A Messiah of the Last Days Read online

  A Messiah of the

  Last Days

  C. J. DRIVER

  Tim and Patti, with love

  I have many people to thank: Fred Inglis, for encouragement and one particular letter; Ben Bradnack, for books, ideas and conversation; my wife and children, for patience and protection; the past and present members of the International Sixth Form Centre at Sevenoaks School, for ideas, argument, trouble and sympathy; John Johnson, agent and friend; Frank Pike and Charles Monteith, publishers and friends; John Adams, Richard Hanson and Alan Hurd, for detailed and generous criticism; Geoffrey Barry, for criticism and typing; Yvonne Richer, for typing; Roger Hobdell and Simon Hornblower, for reading and correcting the MS; and above all, Tim Langdale, for expert guidance and always generous friendship.

  I wrote this novel (and three others) while on the staff at Sevenoaks School and I record my profound thanks to the staff and pupils there for seven years of kindness and understanding.

  All the characters in this novel are entirely fictitious.

  C.J.D.

  I lie quietly secure in the Lord while I see the whole world consuming in the fire of envie one against another. I hear much noyse about me, but it serves onely to deafen me into the still slumber of Divine rest. The formall world is much affrighted, and every form is up in Arms to proclaime open wars against itself: The Almighty power is dashing one thing against another, and confounding that which he hath formerly faced with the glory of his own presence: He setteth up and casteth down, and who shall say, What doest thou? Come then, my soule, enter thou into my Chamber, shut thy doores about thee, hide thyself in silence for a season till the indignation be blown over.

  Joseph Salmon

  Our contemporary experience of work, love, thought, art, learning, decision and play is more fragmented than in any other recorded kind of society, yet still, necessarily, we try to make connexions, to achieve integrity, and to gain control, and in part we succeed.

  Raymond Williams

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Epigraphs

  Preface to the 2014 Edition

  Part I

  1

  2

  Part II

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Part III

  9

  10

  11

  12

  Part IV

  13

  14

  Copyright

  Preface to the 2014 Edition

  We speak of a ‘body’ of writing when an author has produced a number of works that make up, in the span of his or her life so far, an intent, a discovery of the meanings of life experiences that illuminate what and who we are. An identity formed by our historical past, its ethos and ideas, our adoption or rejection of these in our present, and crucially above all the attempt at resolution between socio-political pressure and personal, private emotional drives.

  The ‘body’ of C. J. Driver’s extraordinary work is the warring convictions, the questioning resolutions, the frustrations and fulfilments, body-soul-spirit of human life in the different forms these take in different places and circumstances.

  From the tensions between young revolutionaries in war against apartheid, told from the fundament of placing The Struggle before self, even before survival (Elegy for a Revolutionary, 1969); to the ‘accommodations’ of a white woman with her own liberal standards of peaceful means towards justice in a time and place when, emerging out of herself, she finds the need to risk becoming an accessory to the struggle (Send War in Our Time, O Lord, 1970); to the boldly original tackling of the nature of authority as danger inherent in progeniture, that of father–son and father-figure schoolmaster to pupil (Death of Fathers, 1972), with its strong reflection, known at once in the context of reading Driver’s ‘body’ of work, bringing the reader to the origin of domination by police and military authority.

  A Messiah of the Last Days (1974) is, I believe, something no other South African writer who has had personal ‘bodily’ experience of such authority – Driver spent ninety days in solitary confinement as a young anti-apartheid activist – has also had the broadness of compass to explore in world vision.

  In this novel a lawyer, not an anti-apartheid activist and not within the limit of the South African conflict, is telling a story of class, not race conflict: in England. A democracy, a free country with class conflict openly evident in parliamentary debate, Labour, Liberal, Conservative. There has arisen a revolutionary extremist group who call themselves the Free People. Could be the name of a necessary world phenomenon? Many eras, many parts of the planet.

  This particular avatar of aspiration to create full humanity is engaged by its lawyer-narrator between the injustice of inequality in a country which is supposed to be that of a united people, and the contradictions within the extremist radicals themselves in action against the injustice:

  These young claimed to be political but regarded political organization as a waste of time … They claimed God was dead but spoke the language of religious mania. They claimed to speak for the workers but despised the workers for their concern with money … they claimed to be open to all but regarded people over thirty almost subhuman in their progress to death.

  C. J. Driver’s exceptional alertness to our times is matched by the power and zest of his evocative writing, lit up by wry wit. Faber Finds brings us enlivening insights with its find of these four important books for republication. Our era is right and relevant for them to reach a new public.

  Nadine Gordimer, 2014

  PART I

  1

  If there were no dreams, there would be no story.

  One time I was in a country of mountains, range upon increasing range of them, and I and the people with me climbed the steep slopes, or walked like giants down the mountainsides, or traversed dangerous rifts and cliffs. My father was with me, I think, or perhaps he was in the place we were looking for. We went to the wrong places first: a village of yelping dogs and dirty, hungry children; a few huts where the people hid from us as if we were raiders; a village where the men came out with their weapons to drive us away; a village that had been burned to the ground. In one place there was a deserted temple. In another, although the land seemed right, there were no people. So we went on climbing and searching until suddenly, in the fold of a deep valley, around the edge of a great hollowed-out cliff of sandstone we came to the right place. We did not need telling it was right; we knew almost before we saw the place.

  It was more a town than a village, though the whole of it was built of that fine yellow-red sandstone you find in the villages of the Dordogne, stone which seems to have soaked up centuries of sunlight. But where those are rough and tumbled, for all their colour, this town was perfectly laid, so that each block of stone seemed to have grown exactly from the one on which it was fitted. The streets too were made of the same yellow-red sandstone, smaller blocks these but equal in their symmetry, so you felt the houses grew out of a naturally shaped ground, were not built on the earth, but grew out of it. Yet, for all the uniformity of material, the buildings and streets were not uniform in size or shape, nor were the streets built on the straight lines of a dreary suburban grid, but were shaped to the contours of the valley, just as the buildings seemed shaped to the streets, and the streets to the desires of the people who lived there.

  Where the people of the other villages we had passed through had hidden themselves away or had come out of their huts to beg or had stood at the margins of the villages, armed and angry, these people were neither friendly nor antagonistic nor subservient; they looked at us cooll
y from quiet faces. The children playing in the streets and playgrounds were the same, untroubled by our coming, interested to look at our strange clothing, glancing quietly and incuriously at our faces, but going on with their play. They, like the parents, were all dressed in simple white clothes made of some material like unprocessed cotton; but that too did not seem a uniform, for there were designs and embroideries that made each seem an original.

  I don’t remember what we did there, or if I dreamed at all about that; what stayed with me when I woke was a sense of settledness and completeness in the place, both in itself and in its people, not outside history, but growing in a different kind of history which was not concerned with history. If I saw that town now, I would know it.

  Again, once when Alison and I and the children were staying in Cornwall, I had a kind of waking dream one evening when the children were asleep and Alison already in bed. I was sitting in the bay window of the hotel room, looking out over the sea, and I went either right back in history or right forward, to a time when men knew nothing about history but were free from its demands and obligations. I saw men and women in the same coarse white clothes, standing on the seashore, and I could see their village on the hillside above them, built of stone too, not the sandstone of the other dream, but the stone of Cornwall, granite I think it is, shaped and carved into the same perfection which was not uniform and which seemed shaped out of the ground itself.

  Then, I was a drowning sailor, out beyond them in the sea, and they were waiting for the waves to bring me in, not afraid for me, not worried I would be dead before I got to them, because—for some dream-reason—death did not matter to them. Perhaps it was because they were outside history. They just waited for me, completely at peace; and suddenly I was not afraid of dying any more, and when I woke from my dream—if it was a dream, because I seemed to be half-awake all the time—for once I too had the fear of death removed from me.

  *

  For years I thought my dreams of natural houses joined in a shaped and complete town were nothing more than a wish to live in the kind of house I dreamed of; and certainly the houses I love are of that kind, where the stone of the building is the same stone of the hillsides, and where the stone of the courtyards and walls and paths repeats the stone of the buildings. I used to suppose too that the dreams were a recognition of my own unsettledness, of a childhood in terraced boxes, sometimes pleasant enough with a certain weathering of the brick, but never permanent. John Buckleson taught me another version of my dreams. They came back to me, or he gave them back to me. God knows by what accidents we recognise ourselves in other people; I don’t think they are sent to us, but we seem to go to them willy-nilly. Perhaps the only important thing is that we should recognise them when we get there.

  2

  I had been prosecuting at the Old Bailey, a nasty case of robbery with violence; the defence finished their pleas in the morning, and I expected the jury to be out all the rest of the day. But, as juries sometimes do, they made up their minds very quickly, and the verdict was given, the sentence passed, before lunch. I phoned the clerk of my chambers, and for once he told me there was nothing else for me to do that day. I lunched alone. I had some shopping to do in the afternoon but, since it was a fine day, I decided to take a tube and walk through Hyde Park to Knightsbridge to shop.

  When I realised there was a demonstration going on in the park I was at first annoyed; I wanted to walk in relative quiet, not jostle my way through a crowd of protestors. But the sun was shining, and I decided not to be grudge them their demonstration; I even stopped to listen to what was being said. After five minutes of a red-shirted and red-faced man who seemed to have forgotten he had a microphone and loudspeaker and who was trying to reach a crowd of, I suppose, two thousand by gesticulating, I had little more idea of what the demonstration was about, although I had heard Britain was fighting a class war. I was about to move off when someone else got up on the platform to speak.

  I didn’t know it was John Buckleson; what caught my notice was that he was wearing the clothes of my dreams. I didn’t realise for a moment or two; I simply had a sensation I was not in that place at all but somewhere else, somewhere out of the range of the sun and the summer and the noise of a crowd in a park. Then when I did realise, I could not believe it; it was as though one figure from a dream, a composite figure whom I recognised but did not know, had appeared in a waking crowd. It’s an experience I have had only a couple of times in my life, the coincidence of the apparent world and the dream, and I think it gets more strange, not less.

  I suppose what made me realise that the recognition was not of dream but of broad daylight was seeing other people in the crowd dressed in the same way, the same simple tunic without collar, the wide trousers, both of the same coarse white material. Months later I discovered this was the version of Mexican peasant dress John Buckleson had designed for himself after a visit to Mexico from Berkeley, and which his followers in the Free People had copied. That was before the people who make money out of teenage fashion copied the clothes professionally and sold them to thousands of young people—and some middle-aged ones too—who hadn’t even heard of the Free People, much less had thought why they might or might not wear the uniform of Mexican peasants. At that time, my only feeling was one of astonishment at recognition.

  “Who’s that speaking?” I asked one of the girls standing near me.

  “John Buckleson,” she said, “of the Free People.” She evidently thought that made all clear. I had read somewhere in the papers of a fuss being made by some organisation about some scheme to clear up an area of the East End, though I had taken little notice of it at the time. But I wanted to hear what this John Buckleson of the mysterious Free People had to say.

  I am, in my way, a professional rhetorician, and at first it was simply the professional in me which responded to a skilful speaker; the man before had been fluent enough, but it was fluency to no end, or rather it was fluency without any information; he simply fulfilled a certain expectation of syntax. Buckleson was something different; he had an odd trick of pausing for a long time at the most unexpected place in a sentence or phrase, yet it was a pausing which made you listen, because you wanted to hear what he was going to say next. It was almost as if he was thinking in those pauses, searching for the next words; and when they came you had a sense of delight he had found them after all. For the pauses were not those of embarrassment or even hesitation; they were pauses in the working of an active intelligence.

  Over the years I must have heard him make dozens of speeches, yet I always wanted to listen to him. Was it simply because of the way he looked: the short, thin body which could have belonged to a dancer or a gymnast, the mop of long black hair around a pallid face, the eyes which seemed always to be looking at something further away than what you knew he was looking at, so it seemed he was looking through objects and people to something the other side of them? Or was it what he said? I cannot sort out now the order my reactions came in, but I remember enough of that first time to understand why, even then, I saw him as more than a skilful demagogue; for the recognition I had felt when I saw his uniform and the quarter-recognition when I heard his name was matched by the moment of full recognition when he came to the peroration of his speech. He was talking of an England of the future, where houses were built on a human scale—Le Corbusier, I think—where the towns and cities had been reorganised as real communities, where the new technology served men and not men the technology, where all the filth and squalor of industrial England had been swept away but where people still had the benefits of industrial civilisation, where they lived as they wished to live, and where the landscape was not destroyed to make towns, but towns made to fit the natural shapes of the land. “And if any of you say this is … (long pause) … impossible, then I say to you it’s because … (long pause) … you really don’t want change, you are frightened of the chance the England we can have … (long pause) … will actually happen. We could do it now if we want
ed to. We could build … (long pause) … we could build houses which didn’t fall down in ten years … which weren’t faceless creations doing as well for a school … or a funeral house … or a jam factory … or—what’s worst of all—for houses people are meant to live in. We breed … our own destruction.”

  I suppose you could call it Utopian nonsense; perhaps I knew that myself, but even as my intellectual training was telling me to jeer, the dreams were with me again, as if I were not awake at all, but in the dream-place which grew out of the earth and was not imposed on it. If I had shut my eyes, I could have seen those quiet-eyed people in their white clothes again, and seen the welcome of the time out of history. When John Buckleson was finished, I pushed my way out of the crowd and into the open park, forgetting all my plans, captured by the vision of the settled quiet which is my own vision of the Millennium.

  It was only a moment; I might even have forgotten it completely in a year or two. But chance (which was perhaps also my desire) took me to Buckleson, and the moment became a time—not a permanent time, because I am still in history, but a time long enough never to forget.

  Yet I know the Millennium is intellectual nonsense. I know, meritocrat as I am, that men are not equal in their capacities, ambitions, hopes, lusts; I know passion does not care for equality. I am, after all, a barrister specialising in criminal law and so involved almost every day of my life with people who are living examples of inequity: who kill, steal, lie, cheat, for lust, ambition, gain, satisfaction, or who are accused of those crimes by men as inequitable as they. But the dream is not destroyed, though I know a man would sooner or later come into my perfect city who wanted to abandon the naturalness of stone for the flexibility of concrete, or who needed to refashion us back into history, or who wished to remake us in his own image. Knowledge of the way things are destroys my dream; men destroy it; perhaps even words do. But the dream is still there; it is as much a part of me as the stealing, killing, lying, cheating.