‘An - ar - chist.’ Matthew tasted it on his tongue.
‘There! See?’ Margaret shouted. ‘Be quiet, Matthew!’ And as he opened his mouth again: ‘Be quiet, I tell you! Aren’t we alone enough?’ she stormed on. ‘Victor ill. Myself a virtual widow trying to cope. Don’t I know that they jibe at me, calling me “The Merry Widow” and winking at each other. And you, a mother who reads books no decent woman would borrow from a library. “Red Grandmother” they call you! We came from the quality. I played the piano in the best houses and now our family friends are waterfront anarchists.’
She broke into sobs but neither Edward nor Gran moved. The scene had been repeated many times—the anger, the reviling, the tears. Edward looked slightly embarrassed, Gran annoyed. And as his mother wept loudly Matthew felt his tears run too.
Immediately his distress became the centre of the conflict, the cause for blame, for attack and counterattack. The burden of guilt grew and grew inside him until he felt the wrongdoing of the world weighing on his shoulders.
‘I’m sorry!’ he yelled at them all. ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’ But they didn’t understand and their shouting continued. And Gran and Edward’s strange words became something for Matthew to fear; they entered him and gave him feelings of unbearable guilt.
Matthew hated school, that brick cage with arrowed windows close to the eaves, bitumen playground and high enclosing walls. On Mondays children crowded along the footpath outside the iron gates jostling, shouting and chanting but once inside all noisy freedom vanished. Sullen, listless, they lined up in ranks in front of the double-entrance doors. From these doors stretched the long, empty corridor with echoing wood floor. It led like all institutions into desolate, anonymous spaces in which people existed but seldom lived.
From where he stood Matthew could see the rows of unused round-tipped clothes pegs set in the walls and disappearing in diminishing lines into nebulous recesses. On one side the line was interrupted by doors painted a browny green. They were closed and like the pegs denied that this building could ever be a place of warmth or comfortable habitation. Light at the ground level had a dusty gloom about it as if decades of chalk dust perpetually thickened the air. Higher up the light from the windows fell in pale oblongs on the opposite wall but struggled to reach into the gloom below.
Matthew felt as if he were creeping about on the ground in strangled light. Sometimes he even felt that the air was unable to creep in through the closed doors and windows. He felt suffocated, his stomach churning with the effort to breathe. He was frightened of this deathly quiet place where only the thin rasping of pencils on slates or the thickening noise of breathing stirred the silence. He was frightened by Miss Pilkington, the gaunt, middle-aged woman who ruled the seventy little boys and girls regimented by sex on either side of the central aisle. In black shirt and skirt she strode down the aisle and her dangling medals, clipped one to another on her breast, clanked aggressively in time to her march.
It was these medals which filled Matthew with particular terror. Each Monday his teacher demanded of the children their contribution to the war effort. She belonged to the League of Loyal Women of the Empire and for each Monday’s contribution she acquired another clasp to clip to the one before. So far the clasps pinned to her right bosom reached to her waist. She boasted that before the war ended her clasps would reach the floor. Matthew imagined them as a chain following her across the floor, clanking with dismal echoes and sliding like an angular snake in her wake.
Matthew had no money. By turns he begged his mother, Gran and Edward for a penny but they all refused. His mother said that there were no extra pennies in a house without a breadwinner. Gran said that she was Irish and saw no reason why she should contribute to the ego of any woman loyal to the Empire. Edward said that he would give him a penny but not to contribute to the war because it was a capitalist war in which poor people suffered for the rich.
When he asked Edward who the poor people were Edward surprised him by saying: ‘Families like yours and mine. We’re the poor. We’re the little people. We creep around on the ground or pull the chariots while the rich ride.’
‘With feathers and golden helmets.’
‘Probably, Matthew. At one stage anyway. Here take the penny but remember, honour bound, no contribution.’ Matthew nodded. Gravely, he felt the penny, so round and complete, and smiled at Edward, who smiled back. His poverty had represented to him no more than having no money for the contribution, but something of Edward’s ideas made sense to him. Did he not feel that, at school, he crawled around on the ground? Poverty had no permanent dimensions for him but it had very real, clearly defined, temporary ones. He understood little about the war and since it was never explained to him he knew no more about the contribution than that it was collected with terrifying fanaticism in a small wooden money box thrust in front of every child each Monday.
This Monday was like all the others. He had no money except a farthing left from the penny Edward had given him.
‘No donation again, Matthew Donahue?’ He shook his head, fingering the farthing, longing to take it from his pocket, to hold it out victoriously and drop it in the box.
His eyes fixed on the box. He feared to raise them to her face. ‘No contribution for our King, nothing for your country, nothing for our men dying on the fields of Flanders? It’s as well
