Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN
EVER since first came vat across the word (in T. S. Eliot, I think) it has been my ambition to be a 'poly- math. Early in my gram- mar school days, it became obvious Ilia. certain obstacles were likely to /' obstruct my path. There
' _ wa . the inability to pro-
ceed further ir the physical sciences than atomic weights. I slept with my eyes open throughout a crucial period in chemistry and henceforward found myself unable to understand anything that was said to me in that class. I sat next to a Musical prodigy during music lessons and simply wrote down anything, however ludicrous and im-
probable, that he whispered to me in the weekly test papers. 1 did once make an attempt to con- fess my ignorance of its first principles by boldly standing up and asking the master what all those squibbles and blots actually meant. But he seemed so hurt and depressed at the thought of the wasted hours that I withdrew the question and pretended it was all a feeble joke. In art classes, I created a certain impact by producing enormous crowded scenes of mass action (reminiscent of Frith's Derby Dayl constructed from figures I had traced in the Wizard and the Hotspur. All the people were built to different scales, and borrowed from varied types of boys' adventure stories, so that a tiny Mountie ,would be 'wrestling with a grizzly bear in the centre of a huge cricket ',pitch populated. by giant fifth- formers in soccer clothes while a Sopyvith Camel burst into flames at the feet of Robby the Robot.
It seemed to me a preposterous and inept forgery such as would not deceive a child, let alone a teacher of children. But I had not Counted on the limitless capacity of adults to believe the most flattering explanation of any juvenile Mystery and there was a giddy moment of artistic fame when my instructor tried to explain to me What a 'primitive' was and why I was it. The sheer labour involved in all this copying and transposing (not to mention the underhand propaganda of my fellow pupils who insisted on recognising Lion-Heart Logan and the Wolf of Kabul under the thickest disguises) quickly per- suaded me to pass on to an abstract period. I submitted only wild, hairy, octopus patterns in dirty blues and bilious greens which soon cooled the art master's enthusiasm. 'Interesting but rest- less,' he used to write on the back.
Biology too proved beyond me. Most of my contemporaries seemed to regard all the cutting and flaying as an enjoyable sublimation for their native savagery and sadism. But the first time I entered their slaughterhouse, and found myself surrounded by drawing boards starred with crucified kittens and frogs like a Francis Bacon calvary, I turned white and started to tremble at the fingertips. Instead I turned to eco- nomics where I insisted on regurgitating the Marxian dogmas of surplus value despite my teacher's weary insistence that they had long ago been exploded.
In my mouth, all languages turned out to be dead and when I attempted to speak them in class there was general agreement as to who had killed them. I preferred Latin to French, first because Latin did not have all those peculiar nasal gargling sounds, and second because almost any- thing in Latin looked as if it might be dirty if only you could arrange the heavy leaden words in the right order. Give me an unseen with a couple of paellas, a vii and a mensa in it, and I could emerge with a conte too drolatique even for Balzac. I killed my Latin master's faith forever in the examination system by managing to pass through the Higher School Certitkate with Latin as one of my tour subjects. It remains a puzzle to me why foreign tongues should prove so in- tractable that my Anglo-Saxon is dill more fluent than my French. the least difficulty. I find, is in the vocabulary. In the American Johnson-O'Con- nor learning tests. I am brilliant an can memor- ise any twenty nonsense words with definitions alter reading the list three times. tity what always sinks me is the repertoire of simple. routine con- versational gambits when I want to reply with the French equivalent of 'not so bad,' oi 'bearing up.' or 'a little on the warm side: Nevertheless. I never despair ot some day be- ing able to define logical positivism, repeat the second law of thermodynamics (I keep on think- ing it runs—'the offspring of heavy bodies rise in the world to the level of their parents' social equals') and master the Russian alphabet.
I cherish the belief that I may qualify at least as a monomath—and last week in Cambridge I made tentative efforts to persuade the governing body to offer me a Ph.D. in return for a thesis on 'Prudery and Pedantry in the Oxford English Dictionary.' But I have given up any hope of following my father's career as a polymanual. Like many working men of his generation, he was confident that there was no task involving the manipulation of the hands that a skilled craftsman could not learn in an evtaiing. He had a positively dazzling mastery of string, for in- stance. I4e could untie a knot the size of a grape- fruit almost without having to look at it. I know —because 1 used to spend hours tieing them
with every hitch and noose in th..! Scout hand- book in the hope of .baffling him. He also cut and sheared our hair, mended our shoes, soldered all saucepans and kettles, swept the chimney, designed our toys (I remember particularly a hand-made super-Meccano set and and ill-steel motor-car), repaired clock, 111d A ak:iies. carried out minor surgeries on both humans and animals.
grew roses, strawbert ies and rhuba: la 7.1 bricks, glazed and roofed a garden shed ' mixed cement and ■ was licensed to drive a tramira fie could also cook a threecourae Stintla ,famet and sing terrible comic song, ahich he .earned as a young man when he was part of IL.t.ible-act on the halls. He went to church every Sunday and to a union meeting once a mon'h I le lectured on anti-gas precautions for the AR I' .ind held every possible be-jewelled office in the Ocldiellows, He spent several nights a %Neel: vis;tin,2 .ick brothers
and comrades, paying out money widows and orphans of his organisations.
He invariably referred to the Tories as 'villains
and scoundrels' and it was part of his faith that no man was promoted foreman unless he was not worth his pay as a workman. He had a series of sometimes gnomic maxims such as 'Fools and bairns should see nowt half-done' and 'Always cry before you're hurt--you May not be alive to do it afterwards' which governed his conduct on all occasions. He. was confident that the Magna Carla gave every citizen the inalienable right to trespass on the property of the rich so long as he offered a shilling for any damage caused. He. sometimes claimed to be deaf, and sometimes not, .which made it very difficult to best him in an argument. When I think of his assurance and • versatility in all everyday tasks, I feel that however much I learn I will always remain a child in using my hands. But I take comfort in thinking that to him i was a poly- math,. even .though to a polymath I may never be a polymath*
Previous page
