Fantasies

Recalling materials for a memoir is like being an archaeologist. Sometimes you have to make do with nothing but a handle, or a spout. From this you deduce and reconstruct the rest of the jug whose fragments have been ground small by Time. Painstaking effort must be aided by guesswork, for you don’t have every piece of the puzzle. So in these notes, the snippets of recall light up the darkness of oblivion.

Fantasy can be stronger than reality. It’s as true for a sleepless child in a boarding-school dormitory as for a monk in his cell visited by a succubus. Sent to bed when it wasn’t yet dark I would see through the window giants fighting, like a Punch and Judy show. It was tall elms bending in the wind, their heads knocking together, their jaws silently shouting.

On nights when the other boys were sleeping I would invent images of gratification. Two of these stick in my mind, from when I was eight or nine. The first was simple enough. The scene was the Green outside my home. It’s an expanse of public grass covering the West Hill, where children play and adults walk their dogs, beneath the mournful cries of wheeling gulls and backed by the glittering sea. There’s a playground there still, with swings and a little roundabout and a bucking “horse” big enough for five children to ride. Best of all the attractions is the cliff of sandstone rocks, carved by Time and the limbs of generations into ledges and galleries and crevasses for children to clamber dangerously.

Lying in my dormitory bed, I’d be riding my own horse, a great Shire such as brewers employed to draw cartloads of barrels. Though I could ride it on the beach or through the woods, I chose to canter and gallop in circles around that playground on the hill, showing off its flying tail and mane. The rough boys of the district scattered beneath my charger’s feet, with the respect due to a knight.

Enough said about that fantasy! But the other one was more curious. A certain toy was popular at the school: the “John Bull Printing Outfit” consisting of wooden blocks with grooves to take type, in the form of letters and punctuation marks made of rubber. With tweezers you could place your letters into the blocks to produce a galley of type to press on an ink-pad and thence to paper. Adults also used it, to produce ad hoc rubber stamps.

In nocturnal fantasy I used a printing outfit to produce a special edition of the Book of Common Prayer. This with Hymns Ancient and Modern was one of the two books the congregation used at the village church, as in every Church of England service in those days. It goes back to 1550 and it’s famous for graceful language:

Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord; and by Thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of Thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Typically a prayer book was in tiny print, but this did not deter me from selecting it as the first publication of my magical printing press. Later, my mother acquired a small typewriter and touch-typing manual, with the intention to equip herself with secretarial skills. This was after she had left my stepfather and returned to my grandmother’s house, a move which lightened my own darkness greatly. In the holidays I constantly begged to use this machine, just for the sake of printing words on a page and admiring them.

I confess that the fantasy of making a book has never left me. In ’72 when I lived in a hippy commune and made a great Dragon on my wall in charcoal (to be painted with iridescent scales) it was about composing Illuminations, a compendium of my choicest mystical encounters, drug-induced or otherwise. In the early Nineties commuting on the London Underground I scribbled notes for a mighty tome called Seer and System, a humanist-mystical method for designing computer systems.

Nothing much seems to have changed.