compost and flinging it onto the fire, and I remembered a picture I’d once seen of hell, a sort of cavern with dripping black walls and thick black smoke from somewhere down below, and in the smoke the devil was clutching a pitchfork not unlike my father’s, his long barbed tail flicking up behind him in the gloom. Damp though it was the compost somehow burned, or smoldered at least, and the smell of it, the manure and the rotting vegetables, was so bad I had to creep away, back behind the sheds and down to the Slates, and from there I made my way to the river. Even from down by the Crispin I could see the smoke as it climbed into the gray wintry sky, a long thin column that leaned to the west the higher it rose and eventually drifted away into nothingness off toward the setting sun.
When it was almost dark I made my way back up to the allotments. I saw no sign of my father, so I climbed the fence and approached what was left of the bonfire. The pit was still heaped with compost, and in the middle of it a round core glowed and smoldered in the gloom and crackled suddenly as the heat caught a stray twig or stick of straw and consumed it. Over by the shed all that was left was a patch of pale damp ground inside a wire-mesh fence. I unbuttoned my trousers and pissed into the smoldering compost, and as the piss hissed in the pit a column of steam rose into the darkness, stinking of charred manure.
All this I remembered as I leaned on a garden fork in flapping yellow corduroys and gazed out over the Ganderhill wall, over farmland and wooded uplands, at fat white clouds kicking across a blustery blue sky one fresh autumn afternoon in the early 1950s.
What else to tell you? Almost all I know about what happened at Kitchener Street I worked out during that period. For when I settled down and was able once more to think about that time—the terrible autumn and winter, I mean, of my thirteenth year, when my father first met Hilda Wilkinson—what I found was a jumble of partial impressions: scenes viewed from my bedroom window, scraps of talk overheard from the top of the stairs, mealtimes in that poky kitchen, and glimpses of my father at work in his allotment. But as regards the order and meaning of those scraps: that was what I pieced together, like a shattered window, in the quiet years that followed, fragment by fragment until the picture was whole. And oddly, as my childhood took shape, so did I, Spider, become more coherent, firmer, stronger—I began to have substance. Hard to believe, no? Hard to believe, given the sorry creature I am today, tonight, as I sit here scribbling (out of terror) in the crow’s nest of this shabby ship of a house and swamped, almost, by the surge and flood of sheer
Picture me then, a young man: Spider at twenty-five, tall and lean as I am today but there’s something about me—can you see it?—a vitality, a flame, even if it is a mad one, still it’s there, in the sheen of my skin, in my restless energy as I work in the vegetable gardens from morning to night, it’s there in my eyes—not like the dull filmed glaze that clouds the hollowed eyes of the Spider these days. A handsome man, even! See me in the gardens in shirtsleeves and yellow corduroys, a wiry, muscular figure turning the soil on that Sussex hillside, in that brisk air, framed against the sky—can you see me?—leaves swirl about me, red leaves, golden leaves, swirling down from the elm tree by the wall, and I pause in my work, I thrust my spade in the soil and turn, again, to the landscape I grew so to love, the sweep of the terraces, the cricket field, the perimeter wall with its old bricks glowing a soft rufous- red in the fresh clear air, and beyond the wall the farm and the hills, the trees a vivid slash of color this autumn afternoon. Oh, out with the Rizla, and the paper flutters wildly between my fingers as the tin of Old Holborn appears, and the wind molds the rough fabric of the gray asylum shirt to the bones of my lean trunk, and the thick yellow corduroy flaps about my shanks! Tonight you see me in decay, a brittle bulb housing a flickering, faltering coil, but in those days I had a body, and a vigorous spirit burned inside it!
But enough, enough of this pathetic nostalgia, this romantic drivel. What am I saying, that I was a hero? Standing on my windy hillside, clutching a spade? A hero? This lunatic? I lived among the criminally insane, and I knew routine, community, and order. Whatever strength or structure I had, it came from without, not within, and if you need proof of that then look at what’s happened since my discharge—look at me
But the important thing is that slowly I pieced together an account of what happened, and as the story grew firmer then I grew firmer with it. Conversely, when the story collapsed then so did I, but I rebuilt, I rebuilt, and each time the edifice grew stronger, better buttressed, the struts and braces pulling it together till it was tight, till it was whole. And so was I. And then they discharged me.
There’s irony here, as you will learn. Much was changing; there were pills now, for people like me, and there were also changes afoot in Ganderhill—most notably, the departure of the medical superintendent, Dr. Austin Marshall.
Dr. Austin Marshall was a gentleman, a tall, kindly gentleman in well-tailored tweeds who walked with a limp as a result of a motorcycle accident in medical school that had left him with a steel pin in his hip. A gentleman: it was a rare day I didn’t see Dr. Austin Marshall limping across the terrace, and he had a kind word for each man he encountered; he remembered one’s name, too. “Ah, Dennis,” he would say, pausing to lean on his stick. “How are we today?” He would turn his head to the south and gaze out over that magnificent view, a squire, so he seemed, surveying his demesne. “Good day to be out on a horse,” he’d say. “What about that, Dennis? Fancy a canter, do you? Of course you do!” He’d pat me on the arm and then chuckling gently off he’d limp, and on encountering another inmate he’d again stop, again turn his head to the south and, addressing the man by name, again make his friendly remarks about horseback riding. His conversational gambits were few, but the warmth behind them was genuine; he was a fine medical superintendent, and we all loved him, with the exception of John Giles, who tried to murder him whenever he could.
I rise to my feet and stare out of the window. The first pale suggestion of dawn is apparent, a faint gray smudging out there over the North Sea somewhere. All is quiet in the attic now and my terror has abated, to some extent. My relationship to this book is changing: when I began to write I intended to record the conclusions I’d arrived at about the events of the autumn and winter of my thirteenth year; and in the process I thought I’d buttress and support myself, shore up my shaky identity, for since being discharged I have not been strong. But all this has changed; I write now to control the terror that comes when the voices start up in the attic each night. They have grown worse, you see, much worse, and it is only with the flow of my own words that I am able to block out the clamor of theirs. I dare not think of the consequences were I to stop writing and listen to them.
And so began another day. I no longer knew which was worse, day or night. The silence and solitude of the night had once been my haven, my safe place away from the eyes and the voices and the thought processes, which seemed to be most active when others were awake in the house. Now I dread nightfall, for those damn creatures in the attic give me no rest. I was out there on the landing a few minutes ago, shaking the handle of the door that gives onto the attic stairs—no good, of course, it’s always locked. They’re her creatures, I must not forget this, this is why the door is always locked; but surely I can think of some way of getting at her keys?
I smoke until breakfast time, watching the sky. Banks of billowing blue-gray cloud—this will be a damp day, today the rain will be spitting. I am wearing all my shirts and on top of them a black polo-neck jersey, and on top of that the jacket of my shabby gray suit. Suit trousers, thick gray socks (two pairs), and a large pair of thick-soled black leather shoes with ten close-set lace holes (eyelets) and a sort of flameshaped strip of leather stitched around the toecap and pricked with decorative perforations. Asylum shoes, these, made by the Ganderhill cobbler. I also have strips of brown wrapping paper and thin cardboard taped to my legs and torso, which crackle when I move.
Breakfast was uneventful—dead, fishlike eyes over porridge bowls, the usual squeaky farts. Then straight out into the spitting rain, and off toward the canal, and the streets, thankfully, were empty save for the odd hurrying
