Mitchell A Disturbing Influence

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ISBN: 978-0-571-30419-6
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 212 Seiten

A Disturbing Influence was Julian Mitchell's second novel, first published in 1962. The setting is the small, utterly English town of Cartersfield, where the very quietness of life causes trouble. The young and old are preoccupied alike with their own affairs, to the exclusion of the world. Tetchy schoolmaster Mr Drysdale sums it up: 'We don't care much for change in Cartersfield.' But change comes regardless, in the shape of a rootless young man who finds Cartersfield a fine place in which to recuperate after an illness, and a fine place, too, to indulge his appetite for destruction. In a fascinating new preface to this reissue Julian Mitchell describes how he drew on his Cotswold childhood and the town of Cirencester in order to invent his fictional Cartersfield and populate it with a cast of characters.

Julian Mitchell (b. 1935), is an English playwright, screenwriter and occasional novelist. He is best known as the writer of the play and film Another Country, and as a screenwriter for TV, producing many original plays and series episodes, including at least ten for Inspector Morse. Born in Epping, Essex, and educated at Winchester College and Oxford, he would publish six novels in the 1960s (all of them since reissued in Faber Finds) including the prizewinning The White Father (1964), before shifting his focus to theatre - a move which has come to appear permanent.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mitchell, Julian

Leseproben

2. The Schoolmaster

OURS is a small town. That’s how it is, that’s how it’s always been, and that’s how it always will be, unless it gets smaller, and dwindles away altogether. But I can’t see why anything should ever change here much—oh, a bit up now, a bit down now, but pretty well the same in the long run. Come to that, I can’t think why anyone comes here at all, unless it’s the complete lack of anything interesting to do or see; that could, I suppose, to certain minds have a sort of charm. It does to mine, as a matter of fact. One can be absolutely certain at any given hour of day or night what is happening in the house opposite, the house next door, the houses all over the town. Because this little place of ours is having one of its downs at the moment, it’s got lost, pushed aside by the great new road that whizzes its traffic a mile away beyond Chapman’s Wood. You see, Cartersfield began as a stop for coaches whenever it was that coaches began to trundle regularly along the roads of England. You know the sort of thing—a pub, a place to change horses, to drop mail—all that stuff. And then the coaches didn’t come any more and cars started coming instead—few at first, of course, not that I can remember, but obviously it’s only since the war that things have got quite out of control and there have been more cars than roads to put them on. And the jolly old government decided a few years ago, about thirty years too late, as a matter of fact, that we were living in the age of the automobile now, the dog-cart was dead, and there were many, many towns, like ours, which were a positive menace to navigation. By Jove, said one civil servant to another, look here, old boy, do you see that Cartersfield’s High Street is only three feet wide, and that High Street of theirs carries the main road from Slough to Reading? (Or rather, being a civil servant, and having, one likes to think, a wider view, from London to the west.) I say, old man, said the other civil servant, that’s a bit thin, what? And they both guffawed a bit, and then one of them said, I say, don’t you think we ought to say something to someone about this, old boy? I mean, now we have all this money to build new roads, wouldn’t it be a really jolly good thing to pull old Cartersfield High Street right off the map? And the other one said he thought that might be a little too strong, so they built us a by-pass instead, and our High Street is still only three feet wide (I exaggerate, of course), and the cars whizz through what used to be the north-east corner of Chapman’s Wood. Which leaves us, as you might say, out of the mainstream of life. Which is where I am quite happy to be, thank you, and personally I couldn’t be more pleased that the garages have all moved out to the by-pass, and we can walk across our charming little High Street with its pretty red-brick eighteenth-century houses and its faintly absurd Victorian street-lamps (which people are always preserving with petitions) without more than a sixty-forty chance of being knocked down by one of those madmen in goggles driving export models to the docks (speed limit 30 m.p.h.) at seventy-five through the middle of the place where our stomachs used to be.

You get the picture? I could go on, telling you all about the drears who live here and think that by electing Mr Ponsonby, the ironmonger, to be mayor every year they are helping to preserve all that’s best in Britain. I could tell you about the terrible scandal of Dr Nye, who made the unholy error of patting Miss Spurgeon (age seventy-three) on the knee-cap when she complained of sciatica in her elbow. But I won’t, partly because the whole thing would be tedious beyond words, partly because I don’t believe a word of it anyway, and mostly because I have a much more interesting story to tell you, about Harry Mengel, who isn’t German, as you might think with a name like that, though he isn’t quite altogether English, you know, either, since his great-great-great-God-knows-how-many-times-grandfather was something to do with one of those Moguls who came over with William the Third, who was, if I remember right, the one married to Mary. Anyway, this ancient Mengel married a nice English girl in Cartersfield, and so the family has gone on ever since, though the big-wig from Holland and his lot died out somewhere around the time of the battle of Waterloo. Nobles come, bringing their trains with them, you see, and then they die and the servants stay on. History. Those who’ve read some tell me it’s fascinating, and I’m sure they’re right. From such a minor question as the origin of Harry Mengel’s surname we get a whole picture of social development. Hurrah.

Not that there was much development in the Mengel family, who remained, I imagine, resolutely servile till Harry’s father bought a sweetshop during the depression, managed to keep it going through the ’thirties, the war, rationing (history will keep breaking in, excuse me) and so on, so that when he died a couple of years ago it was from a thoroughly deserved stroke, since his little sweetshop had become the largest grocery store in the town, he had no inhibitions about testing his stock on his stomach, and his belly was the subject of much speculation among the younger members of our community. Harry, in fact, learnt, or so it seems to me, his business skill at an age when he should have been learning his lessons, because kids being kids, bets would be made about the size of old Mr Mengel’s waistline, accurate statistics upon which could be gauged only by a member of the family—i.e. Harry. He took ten per cent for his measurements. In fact, what he did was to measure his father’s trousers (his father having several pairs, as should be obvious), not his old dad at all, but his figures were agreed to be good. Furthermore, his father’s waist went in and out a good deal, since he made spasmodic and quarter-hearted efforts to get off the fat. Thus speculation on his belly was more or less constant, or traditional, rather, among the boys at the school, and Harry did nothing to discourage it, taking his ten per cent without a qualm.

This precociousness was not the only thing which singled out Harry among his contemporaries, I may say. Of course he stole apples, broke windows, played cricket in alleys, booted a football about and so on, like any English kid, but he did all these things, or so it seemed to me, with a certain lack of enthusiasm. I should explain, I suppose, that I am the schoolmaster of Cartersfield. All right, I know, go and talk to the barmaid if you’d rather. Well, when I say the schoolmaster I don’t mean that at all, really, you see there’s a very good little Grammar School in Cartersfield, only it’s very small, and I am only one of seven masters and four mistresses. None the less, my opinion of my colleagues being what it is, I am, in my own eyes at any rate, the schoolmaster here, though the headmaster, who considers himself an almost unbearably fair man, would tell you I’m just a member of his staff. Anyhow, what I’m getting at is this—Harry was brighter than average, not brilliant, no, but decidedly brighter than average, and I, being a sort of damn-fool enthusiast, and pleased with his progress in mathematics, which is what I teach, encouraged him, with the doubtful assistance of his father, to try for a scholarship to Reading University. Now you may say, if you’re a snob, that Reading University is not the sort of university that you’d want your child to go to, and if you are that sort of snob then to you I say, go to hell. Reading is near by, I went there myself, and it is an excellent university. Furthermore Harry had about as much chance of getting to Oxford or Cambridge as I have of being the first man on the moon, someone who is, as it happens, a man I should very much like to be. And from this you will gather why I hold a low opinion of my colleagues—Cartersfield Grammar School has had exactly one pupil at a university in the last ten years. He was sent down from University College, London, for getting a girl with child. (As though that was any reason to deprive him of further education: quite the contrary, in my opinion, but that’s the sort of thing we’re up against.)

Where was I? Oh yes, Harry Mengel. Well, though the headmaster, turning somersaults to be fair to everyone, was against me, and the rest of the staff was against me, doing its damnedest to be unfair to everyone, I was for me, Harry was for me, and between us we taught him enough to get in, if the examiners hadn’t had some prejudice against the school, and possibly against me and Harry as well. I’m prejudiced against the school myself, but I still think Harry was good enough for a scholarship, and if Reading University has the nerve to ask me for money to help them build new buildings again I shall write and tell them exactly what they can do with their new buildings and offer them Cartersfield Grammar School into the bargain. Well, I was exceedingly angry about all this, and Harry was very disappointed, of course, the poor boy, and between us we had a good cry. I hate to see talent chucked away like that. Things are bad enough in this country without wasting perfectly good men like Harry Mengel. But that was that, and I think old Mengel was rather relieved in a way, and Harry went into the store like a good son, and his father got fatter and fatter, though Harry no longer measured him for other people’s bets, and I went on teaching the kids the difference between and parallel lines never meeting, and they still didn’t understand, the dolts.

Now I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in a town like Cartersfield, right out, as I’ve...