Megg Lake is an oxbow, a hoop of water named for the Greek letter Ω, one of the few Greek letters of which the Evangelist approves, the others being in some mystical way gateways to licentiousness. It is constantly refilled by an underground river which flows down from the Mendicant Hills, and when there is a great deal of rain, the lake bubbles over the rocks at the western end and finds its own floodways to the sea. At any time, Megg Lake is a choppy and turbulent body, ripples sprinting out from the centre where the water boils up, and reflecting off the craggy shores to make (according to our geography textbooks) a pattern of constructive interference where the splashes collide and produce waves, and destructive interference where their interaction yields little patches of calm. But now it is frozen, a broad grey-blue crescent of bowed ice, thick and growling.
Ma Lubitsch parks the car. It is a 4 × 4, and it is completely forbidden to Old Man Lubitsch, who (on the occasions when life’s exigencies place him, against his spouse’s better judgement, behind the wheel) drives it like a racing car, in a pair of nasty shades, and draws admiring glances from women younger than his suit. Ma Lubitsch brings the beast to a halt by the lake, and Gonzo scrambles over me or possibly through me in his urgency, and then we are all unloading the car. Tackle box, check. Rugs, check. Charcoal burner, check. Ice saw, check. This family—extended family—is going Eskimo fishing, something Old Man Lubitsch and Ma Lubitsch used to do back when she was a sylph-like thing with no hips and he was a bull of a man, short and powerful as a tropical storm, and my, how she adored him. And from the immodest twinkle in her eyes, at least as much of them as I can see through folds of skin and squint and woollen comforter, she still does, and shall do evermore. It is only the ghost of one soldier that stands between them, and even this is not a separation, but a strange sad bridge and a deep mutual knowing like nothing else. Marcus Maximus Lubitsch, tennis player and able cook, laid to rest now, and visited sporadically in a well-kept corner of the churchyard at the edge of town. At this moment, Marcus is present. Even Gonzo, thigh-deep in snow, and flailing gleefully at the powder, quiets his voice and shares the solemn smile which passes between his parents.
Ma Lubitsch lights the burner, but she uses somewhat too much fluid and the thing fairly erupts, singeing her muffler. She gives a great shout of Polish obscenity and then looks guiltily around, but there are no linguists within thirty miles, and she giggles (more constructive and destructive interference, no doubt, in the pattern of her wobbling fat, but this is concealed), and Old Man Lubitsch goes to get the ice saw.
Megg Lake’s ice is not lightly to be cut. It is oddly clear and hard, more like glacial ice (which is pressurised and squeezed over thousands of years) than lake ice (which is fraught with cracks and rivulets). Gonzo’s father assails the ice with the saw—initially near the shoreline, but latterly further out when it becomes apparent that there’s no earthly danger of it breaking—but to little effect. Old Man Lubitsch hacks away, but this is serious frozen stuff, ice like Arctic ice, with a bad attitude and a stubborn mien. It is ice, in fact, a lot like Old Man Lubitsch himself, who was hounded from his home town for being cheeky to the communists, and then refused return when he was cheeky to the new fellas in much the same way. Perpetual exile, letter-writing malcontent, “Furious and disappointed of Cricklewood Cove,” Gonzo’s father will not concede. He will get through this ice if he must declare an eternal feud upon it. And so it is that Gonzo comes to his aid with a plan.
In the normal run of things, I am Gonzo’s plan-confidant. It is to me he brings his worst ideas, and it is my job to squash them and propose, as an alternative to connecting an electric torch directly to the mains power so as to make a lightsabre, some activity less mortally perilous. Today, however, Gonzo’s plans receive an audience less jaded and, perhaps, less sensible. Parents dote. Fathers, in particular, indulge their sons in matters of manly comportment and tasks which approach the sacred duties of the heteropatriarch, such as shooting enemies, blowing things up and hauling mighty armfuls of dead animal across the white wastes to feed the tribe. This situation—the possible defeat of the clan hunters by an inanimate icecap—falls broadly into these categories, and thus it is that when Gonzo proposes a simple solution, swift and sure, Old Man Lubitsch gets a look in his eye. It is a look which says that, when he was Gonzo’s age, he had some idea of similar magnificence, and this jewel was crushed beneath a weighty grown-up heel. But here he, Gonzo’s father, is in a position to carry through the deed, and in one stroke to avenge himself and demonstrate a more enlightened understanding of his son’s unbridled genius than was shown to him. Grizzled and rugged, red flannel shirt and preposterous fur hat upon his head, Old Man Lubitsch looks down benignly on his child.
“Say it again!” says Gonzo’s father proudly.
“We should use the lighter fluid,” says the infant anarchist, “and burn a hole in the ice!”
Ma Lubitsch sighs a little sigh, but trapped within the matriarch it seems there is still a breathless groupie falling for her husband’s wild eyes and floating hair (such as remains) because there’s a sparkle about her which says loudly she does not approve, does not think this is wise, will not be held accountable, but is absolutely dying to see it happen and will reward most richly whatever prince of men can carry off this splendid boast.
This tacit complicity established, my formless worries are brushed aside, and an order of service is drawn up as follows:
1) a spot will be appointed, no less than thirty metres out, where this conflagration may safely be begun, and where fishing may latterly occur;
2) Old Man Lubitsch, and he alone, will walk out to the spot thus designated and deploy the matériel, in quantity. He shall do this by:
i. hollowing out a small basin
ii. pouring thereinto a large quantity of flammable stuff, leavened with such kindling and fuel as may be garnered from the rear of the car and the ground nearby
iii. making, by means of more stuff, a fuse or trail back to the lakeside, where
3) we shall await him and when he is safe,
4) jointly ignite the furnace.
This all duly done, a strange and beautiful thing happens, which is absolutely not what we had in mind.
The thing begins as advertised, with a bright flame licking smartly across the ice to Old Man Lubitsch’s reservoir. That reservoir, lighter fuel with an admixture of dry wood and charcoal, and a couple of rags from the back of the 4 × 4, catches and burns well, a five-foot-high column with its feet in the ice. A certain amount of smoke goes up, which may also be steam. The whole thing seems to be doing very little in the way of melting the ice, but perhaps it’s early days. And indeed, it is early days; the next stage is somewhat more dramatic than we had envisaged. There is a noise as of incoming mortars or a train crash or the steeple of the church falling into the vestry. It is a vast, tectonic, tearing noise which seems to come from everywhere. In truth, it is probably none of these things, but it is very loud, and I am a small boy.
The ice has split, as it does when you put an ice cube in your drink on a hot day. The fissure is narrow, but it is lengthening at speed, and other cracks are forming, and something vast is shrugging underneath. Ma Lubitsch, with a mother’s sense of threat and consequence, perceives the shape of things to come. As dinosaurs battle beneath the icecap, she throws her beloved, idiot family into the car and takes off at a clip Old Man Lubitsch himself finds somewhat startling. Gonzo and I stare back at Megg Lake, fascinated, through the rear window. Thus we alone in all the world are positioned to see what happens when the run-off of an entire range of hills is pent up for several days beneath a plug of ice and air, and then released by a rebellious sexagenarian with a yen to relive his glory days in front of his family.
The icecap gives a final wriggle, and goes “shhOOOMF!” and a frothing eruption boils up and out. The plume of water reaches higher than the high trees by the lakeside, and lumps of ice like Sunday roasts fall ahead of us on the road. The full weight of water fr
om the Mendicant Hills, thwarted these many days in its passage to the sea and gathered underground in a column of pressure two hundred feet high, is at last released.
A duck, knocked unconscious by a bit of ballistic slush, tumbles to the ground in a field to our right. And then, extremely locally, it rains. It rains sleet and snow and ice, and a small number of unhappy frogs.
Old Man Lubitsch looks back down the road at the devastation, and he starts to laugh. It is not a hysterical laugh, but a genuine, delighted, belly laugh at the view, the madness, the gorgeousness of the cock-up. Ma Lubitsch calls him a string of names, but her face is flushed and she, too, is laughing, and it seems likely that if ever Gonzo is to get a younger brother, it will be tonight.
The Cove Cold Snap ends a few days later, as if by sympathetic magic we have broken the grip of winter on the land. The snow melts overnight, and there are little green things eagerly yammering for attention shortly after. The Lubitsch donkeys, cause of great and now-forgotten turmoil, are led reluctantly from their winter accommodations and told to start thinking of themselves as outdoor beasts again. Their mournful and utterly mendacious cries of distress are responsible for some sleepless nights in the Lubitsch house, but Ma Lubitsch keeps to her iron rule and the donkeys get the message, and are content.
THUS GONZO, incendiarist and leader of men. And Gonzo’s inescapable hanger-on—the kid no one notices? He also grows up. Not even last-picked for football teams and athletic tryouts, the perpetually benched; he is Gonzo’s shadow and occasional conscience when the Plan—be it raiding the kitchen for food or escaping this borstal to live with Gypsies in Mongolia (described by the Evangelist as “a festerance of Sin and Capitulation,” on what evidence I cannot guess)—calls for excesses in excess of what the authorities will accept as demonstrating that boys will be boys. Outwitting the librarian and purloining banned books is almost expected; releasing the inmates of the ant farm along a trail of purloined sugar leading to the staff showers is ingenious enough to merit wry applause from the science master along with a string of punishment duties; making and testing explosives with cheap domestic ingredients I veto, not out of any dislike for the splendidness of the concept, but from a natural awareness that there are borders everywhere, and sending the football pavilion—even empty—four hundred feet into the air using homebrew nitroglycerine is on the far side of both what would be tolerated and our own alchemical competence. I remember, where Gonzo does not, the safety film featuring scarred and rueful victims of their own hubris urging us against such ventures. We settle instead on a concoction intended to induce percussive internal combustion in the rumina of cows, but the test subjects are unaffected by the stuff, save for a minor increase in distraught mooing.
At fourteen, Gonzo discovers martial arts movies: the oeuvre of Messrs. B. Lee and J. Chan, along with assorted other players of greater and lesser talent. The martial arts film is a curiously sentimental thing, fraught with high promises and melodrama. Those of the Hong Kong variety are frequently filled with untranslatable Chinese puns delivered in a bout of sing-song badinage. The plots are moral, Shakespearean, and have a tendency to charge off in some unexpected direction for twenty minutes before returning to the main drama as if nothing has happened.
Inspired by these, Gonzo commences to study karate. He is the ideal candidate: fearless, physical and delighted by the changes wrought in his body by multiple press-ups, his only disadvantage that he comes late to the party. Had Gonzo begun his training younger, he might one day be a true master. As it is, he must content himself with being merely an excellent student. For the weedy sidekick (whose yokogeri kekomi is indeed the weediest in the school’s catchment area), karate is another arena in which life’s beatings are legitimately delivered, but he struggles on. He has—I have—despite a long-nurtured understanding that he cannot equal his friend’s achievements—never learned to quit, one virtue he possesses which is utterly alien to Gonzo, whose effortless rampage through life has never required him to consider it.
And then one day the universe decides that I am fledged, and accordingly demands of me my first solo flight; Mary Sensei leads me from the tatami to examine my now-familiar bloody nose. It has never broken, but—unlike my hands, which remain fragile despite hours of training at the bag—it must by now have developed a mighty sheath of calcium. I wonder if I can shatter boards with it. Mary Sensei replies that this is unlikely, and she would prefer that I delay the experiment indefinitely. Five foot three and fifty-four kilos, Mary Sensei tells me I’m not cut out for karate. But my dedication is sufficiently impressive that she can suggest an alternative: another school.
I object that Gonzo won’t want to change schools.
“No,” Mary Sensei explains. “Not Gonzo. Gonzo will do fine here. Just you. Without Gonzo.”
This is a new concept, but not—oddly—an unpleasant one.
“Another karate school?”
“No. Another style. Maybe a soft form.”
“What’s a soft form?”
She tells me.
The upshot is a tour of the local schools of soft-form pugilism, and the first thing which becomes apparent is that the term “soft” is misleading because it is relative, the comparison being with men and women so desperate to turn themselves into machines of empty-handed demolition that they have spent hours and days and months striking wooden boards and sandpapered target dummies to condition their fists, and who consider an hour ill-spent if they have not driven one foot through a pile of bricks. It is not a question of whether the style is violent, but of whether that violence is direct and forceful or subtle and convoluted. To the eye of a novice, soft forms appear delicate, baroque and artistic, while the hard forms are brutish and merciless. The truth is that the soft forms are more considered in their application of pain and damage to the body. Which is more unpleasant to the object of their attentions is an open question—and which variety attracts more dangerous lunatics in the suburban setting is also unclear. I rapidly reject the smiling, flinty aikidoka, whose expressionless perfection informs the opponent that his life or death is irrelevant, and whose motions include a sword-cut twist at the end to provide the coup de grâce. Their modern, street-fighting cousins of European and Brazilian ju-jitsu are also unsatisfactory; the former are cheery, laddish men tending to be under five foot six and almost the same across the shoulder, the latter are chuckling lunatics with a fondness for submission holds and women in impractical swimwear. Puritanical and sovereign, I stalk from their classroom without a second look—but this leaves me with a problem. Judo is as much sport as self-defence. T’ai chi is fluid and elegant but requires an entire lifetime to be usable in combat. More esoteric—and, to be honest, no softer than karate—escrima and silat are not taught anywhere within an hour of Cricklewood Cove. I look in desperation at Mary Sensei, and perhaps, this once, my need is enough.
“Yes,” Mary Sensei says, “there’s one more thing we can try.”
Which is how, for the first time without Gonzo Lubitsch, I come to be standing on the doorstep of Wu Shenyang, seeking admittance to the House of the Voiceless Dragon.
“Wu like woo,” Mary Sensei said two minutes ago, strangely breathless in her aged VW Rabbit as we sat waiting for the precise appointed hour, “and then Shen and Yang as if they were separate, but they’re not. And you don’t call him Wu Shenyang, anyway, you call him Mister Wu. Or Master Wu. Or . . .” But she could not think of anything else I might call him and anyway it’s time. The door opens. An excited voice says “Come, come!” and I watch my feet take me across the threshold.
Mister (Master) Wu is the first teacher of whatever sort to ask me to his home, and he is the first martial arts instructor who has wanted to know me off the mat before seeing me perform on it. According to Mary Sensei, if he does not find what he is looking for in my heart, there will be no point in testing the rest of me. I inspect my heart, and it seems an impoverished organ for such a big task. It is the right sort of size and located not as mov
iegoers believe in the high left side of the chest (that is in fact a lung) but just off centre and further down. It beats approximately seventy times a minute and pumps vital nutrients and oxygen carried by haemoglobin around my body in the approved fashion, but it conceals as far as I can tell no mysteries, and is devoid of secret heritage or supernatural skills. Having thus ascertained by introspection that I lack whatever it is this gentleman is seeking, I feel able to observe his living room, which is itself remarkable. It is, as well as being a place to sit and read and eat cake, a treasure house of oddments and curiosities—a gold statue of a warlike pig in one corner, a pair of Foo Dogs on the mantle, standing lamps from various periods of design, weapons and china ducks on all the walls. Wu Shenyang is still assessing me—I can feel the stress of his regard—and so I begin to catalogue the contents of this place with an eye to returning perhaps as a cleaner or a general dogsbody.
Item: two armchairs, split in various places and of considerable antiquity, but also to all appearances monstrously comfortable. These are positioned loosely on either side of an open fire at one end of the room, along with a coffee table whose clever construction allows books to be stashed willy-nilly beneath the tabletop.
Item: with its back to us, a leather sofa of similarly advanced age, showing signs (to wit, a pillow and a blanket) of having recently been used as a camp bed. Indeed, there appears to be a person camping on it still, because a pair of white-socked feet, slender and almost certainly feminine (by the pattern of the weave) and perhaps my own age or a little younger, protrude from the western side.