The Electrical Experience Page 2

From a Speech by T. George McDowell

  GEORGE MCDOWELL DOES THE JOB

  He assessed himself as ‘up to the date’. Perhaps in his thinking he was already one calendar ahead—perhaps already into 1939. Anyhow, quite a modern man. He was fortunate too in having a wife who shared his Life Plan—a situation which, in his case, meant that his capacity was doubled rather than halved as in sharing, say, a cake.

  He often said that if it wasn’t for Thelma he would not be where he was today, although he was a self-made man (but not one who worshipped his maker). She had, though, worked for him in the business without wages during the early times and more recently during the economic depression. She was far more diligent at bottle inspection than the average bottle-washer. Like all cordial-makers he lived in a nightmare that one day a bottle would slip through inspection and poison a customer.

  So therefore, although he and she did not go about the town propounding it in conversation, as up to the date people they believed and practised family planning through birth ‘control’. His wife was also a practising Anglican. He was, well, put him down as one who served his fellow man, a business man, and a Rotarian.

  To have a family plan went with having a life plan. Nothing could be accomplished without a Blueprint.

  Together, of course, with initiative and capital.

  They had two well-spaced children and intended having one more to bring the number to ‘three’. ‘Three’ seemed to him to be a manageable and modern number, although they had both themselves come from large families. His wife had been fitted with a diaphragm by a city physician, but she asked that he also wear a condom ‘just in case’, and he did. He himself was a precautionary man, although it was true that all business did involve risk-taking. He had never said this to Thelma, but he felt that somehow the time when they were trying for a child, as it were, was made somehow tingling for them, because on these occasions they did not use, of course, any—precaution. He supposed it was because then, as it were, his ‘skin’ touched her flesh, the flesh, that is, inside her.

  George McDowell cleared a tickle from his mental throat.

  They were, certainly, the times most vividly recalled. Inter course, he realised in maturity, was not everything it was cracked up to be. They had not let it become a ‘complex’. His wife, he sometimes thought, was herself not a highly sexed woman, and although he became quite aroused at times, he was not overly preoccupied, he hoped. He had exercised self-control, as harsh as it was on her, in regard to the police man’s widow. He observed that the limitations and restrictions on the matter of sexual indulgence, placed by Thelma in their marriage, sometimes aroused her unwillingness, he had perhaps that sort of personality which was, which savoured, well, the restraint she imposed, the limitations on when, and her refusals. And now and then, though rarely, he imposed himself on her, and the silent, wordless, impositions he enjoyed too. It had to do, he speculated, with the basic economic principle of scarcity. Though really, this aspect of their lives he did not truly understand and did not ponder over much and which was not to say, either, that they did not conduct their married life correctly.

  She insisted that the condom be flushed down the lavatory immediately after, and that he wash.

  She did not, quite properly, want the girls finding them around the place or to step out in the morning to be confronted by it.

  He badly wanted a son.

  ‘I think we should have, that it is really time for us to consider having, another child if you still want for us to have a third.’

  She said it as they prepared for bed. He was brushing his teeth with Kolynos dental cream and going over in his mind a masonic catechism he needed to know for Tuesday’s Lodge. He did not know why he kept it up. He continued brushing, knowing what she meant and feeling in his pubic region that instant stirring. He smiled boyishly at her but she did not smile. Perhaps the toothpaste around his mouth, and he removed the smile, changed his voice to a proper tone, and said, yes, he would like another child to bring it up to ‘three’, spitting into the white porcelain basin.

  He went to bed without his pyjama trousers and without precaution.

  After, because of germ life, they usually washed, she first, and he second, but because they were trying for a child she did not douche. When he returned from washing, she said to him, ‘People will think I’m awfully old to be having another child.’

  ‘You’re older than customary, I suppose.’

  ‘Forty is really quite old. To be having a child.’

  ‘We’ve always said we’d have three,’ he said firmly, referring to their plan.

  ‘After this birth I think I should perhaps have an operation.’

  ‘Shusssh—don’t talk that way,’ he said, holding her Herco-smelling hand, squeezing it, not liking the clamminess of the idea of a surgical operation on that area of the body. He himself had had no sickness in his adult life to talk of.

  But thinking also that at the same time it would mean an end to birth-control devices, although, on the other hand, a feeling that she would then be simply, well, a hollow body—and maybe of no interest at all.

  He thought then about the Group Scout Meeting that would be held later that week. The plans for the camp up at Mt Keira and the log cabin they were building. Some were in favour of a rustic way of doing the window frames, while he himself preferred a tradesmanlike job all round. He would argue that. No one preferred rusticity when it leaked.

  Head on pillow looking up at the new plaster egg-and-dart cornice there in the dark of their new bedroom of their new house, the curtain lace lapping against the window and the breeze slightly bumping the blind cord, lying there he concluded that as far as he could see, everything in his life was being correctly done.

  He was being recognised. He was becoming a person-about-the-town.

  The new house was finished in detail right down to the built-in holder for toilet-paper rolls, and furnished with a number of electrically operated appliances and a new Stromberg Carlson which only gave static during storms.

  He had been elected District Scout Master. In his speech he had said that the supreme challenge of each generation was ‘holding’ the next generation. Keeping control of the young. That it was possible for a generation to be ‘lost’, for control to slip and for civilisation to be without a generation to take over. He referred to the twenties in America, where a whole generation had been ‘lost’. Maybe the law of oak inheres in oak, he’d said; nevertheless, while membership of a family can ensure that the values of that family inhere in the children of that family, Community Organisations had to police this and to ensure that ‘replacement parts’ were available for those families lacking values. Community Organisations had to give these children replacement values.

  He was outspoken in the Chamber of Commerce but was keeping an open mind on tourism. On one hand the tourist spent in the town—on his soft drinks, he was pleased to say—yet he could concede that they depreciated local facilities and roads without paying rates. He was able, he hoped, to place his own personal advantage aside when considering community issues.

  He had reluctantly joined the Sequicentenary Committee, reluctantly, because he felt the country areas had not received the sort of subsidy needed. He suspected it was someone in the city with a big idea for getting themselves knighted, and that the country towns were expected to obey. The city was beginning to look upon the towns as retinue.

  He had refused a donation to the Roman Catholic School Fund because he did not believe in such schools separate from the public schools. Schools should, he thought, mirror the community in all its diversity—the rich, the poor, the bright, the dull, the protestant, the Roman Catholic. This way the child was prepared for the sort of community which lay ahead for him. Education occurred in the playground. One day this division between Roman Catholic and the rest would lead to bloodshed in this country. They had made the division them selves. He hoped, of course, it could be avoided.

  They owed allegiance to an au
thority outside this country.

  He had moved a motion at the A and H Society to refuse gypsies admission to the showground.

  Gypsies.

  He had a morbid feeling about the gypsies. He stopped once when they flagged him down, parked on the roadside in their American Buicks. A rather pretty gypsy girl just out of childhood, her hair half covering her dark face, and close up he could not judge her age—thirteen?—had flagged him down. Gypsy girl. Had smiled at him in a certain way. He rather thought, self-control slipping, that … maybe … the gypsy girl … would … he had lost his self-control for that instant, she called her mother, his hand on her arm, she had called her mother, groin against her, she called her mother, and the mother was morbidly attractive too, aroused in his trousers, he wanted to offer money to lie down in the bushes with the gypsy girl … maybe an arrangement, but he could go no further than £1. They wanted, instead, to tell his fortune.

  Really, he thought, pulling himself together, he had thought really they were broken-down, needing assistance. The mother asked him to take everything from his pocket to tell his fortune, his handkerchief, his keys, his penknife, his loose change, his wallet, of course, yes, of course, to tell his fortune. She asked for the silver and he gave it to her. Instructed him to do it, and he felt rather hot and helpless. She asked for his hand, of course, he held out his hand. For the telling of his fortune. He tried to look for the young gypsy girl. For the telling of the fortune. The coming of a female figure, a child, a female dark and of a troubled nature. Thoughts of suicide. He looked for the young dark gypsy girl. Other girls in the back of the black Buicks. He had a hand which held money, through which the light did not shine.

  He became uncertain, it seemed to be getting dark, where were his possessions, who was at the car? He could not see the young, alluring gypsy girl. The older gypsy had the things from his pocket. He was prepared for her to have the silver. He wanted his things back.

  ‘I’m sorry, I would like my things back, please return my things.’

  She asked for a £1 note for the telling of the fortune. He grabbed and took back his things, backing towards his car, she held things to him withdrawing them when he went to snatch.

  ‘Take the change, the silver.’

  He had his wallet, she took a £1, she was putting it in her bosom.

  ‘I thought you needed help or something.’

  ‘Take the silver.’

  She kept mumbling and coming towards him and being close to him, and it seemed to be growing quickly dark.

  Sweating cold, he clambered into his Ford. He drove fast but stopped a mile or so along to check his things and found £2 missing from his wallet. How she’d taken it, he did not know. He saw no way of returning to them and getting his money back. He’d been a damn fool. Then he noticed that his new horn, which barked like a dog for moving cattle off the road, was also gone.

  He ran out of petrol at Jaspers Brush. They had milked his tank.

  He did not mention the stopping for the gypsies, the loss of the money, the horn, or the milking of the tank, to Thelma. Or anyone else.

  The little dark-eyed gypsy girl.

  ‘Again?’ his wife queried, as he rubbed himself against her. ‘I feel like it again,’ he whispered.

  ‘All right,’ she said, moving apart her legs. ‘It’s not like you.’

  He had moved that the gypsies not be permitted to enter the showground at showtime, for the purposes of fortune-telling.

  He had never been bitten by a snake. He had always taken the snake-bite as a mark of carelessness in a man.

  Fred Watts had been bitten by a snake only last week and in delirium saw all his old friends, some dead for forty years, and some he’d seen only the day before up at the Adelong Races, saw them all marching in file past his eyes, down into a black cavern. They had turned their eyes neither to the right nor to the left, and gave no sign of having seen him. They were dressed in the suits and hats of their times, some in the dress of forty years ago and some in the dress of today. Every person he had known in his life passed before his eyes.

  Fred had treated himself with nicotine, which was useless. Fred was, and always would be, slapdash.

  George McDowell, without conceit, concluded that his personal book-keeping was in order.

  Yes.

  He had heard the arguments against planning of the family. That it did not build the nation. That the yellow and black peoples of the world would soon outnumber the whites. He believed that birth control should not be used for avoiding family responsibility. He believed each parent should have one child and that a third should be for the building of the nation. That seemed to be a scientific and modern number.

  ‘You haven’t been to the bathroom,’ his wife murmured.

  She meant after the second time.

  Tiredly he got up, feet swinging into his slippers, and went to the bathroom to wash himself.

  Love of luxury and not birth control he blamed for the decline of the British stock. The line between comfort and luxury had to be drawn. Comfort was the justified basic wage for hard effort. Luxury was excessive self-reward—over paying. Hot water, refrigeration and electrically operated appliances, were the New Servants and he did not consider these luxury. They were necessary for the recharging of the body’s energies.

  He believed in Modernisation. What did the job best. Birth ‘control’ seemed to him to be a good example of the modernisation of married life. Good business kept the community up to the date in its commodities. Good tradesmen kept up to the date with new materials and methods and cleaned up after the job.

  George McDowell smiled, there in the bathroom: smiled at himself in the mirror on the cabinet door; a tentative, uncharacteristic smile of a distantly related, unofficial self: not the sort of humour he cared for, because, although one should be capable of laughing at oneself, one should not laugh at one’s values and ideals: but, nevertheless, he smiled as these words formed in his head, ‘You are a good tradesman, George, and you clean up after the job.’

  The words and the smile were then expunged from his mind, leaving behind no trace or residue of self-mockery.

  Colouring Electric-light Globes

  Around the time of the Sesquicentenary George put this in the local paper, but very few took the trouble.

  ‘For a festive occasion dip electric-light globes in a mixture of sodium silicate and gelatin, coloured by water-soluble dyes. The thickness of the mixture is a matter of experimentation.’

  The Song of the Cream

  ‘Let’s sing a song of the cream,

  Through vats and pasteur systems,

  Whose polished linings gleam,

  To a slowly turning wooden churn,

  Flows now the chastened cream.’

  A Piece of South Coast Verse, 1938

  GEORGE MCDOWELL CHANGES NAMES

  On 9th July 1938, when George McDowell strode home from business that evening to eat his tea before going to a meeting, his wife, leaning back from the rise of steam while straining the beans, told him that she was expecting their third child.

  He kissed her on the cheek, she averting her eyes from the beans as a gesture of appreciation for the kiss and to separate the announcement from her task of straining the beans.

  ‘In or about February,’ she said.

  ‘It will be hot in hospital,’ he said, frowning at the bad planning.

  ‘Doctor says to expect a somewhat difficult birth because of my age.’

  ‘Forty isn’t that old,’ he said, himself being thirty-five.

  ‘For having children, the medical profession seem to think so. I told him that three was our plan.’

  He washed his hands in the bathroom with Solvol.

  Of course it meant the training of another child. The training of a child had always been heart-racking. He did not relish the punishment of children, the beatings, the smackings, the sobbings, the locking of children in the broom closet. There was always, too, what seemed to him to be the un nece
ssary messiness and untidiness of untrained children which remained for him a puzzle of nature.

  He was pondering also the coincidence that on the day his wife should be pronounced pregnant, he should change his name.

  As they sat down at the dining-room table, the girls prim and quiet, serviettes under chin, ‘The Lord make us Truly Grateful’, his wife asked, ‘At work today, dear, anything of interest?’

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact,’ he said, twinkling, glad at last to be asked, having waited for what seemed a correct and decorous length of time and distance from his wife’s announcement of the coming of the child, ‘I changed my name today,’ he announced, lightheartedly.

  ‘How do you mean?’ she said, moving fruit in the fruit basket, a way she had of making herself steady, by being busy.

  The children looked towards him with wide, unsure eyes.

  ‘How do you mean, Father?’

  ‘I’ll show you,’ he said, and, leaving the table, he went to the sideboard. Failing to find paper, he went then to the telephone table.

  He returned with a pad and indelible pencil.

  With a flourish, determined but not yet habit, he wrote, ‘T. George McDowell.’ He licked the pencil and wrote in indelible purple, ‘T. George McDowell.’

  ‘It’s longer’ was the first thing his wife said, staring at the new signature, pushed across to her on the pad headed Messages.

  The children peered across.

  ‘Why, Daddy?’

  ‘What does T stand for?’ the older daughter, Gwen, asked.

  ‘T stands for Terence, Daddy’s other Christian name,’ Thelma told the children.

  He went on eating, looking not at the food but at the new signature.

  ‘Why don’t you use it if it comes first?’ Gwen asked.

  ‘A long story,’ T. George McDowell said, returning in a flash and a spin to a boy with a leather schoolbag monogrammed TMCD with a red-hot piece of wire, riding a pony to a one-room coastal school, a drawing illustrating all the people of the Empire by children in different colours and national dress, all smiling, toothily, the enterprising spirit of the Anglo-Saxon race. ‘At my school, you see, we had two Terence McDowells, and I being the younger had to use my second name. As so often happens, it stuck.’