The Summer Isles by Ian R. MacLeod Read Free Book Online

career in the Daily Sketch nearly thirty years later, I gave the impression that John Arthur was one of my brightest and most ambitious pupils, a little comet trail across the pit-dusty Burntwood skies. Thanks to numerous flowery additions by the Sketch’s copy editor, I also stated that he was pale-skinned, quiet, good-looking, intense, and that he possessed a slight West Country accent, this being the time before it had changed to the soft Yorkshire that we all know now—all traits which would have got him a good beating up in the playground—and that, on summer evenings after school when the pit whistle had blown and the swallows were wheeling, he and I would walk up into “the Staffordshire hills” and sit down and gaze down at the spires of Lichfield, the pit wheels of Burntwood and the smokestacks of Rugeley from the flowing purple heather.
    Now, after all these years of practice, those pretty images have become like the tales of your own infancy that you absorb as a child, and become vivid, treasured memories. It’s been my party act, too, a fundamental part of my life, ever since my name—or at least that of Geoffrey Brook—was mentioned by John Arthur as a childhood mentor in his maiden speech before the old House of Commons. So, yes, I do remember the boyhood of John Arthur. He really is there in that classroom at Burntwood Charity with all the other children and the smell of chalk dust and unwashed bodies, the whispers of tension and the straining of the clock as they await the Friday evening bell and the glorious afternoon that shimmers outside to enfold them. His hand is raised from the third row of desks, his sleeve slipping back to show a thin wrist to ask a more than usually pertinent question before I start to ramble on about one of my many pet subjects. That is how I recall him.
    The fact is, I’ve always enjoyed being a teacher. I still do. It’s just that I’m far happier talking about the failures of Captain Franklin or the flower-like symmetry of the Henry VIII’s coastal forts than I am building up the fat blocks of information that are supposedly the foundations of a proper education now; the sort of thing that’s so well defined that every ten year old in the country is probably reading the same page of the expurgated Gulliver’s Travels at exactly the same time. Still, I like to think that it was a different John Arthur who misremembered the name of Griffin Brooke and his leapfrogging enthusiasms when his power finally touched me. Someone who understood love and knowledge.
    Too weary to stop, trailing cigarette smoke, memories, abstractions, I wander these new suburban streets. Here in Oxford, despite the many ways that my external life has changed, everything else about me seems much the same. I still yearn for closeness and understanding. I still play, despite the grasshopper weaknesses of my mind, at being an intellectual. I still feel, far too many times and in far too many ordinary situations, clumsy and foolish and naive. I’m still waiting, really, for my life to start. Now, it will soon be ending…
    The thought slides off me, still too large to comprehend. I sense my consciousness cowering like a trapped animal before it, twisting this way and that as it tries to get out of the way. My thoughts go heedlessly back towards John Arthur, and then my book, and then the subject of next week’s tutorials. Anything, in fact— anything —other than the one big, overwhelming truth.
    Past a space of fenced building sites. 8/10 W EEKLY O R £50 D OWN. G UARANTEED M ODERN H OMES. N EARLY E VERY H OUSE H AS A G ARAGE S PACE . Illuminated artists’ impressions of fireside families, bay-windows, honeysuckle walls, cats sleeping on doorsteps. Then Gladstone Drive, where the posters are made real. Perhaps a recently-constructed Disraeli Road also lies around the corner. Perhaps Disraeli’s accepted now just as he was in his lifetime; scarcely a Jew at all with his clever flattery of making