Engleby Read Online Free PDF

everyone even as it was, and we’d have to build more and more houses which meant that in England at any rate there would soon be no fields left. And then where could we grow the food?
    Perhaps when the next world war started, all this would become irrelevant, because the next world war, which would be between us and the Russians, would be a nuclear one. I knew that my grandfather had fought in the first one, my father in the second, so it followed that my turn would come in the third.
    Near the railway bridge was a large institutional building. I never knew what it was, but it made a big impression on me. Was it a hospital, or a poorhouse? Or a workhouse? What was the difference? In the winter, when the lights were on, you could see figures moving behind the uncurtained windows. There was something in the lights themselves that made me anxious. They can’t really have been gaslight, but they looked like it; perhaps they’d wired up the old gas brackets and put low-wattage electric bulbs in them. That was probably it. Certainly it gave the building a look of something from another time, from the last century. The men I glimpsed through the windows were old. Perhaps they too belonged to that century; in fact, they must have been born in it.
    I think I once saw a matron with a starched headdress. Because I could only see into it on winter afternoons, it seemed to me that it was always teatime in this place. This didn’t mean nice food or cake or anything. It meant the beginning of a long institutional evening. And I always had this feeling that somehow the inmates of this place were immune to time, that they were somehow stuck at five o’clock in perpetuity.
    I knew somehow what it was like inside. It’s possible. Whether I dreamed it, whether my intuition just works well in this case or whether I have in some way lived before, I couldn’t say. But almost every detail of it was known to me and I identified with these old men.
    Something of the atmosphere of that place was universal, at least in England then. The clamp of institution. Gaslight, grey. Like the metal ache of an injection when it fills your arm. No colour, no home; no sister, daughter, lipstick, smile or music; only gaslight and vault, and arched corridor with tiled wall and stone floor for ever.
    I feared to find myself in such a place. And I was always agitated for the men who were there. I wanted to look after them, put pipe tobacco wrapped in scarlet paper in their hands and lead them into colour.
    For some reason, it was my responsibility.
    It’s going well with Jennifer. I see her at the Soc meetings and I’ve started going to history lectures with her. She’s doing an interesting combination of topics, I must say, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she did well in the exam coming up in the summer. The Unification of Germany is one of her strong suits. I don’t think she’s quite got to the bottom of Vichy France, but there isn’t much material to work with, outside the archives. The German ones are hard to get at if you don’t speak German (she only has O level) and the French have locked theirs up. (I know this because we covered this topic for A-level History at school.) She’s pretty steady on the old schoolbook stuff – the Stewdors, the Frog Rev – but on Africa I think she’s been misled by the Marxists. I mean misled about what actually took place, because as far as exams are concerned, of course, the Marxist interpretation will do fine. Most of the history dons are Marxist. They are careful to define whether they are ‘pure’ Marxist-Leninist, or Communist (which means Stalinist, in favour of the invasion of Hungary and Czechoslovakia because although those peoples didn’t like being invaded or living under Communism, the Communists knew better and it was for their own good) or Trotskyist or Menshevik or Gramsci-ist or Eurosocialist or Lukácsist or something even more refined. They do change, however, and they are hugely interested