tempting offers: discount on hymnbooks, and other religious accoutrements; a newsletter with a free gift every time, and a free record at Christmas; and
, of course, the discounts available at the Morecambe guest house.
My mother regularly designed a gift of interest, available only to members of the Society. One year it was a fold-away, wipe-clean copy of Revelations, so that the blessed could be sure of the signs and portents surrounding the Second Coming. Another year, a Tribesman money box for missionary contributions. And my favourite of all, the sliding scale outdoor thermometer. On the one side of this sturdy Bakelite device was a simple temperature gauge, on the other, a sliding scale showing the number of possible conversions that could be made in a year, if every person, starting with you, brought two souls to the Lord. According to the sliding scale, the whole world could be godly within a mere ten years. This was a great encouragement to the timid and my mother received many letters of thanks.
The Society held a regular weekend at the Morecambe guest house, once a year, just before the busy season – the busy season being around Easter, after malingering illnesses contracted during the harsh winter. Of course, there was sometimes an unexpected spate in January, but it’s surprising how long people hang on, once they know it’s the end. My mother, who has always been interested in the End, personal and general, had a friend who used to make most of the wreaths for the Fylde coast.
‘Our time’s coming,’ she used to say, every winter, and every winter she bought a new coat.
‘It’s the only time I can afford it,’ she said. ‘People live a lot longer now, and they don’t want a fuss at the end.’ She shook her head. ‘No, business isn’t what what it was.’
She used to come and stay with us sometimes, and bring her wires and sponges, and catalogues.
‘It’s funny, but they always want the same, never anything adventurous, although I once did a violin in carnations for a musician’s husband.’
My mother nodded sympathetically.
The woman sipped her tea.
‘Now, Queen Victoria, that was a funeral.’
She took a chocolate biscuit from the bottom of the pile.
‘Course, I was young then, but my mother, she wore her fingers to the bone making wreaths. And they were wreaths in them days. Hearts and flowers, coronets, family crests, look I still have them in my catalogue.’ She picked it up and showed us the faded pages. ‘But nobody wants ‘em.’
She took another biscuit.
‘Crosses,’ she said bitterly, ‘that’s all I do, crosses. A woman with my training it’s not right.’
‘Couldn’t you do weddings as well?’ I asked her.
‘Weddings,’ she spat, ‘what would I want with weddings?’
‘You’d get a bit of variety,’ I suggested.
‘And what do you think they want at weddings?’ she challenged me.
I didn’t know, I’d never been. Her eyes gleamed down at me.
‘Crosses,’ she said, refilling her mug.
The weekend we all trouped down to Morecambe for the Society spree, the woman was there as well.
‘On contract work,’ she told us.
Apparently there had been an epidemic at a nearby boarding school. A lot of the pupils were no more, and naturally their parents wanted wreaths.
‘The school wants two tennis racquets in their colours, as a tribute. I’m using mimosa and roses, it’s very difficult, but it’s a challenge.’
‘Well, the money won’t go amiss, will it?’ said my mother.
‘It’ll pay for my bathroom that’s what. A woman of my training without a bathroom, it’s shocking.’
I asked if I could help, and she said I could, so we went down to the greenhouse together.
‘Put these on.’ She gave me a pair of gloves with no fingers. ‘And start sorting them roses.’
Her own hands were red, and speckled with mimosa dust.
‘What d’y think your mother would like?’ she asked me, by way of conversation.
‘Oh something very grand I think. I think she’d like the Bible open at Revelation.’
‘Well, we’ll see,’ said the woman.
The woman and I got on very well. Years later, when I was needing a Saturday job, she helped me out. She had gone into partnership with an undertaker, so they could offer the whole package at special rates.
‘It’s a cut-throat business,’ she told me.
They got a lot of work between them, and usually needed an extra hand. I went along to help with the laying out and make up. At first I was very clumsy. I used too much rouge, and smeared it down the cheekbones.
‘Show some respect,’ said the woman, ‘the dead have their pride.’ We always had a check list with the burial instructions, and soon this became my particular task. I went round making sure that the dead had everything they wanted. Some just asked for a prayer book or their Bible, or their wedding ring, but some were positively Egyptian. We did photograph albums, best dresses, favourite novels, and once someone’s own novel. It was about a week in a telephone box with a pair of pyjamas called Adolf Hitler. The heroine was a piece of string with a knot in it.
‘Some folk,’ said the woman, when she read it.
But we put it in anyway. It reminded me of Rossetti who flung his new poems into the grave of his wife, and had to ask permission from the home secretary to get them out again six years later. I liked my work. I learned a lot about wood and flowers, and I enjoyed polishing the handles as a final touch.
‘Always the best,’ declared the woman.
One year, the Society had a special conference in our town. My mother campaigned for weeks to make sure we got a good turn-out. May and Alice went posting invitations through letter boxes and Miss Jewsbury was billed to play the oboe. It was an open meeting to inform and encourage new members. The only place we could find to host the meeting was the Rechabite Hall on the corner of Infant Street.
‘Do you think that’s all right?’ asked May anxiously.
‘We won’t look too deep,’ replied my mother.
‘But are they holy?’ insisted Mrs White.
‘That’s for the Lord to decide,’ my mother said, very firm. Mrs White blushed, and later we saw she’d taken her name off the volunteer list for buns.
The conference was booked for a Saturday, and there was always a market near Infant Street on Saturdays, so my mother gave me an orange box, and told me to shout at everyone what was happening. I had a bad time. Most of the street traders told me I was in their way, that they had paid to be there, that I hadn’t, and so on. I didn’t mind the abuse, I was well used to it, and never thought it personal, but it was raining and I wanted to do a good job. Eventually Mrs Arkwright from the Factory Bottoms shop took pity on me. She had a stall at the weekend mostly with pet food though she would advise on vermin if it was urgent.
‘I like my little break,’ she said.
She let me put my orange box inside the shelter of her stall, so that I could give out tracts without getting too wet.
‘Tha mother’s mad, tha knows,’ she kept saying.
She might have been right, but there was nothing I could do about it.
I was relieved when two o’clock came and I could go inside with the rest.
‘How many tracts did you give out?’ demanded my mother, who was hovering by the door.
‘All of them.’
She softened. ‘Good girl.’
Someone started playing the piano just then, so I hurried inside. It was very gloomy with lots of pictures of the apostles. The sermon was on perfection, and it was at this moment that I began to develop my first theological disagreement.
Perfection, the man said, was a thing to aspire to. It was the condition of the Godhead, it was the condition of the man before the Fall. It could only be truly realized in the next world, but we had a sense of it, a maddening, impossible sense, which was both a blessing and a curse.
‘Perfection,’ he announced, ‘is flawlessness.’
Once upon a time, in the forest, lived a woman who was so beautiful that the mere sight of her healed the sick and gave a good omen to the crops.
/> She was very wise too, being well acquainted with the laws of physics and the nature of the universe. Her great delight was to spin, and to sing songs as she turned the wheel. Meanwhile, in a part of the forest that had become a town, a great prince roamed sadly along the corridors of his palace. He was considered by many to be a good prince, and a valuable leader. He was also quite pretty, though a little petulant at times.
As he walked, he spoke aloud to his faithful companion, an old goose.
‘If only I could find a wife,’ he sighed. ‘How can I run this whole kingdom without a wife?’
‘You could delegate?’ suggested the goose, waddling beside as best she could.
‘Don’t be silly,’ snapped the prince. ‘I’m a real prince.’
The goose blushed.
‘The problem is,’ continued the prince, ‘there’s a lot of girls, but no one who’s got that special something.’
‘What’s that then?’ panted the goose.
The prince gazed into space for a moment, then flung his body to the turf.
‘Your hose has split, sire,’ hissed his companion, embarrassed.
But the prince took no notice.
‘That special something . . .’ He rolled over, and propped himself on an elbow, motioning the goose to do the same.
‘I want a woman, without blemish inside or out, flawless in every respect. I want a woman who is perfect.’
And he buried his face in the grass and began to cry.
The goose was much moved by this display, and shuffled off to see if she could find some advisors.
After a long search, she stumbled on a clump of them under the royal oaks, playing bridge.
‘The prince wants a wife.’
They looked up as one man.
‘The prince wants a wife,’ she repeated, ‘and she must be without blemish inside or out, flawless in every respect. She must be perfect.’
The youngest advisor got out his bugle horn and sounded the cry. ‘For a wife,’ he shouted. ‘Perfect.’
For three years the advisors roamed the land to no avail. They found many lovely and virtuous women, but the prince refused them all.