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As time grows short there is much left to say. I sometimes waste whole hours and minutes, but I try not to waste a whole day.

Monday, December 21, 2009

Chapter Nineteen - Arbeit Macht Frei


An unexpected benefit to come out of Gerry’s suspension from school was that he got himself a job. It was late springtime and the local and relatively nearby tomato nursery had many vacancies. Most of these were filled by the wives and girlfriends of the servicemen who filled the ranks and houses of the nearby RAF base. The nursery, which spanned several acres across a large plateau at the foot of the mountainous ridge - from where the airbase would launch wartime bomber-command raids on the German industrial heartlands, their Lancaster’s bomb-bays so burdened with ordinance that they virtually fell into flight off the top of their cliff-top runways - was the kingdom of Burt Mee, an enigmatic Australian, who lived, ate and breathed his world of fruit.
“Because, young man, fruit is what they are. Your tomato is not a vegetable but what the good Lord was describing in the bible when he ordered our wonderful world. Which is why I am forced to employ young heathens, such as your good self, as nature’s miracles do not take Sundays off from the need for water and therefore that’s what you’ll be doing instead of attending church, which is where you should be!”.
They walked energetically across the estate which Burt had established, halfway up the then barren hillside and which now gleamed as its collective hundreds of sheer glass facets collected the combined rays of the warm morning’s rays like diamonds in a massive glass and wire sieve. Under the superheated enclosures thrived acres of uniform rows of twisted stems and leaves. Dotted with a Seurat-like pixilation of tiny red dots the combined weight of which held the ever climbing plants securely in their slightly contained rootballs, their mainstems, carefully entwined around the wires which connected the massive grid of life to overhead cables that ran the length of the great cathedral of glass and aluminium. Burt was as high as Doctor Frankenstein on his visionary achievement, and as he and Gerry looked down upon his horticultural utopia, Burt detailed the many days and nights of sacrifice, sleeping alone in frosted greenhouses on beds of horse manure, that had been the tribute required by the God he served in order to create his latter-day Garden of Eden.

A Garden of Eden, nevertheless, where temptation was as plentiful as tomatoes, as Gerry discovered in the number of very attractive but conspicuously pregnant young women he found himself surrounded by. It was hot work and Gerry had much to learn from these remarkable women who quickly taught him the art and purpose of ‘side-shooting’ and defoliation amidst an endless ribald banter that accelerated his knowledge of both men and women well beyond the short years of his pre-teenage adolescence. The ladies of the greenhouse spared none of his blushes and Gerry was soon a popular member of the exclusively female workforce which swept through each greenhouse in locust-like thoroughness caring for each plant in their enormous horticultural maternity ward. Occasionally, one of their own soon-to-become matrons would falter, exhausted from the dual efforts of physical hard work and nurturing the constant demands of their unborn child. Willing and compassionate hands would immediately find a cool and shaded place for them to rest whilst the remaining workforce increased the tempo of their collective efforts to accommodate the fluctuating numbers in the team’s hands.

Gerry loved every moment of it and he fell enthusiastically from his bed each day and cycled the two miles - half of it up the steepest hill on the ridge - chomping on his breakfast as he raced to be at his post earlier and earlier each day. The days when the fruit was picked were his favourite. Hard and sweaty though the work was, Gerry beamed with satisfaction at every filled basket and as these were graded and placed in the correct boxes for market, he felt for the first time that he was doing something worthwhile with his time. If this exclusion from school was a punishment he considered, what better reward for the injustice that had actually led him to be here in the first place. It was with some regret therefore that he returned to school happy at least that he had been offered a part-time evening job by Mr. Mee who seemed quite pleased with his efforts, so far.

His sentence served Gerry was surprised to learn of a new caveat to his being allowed to rejoin his classmates and resume his fitful studies.
“It will be necessary for your son to see the school’s educational psychologist” Mr Winwood stated from his desk as he looked significantly over his ludicrous spectacles.
Gerry and his father made no response to this edict and it was therefore arranged that during the following week Gerry would meet with and be interviewed by Dr. Baines who would be visiting the school specifically for the purpose.

On the day of his arrival, Gerry was conducted into the office of the deputy-head, Mr. Straun, but ‘humph’ was mercifully absent from his lair. Gerry sat across the desk from Dr. Baines, a middle-aged man in a blue suit with dandruff-scattered shoulders who sported riotous eyebrows and who moved his head about in elaborate gestures of internal writhings which Gerry observed with amusement but without trepidation. On his desk was a recent copy of the Daily Telegraph which he picked up, and whilst regarding Gerry closely, carefully tore a one-inch diameter semi-circle from the spine of the newspaper. Without warning, Dr. Baines opened the pages of the newspaper to reveal a dark hole into which, from the other side of the opened broadsheet newspaper to Gerry an eyeball peered at him, staring strangely from beyond this bizarrely constructed barrier. Gerry meant only to block the disturbing apparition now set so dramatically and unexpectedly before him, realising its immediate voyeuristic intention. Were it some kind of ‘ice-breaker’ the Doctor had frozen his subject out in his single bleak moment of scrutiny. In the event the optical illusion presented before him had an altered affect on Gerry’s depth of field which resulted in Dr. Baines suddenly recoiling from behind his fragile barrier, Gerry having poked him soundly in the right eyeball with his index finger.
“Whatever did you do that for?” enquired the Doctor, whilst rubbing his sore eye with his handkerchief as it streamed tears down his reddened cheek.
“I didn’t mean to poke you, I just didn’t like being looked at like that. Why were you doing it?” he asked.
“Well“, smiled the amused psychologist “I was trying to see which side of your brain is the dominant one by seeing which of your eyes was the most quickly focussed!” he declared with a chuckle. “Perhaps I will reconsider that approach in future” he smiled amiably.
“Or keep your glasses on” Gerry tried helpfully, warming to the gentleman’s sense of humour.
They talked easily for a while and Gerry told him that he didn’t think his father understood him and the many other common denominators he shared with most children of his age, and time.
“No, my dad doesn’t beat me, well the odd clip round the ear you know when I push my luck, but no, he’s usually very fair with me.” he told his interviewer.
“So, why do you think you are in so much trouble at school then Gerry?” he asked, widening the remit of his questions.
“I don’t feel like I am allowed to learn things here the way I like to learn them.” he replied, confused himself to learn that the trouble he was in could now be described as ‘so much’.
“And how would you prefer to learn things Gerry” the Doctor now wanted to know.
Gerry thought carefully back to a recent experience and decided to share it with his confidant.
“I used to be terrified of the dark” he began slowly. “I don’t know when or why it began, but I used to have these strange dreams. In one, I would lie, facing the wall in my bedroom and on the wall, like the child’s projector I have, I could see a strange scene. There would be the wagons of a wagon train and they would be trailing across endless marshes, their sad and frightened occupants depressed by the dismal miles of wet and windswept landscape that stretched mercilessly out before them. I could feel the swish and slush of the mud and slime around their corroding wheels and sense the hopelessness of their venture, doomed as it seemed to failure. The second dream would contain a circle of burning wagons and a woman crying something to anyone who might hear her desperate plea.” Gerry appeared to pause, but the pause stretched out infinitely before both occupants in the room until the Doctor gently prompted him “And what was the woman saying Gerry?”.
“I can’t say.”
“Why not?” asked the Doctor.
“Because it is ineffable”
Gerry surprised the Doctor with his grasp of vocabulary and with his carefully measured words, but even the Doctor wasn’t sure that they both held the same understanding of this particular idea.
“Why can’t you say it to me Gerry, here, now, in this safe place?”
Gerry was amused, not only by the notion that the deputy-head’s office was a safe place for him, but by the qualified man’s interpretation of what he had said to him.
“No. It’s not that I can’t or won’t say it to you, or anyone, wherever I might be. It is just ineffable in the sense that I have no way of making the sound. It is unspeakable. I don’t know how to even form the word or sound that she made. It is beyond language. It is something so primitive that I have no way to communicate it and I wish I had never heard it, whatever it means.”

There was no great discovery in the meeting that the Doctor felt able to share with his employers other than to say that he had enjoyed meeting Gerry who he thought was a ’very interesting young man who had an unusual ability to express himself verbally’ an assessment which Mr. Winwood was reluctant to share or accept. Gerry was accepted back into the year he had recently been excluded from but he was, he now learned, to be moved to a different class where the highest academic standards were expected. It was thought that by challenging Gerry more at the level of his intellect his difficulties with authority would resolve themselves. The IQ test Gerry had completed after the meeting with Doctor Baines had apparently satisfied something within Mr. Winwood who had now concluded that Gerry should be in the top class. Gerry’s father smiled at the news and could not quite understand why Gerry didn’t share his pleasure at this latest surprise development.
“They’re all swots dad. You just don’t understand. My life will be misery” he gloomily concluded. Cut adrift from his new found ladies of the greenhouse and his mates at school Gerry began to feel the real price for his misfortune. Alienation from all the friends he had so far made as they accused him of defection and rejection, both of which he now experienced in earnest, now that he was one of the ‘bright-kids’. Those carefree days of chlorophyl covered joy now behind him, banished to the exile of social Siberia, Gerry submerged himself into novels and retrospective accounts of the Nazi holocaust. He consumed the Scourge of the Swastika and the novels of Primo Levi in his one-man pursuit of the answer to the question ‘Why must people be so evil to one another?’ He just didn’t understand it, he hadn’t done anything wrong and yet he had suffered the maximum penalty. Exile. Maybe work would lead to freedom? He’d liked the experience at the greenhouses, and they seemed to like him. Maybe he’d find what he needed in the world of work, but he was too young to make that decision yet and he would have to use his newly discovered intelligence to his advantage, somehow. For now it was school, and merciful music, which would provide his escape from the vagaries of education.

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