The Child in Time Read Online Free PDF Page B

couple of acquaintances, once truly free men, were resigned to a lifetime teaching English to foreigners. Some were facing middle age exhaustedly teaching remedial English or ‘lifeskills’ to reluctant adolescents in far-flung secondaryschools. These were the luckier ones who had found jobs. Others cleaned hospital floors or drove taxis. One had qualified for a begging badge. Stephen dreaded ever meeting her in the street. All these promising spirits, nurtured, brought to excited life by the study of English Literature from which they culled their quick slogans – Energy is perpetual delight, Damn braces, bless relaxes – had disgorged from libraries in the late sixties and early seventies intent on inward journeys, or eastward ones in painted buses. They had returned home when the world grew smaller and more serious to service Education, now a dingy, shrunken profession; schools were up for sale to private investors, the leaving age was soon to be lowered.
    The idea that the more educated the population the more readily could its problems be solved had quietly faded away. It belonged with the demise of a more general principle that on the whole life would get better for more and more people and that it was the responsibility of governments to stage-manage this drama of realised potential, widening possibilities. The cast of improvers had once been immense and there had always been jobs for types like Stephen and his friends. Teachers, museum keepers, mummers, actors, itinerant story-tellers – a huge company and all bankrolled by the State. Now governmental responsibilities had been redefined in simpler, purer terms: to keep order, and to defend the State against its enemies. For a while, Stephen had kept alive a vague ambition to be a teacher in a State school. He saw himself, tall and craggy by the blackboard, before him a silent, respectful class intimidated by his tendency to sudden sarcasm, leaning forwards to catch his every word. Now he knew how lucky he had been. He remained the author of children’s books, and half forgot that it was all a mistake.
    One year after leaving University College Stephen had returned to London with amoebic dysentery after a hashish-befuddled tour of Turkey, Afghanistan and the North-WestFrontier Province to discover that the work ethic he and his generation had worked so hard to destroy was still strong within him. He craved order and purpose. He took a cheap bedsit, found a job as a filing clerk in a news-cutting agency and set about writing a novel. Each evening he worked four or five hours, delighted by the romance, the nobility of the undertaking. He was impregnable against the dullness of his job; he had a secret which was growing at one thousand words a day. And he had all the usual fantasies. He was Thomas Mann, he was James Joyce, perhaps he was William Shakespeare. He added to the excitement of his endeavour by working by the light of two candles.
    It was his intention to write of his travels, in a novel called Hashish , about hippies stabbed to death in their sleeping bags, a nicely brought-up girl sentenced to a lifetime in a Turkish jail, mystic pretentiousness, drug-enhanced sex, amoebic dysentery. First of all he needed to get down the background of his main character, something about his childhood to show the physical and moral distance he had to travel. But the opening chapter stubbornly refused to end. It took on a life of its own, and this was how Stephen came to write a novel based on a summer holiday he had spent in his eleventh year with two girl cousins, a novel of short trousers and short hair for the boys, and Alice bands and frocks tucked into knickers for the girls, with unspoken yearnings, coyly interlacing fingers in place of crazed sex, bicycles with wicker hampers instead of day-glo Volkswagen buses, and set not in Jalalabad but just outside Reading. It was all done in three months and he called it Lemonade .
    For a week he fingered and shuffled his