Tag Archives: childhood

Letters & Interviews, Long Time Walk On Water

Daily Bread (though once a week would do)

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loft 17

INTERVIEWER:  How did you get your background in the Bible?

FAULKNER:  My Great-Grandfather Murry was a kind and gentle man, to us children anyway. That is, although he was a Scot, he was (to us) neither especially pious nor stern either: he was simply a man of inflexible principles. One of them was everybody, children on up through all adults present, had to have a verse from the Bible ready and glib at tongue-tip when we gathered at the table for breakfast each morning; if you didn’t have your scripture verse ready, you didn’t have any breakfast; you would be excused long enough to leave the room and swot one up (there was a maiden aunt, a kind of sergeant-major for this duty, who retired with the culprit and gave him a brisk breezing which carried him over the jump next time).

It had to be an authentic, correct verse. While we were little, it could be the same one, once you had it down good, morning after morning, until you got a little older and bigger, when one morning (by this time you would be pretty glib at it, galloping through without even listening to yourself since you were already five or ten minutes ahead, already among the ham and steak and fried chicken and grits and sweet potatoes and two or three kinds of hot bread) you would suddenly find his eyes on you—very blue, very kind and gentle, and even now not stern so much as inflexible—and next morning you had a new verse. In a way, that was when you discovered that your childhood was over; you had outgrown it and entered the world.

(from an interview given to Paris Review, 1956)

Children cheating. Love it. And so true! I’ve touched on the topic myself:

Sunday school, 1974

We’re baptised but it doesn’t really mean anything. We kind of mutter a prayer on a Sunday before we eat dinner. That’s it. And we’re supposed to say prayers before we go to bed, but no-one ever checks and I’ve forgotten the words at the end.

Gentle Jesus meek and mild, look upon this little child…

Then I la-de-da the lines I can’t remember and then it ends something like;

If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.

Something like that. But he never gives me any of the things I ask for. You know what grown-ups are like.

*

On a Sunday we have to go to Sunday school. They never go to church, but they insist on sending us to Sunday school, don’t they. Cos Wendy and I are Brownies, we have to go dressed as Brownies. It’s really boring but we can’t say we don’t want to go. One particular time, the nearer we got to the church, the less we wanted to go, so you know what we did? We walked around the church block until the service had finished and the people started coming out, then we went to the sweet shop and spent our tuppence on sweets. They never found out. They’ve never once asked us what they talked about at church, so we know they’re not really interested.

Do I believe in God? Yes, of course I do! Well, I think I do.

One last word, 1976

Am I like them? I have some things in common with my mother, yes, that’s true. I got my brains from her, she says. She could have done great things if she hadn’t started having kids and got lumbered. I’ve got her big feet. I hate my feet. But other than that, I don’t think we’re similar. I hope not.

I wouldn’t say I was really happy but then again, I wouldn’t say I was really sad. I don’t think about it like that. It’s just a normal childhood like anyone else’s. We’ve got our own house and we’ve got a car… I’ve got some nice clothes. Maybe… don’t tell anyone I said this, but… maybe if I had a nicer family… nicer parents, like… But anyway, it’s not over yet, not quite, and maybe it’ll get better. Yes, I hope it’ll get better at the end of the summer. The angels will roll the stone away like they do in the Easter Song… and if not, well, when I’m grown up, it’ll be my turn.

The angels rolled the stone away,

The angels rolled the stone away.

It was early Easter Sunday morning,

The angels rolled the stone away.

Jesus had a sad life as well, didn’t he? I mean, they killed him in the end, didn’t they?

(from Long Time Walk on Water)

Verses Nature

First taste

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Berlin photo 8 edit
My little bunny. Pretty thing with little girl’s feet, lacy socks and champing at the bit.

I had my first taste of it when just a wee boy. Been searching for that something ever since; that of innocence, inattentive of hygiene. A bit fish, a bit salmon… crevettes…

She was the daughter of the shopkeeper who owned the Sadna. Whenever mother went there to buy something, I’d be sure to come along cos I just had to get a glimpse of this little girl tho I saw her at school everyday, but when there was no school, I still had to find a way to see her. We were in love, see. No, really. I now happen to think that her father was rather partial to mother too, he kept slipping her freebies and their hands would brush. She told him of a garlic treatment she knew for warts and another one for hair loss: add five chopped cloves of garlic to three soup spoons of olive oil, soak the paste for two days then apply half an hour before washing your hair, she said. And for that extra shine, don’t throw away the water after you’ve cooked rice, massage it into your hair, leave it on for a while, then rinse.

You’re so knowledgeable, Madame! You know all the tricks of your trade. And I know all the tricks of mine…

Dirty little slimer.

Whilst he was working out ways of getting under mother’s skirt, I’d be half hidden behind mother and his daughter would be half hidden behind him. She’d come to my place after school when mother had gone to work for she knew I’d be alone. We’d get undressed, play mothers & fathers then eat whatever she’d pinched from the store, mostly pastilles Vichy. I tried to penetrate her and others later but it didn’t work. In the beginning I thought their hole was at the front.

(from Verses Nature)

The Red Room, Words Worth

Perfume: yellow up the front, brown up the back

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I am as I am
I please whom I please
What is it to you
What has happened to me
Yes, I did love someone
Yes, this someone loved me
As young kids love each other
Knowing
Innocently
How to love one another
And that with such glee…

Can be mean little buggers as well, though, can’t they? They’ll slit open animals for the fun of it and lie through their teeth. They’re the best and worst in us in miniature. Whatever.

 

I love the smell of you. After you had gone the other day, I refused to wash myself. She came home later, wanting, the usual, but I couldn’t touch her. She slept on her side of the bed and I on mine. (Yes, she recollected, he had pulled her to that side of the bed…) I on mine, enveloped in the odour of your juice and sweat. She? She washes at least ten times a day, how’s a man supposed to get excited if he doesn’t have the smell of you in his nose? We wash far too often. Should only wash when we really need to. You should get Him not to wash for a while so he stinks of man, then you give him a royal blow job, he’ll spray like a whale, I swear.
You, you smell fantastic, your tight, juicy foufoun. I read a book once, in French it’s called Le Nez; The Nose. Know it? It’s about a man who kills virgins so he can use their odour to produce the ultimate perfume. That’s one crazy shit, but I understand him. When I sniff my fingers, hhmm, I smell you. I run my fingers under my nose right in front of her, and remember you. I’m not going to wash that bedsheet. Going to keep it somewhere safe so I can smell you when I want to.

My wedding day, right? First marriage, and I’m at my in-laws. The future bride and her parents had gone to the hairdresser’s. We were celebrating the wedding at home, so the bride’s family had asked a neighbour to help out with serving the guests. She was a young, unattractive girl. Come and help me, come and scrub my back for me, I called out to her. She came and scrubbed my back. Thick as a plank, she was. Get in the tub…  She was a country lass and boy, did she smell of c(o)untry. I moved my head down there to get a whiff of her, but believe me, one whiff was enough, even for a man like me. We had a real good shag right there in the bathtub. Then I got dressed and got married.

In the village of my childhood, you wore your underwear for the whole week and washed at the weekend. (Girls as well?) of course girls as well! The air was rank by Friday! And our culottes yellow up the front, brown up the back. (You look happy at the recollection of it…) of course I was happy! Life was simple, but sweet… This is the smell I have in my nostrils till today. This smell, this innocence, of unwashed sex.
In the old days, all the children slept in one bed. Of course there was incest going on. So what? You always hear about fathers raping their daughters. Now you listen to me. Half the time, it’s not rape at all. Those girls want it. They want to make the experience, then when they get jealous of their fathers, they accuse him of rape to get their own back and the poor bastard ends up in prison. We were kids, but we weren’t doing anything abnormal, see? Kids are like this. Kids are sexual beings, too.
Boys were trying it out amongst themselves as well of course they were. I saw my brother get buggered by the boy next door. He was a good bit older than us and he’d often come over to sleep at our place on a Saturday night. Once I heard these noises coming from my brother’s bedroom. I went in, flicked on the light. My brother was on his knees, this other big boy had him by the hips and was giving him a royal humping. I think I said something like; you dirty bastards, that’s what girls are for! I think I also grabbed something and beat my brother across the backside with it. He knows I saw him though we’ve never openly spoken about it. See, it was just like that and do you think things have changed? Are you saying that I come from a family of mental cases? (So, who was humping you…?) I’ll tell you one thing, though: it doesn’t smell the same…

I am as I am
And it’s right that way
What more do you want
What more must I say…

(preview from Verses Nature, first published in The Red Room )