Coming up for Air 精彩片段：
PART Ⅳ-3
I crawled out of bed with a bad taste in my mouth and my bones creaking.
The fact was that, what with a bottle of wine at lunch and another at dinner, and several pints in between, besides a brandy or two, I’d had a bit too much to drink the day before. For several minutes I stood in the middle of the carpet, gazing at nothing in particular and too done-in to make a move. You know that god-awful feeling you get sometimes in the early morning. It’s a feeling chiefly in your legs, but it says to you clearer than any words could do, ‘Why the hell do you go on with it? Chuck it up, old chap! Stick your head in the gas oven!’
Then I shoved my teeth in and went to the window. A lovely June day, again, and the sun was just beginning to slant over the roofs and hit the house-fronts on the other side of the street. The pink geraniums in the window-boxes didn’t look half bad. Although it was only about half past eight and this was only a side-street off the market-place there was quite a crowd of people coming and going. A stream of clerkly-looking chaps in dark suits with dispatch-cases were hurrying along, all in the same direction, just as if this had been a London suburb and they were scooting for the Tube, and the schoolkids were straggling up towards the market- place in twos and threes. I had the same feeling that I’d had the day before when I saw the jungle of red houses that had swallowed Chamford Hill. Bloody interlopers! Twenty thousand gate-crashers who didn’t even know my name. And here was all this new life swarming to and fro, and here was I, a poor old fatty with false teeth, watching them from a window and mumbling stuff that nobody wanted to listen to about things that happened thirty and forty years ago. Christ! I thought, I was wrong to think that I was seeing ghosts. I’m the ghost myself. I’m dead and they’re alive.
But after breakfast—haddock, grilled kidneys, toast and marmalade, and a pot of coffee—I felt better. The frozen dame wasn’t breakfasting in the dining-room, there was a nice summery feeling in the air, and I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that in that blue flannel suit of mine I looked just a little bit distingue. By God! I thought, if I’m a ghost, I’ll BE a ghost! I’ll walk. I’ll haunt the old places. And maybe I can work a bit of black magic on some of these bastards who’ve stolen my home town from me.
I started out, but I’d got no farther than the market-place when I was pulled up by something I hadn’t expected to see. A procession of about fifty school-kids was marching down the street in column of fours—quite military, they looked—with a grim-looking woman marching alongside of them like a sergeant-major. The leading four were carrying a banner with a red, white, and blue border and BRITONS PREPARE on it in huge letters. The barber on the corner had come out on to his doorstep to have a look at them. I spoke to him. He was a chap with shiny black hair and a dull kind of face.
‘What are those kids doing?’
‘It’s this here air-raid practice,’ he said vaguely. ‘This here A.R.P. Kind of practising, like. That’s Miss Todgers, that is.’
I might have guessed it was Miss Todgers. You could see it in her eye. You know the kind of tough old devil with grey hair and a kippered face that’s always put in charge of Girl Guide detachments, Y.W.C.A. hostels, and whatnot. She had on a coat and skirt that somehow looked like a uniform and gave you a strong impression that she was wearing a Sam Browne belt, though actually she wasn’t. I knew her type. Been in the W.A.A.C.s in the war, and never had a day’s fun since. This A.R.P. was jam to her. As the kids swung past I heard her letting out at them with the real sergeant-major yell, ‘Monica! Lift your feet up!’ and I saw that the rear four had another banner with a red, white, and blue border, and in the middle
WE ARE READY. ARE YOU?
‘What do they want to march them up and down for?’ I said to the barber.
‘I dunno. I s’pose it’s kind of propaganda, like.’
I knew, of course. Get the kids war-minded. Give us all the feeling that there’s no way out of it, the bombers are coming as sure as Christmas, so down to the cellar you go and don’t argue. Two of the great black planes from Walton were zooming over the eastern end of the town. Christ! I thought, when it starts it won’t surprise us any more than a shower of rain. Already we’re listening for the first bomb. The barber went on to tell me that thanks to Miss Todgers’s efforts the school-kids had been served with their gas-masks already.
Well, I started to explore the town. Two days I spent just wandering round the old landmarks, such of them as I could identify. And all that time I never ran across a soul that knew me. I was a ghost, and if I wasn’t actually invisible, I felt like it.
It was queer, queerer than I can tell you. Did you ever read a story of H.G. Wells’s about a chap who was in two places at once— that’s to say, he was really in his own home, but he had a kind of hallucination that he was at the bottom of the sea? He’d been walking round his room, but instead of the tables and chairs he’d see the wavy waterweed and the great crabs and cuttlefish reaching out to get him. Well, it was just like that. For hours on end I’d be walking through a world that wasn’t there. I’d count my paces as I went down the pavement and think, ‘Yes, here’s where so-and- so’s field begins. The hedge runs across the street and slap through that house. That petrol pump is really an elm tree. And here’s the edge of the allotments. And this street (it was a dismal little row of semi-detached houses called Cumberledge Road, I remember) is the lane where we used to go with Katie Simmons, and the nut-bushes grew on both sides.’ No doubt I got the distances wrong, but the general directions were right. I don’t believe anyone who hadn’t happened to be born here would have believed that these streets were fields as little as twenty years ago. It was as though the countryside had been buried by a kind of volcanic eruption from the outer suburbs. Nearly the whole of what used to be old Brewer’s land had been swallowed up in the Council housing estate. The Mill Farm had vanished, the cow-pond where I caught my first fish had been drained and filled up and built over, so that I couldn’t even say exactly where it used to stand. It was all houses, houses, little red cubes of houses all alike, with privet hedges and asphalt paths leading up to the front door. Beyond the Council Estate the town thinned out a bit, but the jerry-builders were doing their best. And there were little knots of houses dumped here and there, wherever anybody had been able to buy a plot of land, and the makeshift roads leading up to the houses, and empty lots with builders’ boards, and bits of ruined fields covered with thistles and tin cans.