Walking Home and Squashing Snails

‍

ARNOLD, OCTOBER.

‍

THE leaves – well-turned, but not quite shedding completely – tapped the window now and again before they dropped; the schoolyard across the way was noisy, quiet, noisy again. He timed his cups of tea to the bell, its resulting tumult. He missed the pupils, the smooth brick walls and chalky scents, but not so much as he’d imagined. Somehow five bursts of remote, raucous energy were enough.

What he seemed to miss was purpose.

He'd had it on a dual-track: walking children through the glories of The Whitsun Weddings or High Windows (and navigating the inevitable chortling when one of the brighter ones discovered Larkin's musings on jazz mags), Lawrence’s gritty short stories, Alice Walker’s plangent, driven fiction; but also the pulse of literature itself, or so he liked to think.

When Iris was still with him, every few months she’d clear out for most of a day while he ploughed through ‘the rubble’, as she cheerfully called it: hundreds of poems, some handwritten on blue-lined paper, others crisp and professionally printed, all ranged like origami sea serpents about the teal sea of carpet.
‍

You alright with all – this?’ she’d say, on her way to work, or the cinema.

‘Course!’

He revelled in it – sifting, placing to one side, bringing back with a scratch of the head, hunting for confirmation. It seemed to him like a long, fantastical journey through some medieval wood: the canopy dense overhead, sideways gnarled with trunks and spiralling roots, occasionally disclosing magpie-finds amongst the leaves. Sometimes a dragon came roaring from the undergrowth, but mostly there was smoke, little fire.

It was odd, but he rarely looked at the shelf of perfect-bound volumes behind the standard lamp. They were finished. Instead, he encouraged pupils to submit, spoke several times to the Lit & Phil, even fielded a call from the producers of Geordie Shore asking about poetry classes for the cast.

In consequence, an essay sat – unwritten – in his mind, fat and winking like the last drop in the summer garden tap. It could be good, he thought: ‘Walking Home and Squashing Snails: The Art of the Capsule Biography’. Like most magazines, Threnody required a bio with each submission. They came in all shapes and sizes – he often had to edit for length, and tone – but frequently contained some whoppers. This quality inspired the title, lifted from a couplet in ‘Baggy Trousers':

All the small ones tell tall tales
Walking home and squashing snails.

It seemed to capture that sense of arbitrary revelation forced on the writer by the circumstances of publication. Yet he couldn’t find a way around them – people mutht be amuthed, after all – so depressingly, they stayed.

Now he’d time to do a proper job, he supposed; the same way he had time to cook, but lived on soup and sausage and mash, tinned peas, a weekly Friday portion of fish-and-chips, though he wasn’t Catholic. He heard Iris in the rattle of pans, the clatter of a teatray against the edge of the pouffe.

Arnold sighed, wondered if the Arts Council cancelling his grant had been a good thing. Not intentionally; rather in some mysterious, working-out-of-the-universe sense, the kind Larkin spent his whole life countering, line by line. Michael Lawrence asked him once (a kid with a novelist’s name, but a poet’s eye) in regard to ‘Aubade’. He’d never understood why it had to wait for the TLS; in any other world, it would have led a new collection.

‘Does he mean it, sir?’

‘Mean what, Michael?’

His classes never seemed to mind informality.

‘In the middle. Fearing not being alive, you know – “No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with/Nothing to love or link with”?’

‘Well, yes – I think he does.’

‘Why write it, then?’

‘What do you mean?’

The rest of the class quieted. They could sense something out of the ordinary.

‘I mean he says religion pretends to solve it, then that philosophical stuff about no rational man fearing what it can’t feel, but – ’

‘Being. No rational being. Always be precise, Michael.’

‘Being, okay. But my point stands. Why write the poem, if he’s right? He can publish it now, be pleased if people like you like it. But if he’s dead, and right, why would he care?’

A ripple went through the classroom. Arnold paused, scratching his chin. It had been a week since his beard trim, and the hair bunched unpleasantly through his fingers.

‘Well, legacy, I suppose. He wrote it for us, for posterity, so we’d understand.’

Lawrence looked straight at him, unblinking, but said no more. The boy had taken an English degree, converted to law. He hoped he’d found his answers.

Now Arnold sat thinking of the essay, a queasy hollow feeling stole over his mind. A cup of tea, half-drunk, cooled at his elbow. He looked past the lamp at the row of Threnodies, got up, touched them. Like hardpacked gravel, or keystones in a wall, the spines had pressed together over time into one compacted unit. He cracked it apart, took out a volume here and there. There was enough day yet to allow him to read by natural light, and the kids weren’t due for another hour, or so.

He shuffled the half-dozen volumes, clunky as oversized playing cards. The spines had darkened, like a smoker’s ceiling, to a uniform, dingey yellow, but the covers remained fresh. These had abstracts, mostly – some monochrome from the thirties, some more modern and colourful; he’d sought out students at the art college, had his pick. The snippets of verse on the back, under the standing endorsement of a Great Name that rode between the issues like a galleon, still carried something of their first, fresh scent. But he made himself flip to the biographies.

There were some names he recognised – frequent contributors, bigger names who had moved on – but most were single appearances. Their 50-word capsules were crammed with as much life as would fit, or evade the snippers. Here was one, a woman – he reread her poem. It was rather good, spare and moving. Her mother had died, and she couldn’t get to grips with the socially-prescribed rituals of passing. She foundered on a biscuit-tin filled with old, fragrant sewing things. Her bio was equally spare: “Felicity Cullen lives with her family in Reading. This is her first publication.” It gave nothing away, drove the reader back to the work. Perhaps that was her point.

He laid the volume down, picked another.

He moved down ‘About the Authors’ till he came to a fatter listing. It was a man, of course – he rarely trimmed the fat of any female entry. “Roland Lancaster,” this one began – did the name ring a bell? – “enjoys beer and skittles, countryside walks and all manner of outdoor pursuits. His fifth collection, Cracked Alabaster, is published by Portent Press, and he is presently at work on a book of critical essays concerning the male gaze in an age of sexual warfare.”

Arnold swallowed, looked round for a cup of tea. What absolute nonsense! First the bluff- and-hearties – he was willing to bet Mr Lancaster rarely ventured beyond the snug – then the faux classicism of that title, the obscure press and desperate rearguard action, in language twenty years old, against the welcome changes the last few years had brought. He remembered a girl, Sally, coming to him in tears after a gang of boys ragged on her weight. Some were in his next class, and he took them aside, one by one – under the guise of instructing small group work – to make them feel what words could do. He saw her later in the week, smiling with friends.

Lancaster would be front and centre in his analysis.

Arnold got up to make a fresh pot, stood anticipating the school’s release. Here was the bell, and mere seconds later, the stampede – hundreds of feet, heads, school-bags, spilling from the double-doors in a wave. And the noise!

When he was teaching, the release into silence as the children left was both saddening and a blessing. He’d step to the side-porch for a smoke, then back to the empty classroom as his colleagues left, the janitors clanked-and-slopped around the halls. What stole across him then was a sense of his own legacy. The slim volumes pleased him – now and again, he’d bring one in for an English colleague – but the silent womb of the empty classroom pleased him more. He knew whatever knowledge he inspired that day had passed out into the world on a wave of joyful sound; rode it, half-balanced, half sinking to the depths, while they ran the avenues or rolled to the skatepark, pushing the limits of the day as afternoon died, ploughing through homework and telly and the sweet, effortless dropping into sleep of the young.

Even sleeping, he knew those words set about their work, shaping the world under cover of blinding dark.

Arnold, in October quiet.

He placed the slim volumes back together, briefly touched their covers. The finish squeaked under his fingers. There would be no article, and Lancaster would go his blustery way, pompous and unhindered by self-awareness. He sat down and finished his tea, closed his eyes as a car pulled away in the street below, slipped into a doze, strode through the double-doors in the first finery of his gown and cap, turned from the virgin blackboard to hush and reassure his pupils, and then finally – oh, gloriously! – he began to speak.