HERE AND THERE
LONDON
After we got home at the end of August, the fine summer
declined into a warm, mellow fall, and early one wonderful morning
a truck driver saw from the road what looked like a head sticking out
from the hedge. When he investigated, he found a schoolboy, who had
been missing for a day or two from Bryanston. The boy was gagged, his
hands were tied, and
ire
had no feet.
It
seems he had lain all night
across a railroad track, and an early train had cut off his feet. After
that, he had crawled up a twenty-foot-high embankment and got his head
through a gap. On the following day, with the boy recovering from
these and further amputations, the police announced themselves satis–
fied, after enquiry, that no criminal proceedings were called for. Just
across the Irish sea, in the Isle of Man-which happens to
be
my birth–
place--more enquiries are going on into the case of a five-year-old girl
who, it is alleged, was compelled by her parents to skip rope from nine
till midnight evening after evening, her screams noted, doubtless with
disapproval, by the neighbors; but the little girl died and the matter,
as I say, is being looked into.
Good weather makes many of the English slightly drunk; we are
like spinster aunts tippling at a wedding, and then the sun shines the
next day and the next until we can't reduce the sun content in the blood–
stream, and we are off on a bender with nothing any longer seeming
important except the weather. But, as the footless boy and the tortured
girl remind us, life goes on somewhere; the fantasies of the cruel come
alive daily and tear at somebody's flesh. One of the big London events
of the fall has been the Theater of Cruelty season at the Aldwych, and
so far the hit is the play with the long title now known simply as
Marat/Sade.
This work, originally German but freely adapted for the
Aldwych season, is about a performance, in the early years of the nine–
teenth century, of a play by de Sade about the assassination of Marat.
