Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN
THERE comes a time in every man's life (which is simply a journalist's way of confessing that the moment has arrived in his own career and he hopes to God he is not alone) . . . There comes a time in every man's life when he must decide whether he is going to carry on play- ing the part allotted to him by his audience or whether he should rip off the mask before his face has grown to fit it. Up to the age of twelve or so, I was the chubbiest, cheeriest, cheekiest boy you ever saw. I could have modelled for Just William without the lick of a comb, the wipe of a flannel or a tug at the concertina stockings. Just the sight of me up- rooting their rhubarb, lassooing their dog, firing a catapult at the corner lamp-light or miming a public hanging in shadow play against the cur- tains of our front room, made the neighbours feel that there could be no real harm in the younger generation. I was naughty without being evil, rude without being stupid, irritating without being dangerous. I became a money7box for senti- mental old ladies who would lean over the gate to deposit sixpence in me, a magnet for remorse- ful drunks who would press my face against their belt buckles and confess neglect of their innocent offspring, an orphanage for snivelling, lost little girls who would hold my embarrassed hand while they scuffed their brogues in the dust.
Despite all my attempts to keep up with the other kids in the competitive pursuits of petty thievery, animal cruelty, back-street bullying and front-garden vandalism, .I was widely spotted as a softy at heart. Though I hotly rejected the charge in public, I admitted its justice in private to myself. I had an indelible sense of being different from my contemporaries which made me both proud and ashamed. Looking back through the fogged lens on the moviola of memory, I wonder whether I was a soppy saint or a priggish creep.
But at the time, I merely accepted the secret role of the Dostoievskian wet as a fact of my life. My eyes filled with tears at the agony of a roasting wood-louse or the crucifixion of a tor- tured caterpillar. I was immediately attracted in any group by the moronic outsider, the violent interloper or the butt and bait of the gang, especially if my reason urged me to avoid them. When foreigners from ten streets away invaded our territory in force, I did not run with the rest of my friends, but stayed on the spot to offer myself as a martyr and a sacrifice. I was infected by a kind of heroic lassitude, a masochistic apathy, which even permitted me to be tied to the stake on a 'bonfire once, though a shrug of the shoulders would have snapped my rnefficient and theatrical bonds.
At night I would lie awake, sorrowing over boy's inhumanity to boys, feeling the earth turn perceptibly through space, a revolving cannon- ball falling into infinity. Because mine was a political family, my sympathies stretched far beyond my native town, sniffing the misery which arose like incense from the German Jews, the Spanish peasants, the Chinese patriots, the Abys- sinian warriors and the American unemployed. Twenty-five years onwards, I can isolate the self- indulgence and ego-drama which made me such a Shelleyan sufferer. But only now am I begin- ning to realise that this was the real me—a born bleeding heart—and not the aggressive, cynical, satirical pusher and survivor I became at thirteen and have remained ever since.
By then I had transferred to the grammar school at the other side of the town. There we fought with words not with fists. I used the lib- rary like a gymnasium and grew muscles on my vocabulary. A chance physiological development helped me adopt a new persona—my face and head became lean, long and honed to a jagged razor-edge like a hatchet upon the skinny haft of my body. I looked, as one of my new sophisticated middle-class friends explained to me, like a colonel in the Mongolian Secret Police. I rather fancied myself as young Fu Manchu, repeating under my breath Sax Rohmer's descrip- tion—`a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan.' Both masters and pupils seemed to expect me to lead the attack on authority. I scythed down friends and foes alike with the sweep of my sneer. I took to opposing everything from the continuation of the war to the divinity of Jesus. What my fluency did not carry, my organisation bulldozed through. The Sunderland Echo began to carry glowing reports (written by me) of the Debating Society's decisions that This House Prefers Mr. Churchill's Room to His Company or Morality is the Opium of the People.
Up at Oxford during the war, barely eighteen, and in the RAF a year later, I remained crouched in the same fighting stance. The chips on my
shoulders were epaulettes of rank in the under- ground army of rebellion. I plotted, doubted, mutinied, and resisted conformity. Back at Oxford, after demobilisation, and in journalism during the Fifties, I began to discover that it needed an increasing amount of coals of fire on my head to raise the same pressure of steam.
Editors, agents and TV producers remained convinced that I was born to take the part of the intellectual cad. But, internally, I started to won- der whether I was not in danger of being mis-cast for life. For the first time, I suspected the theo- logical rule that one should hate the sin and not the sinner was not just double-talk. It became more and more difficult to sustain the same
abstract contempt for institutions, parties, classes and ideologies in the face of the fallible, often in- secure, usually sincere, flesh-and-blood people who embodied them. It occurred to me that I did not enjoy hurting people and breaking the illusions which supported and encased their belief in them- selves. As the confidence' in my own invariable rightness ebbed, so my power to strike grew weaker. In personal relations, I found myself like one of those Shakespearian murderers disarmed by their conscience.
Assassins may be useful, perhaps even wel- come, so long as they are on your side. But they do not make very congenial, or comfortable, companions and colleagues. It is with relief that
I note that I am reverting to my original tem- perament. And around me I recognise the same ' mellowing in my .eontemporaries. There seems, • to be a second maturity, as there is a second child- hood, which comes about twenty years after the first, bard shell of late adolescence.
I am still not sure that this may not be an un- conscious form of Ramsay-MacDonaldism: that there is not a streak of cowardly compromise, of false generosity and phoney open-mindedness, in this middle-aged shedding of prickles. Can an honest critic really condemn Society and grow fond of some socialites, oppose Toryism and enjoy working with some Conservatives, remain intransigent on paper but amenable in person?
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