Poor Judgements

When I was a small child and read King Solomon's Mines, a book inherited from my father, I knew it was an invention. And when I read in another of my father's childhood books (volume one of an Edwardian edition of Arthur Mee's Encyclopedia), that the earth had once been a fiery ball and that it had dropped off the sun, I knew it was true. The encyclopedia was true and King Solomon's Mines wasn't. Nevertheless, at one time I tried to tell a cousin of mine that the events in King Solomon's Mines were historical facts even though I knew they weren't, trying by powerful assertion, by faith alone, to drag the story through to sit alongside the fiery ball which had fallen off the sun. Well, it wouldn't go. I needed an identical act of faith from other people to give it even the semblance of this other truth, and no one else would agree to play that game with me. I was alone with the story and with my desire for it to be true. It wasn't the only attempt I made to bring a marvellous fiction through into the real world, to force a general agreement that I was in charge of truth and not the other way round. From the time I was seven until about ten I publicly maintained and defended the proposition that I could talk the language of the animals. The immediate source of this assertion was The Jungle Book—not the books but a film of the book, the one starring Sabu and a page 14 variety of real animals. It absolutely overwhelmed me. My mother must have enjoyed it too, because, for the only time in my childhood that I can remember, I was taken to see a film twice. I couldn't bear that that particular story should remain in what I then perceived as the half life of fiction. Coleridge has described works of fiction as acts of secondary creation, and I wanted to make The Jungle Book primary. I wanted to make it as if it had been created by God not by human beings.

In order to achieve this I publicly claimed and tried to demonstrate that I had the powers of Mowgli. Challenged I would talk an invented gibberish that fooled nobody, least of all any passing dogs or birds, and not one of the lively knowing children round me. So I became more and more extreme in my attempts to demonstrate my oneness with animal creation. I ate leaves in public ... all sorts of leaves ... children came up to me in the playground and offered me leaves which I ate indiscriminately. I drank from roadside puddles as dogs do. Of course I was subjected to derision which I deserved for poor judgement if nothing else.

I knew all the time that I couldn't really speak the language of the animals in the world of primary creation, but I imagine now that I wanted people to agree to create the secondary world with me, a world in which I had already given myself a starring role. I also believe there were elements of the story existing in me already, that it was not that Kipling's imagination, filtered through the medium of film, imposed itself upon me, but that something already in me leaped out to make a powerful connection. Certainly at some levels I was powerless to resist whatever it was that came crashing in, or perhaps out. Nor am I suggesting that this susceptibility is a thing to be uncritically encouraged. I do think, however, that it is far from unique and in order for it to be understood it needs to be described. It certainly can be dangerous (after all I could have poisoned myself eating so much vegetation that unqualified way), but the same thing can be said of a lot of human obsessions including patriotism and love and even truth itself ... they're all very risky indeed. Still, having received that story, I think I had to incorporate it, having incorporated it I had to discharge it, and, as I was young and simple, the discharging took a wrong turn—an inappropriately literal one.

Now oddly enough, at the same time that I was being teased about my claim to talk the language of the animals, I was subject to an equal derision, which once resulted in my being chased home by indignant children, some page 15 of them cousins of mine which seemed to add insult to injury. I publicly asserted that the earth had once dropped off the sun, that I had a picture at home that proved it, and I added on the same authority (that of Arthur Mee's Encyclopedia) that the world would some day, a million years from now, come to an end. I can remember running home with other outraged children after me, turning in at a strange gate, knocking on the door and saying to the astonished woman who answered it that the children were waiting outside to beat me up because I had told them the world had once fallen off the sun and that it would come to an end one day. I was confident that an adult would recognise and confirm the truth I was telling and rally to support it. Whether she believed it or not there was nothing she could do to help me.

Of course if you present certain facts too confidently it sounds as if you are taking personal credit for them, and perhaps I sounded as if I thought I was the one who had caused the world to fall off the sun in the first place and would one day will its end. And I certainly don't want to sound as if I'm whinging because I didn't have the respect I should have had at school. I think I deserved all I got for eating leaves and drinking from puddles, which is not a sign of superior sensibility only of poor judgement, tragically coupled with the will to be marvellous. I totally agree with the person who said that a difficult time at school doesn't necessarily entitle you to write a novel. But what I do want to record is that non-fiction could provoke as much derision, disbelief and resentment as fiction ... and, just to make the situation a little more complicated, nowadays no astronomer seems to believe that the earth ever fell off the sun. The other children were right to suspect this fact, even if they suspected it for the wrong reasons. What I learned as truth back then was another mistake.