Knights Timorous

By SIMON RAVEN

Now that the Bingo parlours are closing and the visitors have left our strip of coast for another year, one can concentrate on what is indigenous—landladies lamenting fallow bed- rooms, shopkeepers wearily disposing of summer surplus. But to listen to these for long is melan- choly work; and I find the only residual hint of life or colour in a phenomenon which, I imagine, is now widespread. For every evening at dusk, just as there seems nothing left to hope for and the two newsboys slink homeward muttering to themselves for comfort, suddenly the streets roar into action and the dim lamps strike fire off gleaming accoutrements: disgorged from alley, slum and housing estate, splendid in leather armour and plastic casques, mounted on steeds which have been lovingly cared for with lubri- cants and much mantled in protective metals, the young Knights Errant of the Equinox come riding by.

At first one is grateful for the pageantry. Then one is appalled by the noise. At last one falls to wondering what, if anything, this massed chivalry of the internal combustion engine is looking for in the autumn streets. For it is at once apparent that they are not just passing through on their way to adventure elsewhere; as soon as they reach the limits of the town, as soon as there is the merest suggestion of a tree or a field, they turn round and come roaring back. Not for them the marsh or the forest or the dark tower on the hill: the treasures or the damsels which they pursue are here among the bricks and car parks, somewhere between the Bus Station and the Butts. Every now and again some four or five of them converge and take counsel; their helmeted heads nod gravely, then down come the visors and with a thunder of exhaust pipes they are off—only to meet again some half a mile away and two minutes later, when the nodding and muttering is renewed among the fumes and idling engines.

`You see,' said the nicotine-smeared woman behind the bar, 'they've been brought up to expect something, and they haven't had it, and that's what these machines are all about.' The young knights do not often enter pubs, but a small group of them had just come and gone; they had drunk one soft drink apiece, still wearing their helmets, and then they had looked at each other in silence and left— without returning their glasses to the bar.

'They're disappointed, see?' croaked the woman (landlady? barmaid? casual help?).

'Why?' I said.

`Because they've been told that they're impor- tant and they've found out that they're not.'

`I don't quite follow you. I should have thought these days ' Yes, dear, of course you would. And so did they. Education for a start—everything, they were told, is going to be done for Youth. Nothing too good for them—the country's Youth. And then, advertisements and so on. "Special for you." "Ready now for you." As though the man on the screen meant you your- self, not just one more of a million suckers. All this stuff—whether it's put out by the Govern- ment or the telly—they've thought it applied to them personally.'

`Well, they don't do too badly at that. Good money.. .

`Yes, dear. Good money, easy hours, plenty 'One at a tune, please, one at a time.'

of welfare—the lot. But none of that individual importance they thought they were promised. Just one of a crowd. Doing a dull job that anY' body else could do at a moment's notice Nothing "special for you" about that.'

`So they buy these motor-bikes to make up?'

'That's it.' The woman coughed and her cigarette flew into the swipes. 'Make a lot of noise,' she said, lighting another one : 'assert themselves.'

`Then why don't they go somewhere wor while on them? Why just hang around t streets?'

'Girls.'

`They could find girls anywhere.'

`Plenty here. I told you, dear. They don't bu those bloody bikes to go anywhere, only to kid( up a row so that people will look at them and, they can think themselves important like theit teachers and the telly always said they were Get it? And of course the girls look at them too, and there they are.'

At least, one felt, the knights errant had been credited, by this grudging'harridan, with one of their traditional functions. For knight-errantry had always been, at bottom, a disreputable trade, encouraging pillage and seduction rather than righting of wrongs or rescue. And so it was here, I thought. I pressed for details.

`So they pick up the girls and then tumble them in the sand-dunes'?'

'A few perhaps.' The woman shrugged. 'But mostly they just marry them.' 'They what?'

`Marry them. Once you see one of those boys with a girl on his pillion, you know the end's near for him. In six months he'll have sold his beautiful bike and got a scooter to g° to work on. If that. He'll have settled, see.'

'But why? If they're trying to assert their inde- pendence . . . to get attention . .

'That's just the way to get attention. From the girls for a start. And then you know what a fuss people always make about engaged couples, young love, newly-weds. It's ordinary enough, but it gets attention—for a time, anY' how. Tears at the wedding, lots of free care at the maternity clinic. That's why they all marry so young nowadays. They think they're doing something original, something important, and so the telly advertisements—"Special for you"—start to mean something again.'

'1 see.'

I should have known. Of course the whey' faced and pimply knights, issuing forth in the equinoctial dusk, had nowhere to go. However sour the chain-sMoking woman might be, she was right: society had promised them signifi' cance and had then reduced them, without 8 qualm, to anonymity. Their pathetic protest, noise and speed, would mean far less in open spaces; and as for other towns, they were already crammed with similar young men seek' ing similar recompense. Had they been of a calibre for true defiance, their feet could have carried them as far away as any motor-bike. As it was, they had settled for a brief period Of mechanised bluster which would lead only to a windy but commonplace courtship.