knelt down beside it. The child was still wedged inside. Its head was at an angle which made it seem that its neck might indeed be broken: its knee and elbows were scraped and slightly raw. The child's eyes were closed; it was holding its cap down by its knee; it had dark curly hair; it was smiling. One of its cheeks was brown and pink with dirt and blood: I wondered ifl might lick it. I thought
— The child is alive! Then I realized that the child, whom I had taken to be a boy, was in fact a girclass="underline" she was a small bright girl of eight or nine. She had opened one eye and was smiling. I thought I might say — Are you all right? None of this seemed, at the time, all that extraordinary. It seemed that I should put out a hand and see if any bones were broken; but I did not want to touch the child; I remained squatting in front of her with my forearms on my knees. I smiled at her. The girl moved her neck, her arms, tentatively, as if preparing to climb out of the tyre; she was looking towards something beyond me. I thought — Well, now, what am I going to see if I turn: some old monster emerge from that hut that has been sleeping for a thousand years? When I turned my head there was, yes, someone standing by the hut; it was another child, a boy; smaller even than the child within the tyre: this child seemed to have come out of the hut and was standing by the two grey-and-green bushes. I thought
— Well, you mean, this is what we have been waiting for all these centuries, these children? Then — This is ridiculous. The girl was climbing out of the tyre; her coat was torn; she had thin arms and legs like bones which have been picked clean. She remained crouching. Then with her hands she made flashing, darting movements towards the child who was by the hut: it was as if she were flicking bits of light at him; as if the bits of light might come down on him like golden rain. Then this child came up to her and held out his hand. He was wearing a rough brown smock to just below his knees. I thought — Oh I see, the child who has been in the tyre is deaf or dumb; or this other child is deaf and dumb; perhaps they both are; that's why she makes these flashing movements with her hands. Then — Or this silence, this scattering of light, is like the speech, or milk, of angels. The child who had been in the tyre stood and took the hand of the smaller child who was standing gravely by her. She did not in fact appear to be injured. Neither child up to this time had paid much attention to me. I thought — But that is all right, I am an observer in this clearing in the jungle. Then the girl who had been in the tyre did turn to me and made one or two flicking movements towards me with a hand. I smiled; I nodded; I
shook my head. I thought — But what does it matter if I do not understand? I understand. Then the girl, laughing, held her hand in front of her hips and made one or two movements forwards and back with her finger and thumb in a circle which might have been taken, if they had not been done so laughingly, to refer to something that could be called obscene. I laughed too; I raised my hand; I shook my head. Then the girl turned away. I thought — But thank you for the offer! It was kind. The two children set off beneath the railway lines hand-in-hand. The girl stopped once more and looked back at me; she made no more flicking movements with her hands. She looked first at me, then at the hut, then at the boy; then she remained for a time looking back at me. I watched her. I thought — She is trying to make some further message. I tried to say to her — It is all right! Then I watched them go. I had sat down on my haversack in the clearing by the hut. I was thinking — Well what might indeed grow, in the mind, if there is silence: something that has been dormant for a thousand years?
The rector of St Biscop's was a sandy-haired man called Peter Reece who strode about his parish without a jacket and with what looked like bicycle clips on his shirt-sleeves, so that with these and his dog-collar and his way of walking — leaning forwards with his arms held close to his sides — it was as if he were in harness and pulling a great weight. Sometimes he would stop and look back as if the weight had slipped from him and gone rolling down a hill. He seemed to be wondering — It is my fault if people have to suffer? to die?
His parish was High Anglican; his church had a ceiling which was painted blue with golden stars; beneath it there were niches from which dapper saints looked down. Peter Reece lived on his own in the large rectory; some of the young men who came to work for him looked somewhat like the dapper saints. He lived in an attic at the top of the house and on the first floor were dormitories where the young men slept and on the ground floor were rooms where unemployed men and schoolchildren could be given free meals. Between the rectory and the church there was a piece of waste ground where there had previously been the parish hut and a tennis court; it was here that there was being built the new Recreational Hall. In this there were to be games — table tennis and snooker and whist and ludo — classes in woodwork and pottery, and lectures on current affairs in the evenings.
Peter Reece had got help from local builders to provide him with
materials and there was a rich widow in the town who gave him money for expenses. But he did not get much help in this work from the unemployed themselves: they seemed to feel that they might undermine their case for what they were entitled to. So Peter Reece had asked for volunteers from Cambridge where he had recently served as an assistant priest. He then worried that his volunteers might be seen as dispensers of charity: there was a certain amount in the Bible about the virtue in the dispensing of charity, but who benefited from this virtue seemed to remain obscure.
Groups of men in cloth caps and mufflers would stand at some distance from the half-built Recreational Hall and watch us working. We thus became somewhat self-conscious in our work. I would think — Perhaps virtue resides in the embarrassment of those who are charitable? Then — What would be really charitable, of course, for the people who are watching us working, would be if we could arrange for the building to fall down.
It was difficult to make much contact with the men in cloth caps. We would try: but the more we tried, of course, the more unacceptable we became as people who were seen as doling out charity.
My first job was to transport by wheelbarrow loads of bricks to the building site from where they had been dumped by a lorry. Children would watch me: I would sometimes manage to give them a ride in the wheelbarrow. Then I got the job of manhandling bricks up to the level where two men were constructing a wall standing on planks between trestles. I thought — So here, again, might it not cheer up the watching children and the men standing on street corners if we embarked on one of those slapstick routines that play such a part in pantomimes: clowns knocking each other over with planks swinging on shoulders; builders toppling off ladders and falling head first into buckets. And after a time we might have managed to provide better recreation than that which could be provided by a hall.