Dennis Boys and Girls Come Out to Play

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-32095-0
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 440 Seiten

'Everyone who now remembers Nigel Dennis thinks that his first novel was Cards of Identity (1955). But in fact he had already written Boys and Girls Come Out to Play (1949)... what I recall liking so much about it was first the story of a young man's emergence from the dark tunnel of his childhood, with the discovery that there are drugs to control the epilepsy that has kept him imprisoned, and then the account of his first glorious summer of freedom... in an unnamed but famously picturesque north European city... What caught my imagination was Dennis's ability both to enjoy the brightness of this little arena of casual pleasure and to go with the waiters and skivvies into the backstage world of dark kitchens and hard labour that frames and sustains it.' Michael Frayn,Guardian

Nigel Dennis (1912-1989) was born in England and educated variously in Rhodesia, South African, Austria and Bavaria. He wrote too little but for all that there were three novels (and one that was disowned), four plays, a volume of poetry and three works of non-fiction. For twenty years he was the lead reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph. His study of Jonathan Swift, one of his heroes as his own mastery of satire suggests, won the Royal Society of Literature award. Faber Finds is reissuing his three novels: Boys and Girls Come Out to Play, The Cards of Identity and A House in Order.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Dennis, Nigel

Leseproben

PART TWO
IN a blooming cathedral town, streets run like supply lines to the cathedral’s doors, taking their names naturally from bread, milk, brewers, vintners, rarely from bishops and landlords, whose vanity must rest content with memorable tombs. In time, these streets and their heart of piety form the centre of Old Town, on whose fringe, abruptly in a few decades, the chimneys and villas of industrial New Town spring up. Mell had never grown into New Town. Its gold mines had been worked before Columbus, and had bought it influence and a bishop; but with the coming of gold from the New World, Mell had gone to sleep, and had been kissed awake, looking not a day older or younger, by an Englishman in knickerbockers on a bicycle, three hundred years later. In his book Wheeling Round the Baltic this Agent of the Forces (for that was his name) had given Mell a full chapter. The inhabitants, who had never seen an Englishman or a Force before, treated him with great friendliness: when he woke up on his first morning in Mell, he found that the cottager’s son had washed his bicycle, and the mother had brushed and ironed his dusty knickerbockers. He stayed a full week in Mell, instead of the one night he had planned, and wrote in his book of the extraordinary courtesy of these somnolent, semi-literate people, with their decaying cathedral and primitive gold-mines. He also remarked that during his stay he never met a single Englishman—so striking a statement that a dozen Englishmen, after cunningly spreading false trails among their friends and relatives, sped surreptitiously to Mell the very next summer, and came home saying that it was indeed a lovely place, without even cesspools, but that the English were already beginning to spoil it. By 1912 the cottage selected by the Forces to house their bicycling Agent had been impelled to add on four rooms and to call itself the Hotel Bristol. Soon after it was found that more thorough gold-mining would be profitable if the product could be sold to tourists; and Mell began to be reputed as a curiosity—one of Europe’s few remaining gold areas. New trade breeds old customs, and by 1925 the traditions of Mell had grown so vigorously that the townsfolk themselves wondered how they had ever done without them. “There is in Mell,” said one of the new guide-books, “a centuries-old pride in fine workmanship in gold, handed down from the Middle Ages in an unbroken line from father to son. The craft of ‘Mell Gold,’ known but to a few, is one of Tutin province’s most jealously guarded secrets, comparable to the Stradivarius tradition in violin-making, but considerably older.” Bread Street, the largest of the old cathedral alleys, became an avenue of goldsmiths; its owners had the sense to leave its outlines unspoiled, its corners blind to motorists. From June to September tourist brides bought the little nuggets named “Mell Dowries” (“for centuries the brides of Mell have pinned these in their hair”); others bought enamelled beauty-compacts, engine-turned in Tutin and Danzig, with a raw pea of Mell gold sunk in the cover; or gold cigarette boxes which played Hark, hark, the lark!; an occasional tiara was also sold. Golden weddings were a specialty; octogenarian couples hobbled thousands of miles to this one place in the world where they were in the swim. The usual developments accompanied the revival of the town. Middle-class residences became pensions; go-ahead fathers compressed their children into backrooms, and made the front rooms a home for Kodak supplies, postcards, soft drinks, Tauchnitz books, Uhu, Camels and Players. American children, peeping into the mullioned store-windows of the Old World, saw Beechnut, Klapp and Hemo. The cathedral was restored in the parts that no longer existed, and when someone thought he recalled, that in the sixteenth century the central dome had had a peculiar timepiece, in which God struck the hours by hitting the Devil with a club, this too was restored, by a firm of Swiss clockmakers. The inscrutable Force that had made Mell a rare combination of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Klondike, modified by Teutonic influences, was exploited in interlocking agreements too numerous and enclaused to describe: the signers included the Pilsudski Charabanc Company of Turin, the Gdynia Traction Co., the Hotel Poland, the Warsaw Railways, Katinka’s Fur Emporium, The Mell Association of Goldholders, The Ancient Bank of Danzig, The Amalgamation of Mell Pensions, and Mike’s Last Bid—a small gold-mine in the Union of South Africa, owned by an Irishman who had changed the name of his property to Mell and who supplied “Mell” nuggets when tourist demand was more than the mother-town could meet. On the old site of the Bishop’s Palace stood the Hotel Poland, Mell’s largest, most expensive hotel. Here, at dawn on July 4, Morgan jumped out of bed, took one look out of the window, and dressed with the speed of a person who has not a moment to lose. The rest of the hotel was still asleep; in the room adjoining Morgan’s Divver lay asleep too, his fists clenched, gently gnashing his teeth. Outside the two rooms a long corridor, carpeted in green, ran past numbered doors until it was halted at either end by a green shrub in a copper tub. Frosted lights hugged the ceiling; little squares of white cardboard hung by strings to the door handles, saying, “Do Not Disturb.” Morgan moved down the corridor at a tripping step. He wore a brand-new summer suit; his hair, watered and combed, shone under the lights. In his pigskin wallet was a wad of pink and blue Polish banknotes of whose value he had not the faintest idea. Smiling and bowing at the doors, the frosted lights, the warning notices and his polished shoes, he declaimed to himself: Your majesty shall shortly have your wish, And ride in triumph through Persepolis…. O, my lord, ’tis sweet and full of pomp. Electric arrows on the passage walls indicated the direction of the elevators. With instant stubbornness he walked in the opposite direction, in search of a means of leaving and entering the hotel that would be exclusively his own. At the end of the passage, on either side of the tall palm, was a door, one of metal, one of green baize. He opened the baize door, and at first found it difficult to see anything in the dim world beyond. Then he saw that it was some special part of the hotel. The passage in which he stood continued through the doorway, but once across the threshold it doubled its width, and its trim green carpeting was displaced by a heavier, red, Oriental nap. The ceiling sprang ten feet higher, the ceiling lights collected and dropped into one huge chandelier, its long crystals attached to a rich gilt crown suspended from the ceiling by a chain. To the left was a short row of black-oak doors, their lintels carved inches deep with leaves and fruit. On the first door, under an elaborate heraldic shield, was painted in flowing script: “The Archduke Suite.” Exactly at that moment this door opened and a portly, white-haired man stepped out, wearing, of all things, a common American worksuit of blue denim. He crossed the passage and stepped straight into what appeared to be a gold cage set in the opposite wall, where he remained motionless for a few seconds; all at once his legs disappeared, followed by his body and head, and there was a faint sucking noise of uncoiling greased steel rope. Morgan closed the baize door and opened the metal one. Here, the trim corridor dropped sharply away into a flight of rough stone backstairs; the walls were stained and damp, a bare bulb hung over the stairwell from a length of flex. Morgan ran down at once—past floors littered with rusty buckets, dripping taps, mops, squeegees, corrugated drums of wax and oil —until he saw light at the end of a long passage, and emerged into the Hotel Poland’s backyard of broken, lumpy cobblestones. At his back the hotel’s six stories of grimy brickwork climbed to a summit of water tanks, swinging air-vents and bunches of stumpy chimneys. But without pausing Morgan rounded the side of the hotel, still at a half-run, holding his breath in anticipation—and in a flash the marvellous world he had seen from his window was in front of him again. The morning sun was still so low that its white light disbursed not warmth but coolness. To Morgan’s right, the white facade of the hotel—its name printed in gilded capitals across the third storey, its entrance of broad marble steps flanked by flowering shrubs—looked out on a cobbled square as large as a playing-field. An immense lime tree, its foliage spreading shade to twenty houses, stood at one long end of the square; at the opposite end Mell Cathedral’s green, fluted dome, ringed at the base by a circlet of little domes and topped by a short spire with a gold cross at the tip, raised itself out of a crush of old houses which hid its lower half. The big dome and its little satellites were still dewey; they sparkled in the early sun, except where strips and patches had dried off into jagged patches of a deeper green. The charm of the square was not in uniformity but in harmonious variety. Six streets, hardly wider than alleys, ran out of it at eccentric points and careless angles. The fronts of the little blocks emerged as architectural islands whose styles were not even distantly related. Most of the block directly opposite the Hotel Poland was made up simply of square, plain...