Spider

what seemed an eternity, watching the skewed grid of shadows on the ceiling, and then I began to see the cobwebs in the roof of my father’s shed; from this I derived comfort of some kind, for I managed to sleep then.

The next days passed in alternating cycles of monotony and hell. I easily became distraught and agitated— hardly surprising—and soon I’d lost my shirt and trousers and was locked up in an untearable canvas gown. Oh, this was the low point; I shudder, now, to think of what I must have been going through to do the things I did. Such was my despair, my pain, the sheer bloody wretchedness and misery of my isolation that I flung off my gown and used my own feces to write my name on the wall—my real name, that is, Spider,

I mean, daubed and smeared in damp brown clots across the plaster—and now see me, hunkered naked on my hams and grinning at the wall where my own name drips in shit in letters two feet high, and for a few brief minutes I am my own creature, not theirs, not theirs. But then see how I’m marched ungently down to the bathroom while my cell is scrubbed down with hot water and coarse bleach, confirmed, in their eyes, as a lunatic, by this dirty deed, though in my own eyes the reverse!

Bad days, then, though in time I learned, as I say, to build up the old two-head system and give them a lunatic while the Spider stood aloof. This was partly due to tobacco: in Ganderhill tobacco was one of those rude struts men used to give their days shape. There was an issue after breakfast and an issue after supper, from the tin at the front of the ward. I soon learned to join the others when they lined up for it, though it wasn’t so much the tobacco that yielded the pleasure, it was, oddly, the scarcity of the stuff, the paltriness of the morning issue that made you impatient for the evening (having smoked it all by noon) and then in turn it was finishing the evening issue that made you look forward so avidly in the long sleepless hours of the night to the morning. The pleasure was all in the delay, the anticipation; and this is how they made you their creature, for if you got into trouble you lost your tobacco, and the whole sweet rhythm of anticipation and satisfaction disappeared from the day; and what a bleak and dreary day that made it! So this too prompted me to build up the old two-head system, for if I gave them a good lunatic they gave me tobacco, twice a day, for me to hoard or smoke as I chose. Not that tobacco could do everything: men still banged their heads against the wall till they bled, they tore out their stitches, they burned holes in their flesh with cigarettes, they stuffed their gowns down the toilet then flushed till the water flooded the cell and went streaming down the corridor. For this was a hard-bench ward, and we were there because we failed; but I did learn to give them a good lunatic, and it was at that point they decided I was ready to see Dr. Austin Marshall.

The interview was not a long one. It took place in his office; he sat, I stood, with Mr. Thomas behind me at the door.

There was a file open on the desk; I realized that this was my file; somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that I had a file. He poked at his pipe with a matchstick. “You’re very young to be so sick,” he murmured, gazing up at me with the pipe clasped between his fingers. “How are you getting along on the ward?”

“Fine,” I said. (I’d been told to say this.)

“Sir,” said Mr. Thomas quietly.

“Sir,” I said.

“Like to try and make a go of it downstairs, Dennis?”

“Yes sir,” I said.

“Yes,” he murmured as his eyes returned to my file. Then: “Why did you do it, son? Any idea?”

“I didn’t mean to, sir. It was a mistake.”

“Sorry you did it, then?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well that’s a start. Eh, Mr. Thomas? That’s a start, eh?”

“Yes sir,” said Mr. Thomas from the door.

“Don’t suppose you’ll ever do it again,” said Dr. Austin Marshall. “Only got one mother after all.” He looked up with raised eyebrows; I had been told on no account to mention what my father had done. Mr. Thomas cleared his voice, a reminder. I stayed silent. The superintendent scribbled in my file for some moments, then said briskly: “Let’s try him out on a downstairs ward, see how he gets along. Block B, Mr. Thomas—can I leave the details to you?”

“Yes sir.”

“Jolly good. Don’t know any naval history, I suppose, Dennis?” he said, rising to his feet and waving vaguely with his pipe stem at a painting in oils of a sea battle. I couldn’t look at the thing, all that smoke and blood, screaming men in a burning sea as mainmasts were shattered and cannons belched flame, I could hear it, I could smell it, I wanted no part of it. “No, of course you don’t,” he said. “Still, you should, East End boy like yourself. It’s the Royal Navy made this country great, am I right, Mr. Thomas?”

“Quite right sir.”

“Jolly good then. Well off you go.”

Off we went, and so began my first stint on a downstairs ward. In later years I found it to be generally true that you only got to see Dr. Austin Marshall when you least needed him. Odd, eh?

The sea gull has settled on the pilings in the river and I seem unable to tear my eyes away from it. Ugly fat thing, with its beady eyes and webbed feet, now it lifts its hooked beak and lets out a screechy croak, you can imagine that beak coming at your face, pluck out an eye like a cockle, leave an empty socket and a bloody cheek— bloody cheek! Bloody nerve! Bloody nerve, nerve, nervous disease—I hate birds. The water’s boiling and frothing round my pilings now, whitecaps further out, strong current running, wash you out to sea like a scrap of flotsam, death by water, death by gas, death by hemp hemp hemp: they should have strung Horace up by the neck and let him swing. Horace—Horrors! Horrors Cleg! Horrors and his bird Hilda, they should’ve strung’em both up! Tower Bridge a dim gray structure of pencils and string against the failing light of this blustery afternoon, long strips of dark gray cloud sweeping out across the western sky, a few ragged, jagged tears between with the light shafting through, me on my bench leaning on the umbrella as the wind spits bits of river in my face and the gull lifts off the piling with more screechy croaks and an untidy flap of dirty wings before wheeling off on the wind and letting me rise at last to my feet and shuffle off home.

Upstairs without being seen and out with the book. Like a fox, the Spider, for when she found my rope and tablets in the fireplace she didn’t find the book: I was just too clever for her. For inside the flue, directly behind the mantelpiece that sticks out over the gas fire, there’s a narrow shelf, a ledge, and I stand the book on this ledge and wedge it firm with an upright brick. Only one way to retrieve it when it’s wedged on its ledge: flat on my back with my head up against the gas fire, my arm through the gap, into the fireplace, up the chimney—I grope, I stretch—and my fingers are just able to reach the brick and lift it down, and the book comes tumbling after; and despite the brown bag it is dirtier than ever now. Pencils: these I’ve been stealing from around the house, no sense letting her know what I’m up to, and I’m using the old Ganderhill system for these, the sock down the trousers. So out with my pencil, open the book, and gaze out the window at the sky, now dark, and return in my mind to the old days.

Life was certainly better on a downstairs ward. Tobacco and books; a room with a door; fresh air out on the terraces. This last was my great joy. There were benches on the terraces (my life has been a journey from bench to bench, and will end on a bench with a lid!) from which I had a clear view over the vegetable gardens and the cricket field, the wall down at the bottom, and beyond it farmland that gradually yielded to wooded hills in the distance. When the wind blew from the south it carried up from the farm a rich smell of manure, and this too gave me pleasure. For a lad who’d grown up on Kitchener Street, for whom the allotments and the working Thames were all he knew of nature, this sweep of countryside was true glory. And the skies it gave me! My skies were London skies, but these were blue, with high white clouds moving across in stately caravan, and my spirit exulted, something was awoken in your old Spider when first he met those skies, and it’s still there, faint now, and burning low, but it’s there. And I remember how, one day, sitting on a bench at the back of Block B, I watched the men at work in the vegetable gardens, in their flapping yellow corduroys and their green jerseys, and when I went back in (they gave us only half an hour on the terrace) the men in the vegetable gardens were still there, and I thought: this is the work for me.

It took years. At times I’d become agitated, I’d do something stupid, and back upstairs I’d go. Always John Giles was there to meet me, though his grin was a goonish one now, for after he bit off an attendant’s ear they’d