Let England Shake

I asked little r if she had spilled the ice-cream by mistake or if she did it deliberately.

"Deliberately," she said, with amazing confidence.

"Then you are more foolish than I thought." This at once made me sound pompous, like some upright character from a Hardy novel. I wasn't even wearing black.

She just looked at me with venom in her narrowing eyes and a pointing, accusing finger:

"From this day onwards you are my number one enemy."

...

By morning she had reconsidered after I made it a point of telling everyone about what was either world-class acting or a ridiculous bit of high drama. She turned her head, laughed, and said,  "my ten thousandth enemy."

~~~

Derek Raymond writes as if there is barely any hope left for the human race. His trick is-and what a trick it is- to take one simple and brilliant notion and let it ride. There isn't "precision" or "accuracy" but instead an emotional truth, a feeling or tone that hangs about. Everything else seems tangential, or drawn to that centre, touching it obliquely, like secondary waves, undercurrents.

What bleak skill! 

Here, in How the Dead Live, there is the all-pervading sense that something in the world is lost, that England is well and truly gone. The dull ordinary roughness at the edges of a life comes to the fore. Yes, but it's also that what was gold, or might have been gold, sinks to oblivion.

There was a time when I thought it was important to be religious, that all else was really hanging onto its coat tails. Now? Now I think one has to look carefully, eke out some narrow width of meaning for oneself. One may or may not find a sinew of truth.

There is something old, perhaps as inconsequential as manners, a turn of phrase, a certain demeanour, that just survives the deluge. Old hands, mostly useless, have seen their time. The dark winds of winter giving us our final form. A time remembered, a summer evening, when hand and heart were one, the inner wrist glowing with certainty.

England will shake, the heart will fall. Nothing new seems to happen. But this, too, is something you only dimly understand, otherwise it might offer you a compensating low wisdom. There is no peace here and no acceptance of the facts, only a grey haze swirling around the tree tops and a dark light growing in my mind.