Loving Monsters Read Online Free PDF Page B

house all the time. It goes against human instinct. We need our continuities, we ache for places. So I think many people would rejoice if told that, all else being equal, they would still be doing the same work in ten, even twenty years, gradually moving up the ladder of seniority, bringing home a little more money and taking slightly longer holidays.
    – So if I describe my father as an archetypal nine-to-five man I’m certainly not mocking him. The twenties and thirties were hardly a stable period, what with post-war prostration and the mass unemployment of those who came back. Then the WallStreet crash, the Slump, the hunger marches. To be in a skilled and essential line of business like my father’s was a godsend for a man with family responsibilities. As long as there was trade there were merchant vessels; and as long as there were valuable cargoes shuttling about the world on the high seas my father would be in employment. Not true of goose farmers, after all. –

    Maybe it was partly this aspect of his father, that of the hard-working small burgher with aspirations, to which Jayjay was referring as having had consequences for himself. Harold Jebb’s own schooling, such as it was, had stopped when he was fourteen, a year before he allegedly entered night school at Well Hall under the tutelage of that ardent socialist, E. Nesbit. Harold’s eventual redemption through his apprenticeship at Lloyds evidently left him determined his son should have abetter chance. Accordingly the shipping broker stretched his modest though reliable income in order to send his only son to Eltham College.
    Eltham College was, and still is, an independent school with a reputation for solid academic standards. It was founded in the 1840s for the sons of missionaries who were usually sent home for their secondary schooling from India and Africa and China. Typically, such children boarded or were farmed out to relatives or church families in the locality, living out of steamer trunks in spare bedrooms, exiled from their parents by thousands of miles of ocean. English literature of the period is full of the cries of children who grew up articulate enough to describe the desolation these banishments could entail. Kipling and Saki were both examples of the type. This was no direct part of Jayjay’s own experience, of course. By his own account his suburbia was benign and supportive. Yet from time to time a certain melancholy would tiptoe in behind his descriptions of childhood Eltham and just stand there, like a summoned employee respectfully waiting for his boss to get off the telephone before he can speak. Later, having myself become familiar with the area in the course of my researches, I can say that anybody might visit one of those semi-detached houses in streets named after Scottish glens, all of them built to much the same pattern as Jayjay’s birthplace in Beechill Road, and sense how it might have been for a child uprooted from his family overseas. Each landing halfway up the stairs has a sash window and, unless it has been modernised, each window has ornamental borders of stained glass. The exact patterns and colours may vary in detail from house to house, from street to street, depending on the whims and supplies of the original builders. It is possible to stand on the landing halfway up the staircase and, at the head-height of a child, look through a panel of coloured glass and completely transform the world outside. By slightly moving one’s head the back garden plunges through acrid green to desert ochre, from ultramarine to hellish red. It is the Saki trick, turning a suburban garden into an exotic world, somewhere else, anywhere else: a cool, undersea landof mysterious longing or a vengeful inferno as the doomed planet falls into the sun. To visit these houses is still now and then to be fleetingly possessed by the clamorous ghosts of children who once stood, chin on forearm at the narrow sill, staring out for hours,