Fortnight Publications Ltd.

Fortnight Literary Section: Strong and SweetAuthor(s): Ian WilsonSource: Fortnight, No. 133 (Sep. 24, 1976), pp. 9-10Published by: Fortnight Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25545964 .

Accessed: 25/06/2014 03:35

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Fortnight Publications Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Fortnight.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.86 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 03:35:01 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

FRIDAY 24th SEPTEMBER 1976/9

FORTNIGHT LITERARY SECTION

STRONG AND

SWEET Mostly, it wasn't a summer that I want to remember. But there are

plenty of little incidents that still swim around my head after I've weighted the bigger traumas and sunk them into my subconscious depths. It was

the summer just after I'd sat my final examinations. Now I stood victorious, one foot on a conquered heap of exam papers, my sweaty biro raised aloft in triumph. For months I'd been

living in an academic fog which blurred all boundaries between fact and fiction, past and present. I saw

George Eliot's vague outline in

Shaftesbury Square; I glimpsed Mr

Dombey one evening hurrying up the

Malone Road. Spectres of Donne and Herbert squeaked and gibbered in the still night air around the library. The

fog thickened, the atmosphere grew

clammy, we all prepared for the final holocaust. To keep up morale I had a

motto "All things must pass", and I

looked forward to passing out of the

gloom to the land fit for heroes,

flowing with milk and honey and

peopled solely by a blonde sociologist and myself. Well, the promised land

when I reached it seemed even

foggier, but I'm not going to dredge my subconscious to try to remember

why. Maybe it was simple. I'll just say I was suffering from a sprained brain.

A few weary weeks later I stood attired in collar and tie, neat jacket, polished shoes; a temporary civil

service clerk, no less, no more.

Adding up traffic figures. For months, years, I'd been immersed in words? books and learned journals, essays and notes, lectures and tutorials.

Words, thousands upon scores of thousands of words had entered my

mind, been beaten round it, and had their meanings forced out of them.

The lucky ones were forgotten, the others held in captivity for use in

evidence when I was called for final

judgment. Now my head was a

graveyard of dead word prisoners. Well, that did get me down. So, at

first anyway, it was something of a

relief to be adding, subtracting,

dividing and multiplying rows of

figures all day long, the simple sums

on a bit of government scrap paper, the big ones on a government adding

machine. I found a little thrill of

pleasure in putting a ten-digit number

up in lights on the machine, and

dividing it by forty-seven, or some

equally awkward number. There is a

split-second of hectic flashing, then

up comes your answer, clear and

correct. Mark it down on the official

sheet for the traffic turning off the M2

at Greencastle, June, and move on to

the next sum. All very systematic and

logical and satisfying after habitually

trying to assess the depth of

religiosity in Marvell's poetry.

I worked in a large room in S . . . ., a

well-known building devoted to the

theory and practice of government. Britannia and her lions may command a panoramic view from their pinnacle above the entrance, but frosted

windows, with just one clear pane at

the top, allow her servants in S . . . .

only the narrowest glimpse of the sly. So there was no alternative to

keeping your head down all day, to

work or do the "Daily Mirror" crossword. However, it wasn't long before I began to notice a strange

phenomenon in the room. Everyone would be working or doodling conscientiously when they would, as

one, get up and hurry out of the door; not a word was said, not an eye was

caught. I did know where they were

going, it was to the tea-trolley that

moved round the corridors in

mid-morning and mid-afternoon, and

if the odd behaviour had occurred at

the same time every day it could have been explained ?all had synchronised

watches before the day's labours had

started, and all knew that ten-thirty and three-thirty meant tea-break. But close observation on my part revealed that these events took place at

slightly different times each day. I

thought that being an honours

graduate made me a smart guy, but all this was draining my self-esteem. No bells rang, no buzzers buzzed, no

lights flashed. Had there been the

development of a collective intuition at the approach of the trolley, the

uncanny product of years of civil service life? For it may be a cliche to talk about the tea-drinking rituals of

government offices, but like most

cliches, it's true.

It came to the middle of my second

week, and I was still utterly baffled. Twice a day, every day, everyone in

the room would, as if by telepathic

understanding, stand up, go out and

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.86 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 03:35:01 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

10/FORTNIGHT

return with their cup of tea and sticky bun. Being only a minion, and just a

temporary minion at that, I didn't like to ask my superiors to explain their

behaviour. Eventually I couldn't bear the bewilderment any longer, so I

approached another, permanent minion and asked her bluntly how

everyone knew when the trolley was

in the vicinity. She gave me a blank look and said, "Sure the girl gives a

shout". There you are, splendidly simple. But I went back to my traffic

figures in a daze. I'd never heard any shout. Now I began to get worried,

thinking perhaps recent rigours had

upset my perceptions. A shout, she

said; if everyone else heard a shot,

why didn't I? I determined to listen

carefully as the next tea-break became due. From twenty past three onwards I moved my fingers meaninglessly over the buttons of the

adding machine, making a show of

being busy, but actually listening hard for the mysterious signal at which

work ceased. Half past came and still no sound nor sudden exodus of civil servants. Another couple of minutes

passed, and then, echoing along the

corridors, the faintest of cries

"Trolleeee-eee". Up they all got, out

they all went. I followed at the rear as

usual, although this time there was a

bounce in my step; I had received the cue. It was reminiscent of that whistle

only dogs can hear. Nobody with an

untrained ear could ever have heard

that shout among the rattle of

typewriters, hum of voices and other office noises. But as the clock moved close to the appointed times, specially sensitive equipment was activated in the workers' minds, which on

receiving the signal notified its owner

that he could lay down his pen and reach for his cup. It only took a day or two before the

alerting gear that I immediately called into use was working sufficiently well for me to add, divide or multiply intently until the faintest echo inside

my head made me flash instantly from the roundabouts of the M2 to a

place in the file out of the door. Sometimes I was even first in it.

Ian Wilson

NEW POEMS

Saturday Morning I looked this morning into a toyshop

window.

Tanks were deployed on a dustless

papier-mache plain: Infantry, in pressed pants advanced

alert, and gunners,

Greased and shining, lay comfortably sighting.

I remembered how on most Saturday mornings

My leaping Zulu warriors And my bronzed Redskins

Would attack, frontally, in frenzied

stupidity, The sandbagged positions of my

Grenadier Guards, Home Guards, Lancers, Desert Rats,

machine guns and field artillery.

In the final moments of battle I would

place on

The leaden bodies of dead Zulus with dark glazed

Cavities in their sides, ragged necklines dispossessed

Of heads. These were my footless, armless, chestless dead.

Relics who performed on the dried up woodwormed boards

Of an upstairs store-room would be out of place in a

Dustless papier-mache plain. NEILLSPEERS

This content downloaded from 62.122.73.86 on Wed, 25 Jun 2014 03:35:01 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions