Free Fall Read Free Page B

house, her wide belly expands, she is seated in her certainty and indifference more firmly than in a throne. She is the unquestionable, the not good, not bad, not kind, not bitter. She looms down the passage I have made in time.
    She terrifies but she does not frighten.
    She neglects but she does not warp or exploit.

    She is violent without malice or cruelty.
    She is adult without patronage or condescension.
    She is warm without possessiveness.
    But, above all, she is there.
    So of course I can remember her only in clay, the common earth, the ground, I cannot stick the slick commercial colours on stretched canvas for her or outline her in words that are ten thousand years younger than her darkness and warmth. How can you describe an age, a world, a dimension? As far as communication goes there are only the things that surrounded her to be pieced together and displayed with the gap that was Ma existing mutely in the middle. I fish up memory of a piece of material which is grey with a tinge of yellow. The one corner is frayed—or as I now think, rotted—into a fringe, a damp fringe. The rest is anchored up there somewhere about my ma and I swing along, fingers clutched up and in, stumbling sometimes, sometimes ungently removed without a word said, by a huge hand falling from above. I seem to remember searching for that corner of her apron and the pleasure of finding it again.
    We must have been living in Rotten Row then for certain directions were already as settled as the points of the compass. Our bog was across worn bricks and a runnel, through a wooden door to a long wooden seat. There was an upthereness over our room, though surely not a lodger? Perhaps we were ever so slightly more prosperous then, or perhaps gin was cheaper, like cigarettes. We had a chest of drawers for a dresser and the grate was full of little iron cupboards and doors and things that pulled out. Ma never used these but only the little fire in the middle with the hot metal disc that closed the top. We had a rug,too, a chair, a small deal table and a bed. My end of the bed was near the door and when Ma got in the other end, I slid down. All but one of the houses in our row were the same, and the brick alley with a central gutter ran along in front of them. There were children of all sizes in that world, boys who stepped on me or gave me sweets, girls who picked me up when I had crawled too far and took me back. We must have been very dirty. I have a good and trained colour sense and my memory of those human faces is not so much in passages of pink and white as of grey and brown. Ma’s face, her neck, her arms—all of Ma that showed was brown and grey. The apron which I visualize so clearly I now see to have been filthily dirty. Myself, I cannot see. There was no mirror within my reach and if Ma ever had one it had vanished by the time I was a conscious boy. What was there in a mirror for Ma to linger over? I remember blown washing on wire lines, soap suds, I remember the erratic patterns that must have been dirt on the wall, but like Ma I am a neutral point of observation, a gap in the middle. I crawled and tumbled in the narrow world of Rotten Row, empty as a soap bubble but with a rainbow of colour and excitement round me. We children were underfed and scantily clothed. I first went to school with my feet bare. We were noisy, screaming, tearful, animal. And yet I remember that time as with the flash and glitter, the warmth of a Christmas party. I have never disliked dirt. To me, the porcelain and chromium, the lotions, the deodorants, the whole complex of cleanness, which is to say, all soap, all hygiene, is inhuman and incomprehensible. Before this free gift of a universe, man is a constant. There is a sense in which when we emerged from our small slum andwere washed, the happiness and security of life was washed away also.
    I have two sorts of picture in my mind of our slum. The earlier are the interiors because I can remember a time when for