Bowen The Centre of the Green

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ISBN: 978-0-571-30514-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 226 Seiten

First published in 1959 The Centre of the Green is John Bowen's third novel. The story centres around the Baker family: the father Justin is a retired Colonel; the mother, Teresa, is over-possessive and refuses to admit that her sons have grown-up; the sons Julian and Charles - one is a married advertising copywriter with a penchant for extra-marital affairs while the other is withdrawn and suicidal, desperately looking for human contact in the vast anonymity of London. It is Julian's involvement with a seventeen-year-old girl that sparks the chain of events that eventually encompasses the whole family. The scene shifts between Devonshire, London and Majorca as each member of the family searches for a resolution to the impasse into which they have drifted and struggle to regain the family ties that they once had. A subtle, intelligent and compassionate novel The Centre of the Green was commended by the Observer for its 'admirable vitality', while the Spectator described it as 'a series of expertly managed shocks'.

John Bowen was born in India, sent 'home' to England at the age of four and a half, and was reared by aunts. He served in the Indian Army from 1943-47, then went to Oxford to read Modern History. After graduating he spent a year in the USA as a Fulbright Scholar, much of it hitch-hiking. He worked for a while in glossy journalism, then in advertising, before turning freelance when the BBC commissioned a six-part adventure-serial for Children`s Television. Between 1956 and 1965 he published six novels to excellent reviews and modest sales, then forsook the novel for nineteen years to concentrate on writing television drama (Heil Caesar: Robin Redbreast) and plays for the stage (After the Rain: Little Boxes: The Disorderly Women). He returned to writing novels in 1984 with The McGuffin: there were four more thereafter. Reviewers have likened his prose to that of Proust and P. G. Wodehouse, of E. M. Forster and the young John Buchan: it may be fair to say that he resists compartmentalisation. He has worked as a television producer for both the BBC and ITV, directed plays at Hampstead and Pitlochry and taught at the London Academy of Dramatic Art. He lives in a house on a hill among fields between Banbury and Stratford-on-Avon.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bowen, John

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE

Colonel Baker, taking his usual solitary afternoon walk, was caught in a summer cloudburst. He was on the open moor; there were no trees nearby for shelter. But the Colonel did not mindtherain. He pulled his plastic mac from the baggy pocket of his old tweed jacket, unfolded it, and put it on. He pulled his old tweed hat further down on his head, planted his stick more firmly on the ground, and strode on through the heavy rain. The water poured from the brim of his hat onto the shoulders of his plastic mac. As he walked, tiny individual drops were thrown back into the air from his moustache. Colonel Baker always went for a walk on the moors by himself in the afternoon. He covered ten miles or so in a circular tour, and was home by tea-time.

On the high ground of the moor, the raindrops came together into trickles that filled every declivity of the rock and brown earth. These trickles ran downwards until they found some trench or gulley or gutter in the earth, when they would combine again, running together along this new path, spilling out for a while when the gulley came to an end, then back to some new combination in the waters of a small and temporary stream, and so on until eventually they joined the course of one of the three rivers which rose in the moor. Colonel Baker, reaching the stepping-stones which were set across one of these rivers, found that the water had covered them, and had to take shelter after all until the water subsided and he could cross. The cloudburst lasted for about twenty minutes. Then the rain stopped, the trickles ran dry again or turned to puddles, the level of the water in the river fell, and Colonel Baker crossed the stepping-stones to the other side.

The ground was wet and shining after the rain. The Colonel noticed the clarity of the colours around him, and smelled the wet earth. What he had once taken for granted was now, in these years of his retirement, something to be noticed, appreciated, and noted down in his Nature Diary. He left the river bank, and cut up the side of a steep field. Reaching the top, he climbed over a wooden gate set in the hedge, and saw the village below him. Thatch and slate roofs were scattered about a church. That was the village as it used to be, and to it was added the new brick of council houses and the corrugated roof of a garage. Perhaps a mile from the church was a group of three cottages, one deserted, one the week-end retreat of a celebrated novelist, the third his own. Even at this distance he could distinguish his television aerial. It was the only one in the village.

*

At the outbreak of the 1939–45 war, Colonel Baker had been in command of a battalion of infantry. Like many other forthright people, he had been shamed by Britain’s part in the Munich agreement, alarmed and disgusted at the stories which came out of Nazi Germany. The Colonel did not share the anti-Semitism of some of his colleagues, and, as an unthinking humanist, he had guided his life on the principle that most human beings were fundamentally decent chaps. All that he heard of the German dictatorship outraged him, and he went through the preliminary stages of training and equipping with a sense of mission. Then, when embarkation orders for his battalion had actually been received, his superiors decided that Justin Baker was too old for an active command. He was promoted from Lieutenant-Colonel to full Colonel, kept semi-employed for a while in a number of administrative jobs, and then sent to India in 1941 as the Commandant of an Officers’ Training Camp. He remained there until the end of the war, and was shortly afterwards retired. He returned to his home and to the years of retirement that stretched in front of him, to find that his three sons had grown up, his wife had grown away, and that there was as little place for him in his own family as there had been in his regiment, once the fighting began.

At first, he had attempted to resume the intimacies of marriage. He noticed that his wife was more flaccid than he remembered, and that nowadays she neglected to shave under her arms. He made all at once the discoveries that usually come gradually during a marriage and are swallowed up by habit, not only the physical differences between husband and Wife, but all the little irritating tricks of speech and behaviour. The Colonel noticed these things, but he put them out of his mind, prepared to let habit take over again. But the noticing was not all on one side, and his wife was more prepared to hurt his feelings than he was to hurt hers. “Your flatulence is disgusting, Justin,” she said. “Besides it keeps me awake at night.” So, after the first week of his return, Mrs. Baker slept in the double bed alone, and the Colonel had a cot in his own room.

Of their three sons, Henry (sixteen years old in 1939) had already grown up, married and made a home of his own. Henry was now in a bank in Bombay, whence his wife wrote a blue air-letter once a week to Mrs. Baker, a real family letter about how the children were growing. Julian, the second son, had been at Oxford when the Colonel returned, while Charles, the third, was a conscript doing his National Service. Julian now worked in an advertising agency, Charles for a small trade paper with offices in Holborn. Julian was married, and lived in Putney; Charles had a room in Holland Park. Neither came back very often to their parents’ cottage in Devonshire; it was too far away for a casual visit.

Left alone together, the Colonel and Mrs. Baker had settled into a routine. At seven-thirty every morning, the Colonel would get out of bed, go downstairs, boil a kettle, and make tea. While he was waiting for the kettle to boil, he would smoke a cigarette. He would set a tray, put the woollen cosy on the teapot, take two biscuits from the tin and place one on each saucer. When the tea was made, he would carry the tray upstairs to his wife’s room. He would put it down on her bedside table, kiss her quickly on the cheek, say, “Good morning, old girl” or “Good morning, my dear” or “Good morning, Teresa”, and go over to the window to draw back the curtains. Mrs. Baker would sit up in bed, and pour out two cups of tea, milk first. Then the Colonel would sit on the bed for twenty minutes or so, and they would both drink their tea, usually, after a remark about the weather, in silence. Then the Colonel would dress, and (in winter) rake out the ashes of the living-room fire and lay a new one, while Mrs. Baker prepared the breakfast, which was eaten in the kitchen.

From breakfast to lunch time, Colonel Baker worked in the garden while Mrs. Baker worked in the house, or went into the village to shop. All in their season the Colonel dug and planted, mowed the lawn, raked the gravel, clipped the hedges, made bonfires, pruned, transplanted, staked. In the summer he wore his old tweed hat against the sun, and the sweat ran down the back of his neck, and dripped off his nose. In winter the hat was damp with rain, and he plodded about in rubber boots, corduroy trousers and an old jacket patched with leather. When the weather would not allow him to work in the garden, or there happened to be nothing to do (but this was seldom), he fretted about the house trying to settle to the newspaper. Lunch marked the end of the morning. After lunch he went for his usual afternoon walk, and Mrs. Baker retired upstairs for her usual afternoon nap. In the evenings, she watched television while he read a book, tinkered with the household accounts, or made entries in the Nature Diary he had been keeping for the past five years. Sometimes whole evenings would pass without their needing to speak to one another.

The Bakers did not own a car, so they could not often go out in the evenings. Mrs. Baker went to church on Sundays; Colonel Baker attended the infrequent meetings of the district Conservative Association. Usually on these occasions they were called for. They could have afforded a small car, but they would have had to buy it out of capital, and both of them were frightened by the idea of “dipping into capital”. The cottage, although freehold and on a very low rate, was expensive to maintain. Their living costs were kept down by the produce of the garden and the chicken-house, but the Colonel’s pension was sometimes stretched thin. A prolonged visit by one of the boys, the Nursing Home expenses when Teresa needed to have most of her teeth extracted, rethatching—all these eventualities were likely to prove a bit of a strain on the old housekeeping. Of course the Colonel’s life was insured, and the payments made regularly through Grindlay’s. Teresa would be perfectly all right on her own when he kicked the bucket.

Now the sun was out again, and the earth steamed after the rain. The end of the Colonel’s afternoon walk had been spoiled by flies and sweat. Punctually by four-thirty he had reached his own garden gate again.

There was the front garden, and the cottage beyond it. The lawn was neat, and free from weeds. No plantains flourished there, no dandelions, no moss. It was a model lawn, grown from seed not sod. Every year, regular in their seasons, the flowers appeared. This was not just a Spring garden, not a Summer garden, not an Autumn garden, but a garden for all the flowering year. After the snowdrop came the crocus, the daffodil, the narcissus, the dwarf hyacinth, the tulip, the gladiolus, all from bulbs planted to...