Practically everything worth doing was forbidden, in theory anyway. According to Mother, everything that a boy ever wants to
do was ‘dangerous’. Swimming was dangerous, climbing trees was
dangerous, and so were sliding, snowballing, hanging on behind
carts, using catapults and squailers, and even fishing. All
animals were dangerous, except Nailer, the two cats, and Jackie the
bullfinch. Every animal had its special recognized methods of
attacking you. Horses bit, bats got into your hair, earwigs got
into your ears, swans broke your leg with a blow of their wings,
bulls tossed you, and snakes ‘stung’. All snakes stung, according
to Mother, and when I quoted the penny encyclopedia to the effect
that they didn’t sting but bit, she only told me not to answer
back. Lizards, slow-worms, toads, frogs, and newts also stung.
All insects stung, except flies and blackbeetles. Practically all
kinds of food, except the food you had at meals, were either
poisonous or ‘bad for you’. Raw potatoes were deadly poison, and
so were mushrooms unless you bought them at the greengrocer’s. Raw
gooseberries gave you colic and raw raspberries gave you a skin-rash.
If you had a bath after a meal you died of cramp, if you cut
yourself between the thumb and forefinger you got lockjaw, and if
you washed your hands in the water eggs were boiled in you got
warts. Nearly everything in the shop was poisonous, which was why
Mother had put the gate in the doorway. Cowcake was poisonous, and
so was chicken corn, and so were mustard seed and Karswood poultry
spice. Sweets were bad for you and eating between meals was bad
for you, though curiously enough there were certain kinds of eating
between meals that Mother always allowed. When she was making plum
jam she used to let us eat the syrupy stuff that was skimmed off
the top, and we used to gorge ourselves with it till we were sick.
(pp. 52-53)
If I tot up the account, I suppose I must
admit that the war did me good as well as harm. At any rate that
year of reading novels was the only real education, in the sense of
book-learning, that I’ve ever had. It did certain things to my
mind. It gave me an attitude, a kind of questioning attitude,
which I probably wouldn’t have had if I’d gone through life in a
normal sensible way. But—I wonder if you can understand this—the
thing that really changed me, really made an impression on me,
wasn’t so much the books I read as the rotten meaninglessness of
the life I was leading.
(p.126)
It struck me that perhaps a lot of the people you see walking about
are dead. We say that a man’s dead when his heart stops and not
before. It seems a bit arbitrary. After all, parts of your body
don’t stop working—hair goes on growing for years, for instance.
Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the
power to take in a new idea. Old Porteous is like that.
Wonderfully learned, wonderfully good taste—but he’s not capable
of change. Just says the same things and thinks the same thoughts
over and over again. There are a lot of people like that. Dead
minds, stopped inside. Just keep moving backwards and forwards on
the same little track, getting fainter all the time, like ghosts.
(p.168)
