A Word Child Read Online Free PDF Page A

having been incurably maimed by injustice.
    The most profound and maiming piece of injustice was the separation from Crystal. I cannot remember anything about the event of Crystal’s birth, but I can recall her in infancy and trying to carry her in my arms. I felt none of the jealousy the earlier child is supposed to experience. I loved Crystal at once in a sort of prophetic way, as if I were God and already knew all about her. Or as if she were God. Or as if I knew that she was my only hope. My younger sister had to be my mother, and I had to be her father. No wonder we both became a little odd. The orphanage was not too far away from the caravan site, and I must have seen quite a lot of Crystal in the earlier time after my mother’s death. I have memory pictures of Crystal aged two, three, four, and the sense that we played together. But as I developed more and more into a ‘bad’ boy I was allowed to see less and less of my sister. It was supposed that I would be ‘bad for her’. And by the time I was eleven we were almost completely separated. I saw her on occasional holiday outings and at Christmas. The anguish of these occasions did nothing to lighten my reputation for being ‘disturbed’. One Christmas time I arrived at the caravan to find Aunt Bill slapping Crystal’s face. I attacked Aunt Bill’s legs, which was all I could get at. She kicked me and I spent Christmas Day in hospital.
    My reputation for ‘badness’ was not unmerited. I was a strong child and soon given to violence. I was not bullied by other children. I did the bullying. (These are disagreeable memories. Am I still a monster in the dreams of those I injured then?) I was good at games and excelled at wrestling. These activities gave me my first conception of ‘excellence’, inextricably mixed up with the idea of defeating someone, preferably by physical force. Many years later a social worker (little knowing that I was myself something of an expert on the matter) told me that criminals who not only rob but quite gratuitously injure their victims as well, do so out of anger. This seems to me very plausible. I was brimming with anger and hatred. I hated, not society, puny sociologists’ abstraction, I hated the universe. I wanted to cause it pain in return for the pain it caused me. I hated it on my behalf, on Crystal’s, on my mother’s. I hated the men who had exploited my mother and ill-treated her and despised her. I had a cosmic furious permanent sense of myself as victimized. It is particularly hard to overcome resentment caused by injustice. And I was so lonely. The bottomless bitter misery of childhood: how little even now it is understood. Probably no adult misery can be compared with a child’s despair. However I was better off than some. I had Crystal, and I lived in and for the hope of Crystal as men live in and for the hope of God. When we parted from each other, mingling our tears, she used always to say to me, ‘Oh be good !’ This her having so often heard what a rascal I was. Not that her love wavered. Perhaps she felt that somehow if I became better we would meet more often. But for me Crystal’s little cry was and is the apotheosis of that word.
    Religion, of a low evangelical variety, was everywhere at the orphanage. I detested that too. Crystal’s ‘Be good’ (which had little or no effect on my conduct) meant more to me than Jesus Christ. Christ was always purveyed to me by people who clearly regarded me not only as a delinquent but as an object of pity. There is an attitude of complacent do-gooding condescension which even decent people cannot conceal and even a small child can recognize. Their religion seemed to me over-lit, over-simple, covertly threatening. There was nowhere in it to hide. We roared out ‘choruses’ about sin and redemption which reduced the hugest theological dogmas to the size of a parlour trick. I rejected