Jerusalem the Golden by Margaret Drabble Read Free Book Online

weed on the bank saw it die, and laughed, and reflected that it would live till the next year. And it did.
    The curious feature of this tale was its moral ambivalence. By every law of the genre, the death of the tall weed should have vindicated the life of the other, as the death of the grasshopper vindicates the ants, but the story somehow did not end that way. Incredibly enough, it seemed to end with a choice. It would hardly have been possible for it to support beauty and extravagance and pleasure at the expense of mere survival, but it did at least hint that such a view could be held, and its mere admission of this possibility was to Clara profoundly satisfying. Each time she read the story, she experienced a new shock; it was the shock of finding the new contained and expressed in the framework and the terms of the old. In such context, between such gilt-lettered cloth-bound boards, the concession was nothing less than munificent.
    When she was eleven, Clara, like her brother Alan before her, acquired a Grammar School place. Her mother, although of the mentality that refuses such places because of the price of the uniform, was luckily not in a social or financial position where she could reasonably do so, and although she was often unreasonable enough, she did not like to appear to be so in the eyes of the whole neighbourhood, so she constrained her parsimony and her innate distrust of education into selecting the less distinguished of the schools available, on the grounds that the bus fare was cheaper. It was a large, rather forbidding and gloomy building, called Battersby Grammar School, and it was on the fringe of that decayed, desolate, once-grand grey fringe that surrounds the centres of most cities; the houses in this area, large and terraced and of some dignity, had been long abandoned by the middle classes, and were now occupied by families who could not afford to live anywhere else. An occasional member of the fugitive genteel stuck it grimly out until death; once Clara was accosted by an old lady, battered and ragged and bent, who said as she walked along, and in accents of refined madness, that once the people that lived there had held their heads up high. Clara, a poor audience with her twisted knee socks, did not know what she meant.
    The shabbiness of the district and the dingy gloom of the school itself meant nothing to Clara. To her, the building was endlessly exciting, and she liked it for all the reasons that most people would specify as particular causes for dislike. She liked its huge, barn-like, inhuman bleakness, its corridors shoulder-high in dark green, shoulder-to-ceiling in pale peppermint, its vast lukewarm radiators, its muddy echoing boards, its tall, high, dirty windows. She liked the cloakrooms and the lockers, the sense of institution, the rows and rows of washbowls and lavatories, the accessibility of the drinking fountains. She liked the way it stood, distinct and certain, rising out of the level muddy waste of grass and tarmac that generously surrounded it: a bomb had fallen during the war, on a neighbouring chapel, and the site had been levelled out and was now an unofficial part of the school’s playgrounds. The whole area was of a bleak airiness, and a cold wind seemed to blow incessantly upon it, turning the knees and knuckles of the girls pink and blue, and snatching away their obligatory berets the moment they emerged from the school porch. Clara did not mind the cold, for she liked anything that was not small and cramped and heartlessly cosy; she liked the nameless multitudes that tramped mud on the cloakroom floors and left hairs in the cloakroom basins, and liked them because they were nameless, because they were not her mother and Alan and Arthur. Domesticity appalled her, and she nourished in it, despite a yearning for the comfortlessly grand.
    She liked, too, the work. She found it easy: to begin with, she found everything easy, as her memory for facts was remarkable, and it