Waterland Read Online Free PDF

But how to avoid all that adult mess? Departmental reshuffling. Budgetary directives … And the relevance of the subject to the real world …
    (But since when have you been living, Lew, in the real world?)
    So he says, ‘We’re cutting back History …’
    He doesn’t say: ‘If it were anything else … But child theft. Child theft. A schoolmaster’s wife. You can’t deny the repercussions. And those damned press reports …’
    He doesn’t say: ‘I’d stand by you, Tom, I’d defend you. But, in the circumstances – these lessons – these circus-acts …’
    He doesn’t say: ‘How is she, Tom?’
    (She’s what in days gone by they might have called mad. She’s in what, in days gone by but not any more, they called an asylum.)
    He doesn’t ask: ‘Why?’
    He says— But he can’t even say what he’d planned to say: he’s opening his filing cabinet, he’s going to offer me whisky. No reasons, no explanations, no digging up what’s past. He’d rather pretend it isn’t real. Reality’s so strange, so strange and unexpected. He doesn’t want to discuss it.
Mr Lewis Scott, Headmaster, had ‘no comment’ today when faced with angry reaction from parents.
    He’d like it over and done with and out the way.
    Early retirement. Full pension. We’re cutting History.

5
A Bruise upon a Bruise
    I T BOBBED gently. It swivelled and rocked in the eddies, face down, arms held out, bent at the elbow, in the position of someone quietly, pronely asleep. But it was dead, not asleep. Since bodies do not sleep which lie face down in the water, least of all if they have been lying thus, undetected in the darkness, for several hours.
    For that night (July the twenty-fifth, 1943), as chance would have it, Dad had not been plagued by his usual restlessness. That night he had slept soundly till woken by the dawn, at which he had risen, along with Dick who, never suffering himself from disturbed nights, woke every morning at five-thirty, to depart at six-thirty on his motor-cycle for the outskirts of Lynn, where he worked on a dredger in the Ouse. Only a commotion coming from the front of the cottage, a hoarse shout from Dad, the clanking of someone running over the cat-walk of the sluice, denied me the extra hour’s sleep I was allowed as a studious schoolboy (schoolboy then on holiday, and not so exclusively studious) and prevented me from being woken, as I usually was, by the coughings and garglings of Dick’s motorbike.
    And when I went into Dick’s room to look out over the river, Dad and Dick were standing on the cat-walk, bent forward, eyes lowered, and Dad was prodding something in the water, tentatively, nervously, with a boat-hook, as if he were the keeper of some dangerous but sluggish aquatic animal and were trying to goad it into life.
    I flung on my clothes; went downstairs, heart jumping.
    At that time of year the river was low. The barrier of the sluice itself, the vertical brick-facing of the adjacent river bank and the pier between sluice and lock formed a deep three-sided enclosure from which no body, alive or dead, could be lifted with ease. Dad must have been considering this fact and was scrambling back to the cottage to look for better tools than the boat-hook, when he met me, scrambling in the opposite direction, by the sluice engine. His face had the look of a criminal caught in mid-crime.
    ‘Freddie Parr,’ he said.
    But I had already recognized the checked summer shirt, the grey cotton trousers, the prominent shoulder-blades, the dark hair which, even when soaked with river water, formed unsmoothable tufts at the back of Freddie’s head.
    ‘Freddie Parr.’
    He brushed past me. I joined Dick on the cat-walk. He held the boat-hook and was giving gentle, deliberate pokes to the body.
    ‘Freddie Parr,’ I said.
    We could not get beyond this repetition of a name.
    ‘Freddie Parr,’ Dick said. ‘Freddie Parr-Parr.’
    For that was how Dick spoke, in a sort of baby-language.
    He turned