Seeing Things. Oliver Postgate

his parents. His complexion was olive, his hair black, his eyes bright and dark brown. His most attractive feature was his bright, white-toothed grin. Inattentive, rampageous and greedy, he got himself forgiven innumerable escapades by his cheerful smile and instant assumption of a false penitence … James held a larger place in his father’s affection than Richard, a year younger. Richard was not indeed so apparently lovable a child … With one year’s gap in everything, Richard had had to strain always, and learned to ascribe his failure to cheating by his brother, to ill-luck, to insufficient self-advertisement, to anything rather than his natural inferiority … Because his elder brother grabbed all the attention that he could, Richard had formed the habit of talking almost incessantly, so that he might break into any pause in the conversation and for a minute secure the centre of the stage. Once started on his way, it had become an obsession with the child: he thought aloud like an old man. ‘Vere is,’ he would say – he had retained one or two childish mispronunciations – ‘a man in ve park who gives sixpences if you run fastest in races. Yesterday I ran faster van James and he gave me sixpence. I know he is vere and and it is true. He always gives sixpences and he wears a brown hat. I can run faster van James. When I have forty sixpences I shall buy a bicycle. Arfur, James’ friend at school who doesn’t like me, was bought a bicycle by his faver …’ Anne was too conscientious a mother to rebuke or punish Richard for ‘lying’, but his incessant stream of small imaginings was a minor nuisance, battering on her half-attentive ears day after day. It obscured Richard’s sweet and generous nature and his puppylike affection. He was far more unselfish than his brother: give him a quarter of chocolates and he would scatter them around his friends (or rather his brother’s friends, who would condescend from their attitude of contempt to him just long enough to rob him completely) while James would stuff himself silently in a corner …*

      Although the age gap is different I’m sure that James was John. I also have evidence to confirm that Richard was me, and there is no reason to doubt that the piece is a fairly accurate account of how our parents, or at least our father, saw us. When I look back at myself the picture I get is very similar to the one Ray gives, but seen from a different angle. It is that of a child constantly scrambling for acceptance, like somebody frantically trying to clamber on to a crowded raft, hoping somehow to be allowed a place. Fortunately, I could also see that the child knew nothing of this. He never lost hope, never gave up trying, bore no grudges and took whatever small mercies came his way with innocent delight.

      That is all ancient history but there is one small piece of evidence with which I would like to set the record straight. The green bench I was sitting on was the one which the man in a brown hat had sat on when he did, once, give me sixpence for winning a race. His hat was brown and, dammit, I wasn’t lying.

      I got up and walked away from these disagreeable memories. There were more pleasant ones to entertain.

      John and I were not stuck in that poky house for all our time. Ray and Daisy were great travellers and they took us to France almost every year, and once on an epic journey to Spain.

      They would often go for short visits to Paris on their own. Daisy had even flown there in an airliner, a Handley-Page Heracles, from Croydon Aerodrome. The adventure had frightened her terribly but I, with my passion for vehicles, thought it must have been terribly exciting.

      Daisy’s younger brother, our uncle Eric, had had a different aeronautical adventure. He was to fly in an airship, but he was lucky enough to miss his flight because his car broke down. The airship was the ill-fated R101 which, that night, crashed into a hill in France and burst into flames.

      I saw the newspaper pictures of the crumpled skeleton of the airship and heard the reports on the wireless, and I know I wondered what I would do if I were on an airliner which was about to crash. It occurred to me that the obvious thing to do at, or just before, the moment of impact, was to jump vigorously into the air. In that way one would be going upwards, not downwards, and would land gently, as one would from such a jump. I wondered whether anybody had thought of doing this. The idea stayed in the back of my mind, along with the car which had small wheels in front and large wheels at the back so that it would be going downhill all the time, thus eliminating the need for an engine.

       V. Another Place.

      When they went to Paris Ray and Daisy usually left John and me at home with the housekeeper or, quite often, they would send us with her to a left-wing holiday camp called Treetops. Once or twice we stayed with Grannie, Ray’s mother, sometimes with other relations. Only once did we spend a long time in a completely strange environment.

      This happened at the beginning of 1933 when Daisy had arranged to become a film star. No, that’s an exaggeration. What happened was that Rudolph Messel, who was a very rich young man as well as a socialist, had formed an organization called the Socialist Film Council, which was going to make The Road to Hell, a film about the evils of unemployment and the Means Test. Everything was set up for this and shooting was about to start when Amy, our housekeeper and the king-pin of the family’s life, had to go back to her home in Leiston. This was a serious crisis because somebody had to look after John and me.

      So, towards the end of March, we were sent to Woodstock School as boarders.

      Woodstock School only took about half a dozen boarders at a time but that was quite enough because Mrs de Vries, the headmistress, saw to them herself. We slept in tiny rooms high up under the roof, we had our meals and were left to play in a large, uncomfortable, bare room with a floor of brown linoleum, and each weekday morning at a quarter to nine we simply went to school, but through a green-baize door in the hall, not through the main entrance.

      I was lonely and miserable so I was quite glad to be taken over by a slightly older girl whose name was, I think, Laura. She was very shocked to discover that I had not been taught to pray because she knew it was essential to ‘pray for God’, as she put it, every morning and evening. She explained that if I didn’t do this God wouldn’t know I was there and consequently wouldn’t be able to look after me. She showed me how to kneel at the foot of the bed and told me what to say. I remember I felt a bit dubious about the whole procedure but this didn’t interest Laura. Her only purpose was to get me to do what had to be done. What I thought about it was irrelevant.

      In fact I didn’t think anything about it. I mean, as far as I know, I had no previous acquaintance with the subject. Ray and Daisy were simply not religious, they didn’t talk about God. Nor, as far as I can remember, did Amy. So Laura had a clear field.

      I asked Laura a lot of questions about God and also about Jesus who, she said, was also God but not quite. Her answers weren’t really very clear but I was able to piece together a picture of a white-haired old man, a bit like Grandad, but cross. He was sitting on a white cloud surrounded by glory, which was goldcoloured and shiny. I wondered where He was. Laura said He was everywhere, which didn’t seem very likely, and that He could do anything and see everything, and that He moved in a mysterious way.

      I knew about that. I had once seen my parents’ friend, the novelist Naomi Mitchison, ‘move in a mysterious way’. She was playing charades I think, wearing a wide hat and a cloak. It had been very impressive.

      I observed the rituals Laura required and also consented to do a ballet dance with her in front of everybody, or, to tell the truth, half a ballet dance, because she had dressed me in a sort of frill, like a vestigial tutu, and after the gramophone ran down in the middle of the dance I refused to go on with it on the grounds that I was making an idiot of myself. After that she gave up her charge of my life and let me be.

      But the question of the existence or otherwise of God remained in my mind. As far as I could tell He didn’t seem to be taking a very active part in my life because cause and effect seemed to be proceeding according to what I assumed to be natural laws. However, it was worth while finding out, so, roaming through the empty school one chilly afternoon, I decided to confront my maker and test His mettle.

      I looked out of a window and said: ‘All right then, try this. If that bird gets to the telegraph pole before the red bus